Global Research

A mid-December announcement by the European Union was made stating that the EU had agreed to restore ties with the Southeast Asian Kingdom of Thailand “at all levels” after suspending them in 2014 in the wake of a military coup which ousted the government of Yingluck Shinawatra.

AFP reported in its article, “EU resumes official contacts with Thai junta,” that:

The bloc said developments in Thailand this year, including the adoption of a new constitution and a pledge by junta chief Prayut Chan-O-Cha to hold elections in November 2018, meant it was “appropriate” to resume ties.

The announcement however, was conditional. AFP  also reports:

But the European Union repeated its call for the restoration of full democracy and said it was still concerned about harassment of human rights activists and the curtailing of free speech in Thailand.

What the AFP article and the EU statement both fail to mention was the context of the 2014 coup, the nature of the government it ousted from power and precisely which groups have been subjected to the so-called “curtailing of free speech.”

The EU’s move, which was immediately supported by the US embassy in Bangkok, is likely an attempt to pressure the current interim government from further delaying elections and holding them prematurely, thus likely returning political proxies associated with Yingluck Shinawatra to power.

Returning a US-European Proxy to Power 

Yingluck Shinawatra was sister to ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin Shinawatra held office from 2001-2006, committed serial human rights abuses including the extrajudicial killing of nearly 3,000 in a “war on drugs” in just under 90 days in 2003. He also eagerly censored his political opponents and critics in the media either through courts or through physical intimidation and violence. Several of his critics were either assassinated or disappeared over the course of this time in office.

In 2006, the Royal Thai Army swiftly and without bloodshed, ousted Thaksin Shinawatra from power. Since Shinawatra’s removal from power in 2006, he and his supporters have conducted an on-and-off campaign of terrorism, violence, arson, political assassinations together with a concerted propaganda campaign attacking Thailand’s independent institutions including the nation’s courts, its military and its constitutional monarchy. Together, these institutions represent insurmountable roadblocks to Shinawatra’s return to power. They also, by no coincidence, impede foreign interests from entering and fully exploiting Thailand, its population and its natural resources.

It has been groups associated with Shinawatra’s efforts to attack and undermine Thailand’s institutions that have been targeted by the “curtailing of free speech.”  These groups also so happen to enjoy extensive funding, political and material support from the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and the EU.

The aforementioned AFP article also characterised the ousted government of Yingluck Shinawatra as representing a certain level of “democracy.” However, Yingluck Shinawatra openly campaigned in 2011 as her brother’s admitted proxy. Thaksin Shinawatra currently resides abroad evading jail after a criminal conviction for abuse of power was handed down by Thai courts in 2008. In other words, the “democracy” AFP claims Yingluck Shinawatra’s government represented in reality amounted to a convicted criminal running the government remotely through a nepotist-appointed proxy. In truth, it represented neither “democracy” nor adhered to even the most elementary underpinnings of rule of law.

As to why the EU seeks elections in Thailand prematurely before reforms can be fully implemented and Shinawatra’s return to power blocked indefinitely, it is necessary to examine Shinawatra’s utility to US and European interests both in Thailand and in a wider context, in Asia Pacific vis-à-vis China.

During Shinawatra’s time in office, he eagerly supported US-European foreign policy both in Asia and globally. He committed Thai troops to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and hosted the US Central Intelligence Agency’s extraordinary rendition and secret detention programme on Thai territory. He also attempted to pass a US-Thai free trade agreement by sidestepping both public opposition to it and any form of Thai parliamentary review and approval.

The most recent EU statement also included mention of “free trade.”

With years of US-European support for Shinawatra’s efforts to return to power accumulating a substantial political debt, any possibility of his actual return would be accompanied by an even more zealous commitment to US-European interests at Thailand’s and the region’s expense.

Containing China, Maintaining US-Euro Primacy in the Pacific 

In a wider context, the time period Shinawatra held power saw the US and Europe cultivating other client regimes in the region including Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party in Myanmar, Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia and before a very recent falling out, Hun Sen in Cambodia. Together, this collection of client regimes was to constitute a united front against the growing influence of Beijing.

From the turn of the century to present day, it is clear that US and European plans have suffered immeasurable setbacks. In Thailand, Shinawatra’s ouster in 2006 followed by his sister’s ouster in 2014 represent a downward trend in both Shinawatra’s political staying power and the influence of US-European-funded organisations, media platforms, institutions and opposition fronts.

And as US-European influence via clients like Shinawatra wanes, ties between China and Thailand have grown substantially. While Washington offers “free trade” and ambiguous “military ties” to Thailand, Beijing offers nationwide infrastructure projects including high speed rail, new rolling stock for Thailand’s existing mass transportation networks, military hardware to replace Thailand’s ageing US-made inventory and above all, a partnership absent of preconditions regarding Thailand’s internal political affairs.

These deals have been sealed by the political order opposed to Shinawatra and currently holding power in Thailand.

Despite hopes fading of ever reestablishing primacy in the Pacific, it is clear that the US and its European partners have not abandoned efforts to try. And while their primary objectives may never be achieved, slowing Beijing’s ascent enough to integrate it into the existing Washington-London-Brussels dominated international order rather than having Beijing find itself at the head of an alternative model of international relations, in their minds, may still be possible.

If US-EU Cannot Have Thailand, No One Will… 

While any sort of substantial and enduring return to power for Shinawatra or a US-European proxy like him is highly unlikely, as the United States and the European Union have done elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East in regards to Iran’s rising influence and its enemies’ inability to contain it, where client states cannot be created, chaos is created instead to deny opponents economic and military partners, or any semblance of peace and stability along their peripheries.

A variety of gambits have been put into play simultaneously alongside efforts to return Shinawatra to power aimed at sowing discord within Thailand and producing synergies with similar destabilisation efforts in neighbouring Myanmar and Cambodia. These include efforts pursued by the US and EU member embassies in Thailand itself to prop up and perpetuate protests against the current Thai government. They also include efforts to expand conflict in Thailand’s troubled southern provinces and foster inter-religious conflict between Thai Buddhists and Muslims who have coexisted for centuries.

In other words, if the US and Europe cannot have Thailand, they have cultivated multiple options to ensure the nation can provide no one else, particularly Beijing, constructive ties or contribute to wider regional peace and prosperity.

This explanation goes far in illustrating why media organisations like AFP and the European Union in its recent statement so disingenuously portray Thailand’s current political crisis as a battle between “democracy” and a “junta.” The truth is far more illuminating as to who, what and more precisely why Thailand is unable to enjoy political stability and move forward together with the rest of the region into economic prosperity Europe and its partners across the Atlantic see disappearing into the distance as the global balance of power shifts.

The EU “restoring ties” with Thailand is mostly symbolic. Bangkok is unlikely to receive any benefit from these “ties,” and regardless of the current government’s timetable for elections or any signal from Bangkok in appeasement to Brussels, EU member embassies have every intention to continue creating and sustaining opposition fronts aimed both at fostering short-term instability and the long-term undermining of Thailand’s sovereign institutions.

For Thailand, continuing to foster real partnerships and ties beyond the US and EU while building up its own independent capacity to ensure economic prosperity and national defence is essential to overcoming the challenges EU “ties” really represent. Anglo-American and European foreign policy for centuries has been predicated on dictating terms from a position of uncontested strength. As the global balance of power shifts, this position of strength has eroded. Whatever Thailand agrees to, it must be done in the wider context of further eroding US-European primacy in regions thousands of miles from their respective capitals and striking a more equitable and mutually beneficial balance in international relations.

The EU’s offer to “restore ties” with Thailand is empty and will only serve as a thin veil over continued efforts to coerce Bangkok into rushing ahead with elections the EU and its partners in Washington hope to influence.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from the author.

North Korea has rejected media speculation, fuelled by the US National Security Strategy, that it’s preparing for chemical warfare. Pyongyang accused Washington of fabricating yet another “false pretext” for a surprise attack.

South Korean and US Marines take part in a joint annual winter exercise in the mountains of Pyeongchang, part of the Korea Marine Exercise Programme (KMEP) pic.twitter.com/SC6URH3Y29

— RT (@RT_com) December 20, 2017

Pyongyang’s statement follows the conclusion of last week’s US-South Korean ‘Warrior Strike’ military drills which focused on practicing a potential infiltration into the North to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear installations. The North could possess up to 13 types of pathogens that can potentially be used as biological weapons and that need to be secured in case of a war, according to the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

While the US keeps insisting that it is ready to pursue a military option to neutralize the North Korean threat, both Russia and China have been calling for calm, urging a diplomatic solution to the crisis based on a ‘double freeze’ initiative. The simple Sino-Russian proposal, rejected by Washington, seeks a simultaneous suspension to any missile launches and nuclear tests by Pyongyang, as well as large-scale military exercises by Washington and Seoul.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons.

For five decades, the state of Israel has implemented an overt agenda of ethnic-cleansing in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights where it has induced over 600,000 Israeli citizens to leave their homes in order to illegally settle on Palestinian land that had been in the continuous majority possession of the indigenous Muslim Arab for over a thousand years. All this in defiance of the will and resolution of the United Nations – the very Assembly that approved the establishment of a Jewish homeland in a part of the predominantly Muslim Arab land of Palestine, in 1947.

This agenda has been enthusiastically overseen by the leader of the hard-Right Likud Party, Binyamin Netanyahu. He is a Revisionist Zionist politician whose father was the right-hand man of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the former leader of the terrorist militia organisation, IZL, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, who fought British troops supervising the Mandate for Palestine in the 1940s. The Irgun was responsible for many bloody atrocities in those years, against both Britain and the local Arab population, including the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91.

Netanyahu himself is currently under investigation on serious charges of corruption against the state by the alleged enriching of himself and his family. The investigation includes official allegations that he benefited from kickbacks during the subsidised delivery of a fleet of state-of-the-art, Dolphin Class, strike submarines from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that, at a stroke, has unilaterally altered the balance of global power in not only the Middle East but also in Europe. These undersea, secret war vessels have subsequently been retro-fitted and nuclear-armed with deadly, long-range cruise missiles.

During the past decade, Netanyahu has also overseen the inhuman blockade of essential medicines, foodstuffs, energy supplies and building materials to nearly two million civilians in Gaza, in a determined, but unsuccessful, effort to illegally effect regime change and to permanently damage the indigenous population.

All of the above political machinations of the hard-Right Likud Revisionist Zionist Party have tried but failed in the implementation of an agenda to build a Greater Israel by the simple expediency of forcibly dispossessing and disenfranchising millions of ethnic Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem and the other Occupied Territories in a blatant violation of international law and in contempt of the will of the United Nations.

Notwithstanding these illegalities and violations that have brought death and destruction to millions of ethnic Arabs and instability to the eastern Mediterranean, Netanyahu and his government are enthusiastically supported by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Mrs Theresa May and her ruling Conservative Party.

Which begs the question: why would a British Prime Minister not only fête an allegedly corrupt politician who is guilty of the persecution of an indigenous people over more than a decade, but who also categorically asserts that any criticism of the Israeli government is thinly disguised antisemitism? Does PM Theresa May really not know the difference between a Jewish voter in London and an IDF soldier in the occupied West Bank?

The above is but just one of the political errors that will probably ensure the defeat of the current Conservative government by the resurgent British Labour Party that has a declared policy of radical change in Britain’s approach to aggressive Revisionist Zionism in the former ancient land of Palestine by pro-Israel activists who treat UN SC Resolution 2334 with contempt. That Resolution, demands the immediate and complete withdrawal of all Israeli settlers from the Occupied Territories.

The UK Labour Party, in contrast to Mrs Theresa May’s Conservatives, pledges, when in a future government, to support and implement the majority decision of the United Nations, to the very best of Britain’s international ability.

Congress’ passage of the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the rich marks a new stage in the decades-long social counterrevolution in the United States. It will make America, already the most unequal advanced economy in the world, far more unequal, entrenching the rule of an unaccountable financial oligarchy.

The Senate passed the bill on a strict party-line 51 to 48 vote in the early morning hours of Wednesday following a truncated and perfunctory debate. The House followed suit later on Wednesday, passing the bill 224 to 203, with 12 Republicans joining all 191 voting Democrats to oppose the measure. Most of the Republican “no” votes came from the high-tax states of California, New York and New Jersey, which will be hard hit by provisions limiting federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes.

The legislation is designed to massively transfer wealth from the working class to the ruling elite. At the same time, it will sharply increase budget deficits and the national debt, providing the pretext for an attack on domestic programs, with particular emphasis on the basic entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Congressional Republicans rushed to pass the legislation in the face of multiple opinion polls showing that a majority of the American people oppose the bill and that popular opposition has grown over the past month. A series of non-partisan analyses of the measure, including by congressional agencies, have concluded that the tax cuts will go overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 10 percent, and that by the end of the decade, the majority of Americans will see their taxes increase.

The centerpiece of the bill is a permanent cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. It is estimated that this will raise corporate revenues by more than $6 trillion over the next decade.

Other pro-business provisions include the elimination of the corporate alternative minimum tax and a 20 percent tax reduction for owners of “pass-through” companies, such as partnerships and S corporations. At the last minute, commercial real estate developers were added to the list of covered “pass-through” firms, greatly benefiting Trump personally.

On the individual side, the bill slashes the top federal income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, reduces the individual alternative minimum tax, and doubles the exemption for estate taxes to $22 million for married couples.

It includes two provisions to modestly reduce taxes for many middle-income households: a doubling of both the standard deduction and the child tax credit. However, these are largely offset by other provisions that eliminate or reduce current tax deductions, such as on mortgage interest and state and local taxes.

It replaces the Consumer Price Index with the so-called “chained” CPI, which underestimates the inflation rate. As a result, taxpayers will move more quickly into higher tax brackets, and many low-income households will become ineligible for the earned income tax credit.

The bill also ends the Obamacare requirement that individuals not otherwise covered buy health insurance from private providers, in many cases with the help of government subsidies. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this will result in 13 million more people without health insurance by 2027 and a 10 percent yearly increase in premiums for policies bought on the individual market.

All of the individual tax breaks included in the bill expire at the end of 2025, meaning that millions will suddenly face increased taxes beginning in 2026.

In the first year of the tax “reform,” middle-income taxpayers will see an average cut of less than $1,000, while the average member of the top 1 percent will receive $51,140.

According to various non-partisan analyses, by 2027, 83 percent of the tax benefits will go to the top 1 percent of earners, while 53 percent of the population, including all those making less than $75,000, will pay higher taxes.

This far-reaching legislation, which will impact every section of American society, has been rammed through Congress in little more than seven weeks, without a single congressional hearing. Trump and the Republicans have sought to sell it to a skeptical public on the basis of brazen lies, insisting that they are cutting taxes for corporations in order to help the “hard-working middle class.”

The Democrats, for their part, have done nothing to seriously oppose this naked piece of class legislation. They themselves advocate a deep tax cut for corporations and spent most of their efforts pleading with the Republicans to be included in talks on the plan.

The entire process has been a travesty of democratic procedures, exposing the fraud of American democracy and underscoring the basic fact that the United States is ruled by an oligarchy that controls the political system and both major parties. It wanted the money and was prepared to do whatever was necessary to get it.

Trump is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days, although there are reports he may hold off until after the New Year. Following its passage, he told reporters at the White House,

“This bill means more take home pay. It will be an incredible Christmas gift for hardworking Americans.”

Later, in a celebratory demonstration with Republican lawmakers on the Capitol steps, he declared that the bill “means jobs, jobs, jobs!”

It will, in fact, no more provide decent-paying jobs and improved wages than the previous tax “reforms” carried out over the past three-and-a-half decades. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut in 1997 and George W. Bush’s tax “reform” of 2001 were all part of a ruling class offensive against the working class, which included sweeping attacks on wages, jobs, pensions, education, health care, housing and other social benefits.

Regressive tax changes have played a major role in engineering a redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top that has brought social inequality in America to its highest level since the 1920s. The World Inequality Report published last week by a team of economists headed by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman noted that since 1980, the top 1 percent and the bottom half of income earners in the US have essentially flipped positions. While the bottom 50 percent received 20 percent of national income in 1980, that figure declined to just 13 percent by 2016. Conversely, the top 1 percent steadily increased their share of national income from 10 percent to 20 percent.

The report warned that the Republican tax cut plan would “turbocharge” a further growth of inequality in America.

The Democratic Party has been no less complicit in this social counterrevolution than the Republicans. The Reagan tax cuts were carried out on a bipartisan basis, and the Bush tax cut of 2001 won the support of a significant section of Democratic lawmakers.

Now the Democrats are using verbal denunciations of the tax bill and party-line votes in opposition to obscure their tacit support for tax changes that benefit the corporations and the wealthy. They are largely attacking the Republican bill from the right, on the basis of fiscal responsibility and economic nationalism.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, while warning of “plutocracy” (despite personal wealth estimated at nearly $200 million), has denounced the bill for “exploding the deficit.” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni published an op-ed piece Wednesday promoting the Democrats as the “new Republicans,” i.e., the true party of “fiscal responsibility,” along with family values, patriotism, law-and-order, national security and decency.

Bernie Sanders, interviewed Wednesday on CNN, denounced the bill for encouraging US companies to invest abroad and ship “American” jobs to Mexico and China.

The Democrats and their allies in the trade union leadership have not called a single protest against the tax bill, despite broad popular opposition. Their priorities are elsewhere: fomenting anti-democratic campaigns such as the hysteria over alleged sexual misconduct, the war-mongering against Russia and the linked crusade against “fake news.” All of these are designed to mobilize the Democrats’ upper-middle class base around a program to prepare for war, criminalize political opposition and censor the internet.

While they want nothing to do with a mobilization of popular anger over the tax windfall for the rich, the threat to the CHIP children’s health insurance program or the impending mass roundup of young immigrants currently protected under the DACA program, it is reported that the Democrats are preparing for nationwide protests against any move by Trump to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

They are the staunchest defenders of the American secret police and the military, which are being prepared to violently suppress working class opposition to the capitalist system and all of its depredations.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

North Korea threatens no one. Yet Trump’s rage for war makes the unthinkable increasingly possible. What’s ongoing in America is similar to what preceded US aggression on Iraq in 2003 – both nations and their leadership demonized, unfounded threats alleged.

Trump’s National Security Strategy said North Korea could use nuclear weapons against America. It also claimed it’s “pursuing chemical and biological weapons which could also be delivered by missile.”

These accusations are utter nonsense. Yet they continue, escalating tensions, maybe heading toward a point of no return.

Russia’s ambassador to China Andrei Denisov expressed concern, saying we’re “witnessing…negative escalation as (America and the DPRK) continue to descend the stair.”

Responding to each other in harsh terms “means taking another step down…the lowest point yet…(T)he situation is…alarming (and) unpredictable.”

The only solution is diplomacy, he stressed, not forthcoming because Trump rejects it. Can Russia and China save the region from catastrophic war, likely to be nuclear if launched?

Their best efforts so far failed. US rage for confrontation undermined them. The situation is extraordinarily dangerous. The threat of war between two nuclear powers should terrify everyone.

Chinese government advisor Shi Yinhong said

“(c)onditions on the peninsula now make for the biggest risk of a war in decades,” adding:

“North Korea is a time bomb. We can only delay the explosion, hoping that by delaying it, a time will come to remove the detonator.”

Former Nanjing Military Region deputy commander Wang Hongguang warned war could happen any time.

“Northeast China should mobilize (its) defenses,” he stressed.

Days earlier, the northern Chinese Jilin Daily published a full-page article on what to do in case of a nuclear attack – expressing concern about possible imminent war.

On Wednesday, London’s Telegraph headlined “Exclusive: US making plans for ‘bloody nose’ military attack on North Korea,” saying:

“The White House has ‘dramatically’ stepped up preparation for a military solution in recent months…”

Options include destroying DPRK launch sites and stockpiles of weapons. The Telegraph cited and quoted two former US officials “familiar with current thinking,” along with a current member of Trump’s administration.

“The Pentagon is trying to find options that would allow them to punch the North Koreans in the nose, get their attention and show that we’re serious,” a former unnamed US official said.

According to the Telegraph, US and UK officials believe the Trump administration is more willing to consider military options…than widely assumed.”

“(S)enior British diplomats fear America has already begun a ‘step by step’ military build-up in the region that could escalate,” the paper said.

After meeting with US National Security Advisor HR McMaster recently, one unnamed UK official left believing the Trump administration rejects diplomacy.

“(M)ilitary action is very much an option” on the table, he said.

Former GW Bush defense strategy director Kori Schake said

“(t)he (Trump) White House very strongly believes that either North Korea will agree to give up its nuclear weapons or we will launch a preventative attack to destroy them,” adding:

“I would put the odds of them actually carrying that out at three in 10. Other policy experts say it is four in ten.”

Trump and McMaster increasingly favor the military option, said the Telegraph. Defense Secretary Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson argued against it.

Will the Trump administration attack North Korea? Things seem heading incrementally in this direction.

Waging war on the country would be madness, endangering the entire region.

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

The speculative wave in the cryptocurrency bitcoin saw another surge this week when the Chicago-based CME exchange began trading in bitcoin futures. This followed the decision by the smaller Cboe group to initiate futures-trading a week earlier.

Significantly, these decisions open the way for large institutional investors to get into the bitcoin frenzy. Until now, they have been held back because of restrictions on trading in unregulated markets. However, trading on a regulated futures exchange opens up new possibilities for speculative profits.

Reporting on the opening of bitcoin futures trading, the Financial Times said

it “came in response to soaring cryptocurrency prices and demand from professional investors seeking exposure inside the walls of a regulated exchange.”

The price of bitcoin reached as high as $20,000 this week—a 20-fold increase since the start of the year—but fell back after two cryptocurrency exchanges were hit with problems. A South Korean exchange was forced into bankruptcy after a cyber-attack, causing it to lose 17 percent of its assets, and the San Francisco exchange, Coinbase, reported it was investigating staff for insider trading.

There are warnings that the speculative bubble could soon burst, including from one of its earliest proponent—Emil Oldenburg, a founder of Bitcoin.com, who said he had now liquidated all his holdings.

“I would say an investment in bitcoin is right now the riskiest investment you can make. There’s an extremely high risk,” he told the Swedish tech site Breakit.

Oldenburg sparked another surge, however, when he said he was moving into bitcoin cash, a split off from bitcoin created in August. On Tuesday bitcoin cash jumped in price by $450 in 90 minutes.

The appetites of financial speculators continue to be whetted by reports of massive gains being made by hedge funds which specialise in bitcoin and numerous other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin.

On Tuesday the New York Times reported that the Pantera Bitcoin Fund, set up in 2013 to specialise in cryptocurrencies, had delivered a 25,004 percent return since its establishment, most of it made this year due to the staggering rise in the price of bitcoin.

According to the report, more than 150 hedge funds based on cryptocurrencies have been set up this year, bringing the total to 175.

In a note to clients this week, Morgan Stanley said this year an estimated $US2 billion had been invested by specialist hedge funds focusing on cryptocurrencies.

The hedge-fund industry data provider HFR last week launched two new indices, one covering cryptocurrencies and the other centring on the underlying blockchain technology. It reported that the cryptocurrency index had soared 292 percent since its inception and 1,641 percent for the year through to November 2017.

In a release announcing the new indices, HFR said that investor interest in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies had “surged in recent months as these innovations continue to move towards the mainstream and generate compelling opportunities for investors, portfolio managers, traders and other market participants.”

The frenzied character of the speculation is expressed in the brief history of the company Longfin which was launched on the Nasdaq exchange on Wednesday last week. Since its launch, shares in the company have leapt 2,600 percent, most of the rise coming since last Friday when it announced it was purchasing Ziddu.com, a company involved in blockchain technology.

Its shares opened at $5, then rose to above $22 on Friday and hit more than $72 by Monday, making its founder a billionaire virtually overnight. The company said it was using blockchain technology to offer loans in Ziddu coins, a digital currency it had created “loosely pegged” to ethereum and bitcoin. Even the founder of the company said the escalation in the share price was “unwarranted.”

Some market observers are likening the situation to 1999, during the dot.com bubble, when companies that put forward Internet ventures soared in price.

In a note issued on Monday, Jordan Rochester, an analyst with the Japanese financial firm Nomura said:

“The level of speculative mania has reached the point where stock prices have been boosted by companies simply inserting ‘blockchain’ on to the end of their names.”

Longfin is not the only company to enjoy a spectacular rise. The Financial Times reported that shares in Rich Cigars, a cigar maker, jumped more than 2,000 percent in a single day last week. It had announced it was changing its name to Intercontinental Technologies and entering the business of cryptocurrency mining—the process by which new bitcoins and other virtual currencies are created.

The chief investment officer at Capital Innovations, Michael Underhill, told the Financial Times that the market was being driven by the “fear of missing out” and the Longfin escalation was “absent any fundamental reasons in a company that used technology that few people understand.”

On Tuesday, US regulators halted trading in the shares of Crypto Company, whose value surged 2,000 percent this month, citing concerns over the possibility of market manipulation.

However, even amid warnings that this speculation is extremely risky, the push to extend it goes on.

Having established a market for trading in bitcoin futures, Cboe has issued a request to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to have two bitcoin-linked exchange-traded funds (EFT) listed on its markets.

So far the SEC has refused such initiatives and last March rejected a proposal by the Winkelvoss twins, who helped found Facebook, to have an ETF based on bitcoin listed. But the decision by Cboe and CME to start futures-trading is adding to pressure on the SEC to give the go-ahead for ETFs, which would broaden trading in cryptocurrencies.

The bitcoin mania has been denounced by central bankers and financial authorities as speculative and extremely risky.

A vice-president of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, has written to EU financial regulators urging them to do more to warn of the risks of bitcoin, saying recent market volatility required “heightened attention.”

The Guardian has reported that a group of 50 leading European economists has concluded that bitcoin poses no risk to financial stability, citing its small total value of $300 billion in relation to the total value of global shares of almost $80 trillion.

However, one economist, Wouter den Haan of the London School of Economics, has warned that past crises had shown that it would “take just one key financial institution taking on large risky positions to put the system at risk.”

Those risks arise from the fact that the bitcoin mania is itself a product of the policies of the central banks. Pumping trillions of dollars into the global financial system over the past decade, they have created a vast ocean of finance capital. Those funds are now seeking a return on ever riskier bets in financial markets via speculation in stocks, bonds, real estate and other financial assets in what has been described as a “bubble in everything.”

In other words, the program of quantitative easing, developed in response to the meltdown produced by the collapse of the sub-prime bubble, has only created the conditions for the next one.

The bitcoin-blockchain frenzy is only the most egregious expression of the financial speculation that has increasingly come to dominate profit accumulation in place of investment and the expansion of production.

For example, it is estimated that as a result of the quantitative easing program and ultra-low interest rate regime set in place by the major central banks, around $9 trillion of government debt is trading in bonds that return a negative interest rate.

That is, the price of the bond has been pushed so high by the flood of money seeking a rate of return and interest rates have correspondingly been forced down so low (the two move in an inverse relationship) that a purchaser of the bond who holds it to maturity will make a loss.

Of course, such purchases are not carried out to hold the bond long-term and receive interest payments as in the past. Rather they are made in accordance with the “bigger fool” theory—that someone else will buy the bond at an even higher price enabling the seller to make a capital gain. This is the modus operandi throughout the financial system.

It is by no means clear what the effect of the eventual collapse of the bitcoin bubble will be. But, as one questioner reminded outgoing Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen at her final press conference last week, her predecessor Ben Bernanke claimed in 2007 that the sub-prime bubble only amounted to $50 billion and so would not impact on the broader financial system.

However, such were the interconnections between the sub-prime speculation and the financial system as a whole that the sub-prime crisis produced a US and global meltdown.

Ten years on, the opacity of the financial system, a result of its private ownership, makes it difficult to determine the exact extent of the interconnections between the bitcoin frenzy and the broader market. But, given the fact that the essential drive of the entire financial system is speculation, the linkages are bound to exist and could produce devastating consequences.

Updated analysis released by Corporate Europe Observatory and Global Justice Now exposes how official lobby meetings about Brexit and post-Brexit trade are being dominated by big corporate interests at the expense of civil society.

As EU leaders start to gather in Brussels to agree on opening talks regarding post-Brexit transition and trade, the figures shine a light on the risk of Brexit being shaped by the concerns of big business, rather than those of the population as a whole.

The analysis of official statistics on lobby meetings with ministers from the UK’s Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) and the Department for International Trade (DIT) between October 2016 and June 2017 reveals a shared willingness to meet the representatives of big corporations above all others. The analysis shows:

Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU)

• Finance sector and audit firms are prominent in the list of firms lobbying DExEU, with lobby organisation TheCityUK (8 meetings) and HSBC (7 meetings) near the top of the chart. Lloyds Bank, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCoopers also all made the list (4 meetings each).
• 70% of all meetings held by DExEU ministers were with business representatives. This figure may even just be the tip of the iceberg, as Brexit lobby meetings are also likely to take place with DExEU officials not required to disclose meetings.
• While representatives of the small-business sector, including the Federation of Small Business and the British Chambers of Commerce, feature among the list of the most frequent DExEU lobbyists, meetings with larger corporations are prominent in ministers’ diaries.
• The Brexit secretary David Davis has met business representatives 29 times. However, he failed to even once meet groups representing those people most affected by Brexit –  the over 4 million EU citizens in the UK and the British citizens living across the EU.

Department for International Trade

• Over 90% of all meetings held by DIT ministers were with corporate lobbyists. Civil society organisations were included in just 3% of meetings
• Financial sector and audit firms figure prominently on the list of top lobbyists of DIT ministers with HSBC (10 meetings) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (10 meetings) topping the chart. Barclays, KPMG and Standard Life (6 meetings each) all make the list.
• Oil and gas firms also made the top lobbyists’ list with BP (8 meetings) and Shell (6 meetings).
• Other firms in the top lobbyists’ list include Rolls Royce (10 meetings) and the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (6 meetings)

The full list of meetings highlights just how rarely citizens and civil society have been heard by the negotiators, despite the fact that Brexit will directly affect the everyday lives of all UK residents.

A similar pattern emerges at the EU level, with 72%  of meetings of Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier and his task force held with corporate interest representatives, with the finance sector as well as the food / agriculture sector dominating.

The research also highlights the lack of lobby transparency around these meetings.  Decision makers refuse to release participant lists, agendas, minutes and other documents from lobby meetings, making it impossible to know who exactly is in the room and which specific policy options are being discussed.

Corporate Europe Observatory’s transparency campaigner Vicky Cann said:

“Brexit will strongly affect people’s private and professional lives in the UK, so it is vital that the process is as transparent as possible and that many different interests are consulted.

“But we observe a clear corporate dominance in the lobby meetings of the UK Brexit negotiators. And this pattern is replicated by EU negotiators as well. Civil society has had far less face-time with ministers and negotiators to voice  the public’s needs, concerns, and proposals around Brexit.”

Alex Scrivener, a campaigner at Global Justice Now, added:

“The corporate bias that has been exposed in this list of meetings shows that we are veering dangerously towards a ‘big business Brexit’ that ignores the wider needs of UK society. Unless there is some sense of transparency and accountability in this process, there is every chance that the UK government will use Brexit as an opportunity to do away with existing, albeit imperfect, protections relating to labour rights, consumer standards and the environment.”

“The fact that David Davis has found  time to meet business representatives 29 times since October 2016 but has not once met with citizens’ rights advocates for EU citizens in the UK and British people in Europe is shocking and shows that this government has its priorities totally wrong on Brexit.”

Featured image is from TruePublica.

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking in Geneva in honor of International Human Rights Day cited the need to:

“Build a new social and economic system with human rights and justice at its core. Deliver climate justice and a better way to live together on this planet. Recognise the humanity of refugees and offer them a place of safety. Work for peace, security and understanding. The survival of our common humanity requires nothing less.”

***

Thank you Paul for that introduction. And let me give a special thanks to the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Your work gives an important platform to marginalised voices for social justice to challenge policy makers and campaign for change.

I welcome pressure both on my party, the British Labour Party, and on my leadership to put social justice front and centre stage in everything we do. So thank you for inviting me to speak here in this historic setting at the Palais des Nations in Geneva a city that has been a place of refuge and philosophy since the time of Rousseau. The headquarters before the Second World War of the ill-fated League of Nations, which now houses the United Nations.

It’s a particular privilege to be speaking here because the constitution of our party includes a commitment to support the United Nations. A promise “to secure peace, freedom, democracy, economic security and environmental protection for all.”

I’d also like to thank my fellow panelists, Arancha Gonzalez and Nikhil Seth, and Labour’s Shadow Attorney General, Shami Chakrabarti, who has accompanied me here. She has been a remarkable campaigner and a great asset to the international movement for human rights.

And lastly let me thank you all for being here today.

Internationalism

I would like to use this opportunity in the run-up to International Human Rights Day to focus on the greatest threats to our common humanity. And why states need to throw their weight behind genuine international co-operation and human rights both individual and collective, social and economic, as well as legal and constitutional at home and abroad if we are to meet and overcome those threats.

My own country is at a crossroads. The decision by the British people to leave the European Union in last year’s referendum means we have to rethink our role in the world.

Some want to use Brexit to turn Britain in on itself, rejecting the outside world, viewing everyone as a feared competitor.

Others want to use Brexit to put rocket boosters under our current economic system’s insecurities and inequalities, turning Britain into a deregulated corporate tax haven, with low wages, limited rights, and cut-price public services in a destructive race to the bottom.

My party stands for a completely different future when we leave the EU, drawing on the best internationalist traditions of the labour movement and our country.

We want to see close and cooperative relationships with our European neighbours, outside the EU, based on solidarity as well as mutual benefit and fair trade, along with a wider proactive internationalism across the globe.

We are proud that Britain was an original signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights and our 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined it in our law. So Labour will continue to work with other European states and progressive parties and movements, through the Council of Europe to ensure our country and others uphold our international obligations.

Just as the work of the UN Human Rights Council helps to ensure countries like ours live up to our commitments, such as on disability rights, where this year’s report found us to be failing. International co-operation, solidarity, collective action are the values we are determined to project in our foreign policy.

Those values will inform everything the next Labour government does on the world stage, using diplomacy to expand a progressive, rules-based international system, which provides justice and security for all.

They must be genuinely universal and apply to the strong as much as the weak if they are to command global support and confidence. They cannot be used to discipline the weak, while the strong do as they please, or they will be discredited as a tool of power, not justice.

That’s why we must ensure that the powerful uphold and respect international rules and international law. If we don’t, the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 will remain an aspiration, rather than a reality and international rules will be seen as a pick and mix menu for the global powers that call the international shots.

Threats to Our Common Humanity

Most urgently we must work with other countries to advance the cause of human rights, to confront the four greatest and interconnected threats facing our common humanity.

First, the growing concentration of unaccountable wealth and power in the hands of a tiny corporate elite, a system many call neoliberalism, which has sharply increased inequality, marginalisation, insecurity and anger across the world.

Second, climate change, which is creating instability, fuelling conflict across the world and threatening all our futures.

Third, the unprecedented numbers of people fleeing conflict, persecution, human rights abuses, social breakdown and climate disasters.

And finally, the use of unilateral military action and intervention, rather than diplomacy and negotiation, to resolve disputes and change governments.

The dominant global economic system is broken. It is producing a world where a wealthy few control 90 per cent of global resources.

Of growing insecurity and grotesque levels of inequality within and between nations, where more than $100-billion a year are estimated to be lost to developing countries from corporate tax avoidance.

Where $1-trillion a year are sucked out of the Global South through illicit financial flows. This is a global scandal.

The most powerful international corporations must not be allowed to continue to dictate how and for whom our world is run.

Thirty years after structural adjustment programmes first ravaged so much of the world, and a decade after the financial crash of 2008, the neoliberal orthodoxy that delivered them is breaking down.

This moment, a crisis of confidence in a bankrupt economic system and social order, presents us with a once in a generation opportunity to build a new economic and social consensus which puts the interests of the majority first.

But the crumbling of the global elite’s system and their prerogative to call the shots unchallenged has led some politicians to stoke fear and division. And deride international co-operation as national capitulation.

President Trump’s disgraceful Muslim ban and his anti-Mexican rhetoric have fuelled racist incitement and misogyny and shift the focus away from what his Wall Street-dominated administration is actually doing.

In Britain, where wages have actually fallen for most people over the last decade as the corporations and the richest have been handed billions in tax cuts, our Prime Minister has followed a less extreme approach but one that also aims to divert attention from her Government’s failures and real agenda.

She threatens to scrap the Human Rights Act, which guarantees all of our people’s civil and political rights and has actually benefited everyone in our country. And she has insisted “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

There is an alternative to this damaging and bankrupt order. The world’s largest corporations and banks cannot be left to write the rules and rig the system for themselves.

The world’s economy can and must deliver for the common good and the majority of its people. But that is going to demand real and fundamental structural change on an international level.

The UN has a pivotal role to play, in advancing a new consensus and common ground based on solidarity, respect for human rights and international regulation and co-operation.

Transnational Corporations

That includes as a platform for democratic leaders to speak truth about unaccountable power.

One such moment took place on 4 December 1972, when President Salvador Allende of Chile, elected despite huge opposition and U.S. interference, took the rostrum of the UN General Assembly in New York.

He called for global action against the threat from transnational corporations, that do not answer to any state, any parliament or any organisation representing the common interest.

Nine months later, Allende was killed in General Augusto Pinochet’s coup, which ushered in a brutal 17-year dictatorship and turned Chile into a laboratory of free market fundamentalism.

But 44 years on, all over the world people are standing up and saying enough to the unchained power of multinational companies to dodge taxes, grab land and resources on the cheap and rip the heart out of workforces and communities.

That’s why I make the commitment to you today that the next Labour government in Britain will actively support the efforts of the UN Human Rights Council to create a legally binding treaty to regulate transnational corporations under international human rights law.

Genuine corporate accountability must apply to all of the activities of their subsidiaries and suppliers. Impunity for corporations that violate human rights or wreck our environment, as in the mineral-driven conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, must be brought to an end.

For too long, development has been driven by the unfounded dogma that unfettered markets and unaccountable multinational companies are the key to solving global problems.

So under the next Labour Government the Department for International Development will have the twin mission of not only eradicating poverty but also reducing inequality across the world.

To achieve this goal we must act against the global scandal of tax dodging and trade mis-invoicing – robbing developing countries and draining resources from our own public services.

In Africa alone an estimated $35-billion is lost each year to tax dodging, and $50-billion to illicit financial flows, vastly exceeding the $30-billion that enters the continent as aid.

As the Paradise and Panama Papers have shown the super-rich and the powerful can’t be trusted to regulate themselves.

Multinational companies must be required to undertake country-by-country reporting, while countries in the Global South need support now to keep hold of the billions being stolen from their people.

So the next Labour government will seek to work with tax authorities in developing countries, as Zambia has with NORAD – the Norwegian aid agency – to help them stop the looting.

Tomorrow is International Anti-Corruption Day. Corruption isn’t something that happens ‘over there’. Our government has played a central role in enabling the corruption that undermines democracy and violates human rights. It is a global issue that requires a global response.

When people are kept in poverty, while politicians funnel public funds into tax havens, that is corruption, and a Labour government will act decisively on tax havens: introducing strict standards of transparency for crown dependencies and overseas territories including a public register of owners, directors, major shareholders and beneficial owners … for all companies and trusts.

Climate Change

Climate change is the second great threat to our common humanity. Our planet is in jeopardy. Global warming is undeniable; the number of natural disasters has quadrupled since 1970.

Hurricanes like the ones that recently hit the Caribbean are bigger because they are absorbing moisture from warmer seas.

It is climate change that is warming the seas, mainly caused by emissions from the world’s richer countries.

And yet the least polluting countries, more often than not the developing nations, are at the sharp end of the havoc climate change unleashes – with environmental damage fuelling food insecurity and social dislocation.

We must stand with them in solidarity. Two months ago, I promised the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, that I would use this platform to make this message clear.

The international community must mobilise resources and the world’s biggest polluters shoulder the biggest burden.

So I ask governments in the most polluting countries, including in the UK:

First, to expand their capacity to respond to disasters around the world. Our armed forces, some of the best trained and most highly skilled in the world, should be allowed to use their experience to respond to humanitarian emergencies. Italy is among those leading the way with its navy becoming a more versatile and multi-role force.

Second, to factor the costs of environmental degradation into financial forecasting as Labour has pledged to do with Britain’s Office of Budget Responsibility.

Third, to stand very firmly behind the historic Paris Climate Accords.

And finally, take serious and urgent steps on debt relief and cancellation.

We need to act as an international community against the injustice of countries trying to recover from climate crises they did not create while struggling to repay international debts.

It’s worth remembering the words of Thomas Sankara, President of Burkina Faso, delivered to the Organisation of African Unity in 1987 a few months before he too was assassinated in a coup.

“The debt cannot be repaid,” he said, “first because if we don’t repay lenders will not die. But if we repay… we are going to die.”

Refugees

The growing climate crisis exacerbates the already unparalleled numbers of people escaping conflict and desperation. There are now more refugees and displaced people around the world than at any time since the Second World War.

Refugees are people like us. But unlike us they have been forced by violence, persecution and climate chaos to flee their homes.

One of the biggest moral tests of our time is how we live up to the spirit and letter of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Its core principle was simple: to protect refugees.

Yet ten countries, which account for just 2.5 per cent of the global economy, are hosting more than half the world’s refugees. It is time for the world’s richer countries to step up and show our common humanity.

Failure means millions of Syrians internally displaced within their destroyed homeland or refugees outside it. Rohingya refugees returned to Myanmar without guarantees of citizenship or protection from state violence and refugees held in indefinite detention in camps unfit for human habitation as in Papua New Guinea or Nauru. And African refugees sold into slavery in war-ravaged Libya.

This reality should offend our sense of humanity and human solidarity. European countries can, and must, do more as the death rate of migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean continues to rise. And we need to take more effective action against human traffickers.

But let us be clear: the long-term answer is genuine international co-operation based on human rights, which confronts the root causes of conflict, persecution and inequality.

War and Conflict

I’ve spent most of my life, with many others, making the case for diplomacy and dialogue … over war and conflict, often in the face of hostility. But I remain convinced that is the only way to deliver genuine and lasting security for all.

And even after the disastrous invasions and occupations of recent years there is again renewed pressure to opt for military force, America First or Empire 2.0 as the path to global security.

I know the people of Britain are neither insensitive to the sufferings of others nor blind to the impact and blowback from our country’s reckless foreign wars.

Regime change wars, invasions, interventions and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and Somalia have failed on their own terms, devastated the countries and regions and made Britain and the world a more dangerous place.

And while the UK government champions some human rights issues on others it is silent, if not complicit, in their violation.

Too many have turned a willfully blind eye to the flagrant and large-scale human rights abuses now taking place in Yemen, fuelled by arms sales to Saudi Arabia worth billions of pounds.

The see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach undermines our credibility and ability to act over other human rights abuses.

Total British government aid to Yemen last year was under £150-million – less than the profits made by British arms companies selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. What does that say about our country’s priorities, or our government’s role in the humanitarian disaster now gripping Yemen?

Our credibility to speak out against the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims is severely undermined when the British Government has been providing support to Myanmar’s military.

And our Governments pay lip service to a comprehensive settlement and two state solution to the Israel- Palestine conflict but do nothing to use the leverage they have to end the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

70 years after the UN General Assembly voted to create a Palestinian state alongside what would become Israel, and half a century since Israel occupied the whole of historic Palestine, they should take a lead from Israeli peace campaigners such as Gush Shalom and Peace Now and demand an end to the multiple human rights abuses Palestinians face on a daily basis. The continued occupation and illegal settlements are violations of international law and are a barrier to peace.

The U.S. president’s announcement that his administration will recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, including occupied Palestinian territory, is a threat to peace that has rightly been met with overwhelming international condemnation.

The decision is not only reckless and provocative – it risks setting back any prospect of a political settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

President Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly in September signalled a wider threat to peace. His attack on multilateralism, human rights and international law should deeply trouble us all.

And this is no time to reject the Iran Nuclear Deal, a significant achievement agreed between Iran and a group of world power to reduce tensions.

That threatens not just the Middle East but also the Korean Peninsula. What incentives are there for Pyongyang to believe disarmament will bring benefits when the U.S. dumps its nuclear agreement with Tehran?

Trump and Kim Jong Un threaten a terrifying nuclear confrontation with their absurd and bellicose insults.

In common with almost the whole of humanity, I say to the two leaders: this is not a game, step back from the brink now.

It is a commonplace that war and violence do not solve the world’s problems. Violence breeds violence. In 2016 nearly three quarters of all deaths from terrorism were in five states; Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria and Somalia.

So let us stand up for the victims of war and terrorism and make international justice a reality. And demand that the biggest arms exporters ensure all arms exports are consistent, not legally, but with their moral obligations too.

That means no more arms export licences when there is a clear risk that they will be used to commit human rights abuses or crimes against humanity.

The UK is one of the world’s largest arms exporters so we must live up to our international obligations while we explore ways to convert arms production into other socially useful, high-skill, high-tech industry.

Which is why I welcome the recent bipartisan U.S. House of Representatives resolution which does two unprecedented things.

First, it acknowledges the U.S. role in the destruction of Yemen, including the mid-air refuelling of the Saudi-led coalition planes essential to their bombing campaign and helping in selecting targets.

Second, it makes plain that Congress has not authorised this military involvement.

Yemen is a desperate humanitarian catastrophe with the worst cholera outbreak in history.

The weight of international community opinion needs to be brought to bear on those supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, including Theresa May’s Government, to meet our legal and moral obligations on arms sales and to negotiate an urgent ceasefire and settlement of this devastating conflict.

If we’re serious about supporting peace we must strengthen international co-operation and peacekeeping. Britain has an important role to play after failing to contribute significant troop numbers in recent years.

We are determined to seize the opportunity to be a force for good in peacekeeping, diplomacy and support for human rights.

Labour is committed to invest in our diplomatic capabilities and consular services and we will reintroduce human rights advisers in our embassies around the world.

Human rights and justice will be at the heart of our foreign policy along with a commitment to support the United Nations.

The UN provides a unique platform for international co-operation and action. And to be effective, we need member states to get behind the reform agenda set out by Secretary General Guterres.

The world demands the UN Security Council responds, becomes more representative and plays the role it was set up to on peace and security.

We can live in a more peaceful world. The desire to help create a better life for all burns within us.

Governments, civil society, social movements and international organisations can all help realise that goal.

We need to redouble our efforts to create a global rules based system that applies to all and works for the many, not the few.

No more bomb first and think and talk later.

No more double standards in foreign policy.

No more scapegoating of global institutions for the sake of scoring political points at home.

Instead: solidarity, calm leadership and co-operation. Together we can:

• Build a new social and economic system with human rights and justice at its core.
• Deliver climate justice and a better way to live together on this planet.
• Recognise the humanity of refugees and offer them a place of safety.
• Work for peace, security and understanding.

The survival of our common humanity requires nothing less. We need to recognise and pay tribute to human rights defenders the world over, putting their lives on the line for others – our voice must be their voice.

Thank you.

Our thanks to Socialist Project (Canada) for bringing this important speech to the attention of Global Research

If military aid to Kiev increases, then the situation in Eastern Europe will become more heated – with the US and Canada promising to control the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

Ottawa has included Ukraine in the list of countries where from December 13, the supply of Canadian lethal weapons has become legal.

In fact, Canada creates a dangerous precedent, denies the essence of the Minsk accords and becoming one of the sides of the intra-Ukrainian conflict. The implementation of these plans may cause an escalation of the conflict in the Donbass.

By strange coincidence, the United States on the same day accused Russia of shelling civilians in eastern Ukraine, although State Department spokesman Heather Nauert did not show any evidence of these events.

Earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada will continue to help Ukraine “defend its sovereignty” – 200 Canadian military instructors will continue training the soldiers and officers of the Armed Forces in the Yavoriv area in the Lviv region until March 2019. Canadian Defense Minister Kharjit Sadzhan spoke about plans to build a factory in Ukraine for the production of ammunition.

Investors need war, and member of the North Atlantic alliance Canada is most definitely pushing Ukraine toward militarization and unleashing large-scale military operations on the border with Russia.

Figures and Facts

The military industry of Canada is based on the aerospace, radio-electronic and shipbuilding industries, which are dependent on the United States.

High-tech military equipment is acquired from the US and Western European countries (for example, 80 Leopard 2A4 tanks were purchased in the Netherlands in 2008). The only production in Canada of armored combat vehicles is the property of the American company General Motors.

The Canadian army is equipped with licensed automatic rifles C2 and C1 – analogues of the American M16 (caliber 5.56 mm), modifications of the British automaton of the Sterling system and the Belgian machine gun FN MAG (caliber 7.62 mm).

Canada produces for itself ammunition for small arms and artillery, but can only export a modest 10 percent of its output in this spectrum. Cartridges of calibers 5.56, 7.62 and 9 mm, caliber 20-105 mm, sea, antipersonnel and antitank mines, various bombs, powder charges for the 155 mm self-propelled howitzer M109 guns are produced by the company Kanedien Arsenals (annual cost output of about 100 million dollars).

It is obvious that to build an ammunition plant in Ukraine and to provide the APU with automatic rifles C2 and C1, Canada will be able to do only with the help of the USA, since it is a question of high-tech (licensed) production, and hundreds of thousands of small arms.

Coincidentally, in January 2017, Ukroboronprom signed an agreement with the American company Aeroscraft on the mass production of the M16 rifle on the Ukrainian territory. The role of Canada is just a small detraction from the usual suspect.

The American defense support of Ukraine for 2018 is 350 million dollars – twice as much as in 2017. Probably, this is only the visible part of the financing directed at the rearmament of the APU.

Deliveries of lethal weapons to Ukraine directly from the United States are a violation of the Minsk agreements – but Washington is able to covertly manage the cash flows and resources of NATO partners – it is very convenient, as it causes fewer questions by the world community.

Dozens of countries are included in the American weapons schemes. Recently, we reported on the role of Lithuania. Earlier, Britain, Poland and the United Arab Emirates were mentioned among the arms suppliers for Ukraine. It is known that Japan donated $ 1.85 billion to strengthen the Armed Forces, Saudi Arabia – $ 40 million to develop and produce Ukrainian cruise missiles.

The prospects are quite transparent: if military aid to Kiev grows, then the situation in Eastern Europe will become proportionally more heated. Infinite armament of Ukraine sooner or later initiates a large-scale military conflict that will extend beyond Europe.

US actions are encouraging Kiev, inspiring hope for a military victory. For Russia, this is an extremely irresponsible tactic. Over the decades of of failure in Middle East, the Pentagon and NATO have not learned anything. While Ukrainians themselves are manipulated to believe they are anything more than pawns in wider geopolitical gains.

Ukraine needs dozens of billions of investments for the economy, and not stockpiles of weapons which will devastate Europe – but the United States, as always, remains insulated by the Atlantic Ocean.

In an ideal world – there should not be NATO troops on Ukrainian territory, Global Strike and ABM systems should not be deployed in Bulgaria, Romania or Poland. The non-aligned status of Ukraine is the best choice for Brussels, Washington, Ottawa and Kiev.

Translated by Inessa Sinchougova 

Seoul.

Atrocity tourism and what might be termed the tourism of divisive obstacles (fences, barbed wire, mine fields) can be great money earners.  Former concentration and extermination camps in Europe bring in currency even as visitors shake with stunned grief and moral disturbance – tears and foreboding as valuable currency.

In South Korea, the money earner is the Demilitarised Zone, shortened to the seemingly innocuous DMZ.  Euphemised in such a manner, and one can forget the tens of thousands of helmeted men who gaze at each other at border points, or the thousands of artillery pieces in concealed spaces waiting to be deployed in a moment of annihilating fury.

Gazing across a territory with millions of unexploded mines, a territory that, ironically enough, is meant to be demilitarised, chills the blood.  Here, along the 38^th parallel, another legacy of great power cruelty and avarice, two Koreas face each other on one of the most heavily armed borders on the planet.  This may be the site of the next regional, or world war, one that promises to be over with apocalyptic brevity.

Time and history are suspended here, a form of cryogenic storage.  There are monuments to the signing of the armistice that never formally concluded the war of 1950-1953.  There are scrap items such as shot up trains gloomily present in rusty solemnity.  A crisp, biting air adds to the atmosphere as the field glasses are deployed across from the Dora observatory. Birds of prey hover over an area teaming with ornithological variety, and seem indifferent, or certainly acclimatised to the megaphone music blaring across the border.  Two enormous flagpoles gaze at each other, accompanying flags limp.

Kaesong City can be seen from Mount Dora.  To the left, is something that could hardly count as a village.

“If you look to the left, it is a fake city,” points the guide Han.

That purports to be “Propaganda Village” or Kijong-dong, supposedly an incentive to lure those in the South who have had enough, and wish for the offerings of the north.

The guide is intent on educating his guests. In the manner of an overly enthusiastic master, he wishes to dictate things early.

“You will all be known as Han’s guests.”

He insists, with a weak stab at humour, on being called Han, or, should you wish, Han Solo.  If all things fail, he will settle with Rob.

As we make our way to the DMZ, Han feels obligated to regale us with stories punctuated by trivia.  In time, he starts to ramble, even prattle.  His points of discussion are suitably packaged for morsel-sized consumption, directed at social media junkies rather than bookish types.  These are not visitors who are too aware of their history, offering easy pickings.

He describes the situation for defectors, most of who come through China rather than brave the murderous parallel.  They are offered assistance and programs to integrate into South Korean society, though these are, in the scheme of things, modest.  The arms might be open in welcome, but these are only ever at half-stretch.  The citizens of the DPRK remain, at best, second in the political and social lottery.

To the border, moments of absurd optimism are presented. What promises to be an international station at Dorasan, a potential future meeting point on the way to Pyongyang, is heralded as another hopeful sign.  We do not know when, but the sense here is that the train service to the DPRK will commence, a state of affairs that will link the Koreas to lucrative trans-continental train lines, including the Trans-Siberian.

“Not the last station from the South,” comes the advertisement, “But the first station toward the North.”

Even across the unpromising barbed wire, the frosty gazes, the lethal defences, Han is confident: “Eventually, we are all going to be re-unified.”  At the station entrance is yet another installation to press home the point: a piano for reunification with its strings replaced by barbed wire.

The absurdity does not stop there.  Infiltration tunnels provide visitors a glimpse into the efforts of North Korean burrowers to find means of penetrating South Korean territory, though suggestions that these might be used in the event of an invasion are simply not convincing. For one thing, they are squat, narrow constructions that would only be suitable for an army of malnourished midgets on a suicide mission. An Indonesian lady, burnished with a hard hat, barely grazes the top. Taller visitors are not so lucky, and helmets crash and graze the tunnel as the claustrophobia sets in.

A few beat a hasty retreat on initially seeing the 263 metres before them.  To get to that tunnel requires traversing another dug entrance.  “Too crazy, too hot,” comes the surrendering lament of a thick set Indian man.  The walls, covered in coal glazing to give the impression of a legitimate mining venture, seem to be moving in; the back begins to ache, the muscles to tighten.

The tourist spectacle resolves itself in being stark, though, in anticipation of US tourists, take away coffee options are plentiful at meeting points through the DMZ tour. The knickknacks are poor in variety.  Ginseng brandy from North Korea is available for purchase, as are a range of trashy trinkets reflecting the parlous state of border relations.

On the return to Itaewon, the guide makes a modest effort to rein in his enthusiasm. He decides the visitors to go to the amethyst factory, promoting the magic of Korea’s national stone.  The employees at the factory pounce with unremitting fury, hoping to make a killing. Some succeed. Han Solo-Rob looks pleased.  Even in the shade of potential, existentially harmful conflict, business will go on as the Koreas continue, to a large extent, to remain ghosts at the feast of power politics.

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

The Russian government has recently announced it will issue nearly $1 billion equivalent in state bonds, but denominated not in US dollars as is mostly the case. Rather it will be the first sale of Russian bonds in China’s yuan. While $1 billion may not sound like much when compared with the Peoples’ Bank of China total holdings of US Government debt of more than $1 trillion or to the US Federal debt today of over $20 trillion, it’s significance lies beyond the nominal amount. It’s a test run by both governments of the potential for state financing of infrastructure and other projects independent of dollar risk from such events as US Treasury financial sanctions.

Russian Debt and China Yuan

Since the August 1998 sovereign default triggered by the West, Russian state finances have been prudent to almost a fault. The size of the national government debt is the lowest of any major industrial country, a mere 10.6% of GDP for the current year. This has enabled Russia to withstand the US financial warfare sanctions imposed since 2014, and forced the country to turn elsewhere for their financial stability. That “elsewhere” is increasingly called the Peoples’ Republic of China.

Now the Russian Ministry of Finance is reportedly planning the first sale of Russian debt in the form of bonds denominated in Chinese yuan currency. The size of the first offering, a testing of the market, will be 6 billion yuan or just under $1 billion. The sale is being organized by the state-owned Russian Gazprombank, the Bank of China Ltd., and China’s largest state bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China. The move is being accelerated by reports that the US Treasury is examining potential consequences of extending penalties, until now concentrated on Russian oil and gas projects, to include Russian sovereign debt in its sanctions warfare. The new yuan bond will be traded on the Moscow Exchange and will aim to sell to mainland Chinese investors as well as international and Russian borrowers at attractive interest rates.

Western sanctions or threats of sanctions are forcing Russia and China to cooperate more strategically on what is becoming the seed of a genuine alternative to the dollar system. The Russian yuan debt offerings will also give a significant boost to China’s desire to build the yuan as an accepted international currency.

China Petro-Yuan

The steps to begin issuing Russian state debt in yuan are paralleled by another major development towards broader international yuan acceptance vis a vis the US dollar. On December 13, Chinese regulators completed final testing in preparation for launch of not a dollar-backed, but rather, a yuan-backed oil futures contract to be traded on the Shanghai Futures Exchange. The implications are potentially large.

China is the world’s largest oil importing country. Control of financial oil futures markets until now has been the tightly-guarded province of Wall Street banks and the New York, London and other futures exchanges they control. Emergence of Shanghai as a major yuan-based oil futures center could significantly weaken dollar domination of oil trade.

Since the 1970’s oil shock and the 400% rise in the oil price from OPEC countries, Washington has maintained a strict regime in which the world’s most valuable commodity, oil, would be traded in US dollars alone. In December 1974, the US Treasury signed a secret agreement in Riyadh with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, “to establish a new relationship through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with the US Treasury borrowing operation” to buy US government debt with surplus petrodollars.

The Saudis agreed to enforce OPEC dollar-only oil sales in return for US sales of advanced military equipment (purchased for dollars of course) and a guarantee of protection from possible Israeli attack. This was the beginning of what then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called recycling the petro-dollar. To the present, only two oil export country leaders, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Qaddafi, have tried to change the system and sell oil for euros or gold dinars. Now China is challenging the petro-dollar system in a different way with the petro-yuan.

The difference between Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi is that far more influential countries, Russia and now Iran, with China’s implicit support, are cooperating to avoid the dollar out of necessity forced by US pressure. That is a far stronger challenge to the US dollar than Iraq or Libya could ever manage.

The China yuan oil futures contract now will allow China’s trading partners to pay with gold or to convert yuan into gold without the necessity to keep money in Chinese assets or turn it into US dollars. Oil exporters such as Russia or Iran or Venezuela—all targets of US sanctions—can avoid those US sanctions by avoiding oil trades in dollars now. This past September Venezuela responded to US sanctions by ordering the state oil company and traders to make oil sale contracts into euro and not to pay or be paid in US dollars any longer.

Gold for oil?

The Shanghai International Energy Exchange will soon launch their crude-oil futures contract denominated in yuan. The Shanghai International Energy Exchange futures contract will streamline and solidify the process of selling oil to China for yuan that Russia began after sanctions in 2014. This will also allow other oil producers around the world to sell their oil for yuan instead of dollars. The crude oil futures contract will be the first commodity contract in China open to foreign investment funds, trading houses, and oil firms. The circumvention of US dollar trade could allow oil exporters such as Russia and Iran, for example, to bypass US sanctions.

To make the offer more attractive, China has linked the crude-oil futures contract with the option to efficiently convert yuan into physical gold through gold exchanges in Shanghai and Hong Kong. According to Wang Zhimin, director of the Center for Globalization and Modernization at China’s Institute of Foreign Economy and Trade, the possibility of converting the yuan oil futures into gold will give the Chinese futures a competitive advantage over Brent and West Texas Intermediate benchmarks.

Now Russia or Iran or other oil producers are in a position to sell oil to China for yuan or rubles, bypassing the dollar entirely. The shift is about to take place in the coming weeks as the yuan oil futures contract is officially launched. Further in October China and Russia launched what is called a payment versus payment (PVP) system for Chinese yuan and Russian ruble transactions that will reduce settlement risk for oil and other trades.

Already reportedly Russian oil and gas sales to China are being conducted in Ruble and Yuan and since the foolish US effort to isolate Qatar in the Persian Gulf, Qatar, a major LNG gas supplier to China has switched to pricing in yuan. Pressure is growing that at some point Saudi Arabia breaks its 1974 pact with Washington and sells its oil to China also for yuan.

Iran to Join EEU

A new element is about to be added to the growing cooperation across Eurasia centered around China and Russia, namely Iran. According to Behrouz Hassanolfat of Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization, in a statement carried on Iranian state-owned Press-TV, as early as February, 2018 Iran is set to become a member of Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Presently the EEU, created in 2015, includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan to create a large zone for free transit of goods, services, capital and workers among member states. Presently the EEU is a market of 183 million people. Addition of Iran with its more than 80 million citizens would give a major boost to the economies of the EEU and to its economic importance, creating a common market of more than 263 million, with skilled labor, engineers, scientists and industrial know-how.

Iran has already announced, in face of escalating threats from Washington, that it seeks ways to sell its oil for non-dollar currencies. Integration into the EEU could bring a solution to this as Iran, Russia and China inevitably draw closer in face of relentless US pressures on all three.

Increasingly in proportion to the pressure from the West the nations of Eurasia are developing modes of growing their economies independent of US Treasury financial sanctions. In retrospect, it’s likely that those US sanctions will be seen as one of the more stupid attempts of Washington to dominate the economies of Eurasia.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from NEO.

The effects of humankind created Climate Chaos are proving to be more devastating than even the most grim predictions. Wealth inequity is worse than in the Gilded Age. The US empire wages perpetual war, hot and cold, overt and covert, including military brinksmanship with the nuclear power, The Russian Federation. 

Speaking of the latter, the US media, retails a storyline that would be considered risible if it was not so dangerously inflammatory i.e., L’affaire du Russia-gate, wherein, according to the lurid tale, the sinister Vladimir Putin, applying techniques from the Russian handbook for international intrigue, Rasputin Mind Control For Dummies, has wrested control of the US Executive Branch of government and bends its policies to his diabolical will. 

Ridiculous, huh?  Yet the mainstream press promulgates and a large section of the general public believes what is clearly a reality-bereft storyline, as all the while, ignoring circumstances crucial for their own economic well being; their safety, insofar as a catastrophic nuclear exchange; and the steps required to maintain the ecological criteria crucial for allowing the continued viability of human beings on planet earth.

A socio-cultural-political structure is in place wherein the individual is bombarded, to the point of psychical saturation, with self-serving, elitist manufactured media content. Decades back, news and entertainment merged thus freedom of choice amounts to psychical wanderings in a wilderness of empty, consumer cravings and unquenchable longings. Moreover, personas are forged upon the simulacrum smithy of pop/consumer culture, in which, image is reality, salesmanship trumps (yes, Trumps) substance. Among the repercussions: A reality television con man gains the cultural capital to mount a successful bid for the US presidency. 

Trump’s ascendency should not come as a shock. Nor should desperate Democrat’s embrace of Russia-gate/The Russians Are Coming (fool’s) mythos. In essence, US citizens/consumers are the most successfully psychologically colonised people on planet earth. In the realm of the political, Democratic and Republican partisans alike, on cue, are prone to parrot the self-serving lies of their party’s cynical elite, who, it is evident, by the utter disregard they hold towards the prerogatives of their constituency, view the influence-bereft hoi polloi with abiding distain…that is, in the rare event they regard them at all.

The crucial question is: Whose and what agenda does the Russia-gate yarn serve? The answer is hidden in plain sight: the profiteers of US economic and militarist hegemony. The demonisation and diminution of Russian power and influence is essential in order to maintain and expand US dominance and the attendant maintenance and expansion of the already obscene wealth of capitalism’s ruling elite.

While it might seem we are mired in an (un-drainable) swamp of complexity, in reality, the political landscape is a bone dry wasteland, wrought by a single factor — the addictive nature of greed.

Moreover, the reality of Beginning Stage Human Extinction crouches just beyond the line of the horizon. All signs auger, we lost souls of the Anthropocene must alter our course. Yet, we, stranded in the mind-parching wasteland of late stage capitalism, collectively, continue to stagger, mesmerised, towards mass media mirages leading us further and further into the hostile-to-life terrain.

Yet the wasteland’s Establishment media outlets are doing a dead-on, although straight faced, impression, right out of Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film of Cold War era madness, Dr. Strangelove, of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper’s roiling with paranoia ranting about a Russian “conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids [of the US body politic].”

Hyperbolic? Take at perusal at the cover story of the Washington Establishment mouthpiece Newsweek, headlined: “PUTIN IS PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR III—IS TRUMP?”

A sphincter-clinching tale of woe and warning promulgated by the same governmental entities and their corporate media stenographers who waxed apocalyptic about Iraq possessing weapon’s of mass destruction; that an immediate NATO bombing campaign must be launched against the government of Muammar Gaddafi or a else mass slaughter of the innocent will be immanent; and regime change in Syria must proceed because Assad is gassing his own people.

Just what sort of an embittered cynic would call into question the credibility of and mistrust the motives of such paragons of probity? Yet, somehow, in regard to Russia-gate, liberals display scant to zip scepticism towards the stories peddled by this unelected, unaccountable clutch of hyper-authoritarian  prevaricators. In fact, they are, in a cringe worthy spectacle, allowing themselves to be played like Dollar Store kazoos.

Although, I get it. The tangerine-tinged Terror Of Tweettown represents a hideous affront to common sense and common decency. But the same applies to his antagonists in the anti-democratic institutions of the US National Security State and Intelligence Community. While the mission statements of the bureaucracies in question declare they exists to protect the nation from all manner of threats to the safety of the citizenry, a study of their history and present day operations reveals, their modus operandi serves to ensure obscene amounts of wealth continue sluicing into the already bloated coffers of the profiteers of global-wide operations of capitalist plunder.

I understand their desperate need for hope. To crave the quality is inherently human. Even to the point of being whipped into a tizzy by the Russia-gate imbroglio. Yet: All and all, an obsessive focus on Trump, the Orange Scylla, buffets one into the maw of the Washington Establishment’s Charybdis. Again, I understand the sense of desperation: Trump’s smug, bloated face, the grandiose squawk of his voice, and his crass, mean spirited, petty minded pronouncements and middle school bully taunts deserve to be resoundingly rebuked. His hubristic posturing simply begs for comeuppance. One is prone to grow plangent with magical thinking. One longs to witness the bully smirk smacked from his face as he is dispatched in disgrace, Richard Nixon-style, to his parvenu palace at Mar a Lago.

But the effect of banishing Nixon was cosmetic. The accepted Watergate storyline, of probing, political inquest and Constitutional redemption, served as a  palliative administered to the US public in the rare case the slumbering masses might have desired to delve deeper into the heart of darkness of US empire thus might begin to question the mythos of American Exceptionalism and doubt the uplifting denouement cobbled onto the scandal by the political and media elite e.g.,  the system of checks and balances functioned as the nation’s Founders intended. Granted, the system did work as designed, only not in the cliched manner portrayed by its apologists; it worked in the manner it was rigged, to wit, to preserve the secrets of state. The long national nightmare was far from over. In fact, it has been normalised.

When the unthinkable becomes quotidian, by means of the normalisation and systemic codification of crimes against the greater good of humanity, there is a good chance the dynamics of empire building are in play. Empires are not only inherently entropic but they are anathema to the democratic processes crucial to maintaining a republic.

The vast amounts of wealth acquired by means of plunder render a nation’s elite not only craven with cupidity but prone to become so dismally shortsighted, even, judging by the evidence of their reckless actions and crackbrain casuistry, bughouse mad. The present US nuclear sabre rattling at North Korea and the economic aggression and militarist posturing deployed against the Russian Federation are proof of the declaration. A military empire’s unchecked, monomaniacal, more often than not self-destructive, impulse for domination are monstrous traits. The death and carnage strewn in the wake of the imperial monster’s presence in Libya and Syria illustrate a grim testament to the fact.

History reveals, overreach and the passage of time render the aspirations of imperium a nimbus of dust; its grandiose pronouncements a cacophony of strutting clowns; its belief in its inviolable nature and its trumpeted tales of vaunted exceptionalism the stuff of asylum dweller gibbering. On the contrary, a sense of perspective imparts the knowledge, late empire is a fool’s inferno played out on a landscape ridden with exponentially increasing decay.

The storylines of the beneficiaries and operatives of vast systems of runaway power concoct are, more often than not, self-justifying fictions. Cover stories and flat out prevarications, rolled out for the purpose of hiding the prevailing order’s actions and motives, come to dominate the socio-cultural-political sphere. Views running counter to reigning narratives are apt to be marginalised and/or met with scorn, rage and revulsion. A dangerous one-sidedness prevails.

Analogous to the laws governing thermodynamic equilibrium, when a governor (or speed limiter or controller) switch has been rendered inoperative, a state of thermic runaway comes into play. We are talking the stuff of runaway trains, flaming out super novas, nervous breakdowns, and overreaching empires. By suppressing countervailing views, empires create chaos and carnage and will, in the end, meet their demise by self-annihilation. The rage for total dominance and attendant overreach of capitalist/US militarist hegemony has wrought the phenomenon on a global wide basis.

The governor switch within the greed and power crazed minds of the corporate, military, and governing elite, by all indications, is inoperable. Impervious to the consequences of their recklessness, ranting about Russians, they careen through the Anthropocene. At present, the whole of humankind is held in the thrall of a trajectory of doom. Yet their power is hinged on the ability to dominate the storyline.  Withal, complicity translates to destiny usurped. Conversely, the first measure towards a restoration of equilibrium is to call out a lie. 

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living, now, in Munich, Germany. He may be contacted: [email protected] and at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh

Featured image: President-elect Donald J. Trump and U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi smile for a photo during the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos)

On December 6, a majority of Democrats in the House joined all House Republicans in voting to prevent the House of Representatives from even debating articles of impeachment against President Trump. The House voted 364-58 (with 10 non-votes) to table impeachment articles (H RES 646) sponsored by Texas Democrat Al Green. Over the strong objections of Democratic leaders (an oxymoron), Green had brought his impeachment resolution to a vote by invoking his personal privilege as a House member. Green’s resolution began:

ARTICLE I

In his capacity as President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies necessary for stability within the society of the United States, Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed the society of the United States, brought shame and dishonor to the office of President of the United States, sowing discord among the people of the United States by associating the majesty and dignity of the presidency with causes rooted in white supremacy, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, white nationalism, or neo-Nazism on one or more of the following occasions…

There is nothing surprising or false in this observation. The remainder of Article I lists well-reported occasions when Trump acted as described. There is no doubt that the events occurred. Article I concludes that:

“Donald John Trump by causing such harm to the society of the United States is unfit to be President and warrants impeachment, trial, and removal from office.”

There is no question about what Trump’s behavior has been. The argument would be whether his behavior constitutes an impeachable offense under the Constitution’s Article II, section 4, which provides only that:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

So what are “other High Crimes and Misdemeanors”? The Constitution does not say, and no one knows with certainty what the Constitution’s framers thought they were. What it comes down to in any case of impeachment is whether the president’s behavior is serious enough or damaging enough to the good of the country as a whole that he should be removed from office. Is it enough that he openly violates his oath of office? Is it enough that he issues orders illegal on their face? Is it enough that he continues to commit the war crimes of his predecessors? Is it enough that he trumpets impeachable offenses on TV? Is it enough that he has flouted the Constitution since Inauguration Day? Is it enough that he publicly corrupts the legal process? In any healthy society, the behavior of Donald John Trump would be enough to provoke serious debate as to whether the country should suffer it any further.

A majority of Democrats, appearing neither serious nor healthy, have now gone on record in opposition even to debating Trump’s behavior on its merits. Those Democrats, 128 of them, mostly white-privileged, have voted in tacit support of the racism, bigotry, and prejudice streaming from the Trump administration. Led by Nancy Pelosi, these 128 Democrats (including all the party leadership except James Clyburn) have taken a public pass on discussing real issues of conscience with national importance. Only 58 Democrats voted with conscience, and the corruption of our system is expressed by Washington’s surprise that there were so many, not so few.

Surprise that there were “only” 128 cowards among Democrats in the House is well founded. Nancy Pelosi is the same leader who lacked the stomach to try to impeach George Bush for lying us into a war that the country continues to pay for in money and blood, albeit mostly other people’s blood. In Pelosi-World, if lying the country into war isn’t an impeachable offense, what is?

And let’s be clear here, it’s not as if the votes of any of those 128 Democrats were going to make anymaterial difference in the outcome. The Republican majority in the House was going to table the impeachment resolution no matter how any of the Democrats voted. The Democrats voting not to consider articles of impeachment had no practical grounds for doing so. Each of them put personal politics ahead of any moral reckoning, much less the desperate need of the country for principled leadership. Each of them cast a squalid vote not to confront the profoundly destructive behavior outlined in the impeachment articles, the second (and last) of which began:

ARTICLE II

In his capacity as President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office, of the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony, and respect necessary for stability within the society of the United States, Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than simply insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed the American society by publicly casting contempt on individuals and groups, inciting hate and hostility, sowing discord among the people of the United States, on the basis of race, national origin, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, on one or more of the following occasions …

Again the resolution lists illustrative instances of the offending behavior, which happened without any doubt.

But 128 Democrats don’t want to object, or even to be seen as being willing to object to Trump behavior. These 128 Democrats prefer to be seen voting not to discuss outrages even when there is no chance whatsoever that these outrages will be subject to public debate. They all knew before they voted that Republicans wouldn’t allow it. Yet given an absolutely no-risk opportunity to object to Trump behavior, 128 Democrats chose instead to vote as if they have no serious objection to racism-based policy dominating American government. How can we know that’s not exactly true?

Democrats have been fleeing from the impeachment process for months now, ever since Green first brought out his articles in May. At least six other House Democrats have filed articles of impeachment against Trump, none of which have been voted on yet. Five new articles of impeachment were introduced in mid-November, charging Trump with obstruction of justice, illegally taking money from foreign entities, illegally taking money from American entities, undermining the courts in violation of his oath of office, and undermining public media in violation of the First Amendment – all producing demonstrable damage to the United States as a constitutional democracy.

This is all denied by the Democratic leaders, including Pelosi and her minority whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who said without apparent irony:

Do we disagree with the policies? We do. But disagreeing with the policies is not enough to overturn an election, a free and fair election…. There are a large number of Democrats that believe this president ought to be impeached, we have just a made a judgment that the facts aren’t there to pursue that….

According to Hoyer, 2016 was – unquestionably – a “free and fair election,” despite evidence that it was anything but, especially the Democratic primaries. He and Pelosi might well have reason to keep anyone from looking too closely at any of that. Their personal culpability in a corrupt primary process involves, at the very least, doing nothing about it. And the troubles of the Democratic party leadership run much deeper than that, as lucidly articulated Nomicki Konst, member of the Democratic National Committee Unity Reform Commission, who wonders why the DNC spent $700,000 on five “consultants” but didn’t have money for yard signs in Michigan and Wisconsin.

And there’s no sense or decency coming from Doug Jones, who was just elected Senator from Alabama. He says the sexual aggression allegations against Trump don’t much matter now. He dismisses the women who have come forward recently, he dismisses the movie “16 Women and Donald Trump“ recently released by Brave New Films, and he dismisses calls for Trump’s resignation or impeachment. Senator-elect Jones, a lawyer who probably knows better, told CNN’s Jake Tapper in his pseudo-folksy Alabama manner:

You know, Jake, where I am on that right now is that those allegations were made before the election. And so people had an opportunity to judge before that election. I think we need to move on and not get distracted by those issues. Let’s get on with the real issues that are facing the people of this country right now.

THAT expresses the specious heart of the Democratic Party these days, a party of dishonesty and denial. Jones must know that the allegations raised during the election were not fully vetted. Jones must know that the allegations have expanded and taken on more weight and credibility as strong, articulate women have come forward to support them. Jones dismisses issues that matter significantly to more than half the population. And what does Jones mean by “real issues”? Does he really think a corrupt, bigoted president threatening nuclear war is not a real issue?

The reality of the Trump presidency is that the president has not spent a single minute in office when he wasn’t committing at least one impeachable offense. Advised after the election to divest himself of conflicts of interest, Trump complied in part but continues to profit from foreign and domestic businesses in clear violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses ( Foreign, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8; and Domestic, Article II, Section 1, Clause 7). In a lawsuit pending since June, almost 200 House and Senate Democrats have sued Trump to enforce the emoluments clauses. On Inauguration Day 2017, attorney John Bonifaz of Free Speech for People started an impeachment campaign based on the emoluments clauses. In his view, impeachment can and should proceed as a civil action parallel to the criminal action headed by special counsel Robert Mueller. On Democracy NOW December 15, Bonifaz spoke of the difference between criminal and civil procedures:

The question here are crimes against the state. That is what impeachment is about – abuse of power, abuse of public trust, and not only through the violations of the anti-corruption provisions. There is now, of course, evidence of obstruction of justice. There’s evidence of potential conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 elections and violate federal campaign finance laws, among others. There is now evidence of abuse of the pardon power in the pardoning of former Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There’s recklessly threatening nuclear war against a foreign nation. There’s misuse of the Justice Department to try to prosecute political adversaries. And there’s the giving aid and comfort to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. All of this—all of this deserves an impeachment investigation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Realistically, no impeachment proceeding can go forward without some Republicans, an unlikely development before the 2018 elections. The Democrats in charge seem to have the same blind assumption of winning that they had in 2016, which is hardly reassuring. Waiting for that “certain” victory, those Democrats are content to subject the country to another year of unchecked Trump behavior, with no Plan B should Democrats fail to take the House. Meanwhile, Democratic shucking and jiving does nothing to bring Republicans face to face with their own monstrosities. Democratic dishonesty at the top seems to know no shame, as Pelosi said with counter-factual fatuity:

If you’re going to go down the impeachment path, you have to know you can do it not in a partisan way….. We have an investigation in the Justice Department that is seeking facts. We don’t want it to look political…. [My goal is] for our country is to come together to win the next election.

Impeachment is inherently partisan, with the possibility of being bipartisan in part. In reality, “not partisan” is a lie or a delusion. The Mueller investigation is a criminal investigation that may or may not lead directly to indicting a sitting president. It cannot lead directly to impeachment and removal from office. It might lead there indirectly, but that’s a long process that took three years with Nixon. The goal of the country coming together is a fantasy, and winning the next election is purely partisan – what Pelosi says is obscurantist garbage, but that seems to be the best Democratic leaders can give us these days.

***

 

Note: listed below are the 58 House Democrats who voted to proceed to consider Rep. Green’s two articles of impeachment. If your Representative is not among them, you might ask him or her why. If we’re to have a Democratic wave election in 2018, it might as well be one worth having.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Joining the Eurasian Development Bank could send the strongest signal yet of Pakistan’s multipolar and friendly intentions towards Russia and dispel the second thoughts that some of Moscow’s Indian-aligned “deep state” elite may have about the sincerity of its motives, thereby accelerating the already rapid rapprochement between them as a pragmatic reaction to the hostility that both Great Powers stand to be subjected to as a result of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy.  

Russia and Pakistan have been moving closer to one another across the past couple of years, with their fast-moving rapprochement becoming multidimensional and extending across the military, political, energy, and even economic realms. The steady progress that has been made on these fronts is commendable and certainly has the potential to pioneer game-changing geopolitical developments if the present trajectory continues, but what’s crucially needed at this time is a financial accelerant that can take everything to the next level.

There are many potential projects waiting in the pipeline, but thus far no formal mechanism for actualizing them. On top of that, there are still some “traditionalist” holdouts in the Russian “deep state” who are suspicious of Pakistan’s motives for deepening its engagement with Moscow, believing that Islamabad is mostly engaged in highly publicized but ultimately non-committal talk in order to drive a wedge between Russia and India. It’s therefore in Pakistan’s best interests to send as direct of a signal as possible that it is sincere in its desire to enter into a strategic partnership with Russia, and applying to join the Eurasian Development Bank would deliver an unambiguous message in this regard.

There is no clearer institutional step that Pakistan can take towards Russia than that, since even the act of applying to join would draw a lot of positive attention in Moscow by symbolizing the first real interest that any non-Soviet state has ever had in this framework. The membership negotiations could also open up an additional channel of communication between Russian and Pakistani decision makers, thereby setting into motion other cooperative initiatives and infusing them with a new inertia. Not only that, but both Great Powers could use this as a peaceful and pragmatic opportunity to respond to the hostility that they stand to be subjected to as a result of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy.

This policy-forming document describes Russia as one of the US’ “strategic rivals” that must be countered at all costs, and it doesn’t shy away from using harsh and confrontational language against Pakistan. Quite evidently, both Moscow and Islamabad are in Washington’s crosshairs, though New Delhi is interestingly (though expectedly) being coddled and encouraged to become Beijing’s chief geopolitical rival in the Afro-Pacific space for all of this century. Russia senses that the US’ support for India poses a challenge to Moscow’s efforts to diversify its military and nuclear energy relationship with New Delhi into the real-sector economic sphere, while Pakistan recognizes that it’s all but lost its former American “ally” in the War on Terror.

Correspondingly, Russia seeks to expand its partnership with Pakistan as a means of showing India that it has other options, which will hopefully cause New Delhi to reprioritize the improvement of its disappointing commercial cooperation with Russia. Likewise, Pakistan can no longer depend on American developmental assistance nor ever hope to play the US off against China for its ultimate benefit,instead coming to the conclusion that it’s more prudent to replace the US with Russia since Moscow and Beijing could engage in friendly Silk Road competition with one another along CPEC instead.

Basically, Russia and Pakistan both want to show their traditional but increasingly distrusted Indian & American partners that geopolitical alternatives exist, with the additional benefit being that their newly diversified relations with one another can also help them negotiate better deals from their shared Silk Road counterparts in China. Just as Russia is looking to establish concrete economic influence in South Asia, so too is Pakistan seeking the same in Central Asia, and the Eurasian Development Bank is the perfect institutional vehicle for actualizing their respective visions and placing the two states on the path to a strategic partnership.

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 Belarusian News.

The gist of the Guardian piece is that the findings of the aforementioned journalists are not credible because they are being “used by Russia” to justify Russia’s foreign policy in regards to Syria.

First of all, the Guardian’s premise is rather absurd to begin with, as according to international law, Russia’s presence in Syria is fully legal while that of the countries that back the White Helmets (the US, UK and France, among others) is illegal.

Consequently, the presence of a so-called NGO like White Helmets (in reality they are handsomely funded by western governments) is also illegal as they are operating in Syria without the consent of the Syrian government and without any mandate from the United Nations.

Therefore, the burden of proof in any criticisms of Anderson, Beeley and Bartlett, lies on those who are openly advocating for violations of international law.

But even more fundamentally, there is a fatal flaw in the Guardian’s hatchet job.

On the 2nd of November, an exhaustive report on the alleged chemical attack in Syria’s Khan Sheikhoun was released by the combined Foreign, Defence and Industry and Trade Ministries of the Russian Federation.

The findings of this forensic study affirm that the journalistic findings of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley regarding both the White Helmets organisation as well as the bogus US narrative on the so-called chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun.

The following are the crucial findings of the official Russian study:

• “Victims” of the alleged attack arrived at hospitals hours before the alleged attack was said to have occurred.
• The crater at Khan Sheikhoun was consistent with that created from a ground based crude incendiary device, not an explosive dropped from a Syrian fighter jet, as the US alleged.
• The video of White Helmets ‘medics’ responding to the ‘chemical attack’ is a forgery. Based on the protective wear and lack thereof, seen on the White Helmets ‘volunteers’, the men would have died instantly if dressed in such a way around a real Sarin gas attack.
• Forensic reports show that gas was poured into the crater in question, only after the staged ‘rescue operation’ had long concluded.
• The OPCW report’s findings on the issue were politicised due to the influence of the US government

Below is the two hour long presentation made by Russian officials, detailing the findings of the study on the Khan Sheikhoun attack.

Even prior to the report from the 2nd of November, the Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that the White Helmets are known to travel in terrorist circles and have been guilty of terrorist atrocities themselves.

On the 27th of April, Zakharova stated,

“The White Helmets not only feel at home on territories controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State (Daesh) but also openly express positive attitude towards them, provide information and even financial assistance to them.

There is documentary evidence proving that White Helmets members participated in some operations carried out by Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as covered up the signs of civilian executions”.

Yet the Guardian’s piece about western journalists in Syria, whose independent findings were later confirmed by those of the Russian government, does not mention this fact.

In reality, the Guardian piece is more than a hit-job on Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley, it is an attack on the official statements and forensic reporting of all levels of the Russian government.

The independent findings of the western journalists and those of the Russian government have been backed up by copious amounts of evidence. By contrast, the Guardian hit-piece does not attempt to offer any exculpatory evidence in respect of the White Helmets. The report merely attempts to destroy the credibility of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley on the basis that their work has become popular and that their findings have been discussed on the news outlet RT.

The Guardian piece neither proves nor disproves anything. It merely attempts to use crude talking points borrowed from the American “Russiagate” narrative in order to demonise anyone said to be associated with Russia, even though Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley are not associated with the Russian government.

However, unlike those alleging Russian interference in the 2016 US election, the Guardian did not have the courage  to attack the credibility of the Russian study which vindicates the findings of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley.

Perhaps this is because Russia is more than capable of responding to such a frivolous attack, not least through the social media page of the Russian Embassy in the UK. Maybe however, even Guardian readers are growing tired of the anti-Russia narrative, so instead the Guardian thought they might be able to publish something more ‘exciting’ by attacking independent journalists?

Whatever the thinking of the Guardian’s editors might be, the fact of the matter is that unless the Guardian presents evidence from a study as exhaustive and as thorough as that which Russia conducted in the wake of the OPCW report which has been forensically refuted, the findings of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley remain not only vindicated but validated.

Adam Garrie is managing editor at The Duran.

Featured image is from Fastly.

President Trump has often said that his foreign policy objective was to keep his enemies guessing. If that’s the goal, you could say that he’s doing a good job. The problem is who does he think his enemies are, because the American people are often left guessing as well.

US policy toward North Korea last week is a good example of how the Trump Administration is wittingly or unwittingly sowing confusion among friend and foe alike. In what looked like a breakthrough, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced last Tuesday that the US would be willing to sit down and talk with North Korea “without preconditions.” Previously the US had demanded that North Korea agree to end its nuclear weapons and missile programs before Washington was willing to sit down to formal talks.

The State Department shift toward actual diplomacy with North Korea was quickly quashed, however, when the White House announced that its position on North Korea had not changed. It seemed that the State Department and White House were each pursuing different foreign policies on the Korea issue.

The White House even appeared to belittle Tillerson’s attempt at diplomacy, releasing a statement on Wednesday that talks with North Korea would be “pointless.” No wonder speculation persists that Tillerson is on his way out as Secretary of State.

Then on Friday Secretary Tillerson seemed to do a u-turn on his own policy, announcing at a UN Security Council meeting that a “sustained cessation of North Korea’s threatening behavior” must precede any negotiations with the US. “North Korea must earn its way back to the table,” he said. So, after just three days the offer of unconditional talks with North Korea had been put on and then removed from the table.

There is more than a little hypocrisy in US demands that North Korea cease its “threatening behavior.” Just this month the US and South Korea launched yet another joint military exercise targeting North Korea. Some 12,000 military personnel and 230 aircraft – including stealth fighters – participated in the massive war games. Does anyone think this is not meant to be threatening to North Korea?

It is a shame that the hawks in the Administration continue to dominate. It seems pretty reasonable to open talks with North Korea after a period of “good faith” gestures between Washington and Pyongyang. Why not agree on no US/South Korean joint military exercises for six months in exchange for no North Korean missile launches for the same period and then agree to a meeting on neutral ground? How could it possibly hurt, particularly considering the alternative?

The hawks continue to talk up a US strike against North Korea. Senator Lindsey Graham seemed pleased when he announced that there was a 70 percent chance that the US would attack North Korea if it detonated another nuclear weapon. Does he realize how many people will die? Does he care?

Defense Secretary James Mattis seems skeptical about neocon hysteria, declaring that the North Korean missile program does not pose a “capable threat” to the United States. With that in mind, we can only hope that President Trump will encourage Tillerson to do another about-face and return to the idea of talks without pre-condition. Strategic ambiguity is one thing, sending constantly mixed signals when nuclear war looms is something else.

Featured image is from AOL.com.

The new US National Security Strategy released this week and the speech delivered by President Donald Trump Monday to introduce it constitute a grim warning to humanity that US imperialism is firmly embarked on a road that leads to a nuclear third world war.

While the document has largely been passed over in silence by the president’s ostensible political opponents in the Democratic Party and given relatively short shrift by the establishment media, more thoughtful ideologists of imperialism have noted the far-reaching changes presented in the document.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the historian Arthur L. Herman declared Trump’s National Security Strategy heralds a “profound shift back to the world before 1917: an anarchic international arena in which every sovereign state, large or small, has to rely on armed strength” for its security.

“In this new era” Herman writes, “might inevitably makes right.” Only power matters, and “the big powers inevitably dominate the small.”

Herman adds,

“This is the world of Otto von Bismarck, who said in 1862: “The great questions of the time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions. .. but by iron and blood.”

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal lauded the document’s unvarnished realpolitik, praising its identification of China and Russia by name as “revisionist powers” that seek to “challenge American power, influence, and interests.” With a glee that resembles nothing so much as the war fever gripping the ruling classes before the First World War, the Journal hails the document as an “important corrective from the sunny assurances of the Obama years” and his proclamations that “the tide of war is receding.”

The international press has likewise drawn far-reaching conclusions from the document, with Brendan Thomas-Noone proclaiming in the Australian that, despite the “uncertainty” surrounding the Trump Administration, the document reveals a longer-term “shift in the US foreign policy consensus from global economic integration to great power competition.”

He continues:

“The security strategy argues that the US is entering a new era of great power competition with ‘revisionist’ states—China and Russia. For several decades now, US policy has been to engage these powers, bringing them into international institutions and integrating them with the global economy. It was thought that this would, as the strategy puts it, ‘turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners’. It adds that ‘for the most part, this premise turned out to be false.’”

To the extent that there has been criticism from the Democrats and their media allies, it has largely centered on the failure of both the document and the speech to explicitly denounce Russia for its alleged “meddling” in the 2016 election. This line of faultfinding only tends to support the overall bellicose character of the administration’s policy, merely advancing a tactical quibble over whether Russia or China should be the priority target in US war preparations.

Mandated by a law passed in 1986, the annual presentation by the White House to Congress of a National Security Strategy (NSS) is supposed to outline Washington’s “worldwide interests, goals and objectives” and present “proposed short-term and long-term uses of the political, economic, military, and other elements of the national power” to achieve them.

If the latest NSS and Trump’s speech have elicited little in the way of substantive criticism, it is undoubtedly because there has been a strong element of continuity in US strategy over the course of the past quarter century since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proclamation by Washington of a new “unipolar moment.”

In essence, that strategy has been based on the conclusion that the liquidation of the USSR had relieved US imperialism of previous restraints upon the use of military force in pursuit of its global interests. The predominant layers within the US ruling elite embraced a strategy based upon the delusion that US military supremacy could be actively employed as an instrument for offsetting the relative decline of American capitalism’s dominance of the globe.

This belligerent posture was a manifestation not of American capitalism’s strength, but rather its degeneration and the fears within the US ruling class that the much-celebrated “American Century” could be coming to an end.

In 1992 the Pentagon adopted a foundational Defense Planning Guidance document spelling out Washington’s global hegemonic ambitions. It stated:

“There are other potential nations or coalitions that could, in the further future, develop strategic aims and a defense posture of region-wide or global domination. Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.”

The 1990s saw the implementation of this new policy through the first Persian Gulf War and the brutal intervention to break up Yugoslavia, culminating in the US-led bombing of Serbia in 1999.

The events of September 11, 2001 provided the “war on terror” pretext for a vast escalation of global American militarism. Washington’s policy was spelled out in a 2002 National Security Strategy issued by the Republican administration of George W. Bush adopting the doctrine of “preventive warfare.” This doctrine held that the US could attack any country in the world that it perceived as a potential threat to US interests, a policy that essentially repudiated the Nuremberg principles on aggressive war that provided the legal foundation for the trial and execution of the surviving Nazi leaders.

The doctrine found swift application in the US invasion of Iraq, on the phony pretext of “weapons of mass destruction,” producing one of the greatest war crimes since the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Democratic President Barack Obama, elected based on the misconception that he would initiate a reversal of Bush’s policy, embellished upon the “preventive war” doctrine in his justification of the unprovoked 2011 US war of aggression against Libya. He insisted that US military force was justified even when “our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are,” adding that this included actions aimed at “ensuring regional security, and maintaining the flow of commerce.” In other words, Washington reserves the “right” to launch aggressive war anywhere that the profits and markets of US banks and corporations are at stake.

While there is an unmistakable continuity between these earlier elucidations of the doctrine of global US militarism and the belligerent NSS document and speech delivered by Trump, there is also a significant break, reflecting the deepening crisis of American and world capitalism and the fact that the latest stage in the ongoing US struggle for world hegemony is aimed ever more directly at Russia and China, both nuclear powers.

In his speech, Trump cast himself—much in the manner that Adolph Hitler did in Germany eight decades ago—as the savior of the nation and the champion of the “forgotten man” come to reverse a sellout to foreign interests by “too many of our leaders—so many—who forgot whose voices they were to respect, and whose interest they were supposed to defend.”

Underlying this “stab in the back” rhetoric is the fact that the past quarter century of US military aggression has produced one debacle after another while demonstratively failing to reverse the decline of American capitalism on the world stage.

At their core, the NSS document and Trump’s speech reflect the conclusions drawn from this experience by the top brass of the US military, whose representatives—McMaster, Mattis and Kelly—now dominate the White House and US foreign policy. Described by leading Democrats as “the adults in the room,” their prescription is for a massive escalation of US militarism.

The document laments the “strategic complacency” of the US over the past period, the failure to build “military capacity” and acquire “new weapons systems,” as well as the idea that war could be “won quickly, from stand-off distances with minimal casualties.” Clearly, what they have in mind are an unprecedented increase in military spending and new wars in which the deaths of US soldiers will once again be counted in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

Above all, however, the text departs from previous NSS documents in its open embrace of nuclear war as a viable option. The document states that a buildup of the US nuclear arsenal is “essential to prevent nuclear attack, nonnuclear strategic attacks, and large scale conventional aggression,” strongly suggesting that the US military is prepared to launch a nuclear first strike in response to a nonnuclear challenge. It goes on to affirm that “fear of [nuclear] escalation will not deter the United States from defending our vital interests.”

“History,” Leon Trotsky warned on the eve of the Second World War, “is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”

This prognosis has found powerful confirmation in the threats emanating from Washington this week. The lack of any significant opposition makes it clear that there is no “peace faction” within the US ruling establishment. The prospect of a third—nuclear—world war can be countered only by the international working class mobilizing itself as an independent revolutionary force against imperialist war and its source, the capitalist system.

The US media has recently confirmed that the “US government had quietly funded a program to study UFOs for years…. The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, … collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents.” (NYT)

In this video first released and posted on GR in March 2015, Paul Hellyer forcefully addressed the issue of extraterrestrial life.

***

 “Today, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s former Minister of National Defense warns of an Orwellian New World Order run by banker elites and their masters of war with designs on our personal freedoms.

They don’t want any change,” says Hellyer. 

He ends with a plea to urge the Harper government and legislators everywhere not to let current free trade agreements go forward. “That is high treason,” he says.  

Since late October, an ongoing release of intelligence files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have reignited decades old conspiracy claims. While the material released is reportedly a mix of new and old, some critics have declared that the recently declassified files reveal even more startling evidence regarding the death of 35th president of the United States.

Upon reviewing pivotal historical elements linked to the Kennedy assassination, we’re told that the vast majority of CIA and FBI records regarding the JFK files have been released, though many are still pending.

Despite claims that newly revealed files contain smoking gun evidence in the enigmatic case, the murder of President John F. Kennedy is perhaps an act that will forever be shrouded in conspiracy and mystery as the controversial case is unlikely to bever e officially reopened during our lifetime.

‘CLOAKED IN CONSPIRACY’ – JFK assassination claims have been reignited following the CIA and FBI case record releases. (Photo Illustration 21WIRE’s Shawn Helton)

NOTE* – While the JFK files have been making their way to The National Archives website since late October, some material released contains names of certain individuals that will remain redacted due to apparent concerns over national security.

Although the JFK case is one of America’s most compelling conspiracies, it’s doubtful that there will ever be complete transparency regarding any information concerning a larger premeditated plot. Among the mountain of theories and credible information concerning the 35th president’s assassination, is the likely inclusion of red herrings, false leads, misinformation and media tripwire’s that will forever float in the ether of conspiracy realms in an effort to misdirect the public.

In the early 1950’s, the CIA ran a cloaked wide-scale program called Operation Mockingbird. The controversial program infiltrated the American news media in order to influence the public, while also disseminating propaganda through various front organizations, magazines and cultural groups.

At the start of 2017, more than 12 million declassified documents from the CIA were reportedly published online. While the intelligence docu-dump was believed to have shed additional light on covert war programs, psychic research and the Cold War era, it also contained more evidence confirming the symbiotic relationship between the CIA and American media.

‘DARK DAY’ –  The JFK motorcade traveling through Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. Later that fateful day, Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. One month earlier, Kennedy had discussed plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam. (Image Source: businessinsider)

Over the course of this article, we’ll take a look at one of America’s most puzzling crimes, while examining some of the most intriguing aspects related to the recently declassified JFK files…

Guarding the Hen House

Although the CIA’s declassified JFK documents offer a window into a web of clandestine operatives, cloaked mafia figureheads and uncanny politically connections at play throughout the tension inducing Cold War era, one should remain skeptical and cautious, as it’s very unlikely that any new release would result in a criminal case against the producers of such a large conspiratorial crime, even if such a plot revealed irrefutable evidence.

‘TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS’ –  After Jim Garrison’s case against Shaw, the DA was found not guilty on charges of bribery in a separate trial regarding illegal pinball gambling. Garrison represented himself in 3-hour much ballyhooed closing statement and was easily acquitted on all charges. (Image Source: nola)

Moreover, while it’s tempting to take the claims of the US intelligence apparatus at face value, an astute observer should tread lightly when viewing any new disclosures related to the JFK assassination.

In fact, the very institutions releasing these files today, were at the heart of a controversial investigation conducted by New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, whose CIA related conspiracy claims regarding President Kennedy’s assassination led to charges against a well-known New Orleans businessman and former WW2 military intelligence officer named Clay Shaw. After having been decorated with several prestigious military merits without ever having seen fire in the battlefield – Shaw quickly rose through the ranks of the military, even joining the counterintelligence squad known as the Special Operations Section.

Shaw’s military pedigree recalls the prototype for modern ‘Deep State’ intelligence programs and the formation of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), an intelligence propaganda agency in 1941 that was succeeded by Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a wartime intelligence apparatus created in 1942 which focused on psychological warfare prior to the formation of the CIA. OSS agents also worked closely with British Security Coordination (BSC). Additionally, the notorious right-wing paramilitary group Organisation armée secrète (OAS) in France from 1954-1962 had close ties with the CIA through various front organizations connected to the agency.

Below is passage concerning the formation of the CIA as illuminated by Jay Dyer of Jay’s Analysis. Here we see that the inception of the CIA was a direct result of the passing of the National Security Act of 1947, as well as the influence of powerful political US-UK think-tanks coordinating in the background:

“First, the CIA (preceded by the OSS) was set up as a result of the National Security Act of 1947 [signed] under [Harry S. Truman after the OSS creation by] Franklin D. Roosevelt, springing in part from the Pratt House in New York (future home of the Council on Foreign Relations), itself modelled from the British Secret Intelligence Service.  Likewise, the over-arching institutions that control and run the intelligence agencies in the West, like the Council on Foreign Relations, were modelled on the Oxford Round Table Groups and the Royal Institute for International Affairs.  Indeed, the Pratt House’s British counterpart was the Chatham House.”

From America to Europe, the spectre of intelligence operations has loomed large throughout much of the last century and in the suspicious death of JFK, this was never more apparent…

‘CONSPIRATOR?’ – A brooding Clay Shaw photographed during the JFK assassination trial in 1968. (Image Source: nola)

Company Men & Spymasters

In the aftermath of WW2, Shaw was stated to have been officially discharged from military duty. This prompted the published playwright and Chevalier of the Order of the Crown in Belgium (Knight of Malta) to then travel to New Orleans, whereupon he supposedly received support from the entrepreneurial millionaire Theodore Brent, a local businessman known for rail and shipping operations, including the Mississippi Shipping Company, an organization believed to be a CIA intelligence front that allegedly focused on gathering information on Latin America. Incidentally, the former OSS intelligence officer Shaw, held his first post-war position with the Mississippi Shipping Company.

In 1943, Brent helped charter the International House with a collection of leaders of commerce, trade and banking insiders. It would become one of two predecessors before the creation of the world’s first trade center.

In 1947, Shaw became a founder and managing director of International Trade Mart, a New Orleans financial partner housed in a 33-story cross-shaped building that played a large role in international commerce. The ‘Trade Mart’ as it was called, merged with the International House to form the World Trade Center (see left photo) of New Orleans in 1968. Upon the apparent ‘sponsorship’ of the trade center, the group sought to expand trade operations in Basel, Switzerland, a project that was backed by a slew of well-connected financiers that brought to fruition the organization known as Permindex. Over the years, many researchers have examined extremely compelling ties between the CIA and Permindex, as one of the holding company’s main backers, a lawyer named Lloyd J. Cobb held a Covert Security Clearance issued by the CIA in October of 1953. In addition, Shaw served on the board of directors at Permindex, as Cobb would later become president of Trade Mart in 1962, providing further evidence of the kind of international reach held by the CIA-linked group of partners. Interestingly, one of the Trade Mart’s stated goals would not only be to act as a conduit for foreign trade but the organization would also“counter communist propaganda.” This is something that would later fall in line with other CIA-linked operations over that time period.

Temple University professor and well-known JFK researcher Joan Mellen, found a number of other links between the CIA and the International Trade Mart that aroused suspicion. Here’s a short passage from her book entitled “A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And the Case That Should Have Changed History:”

“The International Trade Mart was run by CIA operatives, its public relations handled by David G. Baldwin, who would later acknowledge his own “CIA connections.” Baldwin’s successor, Jesse Core, was also with the CIA. It was a matter of saving the Agency “shoe leather,” Core would say. The Trade Mart donated money to CIA asset Ed Butler’s INCA. Every consulate within its bowels was bugged.”

Furthermore, not only were Trade Mart and Permindex linked to the CIA – but (see left photo) they were also suspected of ties to organized crime.

In March of 1967, according to the Italian newspaper Paese Sera, Permindex was said to have been CIA front for the purposes of political espionage in Europe, including claims that the company took part in an attempted assassination on the French President Charles de Gaulle alongside the extremist French group OAS in 1961. There were some 30 attempts on de Gaulle’s life in the early 1960’s, which many believe was linked to him granting Algeria independence. In 1966, de Gaulle also bucked the established order by withdrawing France from the NATO Military Command Structure. In 1958, after the inception of Permindex, Shaw, along with Cobb and other banking and trade insiders, including David Rockefeller, created a Permindex subsidiary in Rome known as Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). Permindex/CMC, were later kicked out of Italy due to implications that the CIA front organizations were involved in the subversion of European governments.

After Shaw’s arrest, Joan Mellen’s husband Ralph Schoenman sent the Paese Sera newspaper articles to Garrison from London. The Italian paper according to Mellen, exposed the “CIA’s pernicious attempt to influence European electoral politics and thwart the democratic process in more than one country.”

Adding to that, Mellen explained in her book mentioned above, that the family of former CIA Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles (left photo), had been very ‘interested’ in Permindex.  In 2005, Dr. Daniele Ganser stated that a highly secretive CIA-backed paramilitary army was “born out of the head of Allen Dulles”in his seminal book, “NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe.” According Ganser’s research, documents revealed that the CIA’s covert armies were used to subvert the political interests of various nations through the implementation of a Cold-War era strategy of tension. As the former Swiss Director of the OSS, Dulles, had a tainted past tied to a program which sought to assimilate Nazi scientists into America after WW2 under the code name Operation Paperclip. A decade later in 1953, Dulles as head of the CIA approved $1 million dollars in the lead up to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in what became known as Operation Ajax (aka the TPAJAX project). One year later, in 1954, he was the mastermind of a Guatemalan coup.

In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, Dulles would be appointed as one of a seven member panel on the controversial Warren Commission headed by fellow Freemason Chief Justice Earl Warren. Rather intriguingly, David Talbot‘s book entitled “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,”  recently raised more questions concerning the potential role played by Dulles in the death of Kennedy.

During the Dulles era as CIA chief, Shaw’s served as an informant in the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Service throughout 1948-1956. Given Shaw’s extensive military intelligence background, it stands to reason any connection to the CIA would have been extremely significant.

Prior to the formation of the top-secret project QKENCHANT in 1952, Shaw was granted a ‘five-agency’ clearance in 1949. According to FOIA documents obtained by the Mary Ferrell Foundation, “Subject [Shaw] was granted a Provisional Security Approval for use under Project QKENCHANT on an unwitting basis on 10 December 1962.” The ‘Agency’ project QKENCHANT was allegedly used to grant security approvals to “non-Agency personnel,” along with closely tied entities for the purpose of proposing future projects, activities and the formation of new relationships. Interestingly, project QKENCHANT also used the services of another individual swirling in the JFK assassination stratosphere named E. Howard Hunt. Years later, the former CIA operative and White House aide Hunt, would become a well-known name as he was tagged as one of five Watergate burglars that stained the Nixon administration after breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The list of additional accomplices included three other apparent anti-communist Cuban exiles, along with G. Gordon Liddy, and James McCord who would also be implicated in the ‘White House Plumbers’ plot.

In 2007, although Hunt declined direct participation, he released a 2004 controversial confessionthat suggested he played a ‘benchwarmer’ role in the plot to kill Kennedy. While Hunt’s apparent allegations caused quite a stir, he fingered several suspected plotters such as the anti-Castro Frank Sturgis and Cuban exile leader of Alpha 66, Antonio Veciana, a man who claims to have ‘inadvertently’ witnessed a meeting with the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.

In Michael Benson‘s “Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination: An A to Z Encyclopedia,”according to Garrison, CMC represented the paramilitary right in Europe, along with the “Italian fascists, American CIA and other interests.” Here’s a compelling passage from Benson’s book that links CMC, Permindex, the CIA and organized crime:

“According to evidence in the WC [Warren Commission] hearings, Permindex was suspected of funding political assassinations and laundering money for organized crime. Shaw was also on the board of directors for Permindex’s sister corporation, Centro Mondaiale Commerciale CMC.

Benson’s book also cites other well researched claims regarding CMC and the apparent money laundering of their liquid assets. According to a 1958 State Department document, the CMC, the World Trade Center of Rome, was indeed modeled after the CIA-created Trade Mart in New Orleans.

More recently, important ‘groundbreaking’ documents associated with the construct of CMC were unearthed in 2016 by the Italian journalist Michele Metta.

According to well-known researcher and writer Jim Marrs a tangled web of intelligence operations linked to Permindex and CMC were further described in his book entitled “Cross Fire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.” Below is a revealing passage from the seminal JFK researcher:

“The Trade Mart was connected with the Centro Mondaiale Commerciale CMC through yet another shadowy firm named Permindex (Permanent Industrial Expositions), also in the business of international expositions.”

Continuing, Cross Fire exposed other suspicious intelligence links:

“The Italian media reported that [Ferenc] Nagy was president of Permindex and the board chairman and major stockholder was Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield a powerful Montreal lawyer who represented the Bronfmans, a Canadian family made wealthy by the liquor industry, as well as serving US intelligence services. Reportedly Bloomfield established Permindex in 1958 as part of the creation of worldwide trade centers connected with CMC.”

As reported in investigative work by David Goldman and Jeffery Steinberg in 1981, Bloomfield was stated to have been recruited to be part of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1938. later the Montreal lawyer obtained an official rank in the US Army, OSS intelligence and the FBI’s counterespionage ‘Division Five’ unit as confirmed by Marrs. Additionally, Bloomfield held close ties with Master Mason FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Tibor Rosenbaum, a head of finance for Israeli intelligence.

Further conspiratorial claims would be levied on Rosenbaum’s Geneva-based Banque de Credit International (BCI), a Mossad-linked bank that allegedly laundered Permindex money to finance assassination attempts on de Gaulle. BCI was also the predecessor to the scandal plagued Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) that was later found to be peddling in terror funding, arms deals and prostitution. BCCI would later be implicated in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report called The BCCI Affair. In 1974, Rosenbaum himself was said to have owed BCI some $60‐million after his business associate Baron Edmond de Rothschild of the Israel Corporation, discovered an apparent an “open and shut case of unauthorized conversion of company funds,” that were transferred to the insolvent Inter‐Credit Trust of Vaduz instead of BCI.

‘COVERT OPERATOR?’ – Lee Harvey Oswald seen handing out ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ leaflets outside the International Trade Mart in New Orleans in August of 1963. (Image Source: neworleanspast)

The Dallas Plot & The Cuban Project

In March of 1967, Garrison, the ex-FBI agent turned DA, indicted Shaw on conspiracy charges related to the assassination of President Kennedy. It would take 22 months before the court proceedings would begin in a trial which lasted 34 days. Aspects of the Shaw trial became popularized following Oliver Stone‘s much debated and controversial thriller entitled JFK (1991).

At the start of the trial in 1969, Garrison’s opening statement contended that Shaw, a man believed to have used the alias known as ‘Clay Bertrand’ (also Clem) within the New Orleans socialite scene and gay underground, was also a well-connected former military intelligence officer with no formal background in trade that allegedly participated in a plot to kill the 35th president of the United States. Garrison would further assert that Shaw met with a former US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald and an airline pilot for Eastern Airlines, David Ferrie on several occasions over the summer of 1963, eventually culminated in a meeting at Ferrie’s New Orleans apartment where Garrison’s star-witness a 25-year-old insurance salesman for Equitable Life Assurance Society named Perry Raymond Russo, apparently overheard the men discussing critical details regarding a JFK assassination plot in September of 1963.

Below is screen shot depicting a portion of a NY Times article discussing Russo’s testimony of the JFK plot…

Russo’s account of what happened was a major part of the trial and has been one of the most controversial aspects of Garrison’s case against Shaw ever since. Over the years, researchers and mainstream critics have debated the credibility of Russo after receiving hypnosis prior to his testimony.

JFK case critics believe that due to the combination of the credibility of witnesses called into question, the possibility of planted witnesses and the untimely deaths of some 18 material witnesses, including the controversial death of Ferrie, who was not able to be deposed, Shaw was acquitted in 54 minutes in the only JFK assassination case to make it to trial.

A documentary entitled ‘The JFK Assassination; The Jim Garrison Tapes’ discusses many of the  controversial elements of the Shaw trial and its aftermath…

Interestingly, the demanding trial would include some surprising moments based on witness testimony, as well as the shocking Abraham Zapruder footage which was viewed publicly for the first time before the jury. Moreover, it would later be revealed that the apparent dressmaker Zapruder, had his own links to a CIA front organization as he was stated to have been a member of the Dallas Council on World Affairs. Another fellow member of the council orbiting around the JFK plot, was petroleum engineer George Serguis de Mohrenschildt. Mohrenschildt’s ties didn’t end there, as he apparently worked out of a CIA-trust building and had befriended Oswald in the summer of 1962. It would later be revealed that Mohrenschildt exchanged letters with Texas oilman and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) some seven months before the JFK assassination and that he knew George Bush Sr since 1942. Surely, these high level links to CIA and top-ranking officials tracing back to Oswald were not just a coincidence. The whole episode appears to have been echoed two decades later, as a Bush/Hinckley family nexus was exposed following an attempt to assassinate the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

While many mainstream accounts support a Fidel Castro theory in the death of Kennedy due to the apparent assassination attempts on his life, its important to note the massive CIA influence in Cuba. According to Cuban-born American historian and writer Servando Gonzalez, Castro himself allegedly had ties to the Council on Foreign Relations.  Furthermore, when concerning a larger conspiracy revolving around Cuba, one should consider the political backdrop – on one hand there was the possibly designed to fail CIA-backed ‘Bay of Pigs‘ invasion which set the stage for Operation Mongoose, a clandestine program overseen by the CIA, the US State Department (DOS) and the Department of Defense (DoD). Mongoose made use of the anti-Castro Oswald-CIA-mafia-linked Ferrie, along with Cuban exiles in order to sabotage the Castro regime. Additionally, waiting in the wings was the top-secret proposal called Operation Northwoods, a particularly subversive false flag program that included plots of hijacked planes, the bombing of a US ship, a virulent communist Cuban terror campaign in US cities and manufacturing the “real or simulated” deaths of Cuban refugees.

In April of 1961, US planning for the Cuban Project aka Operation Mongoose began and was to stated to have been led by Air Force General Edward Lansdale, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and others. The all-encompassing covert war program (seen in part in the image below) would be set in motion to subvert the Cuban regime by October 1962. Underneath the network of Operation Mongoose, there were 33 proposed plans (including Operation Northwoods) designed specifically to be used as a pretext to invade Cuba.

The Northwoods false flag operation (see text of memorandum below) drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed off on by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer was ultimately rejected by Kennedy. However, the declassified files related to the operation are still shocking 55 years later, as the program considered creating “funerals for mock victims,” for one of the various plots, as well as produce “casualty lists in US newspapers,” in order to “cause a helpful wave of indignation,” as another plot would reveal where “Soviet bloc incendiaries could be found,” after a night of cane-burning in Cuba.

This was all said to be happening as President Kennedy was stated to have quietly been working to negotiate through ‘back channels’ with Castro.

October of 1962 ushered in the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis‘ a tense escalation during the Cold War that culminated in Soviet nuclear missiles being placed in Cuba to prevent an invasion. During this time, all Mongoose related operations were halted, as US intelligence apparently failed to warn the Kennedy administration of the Soviet military aid.

One could contend that the entirety of Mongoose PSYOP used to cast blame on Cuba was a precursor for future nation building projects that have also unfairly manipulated the public in the wake of alleged mass trauma.

‘PATSY?’ – Many researchers believe that the alleged lone gunman in the JFK assassination was an intelligence linked operative who used the alias, Alek Hidell.  (Image Source: pinterest)

Covert Operators, the Mafia & NATO’s False Flags

As the identity of Oswald has been shrouded in mystery and manipulation, one is reminded of his ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ Committee housed at 544 Camp Street in the very same building of Guy Banister, ex-FBI agent turned private investigator, whose office was at 531 Lafayette Street, just around the corner from Oswald’s office in the now demolished Newman building. Incidentally, Banister was stated to have been linked to the FBI’s Hoover, while maintaining a front investigative firm that included the CIA operative Ferrie, who reportedly had very close ties to one of the country’s most powerful mafia bosses, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. According to a Washington Post article from 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations believed that Banister’s “private detective agency was a cover for his role as go-between for the CIA and the Cuban exiles involved in anti-Castro operations.” Additionally, Banister and Ferrie were reportedly engaged in a gun-running operation for Cuban commandos, as the building became headquarters for anti-Castro groups. A decade after the assassination and Shaw trial, CIA operative William Gaudet claimed to have seen Banister with Oswald in a garage near the Camp Street offices. Banister was also found to have ties to the extremist French group OAS.

Interestingly, both Oswald and Ferrie operated offices out of the 544 Camp Street address. This meant that the apparently pro-Castro Oswald group operated directly next to Ferrie’s anti-Castro activities. The absurdity of this revelation is still as potent today as it was in the late 1960’s. Furthermore, the Post article mentioned above, explained that “Banister’s Camp Street office was surrounded by Cuban-exile organizations, including at one point the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a CIA front group set up by, among others, Antonio de Varona, the Cuban exile leader.”

Rather intriguingly, the Warren Commission would conclude that no one could connect Oswald to 544 Camp Street. This would directly contradict the FBI’s own pre-assassination file which had already conclusively linked Oswald to the well-known Camp Street address.

Even though allegedly avowed Marxist Oswald operated the pro-Castro ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ Committee, the group was later suspected to be an intelligence ‘cover’ designed to further the pursuits of the anti-Castro movement. This something which fell in line with the “rabidly anti-Communist,” CIA-linked Ferrie, a person with a sordid past and lengthy history of sexual abuse from his time in priesthood as well as aeronautics.

It was later publicly acknowledged that Ferrie first met Oswald while instructing a small squadron at Moisant Airport from June to September 1955. This contradicted Ferrie, who denied knowing Oswald after the Kennedy assassination. The 15-year-old Oswald joined Ferrie’s squadron on July 27, 1955.

‘COLLABORATORS?’ – The Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie seen together with a flight squad at Moisant Airport. (Image source: meandlee)

NATO’s paramilitary-style stay-behind-armies are stated to have been comprised the CIA-linked Operation GLADIO. The origins of GLADIO have been well documented and the secretive counterintelligence operation has been linked to a wave of right-wing ‘false flag’ terror attacks across Europe throughout the 1950’s into the 1980’s. The anti-communist organizational designs were directly connected to that of the CIA and MI6 in particular, with the US and British special forces reportedly facilitating the training.

QUESTION: Did Permindex/CMC, along with NATO intelligence, also play a part in facilitating the efforts of Operation GLADIO?

When you consider the time frame of ‘Stay Behind’ operations already in existence since 1952, it seems likely that the CIA would make use of its various front organizations to supply the means to produce such covert operations. This is further bolstered by the fact that in 1956, the same year Permindex became operational in Switzerland, Prime Minister of Hungary Ferenc Nagy, who is documented to have been a CIA asset, had gone to Germany and Switzerland on the heels of the apparently CIA influenced Hungarian Revolution. It’s worth noting that Nagy was also said to have served on the board of directors at Permindex.

According to noted writer and researcher Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan’s administration, JFK was unaware of the CIA-NATO terror related activities of Operation GLADIO. Here’s a passage from that report by Roberts below:

“President John F. Kennedy had experienced in the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer a high level of insubordination. Lemnitzer showed in White House meetings contempt for the president. When Lemnitzer brought Kennedy the Northwoods Project to shoot down American citizens in the streets of America and to blow American airliners out of the sky in order to place the blame on Castro so that the US could invade and achieve “regime change,” a popular term of the George W. Bush regime, in Cuba, President Kennedy removed Lemnitzer as chairman and sent him to Europe as head of NATO.

Kennedy did not know about Operation Gladio, an assassination program in Europe run by NATO and the CIA. Communists were blamed for Operation Gladio’s bombings of civilians in train stations in order to erode communist political influence, especially in Italy. Thus, Kennedy’s way of getting rid of Lemnitzer put Lemnitzer in charge of this program and gave Lemnitzer a way to get rid of John Kennedy.”

The article also provides a plausible explanation for the assassination of JFK’s brother Robert after he won the Democratic party primary in California in June of 1968. It appears according to Roberts, that RFK might have known about the assassins interwoven into the fabric of the intelligence-crime syndicate shaped and organized by military-linked men, those in high level security operations and those connected to the mafia that played a role in JFK’s death. Roberts suggests that RFK was seeking higher office to potentially hold those involved accountable for their crimes against America and his brother, the 35th president of the United States.

From this, we can view global operations like GLADIO in addition to the post-9/11 “War On Terror”security surge as a form of ‘power politics’ used to aggressively influence the foreign policy of other nations through the use of covert militarization.

Lets take a look at some of the records related to the latest CIA and FBI releases in 2017 worth examining in one of the most notorious crimes of the 20th century…

Below is a screen capture of one CIA document that discussed a dinner sponsored by Oren Fenton Potito, an individual listed as a President of the Eastern Synod of Christian Identity and an organizer of the National States’ Rights Party (NSRP), who also happened to be a member of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). In the now declassified document, Potito acknowledged an association between Lee Harvey Oswald and a man identified as Ruby, formally Rubenstein, otherwise known Jack Ruby. Interestingly, both Oswald and Ruby had ties to the Marcello crime family.

Another revelation in the memo below added to already existing expert testimony concerning the probability of multiple shooters on November 22nd, 1963…

It’s worth noting that both NSRP and the KKK were both heavily infiltrated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, a counter-intelligence program that was specifically designed to influence, disrupt, coerce and discredit political factions from the inside out. The secretive FBI program infiltrated both left and right-wing political groups across America from 1956-1971. Moreover, the controversial program influenced, radicalized and neutralized political dissidents through the use of divisive tactics such as Bad-Jacketing, a technique which manufactured false evidence, fear and rumors regarding various activists. Since NSRP and the KKK were FBI infiltrated groups, it is much more likely that anyone associated with Potito would have already been well-known to authorities.

In essence, the document pictured above provides more evidence that Oswald was in reality a known wolf – one who is still without a clear motive in the crime of which he was accused.

In October of 2017, another controversial nugget in the JFK files was a memo written by FBI Director Hoover after Oswald was shot by Ruby. The memo revealed that the head of FBI was concerned that the bureau needed to ‘convince’ the public that Oswald acted alone in the Kennedy assassination. A portion of Hoover’s memo read “The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”

Other intriguing aspects included in the recent releases concerned the informant status of Dallas police officer J.D Tippit and his alleged involvement in the Kennedy assassination as a trigger man. According to the official narrative Tippit was shot by Oswald 45 minutes after Kennedy’s homicide, but the newly circulated memo states that Tippit met with Oswald and Ruby at a nightclub a week prior to the shooting.

An additional memo released suggested that the UK’s Cambridge News received a warning call 25 minutes prior to JFK’s death. This information was written in a memo by then FBI Deputy Director James Angleton to Hoover. However, since this story was made public in late October, Cambridge News has denied  that the tip-off ever occurred. Other JFK file details suggest a US plan to create a false flag scenario using Soviet planes to carry out attacks.

In Summary 

There’s been a host of characters and Deep State actors that have an uncanny connection surrounding a swirling conspiracy in JFK’s death and this article covers only a fraction of the overwhelming intelligence backdrop associated with the case, not to mention the highly suspicious forensic elements involved in the shooting itself. While varying theories in the JFK murder plot have implicated everyone from the CIA to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to lurking spymasters, crime bosses and oil barons to pro-Castro Cubans, to Cuban exiles and trade executives – one thing is clear, due to its own compromising alliances, elements within the US government deliberately stonewalled convincing and credible information prudent to the American people regarding the now mythic case.

Moreover, the symbolic nature of JFK’s violent end, along with the establishment’s masking of Oswald’s intelligence links to high-ranking officials and other syndicate members perpetually forces the American to people to relive the ritualistic trauma of that dark November day on a time loop without any true resolution.

The further one digs into America’s seedy underworld of organized crime, intelligence operations, unlikely coincidences and covert relationships concerning the mysterious plot to kill Kennedy, a highly intricate web of activity emerges that points to a compelling case beyond almost any other modern-day conspiracy.

21WIRE associate editor Shawn Helton is a researcher and writer, specializing in forensic analysis of high-profile crime scene and counter terrorism investigations, and the deconstruction and analysis of the mass-media coverage surrounding those cases. He has compiled an extensive body of work covering a number of high-profile events since 2012.

This article was originally published by 21st Century Wire.

The economy is seen by sustainable development theorists as a tool, a means to achieve sustainability. [1] Although all UN Member States have adopted in 2015 twenty global sustainable development goals by 2030 “to ensure peace and prosperity for people and the planet”, [2] funding for the actions needed to achieve these goals is slow to materialize. [3] Yet financial resources have never been so abundant in the global economic system.

The priorities of the neo-liberal economy centered on the enrichment of a privileged few are in fact contrary to the collective well-being. The main economic actors turn a blind eye to the tragic socio-environmental effects of their practices and act as enemies of sustainable development. Banks and financial systems, trade regulators, private companies and political authorities, however, have an essential role to play and a responsibility to assume if we want to succeed on the way to sustainability. As underlined by the ATTAC (Association for Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen Action), one of the main challenges is therefore to use the political, economic and financial levers, whether they are already available or they must be invented to speed up a transition to more responsible investments. [4]

Indebtedness and bankruptcy

In Europe and America, central bank policies are dictated by the lobbies of private banks. [5] [6]  Current economic frameworks promote easy access to credit, leading to over-consumption and scandalous debt levels. According to the Institute of International Finance, [7]  the public and private indebtedness of the 44 richest countries reached 235% of GDP in 2017 while it was 190% in 2007. Governments and people become hostages of banks and their fraudulent monetary system. By flooding the market with banknotes [8] (a process known as quantitative easing) whose value is based on the debt of the States and offering very low or even negative borrowing rates, the European Central Bank, following the example of the US Federal Reserve[9] and the Central Bank of Japan, [10] could lead the European economy in a “nuclear” doldrums. [11]  The collapse of the banking sector in 2008, mainly caused by the low interest rates, easy money, subprime mortgage policy and inadequate banking regulation of the US Federal Reserve, [12] [13] led to the bankruptcy of thousands of households. In recent years, the bankruptcy rate of private banks around the world has reached an all-time high at the expense of many small savers. [14] [15]

Even though the world of finance has been advocating for responsible investment [16] and the green economy [17] [18] for some time, its contribution to sustainable development is rather disastrous. This led the UN and the World Bank to publish in November 2017 a roadmap that proposes “an integrated approach that can be used by all actors in the financial sector – public and private – to accelerate the transformation towards a sustainable financial system. » [19]  The UN’s Responsible Investment Program has also highlighted the unwillingness of financial advisors to promote responsible investment and the lack of consideration of environmental and social issues in investment decisions. [20] In 2017, the green bond market represents only 0.1% of the volume of the international bond market valued at nearly $ 100 trillion. [21] Will the financial community by itself take effective measures against deregulation, [22] tax evasion, [23] [24]  large-scale market manipulation, [25]  vulture funds, [26]  corruption [27] and money laundering? [28] Will it subject itself to integrating environmental and social impacts into investment decisions? Unless forced to do so, it is permissible to doubt it.

Overconsumption and overexploitation

Motivated by short-term gain and easy money, the business sector is flooding consumers with riotous advertising promoting questionable lifestyles and cheap products and encouraging over-consumption and waste. The use of corruption to access markets and resources, tax evasion, cartelization, [29]  the relocation of industrial jobs [30] and the social exploitation of workers [31] are but a few of the unsustainable and unacceptable practices in this sector. Despite its commitment to the UN’s sustainable development goals [32] and the adoption of social [33] and environmental [34] management standards, the business community has yet to develop and implement a truly responsible growth model.

Inequitable trade

Similarly, international trade and commerce is controlled by multinationals eager for free trade agreements that expand their hegemony at the expense of small local producers. [35] It is well known that small island sugar-producing states would simply need a fair price to make their production economically viable. [36] When will the World Trade Organization truly integrate equity in its decision-making? When will it act effectively against illegal cartels and commercial dumping?

Security at all costs

The military-industrial complex, the war and security industry, is in itself a major deterrent to sustainable development. This industry sector has a strong record of engaging in threat inflation. In his book, Indefensible – Seven Myths That Sustain the Global Arms Trade, [37]  Paul Holden describes how the defense industry, the military, political leaders and an accommodative press can agree to unduly amplify security threats, justify military interventions, pursue specific foreign policies and massively divert financial resources to the industries and individuals that will be paid to defuse the threat.

The global increase in military budgets observed in recent years has come at the expense of much needed social and environmental investments (up 43.6% since 2000 in the United States alone to reach US $ 611 billion in 2016; [38]  according to a study by the Brown University of Rhode Island published in 2017, US $ 5,600 billion has been spent on US wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, veterans and homeland security since 2001 [39] ). Many believe that the military activity of the United States and other NATO members held under false humanitarian motives would be aimed primarily at protecting their economic hegemony, eliminating competition and enslaving the peoples by destabilizing and destroying emerging countries. [40] [41] [42] [43]

The IMF and the World Bank, obstacles to sustainable development? [44]

In 1971, shortly after the US decision to end the International Monetary System by dissociating the dollar from the gold standard (so the US dollar was no longer convertible into gold),[45] the IMF and the World Bank are invested a new mission: to impose on developing countries the liberalization of their economy by setting as conditionality to the granting of any loan the adoption of a series of neo-liberal structural adjustment measures. Reduction of state expenditure, privatization of national enterprises, devaluation of the local currency (let the currency float), reorientation of the national economy towards exports, truth of prices (eliminate subsidies), lower wages, adoption of a legal framework favoring respect for private property rights …

Although apparently laudable, these measures prove to be ineffective since they necessarily entail a loss of financial autonomy for the countries concerned, a reduction of public services and an impoverishment of the population in general for the benefit of an elite; the opposite of sustainable development.

For an ethics of development

Chronic indebtedness, questionable or downright illicit financial practices, inequitable trade and the massive misappropriation of public funds for the defense industry largely explain why it is so difficult to finance actions that promote sustainable development. As economist Rodrigue Tremblay points out in his book The Code for Global Ethics, humanity needs a serious moral stroke to continue its march towards continuous progress and increased freedom. [46] The world of finance, business and politics suffers from a lack of morality. Its commitment to sustainable development must be based on a universal ethics aimed at truly improving people’s quality of life and social well-being. An ethics that our political leaders have the responsibility to translate into concrete prescriptions.

 

Article in french :

La finance et les affaires, ennemies du développement durable?, December 11 2017,

 

Références

[1] «Economic instruments, by changing prices and market signals, discourage certain modes of production and consumption and encourage others, thus reducing environmental degradation.» http://www.rncreq.org/images/UserFiles/files/2014-10-21_M%C3%A9moire_Commission_Fiscalit%C3%A9.pdf

[2] http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

[3] http://www.un.org/apps/newsFr/storyF.asp?NewsID=40157#.Wiqup0ribIU

[4] https://france.attac.org/IMG/pdf/rapportfinancevertevf.pdf

[5] http://www.postedeveille.ca/2016/09/trudeau-la-grande-trahison.html

[6] Canada’s Money Problem – Who Changed the Bank of Canada’s Policies in 1974 and Why? https://canadaundernewstyranny.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/canadas-money-problem-who-changed-the-bank-of-canadas-policies-in-1974-and-why/

[7] https://www.iif.com/

[8] https://qz.com/754103/central-banks-are-printing-money-as-though-the-global-economy-is-in-freefall/

[9] https://www.businessbourse.com/2016/09/06/usa-de-leconomie-industrielle-a-leconomie-de-la-planche-a-billets-lincroyable-declin-de-lindustrie-americaine/

[10] http://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/be203cab-5da2-4359-87c7-4e4664956cd8__7C__ot7DLJjmdGLG.html

[11] http://www.lepoint.fr/economie/la-bce-prete-a-appuyer-sur-le-bouton-nucleaire-de-la-politique-monetaire-20-01-2015-1897908_28.php#

[12] Tremblay, R. 2008. Questions et réponses concernant l’actuelle crise financière. Mondialisation.ca, 24 janvier 2008. https://www.mondialisation.ca/questions-et-r-ponses-concernant-l-actuelle-crise-financi-re/7885

[13] Tremblay, R., 2013. The Fed’s Monetary Policy of Zero Interest Rates. Global Research, March 05, 2013. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-feds-monetary-policy-of-zero-interest-rates/5325258

[14] http://www.wikistrike.com/2015/06/plusieurs-banques-europeennes-font-faillite-dans-le-silence-assourdissant-des-medias-francais.html

[15] http://www.agefi.fr/banque-assurance/actualites/video/20171024/declin-banques-se-poursuit-dans-finance-europeenne-230391

[16] More on UN responsible investment program here : https://www.unpri.org/

[17] https://www.cairn.info/revue-reflets-et-perspectives-de-la-vie-economique-2012-4-page-97.htm

[18] https://france.attac.org/IMG/pdf/rapportfinancevertevf.pdf

[19] UN Environment & the World Bank Group, 2017. Roadmap for a Sustainable Financial System. http://unepinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Roadmap_for_a_Sustainable_Financial_System.pdf

[20] file:///C:/Users/Utilisateur/Downloads/PRI_Investment-consutant-services-review.pdf

[21] https://france.attac.org/IMG/pdf/rapportfinancevertevf.pdf

[22] «La croyance dans l’autorégulation pour remplacer la réglementation a clairement failli». Jeffers, E. & J.-P. Pollin, 2012. Déréglementation bancaire des années 1980 et crise financière. Revue d’économie financière 2012/1 (N° 105) : 103-114. https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-financiere-2012-1-page-103.htm

[23] More than half of international financial transactions pass through tax havens, and are exempt from national taxes. See : Sainteville, M. 2011. Les paradis fiscaux dans la mondialisation boursière. Espace politique 15/2011-3. https://espacepolitique.revues.org/2180

That was $ 5.3 trillion a day in April 2013 according to the Bank for International Settlements cf. http://bourse.lefigaro.fr/devises-matieres-premieres/actu-conseils/devises-5300-milliards-de-dollars-echanges-chaque-jour-491677)

[24] http://ici.radio-canada.ca/emissions/enquete/2013-2014/evasion-fiscale/#Introduction

[25] Zero Hedge, 2016. Every Single Bloody Market Is Manipulated. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-14/markets-are-manipulated

[26] Vivien, R. & A. Penasse, 2017. Les fonds vautours : Dépeceurs des peuples.Mondialisation.ca, 20 mars 2017. https://www.mondialisation.ca/les-fonds-vautours-depeceurs-des-peuples/5580875

[27] http://international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/peace_security-paix_securite/corruption.aspx?lang=fra

[28] http://www.chambresf.com/fr/info-deonto/gestion-des-dossiers/lutte-au-blanchiment-dargent/lutte-au-blanchiment-dargent-et-au-financement-des-activites-terroristes/

[29] Escande, P. 2017. Concurrence : la cartellisation du monde est en marche.

http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2017/09/22/concurrence-la-cartellisation-du-monde-est-en-marche_5189683_3234.html

[30] Hurteau, P. 2009. Mondialisation et délocalisations d’emplois. Rapport de recherche IRIS/CISO. https://www.ciso.qc.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Rapport_CISO_IRISv9.pdf

[31] Beatson, J. & J. Hanley, 2015. L’exploitation des travailleurs étrangers chez nous. Examen de l’exploitation de la main-d’œuvre et du travail forcé au Canada. http://cjf.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Exploitation_des_travailleurs_etrangers_chez_nous-CATHII_aout2017.pdf

[32] http://www.wbcsd.org/Overview/Resources/General/CEO-Guide-to-the-SDGs

[33] https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/archive/pdf/fr/discovering_iso_26000.pdf

[34] https://www.iso.org/fr/iso-14001-environmental-management.html

[35] file:///C:/Users/Utilisateur/Downloads/grain-5801-nouveaux-accords-de-libre-echange-la-normalisation-de-la-brutalite-des-chaines-d-approvisionnement-mondiales.pdf

[36] Nations unies, 2005. Rapport de la réunion internationale chargée d’examiner la mise en œuvre du programme d’action pour le développement durable des petits états insulaires. Port-Louis (Maurice), 10-14 janvier 2005. Page 90.

[37] Holden, P., 2017. Indefensible – Seven Myths That Sustain the Global Arms Trade. Zed Books, U.K.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/20/how-the-arms-industry-trades-on-our-fear-of-terrorism-book-paul-holden-indefensible

[38] Beaudoin, D. 2016. Quels pays ont le plus augmenté leur budget militaire? La réponse en carte. Radio-Canada, 20 mai 2016. http://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/782687/evolution-depenses-militaires-monde-carte

[39] Crawford, N.C., 2017. United States Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2018: A Summary of the $5.6 Trillion in Costs for the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and   Post-9/11 Veterans Care and Homeland Security. Watson Institute, Brown University.  http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2017/Costs%20of%20U.S.%20Post-9_11%20NC%20Crawford%20FINAL%20.pdf

[40] See for example : Ganser, D. 2007. Les armées secrètes de l’OTAN. Éditions Demi-Lune.

[41] http://www.alterinfo.net/Les-CAUSES-des-GUERRES_a1524.html

[42] Chomsky, N. 2002. De la guerre comme politique étrangère des États-Unis. Éditions Agone.

[43] Chossudovsky, M. 2002. Guerre et mondialisation: La vérité derrière le 11 septembre. Éditions Éco-société.

Jacques Prescott is a consultant in biodiversity and sustainable development and associate professor, Chair in eco-advising, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi

The holiday period provides us with a unique opportunity to express the new awareness that must inform a less commercialised and sharing-oriented world. Rather than spending all our time partaking in conspicuous consumption, why don’t we commemorate Christmas by organising massive gatherings for helping the poor and healing the environment?

At this time of year, our overconsuming lifestyles in the affluent Western world are impossible to ignore. Brightly-lit shops are bursting with festive foods and expensive indulgences, while seasonal songs play in the background of shopping malls to keep us spending the money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t matter.

The frenetic commercialism of Christmas on the high streets continues to escalate to inconceivable proportions. Despite all the warnings from climate scientists that ordinary Western lifestyles are destroying the planet, still we buy enough Christmas trees in the UK alone that could reach New York and back, if placed in a straight line. Enough card packaging is thrown away in this country that could cover Big Ben almost 260,000 times. Not to mention the 4,500 tonnes of tin foil, the 2 million turkeys, the 74 million mince pies and 5 million mounds of charred raisins (from rejected Christmas puddings) that are thrown away come early January. Mountains of e-waste from discarded electronic items – much of it bought as unwanted gifts and soon discarded – is projected to reach 10 million tonnes by 2020.

Pause for a moment and try to picture the extent of that annual waste by the British populace. For if you combine our surplus produce with every Christian nation in Western Europe, North America and other overindustrialised regions, you have an appalling idea of the unnecessary ecological destruction that we collectively contribute to each year. Christmas is, after all, only an exaggerated illustration of the gross materialism that defines our everyday lives in a consumerist society.

What is more difficult for us to contemplate, however, is how our profligate consumption habits also directly exacerbate levels of inequality worldwide. We know that the so-called developed world – roughly 16% of the global population – consumes a hugely disproportionate share of the earth’s resources, and is responsible for at least half of all greenhouse gas emissions. But behind such statistics lies a depressing reality, in which our artificial standards of living in the global North are dependent on the dire working conditions and impoverishment of millions of people throughout the global South.

In spite of the spurious claims of trickledown economics by the adherents of corporate globalisation, the number of people living on less than $5-a-day has increased by more than 1.1 billion since the 1980s. The vast majority of people who live in developing countries survive on less than $10-a-day; none of their families can remotely afford the wasteful and conspicuous consumption that we consider normal.

Our personal complicity in this unsustainable global order is highly complex, of course, because we are all caught in a socioeconomic and cultural system that depends on ever-expanding consumerism for its survival. Everywhere, we are besieged with messages that encourage us to buy more stuff, as profit-driven businesses increasingly seek to meet our needs – either real or constructed – through interaction in the marketplace. Our consumption patterns are often tied to our sense of identity, our desire for belonging, our need for comfort, our self-esteem.

So we are all the victims of an excessively commercialised culture, not only in a collective way through environmental harm and global warming, but also through the proximate psychological and emotional harm that in some way afflicts everyone. We experience that harm through time-poverty affluence; through all the pressures of living in an individualistic and market-dominated society; through all that we have lost due to the competitive work/consume treadmill – our freedom for leisure, our mental space, our community cohesion, our psychological health. There is also an inarticulable form of spiritual harm that arises from simply being part of this exploitative world order, in which our overconsuming lifestyles in the West are connected to the vast suffering and immiseration of people in poorer countries who we do not know, or care to know.

Clearly it is the whole system that needs to go through a radical transformation – but how can that transformation be brought about, when we ourselves are the constituent parts that maintain the system in its currently destructive form?

Over many decades, the basic problem and solution has been well articulated in a theoretical sense by progressive thinkers. Numerable reports cite the physics of planetary boundaries, demonstrating how we already require one and a half planets to support today’s consumption levels. Simply put, it is impossible to reconcile the twin challenges of ending poverty and achieving environmental sustainability, unless we also confront the huge imbalances in consumption patterns across the world, and fundamentally reimagine the economy as something different that escapes the growth compulsion.

Hence the resurgent focus on post-growth economics in a world of limits, recognising the importance of reducing the use of natural resources in high-income countries, so that poorer nations can sustainably grow their economies and rapidly meet the basic needs of their populations. Nowhere is the case for sharing the world’s resources more obvious or urgent, than in the question of how to achieve equity-based sustainable development or ‘one planet lifestyles’ for all.

Yet our societies remain so far from embarking on this great transition, that the interrelated trends of commercialisation, inequality and environmental destruction continue to intensify year on year. What better example of double-standards and duplicity than the spectacle of French President Emmanuel Macron convening the ‘One Planet Summit’ this month to demonstrate international solidarity in addressing climate change, while at the same time governments were attending the resurrected World Trade Organisation talks in their continued attempts to turn the world into a corporate playground with minimal protections for the poor.

These larger questions of global injustice and ecological imbalance may seem far removed from our daily lives, but everyone who participates in a modern consumerist society is conjointly responsible for perpetuating destruction and divisions on an international scale. Again, our frenzied spending around Thanksgiving and Christmas time is a salient case in point, exemplifying how our relentless mass consumption is directly propping up an extreme market-oriented economic system, and further preventing us all from embracing the radical transformations that will be required in the transition to a post-growth world. What, then, should we do?

There are lots of answers from campaigners about how we can de-commercialise Christmas, like the buy nothing movement that advocates we ignore altogether the conditioned compulsion to purchase luxury goods, thus demonstrating our awareness of overconsumption and how it affects global disparities and the earth. At the least, we can practise ethical giving and support the work of activist groups and charitable organisations. For example, Christian Aid have released a witty video this year that entreats UK citizens to be aware of festive food waste in the context of global hunger, and donate £10 from Christmas food shopping – enough for a family in South Sudan to eat for a week.

Actions like these may constitute a small step towards celebrating Christmas with awareness of the critical world situation, and the need for Westernised populations to live more lightly on the earth, while prioritising the needs of the less-privileged. If extended beyond the holiday season, hopefully that awareness may be translated into a mass movement that rejects the consumerist lifestyle altogether, instead voluntarily downshifting their lifestyles and meeting more of their needs in ways that bypass the mainstream economy.

As proponents of the gift economy, the commons and collaborative consumption variously attest, this is the long-term antidote to mass consumerism. It means becoming co-creators of alternative economic systems in which we reinvest in our communities, shift our values towards quality of life and wellbeing, and embrace a new ethic of sufficiency. It means resisting the competitive economic pressures towards materialism and privatised modes of living, thereby releasing our time and energies for cooperative activities that promote communal production, co-owning and civic engagement. It means, in short, an expanded understanding of what it means to be human on this earth, in which we relearn how to participate in civic life and share resources at every level of society.

The holiday period during Christmas actually provides us with a unique opportunity to express the new awareness that must inform a less commercialised and sharing-oriented world. Rather than spending all our time partaking in conspicuous consumption that has nothing to do with the message of Christ, why don’t we organise local meetings or massive gatherings for helping the poor and healing the environment, both in our own countries and further abroad?

Such an appeal to our goodwill and conscience is made in a seminal essay by Mohammed Mesbahi, titled Christmas, the System and I. He exhorts us to imagine what could be done if all the money we needlessly spend on festivities and unwanted gifts was collectively pooled, then redistributed to all those who urgently need it. Indeed imagine what could be achieved if people not only donate to charities at this time of year, but also unite in countless numbers on the streets for sharing and justice on behalf of the poorest members of the human family.

If Jesus were walking among us today, writes Mesbahi, surely that is what He would call on us to do. For what cause can be of greater priority in this era of growing inequalities and planetary crisis, than the need to save the millions of people who continue to die from poverty-related causes each year? Perhaps that would be the first expression of the true meaning of Christmas in the twenty first century, when millions of people come together in constant demonstrations that call upon our governments to implement the principle of sharing into world affairs.

Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources (STWR) where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from Banksy.

Featured image: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016, during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”

The American public is now experiencing mass paranoia over Russia-gate, hysteria about Russia supposedly corrupting and manipulating the U.S. political system. This panic originated with Obama administration holdovers in the intelligence community who outlined the narrative while providing few if any facts — and it has been carried forward by Democrats, some Republicans hostile to President Trump, and by the U.S. mainstream media.

The Russia-gate frenzy has similarities to the madness that followed the 9/11 attacks when public passions were manipulated to serve the geopolitical agenda of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. In that case, civil liberties that had become accepted norms in the U.S. were suddenly cast aside – and the public was deceptively led into the invasion of Iraq.

In both cases – the Iraq War and Russia-gate – the U.S. intelligence community played central roles by – regarding Iraq – promoting false intelligence that Iraq was hiding WMD and had ties to Al Qaeda and – in the Russian case – assessing (without presenting evidence) that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic emails and their publication via WikiLeaks to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and to help elect Donald Trump.

While the Iraq deception was driven by the neoconservatives in the Bush-Cheney administration, the Russia paranoia was started by the nominally left-of-center administration of Barack Obama in the closing months of his presidency. It has been fanned ever since by liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party and the never-Trump contingent in the Republican Party as well as the mainstream media – with the goal of either removing Trump from office or politically crippling him and his administration, i.e., to reverse the results of the 2016 election or, as some might say, reverse the “mistake” of the 2016 election.

Because promoters of the Russia-gate hysteria talk about the Kremlin’s “war” on the U.S. political process, the frenzy also carries extreme dangers, even greater than the death and destruction from the Iraq War. Russia is the only country on earth capable of turning the United States into ashes within a day. And even as U.S. journalists and politicians have casually – and sloppily – hyped the Russia-gate affair, the Russians have taken the growls of hostility from the United States very seriously.

Rumbles of War

If Russia is preparing for war, as the latest issue of Newsweek magazine tells us, we have no one but our political leaders and media pundits to blame. They have no concern for Russian national sensitivities and the “red lines” that the Russians have drawn. U.S. senators and congressmen listen only to what U.S. “experts” think the Russian interests should be if they are to fit into a U.S.-run world. That is why the Senate can vote 98-2 in favor of elevating President Obama’s executive sanctions against Russia into federal law as happened this past summer so President Trump can’t reverse them.

There have been a few U.S. journalists and academics who have examined the actual facts of the Russia-gate story and found them lacking in substance if not showing outright signs of fabrication, including Consortiumnews.com, Truthdig.com, and Antiwar.com. But they make up a very small minority.

Instead the major U.S. media has taken the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” accusing the Russians of meddling in the 2016 election as unassailable truth despite its stunning lack of evidence. According to President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, that “assessment” came from a “hand-picked” group of analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, not the “all 17 intelligence agencies consensus” that the public was repeatedly told.

Perhaps the most significant challenge to the Russia-did-the-hacking “assessment” came from a study of the available forensic evidence by a group of former U.S. intelligence officers with relevant technical expertise from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The VIPS’ analysis of the known download speed of one batch of Democratic emails concluded in July that the emails were likely extracted by a local download, not an external hack over the Internet, i.e., an inside job by someone with direct access to the computers. But the VIPS findings were largely ignored by the U.S. mainstream media, which has treated the original “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts as unchallengeable if not flat fact.

Besides the conventional wisdom that Russia did “hack” the emails and somehow slipped the emails to WikiLeaks, there is another core assumption of the Jan. 6 report – that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hack of the Democratic emails and their publication through WikiLeaks because of his contempt for Hillary Clinton and his desire for Trump to win.

Indeed, the Jan. 6 “assessment” treats this supposed motive as the central evidence of Russian guilt, since actual physical or testimonial evidence is lacking. Yet what is also missing from the report is any recognition of other attitudes among the Russian political elite that would go against the report’s thesis, including whether Putin would have taken such a risk in the face of a widespread consensus that Clinton was the near-certain winner – and the strong possibility that any Russian operation would be exposed. An evenhanded intelligence “assessment” would have included these counter-arguments even if in the end they were cast aside. But the Jan. 6 report offered no such context or balance.

A View from Moscow

However, from my perspective – having participated in some of the leading Russian public affairs programs in 2016 – I heard Russian insiders close to President Putin expressing grave doubts about whether a Trump presidency would be good for Russia.

Political talk shows are a very popular component of Russian television programming on all channels, both state-run and commercial channels. They are mostly carried on prime time in the evening but also are showing up in mid-afternoon where they have displaced soap operas and cooking lessons as entertainment for housewives and pensioners.

The shows are broadcast live either to the Moscow time zone or to the Far East time zone. Given the fact that Russia extends over nine time zones, they are also video recorded and reshown locally at prime time. In the case of the highest quality and most watched programs produced by Vesti 24 for the Rossiya One channel, they also are posted in their entirety and in the original Russian on Youtube.

The panelists come from a rather small pool of Russian legislators, including chairmen of the relevant committees of the Duma (lower house) and Federation Council (upper house); leading journalists; think tank professors; and retired military brass. The politicians are drawn from among the most visible and colorful personalities in the Duma parties, but also extend to Liberal parties such as Yabloko, which failed to cross the five-percent threshold in legislative elections and thus received no seats in parliament.

(Since I live in Brussels, I was flown by the various channels who paid airfare and hotel accommodation in Moscow. That is to say, my expenses were covered but there was no honorarium. I make this explicit acknowledgement to rebut in advance any notion that I and other outside panelists were in any way “paid by the Kremlin” or restricted in our freedom of speech on air.)

During the period under review, I appeared on both state channels, Rossiya-1 and Pervy Kanal, as well as on the major commercial television channel, NTV. My debut on the No. 1 talk show in Russia, “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev,” on Sept. 11, 2016, was particularly useful because I had a chance to speak with the host, Vladimir Soloviev, for five minutes before the program.

I put to him the question that interested me the most: whom did he want to see win the U.S. presidential election. Without hesitation, Soloviev told me that he did not want to see Trump win because the celebrity businessman was volatile, unpredictable — and weak. Soloviev added that he and other politically knowledgeable Russians did not expect improved relations with the U.S. regardless of who won. He rejected the notion that Trump’s tossing the neocons out of government would be a great thing in and of itself.

The Devil You Know

Soloviev’s resistance to the idea that Trump could be a good thing was not just an example of Russians’ prioritizing stability, the principle “better the devil you know,” meaning Hillary Clinton. During a chat with a Russian ambassador, someone also close to power, I heard the firm belief that the United States is like a big steamship which has its own inertia and cannot be turned around, that presidents come and go but American foreign policy remains the same.

This view may be called cynical or realistic, depending on your taste, but it is reflective of the thinking that came out from many of the panelists in the talk shows.

To appreciate what weight the opinions of Vladimir Soloviev carry, you have to consider just who he is – that his talk show is the most professional from among numerous rival shows and attracts the most important politicians and expert guests. But even more to the point, he is as close to Putin as journalists can get and is familiar with the President’s thinking.

In April 2015, Soloviev conducted a two-hour interview with Putin that was aired on Rossiya 1 under the title “The President.” In early January 2016, the television documentary “World Order,” co-written and directed by Soloviev, set out in forceful terms Putin’s views on American and Western attempts to stamp out Russian sovereignty that first were spoken at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 and have evolved and become ever more frank since.

Soloviev has a Ph.D. in economics from the Institute of World Economics and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was an active entrepreneur in the 1990s and spent some time back then in the U.S., where his activities included teaching economics at the University of Alabama. He is fluent in English and has been an unofficial emissary of the Kremlin to the U.S. at various times.

For all of these reasons, I believe it is safe to say that Vladimir Soloviev represents the thinking of Russian elites close to Putin, if not the views of Putin himself.

I encountered similar skepticism about Trump elsewhere as well. On Sept. 27, 2016, I took part in the “Sixty Minutes” talk show on Rossiya 1that presented a post-mortem of the first Trump-Clinton debate the day before.

Presenter Yevgeny Popov and his wife and co-presenter Olga Skabeyeva made a point that was largely missing in Western news coverage – that the Democrats and Republicans had largely switched positions on the use of military force, with Clinton taking the more hawkish position and Trump the more dovish stance.

Doubting Trump

Yet, Russian politicians and journalists on the panel were split down the middle on whether Trump or Clinton was their preferred next occupant of the Oval Office. The Trump skeptics noted that he was impulsive and could not be trusted to act with prudence if there was some crisis or accidental clash between U.S. and Russian forces in the field, for example.

They took the cynical view that the more dovish positions that Trump took earlier were purely tactical, to differentiate himself from his Republican competitors and then Clinton. Thus, these analysts felt that Trump could turn out to be no friend of Russia on the day after the elections.

One Trump doubter called Trump a “non-systemic” politician – or anti-establishment. But that is not a compliment in the Russian context. It has the odious connotation applied to Alexei Navalny and some members of the U.S.- and E.U.-backed Parnas political movement, suggesting seditious intent.

The Oct. 20 program “Evening with Vladimir Soloviev,” which I watched on television from abroad, was devoted to the third Clinton-Trump debate. My main takeaway from the show was that there was a bemused unanimity on the very diverse panel that the U.S. presidential campaign was awful, with both candidates having serious weaknesses of character and/or careers. Particular attention was devoted to the very one-sided position of the U.S. mass media and the centrist establishments of both parties favoring Hillary Clinton.

Though flamboyant in his language, nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the LDPR Party, touched on a number of core concerns:

“The debates were weak. The two cannot greet one another on stage, cannot say goodbye to one another at the end. They barely can get out the texts that have been prepared for them by their respective staffs. Repeating on stage what one may have said in the locker room. Billions of people around the world conclude with one word: disgrace!  This is the worst electoral campaign ever.

“And mostly what we see is the style of the campaign. However much people criticize the USSR – the old fogies who ran it, one and the same, supposedly the conscience of the world. Now we see the same thing in the USA: the exceptional country – the country that has bases everywhere, soldiers everywhere, is bombing everywhere in some city or other. …

“Hillary has some kind of dependency. A passion for power – and that is dangerous for the person who will have her finger on the nuclear button. If she wins, on November 9th the world will be at the brink of a big war.”

Zhirinovsky made no secret of his partiality for Trump, calling him “clean” and “a good man” whereas Clinton has “blood on her hands” for the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to her policies as Secretary of State. But then again, Zhirinovsky has made his political career over more than 30 years precisely by making outrageous statements that run up against what the Russian political establishment says aloud.

Zhirinovsky had been the loudest voice in Russian politics in favor of Turkey and its president Erdogan, a position which he came to regret when the Turks shot down a Russian jet at the Syrian border, causing a rupture in bilateral relations.

The final word on Russia’s electoral preferences during the Oct. 20 show was given by the moderator, Vladimir Soloviev:

“There can be no illusions. Both Trump and Clinton have a very bad attitude toward Russia. What Trump said about us and Syria was no compliment at all. The main theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria.”

This being Russia, one might assume that the deeply negative views of the ongoing presidential election reflected a general hostility toward the United States as a country. But nothing of the sort came out from the discussion. To be sure, there was the odd outburst from Zhirinovsky. But otherwise the panelists, including Zhirinovsky, displayed informed respect and even admiration for what the U.S. has achieved and represents as a country. But the panelists concluded that the U.S. has a political leadership at the national level that is unworthy and inappropriate to its position in the world.

Yet, back in the U.S., the ongoing hysteria over Russia-gate and the perceived threat that Russia poses to U.S. national interests, risks tilting the world into nuclear war.

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide.

In an era of media distortion, our emphasis has been on the “unspoken truth”. As an independent site, it is our mandate to challenge the engineered truth by the corporate media. 

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South Africa’s ANC’s “Internal Presidential Elections”: Ramaphosa Rises as Lonmin Expires; Workers, Women and Communities Prepare to Fight, Not Mourn

By Prof. Patrick Bond, December 20, 2017

South Africa’s currency rose rapidly in value after Ramaphosa won, for he is celebrated by big business and the mainstream media. But he has also gained endorsements – due to quirky local political alignments – from the SA Communist Party, ANC-aligned trade unions and most centrists and liberals who despise the Zuptas.

Latin America: The Political Pendulum Swings to the Right

By Prof. James Petras, December 20, 2017

The changes in Argentina and Brazil represent examples of extreme regressive transformations directed at reversing income distribution, property relations, international alignments and military strategies.  The goal is to redistribute income upwardly, to re-concentrate wealth, property-ownership upward and externally and to subscribe to imperial doctrine.

On Hanukkah 2017, Light a Candle for Palestine!

By Rima Najjar, December 20, 2017

When Zionist Jewish terrorist gangs in Palestine were transformed into Israel’s Defense Forces, they continued systematically practicing sociocide, politicide, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide on the Palestinian people under the banner of a bastardized Star of David.

Remembering the Christmas Truce of 1914, The Desire for Real Peace

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, December 20, 2017

“Christian” Europe was in the fifth month of the war of 1914 – 1918, the so-called Great War that finally ground to a mutually suicidal halt after four years of exhausting trench warfare, with all of the original participants financially, spiritually and morally bankrupt.

UN General Assembly to Vote on Rescinding Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration

By Stephen Lendman, December 20, 2017

The draft resolution mirrors the Security Council one Washington vetoed – reaffirming the illegality of actions “alter(ing) the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem” – by Trump’s recognition of the city as Israel’s capital.

French Prosecutors concede that there is credible evidence pointing to Hassan Diab’s Innocence; however, because of the political climate in France, they still want to proceed with a trial based on anonymous intelligence that French authorities received from a foreign service. This is despite the fact that the anonymous intelligence was discredited and withdrawn from the extradition hearing in Canada because of its extremely problematic nature.

Canadian government officials have been merely raising concerns about the delays in Hassan’s case. Neither Prime Minister Trudeau nor any other government official has asked for Hassan’s release or even objected to putting Hassan on trial based on anonymous intelligence. This is despite the fact that such a trial would be contrary to fundamental justice, contrary to our Charter, and a recipe for wrongful conviction.

Such a trial would not be allowed to happen to a Canadian citizen in Canada, much less when, according to the evidence gathered by the investigating judge, Hassan was not in France at the time of the 1980 crime.

Please, we urge you to call or write to PM Justin Trudeau urging him to speak out against putting Hassan Diab on trial based on discredited unsourced intelligence, and asking him to use the full force of his office to bring Hassan home. As you know, the Canadian government extradited Hassan to France in 2014, even though the evidence against him was known to be “suspect”, “illogical”, “convoluted”, and “very problematic” (in the words of the extradition judge). The Canadian government has a moral obligation to help Hassan and bring him home now.

This Wednesday or Thursday December 20 or 21, please call Prime Minister Trudeau’s office at 1-613-992-4211, or Fax him at 1-613-941-6900. You may also call his constituency office (Papineau, Quebec) at 1-514-277-6020.

When you call, please be courteous, say good morning (or good afternoon, etc.) and give your name and where you are calling from. It is likely you will be talking to an answering machine.

Please leave a firm but polite message to this effect:

“Prime Minister Trudeau, I am calling to strongly urge you to speak out against putting Dr. Hassan Diab on trial in France based on secret and unsourced intelligence. I urge you to use the full force of your office to secure Hassan’s release and bring him back to his home in Canada.

As you know, the French investigative judges found “consistent evidence” that Hassan was not in France in 1980 when the hateful attack occurred. French prosecutors are conceding that there is credible evidence pointing to Dr. Diab’s innocence, yet they are asking for Hassan to be tried based on secret, unsourced intelligence that French authorities received from a foreign service. This same intelligence was discredited and withdrawn from the extradition hearing in Canada because of its extremely problematic nature.

The Government of Canada cannot condone a trial based on secret, unsourced intelligence, and must object to subjecting a Canadian citizen to such an unjust trial.

Please, uphold Canadian standards, do all you can to prevent Dr. Hassan Diab’s wrongful conviction, and bring Hassan back to his home and family in Canada.”

***

PLEASE, DO NOT HESITATE TO PHONE EVERY DAY IF YOU FEEL SO INCLINED!

Also, please share this call for help with your friends and family.

With much appreciation,

Hassan Diab Support Committee
http://www.justiceforhassandia b.org
[email protected]

Featured image is from Ottawa Citizen.

Monday night’s internal African National Congress (ANC) presidential election of Cyril Ramaphosa – with a razor-thin 51% majority of nearly 4800 delegates – displaced but did not resolve a fight between two bitterly-opposed factions. On the one hand are powerful elements friendly to so-called “White Monopoly Capital,” and on the other are outgoing ANC president Jacob Zuma’s allies led by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his ex-wife and former African Union chairperson. The latter faction includes corrupt state “tenderpreneur” syndicates, especially the notorious Gupta brothers, and is hence typically nicknamed “Zupta.” (Zuma is still scheduled to serve as national president until mid-2019.)

South Africa’s currency rose rapidly in value after Ramaphosa won, for he is celebrated by big business and the mainstream media. But he has also gained endorsements – due to quirky local political alignments – from the SA Communist Party, ANC-aligned trade unions and most centrists and liberals who despise the Zuptas. With this base and some nominal prosecutions of corruption, Ramaphosa will likely relegitimize the fast-fading ANC in time for a 2019 electoral victory. However, given the narrowness of his win, he probably cannot engineer Zuma’s early departure as many hoped, in the way Zuma had ousted Thabo Mbeki nine months before his term was due to end in 2009.

Moreover, Ramaphosa’s much-anticipated attempt to clear Zupta muck from the corrupt stables of several parastatal organisations and government departments will fail. Too many ANC patronage systems have become cemented. And three other leaders elected at the congress are high-profile Zuptas with corruption-riddled reputations, including secretary-general Ace Magashule and his deputy Jessie Duarte, as well as ANC deputy president David Mabuza. A new slur, “Ramazupta,” may emerge as the epithet for the coming regime.

Ramaphosa was a heroic mineworker leader during the 1980s, a crafty ANC secretary general under Nelson Mandela during the early 1990s when he led negotiations on many crucial semi-democratic deals with the outgoing apartheid regime, the main drafter of the country’s liberal constitution in 1996, and then – after losing the deputy presidency job to Mbeki in 1994 – a black-empowerment billionaire thanks to joint ventures in mining, banking and ‘food’ franchises McDonalds and CocaCola. He became ANC deputy president in 2012 and in government, became the national deputy to Zuma in 2014.

By the 2000s, Ramaphosa had earned a reputation for seeking profits at any cost. The worst incident was at the Lonmin platinum mines at Marikana, two hours’ drive northwest of Johannesburg. On August 15, 2012 Ramaphosa emailed a request to police – for which he weakly apologised only a few months ago – demanding “concomitant action” against “dastardly criminals,” against whom police should “act in a more pointed way.”

He was referring to 4000 desperately underpaid miners who had been on a wildcat strike the prior week, during which six workers, two security guards and two policemen had died in skirmishes. Neither Lonmin officials nor Ramaphosa wanted to negotiate. The following day, as strikers peacefully departed the strike grounds for their homes in nearby shantytowns, 34 men were shot dead by police, and 78 wounded.

Ramaphosa’s role was especially unconscionable given his struggle history. In the Emmy Award-winning film Miners Shot Down (from minute 13’), director Rehad Desai reveals the class-loyalty U-turn. In 1987 in the midst of a legendary strike, Ramaphosa accused the “liberal bourgeoisie” of using “fascistic” methods. Thirty years later Ramaphosa had become the main local investor in Lonmin, and within five years was a “monster,” according to local activists, playing a familiar role described by the workers’ lawyer, Dali Mpofu:

“At the heart of this was the toxic collusion between the SA Police Services and Lonmin at a direct level. At a much broader level it can be called a collusion between the State and capital… in the sordid history of the mining industry in this country. Part of that history included the collaboration of so-called tribal chiefs who were corrupt and were used by those oppressive governments to turn the self-sufficient black African farmers into slave labour workers. Today we have a situation where those chiefs have been replaced by so-called Black Economic Empowerment partners of these mines and carrying on that torch of collusion.”

Lonmin unlamented 

Last week, London and Johannesburg investors witnessed what seems to be the death of Lonmin, a firm born as the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited in 1909. Lonrho had languished through the 1950s but then became one of the world’s most degenerate corporations, thanks to managing director Tiny Rowland’s corrupt deals across post-colonial Africa. By 1973 even British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath labelled Lonrho “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.”

One reason for the company’s death was the backlash against the Marikana Massacre. The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) became sufficiently strong to wage a five-month strike in 2014. The Massacre also humiliated a high-profile Lonmin booster, the World Bank. Its 2007-12 poster-child treatment of Lonmin’s so-called “Strategic Community Investment“ attracted persistent complaints from a Marikana community group, Sikhala Sonke. These grassroots feminists have rebuffed several bogus “dispute resolution” efforts from Washington, and their stinging legal critique of the Bank was deemed valid by an internal ombudsman earlier this month.

But unless objections by such groups and trade unions prove overwhelming before Lonmin’s annual general meeting in London on January 25, the world’s third largest platinum corporation will be swallowed by the young (five year old) Johannesburg-based mining house Sibanye-Stillwater. The price is a measly $383 million, which is 1/7^th Sibanye’s current share value and a tiny fraction (1.4%) of Lonmin’s peak value of $28.6 billion a decade ago.

The company’s complicated post-mortem will have two chapters:

• partial suicide – by a wicked management abetted by the Bank and at least one allied politician, Ramaphosa; and
• partial assassination – by the iron laws of capitalist crisis in the form of overproduction tendencies, combined with Volkswagen’s greenhouse gas emissions scam, which together drove the platinum price up too high and in 2015 crashed it too quickly.

Resource Curses reloaded

Consider the rapid reaction to Sibanye’s takeover by the main union leader representing Lonmin workers, Amcu’s Joseph Mathunjwa:

“We are prepared to join forces with communities around Lonmin to ensure that the interests of mineworkers’ mine-affected communities are defended. We want to warn the new owners and current shareholders that we will fight and not sit quietly as our members’ future is destroyed.”

Not only are 38% of Lonmin’s 33 000 employees due to be retrenched within the next three years, according to Sibanye’s takeover plan. And not only did its CEO Neil Froneman immediately warn critics to cease attacking Lonmin for repeated violations of its state-mandated Social and Labour Plan:

“Communities that are unhappy, the Department of Mineral Resources that is unhappy – need to stop and allow us to complete this so that in the longer-term we can do more.”

Just as importantly, Froneman’s takeover does nothing to resolve at least half a dozen underlying Resource Curses revealed at Marikana, though also witnessed to a lesser extent across the country’s ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’:

• political – the obedience of politicians like Ramaphosa and the state security apparatus to the needs of multinational mining capital;
• economic – the tendency to overproduction intrinsic to the capitalist system, especially in times of a commodity super-cycle (2002-11) whose subsequent crash left Lonmin vastly over-exposed;
• financial – usurious microfinance borrowed by mineworkers, leading to extreme borrower desperation by the time of the August 2012 strikes, and $150 million in World Bank ‘development finance’ investment;
• gendered – especially the stressed reproduction of labour and community by women in the Nkaneng and Wonderkop shack settlements;
• environmental – extreme degradation within fast-growing peri-urban slums, nearby which minerals are dug and smelted using high-carbon processes that also pollute local water, soil and air;
• labour-related –
  • platinum rock drill operators’ inadequate wages and deplorable working and residential conditions, especially in comparison to mining executives’ ludicrously generous remuneration,
  • the durability of apartheid-era migrancy, itself a condition dividing workers from the area’s traditional residents along familial, ethnic and (property-related) class lines,
  • intra-union battles which split workers and generated some of the initial 2012 violence, followed by further violence in 2017 including within Amcu, and
  • ongoing mass retrenchments due to a (failing) automation strategy and platinum gluts.

Unless there’s radical change, the industry’s future is gloomy. As Mining Review Africa acknowledged in November, “demand for platinum, used primarily in diesel-fueled vehicles, continues to take a hit from the repercussions of the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal.” With the platinum market glutted, Froneman’s main rationale in buying Lonmin is to consolidate the firm’s relatively cheaper smelting over-capacity for use by other firms. Closure of Lonmin mine shafts will accelerate.

These factors contributed to mass strikes in 2012 (one month) and 2014 (five months), to periodic social uprisings and to ongoing discontent. Most could have been avoided had the 1955 Freedom Charter calling for socialisation of mining wealth been heeded by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) after liberation in 1994. The social democratic Charter was once, after all, the ANC’s ideological bible – and always vigorously opposed by capitalists.

But when ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema again raised the demand for mining nationalisation at a 2011 conference, a party disciplinary committee led by Ramaphosa expelled him and his comrades. They subsequently founded the Economic Freedom Fighters party and won a large share of the platinum belt’s vote in subsequent elections.

The massacre shifted South African politics forever. Wrongdoing was investigated by the 2012-15 Farlam Commission set up by Zuma, but the outcome was weak and biased. It is tempting to emphasise the negligence or malevolence of personalities. Judge Ian Farlam blamed maniacal police leadership. But recall, too, that Lonmin chief executive Ian Farmer’s salary was 236 times higher than the typical rock drill operator, that his main executive replacement Barnard Mokwena was later unveiled as a State Security Agency operative, and that Ramaphosa’s financial ethics were missing in action.

Ramaphosa was implicated in a Lonmin tax avoidance scandal via his Shanduka firm’s control of the Black Empowerment partner Incwala. According to Lonmin’s lawyer, “Incwala for very many years refused to agree to the new structure” to halt a $100 million outflow to the Bermuda tax haven justified as marketing expenses. As the Paradise Papers recently revealed, Ramaphosa’s firm also retained Mauritius accounts for nefarious purposes and as chair of Africa’s largest cellphone operator, MTN, he suffered continent-wide criticism for illicit capital flight.

Resistance rises too

Against mining capital and the politicians stand Amcu, Sikhala Sonke, the church-based Bench Marks Foundation (which earlier this year began campaigning for Lonmin divestment), the Marikana Support Campaign, Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, and solidarity activists in Britain and Germany. In addition to better wages and community investment, their four post-massacre demands are that Lonmin and the government publicly apologise, pay survivors and widows reparations (civil suits of more than $75 million have been filed) and declare August 16 a national holiday with a monument at the site of the massacre.

But now a much larger opportunity rises to cure the diseases that felled Lonmin, especially if Sibanye’s offer is rejected. After all, Lonmin’s nationalisation at such a fire-sale price is eminently reasonable and affordable. The state should also charge the firm’s shareholders for the costs – legal liabilities and fines – of decades of misbehaviour imposed on the economy, society and the environment. Moreover, so as to lessen vulnerability to volatile world capitalist markets, it is long overdue for South Africa (with 88% of world reserves) to join Russian and Zimbabwean authorities in a world platinum cartel, about which formal discussions began nearly five years ago.

In the process, a genuinely green strategy for the region should move the economy away from overdependence upon traditional coal, iron ore, manganese, gold and diamonds exports, and ensure a ‘Just Transition’ to post-’extractivist’ economic activities in line with South Africa’s growing climate mitigation and adaptation imperatives. As Sikhala Sonke and allies point out, the latter should be especially friendly to women’s needs, within not just the sphere of production but also the reproduction of society. As an example, the Cape Town-based “Million Climate Jobs” campaign recently produced anther booklet explaining the Just Transition process.

These sorts of visionary demands contrast with the ANC’s lowest-common-denominator ideology of neoliberal-nationalism, now that the worst tendencies of both the WMC and Zupta camps are on display within the party’s leadership. Aside from a #FeesMustFall breakthrough when Zuma promoted free tertiary education last Saturday just as the ANC congress began, it is likely that 2018 will begin with budgetary austerity and a Value Added Tax increase. Meanwhile ANC leaders will continue to talk left (so as to) walk right, with renewed preparedness for a state of emergency if socio-economic protests continue rising.

But amidst undisguised pro-Ramaphosa media bias (e.g. the popular Daily Maverick), even his corporate backers are genuinely nervous about Monday’s “poisoned chalice.” As they are now realising, “Markets got this one wrong – and were pricing in a Cyril slate victory,” failing to comprehend new dangers within the ruling party’s fusion of the WMC and Zupta factions. Durable liberal-bourgeois concerns about the new leader have also been expressed in ascerbic critiquesof the “Grand Consensus“ “nothing man“ by Business Day columnist Gareth van Onselen. I once debated another liberal commentator, Richard Calland a few years ago, in which he was pro-Ramaphosa for all the wrong reasons.

Neither the ANC nor Lonmin are going to exit their respective crises in the immediate future. The notion of crisis has always implied both destruction and opportunity. Mining tycoons and political elites have generally (except in 2015) avoided the former and are now grabbing the latter. So even if the South African state under Ramaphosa’s leadership can never become a trusted ally of the left, resistance from below will no doubt expand activist horizons, the more damage Lonmin does – even now in its messy death throes.

The takeaway message is the same threat “Cyrilina Ramaposer” offered in her haunting Makarena on Marikana: “This shit ain’t over.”

Patrick Bond teaches political economy at Wits University.

All images in this article are from the author.

The mad dash of the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and the wealthy for President Trump’s signature before the Christmas break, hit a speed bump on Tuesday. After the House of Representatives passed the measure in a largely party-line vote and the Senate began debate with the aim of securing passage late Tuesday night, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that two minor provisions violated Senate “budget reconciliation” rules.

As a result, the House will have to vote again Wednesday morning on the bill, minus the two provisions that will have been stripped out by the Senate. The end result, however, is a foregone conclusion.

Senate Republicans are using the expedited budget reconciliation process, which enables them to prevent a Democratic filibuster and pass the measure with a simple majority in the narrowly divided (52 to 48) chamber. This is one aspect of the brazenly undemocratic procedure being used to ram through a massively unpopular windfall for America’s corporate-financial elite, which will make the United States, already the most unequal advanced economy in the world, far more unequal.

Legislation that will transfer trillions of dollars from the working class to the richest 10 percent of the population, disproportionately to the richest 1 percent and 0.1 percent, will be made the law of the land within less than two months of its initial release and without a single congressional hearing.

What is being exposed is the fraud of bourgeois democracy and the reality of rule by an oligarchy that controls the political system and both major parties. It wants the money and will stop at nothing to get it.

The Democrats are offering only token opposition. They themselves fully support a sharp cut in the corporate tax rate, something proposed by the Obama White House, and have done nothing to mobilize the widespread popular opposition to the bill.

The giddy mood of Republicans and half-hearted posturing of Democrats is, in no small measure, due to the personal benefits most of those in Congress will receive from the legislation. A majority in Congress are millionaires, including 66 percent of senators.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the lone Republican to vote against the Senate version of the bill earlier this month, suddenly reversed himself last Friday, after House and Senate conferees inserted a last-minute provision in the final bill, adding commercial real estate firms to the list of “pass through” companies entitled to a hefty tax cut. Corker is a former construction executive with significant real estate income.

Enactment of the cynically named “Tax Cut and Jobs Act” will slash federal tax revenues by between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over the next decade. The sharply increased budget deficit and national debt will be used to justify a frontal attack on the core social programs remaining from the 1930s and 1960s: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Trump and the Republicans are accompanying enactment of the tax overhaul with a barrage of lies. They are insisting that the measure is a boon to the “hard-working middle class.” This continued Tuesday after the House initially passed the measure by a vote of 227 to 203, with 12 Republicans, mostly from the high-tax states of California, New York and New Jersey, joining all 191 voting Democrats in opposition.

Despite multiple non-partisan analyses, which have shown that the measure overwhelmingly benefits the rich and will actually increase taxes for a majority of Americans, House Speaker Paul Ryan hailed passage of the bill Tuesday as “a good day for workers.” It will “increase take-home pay,” he added.

Kevin Hassett, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the cable news channel MSNBC,

“Corporations are going to start building plants here. People will open the want-ads page and find a lot more jobs.”

In fact, America’s financial aristocracy will use its newfound wealth to increase its parasitic financial activities and reward itself with more mansions, private islands, personal jets and other means of flaunting its wealth.

As Reuters recently reported,

“US corporations are saying they would used a tax reform windfall to buy back shares, retired debt and other shareholder-friendly moves, in recent calls with investors and securities analysts.”

These include job-destroying mergers and acquisitions, a number of which have already been announced—CVS and Aetna, Disney and 21st Century Fox—in anticipation of passage of the bill.

Despite the campaign of lies, opinion polls show growing popular opposition to the tax bill. A new poll released this week by CNN and SSRS found that 55 percent oppose the proposal and 33 percent support it. Opposition to the bill has increased by 10 percent since early November.

The Democrats, for their part, are directing much of their criticism at the bill’s budget and debt consequences, and attacking the Republicans for being fiscally irresponsible. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (whose estimated net worth is nearly $200 million), while denouncing the Republicans for “looting” the economy, stressed that their bill will “explode the national debt.”

In Tuesday’s Senate debate, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, cited Trump’s newly issued National Security Strategy document, which calls US economic strength a key to national security, and denounced the tax bill for raising the debt and thereby undermining America’s international position.

“Let’s give the $1.5 trillion tax cut to the men and women in uniform” instead of Wall Street, he declared.

The heart of the bill is a massive cut in the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to 21 percent. It is estimated that this alone will increase corporate revenues by some $6 trillion over the next decade.

The effective US corporate rate, i.e., the rate corporations actually pay after making use of tax loopholes and dodges of various kinds, is presently between 19 and 21 percent, already below that paid by US rivals in Europe and Asia. According to economists at the University of Pennsylvania, under the new law the effective rate across all industries will fall to 9 percent next year.

The biggest windfalls will go, not to manufacturing or mining, but to real estate (the basis of the Trump empire) and finance. Real estate firms will see a 16 point reduction and financial companies will enjoy a 12 point cut. Mining firms will see a cut of just under nine points, and manufacturers will receive a seven point reduction.

The economists project that the bill will save financial firms $250 billion in corporate taxes over the next decade, a massive 35 percent cut.

The bill also gives the owners of “pass through” businesses, which are not publicly held corporations, such as partnerships and S corporations, and who pay taxes at the individual rather than the corporate rate, a hefty 20 percent tax deduction.

It lowers the top individual tax rate from the current 39.6 percent to 37 percent, while raising the income threshold. It reduces the alternative minimum tax rate for individuals and eliminates it for corporations.

The bill goes a very long way in consolidating a dynastic aristocracy of wealth in America by doubling the estate tax exemption for couples to $22 million.

It includes two provisions that will modestly reduce taxes for most middle-income households in 2018 and several years thereafter: a doubling of both the standard deduction and the child tax credit. However, these are largely offset by other provisions that eliminate or reduce current tax deductions used by tens of millions of working Americans, including deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes. The bill also pares back deductions on losses from fires and floods, and repeals them for alimony payments and moving expenses.

One critical provision that has been grossly under-reported is the replacement of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) by the so-called “chained CPI” in adjusting tax brackets and certain benefits. The new standard underestimates inflation and will slow the speed at which tax brackets adjust to rising prices. As a result, taxpayers will more quickly find themselves in higher tax brackets.

Low income people who currently claim the earned income tax credit will lose an estimated $19 billion over the coming decade, because of the chained CPI. Moreover, in a vicious attack on immigrants, the new law requires families claiming the earned income tax credit to show a Social Security number. Undocumented parents will thereby be disqualified from collecting benefits, even if their children were born in the US and are therefore US citizens.

On top of all this, the bill terminates all provisions relating to individual tax rates at the end of 2025, leaving low and middle-income people facing a sudden, large tax increase for 2026 and beyond.

Introduction

Clearly the pendulum has swung to the right in the past few years.  Numerous questions arise.  What kind of right?  How far right? How did they gain power?  What is their appeal?  How sustainable are the right wing regimes?  Who are their international allies and adversaries?  Having taken power, how have the rightist regimes performed and by what criteria is success or failure measured?

While the left has been in retreat, they still retain power in some states.  Numerous questions arise.  What is the nature of the left today?  Why have some regimes continued while others have declined or been vanquished?  Can the left recover its influence and under what conditions and with what programmatic appeal.

We will proceed by discussing the character and policies of the right and left and their direction.  We will conclude by analyzing the dynamics of right and left policies, alignments and future perspectives.

Right-Radicalism: The Face of Power

The right wing regimes are driven by intent to implement structural changes: they look to reordering the nature of the state, economic and social relations and international political and economic alignments.

Radical right regimes rule in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras and Chile.

In several countries extreme right regimes have made abrupt changes, while in others they build on incremental changes constituted over time.

The changes in Argentina and Brazil represent examples of extreme regressive transformations directed at reversing income distribution, property relations, international alignments and military strategies.  The goal is to redistribute income upwardly, to re-concentrate wealth, property-ownership upward and externally and to subscribe to imperial doctrine.  These pluto-populist regimes are run by rulers, who openly speak to and for very powerful domestic and overseas investors and are generous in their distribution of subsidies and state resources – a kind of ‘populism for the plutocrats’.

The rise and consolidation of extremist right regimes in Argentina and Brazil are based on several decisive interventions, combining elections and violence, purges and co-optation, mass media propaganda and deep corruption.

Mauricio Macri was backed by the major media, led by the Clarin conglomerate, as well as by the international financial press (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.).  Wall Street speculators and Washington’s overseas political apparatus subsidized his electoral campaign.

Macri, his family, cronies and financial accomplices, transferred public resources to private accounts.  Provincial political bosses and their patronage operations joined forces with the wealthy financial sectors of Buenos Aires to secure votes in the Capital.

Upon his election, the Mauricio Macri regime transferred five billion dollars to the notorious Wall Street speculator, Paul Singer, signed off on multi-billion dollar, high interest loans, increased utility fees six fold, privatized oil, gas and public lands and fired tens of thousands of public sector employees.

Macri organized a political purge and arrest of opposition political leaders, including former President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner.  Several provincial activists were jailed or even assassinated.

Macri is a success story from the perspective of Wall Street, Washington and the Porteño business elite.  Wages and salaries have declined for Argentine workers.  Utility companies secured their highest profits ever.  Bankers doubled interest rate returns.  Importers became millionaires.  Agro-business incomes skyrocketed as their taxes were reduced.

From the perspective of Argentina’s small and medium business enterprises President Macri’s regime has been a disaster: Many thousands have gone bankrupt because of high utility costs and harsh competition from cheap Chinese imports.  In addition to the drop in wages and salaries, unemployment and under employment doubled and the rate of extreme poverty tripled

The economy, as a whole, floundered.  Debt financing failed to promote growth, productivity, innovation and exports.  Foreign investment experienced easy entry, big profits and fast departure.  The promise of prosperity was narrowly based around a quarter of the population.  To weaken the expected public discontent – the regime shut down independent media voices, unleashed thugs against critics and co-opted pliable gangster trade union bosses to break  strikes.

Public protests and strikes multiplied but were ignored and repressed.  Popular leaders and activists are stigmatized by the Macri-financed media hacks.

Barring a major social upheaval or economic collapse, Macri will exploit the fragmentation of the opposition to secure re-election as a model gangster for Wall Street.  Macri is prepared to sign off on US military bases, EU free trade agreements, and greater police liaison with Israel’s sinister secret police, Mossad.

Brazil has followed Macri’s far right policies.

Seizing power through a phony impeachment operation, the mega-swindler Michel Temer immediately proceeded to dismantle the entire public sector, freeze salaries for twenty years, and extend retirement age for pensioners by five to ten years.  Temer led over a thousand bribe-taking elected officials in the multi-billion dollar pillage of the state oil company and every major public infrastructure project.

Coup, corruption and contempt were hidden by a system granting Congressional impunity until independent prosecutors investigated, charged and jailed several dozen politicians, but not Temer.  Despite 95% public disapproval, President Temer remains in power with the total backing of Wall Street, the Pentagon and Sao Paolo bankers.

Mexico, the long-standing narco-assassin state, continues elect one thieving PRI-PAN political regime after another.  Billions in illicit profits flows to the overseas tax havens of money laundering bankers, US and Canadian mine owners.   Mexican and international manufacturers extracted double digit profits sent, to overseas accounts and tax havens.  Mexico broke its own miserable record in elite tax avoidance, while extending low wage-tax ‘free trade zones’.  Millions of Mexicans have fled across the border to escape predatory gangster capitalism.  The flow of hundreds of millions of dollars of profits by US and Canadian multi-nationals were a result of the ‘unequal exchange’ between US capital and Mexican labor, held in place by Mexico’s fraudulent electoral system.

In at least two well-known presidential elections in 1988 and 2006, left of center candidates, Cuahtemoc Cardenas and Manuel Lopez Obrador, won with healthy margins of victory, only to have their victories stolen by fraudulent vote counts.

Peru’s rightist mining regimes, alternated between the overtly bloody Fujimori dictatorship and corrupt electoral regimes.  What is consistent in Peruvian politics is the handover of mineral resources to foreign capital, pervasive corruption and the brutal exploitation of natural resources by US and Canadian mining and drilling corporations in regions inhabited by Indian communities.

The extreme right ousted elected left-of-center governments, including President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay (2008-2012) and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2006-2009), with the active support and approval of the US State Department.  Narco-presidents now wield power by means of repression, including violence against popular movements and the killing of scores of peasant and urban activists.  This year, a grossly rigged election in Honduras ensured the continuity of narco-regimes and US military bases.

The spread of the extreme right from Central America and Mexico to the Southern Cone provides the groundwork for the re-assertion of US centered military alliances and regional trade pacts.

The rise of the extreme right ensures the most lucrative privatizations and the highest rates of return on overseas bank loans.  The far right is quick to crack down on popular dissent and electoral challenges with violence.  At most the far right allows a few rotating elites with nationalist pretensions to provide a façade of electoral democracy.

The Shift from the Center-Left to the Center-Right

The political swings to the far right have had profound ripple effects – as nominal center-left regimes have swung to the center-right.

Two regimes have moved decisively from the center-left to the center-right:  Uruguay under Tabare Vazquez of the ‘Broad Front’ and Ecuador with the recent election of Lenin Moreno of PAIS Alliance.  In both cases the groundwork was established via accommodations with oligarchs of the traditional right parties.  The previous center-left regimes of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa and Uruguayan President Jose  Mujica succeeded in pushing for public investments and  social reforms.  They combined their leftist rhetoric while capitalizing on the global high prices and high demand for agro-mineral exports to finance their reforms.  With the decline in world prices and the public exposure of corruption, the newly elected center-left parties nominated and elected center –right candidates who turned anti-corruption campaigns into vehicles for embracing neoliberal economic policies.  The center-right presidents rejected economic nationalism, encouraged large scale foreign investment and implemented fiscal austerity programs appealing to the upper middle class and ruling class.

The center-right regimes marginalized the leftist sectors of their parties.  In the case of Ecuador, they split the party, with the newly elected president realigning international policies away from the left (Bolivia, Venezuela) and toward the US and the far right– while shedding the legacy of their predecessor in terms of popular social programs. 

With the decline in export prices the center-right regimes offered generous subsidies to foreign investors in agriculture and forestry in Uruguay,  and mine owners and exporters in Ecuador.

The newly converted center-right regimes joined with their established counterparts in Chile and joined the Trans Pacific Partnership with Asian nations, the EU and the US.

The center-right sought to manipulate the social rhetoric of the previous center-left regimes in order to retain popular voters while securing  support from the business elite.

The Left Moves to the Center Left

Bolivia, under Evo Morales, has demonstrated an exceptional capacity for sustaining growth, securing re-election and neutralizing the opposition by combining a radical left foreign policy with a moderate, mixed public-private export economy.  While Bolivia condemns US imperialism, major oil, gas, metals and lithium multi-nationals have invested heavily in Bolivia.  Evo Morales has moderated his ideological posture shifting from revolutionary socialism to a local version of liberal democratic cultural politics.

Evo Morales’ embrace of a mixed economy has neutralized any overt hostility from the US and the new far-right regimes in the region.

Though remaining politically independent, Bolivia has integrated its  exports with the far right neoliberal regimes in the region.  President Evo Morales’s moderate economic policies, diversity of mineral exports, fiscal responsibility, incremental social reforms, and support from well-organized social movements has led to political stability and social continuity despite the volatility of commodity prices.

Venezuela’s left regimes under President Hugo Chavez and Maduro have followed a divergent course with harsh consequences.  Totally dependent on extraordinary global oil prices, Venezuela proceeded to finance generous welfare programs at home and abroad.  Under President Chavez leadership, Venezuela adopted a consequential anti-imperialist policy successfully opposing a US centered free trade agreement (LAFTA) and launching an anti-imperialist alternative, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).

Advancing social welfare and financing overseas allies without diversifying the economy and markets and increasing production was predicated on continuous high returns on a single volatile export – oil.

Unlike Bolivia under President Evo Morales, who built his power with the support of an organized, class conscious and disciplined mass base, Venezuela counted on an amorphous electoral alliance, which included slum dwellers, defectors from the corrupt traditional parties (across the spectrum) and opportunists intent on grabbing office and perks.   Political education was reduced to mouthing slogans, cheering the President and distributing consumer goods.

Venezuelan technocrats and political loyalists occupied highly lucrative positions, especially in the petroleum sector and were not held to account by workers’ councils or competent state auditors.  Corruption was rampant and billions of dollars of oil wealth was stolen.   This pillage was tolerated because of the huge influx of petro-dollars due to historic high prices and high demand.  This led to a bizarre situation where the regime spoke of socialism and funded massive social programs, while the major banks, food distributers, importers and transportation operators were controlled by hostile private oligarchs who pocketed enormous profits while manufacturing shortages and promoting inflation.  Despite the problems, the Venezuelan voters gave the regime a series of electoral victories over the US proxies and oligarch politicians.  This tended to create overconfidence in the regime that the Bolivarian socialist model was irrevocable.

The precipitous drop of oil prices, global demand, and export earnings led to the decline of imports and consumption.  Unlike Bolivia, foreign reserves declined, the rampant theft of billions was belatedly uncovered and the US-backed rightwing opposition returned to violent ‘direct action’ and sabotage while hoarding essential food, consumer goods and medicine.  Shortages led to widespread black marketeering.   Public sector corruption and hostile opposition control of the private banking, retail and industrial sectors, backed by the US, paralyzed the economy.  The economy has been in a free-fall and electoral support has eroded.  Despite the regime’s severe problems, the majority of low income voters correctly understood that their chances of surviving under the US-backed oligarchic opposition would be worse and the embattled left continued to win gubernatorial and municipal elections up through 2017.

Venezuela’s economic vulnerability and negative growth rate led to increased indebtedness.  The opposition of the extreme right regimes in Latin America and Washington’s economic sanctions has intensified food shortages and increased unemployment.

In contrast, Bolivia effectively defeated US-elite coup plots between 2008-10.  The Santa Cruz-based oligarchs faced the clear choice of either sharing profits and social stability by signing off on social pacts (workers/peasants, capital and state) with the Morales government or facing an alliance of the government and the militant labor movement prepared to expropriate their holdings.  The elites chose economic collaboration while pursuing low intensity electoral opposition.

Conclusion

Left opposition is in retreat from state power.  Opposition to the extreme right is likely to grow, given the harsh, uncompromising assault on income, pensions, the rise in the cost of living, severe reductions in social programs and attacks on private and public sector employment.   The extreme right has several options, none of which offer any concessions to the left. They have chosen to heighten police state measures (the Macri solution);  they attempt  to fragment the opposition by negotiating with the opportunist trade union and political party bosses; and they reshuffle degraded rulers with new faces to continue policies (the Brazilian solution).

The formerly revolutionary left parties, movements and leaders have evolved toward electoral politics, protests and job action.   So far they do not represent an effective political option at the national level

The center-left, especially in Brazil and Ecuador, is in a strong position with dynamic political leaders (Lula DaSilva and Correa) but face trumped up charges by right-wing prosecutors who intend to exclude them from running for office.  Unless the center-left reformers engage in prolonged large-scale mass activity, the far right will effectively undermine their political recovery.

The US imperial state has temporarily regained proxy regimes, military allies and economic resources and markets.  China and the European Union profit from optimal economic conditions offered by the far right regimes.  The US military program has effectively neutralized the radical opposition in Colombia, and the Trump regime has intensified and imposed new sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.

The Trump regimes ‘triumphalist’ celebration is premature – no decisive strategic victory has taken place, despite important short term advances in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.  However large outflows of profits, major transfers of ownership to foreign investors, favorable tax rates, low tariff and trade policies have yet to generate new productive facilities, sustainable growth and to ensure economic fundamentals.  Maximizing profits and ignoring investments in productivity and innovation to promote domestic markets and demand has bankrupted tens of thousands of medium and small  local commercial and manufacturing firms.  This has led to rising chronic unemployment and underemployment.  Marginalization and social polarization without political leadership is growing.   Such conditions led to ‘spontaneous’ uprisings in Argentina 2001, Ecuador 2000 and Bolivia 2005.

The far right in power may not evoke a rebellion of the far left but its policies can certainly undermine the stability and continuity of the current regimes.  At a minimum, it can lead to some version of the center left and restoration of the welfare and employment regimes now in tatters.

In the meantime the far right will press ahead with their perverse agenda combining deep reversals of social welfare, the degradation of national sovereignty and economic stagnation with a formidable profit maximizing performance.

Featured image: Abu Dis child playing with a spinning top, 2014 (Source: Rima Najjar)

Since 1897, the first Zionist Congress, Judaism has been entangled with Zionism. It’s time to disengage the two – no easy matter.

When Zionist Jewish terrorist gangs in Palestine were transformed into Israel’s Defense Forces, they continued systematically practicing sociocide, politicide, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide on the Palestinian people under the banner of a bastardized Star of David.

“The bond between the IDF, Judaism and the Jewish people is strong. Both the state and the army have adopted symbols that stress the association with the partly historical, ­­­ mythological – and undoubtedly symbolically loaded – House of David. Israel’s white and blue flag, the DegelLavan, removes any question of religious affinity.” [See Religion and coming to terms with soldiering in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)]

The Israeli Knesset (parliament) is presided over by a menorah and swears allegiance to a warmongering Jewish state that is following in the footsteps of the ancient Israelites in the time of Moses, as follows:

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. (Deuteronomy, 7:1-2; NKJ)”

The Knesset sees nothing wrong in the maiming, torture and outright slaughter of Palestinian children and sets itself up as the embodiment of Jewish self-righteousness. In order to “exist” as a Jewish state, Israel must continue to rob and oppress the Palestinian people targeting and shooting hundreds of unarmed protesters and arresting community leaders as a routine measure..

I’d like to wish religious Jews worldwide a happy Hanukkah holiday in the name of the children of Abu Dis as well as all Palestinian children in the Holy land, over whom Israel now has an iron grip, and those in exile.

Abu Dis is a suburb of Jerusalem in the Holy Land behind the illegal annexation apartheid wall the Jewish state built to keep Palestinians out of al-Quds, where I have lived and taught there many years and taken hundreds of pictures of the place and its people.

“In Israel’s dystopic vision, the village of Abu Dis outside Jerusalem is proposed as the capital of a future fragmented Palestinian “state” – one never created, given that (along with all US-led peace processes), its eventual appearance is entirely dependent on Israel’s permission. This is named, in “peace process” language, as any solution to be agreed “by the parties themselves”, via “a negotiated settlement by the two sides.” (See In Jerusalem we have the latest chapter in a century of colonialism | Karma Nabulsi)

I’d like Jews who identify with Israel to understand what Palestinians want, and I’ll say it, not in angry words, although my anger is monumental, but in the measured words of a highly-regarded scholar – Karma Nabulsi:

“The goal of Palestinians is to unify for the struggle to liberate their land and return to it, and to restore their inalienable human rights taken by force – principles enshrined in centuries of international treaties, charters, and resolutions, and in natural justice.”

In plain language, that means an end to Israel as a Jewish state.  As many political analysts have written, a single state has existed in historic Palestine since 1967 – it’s the status quo. The time has come to battle over the nature of Israel’s racist, apartheid Zionist regime and to call for one democratic state in historic Palestine.

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.

The price of a rare tulip bulb on the futures market in Amsterdam in January 1637 was equal to ten times the annual wage for a skilled crafts worker. A single bulb was reportedly exchanged for 1,000 pounds of cheese at the height of tulip mania. The market collapsed precipitously starting in February 1637, bottoming out in May 1637.

According to Economist Brian Dowd,

“By the height of the tulip and bulb craze in 1637, everyone.. rich and poor, aristocrats and plebes, even children had joined the party. Much of the trading was being done in bar rooms where alcohol was obviously involved…bulbs could change hands upwards of 10 times in one day. Prices skyrocketed… in 1637, increasing 1,100% in a month.”

Bitcoin, the original crypto-currency, was valued at $.08 in July 2010; $8100 on November 20, 2017, and $17,900 on Dec.15 2017. The sky is apparently the limit.

The danger of course,is not just that at some point, the bigger fools, the last purchasers of bit coin and the long term holders (“hodlers” in crypto-speak) will loose some or all of their money. That would be regrettable. But like straight forward pump and dump market manipulations of a stock some will win while others loose.

But, as in 2007 and 2008, the creative greed behind global financialization is creating not just a bubble in bit-coin and many other crypto-currencies as investors , as in Holland in 1637, pile into markets as buyers. There is a real and, I believe, rapidly emerging threat that bit coin and its ilk could follow dynamics similar to mortgage back securities as the basis for highly leveraged and complex financial instruments, like credit default swaps that were traded in unlimited volumes with no limits based on the actual number of mortgages.

Cyrpto-currency has now entered the leveraged futures market. Speculators now can leverage futures purchases 15 to one. This means a 7% drop in the price of bit-coin (a familiar phenomena) will wipe our your capital, returning us quickly to the momentous margin calls of 2007-8. And there is no limit to the number of futures contracts.

Derivative instruments of more complexity and undefined risks are almost certain to swiftly appear as they did in 2007 when,for example, insurance giant AIG took enormous bets to earn premium on credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities. After all were, these were AAA rated… The sudden collapse of mortgage backed securities led to a liquidity crisis. The securities could not be sold for almost any price and the giant financial institutions on wrong side of the bets were suddenly bankrupt.

As Frances Coppola in Forbes points out,

“As more and more financial institutions with connections to the real economy pile into the cryptocurrency mania, the chances of a similar disastrous collapse rise ever higher, and along with it, the likelihood of Fed or even a government bailout.”

The intent of those driving the explosion of crypto-currency prices is not a desire use crypto-currency as a low cost ,reliable medium of exchange verified by a transparent block-chain, but as a magic carpet to wealth. If you’d bought $100 worth of bit coins in 2010, they would be worth $1.79 million as of Dec. 15. 2017. It is paradoxical that crypto-currency, allegedly meant to free us from fiat currency, finds its liquidity and value in the all mighty dollar.

There is much to recommend block-chain for its potential use as a reliable and low-cost means of trade whether is is tied to crypto-currency or not. For example, bock chain is being used in Brooklyn, NY to test sale of solar energy from local producers to local buyers, with the exchange medium in dollars not crypto-currency.

The Media Lab at MIT is working on designing crypto-currency projects that could facilitate, for example, trades and transaction by the global poor purchasing and selling locally produced community renewable energy. Crypto-currency and block chain could be an important tool for people not just beyond power lines, but who live unbanked and with little access to cash or liquidity of any kind. Crypto-currency could become a reliable exchange medium and basis for a community controlled economy.

Bit-coin is also seeing the transaction costs for bit-coin transaction soar rising to $20 charged by block-chain “miners” whose computers verify transaction and at the same time create more blocks and produce more bit coins as part of the solution of the algorithm that verifies transactions. Far from being a means for vey quick cheap, anonymous financial transactions, bit coin is becoming slow and expensive to use. A newer generation of crypto-currencies like IOTA offers an improved block-chain with zero transaction costs and faster transaction all the better to attract investors.

Crypto-currencies could represent a tool for self-management and community economies, a way to use the internet to help challenge the growing netocracy of the Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, Amazons, Ali Babas and their ilk. But by making crypto-currency into an investment who use is part of a get rich quick scheme as opposed to a free instrument of exchange and trade it has become just another arrow in the quiver of making the rich richer and worsening the already grotesque distribution of income. Crypto-currency speculation will make some people rich, as does day trading and house flipping, where many more will loose then win.

I suppose the original sin of crypto-currency was to allow its purchase in dollars, and not, for example, in services provided by one to another based on labor time and materials. But the crypto-currency model is based on a limited quantity that makes it resistant to inflation, but enshrines scarcity and therefore value and the siren calls of greed and desire as it does for scarce commodities like cocaine or diamonds or gold.

The bit-coin and crypto-currency bubble will not end well.

Roy Morrison‘s latest book is Sustainability Sutra Select Books 2017. He is working on building solar PV on working farms www.dual-cropping.com.

Featured image is from Hacker Noon.

What do we make of Trump’s national security speech?  First of all, it is the military/security complex’s speech, and it is inconsistent with Trump’s intention of normalizing relations with Russia.

The military/security complex, using Trump’s position as President,  has defined Russia and China as “revisionist powers,” Washington’s rivals who seek to put their own national interests ahead of Washington’s unilateralism.  Russia and China are “revisionist powers” because their assertion of their national interests limits Washington’s hegemony.

In other words, Washington does not accept the validity of other countries’ interests if those interests are contrary to Washington’s interests.  So, how does Trump expect to work with Russia and China when he reads a speech that Russia and China seek to “shape a world antithetical to our interests and values.”

“Our values” means, of course, Washington’s dominance.

Trump begins by honoring the military, police, Homeland Security, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In other words, “America first” means domination by Washington over the citizenry as well as over foreign countries.

Trump then cloaks himself in the American people who “voted to make America great again.”

Then Trump’s speech picks up the Israel Lobby’s line about a bad deal with Iran and asserts that previous administrations tolerated ISIS, when in fact they created it and set in upon Libya and Syria.

Then he attacks environmental protection and complains of illegal aliens, while ignoring the refugees Washington’s wars imposed on Europe.

In an era of neoconservative celebration of US world hegemony, Trump accuses his predecessors of losing confidence in America.  This is extraordinary.  When a country’s entire foreign policy is based on the assumption that it is the “exceptional and indispensable country,” how is this a loss of confidence?  It is massive arrogance and hubris.  The problem is not a loss of confidence by the rulers but an overbearing hubris.

Then Trump claims that through him, Americans again rule their nation.

He says that now Washington is serving the citizens.  Looking at the tax bill, he must mean that citizens consist of the One Percent.

He next associates making America first with more money for the military.

Then he blames Iran for terrorism, something that Iran lives in fear of, but he does not mention Saudi Arabia’s support for terrorism or that of the US military/security complex’s which encourages terrorism as a weapon against Iran and Russia and as an excuse for its massive budget and power.

Trump then claims credit for the Russian/Syrian defeat of ISIS. It has been proved that ISIS is supported and financed by Washington.  Trump’s claim is even more ridiculous than the previous claims of the Obama regime that the US defeated National Socialist Germany.  Russia, which did defeat Germany, was not invited to the anniversary celebration.

Trump next demands that the countries we defend pay for it.  Who are these countries and who do we defend them from?  He can only mean Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel, and Japan. Is Washington defending them from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran or from the terrorists Washington creates, arms, and supplies to overthrow Libya, Syria and whatever countries Washington is successful siccing terrorists on. Apparently, some of these CIA-created terrorist organizations break loose from their creator and conduct operations on their own.  So, Washington is a government that creates its own enemies.

Trump next brags on the sanctions he has imposed on “the North Korean regime.”  He doesn’t mention, and I would bet he does not know, that Washington has withheld a peace treaty since the 1950s from North Korea.  Washington has kept the war status open for 64 years.  Having seen the fate of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, etc., little wonder North Korea wants nuclear weapons.

Trump standing there threatening the world, says that Washington will take all necessary steps to prevent North Korea from threatening the word.

Trump then delivers the establishment’s propaganda that unemployment is at an all time low and the stock market at an all time high. So, what is Trump rescuing Middle America from if unemployment is at an all time low?  What happened to Trump’s case against jobs offshoring?

This is nothing but feel-good talk.  Trump is repeating the lies because the lies make him look good. What Trump should be doing is pointing out the meaningless of the unemployment rate, because it doesn’t count the unemployed, only those few who looked for a job in the last 4 weeks.  He should be pointing out that the stock market is not a sign of a growing economy but a sign of massive money creation by the central banks of the US, EU, UK, and Japan.  The massive printing of money has flooded into paper assets, driving up their price and further enriching the One Percent.

Trump says that one leg of the strategy is to “preserve peace through strength.”  What peace is he talking about?  In the past two decades Washington has destroyed in whole or part eight countries and overthrown democratic governments in others.  Is Trump equating peace with Washington’s wars?  No other country has initiated wars and invasions and bombings and aggressive military actions on other countries’ borders. Trump says that America is threatened by enemies and to protect us the military will be enlarged.  He said he was overturning the “defense sequester,” something that clearly does not exist.

My conclusion is that Trump has surrendered to the real rulers of America—the powerful interest groups such as the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, the environmental polluters, Wall Street and the banks “too big to fail.”

America is a country in which despite the hopes flyover America had in Trump,  an oligarchy rules. The American people, regardless of who they elect, have no voice, no input, no representation.

The governments of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were the last governments that were subject to any accountability. With the Clinton regime the United States entered into the age of tyranny.

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

Featured image is from Zero Hedge.

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stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

On Thursday, General Assembly members will meet in a rare emergency special session (ESS) in the wake of America’s veto of a SC resolution opposing Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

A draft resolution is expected to be adopted overwhelmingly – America, Israel, and perhaps a few US dominated Pacific island states alone voting against it.

Security Council resolutions alone (with 15 members, 5 permanent, 10 rotating) are binding, not GA ones, the body comprised of all UN members states, so resolutions adopted represent the majority view of all nations, making them significant statements carrying political weight.

GA Resolution 377, Uniting for Peace (1950) states in cases where Security Council members fail to act as required to maintain international peace and security, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately, and may issue recommendations it deems necessary.

The GA may meet in emergency special session if it’s not convened at the time. SC veto power can’t block it. ESS resolutions can be adopted without consent of any or all of the five permanent SC members.

These sessions have been convened 10 times since the UN was established, mostly recently in 1997.

The 10th ESS was adjourned and resumed numerous times since 2000. They differ from special sessions, able to be called within 15 days of a request received by the secretary-general.

America initiated the Uniting for Peace Resolution in October 1950 to circumvent Soviet Russia vetoes during US aggression on North Korea, begun in June that year when the USSR was boycotting the Security Council (from January to August that year), unable to use its veto power in absentia.

GA Res. 377 was adopted by a 52 – 5 majority – “no” votes from Soviet Russia and four other Eastern bloc countries.

On December 19, neocon US UN envoy Nikki Haley outrageously warned its member states, saying:

Trump “will be watching this vote carefully and has requested I report back on those countries who voted against us.”

“We will take note of each and every vote on this issue.”

Separately, she tweeted:

“The US will be taking names” during Thursday’s vote.

Turkey and Yemen requested the ESS on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

The draft resolution mirrors the Security Council one Washington vetoed – reaffirming the illegality of actions “alter(ing) the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem” – by Trump’s recognition of the city as Israel’s capital.

Palestinian ambassador Riyad Mansour said he expected “overwhelming support” for the measure, adding:

“The General Assembly will say, without the fear of the veto, that the international community is refusing to accept the unilateral position of the United States.”

In the wake of Washington’s SC veto, igniting a firestorm in Occupied Palestine, Mike Pence postponed his December 19 visit to Israel until mid-January.

He’s persona non grata in the Occupied Territories, America no longer recognized by Palestinian leadership as an honest peace broker.

It never was before and isn’t now, one-sidedly supporting Israel, partnering in its high crimes.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Permanent war is official US policy, peace and stability anathema notions. The danger of nuclear war perhaps is greater than any previous time.

Interviewed by the BBC on Monday, US National Security Advisor HR McMaster said Washington has “to be prepared, if necessary, to compel the denuclearization of North Korea” unilaterally – barely stopping short of declaring war on the country, perhaps ahead at the Trump administration’s discretion.

McMaster lied calling the DPRK “a grave threat to all civilized people across the globe” – a dubious distinction applying solely to America, NATO, Israel and their imperial allies.

Separately, McMaster added “(w)e’re out of time with this problem,” an ominous warning.

He blasted Russia as well, outrageously saying the Kremlin “is engaged in a very sophisticated campaign of subversion to affect our confidence in democratic institutions, in democratic processes – including elections,” adding:

“What they want to do is create the kind of tension, the kind of vitriol, which undermines our confidence in who we are.”

Washington gave China a new draft resolution for tougher Security Council sanctions on North Korea.

When will Beijing and Moscow say no more? Both countries admitted sanctions are counterproductive, encouraging the DPRK to continue advancing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

An earlier US draft resolution rejected by both countries called for a naval blockade and total oil embargo, similar unacceptable provisions perhaps in what the Trump administration intends proposing.

Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya warned that

“(b)elligerent rhetoric and reckless show of muscle have led to a situation when the whole world is making guesses about the probability of a war,” adding:

“It is a fact of life that in such a tense situation any reckless or wrongly interpreted step may trigger deplorable consequences.”

North Korea will never abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, given the ominous threat of possible US aggression.

On Monday, an editorial in Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmum broadsheet said its leadership rejects talks with America, knowing its aim is getting the DPRK to abandon its most important deterrent weapons, stressing:

“The US is trying to shift responsibility for tensions on the Korean Peninsula to us with its offensive dialogue.”

“The move is seen as being intended to set the tone for manipulating new UN Security Council resolutions that may include a maritime blockade if we do not accept dialogue aimed at discussing the abandonment of our nuclear weapons.”

“There is no change in our stance that we will not budge an inch in our march toward strengthening our nuclear force.”

The broadsheet accused the Trump administration of duplicity – on the one hand threatening “fire and fury” to destroy North Korea, then suggesting talks with no preconditions to exert maximum pressure on the country for denuclearization.

Tensions remain high, the threat of regional nuclear war ominously real. America’s imperial madness makes anything possible.

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

This article first appeared on GR in October 2017.

Now that the defeat of ISIS in Syria appears imminent, with the Syrian army clearing out some of the last ISIS strongholds in the east, Washington’s interventionists are searching for new excuses to maintain the illegal US military presence in the country. Their original rationale for intervention has long been exposed as another lie.

Remember that President Obama initially involved the US military in Iraq and Syria to “prevent genocide” of the Yazidis and promised the operation would not drift into US “boots on the ground.” That was three years ago and the US military became steadily more involved while Congress continued to dodge its Constitutional obligations. The US even built military bases in Syria despite having no permission to do so! Imagine if Syria started building military bases here in the US against our wishes.

After six years of war the Syrian government has nearly defeated ISIS and al-Qaeda and the US-backed “moderates” turned out to be either Islamist extremists or Kurdish soldiers for hire. According to a recent report, the US has shipped two billion dollars worth of weapons to fighters in Syria via eastern Europe. Much of these weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS directly, or indirectly through “moderates” taking their weapons with them while joining ISIS or al-Qaeda.

“Assad must go,” proclaimed President Obama back in 2011, as he claimed that the Syrian leader was committing genocide against his own people and that regime change was the only way to save Syrians. Then earlier this year, when eastern Aleppo was about to be liberated by the Syrian government, the neocons warned that Assad would move in and kill all the inhabitants. They warned that the population of eastern Aleppo would flee from the Syrian army. But something very different happened. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, 600,000 refugees returned to Syria by August. Half of the returnees went back to Aleppo, where we were told Assad was waiting to kill them.

What happened? The neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” lied. Just as they lied about Libya, Iraq, and so on.

While it was mostly ignored by the mainstream media, just this week a Christian was elected speaker of the Syrian parliament. The new speaker is a 58-year-old Orthodox Christian law graduate and member of President Assad’s Baath party.

How many Christians does our “ally” Saudi Arabia have in its parliament? Oh I forgot, Saudi Arabia has no elected parliament.

Why does it seem that US policy in the Middle East always hurts Christians the most? In Iraq, Christians suffered disproportionately from the 2003 US invasion. In fact there are hardly any Christians left. Why aren’t more US Christian groups demanding that the US get out of the Middle East?

The US is not about to leave on its own. With ISIS all but defeated in Syria, many in Washington are calling for the US military to continue its illegal occupation of parts of the country to protect against Iranian influence! Of course before the US military actions in Iraq and Syria there was far less Iranian influence in the region! So US foreign interventionism is producing new problems that can only be solved by more US interventionism? The military industrial complex could not have dreamed of a better scheme to rob the American people while enriching themselves!

What have we achieved in Syria? Nothing good.

This article first appeared on GR in October 2017.

It is now clear that the unexpected counterattack that ISIS militants launched near the Deir ez-Zor and Palmyra, forcing Russia’s air group deployed in Syria to take urgent measures to repel it, that almost overran positions occupied by Syrian forces was staged by the US and its Kurdish SDF allies along with a number of local Sunni tribes. As for the death of Russian General Valery Asapov who was struck dead during enemy shelling at his C2 post, it’s curious that the shot that murdered this high-profile Russian officer was made with such deadly precision. There’s no chance that one could land such a shot without access to satellite and air photos. It’s hardly a secret that the Islamic State (ISIS) has no access to this level of reconnaissance assets, but Washington does.

Featured image: Monarch butterfly photo by John Buse, Center for Biological Diversity.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today released controversial analyses that rely heavily on industry studies to conclude that glyphosate poses no significant risks to humans.

The EPA review, which ignored the agency’s own guidelines for assessing cancer risks, contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of published research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and most widely used pesticide in the world; 300 million pounds of it are used in the U.S. each year.

“The only way the EPA could conclude that glyphosate poses no significant risks to human health was to analyze industry studies and ignore its own guidelines when estimating cancer risk,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The EPA’s biased assessment falls short of the most basic standards of independent research and fails to give Americans an accurate picture of the risks posed by glyphosate use.”

A federal advisory panel of independent scientists unanimously found earlier this year that in assessing glyphosate the pesticides office at the EPA failed to follow its own guidelines for determining whether a chemical can cause cancer. In the final draft released today, the EPA stated that the guidelines “… are intended as a guidance only …” and do not necessarily have to be followed.

Scientists typically use previously agreed upon guidelines to prevent biases from swaying the analysis in one direction or another.

The chair of the EPA’s Cancer Assessment Review Committee, Jess Rowland, resigned in 2015 amid controversy. Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto by cancer victims and their families uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the EPA and Monsanto on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.

In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, Rowland assured Monsanto officials he would work to thwart the review, saying,

“If I can kill this, I should get a medal.”

The Health and Human Services review was never conducted.

In addition to evaluating the risks of glyphosate to human health, the EPA also analyzed risks to plants and animals and found that serious harms could result from using glyphosate, including that exposure from spray drift could harm the growth and reproduction of birds and mammals. It also found that exposure to small mammals exceeded by 10-fold the agency’s level of concern, the exposure level known to cause harm.

In its analysis of harms to plants and animals, the EPA’s assessment included only four paragraphs on harms to the imperiled monarch butterfly. But it concluded that field buffers up to 600 feet would be needed to prevent harm to milkweed, the sole host plant for monarch caterpillars.

Migratory monarch populations have declined by 80 percent in the past two decades, and their decline has been driven in large part by the surge in glyphosate use resulting from the widespread planting of corn and soybeans crops genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate. Glyphosate is a potent killer of milkweed. The dramatic surge in the glyphosate use has virtually wiped out milkweed plants in the Midwest’s corn and soybean fields.

There are currently no field buffers in place to protect milkweed and monarchs from glyphosate.

It seems that the recent developments in Europe, and in particular the rising secessionism (Catalonia, Flandreau, Corsica, Veneto, Scotland), rings a bell, or rather is reminiscent of certain events. The ensuing ones are shedding more light on the roles of the EU (EEC), the USA, Great Britain and Germany. One wonders to what extent those democracies have been guided by the principles of international law and democracy pertaining to the Kosovo crisis.

How much did they appreciate the reports of their (expensive) missions in Kosovo and Metohija (КDОМ, КVМ, ЕCMM) depicting the realities on the ground?

To what extent have they been defending the right to self-determination and human rights and to what extent using separatism for expansion of their geopolitical interests?

As strategies are slow to evolve, recollections of the past may help better understanding of the interests and roles of the USA, Germany, NATO, EU and other geopolitical players in the ongoing Kosovo negotiations in Brussels paired with Serbia’s accession to the EU.

Over a longer period of time, the leading members of both, NATO and the EU, have been supporting the terrorist KLA[1] by political, financial and logistic means. This was particularly visible in 1998. In June that year USA abandoned previous position that KLA was terrorist organization and proclaimed it as liberation force[2]. OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) with personnel of about 1.300[3], from October 1998 to March 1999 was just an imposed and imported umbrella for preparation of the ensuing military aggression. This period was particularly exploited for recuperation and equipping KLA with modern NATO equipment. Subsequently, NATO treated KLA as its ground force in launching military aggression against Serbia (FRY), country which in no way was threatening any other country or organization.

The aggression in clear breach of the UN Charter, without even trying to get consent of the UN Security Council, was a turning point in the world relations towards globalization of the interventionism without authorization of UN SC. To sum it up, the countries and integrations whose highest representatives swear that they have always been upholding the principles and rule-based policies, back in 1999 had provoked the strongest blow to the global legal order and to the United Nations since the end of World War II.

The policies pursued by governments of those countries and by integrations thereof during the Yugoslav and the Kosovo crises have provoked the spread of secession movements, expansion of Islamic extremism and terrorism. Double standards policy toward separatism and terrorism backfire today in Europe and beyond.

By violating the basic principles enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act, in the UN Charter and in international conventions and treaties, NATO and EU member countries have induced a lasting instability in the Balkans as the most vulnerable part of Europe. Siding with the extremist, terrorist and criminals of KLA, in one hand, and condemning, satanizing and even bombing Serbia, in other hand,  had been anything but token of democratic, humanistic, law based, anti extremist or anti terrorist policy. Such EU and NATO key members’ policy ought to be invoked today if we have a will and courage to explain at least some causes of the current spread of extremism, terrorism, organized crimes and separatism in Europe and beyond. If we are ready to face extremists and terrorist in proper way.

Presently, USA, Germany and Great Britain are exerting pressure against Serbia, the one they have been demolishing, deceiving and humiliating by recognizing the forcible capture of her state territory in the form of an engineered unilateral and illegal secession of Kosovo, and requesting that Serbia erases it all from track-record and forgets it all “for the sake of her European future”! What kind of future could it possibly be built upon such foundations!?

The separatist and terrorist genie that the leading countries of NATO and the EU have unleashed from the battle in Kosovo and Metohija back in 1998/99 for the purpose of furthering the geopolitical goals of the USA, Germany and the UK keeps spreading over Europe, while the EU and NATO believe they would be able to push it back into the bottle clearing they names and revive their dented unity by scarifying once again (interests of) Serbia! The real tragedy for Europe is the reasoning that truth is only what the EU commissioners declare to be the truth! The dominance of such reasoning is preventing the genuine understanding of historical maelstrom that has engulfed the Old Continent!

“War on the FRY was waged to rectify an erroneous decision of General Eisenhower from the Second World War. Therefore, due to strategic reasons, the U.S. soldiers have to be stationed there.” This was the explanation given by American representatives at a NATO conference held in late April 2000 in Bratislava, noted by Willy Wimmer, former State Secretary in the German ministry of Defense, in his report to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder dated 2 May 2000.

The first point in this report is an explicit U.S. request that NATO members and candidate members recognize ‘independent state of Kosovo’ as soon as possible, whereas the tenth, last point, reads that ‘the right to self-determination takes precedence over all others”. Should one be surprised now by the present referendum on secession of Catalonia? Or, to save their faces, Europeans should continue to keep repeating USA false, shortsighted claim that “Kosovo is unique case”?

Wimmer’s report also notes the U.S. declared position at the Bratislava Conference was that the 1999 NATO attack on Yugoslavia without UN SC authorization is “a precedent to be invoked by anyone at any time, and which is going to be invoked”. This renders any allegations of a principled and rule-based policy utterly dubious: if the military aggression launched in violation of the UN Charter is declared to be a precedent then unilateral secession being direct result of such aggression can hardly be claimed “unique case”! Normally, if the logic and principles have any place in NATO&EU geo-policies!

 

Yugoslav anti-aircraft fire at night (Source: Darko Dozet / Wikimedia Commons)

In the eve of NATO 1999 aggression on Yugoslavia two major international missions had been actively engaged in the Province of Kosovo and Metohija. One under auspices of OSCE known as Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), headed by American diplomat William Walker and the other under the auspices of EEC (EU) known as European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM), headed by German diplomat and army officer Dietmar Hartwig. The author had opportunity to meet Mr. Hartwig in 2002 in Belgrade, on his request. This was about three years following the end of his EU assignment in Kosovo and Metohija. He demanded consultations on his intention to be witness in ICTY process against former President Slobodan Milosevic. In the prolonged talks during his stay in Belgrade, Mr. Hartwig stated several times that during his assignment in Kosovo and Metohija before the NATO attack his KVM counterpart ambassador Walker surprised him by his harsh, highly provocative behavior and aggressive instructions to his subordinates. “You should all know that there is no such thing as high cost to deploy NATO in Kosovo. Any cost is acceptable” – was one of apparently Walker’s typical instruction to his subordinates before the aggression started on March 24rth, 1999, according to Hartwig.

NATO aggression – illegitimate act

After Kosovo Albanian leadership declared unilateral illegal secession in 2006, Dietmar Hartwig in 2007 sent four letters to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her that Germany should not recognize such unilateral illegal act. In his letter of October 26, 2007 Hartwig says:

“Not a single report (of ЕCMM) submitted from late November 1998 up to the evacuation (of ЕCMM, KVM) just before the war broke out (March 24rth, 1999), contains any account of Serbs having committed any major or systematic crimes against Albanians, and not a single report refers to any genocide or similar crimes… Quite the contrary, my (ECMM) reports have repeatedly communicated that, considering the increasingly more frequent KLA attacks against the Serbian executive authorities, their law enforcement kept demonstrating remarkable restraint and discipline. This was a clear and persistently reiterated goal of the Serbian administration – to abide to the Milošević-Holbrooke Agreement (of October 13, 1998) to the letter so not to provide any excuse to the international community for an intervention. In the phase of taking over the Regional Office in Priština, colleagues from various other missions – KDOM, U.S., British, Russian, etc. – confirmed that there were huge ‘discrepancies in perception’ between what said missions (and, to a certain degree, embassies as well) have been reporting to their respective governments and what the latter thereafter chose to release to the media and the public of their respective countries. This discrepancy could, ultimately, only be understood as an input to general preparations for war against Kosovo/Yugoslavia. The fact is that, until the time of my departure from Kosovo, there has never happened anything of what have been relentlessly claimed by the media and, with no less intensity, the politics, too. Accordingly, until 20 March (1999) there was no reason for military intervention, which renders illegitimate any measures undertaken thereafter by the international community.”

“Kosovo place of restlessness”

“The collective behavior of the EU Member States prior to, and after the war broke out, certainly gives rise to a serious concern, because the truth was lacking, and the credibility of the international community was damaged. However, the matter of my concern is exclusively the role of the FR of Germany and its role in this war and its political objective to separate Kosovo from Serbia…”

“The daily political news reporting over the previous months (before October 2007) made it progressively more evident that Germany not only supports the American desire to see Kosovo independent, but also actively engages on its own in dividing the Serbs…You are to be considered responsible for this. The same goes for your foreign minister, in particular, who knows perfectly well what is going on in Kosovo, and is presently pursuing your political directives by tirelessly advocating Kosovo’s independence and, thus, its secession from Serbia. Instruct him, rather, to promote a durable solution for the Kosovo issue which is in line with the international law… It is only if all states choose to observe the applicable rights, we can have the foundations for the common life of all nations. Should Kosovo become independent, it will be perpetuated as the place of restlessness… Contribute to achieving the solution for Kosovo on the basis of the endorsed UNSC Resolution 1244 pursuant to which Kosovo remains a province of Serbia. American wishes and active efforts to see Kosovo secede from Serbia and see Kosovo and Kosovo Albanians achieve full independence, are contrary to the international law, politically deprecated and, on top of all, irresponsibly expensive…”

Others to claim “Kosovo solution”

“Kosovo’s secession from Serbia guided by ethnic criterion would constitute a dangerous precedent and a signal for other ethnic communities in other countries, including in EU Member States, who could rightfully request the ‘Kosovo solution’” – says Dietmar Hartwig in concluding his letter to Chancellor Merkel.

Enough said about the ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the concerns for the protection of rights of the Albanian population as the features of the “uniqueness of the Kosovo case”. American Military base “Bondsteel” in the vicinity of the town of Uroševac, surely by a pure chance, happens to be among the largest U.S. military bases outside the USA! Perhaps their anxiety over being potentially spied on from the Serbian-Russian Humanitarian Center in the City of Niš uncovers awareness that “Bondsteel”  is illegally built there?!

Aerial photo of Camp Bondsteel, KFOR, Task Force Falcon Public Affairs Office (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

It was the U.S.A, the EU and NATO, not Serbia, who froze the conflict following the armed aggression of 1999. They and kept it frozen for the past 18 years by not allowing complete implementation of UN SC resolution 1244. They pressed Serbia to fulfill all its commitments insisting on the legally obliging character of the resolution while exempting them and the Albanians from any obligation therein. They realized that full implementation of UNSCR 1244 means preservation of sovereignty and integrity of Serbia, values which do not suit their geopolitical objective of expanding to the East (Russia) and South-East (Mediterranean).

At present the West, primarily Germany, insist that Serbia ‘unfreezes’ Kosovo “independence process”. How? By compelling Serbia to sign a ‘legally binding agreement’ with Pristine, to recognize a illegal unilateral secession, legalize illegal 1999 aggression, permanently accept over 250.000 dislocated Serbs and other non-Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija and essentially assume responsibility for all what has happened or may happen in the future!

The German case

French General Pierre Marie Galois, close assistant to the late French President General De Gaulle, is very interesting and reliable witness of the Germany’s politics toward Yugoslavia, particularly toward Serbia and Serbs. In his address to the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals on occasion of the 10^th anniversary of NATO aggression he recalls that “dismantling of Yugoslavia was an operation that had been planned in Germany for a long time. They were not just waiting for the death of President Tito in 1980, but were preparing succession and profiting from his departure by reorganizing this territory[4].” To explain and support this assessment, General Galois considers three key motives behind such German geopolitics:

First, “there was obvious (Germany’s, aut.) desire to exert revenge on the Serbs who twice, from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945 joined with allies against Germany”…“Second, Germans wanted to reward the Croats and the Bosnian Moslems who had joined Nazi Germany”…Third, they wanted Slovenia and Croatia in the sphere of Germany’s interests (EEC) as well as access to the Mediterranean via Adriatic.

Historians will certainly judge objectively the validity of General Galois’ arguments, but it is beyond any doubt that he was exceptionally capable and highly respected military and political strategist in the post WWII France, with access to very important sources of information. Also, his assessment does not contradict other available information. Let it be noted, for instance, that in the eve of civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of 90-ies of the last Century thousands of tones of military hardware from former GDR was illegally exported from Germany to Croatia arming its paramilitary forces. In addition, Germany was the first country to recognize unilateral secessions of Slovenia and Croatia. It was done December 23^rd, 1991 by Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher who disregarded call of UN SG Perez de Cuellar who urged Germany to wait for recognition to be part of the peace plan. The rest of the 12 EEC members followed Genscher’s step.

In the period of 90-es of the last Century Germany was the source of financing separatists and terrorists in Kosovo and Metohija (KLA). So called “Kosovo government in exile” headed by Bujar Bukosi had an office and network of collecting funds in Germany and other West European countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Italy) for recruiting, training and arming the terrorists. In various occasions and on various diplomatic levels this problem was presented to German authorities in order that they stop anti Serbian (FRY) activities from their territory and comply with the diplomatic rules, national and international laws, including specific decisions of the UN Security council. Unfortunately, these interventions had no effects.

On December 9-10^th, 1997,the  Council of the Peace Implementation in Bosnia and Herzegovina was convened in Bon (Dayton-Paris Peace Agreement). The Yugoslav Delegation, headed by Political Director of the Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Dragomir Vucicevic was well prepared for participation, particularly having regard that FR of Yugoslavia was one of the guarantors of the Dayton-Paris Peace Agreement. However, German Minister for Foreign Affairs Claus Kinkel, after opening the Conference, insisted that the agenda of the Conference be expanded to include consideration of the issue of Kosovo and Metohija which had no relevance to the Dayton-Paris Peace Agreement. Kinkel’s method of fait-a-complie, naturally, was unacceptable from the point of the framework of the Conference, practice applied at the preceding conferences and principle of transparent preparations. In addition, Serbia (FRY) had maintained position that Kosovo and Metohija is an issue of internal nature which will be resolved by political methods respecting territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia (FRY). Therefore Yugoslav Delegation abandoned Bon Conference.

Unitarization of Bosnia and fragmentation of Serbia

Interestingly, Bon’s final document is one of the most extensive of all Council’s documents and so called “Bon’s Full Powers” made the High Representative the ultimate legislative and executive authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina – above the Parliamentary Assembly, Presidency, governments. So called Bon’s 1997 principles made the whole Dayton-Paris system deformed, non-functional, non-delivering, and so up today. If there is a single or key cause for Bosnia and Herzegovina being dysfunctional and unstable today, than it is Bon’s “Full Powers” originating from Germany’s Foreign Ministry and its geopolitics. Using and abusing Bon’s “Full Powers” the High Representative had been imposing laws systematically curbing authority of the entities and transferring the power to Sarajevo thus reopening process of centralization and unitarization, destabilizing political system as laid down in Dayton. This process has been particularly directed to deprive the powers of Serbian entity Republica Srpska entrusted to it by Deyton-Paris Peace Agreement.

Aforesaid, perhaps, would not be of much use if today we wouldn’t be faced with similar German geopolitics and demands. Serbia, naturally, does not recognize illegal unilateral secession of its Province. Under UNSCR 1244 and under current Constitution Kosovo and Metohija makes integral part of sovereign Serbian state territory. Nevertheless, Germany insists that Serbia signs “legally binding document on normalization and good neighborliness” with Kosovo! In fact, such “legally binding” document would equal recognition of the illegal secession. This would also mean that Serbia will not object Kosovo’s membership to the UN, UNESCO, OSCE, CE and other international organizations. Finally, by signing such a document, Serbia would “a posteriori” grant amnesty to NATO for its 1999 military aggression, i.e. for all human victims, enormous destruction and war damages. Interestingly, German diplomats have already prepared the draft of such an agreement which most likely will be presented in the way “take it or leave”. Perhaps, the authors of the draft agreement are the same who in 1997 drafted Bon’s “full powers” for High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina? The same ones who initiated Kosovo and Metohija to be part of Agenda of the Bon’s Peace Implementation Council’s meeting convened to consider implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina, in December 1997?

Objective – to bind Serbia only

UNSCR 1244 (1999) is legally binding document of the highest rank in the hierarchy of international public law. It provides guaranty for sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia as well as substantial autonomy for the Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia. Serbia has long ago fulfilled all her obligations from this legally binding document. The others, including UNMIK, KFOR and particularly Kosovo Albanian leaders have not. For example, about 250.000 of displaced Serbs and other non-Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija 18 years after have no possibility as yet to freely and safely return to their homes and lands in the Province! Why? Many Serbs, including school children, harvesters, bus passengers and others have been abducted, or killed in the period since the Province got under the UN mandate. Nobody has been found guilty. Why?

In the Brussels negotiations process under EU auspices in the last several years a number of agreements have been reached. Again, Serbia has fully complied with all its obligations, the others have not.

So, even if Serbia would sign any new legally binding document which what in the opinion of the author Serbia should not do, it would bind only Serbia, not anybody else. All who supposedly would offer guaranty that this time it would be different have lost their credibility long ago, EU including.

Accepting legally binding agreement with Kosovo Serbia would be permitted to come to the door step of EU by 2025. Mere signature would not be enough for EU membership. Full implementation is required before. What happens if Serbia signs such an agreement and EU, or any of 27 member countries come with new demands and preconditions which Serbia would not be able to fulfill? Let us not be mistaken – the history of Serbia’s relations with EU and with a number of neighboring countries abound such examples. Who is enough credible to guaranty to Serbia that this is excluded? Is it possible that Serbia delivers everything that she is required now and finally gets nothing?

Kosovo and Metohija, birthplace of Serbian state, culture, religion, and identity should not be considered commodity to exchange for EU membership.                                    

German diplomacy evokes “Germany’s case” wherein both, West and East Germany (GDR) had been UN members while not formally recognizing each other. This reference is meant to be only face saving for the government in Belgrade, which keeps giving in substantial concessions and at the same time declaring it will never recognize Kosovo as sovereign state. It is, however, quite clear that there are no similarities to compare between FR Germany and GDR, in one hand, and Serbia and Kosovo, on the other.

On April 12, 2007, German ambassador to Serbia Andreas Coble at the European Forum’s conference in Belgrade stated that “if Serbian Government continues to insist that Kosovo is integral part of Serbia, it is possible that the question of Vojvodina[5] may be opened. Hungary might insist on Vojvodina. And not only that. There would be possibility for opening of the question of Sandzak (Raska)”[6]. Could really such elaborated statement be just of personal invention of visionary, well-intended diplomat, or perhaps he has learned about those “possibilities” in the course of preparations for his Belgrade ambassadorial post?

His successor Ambassador Andreas Mass in December 2011 gave astonishing public advice to Serbian nation to teach their children to love NATO because NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 for good of Serbia. Mass did not comment 4000 Serbian citizens killed by NATO, including by German bombers, killing children, train passengers, hospital patients. He did not mention use of missiles with depleted uranium, destroyed schools, hospitals, monuments. Nevertheless he was certain that Serbia will be member of NATO anyway.

“The question is not whether but when Serbia will become NATO member” – said Mass.

Present German ambassador Aksel Ditman in the interview to the Belgrade weekly “NIN” on November 11^th, 2017, stated that Germany supports membership of unilaterally conceded Kosovo to the UN and other international organizations. In fact, Ambassador does not even pretend to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the receiving country which is all but diplomatic.

It is long time since Dietrich Genscher and Claus Kinkel were ministers of foreign affairs of Germany. But the same “good geopolitics” concerning the Balkans and especially Serbs and Serbia, remain firmly implanted in Berlin.

Notes

[1] Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of FR of Yugoslavia 1998-2000. Chairman of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals

[2] Head of EU  (EEC) Monitoring Mission in Kosovo and Metohija (ECMM) from 1998 until March 20^th, 1999

[3] Kosovo Liberation Army

[4] Special USA representative Richard Holbrook met KLA commanders June 20^th, 1998, in Junik, Kosovo and Metohija, Serbia

[5] Of 2000 planned

[6] Message au People Serbe, Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, p. 36, Belgrade 2009

[7] Another Autonomous Province of Serbia partially populated by members of Hungarian national minority

[8] Populated by Moslems (Bosniaks) ethnic community

Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto was speaking at an OSCE meeting in Vienna last week when he requested that the organization send a special monitoring mission to Ukraine’s western region of Transcarpathia, arguing that anti-Hungarian demonstrations there have made it necessary for the international community to keep an eye on the situation. He also made it clear that Budapest interprets Kiev’s new language law as being discriminatory against the Hungarian minority in the area. His government probably won’t be successful in getting Ukraine to overturn its ultra-nationalist legislation, nor in lobbying the OSCE to preemptively dispatch a special monitoring mission to Transcarpathia before the situation worsens, but his comments importantly drew attention to these two interconnected issues and confirmed that Hungary won’t be supporting Ukraine’s pro-Western institutional aspirations anytime soon until these problems are settled.

In fact, Szijjarto’s statement suggests that the international situation between the two neighboring states might even deteriorate further. Observers should keep in mind that Hungary has a policy of supporting ethnic Hungarians in what could be referred to as the country’s own “near abroad” via the dispensation of passports and socio-economic developmental assistance. Budapest’s view is that over 3 million of its compatriots were unfairly left outside of their homeland following the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that formally dismantled the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, as Hungary was officially referred to when it was joined with Austria in the Dual Monarchy. It was only in recent years under Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government that the state became confident enough with its soft power and economic sway to make serious efforts at informally reintegrating these people into the broader context of Hungarian society.

As it relates to Ukraine, approximately 12% of Transcarpathia’s population is ethnic Hungarian, with these roughly 150,000 people living very close to the border with their eponymous state and having been part of its civilization for over a millennium. Apart from the emotional-historic significance that that their welfare holds for Budapest, Hungary’s increasing concern about their rights and safety symbolizes the emergence of a so-called “Western Front” to complement the “Eastern” one that Russia has opened up on the other side of the country in reuniting with Crimea and extending political-moral support to the Donbass rebels. From Kiev’s perspective, its peripheral populations pose troubles for national unity, though this is entirely a problem of its leaders’ own ultra-nationalist making in threatening them, taking away their existing rights, and forcing them to partake in “Ukrainization”.

It’s easy for the West to spin Russia’s support of its own compatriots as a new form of “imperialism”, but it’s comparatively harder for them to do so when it comes to fellow EU- and NATO-member Hungary, which is why the US has allied with Soros against Orban in trying to smear him as an “illiberal dictator”. The US fears that Budapest’s humanitarian interests in Transcarpathia could “destabilize” fragile Ukraine, ignoring the very fact that it’s because of Kiev itself that there are even problems in this corner of the country, and they know if they don’t stop Hungary soon enough, then it’s only a matter of time before Orban’s “Three Seas” partners in Romania and Poland feel comfortable enough to follow suit in raising the issue of their own respective minorities’ rights & security and turn the so-called “Western Front” into a force to be reckoned with.

Map of the Ukrainian Transcarpathia (Source: Oriental Review)

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN:

 

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 Hungary Today.

God is on the Side of Us Americans. “He May Guide Us to Use It [Nuclear Weapons] In His Ways and for His Purposes”: Truman

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 27, 2017

“In a Nuclear War the Collateral Damage would be the Life of All Humanity”. Conversations with Fidel Castro: Hiroshima and the Dangers of a Nuclear War

By Fidel Castro Ruz and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 03, 2017

The Strategies of Global Warfare: War with China and Russia? Washington’s Military Design in the Asia-Pacific

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 07, 2017

By Michael Welch, Prof Michel Chossudovsky, and Carla Stea, December 16, 2017

Towards a World War III Scenario? The Role of Israel in Triggering an Attack on Iran?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 09, 2017

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

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 27, 2017

America had first Contemplated Nuclear War against both China and North Korea in 1950

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 16, 2017

Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 12, 2017

North Korea versus the United States: Who are the Demons? North Korea Lost 30% of Its Population as a Result of US Bombings in the 1950s

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 25, 2017

Fukushima: Nuclear War without a War

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 16, 2017

Pesticide suicide refers to toxic chemicals mucking up the health of animals, plants and insects. This worldwide causatum may be totally out of control or maybe not; nobody knows for sure. Therein lies the scary part.

However, what is known is not encouraging:

“Industrial toxins are now routinely found in new-born babies, in mother’s milk, in the food chain, in domestic drinking water worldwide… Humans emit more than 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances a year, in a toxic avalanche that is harming people and life everywhere on the planet.” (Source: Scientist Categorize Earth as a Toxic Planet, Phys Org, February 7th 2017)

For obvious reasons, it is not at all comforting to hear Earth referred to as a “toxic planet.” Indeed, it would be insulting, if not true.

In that regard, there may be connecting dots around “toxic planet.” A huge increase in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases has been reported in the United States over the last 20 years during the same time frame as pesticide/chemical usage has become ubiquitous. (Journal of Organic Systems)

At the beginning of the 20th century infectious diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia, and diarrheal disease were the leading causes of death. By the 21st century mortality by infectious diseases was replaced by chronic illnesses like heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Regrettably, there is a pronounced trend in America. A Rand Corporation study states that 60% of Americans have one and 40% have multiple chronic conditions. (Source: Incidence and Prevalence of Chronic Disease, Autoimmunity Research Foundation)

Sixty percent (60%) of Americans with a chronic condition is almost impossible to grasp because it’s a mind-boggling statistic. How is this possible? And, why so many?

Whether pesticide suicide (inclusive of all chemicals) is reality is not known 100% certain. But, the indicators aren’t hopeful. The rate of growth of chronic problems increasingly suggests serious problems exist within ecosystems, border-to-border from Maine-to-California and Canada-to-Mexico. Of course, given enough time, truth is revealed via ecosystem breakdowns (already starting) and/or advancing cases of autism, gastrointestinal issues such as inflammatory bowel disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis, Crohn’s disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression, cancer, cachexia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and ALS, or none of above, which would, in part, be indicative of no ecosystem toxicity.

Further to the point, Jennifer Hsaio’s article, “GMOs and Pesticides: Helpful or Harmful,” Harvard University, August 19, 2015: “According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the health effects of pesticides are not well understood, but their use has been associated with conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and neurological effects.”

Once again, the phrase “pesticides are not well understood.” Yet sprayed coast-to-coast to kill things. “Health effects of pesticides not well understood,” prompts a logical response: Is society totally delusional, deranged, crazed? Answer: Yes, it probably is! How can a well-adjusted society permit use of chemicals manufactured to kill things helter skelter throughout the countryside when… “Health effects of pesticides are not well understood?”

The following quote from Julian Cribb’s Surviving the 21st Century(Springer Int’l Publishing, Switzerland 2017) likely tells the story:

“The evidence that we ourselves— along with our descendants, potentially for the rest of history— are at risk from the toxic flood we have unleashed is piling up in literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific research reports. Despite this mass of evidence, the public in most countries is only dimly aware, or even largely unaware of what is being done to them. The reason is twofold: First, most of these reports are buried in scientific journals, written in the arcane and inaccessible language used by specialists. The public may hear a little about certain chemical categories of concern, like pesticides and food additives, or the ‘dirty dozen’ (Stockholm C0nvention 2013) industrial super-poisons, or ‘air pollution’ in general. However, these represent only a scant few pixels in a much larger image now amassing in the scientific literature of tens of thousands of potentially harmful substances which are disseminating worldwide. Second, the proportion of chemicals which have been well-tested for human safety is quite small…” (Page 108)

In short, humanity is poisoning itself with a massive flood of chemicals all across the world, dripping wet with toxicity, and shockingly, nobody is really sure of the impact! Yet, there are dizzying numbers of academic research papers, literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific research that discuss the issue. Duh!

Still, by all appearances, in the public domain, absolutely nobody knows for sure what’s going on, which is a national tragedy, as well as a facsimile of the “unknown” world at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, chemicals may be more ubiquitous worldwide than Fukushima Daiichi, who knows for sure? Could be a tie.

One of the chemicals that is most newsworthy, most discussed, and most entangled in controversy is glyphosate, which is one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. for agriculture, forestry, lawns, gardens, and industrial weed areas. In fact, since 1974, glyphosate usage has increased by leaps and bounds. Two-thirds of the total volume applied from 1974 to 2014 has been sprayed in the past 10 years alone. Glyphosate agricultural usage in the U.S. in 1974 was 1400 (1000 lb) growing to 249,906 (1000 lb) by 2014.

“Genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops now account for about 56% of global glyphosate use. In the U.S., no pesticide has come remotely close to such intensive and widespread use. This is likely the case globally, but published global pesticide use data are sparse. Glyphosate will likely remain the most widely applied pesticide worldwide for years to come, and interest will grow in quantifying ecological and human health impacts. Accurate, accessible time-series data on glyphosate use will accelerate research progress.” (Source: Charles M Benbrook, Trends in Glyphosate Herbicide Use in the United States and Globally, Environmental Sciences Europe, 28:3 January 2016)

Monsanto sold the first commercial glyphosate product in the U.S. in 1974. The brand name is Roundup. Subsequently, many crops have been genetically engineered to be herbicide-tolerant or GE-HT. But, does GE-HT herbicide-tolerance really work?

It was only a few weeks ago that the EU granted glyphosate a new five-year lease throughout Europe, closing one of the most bitterly fought pesticide relicensing battles ever, as 1.3 million EU citizens endorsed a petition to ban the product.

“But the enzyme-blocking chemical has also become a mainstay of modern agricultural techniques that farmer’s unions see as environmentally friendly, even as critics condemn it as a ‘pesticide treadmill’ of danger to plants, animals, and people.” (Source: Arthur Neslen, Controversial Glyphosate Weedkiller Wins New Five-Year Lease in Europe, The Guardian, Nov. 27, 2017) Are farmer’s unions correct or are 1.3 million petitioners correct?

Still, there may be serious problems with GE-HT: According to the following article: Genetically Engineered Crops, Glyphosate and the Deterioration of Health in the United States of America, Journal of Organic Systems, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2014:

“A huge increase in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases has been reported in the United States (US) over the last 20 years. Similar increases have been seen globally. The herbicide glyphosate was introduced in 1974 and its use is accelerating with the advent of herbicide-tolerant genetically engineered (GE) crops. Evidence is mounting that glyphosate interferes with many metabolic processes in plants and animals and glyphosate residues have been detected in both. Glyphosate disrupts the endocrine system and the balance of gut bacteria, it damages DNA and is a driver of mutations that lead to cancer.”

“The World Health Organization recently announced that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen… Although studies have shown conflicting conclusions about the link between glyphosate and cancer in humans, glyphosate has been linked to cancer in rats and mice and experiments in human cells have shown that exposure to glyphosate can cause DNA damage,” Ibid.

GE crops are typically far more contaminated with glyphosate than conventional crops, courtesy of the fact that they’re engineered to withstand extremely high levels of Roundup without perishing along with the weed.

“Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup is harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals,” (Source: Monsanto’s Roundup Herbicide May Be Most Important Factor in Development of Autism and Other Chronic Disease, Mercola, June 9, 2013)

According to The Institute of Responsible Technology d/d May 10, 2013:

“It was ‘supposed’ to be harmless to humans and animals—the perfect weed killer. Now a groundbreaking article just published in the journal Entropy points to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, and more specifically its active ingredient glyphosate, as devastating—possibly ‘the most important factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become prevalent in Westernized societies. That’s right. The herbicide sprayed on most of the world’s genetically engineered crops—and which gets soaked into the food portion—is now linked to autism … gastrointestinal issues such as inflammatory bowel disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis and Crohn’s disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression, cancer, cachexia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and ALS, among others.”

Prompting the logical question: What chronic health-related problems are not listed?

For more details about pesticide issues as discovered by The Institute of Responsible Technology, Jeffrey Smith interviewed Stephanie Seneff, PhD, Senior Research Scientist at MIT. Dr. Seneff has been involved in research at MIT for over three decades. A video by The Institute of Responsible Technology follows:

According to Dr. Seneff: Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup is harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals. The bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. For every cell in your body, you have 10 microbes of various kinds, and all of them have the shikimate pathway, so they will all respond to the presence of glyphosate!

Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the microbe’s function and lifecycle and glyphosate preferentially affects beneficial bacteria, allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over. At that point, your body also has to contend with the toxins produced by the pathogens. Once the chronic inflammation sets in, you’re well on your way toward chronic and potentially debilitating disease.

According to The Detox Project: Anresco Laboratories has found glyphosate in a range of U.S. food products, and the chemical also tested positive in urine, conducted by the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), using validated LC-MS/MS method.

Here’s the problem, as stated by The Detox Project: “The cultivation of Roundup Ready GMOs has considerably increased food contamination by glyphosate. Roundup Ready plants do not degrade glyphosate but tolerate it, so they accumulate Roundup residues during their growth. As a consequence, glyphosate has among the highest maximum residue limits for pesticides with up to 500,000 parts per billion authorized in some GM feed. A recent study on 10 batches of GM soybeans from Iowa found glyphosate at an average concentration of 11,900 ppb (maximum of 20,100 ppb). According to Monsanto, residues levels of up to 5,600 ppb in GM soy represent ‘extreme levels.”

In the main, this article has dealt with one chemical, i.e., glyphosate, at the expense of further investigation of the entire complex of chemicals. That’s an encyclopedic task over decades just to get to the bottom of whether pesticide suicide is truly a reality. Therein lies the horrifying, frightening aspect of a world ubiquitously covered with chemicals. By the time you know for sure, it’s late.

Meanwhile, a Rand Corporation study states that 60% of Americans have one and 40% have multiple chronic conditions: “Nearly 150 million Americans are living with at least one chronic condition; around 100 million of them have more than one. And nearly 30 million are living, day in and day out, with five chronic conditions or more. (Source: Chronic Conditions in America: Price and Prevalence, Rand Review, July 2017)

A colossal crisis? Answer: Without doubt, yes!

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from jetsandzeppelins | CC BY 2.0.

You might as well imagine a large red flag fluttering from the summit of Mount Everest. That’s what the outcome of the parliamentary and provincial elections in Nepal suggests. The Communists have won both decisively. In the parliament, the Communist alliance will hold close to a two-thirds majority. The government that this majority forms will not only be able to last the full five year term – the first time this would have happened since Nepal adopted parliamentary democracy in 1990 – but it will be able to revise the 2015 Constitution.

Both the parliamentary and provincial results show that the Communists won across the country from the countryside to the cities. Even though they have a strong mandate to govern according to their agenda, the likely Prime Minister K. P. Oli said carefully,

“We have seen in the past that victory often tends to make parties arrogant. There is apprehension that the state will become oppressive. Winners tend to become indifferent to their responsibility.”

This is not something the Communist government will do, said Oli.

What allowed the Communists to win so conclusively? The incumbent, the Nepali Congress, was wracked by corruption scandals, infighting, and the lack of any vision for the country. In 2015-16, when the Indian government closed its border to landlocked Nepal, the Congress could not find the words to condemn India. The Communists, particularly Oli, did not hold back. Nationalist sensibility drained from the Congress toward the Communists. But further, the Congress came to the people for this election with an incoherent alliance, cobbling together a coalition that included the Madhesi parties and the monarchist parties – parties of minority populations and the king. There was no way that this haphazard alliance could appeal to the people.

The Communists, on the other hand, went to the people with a very simple slogan: “Prosperity Through Stability.” Since Nepal emerged from the monarchy in 1990, it has been racked by troubles. Failure to create a democratic process sent one section of the Communists to open up a decade-long armed insurgency that ran from 1996 to 2006. About 17,000 people died in this war, which ended with a new democratic process through a Constituent Assembly. The monarchy was abolished in 2008 and the Constituent Assembly drafted the Constitution of 2015. Nonetheless, there have been 10 prime ministers in the decade since the armed insurgency ended and there has been precious little in the way of social development for the people. It was time for something other than corruption and despondency.

Two of the main flanks of Nepali Communism – the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist – UML) – decided to go to the polls together and to pledge that they would form a newly united party after the elections. This second call – for the creation of a newly unified party – promised even more stability than the electoral alliance. It showed that the Communists – who had previously been at each other’s throats – could come together on a joint program. If they could hold that unity, then perhaps they would be able to deliver stable government for five years. This perhaps was most appealing about their campaign. It paid off at the ballot box.

Himalayan Communism

While Communism came to China and India in the 1920s, it missed Nepal, which is sandwiched between the two countries. Harsh repression by the monarchy prevented any progressive movements from taking root in the country. It was not till the 1940s that Communism made any impact inside Nepal. A brave strike by the workers of the Biratnagar jute and cloth mills in 1947 drew in communist activists, such as Man Mohan Adhikari. Adhikari was exiled to India. He, along with Nepali students in India, worried that the Nepali elite – the Ranas – were ready to join with the imperialist powers to set up a military base in Nepal. This would draw Nepal into the orbit of the West and surrender its independence. These students and activists were influenced by the Communist Party of India. One of them, Pushpa Lal Shrestha, translated the Communist Manifesto into Nepali in 1949. Later that year in Calcutta (India), Pushpa Lal Shrestha, Adhikari and others founded the Communist Party of Nepal.

In the first decade of its existence, the Communist Party called for the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. It also called for the creation of a Constituent Assembly. Deep divides inside the party over the question of the monarchy and elections tore it apart. Splits were inevitable. Armed struggle came on the table at the Fourth Convention in 1965. The question of armed struggle divided the movement till 2006.

After 2006, armed struggle fell off the table. It had cost the country far too much. The bulk of the Nepali left, however, had not taken up the gun. It had built popular struggles against the monarchy, feudal authority and capitalist property relations. The United Left Front, which was formed in 1990 to fight for a democratic system in the Jan Andolan, was guided by what would become the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), one of the main pillars in the current Communist alliance. They were the backbone of the fight to restore democracy.

The other pillar of the current alliance is the Maoists, who have now accepted parliamentary democracy. It is these two parties that will likely merge in the new year into one of the most formidable political forces in Nepal.

The Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (also known as Prachanda) arrived in his constituency of Chitwan to celebrate the victory.

“Both the processes of government formation and party unity would move ahead simultaneously,” he said.

Prachanda – from the Maoists – will take over as leader of the party, while Oli – from the UML – will be the prime minister. The broad currents of Nepali communism, which emerged out of the formation of the party in 1949, will now come together.

Agenda

What will be the agenda of the new government? K. P. Oli, who will be prime minister of the Communist government, has said that he wants to put stability of the government at the front. But stability itself is not enough. Nepal suffers from great poverty and from great weakness in its infrastructure. Oli has said that he will welcome investment to build Nepal’s basic infrastructure, including a Chinese railroad from Tibet into Nepal. This is not a tilt toward China, as some suggest. It is more likely a carefully calibrated position by the Nepali communists to stand mid-point between India and China – the regional behemoths. Pragmatism is the name of the game, not fealty to China on ideological grounds.

All parties in Nepal – including the monarchists – want their country to graduate from the Least Developed Country status by 2022. What differentiates them is the path toward that goal. The Communist alliance pledges that per capita income will rise to the equivalent of $5,000 per year from a meager $862 per year at present. To raise the per capita income would require investment in education and health as well as to dramatically increase jobs for young people (currently two million out of 28 million Nepalis find work outside the country).

Where will the government raise resources for all this? An end to corruption will save the treasury a great deal of money. But more than that, more efficient use of tax money will provide the means for development. Fiscal federalism is a major part of the Left’s agenda. It hopes to devolve 50 per cent of the resources to provincial and municipal governments. It is hoped that they will better use the money toward local development. The bet is that a stable government will draw in money and tourists to Nepal – and that the money can be used to develop organic agriculture and clean energy (including hydropower) that will lighten the burden of importing energy.

Oli has asked all parties to join the Communist alliance in trying to raise the living standards of the Nepali people. This is clever politics. It would mean that the Communist agenda would become the national agenda. It would put pressure on the dominant classes and the dominant castes to accede to a policy of social development. That would be one small step forward for Nepal.

Vijay Prashad is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books and the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author of 25 books, the most recent ones being Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).

Featured image is from the author.

You might as well imagine a large red flag fluttering from the summit of Mount Everest. That’s what the outcome of the parliamentary and provincial elections in Nepal suggests. The Communists have won both decisively. In the parliament, the Communist alliance will hold close to a two-thirds majority. The government that this majority forms will not only be able to last the full five year term – the first time this would have happened since Nepal adopted parliamentary democracy in 1990 – but it will be able to revise the 2015 Constitution.

Both the parliamentary and provincial results show that the Communists won across the country from the countryside to the cities. Even though they have a strong mandate to govern according to their agenda, the likely Prime Minister K. P. Oli said carefully,

“We have seen in the past that victory often tends to make parties arrogant. There is apprehension that the state will become oppressive. Winners tend to become indifferent to their responsibility.”

This is not something the Communist government will do, said Oli.

What allowed the Communists to win so conclusively? The incumbent, the Nepali Congress, was wracked by corruption scandals, infighting, and the lack of any vision for the country. In 2015-16, when the Indian government closed its border to landlocked Nepal, the Congress could not find the words to condemn India. The Communists, particularly Oli, did not hold back. Nationalist sensibility drained from the Congress toward the Communists. But further, the Congress came to the people for this election with an incoherent alliance, cobbling together a coalition that included the Madhesi parties and the monarchist parties – parties of minority populations and the king. There was no way that this haphazard alliance could appeal to the people.

The Communists, on the other hand, went to the people with a very simple slogan: “Prosperity Through Stability.” Since Nepal emerged from the monarchy in 1990, it has been racked by troubles. Failure to create a democratic process sent one section of the Communists to open up a decade-long armed insurgency that ran from 1996 to 2006. About 17,000 people died in this war, which ended with a new democratic process through a Constituent Assembly. The monarchy was abolished in 2008 and the Constituent Assembly drafted the Constitution of 2015. Nonetheless, there have been 10 prime ministers in the decade since the armed insurgency ended and there has been precious little in the way of social development for the people. It was time for something other than corruption and despondency.

Two of the main flanks of Nepali Communism – the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist – UML) – decided to go to the polls together and to pledge that they would form a newly united party after the elections. This second call – for the creation of a newly unified party – promised even more stability than the electoral alliance. It showed that the Communists – who had previously been at each other’s throats – could come together on a joint program. If they could hold that unity, then perhaps they would be able to deliver stable government for five years. This perhaps was most appealing about their campaign. It paid off at the ballot box.

Himalayan Communism

While Communism came to China and India in the 1920s, it missed Nepal, which is sandwiched between the two countries. Harsh repression by the monarchy prevented any progressive movements from taking root in the country. It was not till the 1940s that Communism made any impact inside Nepal. A brave strike by the workers of the Biratnagar jute and cloth mills in 1947 drew in communist activists, such as Man Mohan Adhikari. Adhikari was exiled to India. He, along with Nepali students in India, worried that the Nepali elite – the Ranas – were ready to join with the imperialist powers to set up a military base in Nepal. This would draw Nepal into the orbit of the West and surrender its independence. These students and activists were influenced by the Communist Party of India. One of them, Pushpa Lal Shrestha, translated the Communist Manifesto into Nepali in 1949. Later that year in Calcutta (India), Pushpa Lal Shrestha, Adhikari and others founded the Communist Party of Nepal.

In the first decade of its existence, the Communist Party called for the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. It also called for the creation of a Constituent Assembly. Deep divides inside the party over the question of the monarchy and elections tore it apart. Splits were inevitable. Armed struggle came on the table at the Fourth Convention in 1965. The question of armed struggle divided the movement till 2006.

After 2006, armed struggle fell off the table. It had cost the country far too much. The bulk of the Nepali left, however, had not taken up the gun. It had built popular struggles against the monarchy, feudal authority and capitalist property relations. The United Left Front, which was formed in 1990 to fight for a democratic system in the Jan Andolan, was guided by what would become the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), one of the main pillars in the current Communist alliance. They were the backbone of the fight to restore democracy.

The other pillar of the current alliance is the Maoists, who have now accepted parliamentary democracy. It is these two parties that will likely merge in the new year into one of the most formidable political forces in Nepal.

The Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (also known as Prachanda) arrived in his constituency of Chitwan to celebrate the victory.

“Both the processes of government formation and party unity would move ahead simultaneously,” he said.

Prachanda – from the Maoists – will take over as leader of the party, while Oli – from the UML – will be the prime minister. The broad currents of Nepali communism, which emerged out of the formation of the party in 1949, will now come together.

Agenda

What will be the agenda of the new government? K. P. Oli, who will be prime minister of the Communist government, has said that he wants to put stability of the government at the front. But stability itself is not enough. Nepal suffers from great poverty and from great weakness in its infrastructure. Oli has said that he will welcome investment to build Nepal’s basic infrastructure, including a Chinese railroad from Tibet into Nepal. This is not a tilt toward China, as some suggest. It is more likely a carefully calibrated position by the Nepali communists to stand mid-point between India and China – the regional behemoths. Pragmatism is the name of the game, not fealty to China on ideological grounds.

All parties in Nepal – including the monarchists – want their country to graduate from the Least Developed Country status by 2022. What differentiates them is the path toward that goal. The Communist alliance pledges that per capita income will rise to the equivalent of $5,000 per year from a meager $862 per year at present. To raise the per capita income would require investment in education and health as well as to dramatically increase jobs for young people (currently two million out of 28 million Nepalis find work outside the country).

Where will the government raise resources for all this? An end to corruption will save the treasury a great deal of money. But more than that, more efficient use of tax money will provide the means for development. Fiscal federalism is a major part of the Left’s agenda. It hopes to devolve 50 per cent of the resources to provincial and municipal governments. It is hoped that they will better use the money toward local development. The bet is that a stable government will draw in money and tourists to Nepal – and that the money can be used to develop organic agriculture and clean energy (including hydropower) that will lighten the burden of importing energy.

Oli has asked all parties to join the Communist alliance in trying to raise the living standards of the Nepali people. This is clever politics. It would mean that the Communist agenda would become the national agenda. It would put pressure on the dominant classes and the dominant castes to accede to a policy of social development. That would be one small step forward for Nepal.

Vijay Prashad is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books and the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author of 25 books, the most recent ones being Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).

Featured image is from the author.

Featured image: Sebastian Kurz (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) agreed on a coalition deal and presented the government’s programme and ministers on Saturday. The government is to be sworn in today.

It will be the most right-wing government in Vienna since the Austro-fascist state under Kurt Schuschnigg, who governed Austria as a dictator from 1934 until the Anschluss with Hitler’s Germany in 1938. The FPÖ is a member of the “Europe of Nations and Freedom” group within the European parliament, which includes France’s Front National, the Dutch PVV of Geert Wilders, Italy’s Lega Nord and other right-wing extremist parties.

Sebastian Kurz, the incoming chancellor, will be Europe’s youngest head of government at the age of 31. Over the past year, he took power within the ÖVP in a coup and has dictated the party’s course ever since. During the election campaign, he imitated the FPÖ’s anti-refugee agitation and law-and-order slogans.

While Kurz and the head of the Chancellor’s Office, Gernot Blümel, filled the seven ÖVP ministries with lesser-known individuals, characterised above all by their loyalty to Kurz, the six FPÖ ministers control a number of key posts. As many newspapers pointed out, the FPÖ controls “all forces in uniform.” For the first time since 1945, one party holds the posts of interior minister, foreign minister and defence minister.

The deputy chancellor will be FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache. He has enjoyed a long career in various far-right groups. Because of his participation in military sports with people later convicted as right-wing extremists, a complaint was filed against him due to a suspicion of National Socialist activities. He was even arrested at a neo-Nazi event in Germany 30 years ago.

FPÖ General Secretary Herbert Kickl will be interior minister. The former speech writer for Jörg Haider became notorious for election slogans such as “Home not Islam” and “Western lands in Christian hands.” When the FPÖ split in 2005, he broke with Haider and joined the more right-wing faction under Strache. Last year, he participated in a conference of the so-called Defenders of Europe in Linz, which brought together New Right and right-wing extremist ideologists. Kickl recently complained about the “uncontrolled immigration from non-EU states as well as the totally ill-considered opening of the labour market for Eastern European states.”

Mario Kunasek will be minister of defence. The 41-year-old junior officer is a long-time leading figure within the FPÖ who maintains close ties to the neo-Nazi camp. He has been documented as having connections with the Identity Movement and the Party of the People, an openly fascist party with neo-Nazis prepared to commit violence. In January 2016, he called on his Facebook page for asylum seekers to be blocked from entering the country.

FPÖ politician Norbert Hofer, who lost the 2016 presidential election to the Green Alexander Van der Bellen, will be minister for infrastructure. Hofer, who likes to portray himself publicly as a moderate, joined a right-wing extremist student league at the age of 37 as an honorary member.

Karin Kneissl, who is a non-party figure but was nominated by the FPÖ, is to serve as foreign minister. She is known for her sharp criticism of the EU and support for the independence of Catalonia. Kneissl cut her teeth for the FPÖ at the height of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. Kneissl claimed that the refugees, most of whom had fled wars in Iraq and Syria, were largely economic refugees.

Justice Minister Josef Moser is also a former FPÖ member. The non-affiliated jurist ran in the election on the Sebastian Kurz List and was nominated by the ÖVP. Moser was recruited to the FPÖ in 1991 by Haider and led his office for a year. From 1992 to 2002, he was parliamentary group leader of the FPÖ. In 2004, he switched to the Austrian Administrative Court, where he repeatedly appeared in public to call for drastic budget cuts.

Source: Pacific Standard

The new government’s program corresponds to its personnel. A major military build-up at home and abroad, a wide-ranging crackdown on refugees, social attacks and tax cuts are the core pillars of the government’s programme, “Together. For our Austria.”

The police will be significantly strengthened; 2,100 officers and 2,000 trainee posts will be created. The powers of the police and intelligence agencies will be expanded. The surveillance of internet communications will be broadened substantially. The plans for a military build-up are formulated in extremely vague terms. Reference is made in this area to the “appropriate, legal, organisational and budgetary equipping of the army.” However, already in the grand coalition when he served as foreign minister, Kurz was an advocate of significantly expanding the army.

The government is planning major attacks on refugees and foreigners. It intends to introduce stricter controls on Islamic kindergartens and private schools, and have the option to shut them down as a last resort.

Asylum seekers will be forced to hand over all of their money when they make an application so that it can be used to cover the costs of the procedure. The authorities will be given access to asylum seekers’ mobile telephones so that officials can confirm travel routes and identities by means of personal information and social media accounts. Asylum seekers will only receive benefits in kind and no money. In addition, the government wants to reduce the time-frame for filing an appeal during an asylum procedure.

According to the government’s programme, doctors’ confidentiality obligation will be relaxed if the illness of an asylum seeker is “relevant to primary care.” Given that primary care also includes health insurance, this could have a wide-ranging meaning and serve as a pretext to abolish democratic rights.

The attacks on the weakest sections of society are only the prelude to a major offensive against the working population. Basic social welfare benefits are to be regulated at a uniform rate across the country and benefits for a couple in a relationship will be capped at €1,500. This will mean painful cuts for the needy.

Under the heading “More justice in the building of social housing,” the programme plans the regular “adjustment of rent interest” (i.e., rent increases) in social housing, on which many people in major cities, particularly Vienna, rely. The goal is the elimination of the building of social housing as a whole.

The grand coalition has attempted for more than 10 years to cut pensions. Kurz and Strache are now firmly determined to enforce this. To this end, existing pension privileges will be eliminated and the retirement age repeatedly increased.

In line with Germany’s Agenda 2010, the government will change the reasonable job regulations for the unemployed. This will result, for example, in skilled unemployed workers in Vienna being forced into the tourist industry in Tirol for low wages.

With flexibility of the labour time law, protections for employees will finally be broken. The confirmed expansion of the workday to 12 hours is a first step to this end. The reintroduction of student fees to strengthen government finances will once again turn studying into a privilege for the rich. Additional cost-cutting will follow, since a so-called debt brake is to be added to the constitution.

When in 2000 then ÖVP leader Wolfgang Schüssel formed the first government with the FPÖ, led at the time by Haider, mass protests occurred in Austria and sanctions were imposed in Europe. Demonstrations have once again been called in Vienna, but the EU did not utter a syllable of criticism, even though the Kurz-Strache government is much further to the right than the Schüssel-Haider government.

In a country where the ruling class resorted to dictatorship in the early 1930s and largely backed the Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938, the shadow of the past is once again present.

This development can only be understood if one examines the bankruptcy of the former workers’ parties and movements. Today, Social Democrats and trade unions, who formerly participated in protests, are just as right-wing as Kurz. The SPÖ declared its willingness to enter a coalition with the FPÖ, something that has already occurred at the state level. The trade unions are among the strongest advocates for cooperation with the FPÖ.

President Van der Bellen, whose victory over the FPÖ’s candidate Hofer was praised as a victory over right-wing extremism, did not impose any conditions on the formation of the new government, even though he had options to do so. He merely insisted that it declare its unrestricted loyalty to the European Union, which it subsequently did.

This was made all the easier because there are a number of right-wing governments in Europe. It is well known that Strache would like to make Austria the fifth member of the Visegrad group of states made up of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia, all of which are governed by nationalist, right-wing regimes. The FPÖ also concluded a treaty of friendship with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.

While Kurz and Strache appeared before the cameras in Vienna, Europe’s right-wing extremists met in nearby Prague. Both Geert Wilders and Marine le Pen were in attendance. They praised the FPÖ’s entry into the government as “historic.” Le Pen spoke of “tremendous news,” while Wilders declared it to be an “excellent result.”

On Sunday, President Donald Trump continued to deny suggestions that he is about to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller in an effort to shut down the Justice Department investigation into allegations of Russian government intervention in the 2016 elections and Trump campaign collusion with Moscow.

In response to shouted questions from the press as he returned from a weekend at Camp David, Trump said he had no plans to fire Mueller because there was “no collusion whatsoever” between his campaign and Russia, and therefore the Justice Department probe would inevitably exonerate him.

Top White House officials repeated these assurances in appearances on several Sunday television interview programs. Both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House legislative director Marc Short flatly denied that there was any discussion of firing Mueller, while both carefully noted that the president retained the power to do so at his discretion.

Mueller’s investigation has been the target of furious attacks for the past week by right-wing media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Breitbart Newsand Fox News, with increasingly strident denunciations and demands for Mueller’s ouster.

The tone was set by Jeannine Pirro, a former municipal judge who hosts a Fox News program. She demanded not merely the removal of Mueller, but the imprisonment of FBI officials for alleged political crimes against the president.

“The only thing that remains is whether we have the fortitude to not just fire these people immediately, but to take them out in cuffs,” she said during a Saturday night broadcast.

Another Fox News host, Jesse Watters, declared that

“we may now have proof the investigation was weaponized to destroy his presidency for partisan political purposes and to disenfranchise millions of American voters.” He concluded, “Now, if that’s true, we have a coup on our hands in America.”

Congressional Democrats fired back in a series of statements beginning Friday, when Representative Jackie Speier told a local television station in California,

“I believe that the president wants all of this shut down. He wants to shut down these investigations and he wants to fire special counsel Mueller.”

Speier said there was a widespread “rumor” that Trump might fire Mueller as soon as Congress begins its year-end recess this Friday, timing the action for the holiday period in order to minimize the legislative and popular response.

Democratic Party-linked groups were said to be preparing for nationwide protests against such an action—a revealing glimpse of the real priorities of the Democratic Party, which has organized no such protests against the Republican tax cut for the wealthy, the expiration of the CHIP health insurance program for poor children, or the impending mass roundups of young immigrants temporarily protected under the DACA program, which Trump has shut down.

Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned that House Republicans were preparing to shut down all inquiries into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election in tandem with a Trump firing of Mueller. He noted that the intelligence panel has not scheduled any witnesses for beyond this week.

Schiff pointed to the refusal of Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to answer a question about discussions with his father on how to handle press reports of a June 2016 meeting with a Russian delegation at Trump Tower. The younger Trump claimed attorney-client privilege, although neither he nor his father are attorneys.

The latest stage in the political warfare surrounding the Russia investigation has centered on two batches of emails. Last week, the FBI released emails exchanged between Peter Strzok, a top FBI counterintelligence official, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page in 2015 and 2016.

The two, then engaged in an extramarital affair, made disparaging comments about Trump (and Bernie Sanders) and indicated sympathy for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Strzok played a role in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server and then both he and Page worked for Mueller’s investigative team, until the emails came to light last summer and Strzok was transferred out (Page had previously left the probe).

The release of these emails became a cause célèbre with congressional Republicans and Fox News, which presented them as proof that the Mueller probe was “infected” with partisan political bias against Trump.

A second uproar was raised on Saturday when the attorney for the Trump transition organization, Trump for America, which conducted activities to prepare the incoming Trump administration between Election Day and the inauguration, sent a letter to four congressional committees Saturday charging that Mueller had improperly acquired tens of thousands of emails from the transition team.

The emails were retained by the General Services Administration, the government agency that provides infrastructure and communications services during a presidential transition. GSA officials turned the emails over wholesale to Mueller after his investigation sought access.

The letter from Kory Langhofer, the Trump for America attorney, makes a number of self-contradictory claims, calling the emails “private property” while at the same time asserting various forms of privilege that would only apply to communications within the executive branch, and which Trump administration officials have not themselves asserted in response to document requests from Mueller.

Langhofer’s claims were added to volleys fired at Mueller by the ultra-right media as evidence of “overreach” and “Gestapo tactics” by the special prosecutor. There is, of course, ample irony in pro-fascist media outlets like Breitbart complaining of such methods on the part of the government.

The entire furor may have been instigated by the White House as part of an effort to put maximum pressure on Mueller to rein in his investigation and bring it to a conclusion. Trump’s private lawyers and representatives of Mueller are to meet this week to discuss the further course of the investigation.

The most revealing aspect of the current fulminations, however, is the role of the Democratic Party, which entered into the Russia investigation in tandem with the military/intelligence agencies, which opposed suggestions by Trump of a softening of the hard line against Russia initiated by the Obama administration during its second term.

The private emails between the two high level FBI officials, Strzok and Page, confirms what has long been evident: that Clinton had the overwhelming support of senior officials in the military-intelligence apparatus, who regarded Trump as an unstable and potentially dangerous wielder of the powers of the commander-in-chief.

In response to the ultra-right hysteria over FBI political bias against Trump, congressional Democrats have embraced this notorious instrument of repression and political spying as a bastion of democracy. At a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee, where Republicans grilled Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein over the Strzok-Page emails, one Democrat after another jumped to the defense of the FBI.

The senior Democrat on the committee, Jerrold Nadler of New York, called the Republican attacks on the FBI “wildly dangerous” to American institutions. Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, said it was “sickening” to listen to Republicans smear the FBI.

Democrat Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued an email statement declaring,

“The men and women of the FBI are among the most professional and committed public servants in our nation,” adding that they “serve all of us.”

It is tempting to interpret the announcement this week of a delay until the new year in US vice-president Mike Pence’s visit to the Middle East as the ultimate travel warning. It follows an eruption of regional unrest over Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

During protests last Friday, Israeli occupation forces killed four Palestinians and injured more than 250.

US officials, however, are not worried about Pence’s safety. In fact, predictions of a third Palestinian uprising in response to Trump’s Jerusalem declaration may be premature.

After decades of flagrant US bias towards Israel, Trump has confirmed to Palestinians only what they already knew. Some even grudgingly welcomed his candour. They hope he has finally silenced US claims to being an “honest broker” in an interminable “peace process” that has simply bought time for Israel to entrench the occupation.

The Palestinians’ anger towards Israel and the US is a slow-burning fuse. It will detonate at a moment of their choosing, not of Trump’s.

Rather, the hesitation in Washington over the vice-president’s visit reflects the messy new diplomatic reality that the White House has unleashed.

Pence was due here to smooth the path to Trump’s long-promised peace plan and to highlight the plight of Christians in the Middle East. The door has now been firmly shut in his face on both counts. Palestinian officials have declared a boycott of him, as have Christian leaders in Palestine and Egypt.

Instead of cancelling Pence’s visit or exploiting the extra breathing space to try to reverse the damage, the bull-headed Trump administration has indicated it is eager to break more of the china.

Denied access to Palestinian officials, his schedule will focus on Israel. Following a diplomatic precedent set by his boss in May, Pence is due to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s occupied Old City and immediately below the Al Aqsa mosque plaza.

His visit, however, has been billed as “official”, not private. And it will be invested with far graver symbolism, given Trump’s designation of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

To add insult to injury, and in contravention of claims that Washington will not pre-determine the borders of a divided Jerusalem before peace talks, an unnamed senior US official gave Pence’s visit an even more troubling context. He noted that there was no scenario in which the US did not see the Western Wall ending up in Israel’s hands.

The US policy change on Jerusalem has been a hammer blow to the three main pillars supporting the cause of Palestinian statehood: the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the Arab states.

The biggest loser is Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Washington stripped him of his emperor’s clothes: he now heads a Palestinian government-in-waiting that is unlikely ever to be attached to a state, viable or otherwise.

The Arab states, which assumed they were the key to a much-touted “outside-in” strategy, creating a regional framework for peace, have been deprived of the single issue – Jerusalem – that matters most to them.

Egypt scrambled to help Abbas at the weekend by drafting a UN security resolution to rescind any change of status for Jerusalem. But an inevitable US veto made the move moot.

And Europe, which has played “good cop” to the bullying US one, has been exposed as complicit in its partner’s rogue behaviour.

Europe’s predicament is underscored by its peace-making rhetoric. It has long cried wolf, warning that a moment would soon arrive when a two-state solution was no longer feasible, when a temporary occupation morphed into permanent apartheid.

Now that the heart of a Palestinian state has been publicly devoured by the wolf, what will Europe and Abbas do?

The signs are that they will pretend nothing has changed – if only out of fear of what might fill the void if peace-making were exposed as a hollow charade.

But it is precisely the pretence of a peace process that has kept Palestinians chained to an illusion. The perpetuation of false hope about statehood does not benefit Palestinians; it preserves a calm that aids Israel.

That was why the White House accused Abbas of walking away from dialogue last week. But only a fool keeps on appealing to the better nature of a deaf thug.

The burden now falls on the PA, the Arab states and Europe to accept the new reality, and assert a policy independent of the US.

Some Palestinian leaders, like Hanan Ashrawi, already understand this.

“Trump’s move is a new era,” she said last week. “There’s no going back.”

Palestinian goals and strategies must be reassessed. Nonetheless, the pressures for a return to the “peace” business as usual will be intense.

Ordinary Palestinians in Jerusalem may be the first to signal the new direction of struggle – one that recognises that a Palestinian state is dead and buried.

In recent years, growing numbers have started applying, as Israeli law entitles them to, for Israeli citizenship. Israel has twisted and turned to delay honouring its commitment, even as it calls Jerusalem its “united capital”.

Palestinians will have to shame Israel, the US and the watching world by adopting the tools of an anti-apartheid struggle – of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience – to gain equal rights in a single state.

At the moment, the undercurrents of Palestinian rage chiefly swirl below the surface. But they will rise in time, and the consequences of Trump’s deed will become all too apparent.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

President Donald Trump delivered a speech in Washington Monday introducing his administration’s new “America First” National Security Strategy, a 55-page document that sets out in blunt terms the preparations for a new world war.

Whether Trump had even read the document was far from clear. His address itself was essentially a barely warmed over campaign stump speech, celebrating his election in November 2016, his inauguration in 2017 and touting all of his “America First” and “Make America Great Again” themes, ranging from building a border wall and cracking down on immigrants to ripping up trade and climate agreements and upending the nuclear accord with Iran.

Delivered in a flat and indifferent monotone, the speech had all the earmarks of a piece drafted by Trump’s fascistic senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, with its strident anti-immigrant themes, its invocation of American “culture” and “values” and its vow that “we will stand up for ourselves, and we will stand up for our country like we have never stood up before.”

Trump cast his administration’s nearly one-year tenure as an economic turnaround for the United States, reflected above all in the stock market reaching an “all-time high” Monday for the 85th time since his election. He vowed that pending tax cuts for the corporations and the rich combined with the slashing of regulations would continue this trend.

There was more than a faint echo of Hitlerian ideology in Trump’s address, with its denunciations of past presidents for betraying the “forgotten” American citizens and its vow to restore the economy by building up the military and the American arms industry.

“Our will is renewed, our future is regained, and our dreams are restored,” Trump concluded in his address, adding, “Every American has a role to play in this grand national effort.”

The essence of the National Security Strategy document itself consists of a call for the preparation for a new era of “great power” conflict and world war. While including Trump’s themes of militarizing the border and hounding immigrants along with invocations of American nationalism, the meat of the document reflects the thinking within the cabal of active duty and retired generals who dominate US foreign policy, including National Security Advisor Gen. H. R. McMaster, Defense Secretary Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis and Trump’s chief of staff, Gen. James Kelly.

McMaster, who reportedly played the leading role in the drafting of the document, expressed the thrust of its message in a conference organized last week by a British think tank, Policy Exchange.

“Geopolitics are back, and back with a vengeance, after this holiday from history we took in the so-called post-Cold War period,” McMaster said.

After a quarter century of uninterrupted US wars in the wake of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, McMaster and his fellow generals are using the new National Security Strategy to insist that Washington has been insufficiently aggressive and to push for an unprecedented upsurge in American militarism, directed at preparing for global war directed against China and Russia, both nuclear powers.

The document describes both China and Russia as “revisionist powers” and “hostile competitors” that are seeking “to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests.”

“China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” the document states.

“These competitions require the United States to rethink the policies of the past two decades—policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners,” the document continues. “For the most part, this premise turned out to be false.”

The document includes an agenda for trade war and a set of domestic economic policies in its national security prescriptions—all of them aimed at transferring wealth from the working class to Wall Street through tax cuts, deregulation and “restraining federal spending.” Its principal demand, however, is for an unrestrained military buildup.

While the multiple wars waged over the past 16 years have drained nearly $6 trillion from the US economy, and Washington continues to spend more on its military than the next eight countries combined, the document presents the massive US war machine as dangerously underfunded and undermanned.

“Since the 1990s, the United States displayed a great degree of strategic complacency,” the document states. “Instead of building military capacity, as threats to our national security increased, the United States dramatically cut the size of our military … Instead of developing important capabilities, the Joint Force entered a nearly decade long ‘procurement holiday’ during which the acquisition of new weapon systems was severely limited.”

The “holiday,” the document indicates, is over. A military buildup is required to confront the attempt by China and Russia to “reassert their influence regionally and globally.”

“Today, they are fielding military capabilities designed to deny America access in times of crisis and to contest our ability to operate freely in critical commercial zones during peacetime,” it states. “In short, they are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor.”

The Pentagon, it states, must achieve military “overmatch—the combination of capabilities in sufficient scale to prevent enemy success and to ensure that America’s sons and daughters will never be in a fair fight.”

At the same time, it rejects what it describes as a post-Cold War conception that “all wars would be fought and won quickly, from stand-off distances and with minimal casualties.” Implicitly, what now must be accepted is the prospect for far larger wars that will involve the deaths of American troops on a scale not seen since the Second World War.

“To retain military overmatch the United States must restore our ability to produce innovative capabilities, restore the readiness of our forces for major war, and grow the size of the force so that it is capable of operating at sufficient scale and for ample duration to win across a range of scenarios,” the document continues. “The United States must reverse recent decisions to reduce the size of the Joint Force and grow the force while modernizing and ensuring readiness.”

While calling for a substantial buildup of troop levels, the document also lays heavy stress on the strengthening of US capabilities in terms of waging nuclear war.

“The United States must maintain the credible deterrence and assurance capabilities provided by our nuclear Triad and by US theater nuclear capabilities deployed abroad,” it states. “Significant investment is needed to maintain a US nuclear arsenal and infrastructure that is able to meet national security threats over the coming decades.”

In what amounts to a brief for nuclear war brinksmanship, the document asserts:

“We will not allow adversaries to use threats of nuclear escalation or other irresponsible nuclear behaviors to coerce the United States, our allies, and our partners. Fear of escalation will not prevent the United States from defending our vital interests and those of our allies and partners.”

The National Security Strategy document constitutes a grave warning. In 2002, the administration of George W. Bush issued such a document advocating “preemptive war.” Within a year, US troops had invaded Iraq, launching a war of aggression based upon lies. The present document is making the case for a world war fought with nuclear weapons.

Over the course of 2017, ISIS’ presence in eastern Syria has collapsed. Once the dominant power in the provinces of Deir ez-Zour and Raqqa, the militant group’s territory has diminished steadily as a result of the military operations of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the south and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the north. However, even in defeat, the militant group has managed to unleash misery upon the Syrian people, in the form of landmines and IEDs.

Over the course of its three-year rule in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has made copious use of landmines, IEDs and booby traps. Many of the militants were experts in building sophisticated explosive devices to bolster their defensive capabilities. They would hide these explosives in roads and houses, slowing down the advance of their enemies and dissuading civilians from escaping. By rigging up homes and vital infrastructure, the group also ensured that their bombs would double as a device for its scorched earth tactics, ensuring that towns and cities would be too devastated or dangerous to re-inhabit in the wake of their retreat.

Since the liberation of Raqqa from ISIS, the SDF has been working to clear the mines left behind by the militants in a bid to allow for the safe return of local residents. However, the group lacks the sophisticated equipment and know-how to dismantle some of ISIS’ most sophisticated mines, such as the dreaded “Russian Dish” model. Forced to dismantle mines in primitive conditions, the SDF lost many fighters to such explosives.

It is not just SDF fighters who have been killed. The mines have killed numerous Raqqa residents as well. Many of them had returned the city before the SDF gave the all-clear. They are fully aware that their homes might be rigged with explosives and are willing to take the risk. Still, the rising death toll leaves one to wonder if the risk was worth the cost. It is believed that some 120 people, both civilians and SDF fighters, have been killed since anti-ISIS operations in Raqqa came to an end. This weekend alone saw two people in Raqqa killed and seven others injured when they triggered a mine.

The United Nations warns that unexploded ordnance can pose a risk for up to five decades. Indeed, there are many countries around the world that continue to be haunted by landmines decades after their own conflicts came to an end. In Syria, preventing such devices from taking lives down the years will need funding, equipment and training. Alas so far, many parts of the country have access to none.

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America’s endless wars on humanity at home and abroad expose its imperial rage for unchallenged global dominance, no matter the human toll, exploiting its own people like others abroad.

Vast destruction and millions of casualties attest to its brutality, revealing its contempt for human and civil rights, world peace and rule of law principles.

Poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, underemployment, and overall deprivation in America increase under either wing of its duopoly governance – while Wall Street, other corporate predators, and its privileged class never had things better.

UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston published a report on poverty, deprivation, and despair in America – a damning indictment of what he learned firsthand.

He visited California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Washington DC, meeting with experts, civil society groups, federal and state officials, along with impoverished and homeless Americans.

For countless millions of poor and neglected people, the nation is a wasteland of dystopian harshness, deprivation and despair – the Constitution’s general welfare clause forgot, Alston saying:

“My visit coincide(d) with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty.”

“The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% of Americans.”

“The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by the President and Speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”

“It is against this background that my report is presented.”

The world’s richest country increasingly doesn’t give a damn about its poor and disadvantaged.

Alston witnessed deprivation and despair firsthand, meeting with “people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles.”

In San Francisco, he encountered a police officer “telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to.”

He discovered how “thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers.”

He saw sewage-filled areas where state authorities don’t consider sanitation important in impoverished areas.

He saw toothless adults unable to afford proper dental care. He learned about deaths and diseases from “prescription and other drug addiction.”

He saw human despair in Puerto Rico, impoverished people without electricity, running water, and other essentials in normal times, greatly exacerbated by Hurricane Maria over three months ago, many without enough food and other essentials for their families.

He saw positive and negative things, the latter outweighing the former. America’s wealth is enjoyed by its privileged class. Ordinary people struggle to get by.

US healthcare expenditures are double the average of other developed countries – its availability based on the ability to pay, notably to treat expensive illnesses and injuries.

US infant mortality is the highest among industrialized nations.

“Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich (country), and the ‘health gap between the US and its peer countries continues to grow,” Alston explained.

US inequality way exceeds the level in other developed nations. Its obesity is highest among rich countries.

It ranks 36th worldwide in access to clean water and sanitation. It has the world’s highest incarceration rate by far, exceeding China’s and India’s, both countries with four-times the US population.

Its youth poverty exceeds other developed nations. America ranks last among the world’s most well-off countries in terms of labor rights, poverty, safety net protections, wealth, inequality and economic mobility.

Among 37 OECD nations, it ranks 35th in terms of poverty and inequality. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality calls America “a clear and constant outlier in the child poverty league.”

Registered voters are lower than in other OECD countries as a percent of its eligible population. Participation in US elections is low – the farcical process failing to serve ordinary people equitably.

Enfranchisement affords no rights in America – money, power and privilege alone served, ordinary people with no say over how they’re governed.

Alston: Republicans and Dems “reject the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights, despite their clear recognition…in key treaties that the US has ratified” – including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“(T)he United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation,” Alston added.

Poverty and deprivation in America are deep and growing. Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” (1962) got Jack Kennedy to investigate the problem.

Lyndon Johnson addressed it, saying his administration “here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

It was little more than a skirmish, way short of what was needed, yet a step in the right direction – long since abandoned since the neoliberal 90s, and post-9/11 war OF terror priorities, along with serving privileged US interests exclusively.

Undemocratic Dems under the Clintons and Obama, along with Bush/Cheney and Trump administrations declared war on social justice in America.

It’s been eroding toward elimination altogether – Washington’s bipartisan criminal class at war on its poor and disadvantaged citizens.

Growing millions are grievously harmed. Imperial and corporate priorities take precedence.

America’s deplorable state is unfit and unsafe to live in for most of its people – because of deep-seated corruption, rampant human and civil rights abuses, governance for its privileged class exclusively, and imperial madness.

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

Fourteen of the fifteen nations in the United Nations Security Council voted Monday reaffirming the status of the city of Jerusalem as unresolved, and challenging the U.S. administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The U.S., which has veto power in the Council, vetoed the resolution.

Following the U.S. veto of the resolution, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tweeted,

“Thank you, Ambassador Haley. On Hanukkah, you spoke like a Maccabi. You lit a candle of truth. You dispel the darkness. One defeated the many. Truth defeated lies. Thank you, President Trump.”

The veto on Monday’s vote marked the first time that the U.S. has used its veto power since Donald Trump took power in the country.

The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations said following the vote,

“We [veto this resolution] with no joy, but we do it with no reluctance. The fact that this veto is being done in defense of American sovereignty and in defense of America’s role in the Middle East peace process is not a source of embarrassment for us; it should be an embarrassment to the remainder of the Security Council.”

But critics have pointed out that the U.S. administration’s move claiming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is outside of the U.S. government’s jurisdiction, and is undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of the Palestinian people by denying their existence and right to the holy city.

Ambassador Haley also called the UN Security Council Resolution an insult.

The UN Security Council resolution was introduced by the Egyptian delegation to the Council, and was widely supported by nations around the world.

The UN Mideast Envoy Nickolay Mladenov spoke in favor of the resolution, citing Israel’s decade-old ‘E1 Plan’ to encircle the city of Jerusalem with colonial settlements, thereby cutting off the West Bank from the city and expanding the Israeli state in direct violation of international law and signed agreements.

According to Mladenov, since Trump made his declaration on December 6^th,

“some 1,200 units in the occupied West Bank were approved for construction, approximately 460 of them in the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, in addition to the new settlement of Amihai, a new neighborhood in Kochav Yaakov, and a new site near Alon Shvut. The construction of infrastructure in Givat Hamatos…would solidify the ring of settlements isolating East Jerusalem from the southern West Bank.” Also in the past 12 days since Trump’s statement, “Israeli authorities demolished or seized 61 structures, 110 people, including 61 children were displaced and the livelihoods of over 1,000 people were affected.”

He pointed out that Israel has engaged in massive settlement growth on stolen Palestinian land, violence against civilian populations, and incitement against Palestinians, and noted that,

“in 2017, there were 109 shooting, stabbing, ramming and bombing attacks conducted [by Palestinians against Israelis], compared to 223 in 2016. In 2017, 72 Palestinians and 15 Israelis were killed, while in 2016 there were 109 and 13, respectively.

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations criticized the Security Council resolution, saying,

“members of the Security Council can vote another hundred times to criticize our presence in Jerusalem, but history won’t change. While the Jewish people celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah that symbolizes the eternal connection to Jerusalem, there are people who think that they can rewrite history. It’s time for all countries to recognize that Jerusalem always was and always will be the capital of the Jewish people and the capital of Israel.”

But the statement by the Israeli ambassador did not acknowledge that the Security Council was not criticizing Jewish presence in the city of Jerusalem, but was instead challenging a unilateral action by the state of Israel, backed by the United States, to take over territory through the use of military force and expand Israel’s (never declared) borders while pushing out, killing and denying the presence of the indigenous Palestinian population.

As Juan Cole pointed out in 2010 in his synopsis of the history of the city of Jerusalem,

“The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander’s descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander’s other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= ‘Common Era’ or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.

“The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.”

As the late Edward Said noted in 2011,

“The Zionist claim to the land is one claim among many others. Certainly the Arabs have a much greater claim because they have a longer history of inhabitance, of actual residence in Palestine than the Jews did…..If you look at history, you’ll see that the actual Israelite inhabitance in Palestine, in the Old Testament, amounted to about 200 to 250 years. But there were Mallebites, there were Jebusites, there were Canaanites, there were Philistines, there were many other people in Palestine at the time and before and after. And to isolate one of the claims and say that’s THE claim, that is the real owner of the land — that’s fundamentalism…Because the only way you can back it up is to say ‘God gave it to us’. Yes, but Christians say that God gave it to them, Muslims say that God gave it to them – it’s not a rational argument. So I think that the people who have a history of residence in Palestine, including the Jews and, of course, the Arabs, have a claim. But I don’t think that any claim, whether it’s given by god or the emperor, nobody has the claim that overrides all the others’ and entitles that person with that so-called claim to drive people out.”

Featured image is from the author.

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Beijing responded sharply to Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS).

It called China a “revisionist” country, a “rival” state, a strategic competitor, potentially jeopardizing bilateral relations the way they should be.

A statement by China’s Washington embassy said

“(t)he Americans on one hand say they want to develop a partnership with China, but on the other hand they take an oppositional stance.”

“This is contradictory. It is not conducive to exchanges and the interdependent relations between China and the US, and serves to do the opposite of bilateral and international cooperation between the two.”

“It is completely egotistical for any nation to put its interests above the common interests of other nations and the international community. It will lead to a path of self-isolation.”

America wants unchallenged dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations. It aims to transform all sovereign independent nations into US vassal states, war its favored strategy.

Trump’s NSS accused China of seeking to “displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reach of its state-driven economic model and reorder the region in its favor.”

Beijing stresses mutual cooperation among all nations, along with peace and stability, stressing the importance of avoiding wars.

America’s hegemonic agenda is polar opposite, risking eventual confrontation with all nations standing in the way of its imperial goals.

Trump’s NSS mentioned China 33 times, the tone mostly negative. It stresses bilateral rivalry, not mutual cooperation, perhaps signaling added pressure to try forcing Beijing to bend to Washington’s will, a strategy doomed to fail.

According to China’s Global Times,

Trump’s NSS “is a manifestation of the (his) administration’s tough posture, which counts on US power instead of international rules.”

“It showcases Washington’s indisputable insistence on its global hegemony. Neither Beijing nor Moscow will buy it.”

“(T)he newly released National Security Strategy reflects Washington’s reluctance to accept the rise of China” – seeking control over the country it won’t get.

Its hostile agenda will end up “getting its own comeuppance. If Trump (intends) intensify(ing) military confrontation, then let him just try it. We believe East Asian nations will not follow the US, nor are they ready to serve as its tool.”

Unknown is whether Trump’s NSS on China and Russia is just tough talk posturing or firm policy. The risk is it may be more of the latter than the former.

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

As decision-makers and most voters in America and Britain enjoy comfortable lives, the Times and Yemen’s al-Masirah TV report that Saudi warplanes near Yemen’s rebel-held capital struck and killed several people on Wednesday, according to medical officials. These included a group of ten women attending the funeral in Arhab, 25 miles from Sanaa, according to a spokesman for the Houthi rebel group.

Locals said the women were returning on foot from the wedding when they were targeted. Several other women, who were riding in a car, escaped the attacks. “The aggressor committed a hideous crime by targeting ordinary women who were returning from a wedding,” said the father of two of the slain women. The deaths are the latest from more than two years of Saudi Arabia’s devastating military campaign against Yemen. More than 12,000, including many women and children, have been killed in Saudi airstrikes while millions remain displaced, living with shortages of fuel, food and water and the threat of cholera.

The European Parliament takes a stand – but will the Commission heed it?

During a debate in the European Parliament, Green MEP Molly Scott Cato challenged Conservative MEP Geoffrey van Orden over his views on arms sales [see video], asking him whether he would vote to end ‘arms sales to Saudi Arabia that are being used to kill Yemeni children.’

The European Parliament then voted in favour of a Green report, challenging the Commission to introduce an embargo on arms exports to Saudi Arabia. The report also calls for a new process to sanction EU countries which do not comply with EU rules on arms exports . . . a major embarrassment to the UK government which has supported billions of pounds worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Featured image is from the Drone Warfare.

American monsters are ubiquitous in our popular culture. They loom large in film, comics, and video games, and they even haunt our political landscapes.

These monsters inhabit our shared dreams and collective nightmares. 

They provide the artist with potent metaphors, which can be used and re-imagined in a way that provides commentary on our culture.

These new demons make up the iconography of America’s shadow self.

This short film by Michael A. Johnson features the words and artwork of Anthony Freda.

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This article was originally published by GR in December 2016.

Members of the world community finally reached a limit witnessing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The United Nations Security Council presented a peace offering to Palestinians days before the official birthday of Jesus in what is now occupied Bethlehem: resolution 2334, with a “vision of a region where two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders.” Ironically, the seemingly toothless resolution’s main notoriety comes from Netanyahu’s fury at its passage.

The resolution, which aims to bring a lasting peace to Israelis and Palestinians based on international law, comes at a time when Israel seemed to be in the “mop-up” phase of its theft of Palestinian resources (such as water and gas) and its annexation of whatever it wanted of the Palestinian territories it has occupied since 1967: East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

The media censorship of Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians has made their horrific situation virtually invisible to the western public, allowing Israel to ignore — besides basic human decency — virtually all international laws protecting Palestinian human, civil and property rights.  Israel has been ethnicly cleansing East Jerusalem, which it is trying to annex; it is maintaining apartheid in the occupied West Bank according to the 2012 Russell Tribunal, and committing genocide against Gazans according to the 2013 Kuala Lumpur tribunal.  Despite such findings, Israel’s allies are attempting to criminalize speech critical of Israel or advocating redress.

What the resolution calls for

Resolution 2334 lays out the Security Council’s intention to start diplomatic meetings to create a lasting peace based on “the relevant United Nations’ resolutions, and other peace agreements and initiatives”, along with periodic follow-up reports.  More specifically, resolution 2334 calls for:

Israel to “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem” because of their illegality;

  the international community to recognize the difference “in its dealings” between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories;

immediate steps to prevent all violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as acts of provocation and destruction;

calls for accountability in this regard,

both parties to act on the basis of international law, including international humanitarian law… ; and

 efforts aimed at achieving, without delay a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East on the basis of the relevant United Nations resolutions, and … an end to the Israeli occupation.

Implications

The resolution confirms the total illegality of Israel’s settlements; the wording “completely cease all settlement activities” might also be interpreted to mean the dismantling of the settlements.

If Israel refuses to abide by the resolution’s call to end all settlement activity, the Palestinians can pursue cases against Israeli leaders at the International Criminal Court.

By calling for the international community to differentiate between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories “in its dealings“, the UN is calling for an end to trade agreements(such as Canada’s) that support the financial viability of the settlements by allowing Israel to mislabel products produced in the settlements as from “Israel” in order to facilitate sales and avoid duties.

The call to prevent “all violence against civilians, including acts of terror … provocation and destruction”, is a stunning rebuke of Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians and the destruction of their homes and properties. The currently-used definition of terrorism*, which excludes state terrorism (and thus actions by Israel or Hamas) includes the actions of Jewish settlers, the major source of terrorism in Israel.

The call for accountability is a call for an end to Israel’s impunity for crimes including its massive attacks on Gaza as well as its almost daily attacks on Palestinian farmers, fishermen and other civilians.

The call for “both parties” to “act on the basis of …. international humanitarian law” is a demand that Israel, as the Occupying Power, respect the Fourth Geneva Convention, the law governing the treatment of civilians under military occupation.  Israel’s obligations are not only to protect the welfare of those civilians, but to refrain from moving its population into occupied territory or retaining the territory under any circumstances.

The resolution calls for efforts to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, which Israel would find costly. Its confinement of millions of Palestinians is hugely profitable, largely because the world community has assumed Israel’s legal obligation to provide for their food, education and other humanitarian needs.  Israel skims off humanitarian aid money and forces funds to be converted into the shekel, propping up its currency. Palestinians are used as cheap and disposal labor in Israel’s industrial zones and as guinea pigs for its weapons testing.  The West Bank, from which Israel gets much of its water and farm land, is used for Israel’s toxic dumps.

This resolution’s intent to follow up on final status peace negotiations is a major problem for Israel because the next world conference on Israel/ Palestine is on January 15th, when President Obama is still in office.  If a resolution is passed that sets parameters such as the issue of Israel’s borders, the status of Jerusalem and the Palestinian right of return, along with a time-limit for the negotiations, it would be almost impossible for Donald Trump to intervene.  Trump would have to get the support of at least nine countries in the Security Council  behind a new resolution that would overturn the offending resolution — and then ensure that the permanent members, including Russia and China, would not veto it.

Conclusion

Israel’s violations of UN SC Resolution 2334 — which calls for an end to the settlements, steps to prevent acts of violence against civilians, and for accountability — justify boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, particularly of products from Israel’s settlements.

Israel’s ongoing violations should also end the current efforts to criminalize speech critical of Israel.  People of conscience can not be said to be guilty of “racism”, “anti-Semitism”, or “hate speech” when they describe Israel’s defiance of this resolution and of international laws — or advocate economic responses to facilitate a just peace.

Hopes for an ending to the Palestinian plight now hinge on the passage of a follow-up resolution at the January 15th conference that will call for final status negotiations on Israel’s borders, the status of Jerusalem and the Palestinian right of return — with set time limits.

The United Nations SC resolution 2334 demonstrates that the world body retains its credibility in calling for justice.

The UN has been responsible for the Palestinian tragedy; members must now take responsibility for ending it.

The definition of “terrorism” presumably the one used by the annual Global Index of Terrorism:

The Global Terrorism Index uses data supported by the Department of Homeland Security which includes incidents meeting the following criteria:

1. The incident must be intentional – the result of a conscious calculation on the part of a perpetrator.

2. The incident must entail some level of violence or threat of violence — including property violence, as well as violence against people

3. The perpetrators of the incidents must be sub-national actors. This database does not include acts of state terrorism. In addition to this baseline definition, two of the following three criteria have to be met in order to be included in the START database from 1997: ….The violent act was aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal. ….The violent act included evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate, or convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) other than the immediate victims. ….The violent act was outside the precepts of international humanitarian law. (Vision of Humanity)

from:

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Why the Istanbul Declaration Must Succeed: “The Whole World to Recognize East Jerusalem as the Occupied Capital of Palestine”

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, December 18, 2017

To obtain the support of the whole world, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which initiated the Summit will have to go beyond the OIC. An international committee should be established comprising states that are committed to the recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian State. It should be led by China which has endorsed wholeheartedly the East Jerusalem proposal.

Wheelchair-bound Man with No Legs Killed by Israel’s IDF in Gaza During Jerusalem Protest

By RT News, December 18, 2017

Abu Thurayeh, 29, was shot dead east of Gaza City, according to Gaza’s health ministry as cited by the Times of Israel. He is one of four Palestinians who were killed during a protest over the decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Turkey Opens Embassy in East Jerusalem: Erdogan’s Grandstanding East Jerusalem Vow

By Stephen Lendman, December 18, 2017

At an emergency December 13 session in Istanbul, Turkey, 57 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries declared East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state – rhetorical recognition only, changing nothing on the ground now or ahead.

Jerusalem – The Straw that Breaks the Empire’s Back?

By Peter Koenig, December 17, 2017

This insensitive Trump decision or affirmation at this point in time – another one in his basket of disasters – brought everything else but peace to the region, and especially to Palestine. It caused unrest, angry demonstrations from people who are basically fighting with their bare hands; protests which were immediately oppressed with firepower and violence by the Israeli military and police force, killing people in the Israel imposed ghetto of Gaza and the West Bank – i.e. in Palestine, what should become an independent state.

US-Palestinian Relations: The Strange Issue of the PLO’s Washington Office

By Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman, December 16, 2017

In late September this year, the State of Palestine was accepted as a member of the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) and a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved “to discuss a plan with the administration of US President Donald Trump and members of the Congress to pressure the Palestinians and stop their unilateral actions in the international arena with the aim of disrupting the trial of Israeli officials in international courts and even moving towards the closure of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] office in Washington” (which Palestinians call an embassy) unless they stop taking such “unilateral” actions!

Istanbul Summit: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Declares East Jerusalem Capital of Palestine, Urges US to Withdraw From Peace Process

By Daily Sabah, December 15, 2017

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) declared East Jerusalem the capital of Palestine “under occupation” and urged the U.S. to withdraw from the peace process and back down from its Jerusalem decision in a statement issued following an extraordinary summit in Istanbul on Wednesday.

A word ban extends beyond the CDC, the Washington Post reported last night, including at another, unnamed HHS agency that was told how to talk about the Affordable Care Act, presumably to discourage people from signing up for health care. The directive came from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates the president’s budget proposal and rule-making agenda.

On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news (and other outlets confirmed) that CDC officials were prevented from referring to seven words when putting together the agency’s budget: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based.

Additional terminology guidance given to the State Department suggests that the administration intends to pull funding from science-based HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives that work to promote abstinence-only programs instead, even though peer-reviewed research consistently finds that abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual activity or change other sexual risk behaviors.

The CDC word ban was widely repudiated by scientists, senators, and public health advocates. The issue has attracted enormous attention (even from Cher!) as emblematic of a morally, scientifically, and ethically corrupt style of governing.

In an email to staff last night, CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald said that the

CDC “remains committed to our public health mission as a science- and evidence-based institution…science is and will remain the foundation of our work.”

Yet recently, CDC scientists were banned from responding to basic data requests from reporters without political approval—a clear violation of the agency’s scientific integrity policy.

Sidelining science since day one

This starts with words and communication, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just last week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke summoned the head of Joshua Tree National Park to his office for a tongue lashing over tweets the park had sent out referencing climate change. That’s right: the park director flew across the country to be reprimanded for a couple of tweets, in order to send a message to all park directors: talking about climate change is verboten.

And oh, if only word choice was the worst action this administration has taken to undermine the use of science in policy-making. They’re not just trying to downplay the phrase “evidence-based.” They’re trying to ditch the whole idea of basing policy on evidence.

In July, we chronicled how the Trump administration has sidelined science since day one. And since then the abuses of evidence have continued to flow.

The Treasury Secretary claimed that economists were working “around the clock” to come up with analysis justifying the tax bill. They were not. The EPA banned scientists who receive EPA grants—the ones the agency has decided do the most promising environmental and public health research—from providing science advice to the agency. The Department of Interior is trying to defund and prevent public access to the US Geological Survey library system.

The White House has no science advisor, and the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is a ghost town. Numerous political appointees—including the CDC director and the nominee for NOAA administrator—have financial conflicts of interest that lead many to question their ability to do the jobs. The administration has shut down studies where it expects it won’t like the outcome: on climate change in the tropics, on teen pregnancy prevention, and on the health risks of surface coal mining in West Virginia. Science agencies are targeted across the board for severe budget cuts.

An exhaustive list is, quite frankly, impossible. President Trump’s attacks on science harm our environment and make all of us sicker and less safe. If the Trump administration won’t allow federal agencies to do their job, it’s time to ask Congress to step up its game, engage in meaningful oversight, and do its job.

Michael Halpern is an expert on political interference in science and solutions to reduce suppression, manipulation, and distortion of government science.

Featured image is from the author.

The Istanbul Declaration adopted at an Extraordinary Islamic Summit Conference in Istanbul on the 13^th of December 2017 invites “the whole world to recognise East Jerusalem as the occupied capital of the State of Palestine.” It further pledges to ‘mobilize support in the name of entire humanity to strengthen the State of Palestine and its institutions in every field.”

To obtain the support of the whole world, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which initiated the Summit will have to go beyond the OIC. An international committee should be established comprising states that are committed to the recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian State. It should be led by China which has endorsed wholeheartedly the East Jerusalem proposal. Chinese leadership will not only lend weight to the proposal but also make it easier to draw in non-Muslim majority states and make it a truly global endeavour. The Turkish President, Recep Erdogan, who was the driving force behind the initiative, should approach the Chinese President, Xi Jinping.

There are groups that will not be comfortable with this proposal for different reasons. To start with, groups in Palestine and other Arab and Muslim societies will argue that a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital covering only 22% of historic Palestine is a betrayal of justice since West Jerusalem and the 78% that will constitute Israel are also a product of usurpation, annexation and occupation by Jewish settler communities that began aggressively after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The only real solution, these groups opine, is the restoration of Palestine in its entirety to the Palestinian people comprising Muslims, Christians and Jews. What they have in mind is a single unified, secular nation perhaps structured as a confederation with an undivided Jerusalem as its capital guaranteeing rights and responsibilities to all three faith communities and others, and not dominated by any one group in the constitutional or ideological sense.

While there is much truth in what the proponents of a unified Palestine are suggesting, it does not appear attainable in present circumstances. The decades old animosity and antagonism between the different communities compounded by their deep sense of identity and their conflicting notions of history will impede any endeavour, however noble, to bring Muslims, Christians  and Jews together, within the confines of a single home. Besides, their current conflict itself revolves around separate sovereignties.

However, the strongest opposition to the East Jerusalem idea has expectedly come from Israel. For the Israeli elite and the majority of its citizenry, Jerusalem is the “eternal capital of the Jewish people.” It is sacrilegious to talk of dividing it or giving a portion of it to the Palestinians.

This Israeli position is a travesty of truth and history. For Jerusalem and the land of Israel/Palestine have had a complex, multi-ethnic and multi-religious background.  Apart from Jews — once known as “Hebrew tribes” —who have been part of Jerusalem and Israel since antiquity, Rome, Egypt, Syria, Babylon and Persia to name a few civilizations had impacted upon the city and the region for millennia. Jewish rulers appear to have established their authority over Jerusalem and other areas only for periods of time. Kings and Chieftains from other ethnic backgrounds also held sway over the city. Christian rulers for instance were in control of Jerusalem during the Byzantine period from 326 to 638 and the Crusader period from 1099 to 1187. The Muslim period stretched from 638 to 1099 and then again from 1187 right up to 1917. Muslim dynasties associated with the Ayyubid, the Mamluk and the Ottoman played significant roles in shaping the development of Jerusalem and Palestine.  This is why any attempt to obliterate the influence of other ethnicities, religions and civilizations upon Jerusalem is nothing less than a blatant distortion and falsification of reality.And this what the Israeli authorities have been doing in the physical sense since they annexed first West and then East Jerusalem.

The concerted drive to erase Jerusalem’s pervasive, deeply embedded non-Judaic characteristics has a larger political purpose. It is integral to the Israeli justification and legitimisation of their dispossession of the Palestinians for decades. It is to convince themselves and others that they have a God-sent right to own and occupy the whole of Palestine. Given this conviction, it should not surprise us that the Israeli elite has never been sincere about a two-state solution or about recognising the right of the Palestinians to a nation of their own. Indeed, the first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion had made it clear in the 1920s itself that “there is no room in the country for both peoples ….” He was like most other Israeli leaders after him a determined advocate of Israeli expansion, of Erez Ysrael, from the Nile to the Euphrates.

A significant segment of the US elite also subscribes to the view that Israel has the right to occupy Palestinian and Arab lands and to expand its grip. This is especially true of those who are inclined towards Christian Zionism or linked to certain Evangelical groups. Even others in the elite stratum who do not have such connections tend to accommodate Israeli-Zionist interests all the while partly because of their influence within the citadels of US power such as the upper echelons of the financial sector, the media, academe, and in the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.

Seen against this backdrop, President Donald Trump’s announcement about Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, in 1995, the US Congress had already accorded this recognition to Jerusalem though it was in violation of International Law which bestowed upon the city a special status in 1947 meaning by which that it would remain under international control. But Israel claimed West Jerusalem soon after the 1948 war and in 1967 after the 6 day war, it annexed East Jerusalem. No country in the world, except the US, has acknowledged Israeli authority over Jerusalem.

This is why lamentations by a number of leaders, including Arabs and Muslims that in the wake of Trump’s announcement, the US is no longer an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are utterly ludicrous. The US has been Israel’s patron, protector and provider for decades especially after the 1967 war. It has been unashamedly biased and one-sided. But it kept up a charade for a long while. Now finally as a result of Trump’s stark stance the fig-leaf has fallen off, in the words of some commentators.

It is a good time therefore to pursue another approach to peace between Israel, Palestine and other Arab states. The Istanbul Declaration offers some hope. Its language is inclusive and its tone is accommodative.

When its advocates flesh out the idea of two capitals for two states, they should insist that both states should be inclusive and multi-religious in the finest tradition of Jerusalem itself. This  new peace initiative should echo the sentiments in the joint statement crafted by the late Palestinian leader Feisal al-Husseini and the Israeli activist, Uri Avnery, on the 13^th of May 1995, Entitled “ Our Jerusalem” it reads, “Jerusalem is ours , Israelis and Palestinians — Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Our Jerusalem is a mosaic of all the cultures, all the religions, and all the periods that enriched the city, from the earliest antiquity to this very day — Canaanites and Jebusites and Israelites, Jews and Hellenes, Romans and Byzantines, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Mamelukes, Ottomans and Britons, Palestinians and Israelis. They and all the others who made their contribution to the city have a place in the spiritual and physical landscape of Jerusalem. Our Jerusalem must be united, open to all and belonging to all its inhabitants, without borders and barbed wire in its midst. Our Jerusalem must be the capital of the two states that will live side by side in this country — West Jerusalem the capital of the state of Israel and East Jerusalem the capital of the state of Palestine. Our Jerusalem must be the Capital of Peace.”

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

A disabled Palestinian man missing both legs is among those killed by Israeli security forces that opened fire on demonstrators in the West Bank and along the border with Gaza, Gaza’s health ministry said.

Abu had lost his legs in an Israeli attack on Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

“He was injured in 2008 by an Israeli helicopter that targeted him after he brought down the Israeli flag and raised the Palestinian flag along the border,” his brother Samir said. “It did not stop him from demonstrating for Jerusalem. He went alone every day to the border.”

Wheelchair-bound Ibrahim Abu Thurayeh , 29, was shot and killed today along the boarder of east Gaza city by an Israeli solider.

Photo was taken moments before he was shot pic.twitter.com/zHTv1xFUMB

— Jayyab Abusafia (@JayyabSKY) December 15, 2017

Ibrahim Abu Thurayeh, a 29-year-old Palestinian from Gaza who lost his legs in an Israeli airstrike which also destroyed his home in 2008. Despite living under siege in Gaza, Ibrahim went on living – not just for himself, but for his family. Today Ibrahim was murdered by Israel. pic.twitter.com/dFclhrfs19

— Gary Spedding (@GarySpedding) December 16, 2017

Social media have been flooded with videos and photos of Abu Thurayeh a few hours before his death, sitting in his wheelchair and waving a Palestinian flag.

“This land is our land, we will not give up. America has to withdraw its decision,”Abu Thurayeh reportedly said in a video seen by AFP.

Abu had been earning a living for himself and his family by washing cars.

In the meantime, the Israeli military said in a statement that Palestinian rioters had hurled stones and firebombs at their soldiers, who were forced to respond. Protests continue in Palestine, often turning violent and resulting in injuries, after US President Donald Trump officially declared the US embassy to Israel will be moved to Jerusalem. Trump’s declaration has been met with condemnation and protests around the globe.

Featured image is from The Times of Israel.

The Canadian government has given the green light for national defence contractors to sell weapons to Ukraine. This makes Canada a party to the conflict with all ensuing consequences. The decision sets no preconditions for selling the armaments to Ukraine. It has been taken despite the fact that Project Ploughshare and Amnesty International Canada opposed the plan, saying Kiev has so far failed to improve the human rights situation. Canada’s Standing Committee on National Defense has published a report entitled “Canada’s Support to Ukraine in Crisis and Armed Conflict,” which recommends that the government provide lethal weapons to Ukraine if it demonstrates active work on fighting corruption in the country.

The recommendations include providing lethal weapons, intelligence exchange, cooperation in defense industry, support in countering cyberattacks, and in resisting to the dissemination of foreign propaganda and disinformation through the media. Granting visa-free travel to Canada for Ukrainians and promotion of Ukrainian interests at the G7 is also on the recommendations’ list.

The Canadian Cabinet hopes its decision will influence the US Administration to follow suit. The move puts Canada out ahead of the United States, which is considering its own arms sales. Kurt Volker, the US Special Representative to Ukraine, believes there’s no reason to continue the prohibition on delivering lethal weapons.

Ukraine is particularly interested in anti-tank weapons, counter-battery artillery radar, and armoured patrol vehicles like the US-made Humvees.

On December 12, US President Donald Trump signed a defense budget for 2018 providing for the possibility of offering Ukraine lethal weapons of a “defensive nature”. Congress has approved $500 million in “defensive lethal assistance” to Ukraine. Congress authorized $350 million more than the $150 million originally proposed by the administration. Now, the president can start arms supplies any time he chooses. Former President Barack Obama was unconvinced that granting Ukraine lethal defensive weapons would be the right decision in view of corruption widespread in Ukraine.

The two events – Canada’s decision and signing the US defense budget bill into law – come in the context of the failed US-Russia talks on the recently proposed UN peacekeeping mission in Donbass. Now the US weapons could be exported to Ukraine through Canada, including the much-desired Javelin anti-tank systems.

“After this government decree, Canada can sell or transfer Javelin to Ukraine,” said James Bezan, Canadian MP from the Conservative Party.

The US has been sending to Ukraine a variety of non-lethal military help, including equipment like Humvees, medical supplies, bulletproof vests, and radars to track the hundreds of artillery shells.

North America’s assistance to Ukraine is not limited to weapons only; it encompasses other domains as well. The Ukraine Cybersecurity Cooperation Act [H.R. 1997], the bipartisan legislation introduced by Congressmen Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-8) and Brendan F. Boyle (PA-13), unanimously passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Dec. 14. The bill encourages cooperation between the United States and Ukraine on matters of cybersecurity and requires State Department reporting to Congress on best practices to protect against future cyber-attacks.

“Helping Ukraine buttress its cyber defenses will also help the United States in developing new and more effective technologies and strategies in dealing with cyber security on the modern battlefield,” said Boyle, explaining the goal to be achieved, if the legislation becomes law.

It will make Ukraine a part of NATO cyber warfare effort being implemented according to its Cyber Defense Pledge.

The bloc is implementing the Capability Package 120 which aims by 2024 to fund everything from encryption for tactical radios to cloud-integrated storage for the millions of cyber events. Eventually, NATO will move to the public cloud for virtually everything that it does as an alliance. The “centralized patch management” will control all the cyber activities.

For more than two years, the US military’s contingent of roughly 300 military instructors have been quietly training Ukrainian military in the western part of the country to prepare them for fighting in the east. Every 55 days a new Ukrainian battalion comes in to go through a training course at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine. Since 2014, the US and partner militaries have helped grow Ukraine’s forces from just over 100,000 troops to nearly 250,000 today. The US-run maritime operations center at Ochakov Naval Base, Ukraine, became operational in July to serve as a major planning and operational hub during future military exercises hosted by Ukraine. A US military facility near Russia’s borders is a very serious threat to regional security. Its presence turns the Black Sea into a hot spot. US warships visit the sea regularly to provide NATO with long-range first strike capability. The Romania-based Aegis Ashore BMD system uses the Mk-41 launcher capable of firing Tomahawk long-range precision-guided missiles against land targets.

Also in July, two US Navy warships, a P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft, and a Navy SEALs team took part in the 12-day Sea Breeze 2017 joint NATO naval exercise off Ukraine.

The multinational war games took place in the northwestern part of the Black Sea, near the Ukrainian port city of Odessa. 17 nations took part in the training event. The preparations are on the way to hold another Sea Breeze exercise in 2018. Step by step, Ukraine is becoming an element of NATO’s military infrastructure, which could be used as a springboard for a cross-border attack against Russia.

Featured image is from the author.

It has long been since many residents and the Afghan Government officials first vocalized fear over buzzing and landing of mysterious helicopters in parts of Afghanistan where the ISIS-K is reported to have been stepping up efforts for a battle. The ISIS first surfaced in eastern Nangarhar province and then spilled over into the neighboring Kunar province. And now months later the alarming reports uncover the arrival of French and Algerian ISIS loyalists in Darzab district of northern Jawzjan province.

The ISIS’s stationing in Afghanistan’s north could carry more than one reason. The widely held opinion says that ISIS’s rise and then relocation to the northern Afghan provinces is aimed at Russia, but Moscow’s far-laying borders as well as the Central Asian states’ tenacious border embattlement against the possible ISIS assault is overshadowing this reasoning. The ISIS-K’s anti-Russian motto and mobilization in Afghanistan derive from Moscow’s shattering of the group’s strongholds in the Middle East.

The sitting first vice president of Afghanistan Gen. Dostum who is an ethnic Uzbek and a native of northern province where ISIS is gaining ground, spent most of his term time as the commander of an army corps fighting against the Taliban and the ISIS’s encroachment to the north. He really forced the militants to scatter and spoiled their plans. But the Afghan Government was in disapproval of his self-willed military campaign against the militants, perhaps, because the move was supported by Moscow.

The following days he was indicted with the rape of his former aged male aide and even the international community spared no moment to condemn the alleged act. Now, he is living in forced expatriation in Turkey as his plane is banned from landing in Afghan airports.

A third possible motive behind a loosened ISIS-K movement in Afghanistan could be what is recently hitting news – Afghanistan’s rare earth elements. The underground riches of the southern Afghan province of Helmand are being substantially plundered under the pretext of heated war as most mineral-rich fields are declared as no-go war zones. Afghan Ministry of Mines has stated that the ISIS-infested region in the north is abounding in precious minerals and it fears about illegal unearthing of the valuable elements at the group’s hand. The ministry’s spokesman admits the presence of Uranium and other rare earth elements in the region under the ISIS control.

The fully armed Afghan forces in their thousands are awaiting orders from supreme authorities in Kabul to approach and annihilate a potato-small number of ISIS fanatics, but it appears that there is no intent to wipe out the group.

The ISIS which used to siphon off hefty revenues from multiple roots in Syria and Iraq started losing money-making sources in 2016. The Russian fierce air campaign reduced the ISIS to lose 80 of the incomes from oil wells and tax revenues. Money matters for the ISIS and it could be the same for abundant natural resources in Darzab district.

One local man named as Hajji said the fighters were of several nationalities including French, Algerians Uzbeks and Chechens and they were tall, aged in their late 20s and dressed in military clothing. He added:

“They ride their motor bikes, go to the border and come back, but they talk to nobody”

The fighters are said to be arriving via Tajikistan and Uzbekistan into Afghanistan. The European services revealed that at least one Frenchman was arrested in Tajikistan in July who intended to join ISIS in Afghanistan. Whether these radical foreign citizens are the survivors of the ISIS fiasco in Syria and Iraq and moving here to carry on the bloody and dollar-fueled Jihad or are part of a fresh recruitment process, they are supported by the same parties back in Syria and Iraq.

In the past two years, the capital Kabul has went through the most deadly civilian-targeted bombings which have been claimed by the ISIS-K in a bid to gain some weight in the country’s proxy wars. Revealing another dark side, Kabul is everyday witness of quite a few child kidnapping cases under an organized plan. These innocent children abducted from the streets of Kabul city find themselves in the terrorist sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan or in parts of Afghanistan and trained to fill up the ranks of upcoming generation of terrorists. The reports inform that the newly burgeoning ISIS group in the north of Afghanistan is nurturing children as young as 10.

A year ago, Russian foreign ministry and special envoy for Afghanistan repeatedly warned of mysterious aircrafts flying over the skies of northern Afghan provinces, especially Jawzjan. Moscow had realized that the helicopters were dropping cases of arms and foods down to the terrorist training areas to gear up anti-Russian radicalization. Reports indicate that thousands of fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are regrouping in the mountains of Afghanistan to chalk out revenge attack against the Kremlin. Earlier, the ISIS’s high command has given orders to target Russian cities.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had said that Russian Government closely monitors the armament and transportation of the ISIS fighters into eastern parts of Afghanistan. In May 2017, the ministry in a statement asked for the US and NATO’s accounts about the unidentified aircrafts. It stated that they [the US and NATO] have been deployed in Afghanistan for over 15 years and they should find about vague flights in the airspace of Afghanistan.

Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai in an exclusive interview with Russian RT went boldly and pointed at West being behind the momentum of the ISIS in Afghanistan. In October 2017, he blamed the US for supplying weapons to Daesh or ISIS in Afghanistan. He maintained that the US army helicopters were being used to supply weapons to the group. He even went on to say that the militant group emerged in the country over the past three to four years under the watch of US military and intelligence agencies.

During ex-president Karzai’s administration when the brouhaha on the ISIS’s rise in Afghanistan had reached its peak, he once openly talked of anonymous aircrafts carrying ISIS militants into northern parts of Afghanistan in the dead of the night.

The ISIS’s advancements in Afghanistan occur while on Dec. 9 the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al–Abadi announced the end of the war against ISIS in Iraq during the international media conference in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Earlier this month, President Putin made a surprise visit to Syria and announced withdrawal of Russian forces from Syrian air bases. He said that if the terrorists raise their heads in Syria again, Russia will hit them hard with powerful strikes. Russia would keep its Hmeymim air base as well as its naval facility at Tartous on a permanent basis.

The Times reports that the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) designed by the French company Areva and constructed by China General Nuclear Power Corporation (GCN) with EDF in southern China, has had another setback. The deaerator in Taishan1’s reactor, which removes oxygen and other gases from boiler feedwater circuits, cracked during performance testing due to defective welding.

The $8.7 billion Taishan 1, which will be the world’s first functioning example of the European reactor, was due to be finished last year but has been delayed by safety concerns.

According to Power Engineering International the defects found this week had been known to the manufacturer since 2012.  The welding defects in a deaerator used in unit 1 of China CGN’s 3.5 GW Taishan plant had been flagged up in 2012 by an engineer at manufacturer Harbin Boiler, according to a report in the Hong Kong Free Press, The technical report in the Chinese journal Guolu zhizao (Boiler Manufacturing) said that because Chinese welding techniques do not follow the procedures required by European-designed deaerators, gaps are left between deaerator parts which need additional work before on-site assembly.

Work on a similar EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland began in 2005 and it was supposed to be operational in 2009. It is now expected to be finished 2019. EDF is also building a reactor at Flamanville in Normandy which was due to begin operating in 2012. Jean-Bernard Lévy, EDF’s chief executive, now predicts that the reactor will be working by the end of 2018.

Though CGN said the deaerator has now been replaced, this is yet another concern about the two EPR reactors for Hinkley Point C in Somerset, also designed by Areva and to be built by EDF and GNC at a cost of £19.5 billion. They were expected to be operational in 2025 but EDF said this summer that they were likely to be 15 months late.

In October the Times reported that after inspectors found problems with concrete foundations laid on the Somerset coast part of the nuclear plant under construction at Hinkley Point will have to be demolished and rebuilt, commenting “the latest setback for the £20bn project”.

The problems were found in the foundations of the first of the site’s 5 miles of “galleries” — a series of deep trenches that will house the plant’s pipes and electric cables. French state-owned EDF, the owner, insisted the problem is isolated to 150 cubic metres and will not delay construction, but in July admitted that the project is now at least £1.5bn over budget and 15 months behind schedule.

A growing number will share the suspicion voiced by Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the Green Party, that faith in the construction of Britain’s first new nuclear power plant in more than 20 years has been grossly misplaced:

“If you look at the money that’s being spent on Hinkley, some £30bn, it’s just totally uneconomic. We can create a centralised, job-poor nuclear option, which locks us into an expensive deal for decades, or we can invest in a decentralised, job-rich, clean energy renewables revolution.”

Featured image is from Nuclear Industries.

The World Health Organization honored Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade in 2017.[i] Named after a US internationalist, its 48,000 health care workers throughout the South are more than all the rich countries combined. The Brigade has treated 3.5 million people in 21 countries since Fidel Castro created it in 2005.

Some think Cuba’s medical internationalism an impossible dream. Not for a poor country, they say. Don Quixote is honored in Cuba. A large replica dominates a square near the University of Havana.

But Don Quixote is often misunderstood, at least in the North. It is not about impossible dreams.

The word “anarchy” pops up these days, along with “seize your destiny”, “imagine”, “create”. Those following dreams are compared to the Man of the Mancha. We admire them, as if they are courageous, taking risks for an ideal.

Yet Victor Hugo noticed that even revolutionaries resist Don Quixote. They’d rather be Leonidas, with victory assured. Their visions, Hugo writes, are “illusions … [of] human certainty”.

It was not so with Don Quixote. His appealing mixture of “madness and intelligence”, whatever else it was, did not expect certainty. He charged windmills and herds of sheep. But his “madness” was not the straight and narrow.

Cuba has exported solidarity. The US, in contrast, exports ignorance. In 1961, at an economics conference, Che Guevara showed how it works.^[ii] President Kennedy said the US development program “Alliance for Progress” was about democracy. He didn’t define the term. It was defined by power.

Guevara knew “democracy”, the US view, was an expectation. No other view was permitted. The demo in “democracy” is supposed to mean people. Guevara knew people were not permitted, at least not Latin American ones. He said so at the meeting. Cuba was expelled.

Expectations arise from practises. If I live in a white society, I expect people to be white. A non-white person becomes “different”. I don’t admit to thinking people are white. But because of social practises, I have that expectation.

Expectations are useful. I expect heat to burn and withdraw my hand. I may not know the physics but my expectation arises from practises, some scientific. It is reliable. Some expectations, though, are arbitrary, defined only by power.

It explains ignorance about the Henry Reeves Brigade and what it means for democracy and human rights.

The great US novel Moby-Dick is about expectations. It is supposed to be about US democracy because of multiplicity of perspectives. The ship includes Queequeg, a cannibal with strange rituals and beliefs, one of the nicest characters on the boat.

But Moby Dick is a US book because of expectations: for certainty. It is about Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of a whale. But it is also about Ishmael, the narrator, who seeks meaning. Ishmael is central because he seeks meaning. Standing watch at the masthead, he takes the “mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of the deep, blue bottomless soul pervading mankind and nature”.

Some say the search for meaning is a human propensity. Ishmael contemplates the “almighty forlornness” of human beings in nature. He seeks meaning in the whale, its face (which it doesn’t have), its ears and tail.

But we search for what we want to know. We don’t just look for meaning. We look for some meaning. It starts with a question, a set of values, a worldview.

Ishmael cannot know the whale. “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep. I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head“.  Yet Ishmael wouldn’t say the whale cannot be understood if there were no expectation it might be understood.

Moby-Dick, the novel, is about how Ahab’s expectation for superiority over nature fails and how Ishmael, unlike Ahab, accepts the failure. But expecting such superiority is itself surprising, or should be.

Human beings are part of the mysterious and complex unfolding of the universe. Our existence is insecure and, ultimately, unpredictable. We know this from science. Causation is complex, even chaotic. Human beings are subject to such causation.

Smart, sensitive philosophers from across the ages, and across the globe, say the art of dying and the art of living are the same. The reason is simple: All life, including human life, involves decay. Every moment involves change, which is loss. But as Victor Hugo notes, even revolutionaries want certainty.

He calls it the “blind, iron horse of the straight and narrow”. Following dreams is that blind horse. It is following expectations, arbitrary ones, arising from a single, powerful society, a set of values, a worldview. They are followed in ignorance: of expectations, arbitrary ones.

Don Quixote is not about impossible dreams. It is about rationality. Don Quixote wasn’t driven by an “inner voice”, nourished by himself, seeking security that doesn’t exist. However considered, the Man of the Mancha had a vision. He studied and lived it.

Guevara said that thinking freely and creatively is a “close dialectical unity” between individuals and the vision. There has to be vision, direction and leadership. It cannot be otherwise because of the role of expectations, generated by social practises. In a dehumanizing world, they must be transformed.

The role of expectations, rooted in practises, is well known in the philosophy of science. But it is ignored in political philosophy, especially liberal political philosophy, but also anarchism, even sometimes in academic Marxism.

It means reliance upon dreams, imagination, creativity, can only ever be conservative if there is no vision, no direction, no leadership. Cuba has had a vision, more urgent now than ever. The Henry Reeves Brigade is just part.

Ana Belén Montes had that vision.^[iii] She’s in jail, in the US, under harsh conditions. Please sign petition here.

Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014).

This article was originally published by CounterPunch.

Notes

[i] http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2017/05/27/organizacion-mundial-de-la-salud-entrega-importante-premio-a-brigada-henry-reeve/#.Wi-ToVWnHIV

[ii] Inter-American Economics and Social Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) at Punta del Este, Uruguay.

[iii] http://www.prolibertad.org/ana-belen-montes. For more information, write to the [email protected] or [email protected]