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Willy Sutton once said he robbed banks because “(t)hat’s where the money is.”

For GOP lawmakers, the money is in the pockets of ordinary Americans to be picked for corporate predators and super-rich households.

Their tax cut scheme is a colossal heist, grand theft, designed solely to enrich America’s privileged class further at the public’s expense.

On December 11, the US Treasury published a one-page (470-word) “white paper” document on the Senate GOP plan – entirely politicized, lacking credibility, an analysis in name only using fake math, falsified mumbo jumbo to fit policy, a disgraceful exercise in deception.

Economist Stephen Stanley bashed it, saying

“(y)ou have to view this as a political document, not an economic document. The work should be viewed as advocacy rather than academic work.”

“Treasury’s statement that the tax legislation would not increase the federal government’s deficits and debt load are not credible,” economist Mark Zandi explained.

According to Tax Policy Center director Mark Mazur, Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis reports are usually around 20 – 30 pages, produced by numerous staff economists.

Weeks earlier, Goldman Sachs alum/Treasury Secretary Mnuchin lied, claiming

“(w)e believe there will be $2 trillion of additional growth. So under our plan, we believe this will cut the deficit by $1 trillion and that’s what we’re focused on.”

Fact: Tax cuts have nothing to do with stimulating economic growth and jobs creation, everything to do with increasing wealth for large investors, along with providing corporate predators with more funding for stock buybacks and acquisitions to grow larger and more dominant than already.

Fact: The GOP tax cut heist is also about continuing the transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to its privileged class, along with destroying social justice to help pay for it.

Fact: The plan will hugely increase the deficit, not reduce it. Mnuchin lied claiming otherwise.

Tax March advocates for equitable tax reform. In response to Mnuchin’s one-page document, it tweeted:

“Turns out, the bill would be great for the economy…in a world where unicorns exist, pigs fly, and Trump has released his tax returns.”

Tax attorney David Brockway said “I don’t believe in magic.” Business Economics and Public Policy Professor Kent Smetters believes the Treasury’s view of economic growth from the Senate plan is “aspirational in nature,” unrelated to factual analysis.

Differences between House and Senate measures remain unresolved so far – since passage of the Senate bill on December 2.

Asked how discussions are going, Senator John Thune said

“I don’t think you can say at this point anything is really nailed down,” adding he’s hopeful gaps will be narrowed.

Enactment before yearend or early next year seems virtually certain – testimony to governance of, by and for privileged Americans exclusively.

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

The Trump administration is preparing a frontal assault on social programs for the poorest Americans, according to a report published Monday by the Politicoweb site. This would involve “the most sweeping changes to federal safety net programs in a generation, using legislation and executive actions to target recipients of food stamps, Medicaid and housing benefits,” the web site said.

“The White House is quietly preparing a sweeping executive order that would mandate a top-to-bottom review of the federal programs on which millions of poor Americans rely,” Politico reported. “And GOP lawmakers are in the early stages of crafting legislation that could make it more difficult to qualify for those programs.”

The executive order could be issued as soon as next month. It amounts to a political conspiracy against the poorest sections of the working class involving the White House, the congressional leadership and dozens of state governments, working together to slash spending on programs for the poor through a combination of direct benefit cuts, tightened eligibility standards and mistreatment of vulnerable families to drive as many as possible out of programs on which they now depend.

The Department of Agriculture said last week it would give states greater power to limit eligibility for food stamps, which it administers, by imposing drug testing or tighter work requirements, even though the vast majority of families receiving food stamp benefits have at least one working adult.

Congressional Republican leaders indicated that the attack on domestic social spending would not be limited to means-tested programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, which are available only to low-income families. The broadest entitlement programs, which provide services to all families, regardless of income, will also be targeted.

House Speaker Paul Ryan told a radio interview last week,

“We’re going to have to get back next year to entitlement programs.”

He singled out health care, pledging not only to repeal Obamacare, an effort that failed earlier this year in the Senate, but to privatize Medicare, which he denounced as “government-run health care.”

Voicing the claim endlessly repeated by Republicans that it hurts poor families to provide them access to adequate medical care or put food on the table for their children, Ryan declared,

“We have a welfare system that’s basically trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work.”

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue sounded the same theme, calling for further cutbacks in the food stamp program, officially titled the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

“SNAP was created to provide people with the help they need to feed themselves and their families, but it was not intended to be a permanent lifestyle,” Perdue said.

The measures being prepared by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, behind the backs of the American people, would effectively make the poorest sections of the working class pay for the massive tax cut for the wealthy that is now in the final stages of congressional passage.

Both the House and Senate have named members to participate in a special conference that will combine the different versions of a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich that passed the House in November and the Senate last week. All indications are that far from representing a “compromise,” the conference will choose the most reactionary measures from the House and Senate versions to produce a final bill that is substantially worse than either of the separate bills.

Last Thursday, 54 House Republicans sent a letter to the House Republican leadership demanding that they stand firm on the House plan for a full repeal of the estate tax—paid by only 5,500 super-wealthy families—rather than accept the Senate plan, which retains the tax but raises the minimum size of the estate to which it would apply from $22 million to $44 million.

Similarly, Senate Republicans are demanding that the conference committee accept the Senate version’s elimination of the Obamacare tax penalty for those who do not buy health insurance, an action that would destabilize the individual insurance market and leave another 13 million people without health coverage.

The essence of the bill, certain to be retained in whatever version is ultimately adopted, is the lowering of taxes on the earnings of capitalists and the raising of taxes on the earnings of workers. It is class legislation of the most flagrant and reactionary kind. As an analysis of the bill in the New York Timesexplained, “for the first time since the United States adopted an income tax, a higher rate would be applied to employee wages and salaries than to income earned by proprietors, partnerships and closely held corporations.”

Under these conditions, the Democratic Party has chosen to focus not on the historic nature of the attack on working people, but on a series of political scandals, first involving claims of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and now involving a hunt for alleged sexual predators in the entertainment industry, the media and politics, which the Democrats hope will undermine Trump.

Four Democratic senators, including Bernie Sanders, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination in 2016, and Kirsten Gillibrand, who is spearheading the sexual misconduct purge, have called for Trump to resign the presidency because of allegations of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women, involving incidents spread out over three decades.

It is remarkable that the Democrats do not demand that Trump resign because of the crimes his administration has committed against millions of working people—attacking social programs, slashing enforcement of safety and environmental regulations, rounding up immigrants and revoking DACA protection for nearly 1 million immigrants brought here as children—let alone Trump’s threatening the world with nuclear war in North Korea.

Their focus is entirely on Trump’s personal conduct before he entered the White House, not on the policies being pursued by his administration. That is because the Democrats largely support these policies and would do so openly and enthusiastically if the same measures were being carried out by a President Hillary Clinton.

Similarly, the Democratic campaign in the Senate race in Alabama, where voters go to the polls today, is focused entirely on allegations of sexual misconduct against the Republican candidate Roy Moore, dating back as much as 40 years, while the Democrats are silent on the appalling social conditions created by decades of Republican rule in the southern state.

According to a United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, who visited the state last week, Alabama has the worst poverty of any area in the developed world, including the prevalence of diseases like hookworm, normally found only in the poorest areas of sub-Saharan Africa. The UN official, Philip Alston, toured a rural community where “raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits,” he told an interviewer.

The United States has 41 million people living below the official poverty line and the second-highest poverty rate in the developed world—below only the state of Israel, with its large super-oppressed Palestinian population.

These issues are of no concern to the Democratic Party, which shares responsibility for the devastating conditions facing the working class, made significantly worse by eight years of right-wing policies under the Obama administration.

This article was first published by GR in June 2017.

Three-term Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, has proposed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria as well as to any organization working directly with them. Equally important, it would prohibit U.S. military sales and other forms of military cooperation with other countries that provide arms or financing to those terrorists and their collaborators.

Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” challenges for the first time in Congress a U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Syrian civil war that should have set off alarm bells long ago: in 2012-13 the Obama administration helped its Sunni allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provide arms to Syrian and non-Syrian armed groups to force President Bashar al-Assad out of power. And in 2013 the administration began to provide arms to what the CIA judged to be “relatively moderate” anti-Assad groups—meaning they incorporated various degrees of Islamic extremism.

That policy, ostensibly aimed at helping replace the Assad regime with a more democratic alternative, has actually helped build up al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise al Nusra Front into the dominant threat to Assad.

The supporters of this arms-supply policy believe it is necessary as pushback against Iranian influence in Syria. But that argument skirts the real issue raised by the policy’s history. The Obama administration’s Syria policy effectively sold out the U.S. interest that was supposed to be the touchstone of the “Global War on Terrorism”—the eradication of al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates. The United States has instead subordinated that U.S. interest in counter-terrorism to the interests of its Sunni allies. In doing so it has helped create a new terrorist threat in the heart of the Middle East.

The policy of arming military groups committed to overthrowing the government of President Bashar al-Assad began in September 2011, when President Barack Obama was pressed by his Sunni allies—Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar—to supply heavy weapons to a military opposition to Assad they were determined to establish. Turkey and the Gulf regimes wanted the United States to provide anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels, according to a former Obama Administration official involved in Middle East issues.

Obama refused to provide arms to the opposition, but he agreed to provide covert U.S. logistical help in carrying out a campaign of military assistance to arm opposition groups. CIA involvement in the arming of anti-Assad forces began with arranging for the shipment of weapons from the stocks of the Gaddafi regime that had been stored in Benghazi. CIA-controlled firms shipped the weapons from the military port of Benghazi to two small ports in Syria using former U.S. military personnel to manage the logistics, as investigative reporter Sy Hersh detailed in 2014. The funding for the program came mainly from the Saudis.

A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per shipment. Even if the CIA had organized only one shipment per month, the arms shipments would have totaled 2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria from October 2011 through August 2012. More likely it was a multiple of that figure.

The CIA’s covert arms shipments from Libya came to an abrupt halt in September 2012 when Libyan militants attacked and burned the embassy annex in Benghazi that had been used to support the operation. By then, however, a much larger channel for arming anti-government forces was opening up. The CIA put the Saudis in touch with a senior Croatian official who had offered to sell large quantities of arms left over from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. And the CIA helped them shop for weapons from arms dealers and governments in several other former Soviet bloc countries.

Flush with weapons acquired from both the CIA Libya program and from the Croatians, the Saudis and Qataris dramatically increased the number of flights by military cargo planes to Turkey in December 2012 and continued that intensive pace for the next two and a half months. The New York Times reported a total 160 such flights through mid-March 2013. The most common cargo plane in use in the Gulf, the Ilyushin IL-76, can carry roughly 50 tons of cargo on a flight, which would indicate that as much as 8,000 tons of weapons poured across the Turkish border into Syria just in late 2012 and in 2013.

One U.S. official called the new level of arms deliveries to Syrian rebels a “cataract of weaponry.” And a year-long investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed that the Saudis were intent on building up a powerful conventional army in Syria. The “end-use certificate” for weapons purchased from an arms company in Belgrade, Serbia, in May 2013 includes 500 Soviet-designed PG-7VR rocket launchers that can penetrate even heavily-armored tanks, along with two million rounds; 50 Konkurs anti-tank missile launchers and 500 missiles, 50 anti-aircraft guns mounted on armored vehicles, 10,000 fragmentation rounds for OG-7 rocket launchers capable of piercing heavy body armor; four truck-mounted BM-21 GRAD multiple rocket launchers, each of which fires 40 rockets at a time with a range of 12 to 19 miles, along with 20,000 GRAD rockets.

The end user document for another Saudi order from the same Serbian company listed 300 tanks, 2,000 RPG launchers, and 16,500 other rocket launchers, one million rounds for ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns, and 315 million cartridges for various other guns.

Those two purchases were only a fraction of the totality of the arms obtained by the Saudis over the next few years from eight Balkan nations. Investigators found that the Saudis made their biggest arms deals with former Soviet bloc states in 2015, and that the weapons included many that had just come off factory production lines. Nearly 40 percent of the arms the Saudis purchased from those countries, moreover, still had not been delivered by early 2017. So the Saudis had already contracted for enough weaponry to keep a large-scale conventional war in Syria going for several more years.

By far the most consequential single Saudi arms purchase was not from the Balkans, however, but from the United States. It was the December 2013 U.S. sale of 15,000 TOW anti-tank missiles to the Saudis at a cost of about $1 billion—the result of Obama’s decision earlier that year to reverse his ban on lethal assistance to anti-Assad armed groups. The Saudis had agreed, moreover, that those anti-tank missiles would be doled out to Syrian groups only at U.S. discretion. The TOW missiles began to arrive in Syria in 2014 and soon had a major impact on the military balance.

This flood of weapons into Syria, along with the entry of 20,000 foreign fighters into the country—primarily through Turkey—largely defined the nature of the conflict. These armaments helped make al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al Nusra Front (now renamed Tahrir al-Sham or Levant Liberation Organization) and its close allies by far the most powerful anti-Assad forces in Syria—and gave rise to the Islamic State.

By late 2012, it became clear to U.S. officials that the largest share of the arms that began flowing into Syria early in the year were going to the rapidly growing al Qaeda presence in the country. In October 2012, U.S. officials acknowledged off the record for the first time to the New York Times that  “most” of the arms that had been shipped to armed opposition groups in Syria with U.S. logistical assistance during the previous year had gone to “hardline Islamic jihadists”— obviously meaning al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al Nusra.

Al Nusra Front and its allies became the main recipients of the weapons because the Saudis, Turks, and Qataris wanted the arms to go to the military units that were most successful in attacking government targets. And by the summer of 2012, al Nusra Front, buttressed by the thousands of foreign jihadists pouring into the country across the Turkish border, was already taking the lead in attacks on the Syrian government in coordination with “Free Syrian Army” brigades.

In November and December 2012, al Nusra Front began establishing formal “joint operations rooms” with those calling themselves “Free Syrian Army” on several battlefronts, as Charles Lister chronicles in his book The Syrian Jihad. One such commander favored by Washington was Col. Abdul Jabbar al-Oqaidi, a former Syrian army officer who headed something called the Aleppo Revolutionary Military Council. Ambassador Robert Ford, who continued to hold that position even after he had been withdrawn from Syria, publicly visited Oqaidi in May 2013 to express U.S. support for him and the FSA.

But Oqaidi and his troops were junior partners in a coalition in Aleppo in which al Nusra was by far the strongest element. That reality is clearly reflected in a video in which Oqaidi describes his good relations with officials of the “Islamic State” and is shown joining the main jihadist commander in the Aleppo region celebrating the capture of the Syrian government’s Menagh Air Base in September 2013.

By early 2013, in fact, the “Free Syrian Army,” which had never actually been a military organization with any troops, had ceased to have any real significance in the Syria conflict. New anti-Assad armed groups had stopped using the name even as a “brand” to identify themselves, as a leading specialist on the conflict observed.

So, when weapons from Turkey arrived at the various battlefronts, it was understood by all the non-jihadist groups that they would be shared with al Nusra Front and its close allies. A report by McClatchy in early 2013, on a town in north central Syria, showed how the military arrangements between al Nusra and those brigades calling themselves “Free Syrian Army” governed the distribution of weapons. One of those units, the Victory Brigade, had participated in a “joint operations room” with al Qaeda’s most important military ally, Ahrar al Sham, in a successful attack on a strategic town a few weeks earlier. A visiting reporter watched that brigade and Ahrar al Sham show off new sophisticated weapons that included Russian-made RPG27 shoulder-fired rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades and RG6 grenade launchers.

When asked if the Victory Brigade had shared its new weapons with Ahrar al Sham, the latter’s spokesman responded,

“Of course they share their weapons with us. We fight together.”

Turkey and Qatar consciously chose al Qaeda and its closest ally, Ahrar al Sham, as the recipients of weapons systems. In late 2013 and early 2014, several truckloads of arms bound for the province of Hatay, just south of the Turkish border, were intercepted by Turkish police. They had Turkish intelligence personnel on board, according to later Turkish police court testimony. The province was controlled by Ahrar al Sham. In fact Turkey soon began to treat Ahrar al Sham as its primary client in Syria, according to Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

A Qatari intelligence operative who had been involved in shipping arms to extremist groups in Libya was a key figure in directing the flow of arms from Turkey into Syria. An Arab intelligence source familiar with the discussions among the external suppliers near the Syrian border in Turkey during those years told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius that when one of the participants warned that the outside powers were building up the jihadists while the non-Islamist groups were withering away, the Qatari operative responded, “I will send weapons to al Qaeda if it will help.”

The Qataris did funnel arms to both al Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham, according to a Middle Eastern diplomatic source. The Obama administration’s National Security Council staff proposed in 2013 that the United States signal U.S. displeasure with Qatar over its arming of extremists in both Syria and Libya by withdrawing a squadron of fighter planes from the U.S. airbase at al-Udeid, Qatar. The Pentagon vetoed that mild form of pressure, however, to protect its access to its base in Qatar.

President Obama himself confronted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over his government’s support for the jihadists at a private White House dinner in May 2013, as recounted by Hersh.

“We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,” he quotes Obama as saying to Erdogan.

The administration addressed Turkey’s cooperation with the al Nusra publicly, however, only fleetingly in late 2014. Shortly after leaving Ankara, Francis Ricciardone, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2011 through mid-2014, told The Daily Telegraph  of London that Turkey had “worked with groups, frankly, for a period, including al Nusra.”

The closest Washington came to a public reprimand of its allies over the arming of terrorists in Syria was when Vice President Joe Biden criticized their role in October 2014. In impromptu remarks at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Biden complained that “our biggest problem is our allies.” The forces they had supplied with arms, he said, were “al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Biden quickly apologized for the remarks, explaining that he didn’t mean that U.S. allies had deliberately helped the jihadists. But Ambassador Ford confirmed his complaint, telling BBC,

“What Biden said about the allies aggravating the problem of extremism is true.”

In June 2013 Obama approved the first direct U.S. lethal military aid to rebel brigades that had been vetted by the CIA. By spring 2014, the U.S.-made BGM-71E anti-tank missiles from the 15,000 transferred to the Saudis began to appear in the hands of selected anti-Assad groups. But the CIA imposed the condition that the group receiving them would not cooperate with the al Nusra Front or its allies.

That condition implied that Washington was supplying military groups that were strong enough to maintain their independence from al Nusra Front. But the groups on the CIA’s list of vetted “relatively moderate” armed groups were all highly vulnerable to takeover by the al Qaeda affiliate. In November 2014, al Nusra Front troops struck the two strongest CIA-supported armed groups, Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front on successive days and seized their heavy weapons, including both TOW anti-tank missiles and GRAD rockets.

In early March 2015, the Harakat Hazm Aleppo branch dissolved itself, and al Nusra Front promptly showed off photos of the TOW missiles and other equipment they had captured from it. And in March 2016, al Nusra Front troops attacked the headquarters of the 13th Division in northwestern Idlib province and seized all of its TOW missiles. Later that month, al Nusra Front released a video of its troops using the TOW missiles it had captured.

But that wasn’t the only way for al Nusra Front to benefit from the CIA’s largesse. Along with its close ally Ahrar al Sham, the terrorist organization began planning for a campaign to take complete control of Idlib province in the winter of 2014-15. Abandoning any pretense of distance from al Qaeda, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar worked with al Nusra on the creation of a new military formation for Idlib called the “Army of Conquest,” consisting of the al Qaeda affiliate and its closest allies. Saudi Arabia and Qatar provided more weapons for the campaign, while Turkey facilitated their passage. On March 28, just four days after launching the campaign, the Army of Conquest successfully gained control of Idlib City.

The non-jihadist armed groups getting advanced weapons from the CIA assistance were not part of the initial assault on Idlib City. After the capture of Idlib the U.S.-led operations room for Syria in southern Turkey signaled to the CIA-supported groups in Idlib that they could now participate in the campaign to consolidate control over the rest of the province. According to Lister, the British researcher on jihadists in Syria who maintains contacts with both jihadist and other armed groups, recipients of CIA weapons, such as the Fursan al haq brigade and Division 13, did join the Idlib campaign alongside al Nusra Front without any move by the CIA to cut them off.

As the Idlib offensive began, the CIA-supported groups were getting TOW missiles in larger numbers, and they now used them with great effectiveness against the Syrian army tanks. That was the beginning of a new phase of the war, in which U.S. policy was to support an alliance between “relatively moderate” groups and the al Nusra Front.

The new alliance was carried over to Aleppo, where jihadist groups close to Nusra Front formed a new command called Fateh Halab (“Aleppo Conquest”) with nine armed groups in Aleppo province which were getting CIA assistance. The CIA-supported groups could claim that they weren’t cooperating with al Nusra Front because the al Qaeda franchise was not officially on the list of participants in the command. But as the report on the new command clearly implied, this was merely a way of allowing the CIA to continue providing weapons to its clients, despite their de facto alliance with al Qaeda.

The significance of all this is clear: by helping its Sunni allies provide weapons to al Nusra Front and its allies and by funneling into the war zone sophisticated weapons that were bound to fall into al Nusra hands or strengthen their overall military position, U.S. policy has been largely responsible for having extended al Qaeda’s power across a significant part of Syrian territory. The CIA and the Pentagon appear to be ready to tolerate such a betrayal of America’s stated counter-terrorism mission. Unless either Congress or the White House confronts that betrayal explicitly, as Tulsi Gabbard’s legislation would force them to do, U.S. policy will continue to be complicit in the consolidation of power by al Qaeda in Syria, even if the Islamic State is defeated there.

Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including   Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014).

Featured image: Freedom House / CC-BY-2.0

This article was first published by GR in August 2017.

From Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the US has had a military presence across the world, from almost day one of its independence. For those who have ever wanted a clearer picture of the true reach of the United States military – both historically and currently – but shied away due to the sheer volume of research required to find an answer, The Anti Media points out that a crew at the Independent just made things a whole lot simpler.

Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies professor from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team created an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014.

To avoid confusion, indy100 laid out its prerequisites for what constitutes an invasion:

“Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions.”

But indy100 didn’t stop there. To put all that history into context, using data from the Department of Defense (DOD), the team also put together a map to display all the countries in which nearly 200,000 active members of the U.S. military are now stationed.

For more details, click on the country:

The three countries with the biggest U.S. presence, according to DOD numbers, are Japan at 39,623, Germany at 34,399 and South Korea at 23,297.

The publication of the maps comes just after President Donald Trump announced the military would not be pulling out of its 16-year engagement in Afghanistan – a reversal of his previous stance – and that the U.S. would seek stronger ties with India to combat terrorism in South and Central Asia.

Former Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh was assassinated outside of the capital of Sana’a on December 4 just days after he had ordered his supporters to refuse any form of cooperation with the Ansurallah (Houthis) movement.

In the immediate aftermath of the killing, Ansurallah leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi went on national television to describe a plot in which Saleh was said to have been a part of aimed at facilitating the much coveted dominance of Saudi Arabia over the people of Yemen. Saleh, who was pressured into retirement during mass demonstrations in the early months of 2011, had entered into an alliance with the Ansurallah against the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) which has carried out a devastating air and ground campaign in Yemen since March 2015.

The following day on December 5, tens of thousands of supporters of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi participated in demonstrations in the capital of Sana’a which celebrated what they said was the defeat of a plot to undermine the defense of the country from United States backed Saudi attempts to take control of Yemen. Ansurallah leaders said the action of switching sides by Saleh was tantamount to treason against the country.

On December 6, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a statement demanding that the blockade of key Yemeni ports be lifted in light of the horrendous humanitarian crisis inside the region’s most impoverished state. Trump claimed that he had directed administration officials to contact their Saudi Arabian counterparts to urge them to allow much needed food, medicines and supplies into the country.

Nonetheless, not one word was said about reigning in the U.S.-manufactured fighter jets and ordnances laying waste to cities, towns and villages throughout the country. The U.S. provides intelligence coordinates which guide the bombing operations along with refueling technology. Both the previous administration of President Barack Obama and his successor Trump have recognized the ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is under the protection of Saudi Arabia, as the de facto leader of Yemen. Hadi has established an alternative regime in the south of the country.

The closest ally of Washington behind Israel is undoubtedly Saudi Arabia. Until the diplomatic posture of the U.S. shifts, there will be ongoing imperialist militarism targeting the enemies of Tel Aviv and Riyadh causing destabilization, displacements and deaths throughout the region.

Air Strikes Escalate After Saleh Assassination

After the killing of former President Saleh, the GCC coalition began another round of bomb attacks in several areas in Yemen. Saleh was being cultivated by Saudi Arabia as a potential partner in containing the Ansurallah which controls the capital of Sana’s and other areas of the country.

Ahmed Ali, the son of Saleh, who is a former commander of the Republican Guard now living in exile in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), vowed to avenge his father’s death. The leader of the UAE, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan, visited Ali and was photographed sitting with him during a meeting.

Reports indicate that Ali may return to Yemen in order to take control of Saleh’s forces amid indications that some within their ranks are defecting to the Ansurallah. On December 5, Saleh supporters revealed that his nephew, Tareq, who is also a commander, along with the leader of his party, the General People’s Congress, Aref Zouka, had also been assassinated.

Source: Abayomi Azikiwe

According to the al-Masirah television network on December 6, GCC fighter jets carried out bombing operations at Saleh’s residence and other locations occupied by family members now controlled by the Ansurallah. Aerial bombardments took place in Northern provinces including Ta’izz, Hajjah, Midi and Sa’ada.

In other bombing attacks at least 23 people died as a direct result of GCC airstrikes in the Sa’ada Province located in the northwest region of Yemen. The al-Masirah television network told its viewers on December 8 that as many as 15 people died in other aerial assaults in Sha’ban District in the province’s Razeh City. Also an additional 8 people were killed in bombings that targeted the Bani Ma’adh District in the town of Sahar, said al-Masirah.

An article published by Press TV on December 9 noted that media outlets were subjected to aerial attacks as well, noting that:

“The Saudi-led coalition waging war on Yemen has attacked the headquarters of the Yemen al-Youm TV channel in the capital, Sana’a, killing four people and injuring five others. Yemen’s al-Masirah television network reported that in addition to the casualties, the Friday Saudi air raids caused serious damage to the building of the TV station and its equipment.”

This same article goes on to emphasize:

“The building of the Yemen al-Youm TV channel had been targeted twice by Saudi jets over the last week. The TV station was affiliated with the General People’s Congress (GPC) of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was killed on Monday.”

December 11 was a day of renewed bombings when some 14 people were said to have been killed. Al-Masirah television reported on the attacks in the Hamli neighborhood in Moze district located in the southwest province of Ta’izz resulted in the deaths of six people. Other airstrikes in Kataf district in the northwestern province of Sa’ada left eight dead.

Overall since the bombing and ground operations initiated by the U.S.-backed GCC began in March 2015, estimates are that over 13,000 people have been killed. Tens of thousands of others have been wounded and injured. Millions within the country have been driven from their homes both internally and outside Yemen.

A cholera epidemic impacting many children has been described as the worst of such outbreaks in the world. This widespread presence of cholera is a result of the lack of clean drinking water and adequate health facilities which have been targeted by the U.S.-backed forces in the GCC and their allies on the ground.

Humanitarian Crisis Will Not Improve until Peace is Achieved

The war against the people of Yemen has been largely hidden from the American public as the corporate and government-controlled media refuses to cover the conflagration in an objective manner. Numerous reports on the cholera epidemic, the lack of food and water does not mention the U.S.-supported GCC bombing operations as the underlying causes of the crisis.

Although Relief Web reported that some 7 million people have been reached in recent weeks with assistance and that the cholera epidemic is being addressed, the crisis impacting the country’s 22 million residents is by no means over. Without being specific as it relates to actual culprits, a statement from the organization’s coordinator for humanitarian assistance, Jamie McGoldrick, on December 11 still paints a grim picture of the conditions on the ground.

McGoldrick stressed in an entry on the site of Relief Web that:

“The violence that engulfed Sana’a city over the last weeks has subsided, but the suffering continues. Famine still threatens millions; preventable diseases continually strike a weakened population in all parts of Yemen. The continuing blockade of ports is limiting supplies of fuel, food and medicines; dramatically increasing the number of vulnerable people who need help. The priority for humanitarian organizations is to resume life-saving operations that were scaled back because of insecurity. The lives of millions of people, including 8.4 million Yemenis who are a step away from famine, hinge on our ability to continue our operations and to provide health, safe water, food, shelter and nutrition support. This includes assistance to the thousands that were impacted by the recent violence in Sana’a city and other parts of Yemen.”

Consequently, the support for the war being waged in Yemen must be halted in order for genuine stability to occur in the nation. Nonetheless, this goal is unlikely to be realized as long as the status-quo related to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East remains intact.

Trump’s visit earlier this year to Saudi Arabia was largely centered-around a major multi-billion dollar arms deal. Additional indications were that increased hostility towards the Islamic Republic of Iran would continue to characterize Washington’s foreign policy in the region.

The situation in Yemen is often framed as a proxy war between Riyadh and Tehran due to the political support provided to the Ansurallah by the Islamic Republic. Yet the Trump administration is stoking the crisis by providing military technology and diplomatic cover to Saudi Arabia at the expense of the Yemeni people.

First published by GR on September 16, 2017

Introduction

Clearly the US has escalated the pivotal role of the military in the making of foreign and, by extension, domestic policy. The rise of ‘the Generals’ to strategic positions in the Trump regime is evident, deepening its role as a highly autonomous force determining US strategic policy agendas.

In this paper we will discuss the advantages that the military elite accumulate from the war agenda and the reasons why ‘the Generals’ have been able to impose their definition of international realities.

We will discuss the military’s ascendancy over Trump’s civilian regime as a result of the relentless degradation of his presidency by his political opposition.

The Prelude to Militarization: Obama’s Multi-War Strategy and Its Aftermath

The central role of the military in deciding US foreign policy has its roots in the strategic decisions taken during the Obama-Clinton Presidency. Several policies were decisive in the rise of unprecedented military-political power.

1. The massive increase of US troops in Afghanistan and their subsequent failures and retreat weakened the Obama-Clinton regime and increased animosity between the military and the Obama’s Administration. As a result of his failures, Obama downgraded the military and weakened Presidential authority.

2. The massive US-led bombing and destruction of Libya, the overthrow of the Gadhafi government and the failure of the Obama-Clinton administration to impose a puppet regime, underlined the limitations of US air power and the ineffectiveness of US political-military intervention. The Presidency blundered in its foreign policy in North Africa and demonstrated its military ineptness.

3. The invasion of Syria by US-funded mercenaries and terrorists committed the US to an unreliable ally in a losing war. This led to a reduction in the military budget and encouraged the Generals to view their direct control of overseas wars and foreign policy as the only guarantee of their positions.

4. The US military intervention in Iraq was only a secondary contributing factor in the defeat of ISIS; the major actors and beneficiaries were Iran and the allied Iraqi Shia militias.

5. The Obama-Clinton engineered coup and power grab in the Ukraine brought a corrupt incompetent military junta to power in Kiev and provoked the secession of the Crimea (to Russia) and Eastern Ukraine (allied with Russia). The Generals were sidelined and found that they had tied themselves to Ukrainian kleptocrats while dangerously increasing political tensions with Russia. The Obama regime dictated economic sanctions against Moscow, designed to compensate for their ignominious military-political failures.

The Obama-Clinton legacy facing Trump was built around a three-legged stool: an international order based on military aggression and confrontation with Russia; a ‘pivot to Asia’ defined as the military encirclement and economic isolation of China – via bellicose threats and economic sanctions against North Korea; and the use of the military as the praetorian guards of free trade agreements in Asia excluding China.

The Obama ‘legacy’ consists of an international order of globalized capital and multiple wars. The continuity of Obama’s ‘glorious legacy’ initially depended on the election of Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, for its part, promised to dismantle or drastically revise the Obama Doctrine of an international order based on multiple wars, neo-colonial ‘nation’ building and free trade. A furious Obama ‘informed’ (threatened) the newly-elected President Trump that he would face the combined hostility of the entire State apparatus, Wall Street and the mass media if he proceeded to fulfill his election promises of economic nationalism and thus undermine the US-centered global order.

Trump’s bid to shift from Obama’s sanctions and military confrontation to economic reconciliation with Russia was countered by a hornet’s nest of accusations about a Trump-Russian electoral conspiracy, darkly hinting at treason and show trials against his close allies and even family members.

The concoction of a Trump-Russia plot was only the first step toward a total war on the new president, but it succeeded in undermining Trump’s economic nationalist agenda and his efforts to change Obama’s global order.

Trump Under Obama’s International Order

After only 8 months in office President Trump helplessly gave into the firings, resignations and humiliation of each and every one of his civilian appointees, especially those who were committed to reverse Obama’s ‘international order’.

Trump was elected to replace wars, sanctions and interventions with economic deals beneficial to the American working and middle class. This would include withdrawing the military from its long-term commitments to budget-busting ‘nation-building’ (occupation) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other Obama-designated endless war zones.

Trump’s military priorities were supposed to focus on strengthening domestic frontiers and overseas markets. He started by demanding that NATO partners pay for their own military defense responsibilities. Obama’s globalists in both political parties were aghast that the US might lose it overwhelming control of NATO; they united and moved immediately to strip Trump of his economic nationalist allies and their programs.

Trump quickly capitulated and fell into line with Obama’s international order, except for one proviso – he would select the Cabinet to implement the old/new international order.

A hamstrung Trump chose a military cohort of Generals, led by General James Mattis (famously nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’) as Defense Secretary.

The Generals effectively took over the Presidency. Trump abdicated his responsibilities as President.

General Mattis: The Militarization of America

General Mattis took up the Obama legacy of global militarization and added his own nuances, including the ‘psychological-warfare’ embedded in Trump’s emotional ejaculations on ‘Twitter’.

The ‘Mattis Doctrine’ combined high-risk threats with aggressive provocations, bringing the US (and the world) to the brink of nuclear war.

General Mattis has adopted the targets and fields of operations, defined by the previous Obama administration as it has sought to re-enforce the existing imperialist international order.

The junta’s policies relied on provocations and threats against Russia, with expanded economic sanctions. Mattis threw more fuel on the US mass media’s already hysterical anti-Russian bonfire. The General promoted a strategy of low intensity diplomatic thuggery, including the unprecedented seizure and invasion of Russian diplomatic offices and the short-notice expulsion of diplomats and consular staff.

These military threats and acts of diplomatic intimidation signified that the Generals’ Administration under the Puppet President Trump was ready to sunder diplomatic relations with a major world nuclear power and indeed push the world to direct nuclear confrontation.

What Mattis seeks in these mad fits of aggression is nothing less than capitulation on the part of the Russian government regarding long held US military objectives – namely the partition of Syria (which started under Obama), harsh starvation sanctions on North Korea (which began under Clinton) and the disarmament of Iran (Tel Aviv’s main goal) in preparation for its dismemberment.

The Mattis junta occupying the Trump White House heightened its threats against a North Korea, which (in Vladimir Putin’s words) ‘would rather eat grass than disarm’. The US mass media-military megaphones portrayed the North Korean victims of US sanctions and provocations as an ‘existential’ threat to the US mainland.

Sanctions have intensified. The stationing of nuclear weapons on South Korea is being pushed. Massive joint military exercises are planned and ongoing in the air, sea and land around North Korea. Mattis twisted Chinese arms (mainly business comprador-linked bureaucrats) and secured their UN Security Council vote on increased sanctions. Russia joined the Mattis-led anti-Pyongyang chorus, even as Putin warned of sanctions ineffectiveness! (As if General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis would ever take Putin’s advice seriously, especially after Russia voted for the sanctions!)

Mattis further militarized the Persian Gulf, following Obama’s policy of partial sanctions and bellicose provocation against Iran.

When he worked for Obama, Mattis increased US arms shipments to the US’s Syrian terrorists and Ukrainian puppets, ensuring the US would be able to scuttle any ‘negotiated settlements’.

Militarization: An Evaluation

Trump’s resort to ‘his Generals’ is supposed to counter any attacks from members of his own party and Congressional Democrats about his foreign policy. Trump’s appointment of ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, a notorious Russophobe and warmonger, has somewhat pacified the opposition in Congress and undercut any ‘finding’ of an election conspiracy between Trump and Moscow dug up by the Special Investigator Robert Mueller. Trump’s maintains a role as nominal President by adapting to what Obama warned him was ‘their international order’ – now directed by an unelected military junta composed of Obama holdovers!

Special Investigator Robert Mueller

The Generals provide a veneer of legitimacy to the Trump regime (especially for the warmongering Obama Democrats and the mass media). However, handing presidential powers over to ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis and his cohort will come with a heavy price.

While the military junta may protect Trump’s foreign policy flank, it does not lessen the attacks on his domestic agenda. Moreover, Trump’s proposed budget compromise with the Democrats has enraged his own Party’s leaders.

In sum, under a weakened President Trump, the militarization of the White House benefits the military junta and enlarges their power. The ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis program has had mixed results, at least in its initial phase: The junta’s threats to launch a pre-emptive (possibly nuclear) war against North Korea have strengthened Pyongyang’s commitment to develop and refine its long and medium range ballistic missile capability and nuclear weapons.  Brinksmanship failed to intimidate North Korea. Mattis cannot impose the Clinton-Bush-Obama doctrine of disarming countries (like Libya and Iraq) of their advanced defensive weapons systems as a prelude to a US ‘regime change’ invasion.

Any US attack against North Korea will lead to massive retaliatory strikes costing tens of thousands of US military lives and will kill and maim millions of civilians in South Korea and Japan.

At most, ‘Mad Dog’ managed to intimidate Chinese and Russian officials (and their export business billionaire buddies) to agree to more economic sanctions against North Korea. Mattis and his allies in the UN and White House, the loony Nikki Haley and a miniaturized President Trump, may bellow war – yet they cannot apply the so-called ‘military option’ without threatening the US military forces stationed throughout the Asia Pacific region.

The Mad Dog Mattis assault on the Russian embassy did not materially weaken Russia, but it has revealed the uselessness of Moscow’s conciliatory diplomacy toward their so-called ‘partners’ in the Trump regime.

The end-result might lead to a formal break in diplomatic ties, which would increase the danger of a military confrontation and a global nuclear holocaust.

The military junta is pressuring China against North Korea with the goal of isolating the ruling regime in Pyongyang and increasing the US military encirclement of Beijing. Mad Dog has partially succeeded in turning China against North Korea while securing its advanced THAAD anti-missile installations in South Korea, which will be directed against Beijing. These are Mattis’ short-term gains over the excessively pliant Chinese bureaucrats. However, if Mad Dog intensifies direct military threats against China, Beijing can retaliate by dumping tens of billions of US Treasury notes, cutting trade ties, sowing chaos in the US economy and setting Wall Street against the Pentagon.

Mad Dog’s military build-up, especially in Afghanistan and in the Middle East, will not intimidate Iran nor add to any military successes. They entail high costs and low returns, as Obama realized after the better part of a decade of his defeats, fiascos and multi-billion dollar losses.

Conclusion

The militarization of US foreign policy, the establishment of a military junta within the Trump Administration, and the resort to nuclear brinksmanship has not changed the global balance of power.

Domestically Trump’s nominal Presidency relies on militarists, like General Mattis. Mattis has tightened the US control over NATO allies, and even rounded up stray European outliers, like Sweden, to join in a military crusade against Russia. Mattis has played on the media’s passion for bellicose headlines and its adulation of Four Star Generals.

But for all that – North Korea remains undaunted because it can retaliate. Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and remains a counterweight to a US-dominated globe. China owns the US Treasury and its unimpressed, despite the presence of an increasingly collision-prone US Navy swarming throughout the South China Sea.

Mad Dog laps up the media attention, with well dressed, scrupulously manicured journalists hanging on his every bloodthirsty pronouncement. War contractors flock to him, like flies to carrion. The Four Star General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis has attained Presidential status without winning any election victory (fake or otherwise). No doubt when he steps down, Mattis will be the most eagerly courted board member or senior consultant for giant military contractors in US history, receiving lucrative fees for half hour ‘pep-talks’ and ensuring the fat perks of nepotism for his family’s next three generations.  Mad Dog may even run for office, as Senator or even President for whatever Party.

The militarization of US foreign policy provides some important lessons:

First of all, the escalation from threats to war does not succeed in disarming adversaries who possess the capacity to retaliate. Intimidation via sanctions can succeed in imposing significant economic pain on oil export-dependent regimes, but not on hardened, self-sufficient or highly diversified economies.

Low intensity multi-lateral war maneuvers reinforce US-led alliances, but they also convince opponents to increase their military preparedness. Mid-level intense wars against non-nuclear adversaries can seize capital cities, as in Iraq, but the occupier faces long-term costly wars of attrition that can undermine military morale, provoke domestic unrest and heighten budget deficits. And they create millions of refugees.

High intensity military brinksmanship carries major risk of massive losses in lives, allies, territory and piles of radiated ashes – a pyrrhic victory!

In sum:

Threats and intimidation succeed only against conciliatory adversaries. Undiplomatic verbal thuggery can arouse the spirit of the bully and some of its allies, but it has little chance of convincing its adversaries to capitulate. The US policy of worldwide militarization over-extends the US armed forces and has not led to any permanent military gains. 

Are there any voices among clear-thinking US military leaders, those not bedazzled by their stars and idiotic admirers in the US media, who could push for more global accommodation and mutual respect among nations? The US Congress and the corrupt media are demonstrably incapable of evaluating past disasters, let alone forging an effective response to new global realities.

Featured image is from CSMonitor.com.

Incisive analysis first published by GR on December 27, 2016

Israel has strong US-led Western support. Security Council Resolution 2334, affirming the illegality of its settlements, changed nothing on the ground – nor will it any time ahead as far as it’s reasonable to predict.

Eventual Palestinian self-determination based on pre-June 1967 borders is another matter entirely. The possibility of it happening any time ahead concerns Israel most of all.

Longstanding state policy calls for maximum land with minimum Arabs – dispossessing them extrajudicially for exclusive Jewish development, achieving the goal through one bulldozed Palestinian home at a time, eliminating entire communities longer term, settlement expansions continuing unabated on stolen land.

A near-century ago, the World Zionist Organization’s plan for a Jewish state included:

• historic Palestine;

• South Lebanon up to Sidon and the Litani River;

• Syria’s Golan Heights, Hauran Plain and Deraa; and

• control of the Hijaz Railway from Deraa to Amman, Jordan as well as the Gulf of Aqaba.

Some Zionists wanted more – land from the Nile in the West to the Euphrates in the East, comprising Palestine, Lebanon, Western Syria and Southern Turkey.

Hardliner Ze’ev Jabotinsky opposed peaceful coexistence with Arabs, calling it unattainable. Arguing for “an iron wall of (superior) Jewish military force,” his idea was to discourage Arab hopes of destroying Israel – followed by a negotiated settlement based on Israeli-dictated terms.

Ben-Gurion sided with Jabotinsky. Israel’s war of independence followed, seizing 78% of historic Palestine, the rest in June 1967.

Unresolved conflict persists by design. Peace and stability defeat Israel’s longterm objectives. Middle East expert Joseph Massad once said:

“The logic goes as follows: Israel has the right to occupy Palestinian land, lay siege to (its) populations in Bantustans surrounded by an apartheid wall, starve the population, cut them off from fuel and electricity, uproot their trees and crops, and launch periodic raids and targeted assassinations against them and their elected leadership, and if (resistance is encountered, Israel is entitled to slaughter) them en masse (because it’s just) ‘defending.’ itself as it must and should.”

Arabs are considered inferior, undeserving of rights, so “Israel has the right to oppress them and does so to defend itself, but were (they) to defend themselves against Israel’s oppression, Israel (has) the right to defend itself against their legitimate defense” without restraint or regard for the laws of war and humanitarian considerations.

Israel doesn’t negotiate. It demands, imposing its will by brute force. For decades, Palestinians endured ruthless occupation harshness, slow-motion genocide, exacting a terrible toll with no prospect in sight for relief – no matter which wing of US duopoly rule is in power.

Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said John Kerry intends “lay(ing) out a comprehensive vision for” conflict resolution before stepping down on January 20.

A January 15 French peace conference is scheduled, involving dozens of international foreign ministers. A conflict resolution plan will be drafted for adoption by the Quartet and Security Council before Obama leaves office on January 20 if things go as planned.

Israel is hysterical over the prospect of other nations dictating terms it wants sole authority over to maintain oppressive status quo conditions.

According to an unnamed senior Israeli official, “(t)he effort now is to see how to prevent such a move at the Paris conference.”

Ultranationalist Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman was over-the-top, calling what’s planned “a modern version of the (19th century) Dreyfus trial…(T)his time, the whole people of Israel and the whole State of Israel will be in the guilty dock.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said his country is “determined to hold (the) conference…to reaffirm the necessity of a two-state solution.”

Years ago it was possible. No longer with Israel controlling over 60% of West Bank land, calling Jerusalem its exclusive capital, and continuing unabated settlement expansions on stolen Palestinian land.

Whatever comes out of Paris in January, nothing on the ground will change – especially with Trump succeeding Obama in short order, intending to be the most “pro-Israel president ever.”

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Nobel Lecture given by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2017, ICAN, delivered by Beatrice Fihn and Setsuko Thurlow, Oslo, 10 December 2017.

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[Beatrice Fihn]

Your Majesties,

Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
Esteemed guests,

Today, it is a great honour to accept the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of thousands of inspirational people who make up the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Together we have brought democracy to disarmament and are reshaping international law.
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We most humbly thank the Norwegian Nobel Committee for recognizing our work and giving momentum to our crucial cause.

We want to recognize those who have so generously donated their time and energy to this campaign.

We thank the courageous foreign ministers, diplomats, Red Cross and Red Crescent staff, UN officials, academics and experts with whom we have worked in partnership to advance our common goal.

And we thank all who are committed to ridding the world of this terrible threat.
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At dozens of locations around the world – in missile silos buried in our earth, on submarines navigating through our oceans, and aboard planes flying high in our sky – lie 15,000 objects of humankind’s destruction.

Perhaps it is the enormity of this fact, perhaps it is the unimaginable scale of the consequences, that leads many to simply accept this grim reality. To go about our daily lives with no thought to the instruments of insanity all around us.

For it is insanity to allow ourselves to be ruled by these weapons. Many critics of this movement suggest that we are the irrational ones, the idealists with no grounding in reality. That nuclear-armed states will never give up their weapons.

But we represent the only rational choice. We represent those who refuse to accept nuclear weapons as a fixture in our world, those who refuse to have their fates bound up in a few lines of launch code.

Ours is the only reality that is possible. The alternative is unthinkable.

The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be.

Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?

One of these things will happen.

The only rational course of action is to cease living under the conditions where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.
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Today I want to talk of three things: fear, freedom, and the future.

By the very admission of those who possess them, the real utility of nuclear weapons is in their ability to provoke fear. When they refer to their “deterrent” effect, proponents of nuclear weapons are celebrating fear as a weapon of war.

They are puffing their chests by declaring their preparedness to exterminate, in a flash, countless thousands of human lives.

Nobel Laureate William Faulkner said when accepting his prize in 1950, that “There is only the question of ‘when will I be blown up?'” But since then, this universal fear has given way to something even more dangerous: denial.

Gone is the fear of Armageddon in an instant, gone is the equilibrium between two blocs that was used as the justification for deterrence, gone are the fallout shelters.

But one thing remains: the thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads that filled us up with that fear.

The risk for nuclear weapons use is even greater today than at the end of the Cold War. But unlike the Cold War, today we face many more nuclear armed states, terrorists, and cyber warfare. All of this makes us less safe.

Learning to live with these weapons in blind acceptance has been our next great mistake.

Fear is rational. The threat is real. We have avoided nuclear war not through prudent leadership but good fortune. Sooner or later, if we fail to act, our luck will run out.

A moment of panic or carelessness, a misconstrued comment or bruised ego, could easily lead us unavoidably to the destruction of entire cities. A calculated military escalation could lead to the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians.

If only a small fraction of today’s nuclear weapons were used, soot and smoke from the firestorms would loft high into the atmosphere – cooling, darkening and drying the Earth’s surface for more than a decade.

It would obliterate food crops, putting billions at risk of starvation.

Yet we continue to live in denial of this existential threat.

But Faulkner in his Nobel speech also issued a challenge to those who came after him. Only by being the voice of humanity, he said, can we defeat fear; can we help humanity endure.

ICAN’s duty is to be that voice. The voice of humanity and humanitarian law; to speak up on behalf of civilians. Giving voice to that humanitarian perspective is how we will create the end of fear, the end of denial. And ultimately, the end of nuclear weapons.
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That brings me to my second point: freedom.

As the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the first ever anti-nuclear weapons organisation to win this prize, said on this stage in 1985:

“We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction.”

Those words still ring true in 2017.

We must reclaim the freedom to not live our lives as hostages to imminent annihilation.

Man – not woman! – made nuclear weapons to control others, but instead we are controlled by them.

They made us false promises. That by making the consequences of using these weapons so unthinkable it would make any conflict unpalatable. That it would keep us free from war.

But far from preventing war, these weapons brought us to the brink multiple times throughout the Cold War. And in this century, these weapons continue to escalate us towards war and conflict.

In Iraq, in Iran, in Kashmir, in North Korea. Their existence propels others to join the nuclear race. They don’t keep us safe, they cause conflict.

As fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Martin Luther King Jr, called them from this very stage in 1964, these weapons are “both genocidal and suicidal”.

They are the madman’s gun held permanently to our temple. These weapons were supposed to keep us free, but they deny us our freedoms.

It’s an affront to democracy to be ruled by these weapons. But they are just weapons. They are just tools. And just as they were created by geopolitical context, they can just as easily be destroyed by placing them in a humanitarian context.
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That is the task ICAN has set itself – and my third point I wish to talk about, the future.

I have the honour of sharing this stage today with Setsuko Thurlow, who has made it her life’s purpose to bear witness to the horror of nuclear war.

She and the hibakusha were at the beginning of the story, and it is our collective challenge to ensure they will also witness the end of it.

They relive the painful past, over and over again, so that we may create a better future.

There are hundreds of organisations that together as ICAN are making great strides towards that future.

There are thousands of tireless campaigners around the world who work each day to rise to that challenge.

There are millions of people across the globe who have stood shoulder to shoulder with those campaigners to show hundreds of millions more that a different future is truly possible.

Those who say that future is not possible need to get out of the way of those making it a reality.

As the culmination of this grassroots effort, through the action of ordinary people, this year the hypothetical marched forward towards the actual as 122 nations negotiated and concluded a UN treaty to outlaw these weapons of mass destruction.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provides the pathway forward at a moment of great global crisis. It is a light in a dark time.

And more than that, it provides a choice.

A choice between the two endings: the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us.

It is not naive to believe in the first choice. It is not irrational to think nuclear states can disarm. It is not idealistic to believe in life over fear and destruction; it is a necessity.
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All of us face that choice. And I call on every nation to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The United States, choose freedom over fear.
Russia, choose disarmament over destruction.
Britain, choose the rule of law over oppression.
France, choose human rights over terror.
China, choose reason over irrationality.
India, choose sense over senselessness.
Pakistan, choose logic over Armageddon.
Israel, choose common sense over obliteration.
North Korea, choose wisdom over ruin.

To the nations who believe they are sheltered under the umbrella of nuclear weapons, will you be complicit in your own destruction and the destruction of others in your name?

To all nations: choose the end of nuclear weapons over the end of us!

This is the choice that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons represents. Join this Treaty.

We citizens are living under the umbrella of falsehoods. These weapons are not keeping us safe, they are contaminating our land and water, poisoning our bodies and holding hostage our right to life.

To all citizens of the world: Stand with us and demand your government side with humanity and sign this treaty. We will not rest until all States have joined, on the side of reason.
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No nation today boasts of being a chemical weapon state.
No nation argues that it is acceptable, in extreme circumstances, to use sarin nerve agent.
No nation proclaims the right to unleash on its enemy the plague or polio.

That is because international norms have been set, perceptions have been changed.

And now, at last, we have an unequivocal norm against nuclear weapons.

Monumental strides forward never begin with universal agreement.

With every new signatory and every passing year, this new reality will take hold.

This is the way forward. There is only one way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons: prohibit and eliminate them.
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Nuclear weapons, like chemical weapons, biological weapons, cluster munitions and land mines before them, are now illegal. Their existence is immoral. Their abolishment is in our hands.

The end is inevitable. But will that end be the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us? We must choose one.

We are a movement for rationality. For democracy. For freedom from fear.

We are campaigners from 468 organisations who are working to safeguard the future, and we are representative of the moral majority: the billions of people who choose life over death, who together will see the end of nuclear weapons.

Thank you.

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[Setsuko Thurlow:]

Your Majesties,
Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
My fellow campaigners, here and throughout the world,
Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great privilege to accept this award, together with Beatrice, on behalf of all the remarkable human beings who form the ICAN movement. You each give me such tremendous hope that we can – and will – bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.

I speak as a member of the family of hibakusha – those of us who, by some miraculous chance, survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For more than seven decades, we have worked for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

We have stood in solidarity with those harmed by the production and testing of these horrific weapons around the world. People from places with long-forgotten names, like Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga, Bikini. People whose lands and seas were irradiated, whose bodies were experimented upon, whose cultures were forever disrupted.

We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.

I was just 13 years old when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, on my city Hiroshima. I still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15, I saw a blinding bluish-white flash from the window. I remember having the sensation of floating in the air.

As I regained consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself pinned by the collapsed building. I began to hear my classmates’ faint cries: “Mother, help me. God, help me.”

Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can.” As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death alive. I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation.

Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air.

Thus, with one bomb my beloved city was obliterated. Most of its residents were civilians who were incinerated, vaporized, carbonized – among them, members of my own family and 351 of my schoolmates.

In the weeks, months and years that followed, many thousands more would die, often in random and mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of radiation. Still to this day, radiation is killing survivors.

Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew, Eiji – his little body transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony.

To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons. Every second of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everyone we love and everything we hold dear. We must not tolerate this insanity any longer.

Through our agony and the sheer struggle to survive – and to rebuild our lives from the ashes – we hibakusha became convinced that we must warn the world about these apocalyptic weapons. Time and again, we shared our testimonies.

But still some refused to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities – as war crimes. They accepted the propaganda that these were “good bombs” that had ended a “just war”. It was this myth that led to the disastrous nuclear arms race – a race that continues to this day.

Nine nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations. The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.

On the seventh of July this year, I was overwhelmed with joy when a great majority of the world’s nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having witnessed humanity at its worst, I witnessed, that day, humanity at its best. We hibakusha had been waiting for the ban for seventy-two years. Let this be the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.

All responsible leaders will sign this treaty. And history will judge harshly those who reject it. No longer shall their abstract theories mask the genocidal reality of their practices. No longer shall “deterrence” be viewed as anything but a deterrent to disarmament. No longer shall we live under a mushroom cloud of fear.

To the officials of nuclear-armed nations – and to their accomplices under the so-called “nuclear umbrella” – I say this: Listen to our testimony. Heed our warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil.

To every president and prime minister of every nation of the world, I beseech you: Join this treaty; forever eradicate the threat of nuclear annihilation.

When I was a 13-year-old girl, trapped in the smouldering rubble, I kept pushing. I kept moving toward the light. And I survived. Our light now is the ban treaty. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it.”

Tonight, as we march through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame, let us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror. No matter what obstacles we face, we will keep moving and keep pushing and keep sharing this light with others. This is our passion and commitment for our one precious world to survive.

 The American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973.  Since then, over a prolonged period, the capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.

Between the mid 1970’s to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and benefits and the construction of and subsidies for affordable housing have been gutted.  ‘Workfare’  (under President ‘Bill’ Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced workers.  Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate profits to an astronomical degree.

What started as incremental reversals during the 1990’s under Clinton has snowballed over the last two decades decimating welfare legislation and institutions.

 The earlier welfare ‘reforms’ and the current anti-welfare legislation and austerity practices have been accompanied by a series of endless imperial wars, especially in the Middle East.

In the 1940’s through the 1960’s, world and regional wars (Korea and Indo-China) were combined with significant welfare program – a form of ‘social imperialism’, which ‘buy off’ the working class while expanding the empire.  However, recent decades are characterized by multiple regional wars and the reduction or elimination of welfare programs – and a massive growth in poverty, domestic insecurity and poor health.

New Deals and Big Wars

The 1930’s witnessed the advent of social legislation and action, which laid the foundations of what is called the ‘modern welfare state’.

Labor unions were organized as working class strikes and progressive legislation facilitated trade union organization, elections, collective bargaining rights and a steady increase in union membership.  Improved work conditions, rising wages, pension plans and benefits, employer or union-provided health care and protective legislation improved the standard of living for the working class and provided for 2 generations of upward mobility.

Author Prof. James Petras (right)

Social Security legislation was approved along with workers’ compensation and the forty-hour workweek.  Jobs were created through federal programs (WPA, CCC, etc.).  Protectionist legislation facilitated the growth of domestic markets for US manufacturers.  Workplace shop steward councils organized ‘on the spot’ job action to protect safe working conditions.

World War II led to full employment and increases in union membership, as well as legislation restricting workers’ collective bargaining rights and enforcing wage freezes.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans found jobs in the war economy but a huge number were also killed or wounded in the war.

The post-war period witnessed a contradictory process:  wages and salaries increased while legislation curtailed union rights via the Taft Hartley Act and the McCarthyist purge of leftwing trade union activists.  So-called ‘right to work’ laws effectively outlawed unionization mostly in southern states, which drove industries to relocate to the anti-union states.

Welfare reforms, in the form of the GI bill, provided educational opportunities for working class and rural veterans, while federal-subsidized low interest mortgages encourage home-ownership, especially for veterans.

The New Deal created concrete improvements but did not consolidate labor influence at any level.  Capitalists and management still retained control over capital, the workplace and plant location of production.

Trade union officials signed pacts with capital:  higher pay for the workers and greater control of the workplace for the bosses.  Trade union officials joined management in repressing rank and file movements seeking to control technological changes by reducing hours (“thirty hours work for forty hours pay”).  Dissident local unions were seized and gutted by the trade union bosses – sometimes through violence.

Trade union activists, community organizers for rent control and other grassroots movements lost both the capacity and the will to advance toward large-scale structural changes of US capitalism.  Living standards improved for a few decades but the capitalist class consolidated strategic control over labor relations.  While unionized workers’ incomes, increased, inequalities, especially in the non-union sectors began to grow.  With the end of the GI bill, veterans’ access to high-quality subsidized education declined.

 While a new wave of social welfare legislation and programs began in the 1960’s and early 1970’s it was no longer a result of a mass trade union or workers’ “class struggle”.  Moreover, trade union collaboration with the capitalist regional war policies led to the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of workers in two wars – the Korean and Vietnamese wars.

Much of social legislation resulted from the civil and welfare rights movements.  While specific programs were helpful, none of them addressed structural racism and poverty.

The Last Wave of Social Welfarism

The 1960’a witnessed the greatest racial war in modern US history:  Mass movements in the South and North rocked state and federal governments, while advancing the cause of civil, social and political rights.  Millions of black citizens, joined by white activists and, in many cases, led by African American Viet Nam War veterans, confronted the state.  At the same time, millions of students and young workers, threatened by military conscription, challenged the military and social order.

Energized by mass movements, a new wave of social welfare legislation was launched by the federal government to pacify mass opposition among blacks, students, community organizers and middle class Americans.  Despite this mass popular movement, the union bosses at the AFL-CIO openly supported the war, police repression and the military, or at best, were passive impotent spectators of the drama unfolding in the nation’s streets.  Dissident union members and activists were the exception, as many had multiple identities to represent: African American, Hispanic, draft resisters, etc.

Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Medicare, Medicaid, OSHA, the EPA and multiple poverty programs were implemented.  A national health program, expanding Medicare for all Americans, was introduced by President Nixon and sabotaged by the Kennedy Democrats and the AFL-CIO.   Overall, social and economic inequalities diminished during this period.

The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the American militarist empire.  This coincided with the beginning of the end of social welfare as we knew it – as the bill for militarism placed even greater demands on the public treasury.

With the election of President Carter, social welfare in the US began its long decline.  The next series of regional wars were accompanied by even greater attacks on welfare via the “Volker Plan” – freezing workers’ wages as a means to combat inflation.

‘Guns without butter’ became the legislative policy of the Carter and Reagan Administrations.  The welfare programs were based on politically fragile foundations.

The Debacle of Welfarism

Private sector trade union membership declined from a post-world war peak of 30% falling to 12% in the 1990’s.   Today it has sunk to 7%.  Capitalists embarked on a massive program of closing thousands of factories in the unionized North which were then relocated to the non-unionized low wage southern states and then overseas to Mexico and Asia.  Millions of stable jobs disappeared.

Following the election of ‘Jimmy Carter’, neither Democratic nor Republican Presidents felt any need to support labor organizations.   On the contrary, they facilitated contracts dictated by management, which reduced wages, job security, benefits and social welfare.

 The anti-labor offensive from the ‘Oval Office’ intensified under President Reagan with his direct intervention firing tens of thousands of striking air controllers and arresting union leaders.  Under Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and William Clinton cost of living adjustments failed to keep up with prices of vital goods and services.  Health care inflation was astronomical.  Financial deregulation led to the subordination of American industry to finance and the Wall Street banks.  De-industrialization, capital flight and massive tax evasion reduced labor’s share of national income.

The capitalist class followed a trajectory of decline, recovery and ascendance.  Moreover, during the earlier world depression, at the height of labor mobilization and organization, the capitalist class never faced any significant political threat over its control of the commanding heights of the economy.

The ‘New Deal’ was, at best, a de facto ‘historical compromise’ between the capitalist class and the labor unions, mediated by the Democratic Party elite.  It was a temporary pact in which the unions secured legal recognition while the capitalists retained their executive prerogatives.

The Second World War secured the economic recovery for capital and subordinated labor through a federally mandated no strike production agreement. There were a few notable exceptions:  The coal miners’ union organized strikes in strategic sectors and some leftist leaders and organizers encouraged slow-downs, work to rule and other in-plant actions when employers ran roughshod with special brutality over the workers.  The recovery of capital was the prelude to a post-war offensive against independent labor-based political organizations.  The quality of labor organization declined even as the quantity of trade union membership increased.

Labor union officials consolidated internal control in collaboration with the capitalist elite.  Capitalist class-labor official collaboration was extended overseas with strategic consequences.

The post-war corporate alliance between the state and capital led to a global offensive – the replacement of European-Japanese colonial control and exploitation by US business and bankers.  Imperialism was later ‘re-branded’ as ‘globalization’.  It pried open markets, secured cheap docile labor and pillaged resources for US manufacturers and importers.

US labor unions played a major role by sabotaging militant unions abroad in cooperation with the US security apparatus:  They worked to coopt and bribe nationalist and leftist labor leaders and supported police-state regime repression and assassination of recalcitrant militants.

‘Hand in bloody glove’ with the US Empire, the American trade unions planted the seeds of their own destruction at home.  The local capitalists in newly emerging independent nations established industries and supply chains in cooperation with US manufacturers.  Attracted to these sources of low-wage, violently repressed workers, US capitalists subsequently relocated their factories overseas and turned their backs on labor at home.

Labor union officials had laid the groundwork for the demise of stable jobs and social benefits for American workers.  Their collaboration increased the rate of capitalist profit and overall power in the political system.  Their complicity in the brutal purges of militants, activists and leftist union members and leaders at home and abroad put an end to labor’s capacity to sustain and expand the welfare state.

 Trade unions in the US did not use their collaboration with empire in its bloody regional wars to win social benefits for the rank and file workers.  The time of social-imperialism, where workers within the empire benefited from imperialism’s pillage, was over.  Gains in social welfare henceforth could result only from mass struggles led by the urban poor, especially Afro-Americans, community-based working poor and militant youth organizers.

 The last significant social welfare reforms were implemented in the early 1970’s – coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War (and victory for the Vietnamese people) and ended with the absorption of the urban and anti-war movements into the Democratic Party.

Henceforward the US corporate state advanced through the overseas expansion of the multi-national corporations and via large-scale, non-unionized production at home.

The technological changes of this period did not benefit labor.   The belief, common in the 1950’s, that science and technology would increase leisure, decrease work and improve living standards for the working class, was shattered.  Instead technological changes displaced well-paid industrial labor while increasing the number of mind-numbing, poorly paid, and politically impotent jobs in the so-called ‘service sector’ – a rapidly growing section of unorganized and vulnerable workers – especially including women and minorities.

Labor union membership declined precipitously.  The demise of the USSR and China’s turn to capitalism had a dual effect:  It eliminated collectivist (socialist) pressure for social welfare and opened their labor markets with cheap, disciplined workers for foreign manufacturers. Labor as a political force disappeared on every count.  The US Federal Reserve and President ‘Bill’ Clinton deregulated financial capital leading to a frenzy of speculation.  Congress wrote laws, which permitted overseas tax evasion – especially in Caribbean tax havens.  Regional free-trade agreements, like NAFTA, spurred the relocation of jobs abroad.  De-industrialization accompanied the decline of wages, living standards and social benefits for millions of American workers.

The New Abolitionists:  Trillionaires

The New Deal, the Great Society, trade unions, and the anti-war and urban movements were in retreat and primed for abolition.

 Wars without welfare (or guns without butter) replaced earlier ‘social imperialism’ with a huge growth of poverty and homelessness.  Domestic labor was now exploited to finance overseas wars not vice versa.  The fruits of imperial plunder were not shared.

As the working and middle classes drifted downward, they were used up, abandoned and deceived on all sides – especially by the Democratic Party.  They elected militarists and demagogues as their new presidents.

President ‘Bill’ Clinton ravaged Russia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Somalia and liberated Wall Street.   His regime gave birth to the prototype billionaire swindlers: Michael Milken and Bernard ‘Bernie’ Madoff.

Clinton converted welfare into cheap labor ‘workfare’, exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable and condemning the next generations to grinding poverty.  Under Clinton the prison population of mostly African Americans expanded and the breakup of families ravaged the urban communities.

Provoked by an act of terrorism (9/11) President G.W. Bush Jr. launched the ‘endless’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and deepened the police state (Patriot Act).   Wages for American workers and profits for American capitalist moved in opposite directions.

The Great Financial Crash of 2008-2011 shook the paper economy to its roots and led to the greatest shakedown of any national treasury in history directed by the First Black American President.  Trillions of public wealth were funneled into the criminal banks on Wall Street – which were ‘just too big to fail.’  Millions of American workers and homeowners, however, were ‘just too small to matter’.

The Age of Demagogues

President Obama transferred 2 trillion dollars to the ten biggest bankers and swindlers on Wall Street, and another trillion to the Pentagon to pursue the Democrats version of foreign policy: from Bush’s two overseas wars to Obama’s seven.

Obama’s electoral ‘donor-owners’ stashed away two trillion dollars in overseas tax havens and looked forward to global free trade pacts – pushed by the eloquent African American President.

Obama was elected to two terms.   His liberal Democratic Party supporters swooned over his peace and justice rhetoric while swallowing his militarist escalation into seven overseas wars as well as the foreclosure of two million American householders.  Obama completely failed to honor his campaign promise to reduce wage inequality between black and white wage earners while he continued to moralize to black families about ‘values’.

Obama’s war against Libya led to the killing and displacement of millions of black Libyans and workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. The smiling Nobel Peace Prize President created more desperate refugees than any previous US head of state – including millions of Africans flooding Europe.

‘Obamacare’, his imitation of an earlier Republican governor’s health plan, was formulated by the private corporate health industry (private insurance, Big Pharma and the for-profit hospitals), to mandate enrollment and ensure triple digit profits with double digit increases in premiums.  By the 2016 Presidential elections, ‘Obama-care’ was opposed by a  45%-43% margin of the American people.   Obama’s propagandists could not show any improvement of life expectancy or decrease in infant and maternal mortality as a result of his ‘health care reform’.    Indeed the opposite occurred among the marginalized working class in the old ‘rust belt’ and in the rural areas.  This failure to show any significant health improvement for the masses of Americans is in stark contrast to LBJ’s Medicare program of the 1960’s, which continues to receive massive popular support.

Forty-years of anti welfare legislation and pro-business regimes paved the golden road for the election of Donald Trump

 Trump and the Republicans are focusing on the tattered remnants of the social welfare system:  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.   The remains of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society— are on the chopping block.

The moribund (but well-paid) labor leadership has been notable by its absence in the ensuing collapse of the social welfare state.  The liberal left Democrats embraced the platitudinous Obama/Clinton team as the ‘Great Society’s’ gravediggers, while wailing at Trump’s allies for shoving the corpse of welfare state into its grave.

Conclusion

Over the past forty years the working class and the rump of what was once referred to as the ‘labor movement’ has contributed to the dismantling of the social welfare state, voting for ‘strike-breaker’ Reagan, ‘workfare’ Clinton, ‘Wall Street crash’Bush, ‘Wall Street savior’ Obama and ‘Trickle-down’ Trump.

Gone are the days when social welfare and profitable wars raised US living standards and transformed American trade unions into an appendage of the Democratic Party and a handmaiden of Empire.  The Democratic Party rescued capitalism from its collapse in the Great Depression, incorporated labor into the war economy and the post- colonial global empire, and resurrected Wall Street from the ‘Great Financial Meltdown’ of the 21^st century.

The war economy no longer fuels social welfare.  The military-industrial complex has found new partners on Wall Street and among the globalized multi-national corporations.  Profits rise while wages fall.  Low paying compulsive labor (workfare) lopped off state transfers to the poor.  Technology – IT, robotics, artificial intelligence and electronic gadgets – has created the most class polarized social system in history.  The first trillionaire and multi-billionaire tax evaders rose on the backs of a miserable standing army of tens of millions of low-wage workers, stripped of rights and representation.  State subsidies eliminate virtually all risk to capital.   The end of social welfare coerced labor (including young mother with children) to seek insecure low-income employment while slashing education and health – cementing the feet of generations into poverty.  Regional wars abroad have depleted the Treasury and robbed the country of productive investment.  Economic imperialism exports profits, reversing the historic relation of the past.

 Labor is left without compass or direction; it flails in all directions and falls deeper in the web of deception and demagogy.  To escape from Reagan and the strike breakers, labor embraced the cheap-labor predator Clinton; black and white workers united to elect Obama who expelled millions of immigrant workers, pursued 7 wars, abandoned black workers and enriched the already filthy rich.  Deception and demagogy of the labor-liberals bred the ugly and unlikely plutocrat-populist demagogue:  labor voted for Trump.

 The demise of welfare and the rise of the opioid epidemic killing close to one million (mostly working class) Americans occurred mostly under Democratic regimes. The collaboration of liberals and unions in promoting endless wars opened the door to Trump’s mirage of a stateless, tax-less, ruling class.

 Who will the Democrats choose as their next demagogue champion to challenge the ‘Donald’ – one who will speak to the ‘deplorables’ and work for the trillionaires?

The Office of the Istanbul Prosecutor has issued arrest warrants for two “former” CIA agents, accusing them of involvement in the failed July 2016 coup attempt against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. US media and various Washington think-tanks have dismissed the charges as “implausible” and a “likely tit-for-tat” response of Erdogan for the arrest by US authorities of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader accused of violating US sanctions against Iran. Clearly is there is far more behind the accusations than is being said so far.

On December 1, Turkish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Graham E. Fuller, former head of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and former CIA head of Middle East and East Asia operations. The warrant claims Fuller was in the vicinity of Istanbul the night of the coup attempt at a meeting with another top “former” CIA person, Henri Barkey. It claims both CIA veterans were meeting at the five-star Splendid Hotel on the island of Büyükada some 20 minutes boat ride from Istanbul.

What’s notable about the charge is the degree of involvement of Fuller with the reclusive Turkish cult leader, Fetullah Gülen, now in exile at an estate in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania since he was forced to flee Turkey in 1998 to escape trial for treason against the state.

“One of the Most Encouraging Faces of Islam…”

In July, 2016, less than a week after Erdogan accused the vast Turkish network of Gülen for being behind the coup, of using a network of senior military officers who had been recruited into the Gülen organization, Fuller wrote for Huffington Post a fulsome praise of Gülen titled, “The Gulen Movement Is Not a Cult; It’s One of the Most Encouraging Faces of Islam Today.” In it Fuller wrote,

“I believe it is unlikely that Gulen was the mastermind behind the dramatic failed coup attempt against Erdogan last week…”

Fuller goes on to admit he formally backed granting Gülen special US visa status in 2006:

“Full disclosure: It is on public record that I wrote a letter as a private citizen in connection with Gülen’s US green card application in 2006 stating that I did not believe that Gülen constituted a security threat to the US…”

Fuller’s “full disclosure” then however omits the fact that it was not merely a casual letter of recommendation to a man Fuller claimed he had met only once. Fuller’s endorsement of Gülen’s Green Card application was so influential that he managed to override the no votes of the FBI, of attorneys for the US State Department and Homeland Security. In the Gülen hearings, State Department attorneys stated,

“Because of the large amount of money that Gülen’s movement uses to finance his projects, there are claims that he has secret agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkic governments. There are suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing these projects.”

Gülen in NATO’s Gladio

The ties between Fetullah Gülen and the CIA go way back to the 1980’s when Gülen was recruited to be active in a Turkish right-wing NATO “Gladio” network codenamed Counter-Guerrilla. Gülen broadcast over the CIA’s Radio Free Europe into the Islamic regions of the Soviet Union.

Counter-Guerrilla members were responsible for a series of far-right terrorist attacks in Turkey and facilitated a bloody US-backed 1980 military coup. Indeed, in a little slip, in his July 2016 defense of Gülen, Fuller writes in praise about Gülen that,

“He even felt compelled to support the military takeover of the state in 1980 in order to preserve the state…”

That US-instigated 1980 coup, as Fuller well knows, established a military dictatorship under General Kenan Evren in which 650,000 people were detained, 230,000 people trialed, all political parties, unions and foundations were closed, 171 were killed under custody, hundreds of thousands people were tortured, and thousands are still missing. A former senior US intelligence official later reported that as the 1980 coup was underway, then President Jimmy Carter was informed by an aide who said, “Our boys have done it.” And Gülen, the peaceful Muslim, endorsed that brutal CIA coup.

Gülen and CIA English Teachers

In the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990’s in Central Asia the CIA used Gülen and his moderate Islam image to build one of their most extensive networks of subversion reaching across the entire so-called Turkic region of former Soviet Central Asia including Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and even into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China, where ethnic Uyghurs have been recruited via Turkey to wage terror in Syria in recent years.

In 2011, Osman Nuri Gündeş, former head of Foreign Intelligence for the Turkish MIT (the “Turkish CIA”) and chief intelligence adviser in the mid-1990s to Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, published a book that was only released in Turkish. In the book, Gündeş, then 85 and retired, revealed that, during the 1990s, the Gülen schools then growing up across Eurasia were providing a base for hundreds of CIA agents under cover of being “native-speaking English teachers.” According to Gündeş, the Gülen movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone. The CIA “teachers,” he added, submitted reports to an arm of the Pentagon.

Gülen’s organization had been active in destabilizing newly-independent Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union from the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, when the nominally Muslim Central Asian former Soviet republics declared their independence from Moscow. Gülen was named by one former FBI authoritative source as “one of the main CIA operation figures in Central Asia and the Caucasus.”

Who is G. Fuller?

Even Fuller himself admits that the Gülen organization had some two million members in Turkey on the eve of the July 2016 coup. They had systematically infiltrated and largely controlled national policy, the judiciary, national education and the military. Moreover, Fuller’s CIA associate, Henri Barkey, also under arrest warrant, admitted following the failed coup that he had been in the Istanbul area the night of the coup.

Allegedly, Turkish authorities now have evidence that Fuller was also there and reportedly flown out of Istanbul across the border to safety in Greece as it became obvious the coup was failing. The Istanbul prosecutor’s office reportedly determined that Fuller had direct contact with former CIA official Henri Barkey and other suspects involved in the coup attempt. Both Barkey and Fuller, who both co-authored a book on Turkey titled Turkey’s Kurdish Question, are accused of organizing a meeting at Splendid Hotel in Büyükada, a 20 minute boat ride from Istanbul on the day of the coup in July 15 2016.

To read Fuller’s words on news of the Turkish arrest warrant, one would come away with the impression that Graham Fuller was a minor CIA figure. He wrote,

“I served only once in Turkey…as the most junior officer in the CIA Base in Istanbul in the mid 1960s. I met Gülen exactly once in my life, long years after retiring from CIA, in an interview I conducted with him 15 years ago in Istanbul.”

Fuller may have been junior CIA officer in Istanbul in the 1960’s; careers begin somewhere. However he didn’t stay so for long.

By 1982 the CIA named him National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia. This was in the early years of the CIA Operation Cyclone, the vast CIA covert war in Afghanistan using Mujahideen and using Saudi Osama bin Laden to recruit fanatical jihadist terrorists from the Arab world to kill Soviet soldiers and bog the USSR into what Zbigniew Brzezinski and others referred to as the Soviet’s own Vietnam. Graham Fuller was certainly involved in that CIA Afghan war. He was Kabul CIA Station Chief until 1978, on the eve of the CIA’s launch of their Mujahideen Operation Cyclone.

Then Fuller was posted to CIA Langley where by 1982 the CIA appointed him National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia, which included bin Laden’s Saudi Arabia as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan and Turkey. In 1986, the CIA appointed Graham Fuller vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council, where he presumably was in a deciding role in the entire Afghan war and more.

In 1987 according to the New York Times, Fuller as vice-chair of the CIA National Intelligence Council wrote an “instrumental” memo advising what became the explosive Iran-Contra scandal, in which the CIA would arrange covert arms sales to Iran to feed the US-orchestrated Iran-Iraq War and use the proceeds to illegally fund the Nicaragua right-wing Contras. In 1988 as media began to investigate the illegal Iran-Contra details, Fuller left his very senior CIA for a post with the Pentagon and CIA-tied RAND corporation where he remained until 2000. Some suspect it was to get out of the Congressional Iran-Contra limelight.

Gülen, Fuller and Central Asia Geopolitics

Notably, while at RAND he co-authored a highly revealing book with Paul B. Henze in 1993 titled Turkey’s New Geopolitics: From the Balkans to Western China. The book describes precisely the geopolitical network that Gülen has been accused of creating with the CIA after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Henze was also a key CIA figure in the Turkish coup in 1980 that Fuller describes positively in connection with Gülen.

In the US Congressional Record, Fuller is quoted as saying,

“The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power.”

In this context highly interesting is an interview in 2011, by the Washington Post with Graham Fuller. There Fuller categorically denied charges by former head of Turkish MIT intelligence that Gülen schools across Central Asia served as cover for CIA agents to infiltrate the Muslim republics of former Soviet Union. Fuller stated,

“I think the story of 130 CIA agents in Gulen schools in Central Asia is pretty wild.”

Yet Fuller, the former CIA senior official responsible for operations in East Asia and the Middle East wrote a book in 2007 titled The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. At the center of the book was praise for Gülen and his “moderate” Islamic Gülen Movement in Turkey:

“Gülen’s charismatic personality makes him the number one Islamic figure of Turkey. The Gülen Movement has the largest and most powerful infrastructure and financial resources of any movement in the country. . . The movement has also become international by virtue of its far-flung system of schools. . . in more than a dozen countries including the Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union, Russia, France and the United States.”

Then Fuller went on in the 2011 Washington Post interview to deny ever knowing George Fidas, a 31-year-long fellow career CIA senior officer and co-signer with Fuller of the letter asking the US State Department to admit Gülen on a special visa:

“I did not recommend him (Gülen-w.e.) for a residence permit or anything else. As for George Fidas, I have never even heard of him and don’t know who he is.”

Would so prominent a figure as Graham Fuller, former top CIA official bother to sign an appeal for Fetullah Gülen, a man he claims he met only once, and not examine who else signs? Highly implausible.

More unlikely, as another co-signer of the Gülen US visa appeal was former Istanbul US Ambassador Morton Abramowitz whose career, like that of Fuller, has involved him with both the Afghan Mujahideen networks. In 1986 as Fuller was running oversight of the Afghan Mujahideen from his senior post at CIA, Abramowitz, as Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research in the Reagan administration, helped arrange delivery of the Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen. Abramowitz later co-founded the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group that played a key role in justifying the illegal 1999 US bombing of Serbia and later became a director of the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy.

Whatever the outcome of the Turkish charges against Graham Fuller and his close former CIA associate, Henri Barkey, for their alleged involvement in the failed July 15, 2016 Turkish coup d’etat, it clearly throws a major spotlight of world attention on the relation between the CIA and the Fetullah Gülen organization. To open that can of worms could help fumigate more than thirty years of covert Central Asia and other CIA operations with Osama bin Laden, opium trade, Kosovo drug mafia, Turkish dirty CIA operations and far more. Little wonder Graham Fuller writes a blog with the pathetic title, “Why did Turkey Issue an Arrest Warrant Against Me?”

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

Featured image is from the author.

Featured image: Beatrice Fihn (Source: Flickr)

Pope Francis made a renewed appeal for nuclear disarmament on Sunday, addressing a crowd at the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square as the Nobel Committee was awarding one of the world’s foremost anti-nuclear groups with the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

The Pope spoke out about “the strong link between human rights and nuclear disarmament,” arguing that any group concerned with disadvantaged populations must be “also working with determination to build a world without nuclear arms.”

The pontiff has made clear his strong views on eliminating nuclear arsenals from world governments, speaking several times on the issue this year. Last month, he hosted a symposium at the Vatican entitled “Prospects for a World Free from Nuclear Weapons,” which was attended by United Nations representatives, Nobel Peace laureates, and officials from nuclear powers including the United States, Russia, and South Korea.

As he spoke in Vatican City, the Nobel Committee was holding its annual Nobel Prize awards ceremony, at which the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Accepting the award, Beatrice Fihn, the head of the global coalition, made her own urgent call for nuclear disarmament.

“The only rational course of action is to cease living under the conditions where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away,” Fihn said, appearing to allude to recent heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.

Nuclear weapons, she added, “are a madman’s gun held permanently to our temple.”

Since February, North Korea has tested 23 missiles, claiming to have gained the ability to fire a nuclear weapon that could reach the U.S. mainland. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have exchanged increasingly aggressive insults as Americans have reported low levels of confidence in Trump’s ability to safely manage the situation.

“Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?” said Fihn in her acceptance speech.

In its efforts to rid the world of the nuclear threat, ICAN worked to advance of a U.N. treaty banning such weapons. The treaty has been signed by 122 countries—but none of the world’s nine nuclear powers have supported it.

Despite the obstacles that still exist for ICAN and other groups that are working to eliminate nuclear arsenals, Fihn noted in her speech that the treaty’s support by more than 100 countries signifies that “at long last, we have an unequivocal norm against nuclear weapons.”

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Featured image: Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian boy during protests against Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Hebron, West Bank, December 7, 2017. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

European foreign ministers attending Prime Minister Netanyahu’s breakfast in Brussels this Monday may find their thoughts wandering, as the guest of honor once again speaks of Iran, self-indulgent whining of “double standards,” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Some breakfasts are more difficult to swallow than others.

And so, given a recent speech by a certain American president, the attending ministers’ thoughts may drift — perhaps to the occupied Palestinian territories. They may ask themselves some of the questions Israeli governments have consistently refused to address, such as: given how Israel’s grasp over the West Bank is being further cemented, why does Netanyahu’s government even bother to pay lip service to the “peace process?” And isn’t Israel’s policy of forced displacement of Palestinians from parts of the occupied territories a war crime? How many hours of electricity a day does Israel plan to ration for the 2 million Palestinians living at its doorstep in the Gaza Strip next week? And, embassy fanfare aside, what about the 370,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem, living with no political rights since Israel’s annexation half a century ago?

Such unanswered questions may leave one’s mouth dry, and so the very same questions may percolate closer to home. For if Israel continues to cement its grasp all over the West Bank, why does Europe take seriously the occasional Israeli lip service to the “peace process?” And as Israel’s policy of forcibly displacing Palestinians from parts of the occupied territories is indeed a war crime, what is the EU’s effective counteraction? And for how much longer will the lie of “Israeli democracy,” alongside a 21^st-century version of institutionalized oppression and dispossession, be accepted at Europe’s doorstep?

Here’s a caffeine shot: it is all good and well to forever be disappointed by others while standing by and watching as unilateral moves become fait accompli. But it is Europe that has worn away its own credibility for years by repeatedly “expressing concern” over “the eroding possibility” of bringing an end to the occupation. How long can a position be eroded before it is wholly ground to dust courtesy of an Israeli bulldozer?

Yet thanks to the sheer bluntness of current American positions and Israeli actions, Europe can no longer pretend with any degree of credibility that the policy it is pursuing is one of supporting an American-led “peace process.” Such self-evident fiction undercuts Palestinians striving for freedom; Israeli human rights defenders striving for justice; and Europe’s values-driven vision towards a future based on the rule of law, human rights, and democracy.

The guest at Monday’s breakfast openly mocks these values, yet somehow here he is — white tablecloth, croissants, and dignitaries listening politely. In July 2017, in a meeting in Budapest with the prime ministers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, Netanyahu repeatedly called the EU “crazy” for being “the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel… on political conditions.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán chimed in alongside, from his intra-EU perspective. Budapest and Jerusalem seem to be sharing more and more values these days.

As Israel’s number one trade partner, Europe has all the leverage it needs to inform Israeli voters that they cannot continue to have it both ways – enjoy perks justified by presumed shared democratic values, all while trampling those very values. Raising the stakes, Netanyahu is now pushing to further leverage the silencing effect of false accusations conflating the rejection of the perpetual occupation with “incitement to anti-Semitism”, while at the same time cashing in on internal European divisions. He thus aims to sideline even the modest, ineffective conditionality that has existed to date. And he, or his successor, will market such an achievement to Israeli voters as a sign that Israelis can in fact continue having it both ways.

By continuing to express “serious concern” instead of acting, Europe is deciding to allow others to lead the way, and de facto accepting the abundantly clear consequences. Trump’s America is far away from all this, both geographically and morally: it is shielded by an ocean, and outspoken in alignment with Putin, Duterte, Orbán – and Netanyahu. While America is distant, all this is unfolding in Europe’s immediate neighborhood. Out of sheer self-interest, can Europe withstand the consequences of abandoning the values underpinning its post-WW2 project?

It is high time to stop waiting for Washington, Moscow, Budapest or Jerusalem. It is time to stand up for human rights, to demand nothing short of an end to the occupation, and to spell out how European leadership will effectively reject the unacceptable reality of the past 50 years. Backed by an almost global consensus reiterated in last year’s UN Security Council resolution 2334, in solidarity with Palestinians and like-minded Israelis, and together with international actors near and far – this is a task to be realized by a genuine coalition committed to non-violence, human rights, and justice. Europe, wake up.

Hagai El- Ad is Executive Director of B’Tselem.

Featured image: Jeffrey Feltman (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

UN envoy Jeffrey D. Feltman met with met North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho and Vice-Foreign Minister Pak Myong-kuk in Pyongyang during his four-day visit to the country.

Formerly US assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, along with other State Department positions, he was installed by Washington in 2012 as UN under-secretary general for political affairs.

His job isn’t about diplomacy and peacemaking. It’s serving US imperial interests at the world body, the way he operated at the State Department for nearly 30 years.

According to a UN statement, he and North Korean officials “agreed that the current situation (on the peninsula is) the most tense and dangerous peace and security issue in the world today,” adding:

“…the international community, alarmed by escalating tensions, is committed to the achievement of a peaceful solution to the situation on the Korean Peninsula.”

The danger isn’t a possible DPRK miscalculation. It’s Washington’s rage for war and regime change, wanting all sovereign independent nations replaced by pro-Western ones.

The “international community” has no control over US actions, opposing peace and stability “on the Korean peninsula,” refusing to formally end Harry Truman’s 1950s aggression, or engage diplomatically with Pyongyang to resolve contentious issues.

Nor does it recognize the DPRK’s sovereignty, instead making “fire and fury” threats along with others about destroying the country.

Imperialist Feltman was the wrong UN envoy to North Korea. Except on the Security Council where Russia and China have veto power, the world body largely operates as a US subsidiary, serving its interests, polar opposite its Charter mandate:

— “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,

— to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,

— to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

— to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

Feltman’s rhetoric rang hollow, saying

“there can only be a diplomatic solution to the situation, achieved through a process of sincere dialogue. Time is of the essence.”

For decades, Pyongyang sought rapprochement with America and other Western countries, its overtures either spurned or when engagement with Washington occurred, it was betrayed.

Time and again, the US proves it can’t be believed or trusted – Trump’s betrayal of the Palestinians the latest example by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, flagrantly violating international law, revealing it’s no honest broker on any issues with any other parties – friends or foes.

North Korea wants confrontation with no other nations. It wants peace and stability on the peninsula, normalized relations with other countries, hostile sanctions lifted.

Given the threat America poses, it won’t abandon its nuclear and ballistic programs, essential deterrents against a hostile aggressor.

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

U.S. President Trump’s bold support for the apartheid dictatorship of Israel against the nation’s non-Jews, fits into a larger picture of the supremacist nation that America itself has increasingly become. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, had repeatedly referred to the United States as being the only indispensable nation — that all others are “dispensable” — such as when President Obama addressed America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, by telling them:

The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

He was telling the military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations; that U.S. taxpayers fund America’s military at least partially in order to impose the wills and extend the wealth of the stockholders in America’s corporations abroad; and that the countries against which America is in economic competition are “dispensable” but America “is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This, supposedly, also authorizes America’s weapons and troops to fight against countries whose “governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: Stop the growing economies from growing faster than America’s. There is another name for the American Government’s supremacist ideology. This term is “fascism.”

The reality, not talked about in public (since America isn’t a democracy), is that the United States Government propagandizes against foreign governments and then perpetrates coups and/or military invasions against them, in order to impose the U.S. empire’s dictatorial stooges, and then to crush whatever democracy had existed there. This U.S. fascism didn’t happen only in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, but it happens also today, long after the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for it had ended in 1991.

Examples will be cited here, and the silenced lessons will be drawn from them, about the actual nature of the post-1952 U.S. Government — the global fascist victory that has increasingly emerged after the immediate ashes of fascism’s global defeat in 1945. This far-right, imperialist or “neoconservative,” international ideology has risen like a phoenix from those physical ashes of World War II, and has increasingly won — led by the U.S. Government — against the shrinking democratic world, and now seriously threatens to bring World War III to finish it, against the now non-communist lone nation of Russia, after the U.S. and its so-called ‘capitalist’ (but actually and increasingly fascist) NATO military alliance had won the ideological Cold War, and the communist Soviet Union broke up and ended its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, while the U.S. secretly continued its side of the Cold War and has already brought into its anti-Russian NATO alliance virtually all of the Warsaw Pact nations, and all nations except Russia from the former Soviet Union.

The grim global reality is that the U.S. Government has become the world’s leading fascist nation. (And people around the world — outside the U.S. — already know it.)

When U.S. President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, one of the first international problems he had to deal with was a Honduran coup (probably — but not provably — pre-approved by the U.S. White House) that occurred on 28 June 2009, overthrowing the democratically elected progressive President of Honduras and replacing him with a junta who were selected by that country’s dozen aristocrats (or “oligarchs”), who practically own the country. On 16 October 2013, I headlined “Hillary Clinton’s Two Foreign-Policy Catastrophes”, and the main “catastrophe” detailed there was her having assisted those oligarchs (Honduras’s aristocratic families) to keep their new dictatorship in power despite the U.S. Ambassador’s cable to Clinton, from Honduras’s capital, informing her that there would be no legal way to do it. She ignored his comment, persisted at propping up the imposed regime; and Obama remained publicly silent and followed-through by his actions with his Secretary of State’s position, which position was to keep the oligarchs in power despite the opposition not only of the Honduran public but of almost every government in the world against the newly installed Honduran dictatorship — and the U.S. regime kept the coup-regime in power and thus forced the end of Honduras’s brief democracy — and promptly, and for years afterward, Honduras’s murder-rate and drug-trafficking soared.

Then, in February 2014, Obama himself perpetrated a very bloody coup in Ukraine overthrowing the democratically elected Government there and replacing it with a racist-fascist anti-Russian regime that promptly began a years-long ethnic-cleansing program to eliminate the people in the regions of Ukraine that had voted the most heavily — ranging from 75% to over 90% — for the President and legislature whom Obama had overthrown. (Getting rid of these Ukrainian voters was necessary to Obama because if they still lived in Ukraine, then the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime would quickly be elected out of office, and his coup-regime on Russia’s doorstep would end.)

Donald Trump constantly criticizes both Obama and Clinton for many things, but as the U.S. President he continues their most evil policies, and he sometimes imposes far-right policies that are even worse. One of the instances of this is Honduras, where Trump continues Obama’s policies, even in the face of its now especially clear recent repudiation by Hondurans at the election-polls: the Trump regime had actually trained the Honduran regime on how to rig the vote-count in preparation for the latest Honduran national election, which occurred on November 26th. However, since that election, the many public demonstrations against the official outcome, by courageous Honduran democrats and sometimes in the face of police bullets, are making unexpectedly embarrassing the U.S. dictator’s support of the Honduran regime’s crackdowns against the Honduran public.

Regarding the Ukrainian regime that Obama had imposed, candidate Trump was anti-Obama, and on 1 August 2016 in Harrisonburg PA he said, about Crimea, “You want to have World War III to get it back?” (He assumed that ‘we’ had ‘had’ Crimea, but his pro-imperialist audience went along with that aggressive nationalistic and obviously false assumption.) However, on 2 February 2017, President Trump’s official policy regarding this matter turned out to be the exactly the same policy as Obama’s, when CNN headlined “UN Ambassador Haley hits Russia hard on Ukraine” and reported: 

The US ambassador to the United Nations offered a strong condemnation of Russia in her first appearance at the UN Security Council on Thursday, calling on Moscow to de-escalate violence in eastern Ukraine and saying that US sanctions against Moscow would remain in place until it withdraws from Crimea.

“The United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea,” said Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump’s envoy to the world body. “Crimea is a part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.”

In other words: Trump’s policy is that only if Russia repudiates and rejects the 90%+ desire of the residents of Crimea to be Russians and not to be expelled from Crimea or else killed by the rabidly anti-Russian Obama-imposed Ukrainian dictatorship, will Trump even so much as consider ending the U.S. economic and other sanctions against Russia. This is Obama’s policy, and Trump’s policy. And NATO’s pouring U.S. and other hostile troops and weapons near and even onto Russia’s borders is likewise ‘justified’ by this position.

Trump likewise continues Obama’s policy against Syria, which is a nation that has long been a crucial ally of Russia, though not on Russia’s border as Ukraine is. Obama came into office with a secret plan to conquer Syria, and it was fully operational by 2012, when some dissidents within the U.S. intelligence community privately objected up the chain-of-command, against Obama’s then-increasing reliance upon Al Qaeda in Syria for providing the training and leadership of the U.S.-and-Saudi-selected-and-funded ’moderate rebels’ who were America’s “boots on the ground” to bring down Syria’s Government, which was and remains led by Bashar al-Assad.

However, just as Victor Yanukovych had won the Presidency of Ukraine in 2010 on the promise of keeping Ukraine as a free and independent sovereign nation answerable only to Ukrainian citizens, Assad won Syria’s first-ever democratic election in 2014 by promising to keep Syria as a free sovereign nation answerable only to Syrian citizens — but as one that’s allied with both Russia and Iran, against the U.S. and its pro-jihadist allies. In repeated Western-sponsored polling of Syrians, even during the U.S.-Saudi-UAE-and-allied invasion of Syria by tens of thousands of imported foreign jihadists who demand Sharia law for Syrians, every poll shows that well over 50% of Syrian citizens want Assad to continue leading the country. But America’s dictators have different ideas.

As regards Ukraine, the U.S. stooge-regime is trying to outlaw the teaching and speaking of the Russian language there, and to encourage the takeover, by force, of orthodox churches (considered “pro-Russian”), by Catholic and Protestant ones there.

As regards Syria, the Trump Administration has repeatedly indicated its intention never to end the U.S. military occupation of Syria, though this would (if the U.S. military occupation of Syria were to become permanent like in Afghanistan and Iraq) entail a war, in Syria, between Syria’s invited defender Russia, versus Syria’s uninvited enemy the United States occupiers there, which would quickly escalate into a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia — WW III. The U.S. regime expects to ‘win’ such a war.

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

This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.

Featured image is from SCF.

The AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-Justice and Development Party) is celebrating 15 years in power in Turkey. The party came to power in November 2002, against the backdrop of the major 2001 crisis and amidst a legitimacy crisis of the then mainstream political parties stemming from the crisis-ridden 1990s. The AKP’s policies brought about significant transformations in the state, economy and the society. Conventionally, the first two terms of the AKP government (2002-2011) were identified with democratization, reformism and progressive economic policies. The fact that the government’s authoritarianism reached inconceivable levels post-2011 (especially during and after the Gezi protests of 2013), and the fact that Turkey is governed under the state of emergency since the failed coup attempt of July 2016 [Ed.: see Bullet No. 1286] which resembles an ‘exceptional state’ form, have made conventional accounts to argue that Turkey is sliding toward ‘authoritarianism’. These accounts simply share the ‘good AKP goes bad’ view, and ‘class’ or ‘labour’ is absent in their analyses.

In distinction, I sustain the argument that, ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’ or ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ marked the post-1980 military coup which aimed to remove labour as an agency from the political sphere, and in fact the AKP’s general economic and political stance reflected a continuity with this orientation. There is no doubt that there might be some type of a ‘qualitative’ shift in the form of authoritarianism post-2011 or post-coup attempt, however this is not a ‘deviation’ from neoliberalism and should be contextualized within the capitalist social relations of production and restructuring of capital-labour relations.

In this light, this piece attempts to critically review these 15 years from a labour-centred perspective and shed light on developments in labour market and labour movement. The topics are as follows: economic policy-making, the legal context of labour relations, unionism, unemployment, and indebtedness.

1. Economic Policy-Making

Neoliberal economic policy-making is anti-democratic; and constantly attempts to remove democratic and working-class participation from policy-making processes. The intellectual origins of this orientation go back to the diagnosis of the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s by neoliberals that the excess of democracy had weakened the ‘liberal’ resolve of the state and its authority (Bonefeld, 2017). Hence, under neoliberalism, state managers constantly attempted to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from popular dissent, which is an authoritarian tendency in itself (Bruff, 2014).

Economic and political developments in Turkey under neoliberalism reflect this tendency. However, the 2001 crisis, and the AKP’s take over of the power in 2002 amounted to the strengthening of these tendencies. Certain institutions were depoliticized and de-democratized through extra-democratic technocratic institutions (i.e. Central Bank, Independent Regulatory Institutions), and attempts were made to present certain policies ‘out of influence’ by introducing ‘binding rules’ (i.e. IMF agreements, debt ceilings, primary surplus targets, EU conditionality). The state of emergency in the last 16 months has strengthened this stance, and with the introduction of new institutions such as the Turkey Wealth Fund and the further decreasing role of parliament, policy-making is almost completely isolated from democratic interference.

2. Legal Framework of Labour Relations

Following a protracted demand from capitalist circles, the AKP introduced a new Labour Law in 2003 (Law No. 4857). This law introduced and institutionalized new forms of flexible employment and increased the control and disciplinary power of employers in the workplace, as well as reducing the extent of ‘job security’. It paved the way for further precarity, insecurity and de-unionization in the labour market whose political economic consequences will be dealt with later in this piece. In 2012, the AKP introduced a new Trade Union and Collective Bargaining Law (Law. No. 6356). Despite being presented as a ‘progressive’ step from the previous law by the government, it simply kept the post-1980 authoritarian union policy intact and did not bring about any progressive change to labour relations. Hence, the overall aim of the labour legislation in this era – reflecting the characteristic of authoritarian neoliberalism – was ‘individualizing labour laws and weakening collective bargaining processes and institutions’ (Clua-Losada and Ribera-Almandoz, 2017).

Taksim Square, Istanbul, Gezi Park occupation, early-June 2013. (Source: Socialist Project)

Aside from these major legal developments, the AKP government has also used omnibus bills to restructure labour relations in order to make labour more flexible and competitive. More recently, following the coup attempt, statutory government decrees are used for restructuring of state-capital-labour relations, which makes the management of labour power even more anti-democratic.

3. Trade Union Policy and the Condition of Unionism

As mentioned above, the AKP government took over the authoritarian neoliberal orientation of the Turkish state post-1980, which aimed to ‘put an end to class-based politics’ (Yalman, 2009). From the very beginning, the AKP’s trade union policy was authoritarian, even during the so-called ‘democratization’ era of 2002-2011. Hence, as de-unionization and weakening of collective bargaining power was a crucial aspect of this era; unionization levels decreased by 46% between 2001-2011, making Turkey the least unionized country in the OECD area, with union density in 2011 at just 5.4% (Çelik, 2015). The number of workers covered by collective agreements also decreased by 50% from 1990s to 2010s (Labour Ministry statistics), despite the number of workers at work having significantly increased. Currently, the union density is around 11% and membership rates appear to be on the rise. This, however, is due to the government’s corporatist union strategy which promotes unionism in AKP-friendly unions.

Another aspect of authoritarian union policy is strike bans and police violence toward workers’ protests. 13 strikes were ‘postponed’ or, more correctly, banned by the AKP government since 2002. Five of them occurred during the state of emergency following the July 2016 coup attempt. President Erdoğan himself declared that the government is making use of the state of emergency to ban strikes, in a speech made to the businessmen. During its rule, the AKP government has not hesitated to use police power in order to disperse workers’ resistances and occupations. Moreover, May Day celebrations in symbolic Taksim Square were banned between 2003-2008, and again after 2011.

4. Unemployment

Following the 2001 crisis, unemployment levels increased to double digits, and remained in double digits for the most of the AKP rule. Officially, unemployment currently stands at around 10-11% officially. Unions, however, argue that it is actually higher than the official rate. Also, youth unemployment is around 20%, which is alarming. The high unemployment rate is directly related to the AKP’s economic policies. Following the 2001 crisis, inflation targeting and achieving anti-inflationary credibility became the most important objective of the Turkish state managers, and therefore there was no meaningful employment strategy in place. Hence, the high growth years were actually amounting to what is known as ‘jobless growth’, depending on ‘hot money’ flows and financialization and exacerbated by AKP’s aggressive privatization policy. As the official unemployment rate increased to an alarming 16% in February 2009, the government took some measures. However, these were mostly aimed at making the labour market more flexible, as the government’s National Employment Strategy (NES-2014-2023) suggests. Unemployment remains as a significant problem for the current labour market in Turkey.

5. Rising Indebtedness of Workers

Turkish political economy witnessed a new development during the AKP rule: the rising indebtedness of households and/or shifting of the debt from the state to the households. Two elements played a significant role in this development. First, following the 2001 crisis, austerity policies meant that the government debt and deficit decreased, and the banks could not finance government deficits anymore. They had to find new ways (Karaçimen, 2014). Second, the condition of labourers deteriorated significantly in this period. Real wages decreased in manufacturing, and the minimum wage did not show any meaningful increase. Unemployment and precariousness increased significantly. These all paved the way for rising indebtedness of workers. Indeed, the ratio of household debt to disposable income was insignificant in 2003 (7%), but increased to 55% in 2013. Moreover, this trend rather affected the low-income households most, as 42% of the borrowers of consumer loans were people earning less than TL 1,000 per month (Karaçimen, 2014).

The AKP had to take some measures in 2013 to limit credit expansion, and these measures controlled rising indebtedness to some extent. However, following the economic contraction after the 2016 coup attempt, the government again had to rely on credit expansion for economic growth and household debt began to increase again. Overall, during this period, rising indebtedness added a new dimension to capital-labour relations in Turkey, and functioned as a disciplining mechanism.

Concluding Remarks

The 15 year AKP rule cannot be fully examined without taking the question of labour into account. This short paper attempts to do that. I argued that the AKP era represented a direct continuity with the post-1980 authoritarian management of labour power. Conventional accounts which identify earlier periods of the AKP with democratization, reform, and progressive economic policies fail to assess the anti-democratic and authoritarian neoliberal management of the economy and labour relations. In this context, any democratic struggle against the current authoritarian/exceptional state form should prioritize the issue of class, specifically labour, in order to achieve democratic outcomes.

Dr. Mehmet Erman Erol is an Assistant Professor in Politics at Ordu University, Turkey.

Featured image: Fog Factory: “Just at the cloud line, about 4000 feet up, we passed this cement factory and its smokestack.” (Source: Flickr/Jonathan Kos-Read)

Paris will tomorrow host a climate finance summit called ‘One Planet’. This last-minute gathering of business leaders, heads of state and civil society groups will discuss the future of a green economy. But in the lead-up to the summit a new report points to heavy investment in fossil fuel infrastructure. ARTHUR WYNS reports.

The One Planet Climate Summit will be taking place exactly two years after the historic Paris Agreement and was co-organised by French president Emmanuel Macron, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Although not an official UN conference, the summit is expected to gather many country delegations and heads of states, as well as representatives from business, industry and civil society.

Lauded by many as an additional call for climate ambition led by the French government, the inclusion of businesses and industries at the Paris discussions – many of which have investments in fossil fuel infrastructure – has raised concerns on how impartial these talks will be.

Energy industries

According to UNFCCC, the official UN body leading climate negotiations, climate finance is critical in addressing climate change because large-scale investments are required to reduce emissions and to make a systematic transformation to a more sustainable future.

The One Planet summit this December aims to keep this discussion on climate finance going, although it does that outside of the official UN circuit and with mainly non-state actors at the table, including energy corporations.

A recently published report by the U.S.-based thinktank Corporate Accountability (CA) found that energy industries are, in fact, some of the most powerful lobbyists at climate talks, such as the UN Climate negotiations that took place in Bonn, Germany, last November.

“Big Polluters like oil, gas, coal, and agricultural transnational corporations (TNCs) are not only the largest emitters; their climate denial, lobbying, and policy interference make these industries one of the primary obstacles to sound climate policy at the local, national, and international levels,” states the report, entitled ‘Polluting Paris’.

“For almost as long as the UNFCCC has existed, the same industries whose profits depend on the burning of oil, coal, and gas have been permitted to bankroll the UN climate talks,” the report states.

Fossil fuel

“This has long been a contentious issue because it allows some of the corporations to write checks or provide services such as cars for official delegates, to build the negotiating halls where world leaders gather to address climate change, or even to sit at the very tables where climate policy is being decided” states Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability.

Although the inclusion of non-sate actors is absolutely necessary when shaping a just and sustainable transition, giving a voice to companies and institutions with large investments in fossil fuels during climate negotiations – whether they are official ones like in Germany last November or informal ones like in Paris this December – causes a conflict of interest on a scale that affects us all.

“Financial resources are required to allow countries to adapt to the adverse effects and reduce impacts of climate change,” states Jean-Yves Le Drian, French Minister of European and International Affairs and one of the co-chairs of the One Planet Summit.

Nonetheless, a new report by Bankwatch shows how billions are still being invested in fossil fuels under the guise of development aid.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a multilateral development bank (MDB) formed by 65 countries including the U.S and China and the fifth largest in the world, has awarded 3.6 billion pounds into fossil fuel projects between 2010 and 2016, which is more than double its support for renewable energy during the same period. This despite the bank’s claims that it is addressing the climate crisis.

Fuel corruption

According to Bankwatch’s analysis, fossil fuel projects accounted for the largest share, 41 percent, of the EBRD’s 8.7 billion pound energy and natural resources portfolio in 2010-2016.

A previous report in 2012 already warned that though the EBRD had made commendable strides in its support for energy efficiency and renewable energy in the five years prior, nearly half of the bank’s energy lending GBP 2.87 billion went to fossil fuel projects. Commendably, the bank effectively brought investments in new coal power to a full stop the next year.

Four years later, however, Bankwatch’s new report finds that after several years of increased renewable energy investments, the bank has relapsed in 2016, and is now investing less in renewable energy and more in fossil fuels again.

For the past five years, the development bank has spent on average half a billion a year on fossil fuel investments, with GBP 680 million spend on fossil fuels in 2016 alone.

In 2017 this figure could be even higher, as the bank approved a USD 500 million loan to Azerbaijan last October for the realisation of the Trans Anatolian gas pipeline, a deal that is said to fuel corruption, human rights abuse and climate change impacts in the region.

Climate action

Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath, a Policy Officer at the CEE Bankwatch Network, stated:

“The EBRD has been a trail blazer in renewables development and it has made a strategic commitment to direct 40% of its investments to the green economy transition in our countries by 2020. That is exactly why it is so disappointing to see that the bank’s fossil fuel investments are on the rise, including coal heavy utilities and gas pipelines.

“Even more disconcerting is that the EBRD counts some of its investments in fossil fuels as climate action. Such financial support for fossil fuels then translates into a moral support for an industry that is dragging our countries away from a sustainable low-carbon development path.”

The United States is the largest financer of the EBRD. Most of the Development Bank’s fossil fuels investments occur in central Asia, eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the EU.

Arthur Wyns is a tropical biologist passionate about biodiversity and climate change action. He’s been involved in research teams all over the world, and recently joined the Climate Tracker team as a campaign manager.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Controlled by Wall Street, war profiteers, other corporate predators, Pentagon hawks and likeminded GOP extremists, businessman Trump transformed himself into a warrior leader – continuing naked aggression begun by Bush/Cheney and Obama, threatening war on North Korea and Iran.

Are Russia and China on his target list per orders from the nation’s deep state? Is nuclear war inevitable?

On the occasion of Sunday’s Oslo, Norway award ceremony, presenting the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), I was invited on India’s WION television yesterday.

I and other guests discussed the cutting edge issue of our time, WION asking

“Are nuclear weapons dearer than peace?”

We all agreed on the danger these weapons pose. I disagreed with a view expressed that it’s unlikely they’ll be used.

I stressed how America poses a grave danger – the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, twice gratuitously on Japan after the war in the Pacific was won, its overtures to surrender months earlier turned down by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nikki Haley said if Pyongyang threatens America or its allies, “we will have no choice but to totally destroy” the country.

She repeated the threat on Sunday, December 10 talk shows. More on this below. Last October, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, ICAN said nuclear war may be just “a temper tantrum away.”

Sunday on WION, I stressed the grave danger that America may use these weapons again, North Korea the most likely target.

I explained what founder of Washington’s nuclear navy Admiral Hyman Rickover told Congress in the early 1980s, saying when nations go to war, they’ll use all weapons in their arsenal necessary to win.

If America attacks North Korea, nuclear war is likely, the DPRK using its most effective deterrent on pre-selected targets, the Pentagon likely using these weapons in response.

Here’s a link to Sunday’s program. Unfortunately the audio from Chicago is very choppy – hopefully clear enough to understand the points I made.

I emphasized that today is the most perilous time in world history, a view I’ve expressed before in my articles and other interviews.

Cold War “mutually assured destruction (MAD)” kept these weapons from being used. Soviet Russia never intended to use them preemptively.

As it turned out, neither did US leaders, especially Jack Kennedy, saying in the aftermath of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis that he never had any intention of using these weapons.

Trump is no Jack Kennedy. Neither were the Clintons, Bush/Cheney and Obama. For the first time in world history, the threat of possible nuclear war is ominously real.

ICAN said it could be just “a temper tantrum away.” I’ve said it could happen by accident or design.

On Fox News Sunday, Nikki Haley came perilously close to suggesting war on North Korea is coming, saying if China doesn’t do more, “we’re going to take (things) into our own hands…”

Will naked aggression on the DPRK follow? Then nuclear war? Then Seoul, Tokyo and US regional bases attacked?

Then China and Russia intervening to protect their threatened security?

Then WW III? Then armageddon, risking the end of life on earth? It’s breath-holding time, wondering whether nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and/or elsewhere is coming.

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

Featured image: Young Jews participating in the Taglit Birthright program at an event held at the International Conference Center in Jerusalem. January 4, 2012. (Source: Marc Israel Sellem/Flash90)

It is no secret that young Jews often find it difficult to separate Zionism from the Jewish identity as it has been taught to them. Their identity is often centered on political support for the State of Israel, and they see advocacy for Israel — a special course in the curriculum of many private Jewish schools — as a key part of being Jewish. Leaving the protective bubble of Jewish day schools for university campuses, therefore, can be traumatic.

Teaching the centrality of Israel, a policy that has been applied in most non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools for decades, has borne fruit. Graduates often feel that criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Those feelings are genuine, and need not be simplified into attempts at conscious manipulation of anti-Semitism for political purposes.

In many synagogues, support for Israel has entered liturgy. The congregants’ enthusiasm is palpable when they chant the blessing for the State of Israel and its armed forces, enthusiasm that seems missing in the traditionally central parts of the communal service such as the silent amida prayer. Many Jews have simply not noticed that their traditional religious and ethnic identity has morphed into a new political one. They support Israel financially, attend concerts by Israeli singers, and some even encourage their children to serve in the Israeli army. The existence of a state boasting a national flag, a powerful army, and a prosperous economy confers pride and a sense of involvement in something bigger than private life.

This vicarious “Israelism” has replaced the traditional Jewish identity — a shift that has been all the easier given the less demanding nature of the new identity. Since traditional Jewish identity is founded upon obedience to the Torah and to the precepts that it imposes, it impinges both on the private domain, such as food and intimate relations, and public conduct, including strict requirements of ethical behavior. Judaism articulates hundreds of ritual and moral duties. At the same time, Israelism carries with it no particular morality, no prohibition against oppressing the powerless, that the Torah repeatedly articulates. It breaks cleanly with the traditional ways of being Jewish.

Israel has come to embody military power, political clout and material success. At the same time, it raises serious moral concerns. The Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron asserts that

“moral identification with power politics is equivalent to idolatry,”[1]

while American theologian Marc Ellis considers that this same identification constitutes a “disaster” and reminds his readers that “collective pride implies collective guilt.”[2]

The idea of Jews opposing Zionism and Israel may appear as an oxymoron today. Some, however, remember that Zionism, a political movement, which emerged at the end of the 19^th century in Europe, was opposed at the time by the vast majority of Jews — both religious and assimilated. The Balfour Declaration, which provided Britain’s support for Zionism, was bitterly denounced as anti-Semitic by Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British cabinet. Zionists, just as anti-Semites, postulated that Jews did not belong to the countries of their birth. Both disdained Diaspora Jews and found them degenerate, attributing to them many a negative stereotype. Theodor Herzl was well aware of this fact, confiding in his diary:

“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

When my book on Jewish opposition to Zionism appeared first in French and then in more than a dozen languages, it was only the Hebrew publisher in Israel who subtitled it, “the story of a continuing struggle.” Indeed, most Israelis are aware that Jews, including many ultra-Orthodox residents of Jerusalem, continue to reject Zionism and refuse to enlist in Israel’s armed forces, for which many serve time in military prison. This is rarely mentioned, let alone taught, in Jewish schools.

Just as many Jews — and many more Evangelical Christians — ardently support Israel, quite a few Jews denounce Israel or its policies and support the Palestinians. Jews play a prominent role in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) aiming to soften Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians. Nothing divides the Jews more than the question of Israel.

When identity politics supplants the politics of ideas, it is easy to mistake political opposition for discrimination. It is significant that those who impute anti-Semitism to pro-Palestinian movements on campuses often express admiration for the quality of Jewish life at their universities. Apparently, nobody prevents them from practicing Judaism and celebrating Jewish culture; it is their political views and actions that provoke rejection. Our society is politically diverse, and it is important to keep it this way — differentiating ethnic and religious bigotry from political disagreement. To do so, we must beware the diligently cultivated conflation between Judaism and Zionism.

Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor of History at the Université de Montréal and a founding member of Canada’s Independent Jewish Voices; his recent books are A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Zed/Palgrave-Macmillan) and What is Modern Israel? (Pluto/University of Chicago Press).

This article was originally published by +972 Magazine.

Notes

[1] Boaz Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 253

[2] Marc Ellis, O Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1999, p. 52

On Decembers 9, Major General Igor Konashenkov spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of Russia revealed that a F-22 warplane of the US Air Force tried to prevent two Russian Su-25 warplanes from bombing a base of ISIS on the western bank of the Euphrates River on November 23.

Later, the US F-22 withdrew when a Russian Su-35 warplane arrived to escort the two Su-25, according to Maj. Gen. Konashenkov.

“The F-22 launched decoy flares and used airbrakes while constantly maneuvering [near the Russian Su-25 warplanes], imitating an air fight … most close-midair encounters between Russian and US jets in the area around the Euphrates River have been linked to the attempts of US aircraft to get in the way [of the Russian warplanes] striking against Islamic State terrorists,” Maj. Gen Konashenkov said, according to RT.

Maj. Gen Konashenkov also denounced a statement made by Lieutenant Colonel Damien Pickart, a spokesman for the US Air Force Central Command, in which he claimed that the aerospace over the eastern bank of the Euphrates River belongs to the US-led coalition.

“We saw anywhere from six to eight incidents daily in late November, where Russian or Syrian aircraft crossed into our airspace on the east side of the Euphrates River,” Lt. Col. Pickart told CNN during an interview on Decembers 9.

The spokesman of the Russian military described Lt. Col. Pickart statement as “puzzling” and stressed that Syria is a sovereign nation and a member of the UN. The general also said that the US-led coalition should focus on destroying ISIS in Iraq instead of close encounters between US and the Russian jets.

“Unlike the Russian Air Force, the US-led coalition is operating in Syria without any legal basis,” Maj. Gen. Konashenkov said.

Many Syrian experts believe that these harrassments are a part of the US plan not only to stay in Syria after defeating ISIS, but also to divide the country if possible, in a way similar to the Korean Peninsula. However, this scenario is opposed by both the Syrian government and the opposition.

Featured image is from South Front.

Two shale gas companies and their executives are on a database launched today which aims to reveal lobbying in favour of fossil fuels and against climate change action.

The database, from the website DeSmog UK, is designed to be a live log of activities and actions by key players who are said to be “pushing climate science denial and disinformation”.

The almost 70 entries include Cuadrilla and INEOS, companies behind shale gas exploration plans in northern England and the East Midlands, along with their executives, Francis Egan and Jim Ratcliffe.

DeSmog said the database was intended to help the public, journalists, researchers and policymakers check who they are dealing with on climate science and policy.

It gives background on companies and individuals, their connections, stance on climate change, quotes on energy and climate issues and climate lobbying activity.

DeSmog said today:

“Despite the UK posturing as a climate change leader on the global stage, there remain many issues on which it needs to move further, faster, if the government is to meet its own high standards.

“Behind each climate policy failure is a network of politicians, corporate lobbyists and shadowy think tanks pushing to preserve the fossil-fuelled status quo.”

DeSmog said many of the actors in the database were connected through funding, business relationships, personal connections and ideological origins. These links are portrayed on an updated map.

Industry section of the DeSmog UK map of key players

What the database says about shale gas

Cuadrilla

The database describes Cuadrilla as being “at the vanguard of efforts to exploit Britain’s shale gas resources”.

It charts the progress of the company’s planning applications in Lancashire for shale gas exploration.

It also includes Cuadrilla’s efforts to change rules to suit its activities, revealed in a DeSmog UK investigation.

During the summer, vehicles making deliveries to Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site near Blackpool deviated from the preferred route more than 100 times. This week, the company is seeking to bring deliveries into the site outside agreed times. It has also sought to remove the chair of the Preston New Road Community Liaison Group, who it described as not suitably impartial.

Francis Egan

DeSmog lists public statements and actions by Cuadrilla’s chief executive, Francis Egan, related to climate change.

They include his appearance in front of a House of Lords committee when Mr Egan said fracking could be “squared” with the UK’s emissions reduction goals, that it was “remarkably difficult” to get through planning processes to the point of production, and that UK shale gas would largely be competing with imported US liquefied natural gas at around $6 per unit.

INEOS

INEOS describes itself as “the biggest player in the UK shale gas industry. It has partnerships with other UK shale gas companies, including IGas. In November, it was granted a wide-ranging injunction against anti-fracking protesters although two campaigners have said they are seeking an appeal against it.

The database includes the quote by INEOS Shale’s operations director, Tom Pickering, that Scotland’s decision to ban fracking “beggars belief”.

It also refers to accusations made in April 2017 by Friends of the Earth that the INEOS group was exploiting an opportunity in Brexit to seek further exemptions from environmental regulations.

Also on the database is a meeting in April 2015 between INEOS and Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, on the day the original moratorium on Scottish fracking was announced. A month earlier, according to the database, INEOS and IGas agreed a £30m deal to expand fracking operations in England.

Jim Ratcliffe

Mr Ratcliffe, co-founder and majority owner of INEOS, described shale gas as a “saviour” of the UK economy.

The database said:

“He is known for his aggressive pursuit of industrial assets in the UK, including the Grangemouth petrochemical plant and refinery, Forties pipeline and fracking licences.”

On hearing that Ratcliffe’s INEOS was set to purchase the Forties pipeline from BP, an industry insider told Scotland’s Daily Record:

“Holy sh*t. This would be like giving a monkey a machete … Letting Jim Ratcliffe loose on all the operators who feed into that pipeline is a dangerous, dangerous ploy.”

Map of connections on the DeSmog database. (Source: DeSmog UK)

In 2013, in a comment for the Daily Telegraph, Jim Ratcliffe accuses unions of intimidation, running counter to the values of society, in which freedom of speech is cherished.

In 2017, INEOS Shale sought an interim national injunction against anti-fracking protests to its activities.

First published by GR on November 10, 2010

On May 6, 1935, with the country in the midst of the Great Depression, and with indirect efforts to create jobs having not moved the needle of unemployment rates, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034 and appropriated $4.8 billion for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA put millions of Americans to work constructing buildings, painting murals to decorate them, and performing plays for audiences that had never before seen a dramatic production. In the process, many were saved from poverty and starvation and the economy began to revive.

Although Congress, as part of the New Deal, had appropriated money specifically for relief, FDR decided to use the money for a direct jobs program by issuing a Presidential executive order. This Executive Order described the agencies to be involved in the program, its structure and procedure for application and allocation of jobs.

The WPA was quickly implemented. By March 1936, 3.4 million people were employed and an average of 2.3 million people worked monthly until the program ended in June 1943. During its existence the WPA employed more than 8,500,000 different persons on 1,410,000 individual projects, and spent about $11 billion. The average yearly salary was $1,100, a living wage at the time. During its 8-year history, the WPA built 651,087 miles of highways, roads, and streets. It constructed, repaired, or improved 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 parks, and 853 airport landing fields.

Today our infrastructure is crumbling, and loss of revenue is forcing many cities and states to cut basic services. About 15 million people have become unemployed since the crisis hit in late 2008; a million and a half of them are construction workers. The need for a direct jobs program is either as great, or even greater than during the Depression.

But, in light of the election results, is such a program possible? Can the President directly create jobs by executive order? The answer is a resounding yes. Remember when the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which created the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was passed, one of the purposes was to preserve homeownership, and promote jobs and economic growth.

Much of the TARP money has been repaid and the administration refers to the profit on the payments. If one assumes an average cost of one job is $50,000, 6 million jobs could be immediately created for $300 billion. 12 million jobs could be created for $600 billion. Because this is already appropriated money, Congressional Republicans could not block it.

This direct job creation would be bold. It would also be highly stimulative. It would not add to the deficit because it is already appropriated money. Furthermore, one third of it would come back immediately in taxes, and more importantly, the growth in demand from this number of added jobs would expand private sector job growth and grow the overall economy.

This bold program would contrast markedly with prior stimulus bills, which were indirect and whose effects have been too slow to manifest themselves. The posture of the Republicans during the last two years has been to prevent the President and Congress from taking bold steps to intervene in the economy to directly create jobs. Then they used the Administration’s failure to take bold steps to create jobs to say the “stimulus did not work.” They turned the very TARP bailouts they supported into a rallying cry against government intervention in the economy to help people and they characterized as “socialism” any government initiatives such as health care. They decried deficits and opposed any sane tax policies to get the deficit going in the other direction.

By keeping progress in job creation slow and blaming the administration for lack of jobs, the high expectations for the Obama administration became deflated. The loss of jobs exacerbated the mortgage crisis, and banks have been encouraged to foreclose rather than restructure mortgages despite the opposite being explicitly called for the Emergency Stabilization Act.

The people who voted for Obama in 2008 voted for the promised hope and change. Many developed buyer’s remorse when what they got a set of policies which protected Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, big business at the expense of workers, and made unnecessary compromises with the right. The so called “enthusiasm gap” created by Republican obstruction and Administration timidity, produced such a deflation in people’s morale that it acted as an effective form of voter suppression. The election results can be explained in this fashion.

Some have said that it makes no sense that the voters would go in a more rightward direction because the Obama administration was not “left” enough. But the fact is the Obama administration failed to deliver change and also failed to make the case for progressive policies. The election of Democratic incumbents meant only more of the same. And only 9 million of the 23 million young people who voted in 2008, came out in 2010. This undervote made the difference.

Abraham Lincoln once said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” What happened in this election was the right wing was able to fool enough of the people enough of the time to make independents join with rabid right wingers, while at the same time suppressing the progressive electorate.

This country has a lot to do to get its economic house in order. It is heavily dependent on the financial services industry which only promotes speculation and unregulated bubbles. It is largely controlled by the defense industries which have promoted two and possibly more wars. It is beholden to the extractive energy industries, whose owners are funding the “tea party,” thus putting environmental amelioration on indefinite hold. And it is more and more influenced by the prison industrial complex which promotes hostility to immigrants, and takes resources from education and other vital areas. For the last 30 years it has relied on anti-union and anti-worker policies, which has forced the hemorrhaging of high paid manufacturing jobs to low cost countries and driven down wages for U.S. workers which can no longer be papered over with unsustainable debt.

The President cannot solve all these problems overnight, but with a stroke of a pen he can use already appropriated money to create millions of good green jobs, and move down the road to recovery much faster. Any opposition to this from the Republicans will expose their hostility to anyone but the richest members of society, and give the progressive movement ammunition to take the offensive.

Jeanne Mirer, who practices labor and employment law in New York, is president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild.

The US jobs report for November, released Friday, provides further evidence that the much vaunted economic “recovery” in the United States has overwhelmingly benefited Wall Street, whose stock bonanza is based above all on stagnant wages and the destruction of working-class living standards.

The Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 228,000 and the jobless rate remained unchanged at 4.1 percent, the lowest level since January 2000 at the height of the “dot.com” bubble. Manufacturing payrolls rose by 31,000; construction in the aftermath of the hurricanes in Texas and Florida added 24,000 jobs. There was also a boost in the low-wage retail (18,700) and leisure and hospitality (14,000) sectors.

Despite what economists, the media and politicians are calling “full employment,” average hourly earnings rose only 0.2 percent, or five cents, to $26.55 an hour, from a downwardly revised 0.1 percent drop in wages in October. Year-to-year wage increases in November were only 64 cents, or 2.5 percent. If wages rise by another nickel in December, yearly salaries will be up a mere 2.4 percent in 2017, barely above the official projected inflation rate of 2.0 percent.

“President Trump’s bold economic vision continues to pay off,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders boasted on Friday. “The economy’s vital signs are stronger than they have been in years,” the New York Times declared. “Companies are posting jobs faster than they can find workers to fill them. Incomes are rising. The stock market sets records seemingly every month.”

Economic analysts have pointed to anemic wage growth, euphemistically called weak “inflationary pressure,” as a major factor in the determination of the Federal Reserve to continue pumping up the stock market with cheap credit. Although most economists expect a modest interest rate hike at the Fed’s meeting Wednesday, Jerome Powell, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Reserve, made clear last month at his Senate confirmation hearing that he would keep rates at historically low levels. At the same time, he assured the senators that there was little danger of a wages push because of continuing “slackness” in the labor market, i.e., an ample supply of workers desperate for full-time employment.

Other analysts agree.

“Wage growth has been muted thus far,” especially given the “very healthy pace of job creation,” said Michelle Meyer, head of US economics at Bank of America. “It’s been the story throughout the course of this year.”

Describing November’s wage increase as “tepid,” Carl Riccadonna and Yelena Shulyatyeva of Bloomberg Economics wrote:

“Even though job gains are well in excess of the natural growth rate for the labor market, labor scarcity is not yet driving wage pressures higher. The moral of the story from this jobs report is that full employment is indeed much lower in the current cycle relative to history.”

US employers are exploiting a reserve of unemployed and underemployed workers to keep wages low. At the same time, corporations are filling positions with young workers who are paid far lower wages and benefits than the older workers they are replacing.

According to the government, 6.6 million workers in the US remain unemployed, including 1.6 million, or nearly one out of four jobless people, who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. Another 4.8 million were forced to work part-time last month although they want full-time work, and 1.8 million were “marginally attached” to the labor force. The latter want to work but did not search for employment in the four weeks preceding the survey and were therefore not counted as “unemployed.”

The labor force participation rate, or share of working-age people in the labor force, remained at 62.7 percent in November. However, just 79 percent of the prime-age work force, aged 25 to 54, is actually working—below the rate before the 2008 financial crash.

The situation facing the young generation is particularly dire. According to the Class of 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for young high school graduates is 16.9 percent (compared with 15.9 percent in 2007 and 12.1 percent in 2000). For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is currently 5.6 percent (compared with 5.5 percent in 2007 and 4.3 percent in 2000), and 7.1 percent for young male college graduates.

The figures are even higher for “underemployment,” which includes young graduates who are involuntary part-timers or are only marginally attached to the labor force. For young high school graduates, the underemployment rate is 30.9 percent (compared with 26.8 percent in 2007 and 20.8 percent in 2000). For young college graduates, the underemployment rate is 11.9 percent (compared with 9.6 percent in 2007 and 7.1 percent in 2000).

The share of young graduates who are “idled” by the economy—neither enrolled in further schooling nor employed—remains higher in the wake of the Great Recession than in 2007 and 2000, the report noted. This includes 15.1 percent of young high school graduates and 9.9 percent of young college graduates, many of whom are burdened with unsustainable debts.

The stagnation of wages is a long-term tendency. Since the early 1970s, hourly inflation-adjusted wages have grown by only 0.2 percent annually, and labor’s share of national income has fallen from nearly 65 percent in the mid-1970s to below 57 percent in 2017.

The deterioration in the social position of the working class and accompanying explosion of social inequality are not simply the result of objective economic laws. They are the intended outcome of the policies of the American ruling class, implemented by successive Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The transfer of production to lower-wage countries, deindustrialization and mass layoffs in the 1980s and 1990s were used as a hammer to beat back the resistance of workers to a historic lowering of their living standards.

This process was aided and abetted by the trade unions, whose pro-capitalist and nationalist orientation left workers without any progressive response to globalization. Far from opposing wage and benefit cuts, the United Auto Workers and other unions suppressed working-class opposition and collaborated with the corporations to slash labor costs in the name of boosting competitiveness and “protecting American jobs.”

This assault was escalated in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. In the course of the eight years of the Obama administration, the unions limited strikes to the lowest levels since the Labor Department began recording work stoppages in 1947. They collaborated with the Democratic president to crush a potential wages push in 2015-16 as workers in auto, steel, oil, telecom, airlines, rail, health care, retail and other industries, as well as teachers and other public employees, were coming up for new labor agreements.

While workers were determined to recoup lost income after corporate profits had fully recovered from the crash, the unions signed deals that limited pay hikes to the rate of inflation or barely above it while shifting health care and pension costs onto the backs of workers. This was key to Obama’s “in-sourcing” strategy for attracting investment on the basis of low wages, as well as his “quantitative easing” interest rate policy, which fueled the massive rise in the stock market that continues to this day. Virtually all of the net increase in new jobs created under Obama’s “gig economy” were part-time, contingent or temporary.

Trump claims his $1.5 trillion tax cut—including the slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent—will create more jobs and increase wages. As in the Obama years, however, this massive windfall for big business and the rich will not be used to expand production, let alone increase the wages and living standards of workers. It will go for stock buybacks and dividend increases, which benefit the richest investors.

Wages are so low now that 7.6 million Americans are forced to work multiple jobs, a number not seen in 20 years. In a recent article titled “China-Like Wages Now Part of US Employment Boom,” Forbes noted that a forklift operator hired at $12.75 an hour at Amazon’s Fall River, Massachusetts fulfillment center makes $382 for a 30-hour week, “not much more than the average guy in Beijing,” where the median weekly wage is $329.53. At 40 hours a week, a higher paid, full-time Amazon worker in Fall River earns $28,800 a year before taxes, roughly what Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos pockets every minute.

In the thirteen days since North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching large portions of North America, the United States has further escalated its war threats.

• On Thursday, US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned that the United States might not send athletes to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics to be held in South Korea, because it could not guarantee their safety in the event of a war.

• Last Sunday, National Security advisor H.R. McMaster warned that the threat of war between the United States and North Korea is “increasing every day.”

• That same day, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham warned that the United States is “getting close to a military conflict” with North Korea, and urged the military to remove the families of US soldiers from South Korea.

These developments have been met with alarmed warnings from within the US foreign policy establishment as well as international bodies.

• On Friday, the Washington Post published a chilling hypothetical narrative by Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, entitled, “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.” Lewis spelled out in hair-raising detail a scenario in which “nearly 2 million Americans, South Koreans and Japanese had died in the completely avoidable nuclear war of 2019.”

• On Saturday, the New York Times warned that the Trump administration’s rhetoric on North Korea increasingly resembles that of the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The newspaper added,

“Outside experts are increasingly concluding that the Trump administration’s threats may not be empty and that officials are seriously contemplating attacking North Korea and its nuclear weapons and missile arsenal.”

• That same day, UN envoy Jeffrey Feltman issued a statement declaring that, after discussion with North Korean leaders, both the UN and North Korea had concluded that

“the current situation was the most tense and dangerous peace and security issue in the world today,” warning, “Time is of the essence.”

• On Sunday, at a ceremony to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, representatives of the group warned that “mutual destruction” between the United States and North Korea “is only one impulsive tantrum away.”

• On Sunday, conservative columnist George Will strongly hinted that a US attack against North Korea would place the country in violation of international law, noting that “crimes against peace” formed the basis of the Nuremberg tribunal of Nazi war crimes. Will concluded,

“The first two counts in the indictments at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned waging ‘aggressive war.’”

Such statements underscore the profound unease and concern with which large sections of the US and international foreign policy establishment view a potential war with North Korea. As opposed to the successive wars waged against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, the United States has no international supporters in a potential war against North Korea. It is operating increasingly outside of the framework of international law, with flagrant indifference to the mandates of the United Nations and the consensus of its erstwhile allies.

The administration’s critics within the US political establishment fear that a war against North Korea would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States in every conceivable scenario, involving the deaths, at a minimum, of hundreds of thousands of civilians on both sides of the North Korean border. Such a war would shatter whatever remains of Washington’s standing on the international arena, rendering it a pariah state.

The increasingly bellicose stance toward North Korea, which threatens to engulf it in a war far more disastrous than even the invasion of Iraq, has been a leading driver of speculation over the possibility of a White House palace coup.

In an article published in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Scott D. Sagan warns that averting a potentially disastrous war with North Korea may present a substantial impetus for removing Trump from office by sections of the military.

Sagan notes that, in some ways, the US standoff with North Korea is even more dangerous than the Cuban Missile crisis, when “strong civilian leaders countered the U.S. military’s dangerously hawkish instincts.” But now,

“it is the senior political leadership in the United States that has made reckless threats, and it has fallen to Secretary of Defense James Mattis (a former general) and senior military officers to serve as the voices of prudence.”

He adds,

“If senior military leaders believe at any time that Trump is impaired, they have a duty to contact Mattis, who should then call for an emergency cabinet meeting to determine whether Trump is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office’ and thus whether to invoke the 25th Amendment.”

While no one should underestimate the danger of such a military coup, the idea that the US military leadership would somehow serve to check the Trump administration’s drive to war in the Pacific is wishful thinking. Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis has threatened genocide against North Korea, warning that a war could lead to the “destruction of its people.” National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has likewise stated that the United States is prepared to launch a “preventive,” that is, unprovoked, war against North Korea.

As the United States faces an unprecedented acceleration of the breakdown of its postwar hegemony, the possibility exists that it may go to war simply to make good on the Trump administration’s threats.

Meanwhile, the mounting talk of removing Trump from office through impeachment, forced resignation or the invocation of the 25th Amendment increases the pressure on the administration to seek through war a solution to the domestic political crisis gripping the United States.

All of this underscores the immense danger posed by the US nuclear standoff. While there exist factional differences within the US ruling elite over the advisability of a war with North Korea, there is no antiwar faction within the ruling elite. The policy demanded by those factions opposing Trump—an escalation of the conflict with Russia—poses its own danger of an escalation into all-out world war.

Far from warning of the mounting danger of war, the Democratic Party has spent the last two weeks intensifying its campaign over the Trump administration’s alleged collusion with Russia. It is simultaneously working to corrupt public consciousness with its witch hunt against “sexual misconduct” in Hollywood and on Capitol Hill, aimed at rallying an upper-middle-class constituency for its conflict with the Trump administration.

The only social force capable of averting a catastrophic third world war is the international working class. This social force must be mobilized, on the basis of a socialist program, into a mass international antiwar movement, aimed at putting an end to war and the capitalist system that creates it.

Arms sales by the world’s top 100 arm producers rose 1.9 percent in 2016, the first year of growth in five years, with the United States and Western Europe taking an over 82 percent share, according to an international survey released Monday.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) — behind the survey — said in a statement Monday that sales of arms and military services by the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies — the SIPRI Top 100 — totaled $374.8 billion last year, excluding China.

The total arm sales were equivalent to nearly 0.5 percent of global Gross Domestic Product, up 38 percent since 2002.

Topping the list was the U.S., which continues to maintain the world’s largest military expenditures. Companies from the world largest economy increased their sales by 4 percent last year to $217.2 billion, making the U.S. account for 57.9 percent of the total top 100 arms sales.

SIPRI said that U.S. military operations overseas as well as acquisitions of large weapon systems by other countries drove the rise.

“Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms producer, increased its arms sales by 10.7 percent in 2016, reaching $40.8 billion and significantly widening the gap between it and Boeing — the second-largest arms producer,” it added.

Sales of Western Europe arm producers totaled $91.6 billion, a rise of 0.2 percent from 2015.

U.S. and West European companies accounted for 82.4 percent of total arms sales for 2016, SIPRI said.

The Brexit decision does not seem to have had an impact on the arms sales of British companies, which rose 2.0 percent in 2016, SIPRI said.

According to SIPRI, arms sales by Russian firms in the top 100 continued to grow, rising 3.8 percent to $26.6 billion in 2016.

Companies from South Korea boosted their arms sales by 20.6 percent to $8.4 billion last year due to concerns over North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.

Producers in Brazil and Turkey also showed growth, while there was a slight decline for firms in India.

Due to lack of data, Chinese companies were not included. Based on Chinese defense spending that almost tripled between 2002 and 2016, SIPRI estimated that at least nine Chinese firms, including aircraft maker AVIC, could have been included on the list.

“The growth in arms sales was expected and was driven by the implementation of new national major weapon programs, ongoing military operations in several countries, and persistent regional tensions that are leading to an increased demand for weapons,” the group added.

Created 1966 by the Swedish parliament, SIPRI tracks military spending and arms transfers. It began to chart arms sales by defense firms in 2002.

Featured image: Drill cuttings being dumped at a landfill (Source: FracTracker Alliance)

Commercial Landfills in Colorado have been advised that disposal of Oil and Gas Exploration and Production (E&P) waste is not exempt from Colorado Solid Waste Regulations [1], for example, 6 CCR 1007-2. Disposal of fracking waste is a nation-wide problem.

Fracking’s vertical/horizontal drill tailings, flow-back/produced water, scale, and filter socks are all almost certainly radioactive at levels unacceptable for ordinary landfills. Pipe and tank scale exceed acceptable release levels the most due to their continuous build-up of waste [2].

Each oil-well completion destroys from 5 to 10 million gallons of fresh water [Scientific American, July 2015] — permanently removes it from the hydrologic cycle by deep-injection, waste-disposal wells; the lesser value if recycled once. Such injection is necessary because frack waste water is radioactive and otherwise dangerously polluted (benzene, biocides, formaldehyde, etc). Local Operators may or may not use filter socks, thus recycle their frack water. Water recycling is a typical claim, however, to deflect criticism of egregiously wasteful practices in a water-sensitive region.

The problem

Operators are likely dumping E&P waste at radiation levels highly in excess of TENORM (technically enhanced, normally occurring radioactive materials) guidelines. This has recently prompted CDPHE’s concern. CDPHE approves radioactive releases at commercial landfills; COGCC at land spreads. Both claim it is the responsibility of ordinary waste recipients to guarantee that TENORM standards are being met. Acceptable release levels for Radium, for example, must be below 3pCi/gm [3]. Official corrective action should be taken (per the federal “AAL” or Analytic Action Level) for releases at levels greater than 210 pCi/gm.

Landfills and land spreads apparently have been relying on the measurements of Operators, who, in turn, justify their releases per a COGCC 2014 study [4]. That study, however, used a discredited measuring/testing protocol [5]. As a result, Operators are typically under measuring by at least factors of 100. Indeed, Table 1 of the Gradient Corporation study (cited above) cites a measurement of Radium in radioactive tank sludge at 1,293 pCi/gm, well above the TENORM-allowed release level of 3 pCi/gm. TENORM standards will require accurate testing for each radioactive dump load since radiation levels differ for each waste category and change over the large distances (2 to 3 mi) that a drilling pad’s spacing unit comprises.

Frack-waste’s radioactivity derives, in part, from the alpha-active NORM elements Uranium (U), Thorium (Th), and Radium (Ra) which cannot be quantitatively measured, only detected, via the conventional Geiger-type or gamma measuring devices Operators have been using to justify their radioactive releases.

A principle radiation danger of frack-waste arises from ingestion of its alpha sources. Although alpha particle radiation cannot even penetrate one’s skin, it can, once inside lungs and other internal organs, cause cancer. Radium is alpha active, water soluble, and bone-seeking. Ra-226 remains a threat for thousands of years–has a half-life of 1600 years. It can become airborne in dust from drill sites, uncovered transport trucks, disposal landfills and field spreads. It can migrate from top soil spills into groundwater.

Assessments conducted by Operators have greatly under measured alpha radiation because they were done on wet frack waste containing high total dissolved solids (TDS) such as salts. It takes a special test for radioactivity in frack-water; the common drinking water test fails.

Ra levels can be underestimated by 99% [Environmental Science & Technology Letters: 2014, DOI:10.1021/ez5000379]  Michael K. Shultz, prof of radiology, U of Iowa, showed EPA’s drinking water test is unsuitable for frack-water’s high TDS (concentration of ions). Indeed, the ‘coprecipitation method’ (of the EPA’s 900 series protocol) accounts for less than 1% of the Ra present. Accordingly, Avner Vengosh, geochemist, Duke U, urges that Ra be measured in frack-water directly with gamma ray spectroscopy. [Chemical and Engineering News, ISSN 0009-2347, copyright @ 2017 American Chemical Society]

The EPA method (900 series protocol) simply doesn’t work in high salt solutions. Even in treated frack-water, Ra levels can measure 200 times higher when proper protocols are used. The 21 day holding period of 900 series protocol is also inadequate.

See also, Analysis of Radium-226 in High Salinity Wastewater from Unconventional Gas Extraction by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry, T. Zhang, Dept of Geology and Planetary Science, U of Pittsburg. [Environmental Science & Technology, 2015, 49(5), pp 2969-2976] Zhang outlines a method that requires only a several-hour holding period, and it matches gamma spectrometry results.

Using EPA’s 900 series measuring protocol allows dumping of large quantities of dangerously radioactive waste into landfills, according to FrackTracker Alliance. A feature in  A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy [publication 23 (i), 117-35 doi: 10.2190/ns 23.1.h] analyzed fracking’s reserve pit sludge. It found total beta radiation of 1329 pCi/g in Barnett Shale sludge, which exceeded Texas regulatory guide lines by more than 800%.

Accurate radiation measurements of frack-waste require an expensive spectrometry device [6] and at least a 21-day holding period, which an ordinary land fill will not find practical. The cost of independent, third-party safety measurements of radiation should be borne by the Operator.

How has the state of Colorado dealt with these 2014-15 findings and revelations on radioactive E&P waste?

In November, 2014, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission [COGCC] completed a special project 2136, Analysis of NORM in Drill Cuttings Greater Wattenberg Field, Weld County Colorado. It was to provide regulatory oversight and guidance regarding TENORM. 12 samples of drill cuttings were compared to 12 background samples of soil using a procedure described in Sampling and Analysis Plan for NORM in Oil and Gas Well Drill Cuttings [COGCC 2014]. A gamma ray meter was used to identify “presence and degree” of NORM in cuttings (which as noted above will not quantitatively measure important alpha activity in radioactive waste). COGCC staff found no drill cuttings exceeded their background-sample levels of radiation, thus concluded that “the beneficial reuse of drill cuttings as an agricultural soils amendment does not pose impacts … from radiation.”

The problem with this COGCC sampling

The inappropriate EPA 900 series protocol was used with no ‘holding times’ for “gross alpha solids” (necessary to account for daughter radiation). Also, the 900 series protocol for drinking water was used for “gross alpha aqueous” (inappropriate for high TDS, but this time with adequate holding time). Otherwise the testing was meticulously performed.

Several of the commercial labs that were cited as testing sources by State agencies and Operators were contacted to determine their protocols. None answered. Colorado State Agencies, however, continue to accept the discredited EPA 900 series testing protocol.

A more realistic, and better referenced, assessment of TENORM in fracking waste was completed Oct 3, 2017 by Gradient Corporation, retained by Pawnee Waste, LLC. [See 2]. It reviewed publicly available information on the levels of radioactivity and benzene found in E&P wastes from oil and gas shale formations in Colorado (in the context of CDPHE’s administration levels for TENORM). Gradient found that radiation data from Colorado are similar to other areas of oil development across the US (even in Poland) thereby greatly increasing the amount of data in support of their assessments.

Radioactivity from radium-226 + radium-228 for drill cuttings consistently measured within the range 0.107-13.6 pCi/g, with Colorado’s level at 7.42 pCi/g, thus above the maximum TENORM administrative release level of 3 pCi/g (the testing protocol was not disclosed). Gradient further stated that the oil and gas industry has known for decades that pipe and tank scale may have activitiy as high as 410,000 pCi/g [White and Rood, 2001 referenced therein]. A Gradient Corporation reference found soils impacted by scale cleaning operations [Wilson and Scott, 1992] tested from 6.75 to 1,681 pCi/g, thus considerably exceeded CDPHE administrative levels for radioactivity. Filtration wastes, sludge, and sump solids exhibited radioactivity levels between those of drill cuttings and scale.

Gradient cited references that found benzene in crude oil in excess of the COGCC standard by a factor of 86 to 212. The available data indicate that E&P wastes are likely to exceed the COGCC standard for BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and total xylenes). [See 2]

Conclusion

With accurate measuring protocols and holding periods, ordinary landfill-targeted frack-waste cannot meet the TENORM standards needed to protect public health. Indeed, radiation levels are being under estimated by factors of 100 to 1000 (for scale). It is clearly inappropriately legal to land-dump E&P waste. Thus, TENORM land-dumping should be stopped until COGCC/CDPHE rules comply with current knowledge. In the meantime, Operators must find approved disposal sites in order to continue operation.

Wendell Bradley lives in Windsor, CO.

Notes

1. Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), “Notice to Landfills”: TENORM, May 12, 2017 rescinded in favor of “Management and Disposal of TENORM Generated by Oil and Gas Exploration and Production”, Nov 7, 2017

2. Gradient Corporation’s Memorandum to Pawnee Waste, LLC, Oct 3, 2017. Subject: “Radioactivity and BETX in Shale-oil and Shale-gas Exploration and Production Wastes”

3. See (1) where release levels are: U < 30 pCi/gm, Ra (226 + 228) and Th < 3 pCi/gm. The Analytic Action Level (AAL) or level at which action must be taken is 210 pCi/gm

4. Sampling and Analysis Plan for Naturally Ocurring Radioactive Material in Oil and Gas Well Drill Cuttings, COGCC April, 2014

5. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 2 Apr 2016 by A. Nelson and M. Shultz

6. See (5)

This statement was first published on October 6, 2017

It is a great honour to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 in recognition of our role in achieving the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This historic agreement, adopted on 7 July with the backing of 122 nations, offers a powerful, much-needed alternative to a world in which threats of mass destruction are allowed to prevail and, indeed, are escalating.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries. By harnessing the power of the people, we have worked to bring an end to the most destructive weapon ever created – the only weapon that poses an existential threat to all humanity.

This prize is a tribute to the tireless efforts of many millions of campaigners and concerned citizens worldwide who, ever since the dawn of the atomic age, have loudly protested nuclear weapons, insisting that they can serve no legitimate purpose and must be forever banished from the face of our earth.

It is a tribute also to the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the hibakusha – and victims of nuclear test explosions around the world, whose searing testimonies and unstinting advocacy were instrumental in securing this landmark agreement.

The treaty categorically outlaws the worst weapons of mass destruction and establishes a clear pathway to their total elimination. It is a response to the ever-deepening concern of the international community that any use of nuclear weapons would inflict catastrophic, widespread and long-lasting harm on people and our living planet.

We are proud to have played a major role its creation, including through advocacy and participation in diplomatic conferences, and we will work assiduously in coming years to ensure its full implementation. Any nation that seeks a more peaceful world, free from the nuclear menace, will sign and ratify this crucial accord without delay.

The belief of some governments that nuclear weapons are a legitimate and essential source of security is not only misguided, but also dangerous, for it incites proliferation and undermines disarmament. All nations should reject these weapons completely – before they are ever used again.

This is a time of great global tension, when fiery rhetoric could all too easily lead us, inexorably, to unspeakable horror. The spectre of nuclear conflict looms large once more. If ever there were a moment for nations to declare their unequivocal opposition to nuclear weapons, that moment is now.

We applaud those nations that have already signed and ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and we urge all others to follow their lead. It offers a pathway forward at a time of alarming crisis. Disarmament is not a pipe dream, but an urgent humanitarian necessity.

We most humbly thank the Norwegian Nobel Committee. This award shines a needed light on the path the ban treaty provides towards a world free of nuclear weapons. Before it is too late, we must take that path.

Image is from ICAN.

This article first published by Global Research in November 2015 reveals the media lies and fabrications regarding Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), casually portrayed as the outside enemies of America, threatening Western civilization. That’s what is best described as “fake news” in support of a criminal US-NATO military agenda

The sad truth is that in the new millennium, government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skillfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty

Exposing the lies spewing forth from Washington and its MSM ministry of propaganda these days is a fulltime job entrusted to alternative media to report the deceptively hidden truth. The latest round of developments in the aftermath of last week’s Paris tragedy killing 129 people and injuring over 350 more innocent victims illuminates the aforementioned problem in article on Saturday headlined, “Pentagon pressing allies for more help against Islamic State.”

The question becomes help for or against the Islamic State?… because the historical facts clearly show the US Empire and its host of allies have only helped Islamic State terrorists, never for a moment have they seriously fought against the Islamic State.

Bottom line, this undisputable reality only proves that the US and its unholy partners-in-crime have created both al Qaeda terrorists and the Islamic State terrorists, including all the so called moderate terrorists Obama claims to support in between.

A brief history lesson shows that al Qaeda was birthed in the late 1970’s under the guiding tutelage of longtime globalist criminal acting then as President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Under their original name the Mujahedeen were the US proxy mercenary terrorists (not unlike ISIS) recruited by the CIA to combat the Soviet Empire expansion into Afghanistan and then continue growing and flourishing under the Reagan-George HW Bush regime throughout the 1980’s.

Over many years as former CIA director, VP, president Pappy Bush did lots of shady war and oil business dealings with the Saudi aristocratic bin Laden family. So it was a natural marriage to enlist young Osama bin Laden, family upstart, to lead the CIA-sponsored band of rebels that helped defeat longtime cold war enemy and empire rival the Soviet Union.

It worked like such a charm in the empire graveyard of Afghanistan, culminating with the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, that under the new name al Qaeda Osama and his proxy terrorists were rehired to help “balkanize” the Balkans, engaging in ethnic cleansing against Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo and smuggling opium onto the West while assisting in the demolition of the once sovereign nation Yugoslavia into a half dozen weakened failed states under the Bush senior-Clinton regime throughout the 1990’s.

This US notion of “balkanizing” sovereign nations into failed state pieces was echoed by war criminal globalist Henry Kissinger a couple years ago expressing his desire to partition Syria into “more or less autonomous regions.” Of course the same can be said for US design on Iraq. As part of its global chessboard divide and conquer scheme, it’s been a carnivorously predatory foreign policy staple for the imperialistic Empire of Chaos to systematically carve up, destabilize, weaken and otherwise destroy not only entire independent nations but entire regions like the Middle East and North Africa as well.

As a sidebar note, in recent decades a seamless transition of the powers-that-shouldn’t-be have flowed from one administration to another, from Bush one to Clinton one back to the Bush two, onto Obama and God help us not be back to Clinton two. That’s because those who control US foreign policy for a long time have also owned and controlled America’s corrupt two party system. Electing a democrat or republican to office has been the elite’s crafty way of merely granting American voters an illusion of choice but long before any November election the ruling elite handpicks every presidential two party candidate backing both to ensure that every US president elected is a mere puppet dancing on an oligarch string.

The late 1990’s spawned the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the masterplan for “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” as envisioned by the likes of neocon gangsters Cheney, Bush 2, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld et al. These war criminals plotted the demonic exploits of US Empire well into the twenty-first century, of course including the redrawing of the Middle East by using WMD liesas pretext for war after staging their “new Pearl Harbor event,” thus with help from their friends Israel and Saudi Arabia, they created and their al Qaeda terrorists as their hired gun stooges to take the blame for murdering 3000 Americans and establishing their “long” war on terror. Of course also in their sinister plan was the dismantling of the US Constitution and America’s civil liberties.

Tragically the disastrous costly quagmires of both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars were an integral part of the PNAC plan. Right after 9/11 General Wesley Clark became privy to the neocon agenda to take down seven sovereign nations within five years in the Middle East and North Africa. But in actuality regime change has long been embedded standard US foreign policy anywhere in the world where a sovereign country refuses to submit to US Empire’s rape and plunder. Just as Putin and Assad justifiably criticize US global hegemony for its brutal consequences reserved for those nation-states that openly defy Western imperialism, Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah speaking in Beirut a month ago said:

The punitive aspects of US foreign policy are aimed at anyone who refuses to submit to US domination, which is to say, refuses to become local extensions of the US government (and by implication, of the large oil and weapons companies that dominate it.) He who takes his own decision on the basis of his country’s interests is unacceptable to the United States.

If you doubt the truth of Nasrallah’s words, just ask the former Yugoslavia, or Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Syria, Somalia, North Korea, Russia, China, each of them know all too well as targeted US enemies for resisting and challenging Empire hegemony. Or ponder the short list (dozens more attempts were unsuccessful) of fallen leaders from sovereign nations who have been assassinated and/or overthrown by US imperialistic interests: 1953 Iran, 1954 Guatemala, 1950’s Vietnam, 1961 Congo, 1964 Brazil, 1965 Indonesia, 1965 Dominican Republic, 1973 Chile, 1990 to present Haiti, and 2014 Ukraine.

Through its CIA the US-NATO forces have led the West’s state sponsored terrorism for multiple decades on virtually every continent, from MENA to sub-Saharan Africa to South and Central America to Europe to Central Asia and Pacific Asia. Throughout the modern era, US Empire has been the prime suspect among nations as the guiltiest perpetrator systematically utilizing false flag propaganda to get away with spreading terrorist murder, mayhem and war to every corner of the globe with total impunity. No other nation, not Russia nor China but only the US is guilty of tampering and interfering at will with the internal affairs of countless sovereign nations which is a clear violation of international law. Its hypocritical double standard always citing US exceptionalism can no longer be used as the flimsily justified excuse or self-serving mantra on either moral or legal high ground. Empire’s long run as the sole unipolar superpower-world bully is over and as such, the US should no longer expect to get away with flagrantly defying and violating every international law from the Geneva Convention to the UN Charter.

After the costly occupation and horrendous war defeats representing the two longest running wars in US history in Iraq and Afghanistan, in September 2014 Obama declared a fake war against ISIS after the terrorists invaded Iraq in June, promising to “hunt them down.” But instead US military forces were only ordered to pretend to fight a fake enemy when in fact they were actually ordered to defend and protect them with air supportPilots commonly complain they are not being given clearance to fire upon Islamic State forces.

The ISIS invasion of Iraq was merely Obama’s excuse to remove the corrupt Iraq puppet leader Maliki in order to reestablish a US military foothold in Iraq to then go after Assad in Syria, something the world and Putin (who brokered the Assad deal to turn in his chemical weapons) had denied Obama the year before from carrying out his bogus “red line” lie calling for airstrikes against Syria when in fact it was Obama’s own ISIS pals themselves that committed the false flag chemical weapons attack on Syrian children.

Despite leading a so called “coalition” of allied forces alleged to have flown more than 20,000 airstrikes over Iraq and Syria against ISIS in the first year alone and stepping up a relentless inhumane campaign of remote controlled killer drone warfare deployed in over a half dozen MENA nations, ISIS only continues its exponential growth while expanding territorial control throughout the Middle East and far beyond into the northern CaucasusCentral AsiaUkraine, also teaming up with affiliate African terrorist groups Boko Harem in Nigeria and Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Just this week four former drone pilots wrote a formal letter to Obama pleading their case that the drone attacks have only increased the number of terrorists. But then that’s precisely the plan. To keep the war on terror going, fresh new ISIS recruits are needed. Hence by 2019 Obama plans to increase drone use by 50%. Clearly Obama’s diabolical intention is to spread terror around the world.

In another disturbing development this week, African terrorists took 170 mostly Westerners hostage killing 21 of them at the Radisson Hotel in the Mali capital of Bamako. Their ringleader Mokhtar Belmokhtar (image right) happens to be a CIA asset and the incident came five days after CIA chief John Brennan predicted more acts of terrorism. Two weeks prior to the Paris attacks Brennan also met with his French counterpart and former Mossad director and after the Paris incidents admitted to the press that the CIA knew attacks in Europe were coming. If he knows so much, why does he allow them to keep happening? Perhaps because he’s in cahoots with the terrorists himself.

Barack Obama has been chosen by the ruling elite and given the gauntlet to dutifully undermine and destroy the United States from within in order to implement the New World Order’s one world government. Many Americans including contending presidential candidate Ben Carson fear and believe that the next major false flag could usher in Obama’s martial law that through his own illegal executive orders have given him unlimited dictatorial powers that include canceling next year’s presidential election, anointing himself US dictator for life.

Under Obama’s and Brennan’s watch, ISIS has been allowed to extend their operations worldwide, even into America. Our president’s open border policy has enabled terrorist cells to proliferate inside the United States. Back in April this year Judicial Watch reported that ISIS has partnered with a Mexican drug cartel to participate in joint military exercises at a training camp just eight miles from the El Paso Texas border. Yet Obama simply denies the terrorist presence and has done nothing but keep his 1500 mile open border policy intact to purposely leave the nation grossly unprotected and criminally vulnerable, in effect inviting terrorism attacks on US soil as part of his puppet masters’ plan to destroy America from within. As recently as Sunday November 22^nd, on the 52^nd anniversary of the JFK assassination, Obama chose to arrogantly claim that ISIS “cannot strike a mortal blow” against America.

Of course putting on a false front of self-security for the American public is designed to assuage growing fears that another 9/11 is eminent on US soil. This is the same US president who also made “off the record” remarks to friends alluding to not wanting to be murdered on the job like Kennedy as his lame excuse for not standing up more for the American people to fight against his evil NWO handlers. After all, in this diabolical world climate where the US government has devolved into a mere front for a shadowy international crime syndicate owned and operated by the ruling elite, biting the hand that feeds you is signing your own death warrant. Kennedy was the last US president to learn that lesson the hard way and humanity’s been suffering ever since.

A recent Defense Intelligence Agency document confirms that in 2012 the Obama regime elected to throw its full weight behind the Islamic State terrorists fighting against Assad’s Syrian forces knowing that the Islamic State’s ambitious sectarian agenda was to create havoc in order to build a radicalized jihadist caliphate throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the Obama neocons willfully bet on ISIS, squandering US taxpayer dollars to furnish carte blanche heavy weaponry brand new Toyota trucks, continued air support and countless airdrops of arms, ammo, food and medical supplies even after ISIS invaded Iraq in June 2014.

In fact with another 50 ton ammunition airdrop last month, Obama’s still trying to preserve the ISIS supply line stretching from NATO ally Turkey’s border into northern Syria even while as of late Putin’s been busily bombing Islamic State’s infrastructure. In the last several weeks planes from US led allies Canada, Sweden, Germany and the US have all been showing up at the Baghdad airport without authorized approval ostensibly headed toward the Kurdistan region of Iraq filled with arms. But the big question remains for whom? The Kurds or the IS terrorists? In the meantime, since Russia determined that an Islamic State bomb planted onboard its airliner took it down over the Sinai desert on Halloween, Russia has vowed to destroy ISIS with a vengeance. Islamic State tanker truck convoys filled with oil are currently the prime targets of Russian bombs.

For three straight years the lying traitors in Washington have been secretly supporting the cancerous spread of Terrorists-R-US expanding far beyond the Middle East and North Africa and deep into Europe with repeated Paris attacks. Creating failed states will travel, by design US Empire has produced the gargantuan international migration crisis over flooding Europe under the globalist umbrella of multiculturalism. This massive influx of Muslims into Western nations largely populated by Caucasian majorities now desperate to hang onto their historical and cultural roots and identities is designed to enflame and exploit racial tensions and hatred as part of the elite’s divide and conquer agenda, also making it conducive for developing yet more terrorist cellsdangerously operating throughout the West.

The bare truth is our own treasonous leaders in Washington who all swore to uphold, defend and protect our Constitution and nation from both foreign and domestic enemies, from the president to his justice, state and defense departments to key Congressional members have plotted the downfall of the United States as a sovereign nation and every last one of them needs to be held accountable for their crimes against humanity with their arrest and trial for treason against the United States. More Americans are accepting this bitter sad truth that their own government has not only betrayed us, it is preparing to indefinitely detain and/or kill us without legal rights, warrants, charges or trails. Before we’re permanently silenced, we as sovereign citizens need to amass our collective will utilizing military, law enforcement and willing agents within the judicial system who still honor our Constitution to make arrests and hold criminals in our crime cabal government accountable. Two retired generals, one from the Army and the other from the Air Force, have taken to the airwaves onTruNews citing a potential constitutional crisis since Obama has failed to protect American citizens by aiding and abetting our terrorist enemy ISIS that have vowed to launch attacks on US citizens inside America. This could be the legal mechanism that may provide the clout behind removing the treasonous president from office.

This latest AP article portraying the Pentagon’s so called renewed efforts to muster a rallying cry to enlist Western allies’ “help” against ISIS is an insult to humanity as well as an insult to our intelligence because every day more of us world citizens are catching on as to the sinister truth behind US Empire and the ruling elite pulling its strings. A quote from the article:

The call for help is driven by a hope to build on what the Obama administration sees as the beginnings of battlefield momentum in Iraq and Syria. It may also reflect a sense in the Pentagon that the campaign against the Islamic State group has advanced too slowly and requires more urgent and decisive military moves.

This paragraph is laughable. Commander-in-chief Obama possessing the most lethal killing machine on the planet has had fifteen months to “hunt down the Islamic State terrorists,” yet has nothing to show but preplanned failure masking his covert success to not destroy ISIS but to only protect them.

Putin taking charge and actually fighting a real war against terrorists has thrown Obama, Carter and the Pentagon into discombobulated panic. So in retaliation a Russian plane gets blown up killing all 224 people onboard and then the US-Mossad-French intel community in cahoots with IS terrorists pull off France’s 9/11 in Paris a week ago. And now Obama plans to capitalize on his sponsored terrorism by gaining some “battlefield momentum” fighting ISIS his secret allies. What a preposterously unfunny joke! After waging his fake war for over a year, Obama has covertly supported ISIS terrorism allowing the scourge to extend far beyond the MENA region. The AP post “boldly” points out that the Pentagon may reluctantly be acknowledging its progress against ISIS is “too slow,” so it’s now asking for urgent help. What a nauseous façade MSM maintains for the MSM-owned ruling elite.

The only thing Obama and the Pentagon want more help with is removing Assad from power and neutralizing Russia as the only nation engaged in any real war against terrorism. That oil pipeline running through Syria from Qatar designed to cut off the flow of Russian oil-gas exports to Europe doubling as the final gateway to get to the Middle Eastern prize Iran would complete that neocon 7 nation regime change wet dream and that’s really what all this propped up luster bluster for going after ISIS is about. Fork tongued doublespeak is the only language that the Obama regime speaks, and the Washington neocons are banking on their Nazi mentor Joseph Goebbels’ misquoted truism: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

The US is calling for urgent military assistance from European allies that also include Israel, Turkey, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich, thoroughly corrupted Gulf State monarchies that finance, arm and train Islamic State militants. Yet all of these so called “anti-ISIS” allies either protect or are complicit in allowing anywhere from $1-3 million per day that flow into the Islamic State’s bank accounts stolen from Syrian and Iraqi petro field refineries selling black market oil to nations like Turkey and Jordan. That of course was before Putin started bombing both refineries and tanker convoys hurting ISIS where it counts the most.

So while the US allies are too busily crying the financial blues to fill the Empire coffers to continue running its fake war against the terrorists, they all collectively protect, ensure and in some cases patronize ISIS in maintaining and supplying its primary source of revenue that keeps the largest terrorist group on the planet still operating and growing larger with each passing year. Thankfully Putin’s much needed intentions are changing all that, something the US and all its allies have refused to do.

After stating the likelihood that Europe’s too hard up for money to help, the article adds “chances of drawing significant additional help from Arab nations seem even slimmer.” But that’s certainly not because they’re too cash poor like Europe. Of course no mainstream media outlet would ever dare to admit it, the all too obvious reason that the Arab states refuse to help fight against ISIS is that they are its biggest supporters. As Islamic State financiers, trainers, arm suppliers and jihadist joiners coming from the same twisted brands of Sunni Wahhabi and Salafist Islam, they are ISIS!

An anonymous senior defense official revealed to AP after Secretary of War Ash Carter met for an hour with his top military advisors and war commanders urging them to take full advantage of the Paris bloodbath while still fresh on the minds of allied leaders. Carter ordered Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford, NATO Commander General Philip Breedlove and lead commander “fighting” the Islamic State Lt. General Sean MacFarland to reach out to UK, Germany, France, Italy and Turkey to seek military support for combat equipment, supplies, trainers, advisors and special operations forces.

It’s worth noting the stark contrast between how the world reacts to terrorism when it takes place in a Western nation as opposed to the Middle East. A week ago two Islamic State suicide bombers blew themselves up in a Beirut marketplace killing 44 people and over 200 injured yet in the anguish over Paris it was all but ignored by Western media. Thousands upon thousands of innocent fellow human beings who are Lebanese, Syrian, Libyan, Iraqi, Yemeni and Palestinian are also being slaughtered by terrorists.

They suffer far more carnage on a daily basis than any Westerner but the impact of their terrorism remains largely invisible to the rest of the world. Why? More than anything else, when bloodshed is spilled by darker skinned mostly Muslim populations in the Middle East or North Africa, their lives hold less value in the minds of the Western world. Despite millions of innocent victims living in terror (whether at the hands of ISIS, Israeli apartheid killers, Saudi or US bombs/drones or for that matter Assad or Putin bombs) every day across the Middle East and North Africa, few among us even give it a second thought. But when young whites in an upscale Paris district are murdered, France is immediately joined by the US and much of the world in horrified solidarity and support for both the victims and their grieving nation, followed shortly by a deafening chorus seizing the opportunity to escalate the violence on an epic scale, or at least that’s the latest rhetoric reflected in Pentagon news delivered to the world by the Associated Press. More double standard hypocrisy manifests in the form of more jingoistic propaganda hype justifying an upcoming multi-nation global sized war

This AP article is nothing more than Empire propaganda promoting the global masses into blindly accepting the inevitability of World War III. Under the false pretense of going after terrorists, the not so hidden real agenda has been all along to go after emerging giants RussiaChina as Empire’s biggest threats to its full spectrum dominance and global hegemony. Western globalists refuse to accept a bipolar, more balanced, sane and stable world where East and West can peaceably co-exist. From the get-go ISIS has been a required asset to the globalist owned Empire used to maintain its endless war on terror to fulfill its sinister agenda to destabilize and impoverish the entire world. This perpetual war of terror in turn only feeds the Frankenstein monster that Eisenhower warned America about in his presidential farewell address nearly 55 years ago.

The military industrial complex is a gluttonous, parasitic cancer that’s been feeding nonstop off humanity’s very lifeblood for far too long. It’s time for informed citizens of the world who see what’s happening and wish to leave a still habitable world for their children and grandchildren to now rise up and demand that the maniacal evildoing of a handful of subhuman psychopaths be stopped in their tracks from destroying all life on our only planet.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/. Joachim is also a regular contributor toGlobal ResearchSott.netLewRockwell.com

“What you’re getting now is less of a menu of choices in terms of trying to understand the world and that’s what the internet had promised us.  There was the hope we had and increasingly now in the past year, under this umbrella of Russia-gate, we are seeing a reversal of that.”

– Robert Parry (from this week’s interview)

“Fake news is a term that was propagated by the Washington Post and of course it was taken and run by a lot of corporate media entities to try to discredit … very legitimate, progressive news outlets that are doing the real work, getting their hands dirty, based on literally donations from citizen activists who want to see a peoples’ media being represented.”

– Abby Martin (from this week’s interview)  

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As discussed in a previous installment of this radio program, the major media within the U.S., and indeed much of the West, are dominated by and situated within an infrastructure of corporate profiteering interests which have the capacity through flak, advertising, and other mechanisms to restrict and contain news stories which could impact their bottom lines.

Some would argue that the capacity for the one percent to shape media into propaganda instruments has only increased over the last 35 years. In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90% of the media consumed by Americans. Today, the number controlling 90% of what Americans see, hear and read is down to six media conglomerates, namely General Electric, Viacom, News Corp, Disney, Time Warner, and CBS. [1]

Since the unexpected election of Donald Trump to the presidency, those entrenched special interests, many of whom appeared to be banking on the election of his rival Hillary Clinton, were confronted with the realization that they could not control the political narrative anymore.

Pundits and policy makers alike came to the quick and, on the face of it, absurd conclusion that Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election. In the waning days of his presidency, Barrack Obama authorized an act which would restrict the ability of Russians to propagandize Americans. From the moment of his inauguration, President Trump has been dogged by a scandal known as Russia-Gate which sober analysts including Veteran Intelligence Professionals say is groundless.

The dissident Russia government-funded television network RT was forced in November into registering as a ‘foreign agent’ while the Qatar government-funded Al Jazeera and British government-funded BBC are not. Google and facebook have altered their search algorithms to make it harder to access stories and analysis which depart from the narratives put forward by this modern day ‘Ministry of Truth.’

The Press has the power to bring down presidents, expose scandals, mobilize the populace behind war, rally donations behind disaster relief, and manipulate the consumer habits of a mesmerized populace. With the immense geopolitical dilemmas and environmental crises descending upon humankind at this time in history, the inclusion of alternative voices to those endorsed by America’s Military Industrial Congressional complex are essential. The Global Research News Hour radio program therefore focuses this week on the mainstream media propaganda machine’s solidifying grip on the public imagination as well as some of the independent media tools we can reach for to secure release before it’s too late.

Robert Parry is a long-time investigative journalist, and the editor of ConsortiumNews.com, which he co-founded in 1995. He helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal for The Associated Press in the mid-1980s and in tribute to his work over the years, he was honoured with the Martha Gilhorn Prize for Journalism last June. Parry describes how and why journalistic standards have declined since he first started in the field in the mid-70s, he discusses the consequences for democracy, and briefly explains the importance of reader-financed news outlets, such as Consortiumnews. (Their end-of-year fund-raiser is currently underway.)

Abby Martin is the host of The Empire Files for Telesur. She is the former host of RT’s Breaking the Set and has become a much sought after commentator. In an interview originally broadcast for host station CKUW‘s fund-raising drive back in February of 2017, Abby talks of her own foray into journalism, the need for media literacy in a Wild West alternative media landscape, and the challenges facing authentic journalists who don’t fall into line with the U.S. imperial narrative.

The Centre for Research on Globalization encourages donations from listeners and readers who appreciate the unique perspectives presented on this radio program. Incentives such as free books are available in return for generous donations as well for income tax purposes for US residents. Please visit our donation page here.

Many thanks for showing your support for alternative voices!

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in everyThursday at 6pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-illusion-of-choice-ninety-percent-of-american-media-controlled-by-six-corporations/5472690

Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed amid fighting between his supporters and their former allies, the Houthi movement on December 4. Until recently, Saleh loyalists had been fighting alongside the Houthis in a war against the Saudi-backed president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, but a dispute over control of the Yemeni capital of Sana’a on November 29 triggered armed clashes that have left more than 125 people dead. On November 2, Saleh offered to “turn a new page” with the Saudi-led coalition if it stopped attacking Yemen and ended its crippling blockade of the country. The Houthis accused him of a “coup” against “an alliance he never believed in”.

Sources in the Houthi forces said its fighters stopped Saleh’s armoured car with an RPG rocket outside the embattled capital Sanaa and then shot him dead. Sources in Saleh’s party confirmed he died in an attack on his convoy. His death marks a shift three years into a war in a state of stalemate. It risks the conflict becoming even more volatile.

Saleh, a former military officer, became the president of North Yemen in 1978 after a coup but, when north and south reunited in 1990, was elected as the first president of the new country. Saleh was an important player in Yemen’s descent into civil war, when his reluctant departure from power by the Houthis in 2012 brought his Saudi-backed deputy, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, into office. The Houthis fought a series of rebellions against Saleh between 2004 and 2010. They also supported an uprising in 2011 that forced Saleh to hand over power to Hadi.

But in 2014 Saleh forged an alliance with his former opponents, the Houthis, to facilitate their takeover of Sanaa and ultimately to force Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia. While it lasted, the alliance benefited both sides. Saleh used Houthi firepower and manpower, while the Houthis gained from Saleh’s governing and intelligence networks.

In late November, that equation changed as Saleh moved to increase his power in Sanaa and signaled that he was swapping sides, seeking a dialogue with the Saudis and their allies. In a speech on December 2, Saleh appeared to indicate the end of his loyalists’ alliance with the Houthi fighters. He said he was ready to turn a “new page” in ties with the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis, if it stopped attacks on Yemeni citizens and lifted a siege. For that moment, army units loyal to Saleh had been clashing with Houthi fighters few days already.

The war in Yemen has hit a stalemate, and it is hard to say which side is winning. The both sides cannot deliver a decisive blow to each other. Now, Saleh’s apparatus will likely be weakened and the Houthis will become the only power in northern Yemen.

On the other hand, the conflict between the loyalists and the Houthis is exactly what the Saudi-led coalition wants. Together Saleh’s forces and the Houthis were strong enough to hold on to Sanaa, repel the forces of the Saudi-backed government and its Gulf Arab allies and to conduct constant attacks against Saudi-led forces in Yemen and even against targets inside Saudi Arabia. Now, the military capabilities of anti-Saudi forces will be partly reduced.

Despite that, even if some part Saleh’s former forces ally themselves with the Saudis, that by itself won’t guarantee their victory. Indeed, this will mean that Yemen, a now near-permanently unstable and divided state, will become even more nagging a thorn in Saudi Arabia’s side, with constant threat of missiles and Houthi raids. Add to that growing power of Hezbollah and Iran in the region and you get difficult times for Saudi Arabia.

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

The US and global economy are approached the latter stages in the credit cycle, during which financial asset bubbles begin to appear and the real economy appears to be at peak performance (the calm before the storm). This scenario was explained in my 2016 book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy‘. In coming weeks I will be posting in serial form the concluding chapter of that book for readers on this blog, entitled ‘A Theory of Systemic Global Fragility‘.

Is Bitcoin a Bona Fide ‘Bubble’?

“What’s a financial asset bubble? Few agree. But few would argue that Bitcoins and other crypto currencies are today clearly in a global financial asset bubble. Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are the speculative investing canary in the global financial asset coalmine.

One can debate what constitutes a financial bubble—i.e. how much prices must rise short term or how much above long term average rates of increase—but there’s no doubt that Bitcoin price appreciation in 2017 is a bubble by any definition. At less than $1000 per coin in January, Bitcoin prices surged past $11,000 this past November. It then corrected back to $9,000, only to surge again by early December to more than $15,000. Given the forces behind Bitcoin, that scenario is likely to continue into 2018 before the bubble bursts. The question of the moment, however, is what might be the contagion effects on other markets?”

What’s Driving the Bitcoin Bubble?

If Blockchain and software tech company ICOs are driving Bitcoin and other crypto pricing, what’s additionally creating the bubble?…..Who is buying Bitcoin and cryptos, driving up prices, apart from early investors in the companies? ……the absence of government regulation and potential taxation of speculative profits from price appreciation has served as another important driver of the Bitcoin bubble bringing in still more investors and demand and therefore price appreciation. No regulation, no taxation has also led to price manipulation by ‘pumping and dumping’ by well positioned investors….. Another factor driving price is that Bitcoin has become a substitute product for Gold and Gold futures……But what’s really driving Bitcoin pricing in recent months well into bubble territory is its emerging legitimation by traditional financial institutions………futures and derivatives trading on Bitcoin are set to begin in December 2017 in official commodity futures clearing houses, like CME and CBOE…..Bitcoin ETFs derivatives trading are likely not far behind……….big US hedge funds are also poised to go ‘all in’ once CME options and futures trading is established…… Declarations of support for Bitcoin has also come lately from some sovereign countries………While CEOs of big traditional commercial banks, like JPM Chase’s Jamie Dimon, have called Bitcoin “a fraud”, they simultaneously have declared plans to facilitate trading in the Bitcoin-Crypto market.

Bitcoin as ‘Digital Tulips’

Bitcoin demand and price appreciation may also be understood as the consequence of the historic levels of excess liquidity in financial markets today. Like technology forces, that liquidity is the second fundamental force behind its bubble. To explain the fundamental role of excess liquidity driving the bubble, one should understand Bitcoin as ‘digital tulips’, to employ a metaphor.

The Bitcoin bubble is not much different from the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania. Tulips had no intrinsic use value but did have a ‘store of value’ simply because Dutch society of financial speculators assigned and accepted it as having such. Once the price of tulips collapsed, however, it no longer had any form of value, save for horticultural enthusiasts.

What fundamentally drove the tulip bubble was the massive inflow of money capital to Holland that came from its colonial trade in spices and other commodities in Asia. The excess liquidity generated could not be fully re-invested in real projects in Holland. When that happens, holders of the excess liquidity create new financial markets in which to invest the liquidity—not unlike what’s happened in recent decades with the rise of unregulated global shadow banking, financial engineering of new securities, proliferating liquid markets in which securities are exchanged, and a new layer of professional financial elite as ‘agents’ behind the proliferating new markets for the new securities.

Bitcoin Potential Contagion Effects to Other Markets

A subject of current debate is whether Bitcoin and other cryptos can destabilize other financial asset markets and therefore the banking system in turn, in effect provoking a 2008-09 like financial crisis………….Deniers of the prospect point to the fact that Cryptos constitute only about $400 billion in market capitalization today. That is dwarfed by the $55 Trillion equities and $94 trillion bond markets. The ‘tail’ cannot wag the dog, it is argued. But quantitative measures are irrelevant. What matters is investor psychology. ……For example, should cryptos develop their own ETFs, a collapse of crypto ETFs might very easily spill over to stock and bond ETFs—which are a source themselves of inherent instability today in the equities market. A related contagion effect may occur within the Clearing Houses themselves. If trading in Bitcoin and cryptos as a commodity becomes particularly large, and then the price collapses deeply and at a rapid rate, it might well raise issues of Clearing House liquidity available for non-crypto commodities trading. A bitcoin-crypto crash could thus have a contagion effect on other commodity prices; or on ETFs in general and thus stock and bond ETF prices.”

The above text is an excerpt from Jack Rasmus‘ forthcoming article in the December-January issue of the European Financial Review. Jack Rasmus’ most recent book is  ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes?’ 

 

To Netanyahu it is Yerushalayim (city of peace) in Yiddish; to Muslims it is Bayt Al-Maqdis (the house of peace). To Google and now to Trump Jerusalem (city of peace) is the capital of Israel.

On December 7, 2017 Yeni Safak, a conservative Turkish daily newspaper and strong supporter of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reported Erdoğan as saying that Trump’s Jerusalem step ‘will throw the region into a ring of fire’, ‘Trump’s declaration aims to stir up the region, not to bring peace,’ and that “Jerusalem, Mr. Trump, is the red line for Muslims”. No empty words from a NATO partner and a country that has recognized Israel.

“It is not possible to understand what Trump wants to achieve,” Erdoğan said in the capital Ankara before leaving for a visit to Greece.

“The (US) announcement has the potential to send us backwards to even darker times than the ones we are already living in” Federika Mogherini, EU Foreign Policy chief added.

She shared German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sentiments that the European Union had a “clear and united position” on the issue:

“We believe that the only realistic solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine is based on two states and with Jerusalem as the capital of both.”

On December 7, 2017 Newsweek reported Iran says Arabs and Muslims must defend Jerusalem as rockets target Israel. Like Turkey, Iran has demonstrated its resolve on several occasions that it is a country with a leadership that is not impotent. Iran’s military chief of staff, Major General Mohammad Bagheri stated on Press TV

“The world of arrogance, and foremost the criminal U.S., should know that the unity of the Muslim world will obstruct this desperate move and will be defeated with the vigilance of the Muslim world.”

Unity? Is that possible?

A statement from nuclear Pakistan’s Prime Minister’s office stated

“It is deeply regrettable that pleas from states across the globe not to alter the legal and historical status of Al Quds Al Sharif have been ignored, more out of choice than necessity.”

Even Trump’s closest Middle East ally Saudi Arabia has ostracized President Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, calling the move “unjustified and irresponsible”. The statement added that

“The kingdom has already warned of the serious consequences of such an unjustified and irresponsible move.”

But Saudi agenda is to block Iran, not Israel.

Probably the strongest message that the Islamic countries should send is voiced by the Chairman of Indonesia’s Youth Association of Nahdlatul Ulama (IPNU), Irfan Mujahid:

“Expel the US ambassador (to Indonesia) if he ignores this demand.”

Indonesian President Joko Widodo also called on Muslim countries to unite and reject the US move.

So there are four strong Muslim nations Turkey, Iran, Indonesia and Pakistan (I’m always wary of Egyptian intentions) with formidable militaries and a collective population of over 600 million voicing their opposition designating Jerusalem as Israel’s capital against the UN resolution 478 of August 20, 1980.

The OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference) comprising 57 nations will be convening an extraordinary summit for Muslim leaders on December 12-13 in Istanbul to “discuss the repercussions of the American decision, and to formulate a unified Islamic position on this dangerous escalation.” Is a unified Islamic position possible?

The key question that needs to be addressed is one posed by Erdogan: what does Trump want to achieve by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel? Only then can the consequences of Trump’s decision be taken for discussion and whether it’ll result in Erdogan’s ring of fire in the region.

I posed a question on my recent article on Oriental Review if Trump is unpredictable, senile or juvenile?  It seems from opinions of several political and media analysts who know him enough that he truly is all three. His decision to recognize Jerusalem therefore comes as no surprise. But behind these attributes may lay a cunning plot which may well be the genius of Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump wants to make America great and therein is his genius for an irrational war.

As the sun begins to set on any empire, and the most classical ones have been the Roman and British, there develops desperation to somehow keep the sun from setting. The empire’s leadership starts fragmenting and the rationale that made a nation an empire starts to crumble.

America has witnessed no threat from its Muslims citizens as the vast majority have contributed their professional and business talents towards making it great. However, Trump is not willing to accept the contributions of all immigrants including Muslims, Chinese, and Mexicans or even the contributions of his predecessor of Afro-American origin. He favors the alt-Right group as the true contributors. He sees the Muslims, most specifically, within its borders as well as outside as the threat to America in a manner similar to the Germanic tribes that threatened the Roman Empire under the able leadership of Emperor Marcus Aurelius till his son Commodus began the Roman descent. Trump shares the fear of Muslims with Netanyahu.

Trump has thus far failed to drive a wedge between the Shias and Sunnis or between Arabs. The rationale of Trump to making America great is a war-the ring of fire in the region. Trump is not going to backtrack his decision so what responses can be expected from the Islamic leaders following the OIC summit?

If Jerusalem is the red line for Muslims, how do they intend to address it? Will they blink and open up the opportunity for Trump to enforce his decision leading other nations to follow in recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel?

Or will the Muslims unite on the Jerusalem platform? Trump is expecting the Muslims to capitulate and his hopes are pinned among the weaker ones Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Jordan who are fully capable of upsetting the proverbial apple cart and dissent with the stronger nations Turkey, Pakistan and Iran whose actions are needed for Palestinians (including Hezbollah) to continue their struggle.

OIC countries may demonstrate at the Istanbul summit they’re united but historically they’ve always been splintered. It is something that Netanyahu is aware of. They cannot speak with one voice and there is no leadership except venom within their ranks. Most importantly the OIC summit must not show any willingness to negotiate on the position of Jerusalem within the framework of UN resolution 478 because that would be seen as weakness which can easily be exploited by Trump and Netanyahu. In fact the only solution that should be a part of the final OIC communique is the member countries are willing to be prepared for the ring of fire in the region if the US will not retract its decision. If the OIC leaders proffer that unity then Trump and Netanyahu are doomed.

The outcome of the OIC summit will be carefully watched by both Russia and China whose support is critical for Muslims.

Gulam Asgar Mitha is a retired Technical Safety Engineer. He has worked in Libya, Qatar, Pakistan, France, Yemen and UAE with several N. American and International oil and gas companies.. Currently Gulam lives in Calgary, Canada and enjoys reading and keeping in tune with current global political issues.

Featured image is from the author.

The Islamic State in Syrian and Iraq is officially defeated. The UN resolution which allowed other countries to fight ISIS within Syria and Iraq no longer applies. But the U.S. military, despite the lack of any legal basis, wants to continue its occupation of Syria’s north-east. The attempt to do so will fail. Its Kurdish allies in the area are already moving away from it and now prefer Russian protection. Guerrilla forces to fight the U.S. “presence” are being formed. The U.S. plan is shortsighted and stupid. If the U.S. insists on staying there many of its soldiers will die.

Two days ago the Syrian Arab Army closed the last gaps on the west bank of the Euphrates. Having fought all the way from Aleppo along the river towards the east the Tiger Force reached the liberated Deir Ezzor from the west. All settlements on the way are now controlled by the Syrian government. The remaining Islamic State fighters were pushed into the desert where they will be hunted down and killed.

Map via Southfront

Two days ago the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, declared a “complete victory” in Syria:

“Two hours ago, the (Russian) defense minister reported to me that the operations on the eastern and western banks of the Euphrates have been completed with the total rout of the terrorists,” Putin said.“Naturally, there could still be some pockets of resistance, but overall the military work at this stage and on this territory is completed with, I repeat, the total rout of the terrorists,” he said.

Today the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi declared victory and the ‘end of the war’ against ISIS on the Iraqi side:

“Our forces are in complete control of the Iraqi-Syrian border and I therefore announce the end of the war against Daesh (IS),” Abadi told a conference in Baghdad.

North of the Euphrates the U.S. proxy force SDF had recently negotiated another agreement (42) with the remaining Islamic State fighters there. ISIS allegedly handed over a border crossing with Iraq to the SDF and in exchange was guaranteed free passage through SDF controlled areas. This agreement came after an earlier one in which the U.S. and SDF let 3,500 ISIS fighters flee from Raqqa to fight the Syrian Army in Deir Ezzor. That was a U.S. attempt to delay or prevent the victory of Syria and its allies. It failed.

Shortly after the claimed new ceasefire between the U.S. SDF proxies and ISIS, Russian officers met with officials of the Kurdish YPG, the central force of the SDF. The talks completely changed the situation. In a joint press conference the Kurds and the Russians committed to work together to fight ISIS east of the Euphrates. It seems that the YPG is no longer convinced that the U.S. is willing to do so. The Russians took command and the Russian air forces has since supported the YPG in its fight against ISIS in Deir Ezzor governate on the eastern bank of the river:

“A joint operative staff has been created in the town of Es-Salhiya to provide direct control and organize the cooperation with the popular militia units. Apart from Russian advisors, representatives of the eastern Euphrates tribes are taken part in it,” Poplavskiy said, noting that in the “coming days” the entire territory east of Euphrates River will be free from terrorists.Mahmoud Nuri, a representative of the Kurdish YPG, stated that the militia “battled ISIS under Russian command very effectively.” Kurdish forces have also expressed readiness to ensure the safety of the Russian military specialists operating on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River.

The U.S. is seriously miffed that the Russians are suddenly supporting the U.S. proxy in Syria’s north-east. The U.S. wants to claim the area for itself. (It probably also wants to protect the rest of ISIS there to reuse it when convenient.) The U.S. claims that the Russian air support for the Kurds is violating “coalition airspace”.

The U.S. is not invited to Syria but now claims airspace above the country? The Russians, allied with the Syrian government, are invited to fly there. It is obvious who has a sound legal justification to be in the area and who has not. But the U.S. military hates to confront its own malice, and a competent adversary who knows how to play chicken:

In one instance, two Air Force A-10 attack planes flying east of the Euphrates River nearly collided head-on with a Russian Su-24 Fencer just 300 feet away — a knife’s edge when all the planes were streaking at more than 350 miles per hour. The A-10s swerved to avoid the Russian aircraft, which was supposed to fly only west of the Euphrates.
…
Since American and Russian commanders agreed last month to fly on opposite sides of a 45-mile stretch of the Euphrates to prevent accidents in eastern Syria’s increasingly congested skies, Russian warplanes have violated that deal half a dozen times a day, according to American commanders. They say it is an effort by Moscow to test American resolve, bait Air Force pilots into reacting rashly, and help the Syrian Army solidify territorial gains ahead of diplomatic talks aimed at resolving the country’s nearly seven-year-old war.

ISIS is gone. There is no justification for any “coalition airspace”. Where please is the “deal” that allows the U.S. to indefinitely occupy north-east Syria as it now officially demands?

The Pentagon plans to keep some U.S. forces in Syria indefinitely, even after a war against the Islamic State extremist group formally ends, to take part in what it describes as ongoing counterterrorism operations, officials said.There are approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, along with an unspecified number of contractors supporting them. Last month, the U.S. military withdrew 400 Marines from Syria, which U.S. forces first entered in the fall of 2016.

Officials earlier this week disclosed the plans for an open-ended commitment, known as a “conditions-based” presence.
…
The Pentagon has said the forces will target parts of Syria that aren’t fully governed by either regime or rebel forces. The military says it has the legal authority to remain there.

The U.S. military has lots of fantasies about “legal authority” and “deals”. We had already noted that such a “presence” in Syria is obviously illegal. The fig leaf of a UN resolution 2249 to fight ISIS no longer applies. Putin intentionally emphasized the “total rout of the terrorists” and the “complete” victory to point that out. There is absolutely no justification for the U.S. to stay. Moreover – the presence there is unsustainable.

The commander of the paramilitary forces which support the Syrian and Iraqi government sent a note to the U.S. to let it know that any remaining U.S. forces in Syria will be fought down:

[T]he commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp Brigadier General Haj Qassem Soleimani sent a verbal letter, via Russia, to the head of the US forces commander in Syria, advising him to pull out all US forces to the last soldier “or the doors of hell will open up”.“My message to the US military command: when the battle against ISIS (the Islamic State group) will end, no American soldier will be tolerated in Syria. I advise you to leave by your own will or you will be forced to it”, said Soleimani to a Russian officer. Soleimani asked the Russian responsible to expose the Iranian intentions towards the US: that they will be considered as forces of occupation if these decide to stay in north-east Syria where Kurds and Arab tribes cohabit together.

In 1983 U.S. and French military barracks in Beirut were blown up after their forces had intervened on one side of the Lebanese civil war. Several hundred soldiers died. After the attack the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon. U.S. soldiers staying in north-east Syria can now expect a similar fate.

The U.S. claims that it has 2,000 soldiers in north-east Syria. This after it had claimed that the number was 500.  This new number was announced after it had already pulled out 400 marines and it is still way too low:

The updated figure does not reflect troops assigned to classified missions and some Special Operations personnel, Mr. Pahon said.

The U.S. had for months claimed that it only had 500 soldiers in the area. It did not even mention the contractors that follow its troops everywhere. The real number of U.S. personnal must have been ten times as high as the official one. The new official number is “2,000 and some”.  The real new number is likely still above 3,500 plus several thousand contractors. This revelation confirms again that the U.S. military lies whenever and wherever it can.

The now remaining “more than 2,000” will need tens of tons of supplies each day and the U.S. has no secured supply line into north-east Syria. It is arrogant idiocy to keep the troops there in place. A few roving guerillas can easily choke those supplies. Each of the camps those troops occupy will be a target of external and inside attacks.

The YPG Kurds are already skipping out of their coalition with the U.S.. They are now making friends with the Russians who provide them with air-support where the U.S. wants to keep ISIS alive. How much longer will the U.S. soldiers in the YPG controlled areas be able to trust their “allies”?

The Pentagon says that the presence in Syria is “conditions-based” but it does not name any condition that would have to be fulfilled for ending it. General Soleimani seems to believe that a few hundred body bags arriving at Andrews airbase near Washington, DC might be enough condition fulfillment to do the trick.

The situation in other parts of Syria is largely unchanged. The various Takifiri groups in Idelb governate continue to slaughter each other. The Syrian forces will likely hold back their planned attacks into the area as long as their enemies there are devouring each other. But a year from now Idelb, and north-east Syria, will likely be back in the Syrian government’s hand.

On December 6 the U.S. President declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel and announced the U.S. intention to move its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. It’s also widely known that Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem isn’t recognized by the international community or international law. The U.S. ally Great Britain announced it will maintain its embassy in Tel Aviv. Canada’s prime minister announced Canada is keeping its embassy in Tel Aviv, however in its UN General Assembly votes December 7th Canada’s maintained an obtuseness to Palestinian suffering, siding with with the U.S. and Israel.

Since the United Nations Security Council has mandated that no unilateral changes can be made to the status of Jerusalem, the Security Council responded to the U.S. declaration by calling an emergency session December 8th. The U.S. and Israel’s position was not favoured; other countries consider the declaration makes a peace process between Israel and Palestine impossible.

All this is not suppressed news though it can be interpreted as prolonging a genocide warning for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

What is unreported by NATO media is that following President Trump’s announcement the UN’s General Assembly on December 7th passed nine draft resolutions assuring some protection to the lives and rights of Palestinians, and with such large majorities in favour of Palestine that the world’s nations have indicated an overwhelming opposition to the U.S. president’s decision. The UN General Assembly may be the closest humankind is able to offer as the voice of humanity.

Attempting to be more specific I’ll try to order a very confusing press release from “UN Meeting Coverage and Press Releases,” where on December 7th among the 38 resolutions and two decisions made by the General Assembly concerning decolonization, these dealt directly with Israel-Palestine.

1. Assistance to Palestine refugees, was adopted, 162 for and 1 (Israel) against, with 12 abstaining. This resolution expresses extreme concern for Palestinian refugees under occupation and the urgent need for reconstruction of Gaza.

2. Persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 and subsequent hostilities, was adopted, 158 in favour, 7 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States) with 10 abstentions. This draft resolution reaffirms the right of displaced persons to go back to their homes and former residences.

3. Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was adopted, 162 for to 6 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, United States) and 7 abstentions. The resolution’s focus on funding was accompanied by concern for the freedom of movement, harassment and intimidation of United Nations (UNWRA) staff.

4. Palestine refugees’ properties and their revenues, was adopted by a vote of 159 to 7 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States) and 9 abstaining. This resolution requests the protection of Arab property, rights and assets.

5. Work of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, was adopted by a vote of 83 to 10 (Australia, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States) and 77 abstentions. The draft resolution requests continuing investigation of Israeli practices and consultation with the International Committee of the Red Cross to assure human rights protections in the occupied territories.

6. Applicability of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the other occupied Arab territories, was adopted by 157 to 7 (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States) with 10 abstentions. This resolution assures applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the Occupied Palestinian Territory (and Arab territories taken over since 1967).

7. Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan, was adopted by 155 for, 7 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States), and 12 abstaining. It condemns the acts of violence by Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

8. Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, was adopted by vote of 153 to 8 (Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States), with 10 abstentions. The resolution demands Israel stop violating the human rights (including the killing of, injury, arbitrary detention, etc.) of the Palestinian people and to stop all settlement activity.

9. The occupied Syrian Golan, was adopted by a vote of 151 for 2 against (Israel, Palau) and 20 abstaining. The resolution affirms previous UN resolutions and insists on not establishing settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan.

These draft resolutions reveal an ongoing genocidal persecution of the Palestinian people, both the fact of their suffering and humanity’s assessment of a terrible wrong. According to The New York Times,

“In Rome, Pope Francis prayed that Jerusalem’s status be preserved and needless conflict avoided.”

The U.S. has accused the U.N. of a bias against Israel but humanity’s inclination is more positive and compassionate than that.

Sources

“General Assembly Adopts 38 Resolutions, 2 Decisions from Fourth Committee, Including Texts on Decolonization, Israeli-Palestinian Issues,” Dec. 7, 2017, reliefweb & GA/11987 United Nations Meeting Coverage and Press Releases;

“Trudeau rejects Trump approach to Jerusalem, favours ‘two-state solution’,” Steven Chase, Dec. 7, 2017, The Globe and Mail;

“Trump’s Jerusalem move roundly condemned at UN,” Dec. 8, 2017, Al Jazeera;

“U.N., European Union and Pope Criticize Trump’s Jerusalem Announcement,” Jason Horowitz, Dec. 6, 2017, The New York Times.

This article was originally published by Night’s Lantern.

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Pakistan Military Opposes US Drone Warfare: “We Will not Allow Anyone to Violate our Airspace”

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, December 10, 2017

Should US drone operators and the officers responsible for them be concerned by the latest sentiments from the Pakistani Ministry of Defence?  The head of the Pakistan Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Sohail Aman, made the most pointed remarks yet that the defence forces are not pleased.   

Dangerous Crossroads: US and Russian Air Forces Engaged in Syria? US Acts as ISIS’ Air Force

By Joaquin Flores, December 10, 2017

With increased clarity over the US role in Syria, the MOD now more transparently explains that most of the near-misses between the two Air Forces, Russian and American, in Syria and Iraq were connected with Washington’s attempts to help ISIS avoid defeat. 

The Raqqa Exodus: The US Coalition’s “Secret Deal” to Allow ISIS-Daesh Terrorists to Escape…

By Prof  Michel Chossudovsky, November 27, 2017

Confirmed by a BBC report entitled “Raqqa’s Dirty Secret”, the US-led coalition facilitated the exodus of ISIS terrorists and their family members  out of their stronghold in Raqqa, Northern Syria.

Terrorism versus Counter-terrorism: US vs. Russian Military Intervention in Syria

By Stephen Lendman, December 10, 2017

America supports the scourge it claims to oppose – recruiting ISIS and other terrorist fighters, funding, arming, training and directing them.

Syrian and allied forces, greatly aided by Russian airpower, alone defeated ISIS. US forces tried obstructing their efforts.

As World Warms, Heart-Breaking Video Shows What It Looks Like When a Polar Bear Starves

By Julia Conley, December 09, 2017

Paul Nicklen was traveling with the conservation group Sea Legacy in Canada’s Baffin Islands, located in the Arctic, when he spotted the emaciated animal struggling to walk across the dry land—historically covered with ice in December and home to seals that polar bears rely on for food. The bear searched in vain for sustenance in a trashcan before collapsing.

Further Signs of Looming US War with North Korea

By Peter Symonds, December 09, 2017

In another indication of the advanced US preparations for war against North Korea, the Trump administration has suggested that US athletes might not participate in the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February for security reasons.

When Washington Cheered the Jihadists

By Daniel Lazare, December 09, 2017

When a Department of Defense intelligence report about the Syrian rebel movement became public in May 2015, lots of people didn’t know what to make of it. After all, what the report said was unthinkable – not only that Al Qaeda had dominated the so-called democratic revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for years, but that the West continued to support the jihadis regardless, even to the point of backing their goal of creating a Sunni Salafist principality in the eastern deserts.

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Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump/Russia collusion story:

There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks – as everyone by then already knew – had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.

How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as false, the journalist who originally presented it, Congressional reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s PR Department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email, while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but only had sources describe its purported contents:

All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question – one which CNN refuses to address: how did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way, and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?

It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely plausible that multiple sources could all innocently and in good faith misread the date in exactly the same way, all to cause to be disseminated a blockbuster revelation about Trump/Russia/WikiLeaks collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER SO MUCH? For so many significant reasons:

To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives and journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia (through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was re-tweeted thousands and thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).

This tweet is from a member of Congress today. It was RT'd more than 7,000 times (and counting), and liked more than 15,000 times. It's based on a completely false claim, from a debunked CNN story. This happens over and over. This seems damaging. And still no retraction. https://t.co/fixSRKUxxx

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 8, 2017

Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, whose star has risen as he has promoted himself as a friend of former FBI Director Jim Comey, not only promoted the CNN story in the morning, but did so with the word “Boom” – which he uses to signal that a major blow has been delivered to Trump on the Russia story – along with a gif of a cannon being detonated:

boom https://t.co/9RPPltRq8k pic.twitter.com/eyYHkOMEPi

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 8, 2017

Incredibly, to this very moment – almost 24 hours after CNN’s story was debunked – Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false, even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly 250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added noting that the whole thing was false.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived – filled with false news and propaganda – by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy – which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like – would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email, and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that he independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes in US journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct knowledge” told him about all this. Please watch this – again, not just the content but the tenor and tone of how they “report” – as it is Baghdad-Bob-level embarrassing:

Think about what this means. It means that at least two – and possibly more – sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial information to the public: which “multiple sources” acted jointly to disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s largest news outlets?

Just last week, the Washington Post decided – to great applause (including mine) – to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well established principle of journalism – one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in DC – that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.

The Post made the right call to report off-the-record comments given they were offered with fraudulent intent. This should be done far more often to actually powerful-in-DC people who spread lies while hiding behind anonymity https://t.co/EFLEI4eaq8 pic.twitter.com/v6yIJvheT1

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 27, 2017

Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened – what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” – it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are – just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody-in-DC, rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible sequence of events could possibly have happened.

Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by PR executives and lawyers.

How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?

The more serious you think the Trump/Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the U.S. media as “Fake News,” the more you should be disturbed by what happened here, the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding. If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them. It is debacles like this – and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate – that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.

Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend – one could say a constant – when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia and WikiLeaks. I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential and reckless stories that have been published – and then corrected, rescinded and retracted – by major media outlets when it comes to this story.

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction, and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump/Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times yesterday in its news report on CNN’s embarrassment:

It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”

Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.

The report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr. Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.

Several news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a subpoena from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for President Trump’s financial records.

The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.

That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the Trump/Russia story, always in the same direction, toward the same political goals. Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected, walk-backed, or retracted – often long after the initial false claims spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:

• Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
• An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
• WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
• A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
• RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
• Crowdstrike finds Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
• Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)
• Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most devoted critics – such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow – are constantly warning that the U.S. media’s unhinged, ignorant, paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of ways, in the process destroying the credibility of the U.S. media in the eyes of Putin’s opposition (who — unlike Americans who have been fed a steady news and entertainment propaganda diet for decades about Russia — actually understand the realities of that country).

U.S. media outlets are very good at demanding respect. They love to imply, if not outright state, that being patriotic and a good American means that one must reject efforts to discredit them and their reporting because that’s how one defends press freedom.

But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny. It certainly means that all of these “errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction, pushing the same political outcome or journalistic conclusion.

But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we witnessed yesterday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering transparency and accountability. In this case, that can’t mean hiding behind PR and lawyer silence and waiting for this to just all blow away.

At minimum, these networks – CNN, MSNBC and CBS – have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information, or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks – the reason those attacks resonate – is themselves and their own conduct.

(Update: hours after this article was published on Saturday – a full day-and-a-half after his original tweets promoting the false CNN story with a “boom” and a cannon – Benjamin Wittes finally got around to noting that the CNN story he hyped has “serious problems”; needless to say, that acknowledgment received a fraction of re-tweets from his followers as his original tweets hyping the story attracted).

All images in this article are from the author.

Trump critics drew attention to a New York Times report on Saturday regarding the estimated death toll in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria, which left the island devastated after making landfall in September. While the official count of fatalities stands at 64, the Times’ analysis found that a more realistic estimate would be in the thousands.

The newspaper reported that since Maria hit 42 days ago, 1,052 more deaths than usual have happened in the U.S. territory. The mortality rate has grown as half of Puerto Rico is still without power. A month after the storm, about one million residents did not have access to safe drinking water, and many were desperately using water from a Superfund site to bathe and drink.

The dire conditions Puerto Ricans were faced with following the storm have led researchers to believe that Maria was responsible for far more deaths than the government has admitted.

Wanda Llovet, the director of Puerto Rico’s Demographic Registry, told the Times that deaths went up sharply just after the hurricane.

“Before the hurricane, I had an average of 82 deaths daily,” said Llovet. “That changes from September 20 to 30. Now I have an average of 118 deaths daily.”

As officials were noting the rising mortality rate, President Donald Trump downplayed the impact of the storm while Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, made urgent appeals for a massive push in aid delivery to the island.

On October 3, when 556 more people had died since the storm hit than had in the same period the previous year, Trump confidently reported that only 16 people had been killed as a result of the storm.

Earlier this week, the Center for Investigative Journalism also found from its own analysis that the death toll from Maria was likely in the thousands.

According to death records, fatalities from sepsis, often resulting from severe infection and unsanitary conditions in homes and hospitals, went up 50 percent from last year in the weeks after the storm.

The chief of mortality statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, Robert Anderson, told the Times that there was “fairly compelling evidence that that increase [in mortality] is probably due to the hurricane,” and stressed the importance of accurately reporting the number of deaths from a disaster like Maria.

“If we have a lack of information, we can’t adequately prepare for the next disaster. We can’t put measures in place to prevent deaths occurring in the future,” said Anderson.

On social media, politicians and journalists highlighted the report and called for the Trump administration to grapple with the reality of the storm’s impact.

I remain alarmed by death toll from Maria in #PuertoRico which is certainly higher than has been officially reported as noted in this article: https://t.co/MzJAGKkP4F I again call for audit of these numbers given @RealDonaldTrump thinks count reflects well on federal response!

— Rep. Nydia Velazquez (@NydiaVelazquez) December 8, 2017

The Trump administration has not been honest with the world about the death toll in Puerto Rico. https://t.co/2O7fuquN89

— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) December 9, 2017

Appalling. I asked DHS IG weeks ago to investigate misreported death toll in Puerto Rico after devastation of Maria. https://t.co/rgzFB8Q8Eo

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) December 9, 2017

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

According to a nationwide study conducted by the Center For Disease And Prevention (CDC) a greater number of US Americans died (approximately 65,000) from drug overdoses, last year, than were killed during the course of the Vietnam War.

All part and parcel of capitalism’s war against life itself. The emotional and physical pain, anxiety, and depression inflicted by the trauma inherent to a system sustained by perpetual exploitation has proven to be too much for a sizeable number of human beings to endure thus their need to self-medicate.

The root of addiction is trauma. The soul of the nation is a casualty of war. There is not an Arlington Cemetery for these fallen, no hagiographic ceremonies will be performed over their graves nor statues erected in memoriam. Their ghosts will howl through the long, dark night of national denial. Listen to their wailing. It is an imprecatory prayer. A curse and augury…that admonishes, our fate and the fate of the nation will converge…as the nation will stagger, keening in lament, to the abyss.

The solution: Within each of us swells a deathless song. Powerful. Resonate. Piercing. A song, miraculous of influence, plangent with the force to seize back your soul from the death-besotted spirit of the age. Let it rise from within you. Notice: how flocks of empire’s death birds scatter like ashes in the wind.

Yet it will not be possible to navigate around the cultural deathscape; we must walk through it and chronicle its serial affronts to our humanity:

“You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that ‘normalcy’ is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.” — James Hillman   

Try this: Simply stand in the isle of a corporate, Big Box chain store or in the parking lot of a strip mall that squats, hideous, on some soul-defying, U.S. Interstate highway and allow yourself to feel the emptiness and desperation extant. The tormented landscape, besieged by an ad hoc assemblage of late capitalist structures, emporiums of usurped longing, reflects the desperate, rapacious nature of late capitalist imperium.

Compounding the pathos, the forces in play impose a colonising effect upon the mind; therefore, a large percent of the afflicted have lost the ability to detect the hyper-entropic system’s ravaging effects. Stranded among the commercial come-ons and hyper-authoritarianism inherent to late stage capitalism’s imperium of death, the human psyche, like the biosphere of our planet, subjected, at present, to humankind-wrought ecocide, has begun to display the terrible beauty of a nightmare. Internal weather has grown increasingly chaotic: the earth’s oceans and seas are rising; wildfires rage; drought scorches the earth. And conditions will grow increasingly inhospitable in regard to the flourishing of inner life, personal and collective thus will continue, and at accelerating rates, to be reflected in the web of phenomena we know as human culture.

Growing up in a working class social milieu, as I did, I am confronted, more and more, by the news of the large number of men I grew up with who are dying in their 50s. As of late, when I contemplate the fact, I am forced to pause and seek solitude because my eyes become scalded with tears. I’ve known, over the years, hundreds of human beings, born into and ensnared by the crime against humanity known as poverty, broken by the culture of greed and social degradation, and blamed by the clueless and the callous for the tragic trajectory in which impersonal fate and the wounding culture, by no fault of their own, has placed them.

Thus arrive: Tears of rage; tears of outrage. Tears unloosed by passion and tempered by compassion…fall. If poverty was not so profitable for the greed head elite, both punitive-minded conservatives and affluence-ensconced liberals alike, the situation would be addressed and rectified. The cause of the reprehensible situation, it should go without saying, is not the fault of the poor but the poverty of spirit at the core of capitalism.

Truth is, the system, a hierarchy of ghouls, is maintained by harvesting the corpses of the powerless, by means of imperial slaughter and domestic, economic exploitation. Deep down, we know it. The system’s psychopathic beneficiaries, in particular, are aware of the reality. In fact, their desiccated hearts require being irrigated by blood. From the evidence of their actions, it appears, they revel in the knowledge of the damage they incur. They appear to believe they will enter the golden dominion of heaven by climbing a mountain of corpses. It is time we dragged them back down to earth and subjected them to our earth-borne fury.

Or so goes my own (powerless) revelry. Of course, we the powerless, at this point, have been left with scant little but a dreaming heart. When we allow heartless power to subdue and usurp our longings, we languish. Thus many die of a broken spirit. The world itself can appear to be depleted of mercy. In turn, all too many begin to mirror the malevolence of the upper castes thereby losing their own measure of mercy.

Hostility directed at the poor is the shopworn, demagogic sleight of hand trick used to distract from realities such as: Every mcmansion and high end luxury high-rise constructed creates multitudes of the homeless. Every low pay, no benefits, no future mcjob serves to decimate an individual, heart and spirit. Moreover the beneficiaries of the system promote the lie, that shame should be the exclusive dominion of those broken by their system, a system, which is, in essence, a form of government-sanctioned gangsterism, by which they, the ruthless few, and they alone, benefit.

As a result, in an age of denial and duplicity, change tends to arrive violently. Reactionary, racist soreheads, brandishing Tiki torches, construct an ambulatory klavern in the hateful night. Maledictory tweets rise and roil the imperial air like a nimbus of locust. Unmoored from their sense of humanity by lashing angst and alienation, gunmen, in acts of warped libido, raise assault rifles and kill with no more connection to the strangers they slaughter than do stateside deployed pilots of the empire’s predator drones.

We human beings, as as species, have arrived at a profound point of demarcation: paradigm shift are perish. Yet, and the fact is mortifying in its implications, there is not a sign of the emergence, even an incipient one, of a viable resistance to the present order. Weekend marches and boutique protests might promote (ephemeral) feelings of affinity and jack the adrenal systems of participants. But the events have proven woefully inefficacious in regard to the rising and raging tides of adversity we face.

(In addition, monopolist, internet corporations, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, at the behest of US governmental forces, are further marginalising the already almost vaporous left by means of presence abridging algorithms of leftist websites and outright censorship of social media content. Dissenting voices are being ghosted into oblivion.)

An aura of bleakness prevails. Hope seems a fool’s palliative. The victims of drug overdoses and, in general, the large and rising, without precedent, untimely deaths of middle aged, labouring class people should be regarded as canaries in the coal mines of the late stage capitalist order, an augury of  calamities that loom due to the exponentially increasing harm being inflicted upon both humanity and environmental forces crucial to sustaining the continued viability of the human race.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”― C.G. Jung  

Although it does not have to be the case. If reality is met head-on, if empire, external and its inner analog, is renounced and challenged, then a liberation staged by the heart’s partisans can begin, thereby freeing up a great amount of acreage — a fructifying landscape — wherein both the earth’s ecosystem and the architecture of human desire can begin to co-exist and cross-pollinate thus a crucial re-visioning of oneself and the culture can begin.

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

US Air Forces Central Command, Russian/Syrian aircraft crossed a de-confliction line into coalition airspace east of the Euphrates River 6-8 times a day in late November. “The greatest concern is that we could shoot down these aircraft because of their actions are seen as a threat” to coalition forces, the source claimed recently together with CNN.

In turn, Assad’s allies announced that most of the rapprochement between Russian/Syrian and U.S.-led coalition’ aircraft in the vicinity of the Euphrates River valley in Syria was associated with the attempts of the U.S. aircraft to interfere with the destruction of ISIS terrorists.

To be mentioned is that while the Syrian AF accompanied by the Russian side were eliminating ISIS stronghold in the suburbs of the city of al-Mayadin during the Deir-Ezzor campaign, U.S. F-22 aircraft was carrying out ‘flare ejection altitude’ (were releasing several decoy flares) and speed brake deployment maneuvering in airspace and simulating an air fight.

It seems a fight in the skies of Deir Ezzor is here to stay and the Memorandum on Flight Safety in Syria won’t help to pacify U.S. naked ambitions and ruthless determination to dominate in the skies over Syria. In the meantime, the legal basis for ‘coalition’ presence in Syria can’t be demonstrated. According to the international law, there is no U.S.-led coalition’s airspace in Syria. Apparently, the Pentagon had considered that there would be no point in following the international law regarding Syria’s airspace because the U.S. would be unable to benefit by its jets.

CNN statements have already raised a storm of indignation. Many Syrians are asking what are these “coalition forces” really doing in Syria and call them “USA invasion forces.” Some people draw parallels between the U.S. and Israeli Air Force planes as well as their missiles which regularly infringe sovereign Syrian airspace.

Syrians are concerned that there is no reason and excuse for these occurrences.  A number of residents, according to the opinion poll made by Inside Syria Media Center via social media, even joked that ‘Russia was too busy killing the terrorists that the U.S. allowed to escape from Raqqa” (documented by a BBC report), that is why Russian/Syrian aircraft hadn’t notice the U.S. F-22 jets.

Recent events in the Skies over Deir Ezzor should lead the international community to reflect further on that issue.

Russia is in Syria under an agreement with the Syrian government and operates within the framework of international law. In contrast, U.S. military presence in Syria is neither endorsed by a decision of the U.S. Congress nor does it have a mandate from the UN Security Council.

Follow the latest developments by reading Inside Syria Media Center where this article was originally published.

Sophie Mangal is a special investigative correspondent at Inside Syria Media Center.

President Donald Trump declared that the US saw Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced the US would move its Israeli embassy there—reversing decades of policy and removing any pretense of US neutrality in negotiating “peace” between Palestinians and Israelis.

Though both Congress and past presidents of both parties have supported the move in principle for decades, much of the US media establishment is now fretting about the Jerusalem announcement, continuing to push the illusion that a nebulous “peace deal” is still right around the next watchtower.

The American “recognition” of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital further entrenches and condones Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestinian land. But outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS, in editorials and straight reporting, downplayed and skirted matters of substance, reserving critical attention for questions of optics or process.

Thus the frame that dominated headlines as news of Trump’s announcement broke was not on the meaning of the move, but on potential reaction to it, specifically vague “fears of violence” from Palestinians and Muslims throughout the Middle East:

• “Fears of Violence Amid Talk of Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital” (CBS News, 12/5/17)
• “Trump’s Jerusalem Announcement Could Spark Violence, State Department Warns” (Daily Beast, 12/6/17)
• “Warnings of Violence Ahead of Trump’s Jerusalem Embassy Move” (The Week, 12/6/17)
• “Trump Says US Recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital, Despite Global Condemnation; World Leaders Warned Trump That the Move Could Spark Violence and Would Create a Major Impediment to the Israeli/Palestinian Peace Process” (Politico, 12/6/17)

Editorials in the Washington Post (“possibly trigger violence, including against Americans”—12/6/17) and the New York Times (“perhaps inciting violence”—12/5/17) used similar language. Neither opposed Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem or Israel’s brutal, illegal occupation of East Jerusalem as such. Both had lots of Concerns™ and leveled minor critiques on process grounds (the most popular being that the move could “harm” peace efforts), but neither of the two leading papers in the United States could bring themselves to condemn Trump for his radical departure from US policy and international law in and of itself.

This is often the case when it comes to Israel/Palestine: Media focus is on the reaction to injustice, not on the injustice itself. The illegality of Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem is rarely mentioned. Nor is the fact that the United States is now virtually alone out of the 195 countries on Earth in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or that the city has been, and is still, designated by the United Nations as a corpus separatum since 1947; that is, a separate territory under international jurisdiction. (The Economist—12/7/17—was one of the few who did point this out.) Likewise ignored are the UN Security Council’s repeatedcondemnations of Israel’s 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem and its 1980 declaration of the city as its capital, on the grounds that “acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible.”

The broader context of the 60-year military occupation is likewise out of the picture, along with the dozens of international laws Israel breaks on a daily basis. Many of these relate directly to Jerusalem, including the expulsion of residents from the occupied territory of East Jerusalem and the transfer of hundreds of thousands of colonists there since 1967.

The primary focus is, instead, the possibility of “fresh violence in the region,” which evokes tropes of mindless Arab rage and barbarity. As Marya Hannun explained over at Slate (12/6/17), when we center “angry Arab” cliches, we perpetuate the notion that violence is the alpha and omega of resistance:

There is also a more insidious message being sent by warnings about the potential for a “third intifada” in response to President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem, one that has long haunted, not just the conflict over Palestine and Israel, but also other instances where human rights, civil rights and sovereignty are violated. When we focus on violence as the only preventive force against unjust policies, we reinforce the notion that violence is the only effective means of resistance. Perhaps more often than not, these assessments prove to be accurate, but it’s a dangerous game, and only aids those who see no point in working toward peace at all.

By leading with warnings of a “Middle East on edge” (NBC News, 12/7/17), where “Palestinians Vent Their Anger” (New York Times, 12/7/17) and “clashes escalate” (Washington Post, 12/7/17; BBC, 12/7/17), the media double down on dangerous stereotypes, marginalize legitimate frustration and resistance, and obfuscate history in favor of the ever-convenient, shoulder-shrugging, “they’ll just never get along” narrative.

No mention of redoubling of efforts of the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, or other civil-society efforts to resist Israel aggression. No mention of calls for solidarity by Palestinian activists. A singular focus on violence (albeit violence that, it should be noted, is sanctioned by international law) reduces Palestinians to cartoon hotheads rather than a deeply disenfranchised population suffering decades of displacement, discrimination and occupation, while the most powerful country on the planet condones, funds and arms their continued dehumanization.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.

Featured image is from FAIR.

Should US drone operators and the officers responsible for them be concerned by the latest sentiments from the Pakistani Ministry of Defence?  The head of the Pakistan Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Sohail Aman, made the most pointed remarks yet that the defence forces are not pleased.   

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Air Tech Conference and Techno Show in Islamabad on Thursday, Aman seemed spiky and unequivocal. 

“We will protect the sovereignty of the country at any cost.” 

That protection entailed a prohibition against the drones from any state operating in Pakistani airspace.

“We will not allow anyone to violate our airspace. I have ordered the PAF to shoot down drones, including those of the US, if they enter our airspace, violating the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The upshot of his comment was one of competition rather than any new found moral fancy: the US, having monopolised drone warfare in the region, needed to be encouraged to pull out of it. Pakistani authorities, long lagging and ambivalent in the subject and the application of such force, has decide to pitch in with its own variant of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

Outsourcing killing, notably when it involves almost three thousand civilian deaths since 2004 from 429 drone strikes (the figures come from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism), doesn’t look good for the image, as tarnished as the one Islamabad’s is.

The other context of this supposedly new approach lies in the trumpeted successes of the Pakistani security forces.  This reclaiming of sovereignty is largely based on an assertion of competence: that Pakistan can fend for itself when it comes to dealing with Islamic militancy. 

Sen. Nuzhat Sadiq, chairman of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, has been bold enough to suggest that removing and eliminating militants and terrorists within its borders has been, for the most part, successful.  The need for controversial drone strikes initiated under the aegis of US imperial power has abated.

“It is the policy now of the government not to allow any more US drone strikes on our soil, and the air chief has effectively conveyed it to the Americans.”

The history of US drones and their bloody harvest in the Pakistani context stretch back to June 2004.  Under the Obama administration, drone warfare became a matter of elevated priority, a form of sanitised killing from afar that moved beyond the initial confines of Iraq and Afghanistan.  The sweetness of his 2009 Cairo speech, full of conciliatory promise, and the heavily weighted olive branch to the Middle East, were soon forgotten.

The poll readings back in the US were good: slaughtering those with appropriate labels (militants, terrorists, primitive, freedom-hating darkies) was perfectly permissible even if it is did involve wholesale annihilation of families.

Pakistan was then both the host and undermining force of its own sovereignty, internally torn and compromised between ties with the very militants it was hoping to expunge.  The ties to the Taliban remained strong within a certain factions, a nostalgic reminder of successes in previous conflicts of the mujahedeen.

US forces were effectively given a green light to wage robotic inflicted mayhem from the skies, a process that had the obvious appeal of perceived success.  From 2011, the butchering in such areas as the tribal zones of Waziristan had become unsustainable for relations between Islamabad and Washington, at least from the perspective of public relations. The US duly relocated its drone bases to Afghanistan, another state with a troubled concept of sovereignty.

In April 2012, the Pakistani Parliament demanded an end to the CIA-directed drone strikes within Islamabad’s territory, reiterating the same point made in 2008.  The only reason drones made their appearance in the outline of Parliament’s demands stemmed from pressure made by the Pakistan Muslim League-N party. 

Then spokesman of the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, sounded a touch patronising in her reaction to the jitters from Pakistan’s politicians.

“We seek a relationship with Pakistan that is enduring, strategic and more clearly defined. We look forward to discussing these policy recommendations.”

The Foreign Minister in June that year went further, describing the attacks as illegal, a crisis compounded by an incident in November 2011 when 24 Pakistani soldiers had been killed by NATO aircraft.

The not so attractive head that keeps rearing its head in these announcements is that of reliability.  Such statements of defiance and indignation have been made before, not to mention the odd remark about shooting down US drones.  Behind the scenes, strategists plot, shake hands and reach tacit understanding.  Pakistani intelligence has played a role rather different from the public voices in Parliament, supplying the US with material on select militants.  Complicity accompanies condemnation, the true voice of impotence.

On this occasion, the chatterers on the grape vine are claiming that something new is afoot. Aziz Ahmad Khan, a former diplomat, suggests that the “matter has already been settled with the Americans in some recent high-level meetings.” 

A common form of unconvincing reasoning is frequently found in these musings: the drone strikes, deemed illegal, could now stop, because the militant threat has been minimised; but the drone strikes had, in any case, been reduced, enabling the Pakistan air force to work on its own unmanned aerial vehicles.  The contradictions are bound to persist, with Islamabad continuing its troubled association with, and against, the predations of US foreign policy.

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

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson released a press statement regarding Thailand’s National Day. In it he expressed diplomatic greetings and well-wishing to the Thai people, but failed to resist also expressing American exceptionalism – stating, “we look forward to Thailand holding elections next year.”

While the statement may seem rather innocuous at first glance, it is anything but.

Returning a Murderous Proxy to Power 

Thailand’s elections have been put on hold, following a 2014 military coup ousting the US-backed regime of Yingluck Shinawtra who served openly as her brother Thaksin Shinawatra’s proxy.

Thaksin Shinawatra resides abroad in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a convicted criminal evading a 2-year jail sentence for abuse of power. He too was ousted from power in a military coup in 2006.

Before being removed from power, he oversaw a brutal “war on drugs” in 2003 that left nearly 3,000 extrajudicially killed in the streets over the course of just 90 days. He also attempted to unilaterally sign a US-Thai free trade deal without parliamentary approval, sent Thai troops to participate in the US invasion of Iraq, and allowed Thai territory to be used as part of the US CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

Since being deposed from power in 2006, Shinawatra has organized street mobs, militants, and terrorists, killing scores of people, conducting campaigns of mass arson, bombings, and assassinations as part of his bid to seize back power.

He regularly meets members of his Pheua Thai Party (PTP) in Hong Kong, and has been allowed to travel across Europe, to the UK, and even to the US to conduct business despite being a fugitive and despite his human rights record.

When Shinawatra’s sister contested elections in 2011 as head PTP, the campaign slogan was literally, “Thaksin Thinks, Pheua Thai Does,” an open admission that Thaksin Shinawatra, not his sister, would be  running Thailand upon taking office. Despite the obvious illegality of a convicted criminal remotely running Thailand from a hotel room in Dubai, the immense impunity Shinawatra enjoys thanks to his foreign sponsors made it more than possible. The 2011 election results were heavily defended by the Western media and the legitimacy of Shinawatra’s proxy government never questioned.

The military removed his sister from power in 2014 after Shinawatra’s militants began killing protesters in the streets.

Elections have been pushed back repeatedly ever since. The reason is relatively simple – as long as the largest opposition party contesting Thailand’s next election is openly led by a mass murderer and convicted criminal waging a campaign of terror against the Thai state from abroad, elections are untenable.

US Directly Interfering in Thailand’s Elections

A process is well underway to uproot Shinawatra’s criminal influence over Thailand’s political landscape before elections are held, but this process is continuously hampered by pressure from Western governments and the myriad of NGOs they fund. Shinawatra’s networks of agitators, propagandists, lobbyists, and functionaries are being protected under the guise of “human rights” advocacy. Overt criminals and even terrorists are being labelled “political prisoners” by familiar names in the West’s regime change machinery like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The US State Department itself is first and foremost in eagerly funding media fronts, agitators, and faux-rights advocates in Thailand who work in concert to excuse Shinawatra and his followers for their serial abuses and in support of returning Shinawatra to power.

US-funded fronts like Prachatai, Thai Netizen, the Cross Cultural Foundation, Forty Rights, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, and many more, repetitively demand expediency in holding Thai elections, knowing full well the likely victor at the polls will be Thaksin Shinawatra’s PTP. They decry any legislative move that would make it more difficult for Shinawatra’s proxies to return to power, or limit their power should they take office.

Absent from these demands for expedient elections to “restore democracy” is any explanation as to how a government openly run by a convicted criminal and mass murderer from a hotel room in Dubai is in any sense “legal” or  “democratic.” Nor has any explanation been provided as to how removing Shinawatra’s sister from power – who openly served as his proxy – was “illegal” or “undemocratic.”

It is yet another example of American exceptionalism and the tools of “rights advocacy” and “democracy promotion” it wields to advance it.

At a time when US ties with Russia are strained by repetitive accusations of “Russian interference” in Western politics – specifically elections – the US Secretary of State obliquely demanding expedient elections in Thailand knowing full well who will take power  and whose money and influence is responsible for such an outcome -illustrates just how one-sided America views respecting national sovereignty and staying out of foreign elections.

For Thailand, preventing Thaksin Shinawatra from returning to power in any form is certainly a priority, but if the network of money, power, and foreign sponsorship that has maintained Shinawatra’s staying power is not dealt with, another “Shinawatra” will simply take his place. A process of forging ties with other nations to reduce the amount of dependence on and influence form the West is already well underway in Bangkok. It must continue and expand.

The frustrating hypocrisy of the US and its real-world implications is owed to its unwarranted power and wealth. Nations collectively taking steps to minimize that power and wealth in the form of a multipolar world order is key to confronting and dealing with those implications.

Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from the author.

The Russian MOD has reported today that on November 23rd, there was a major incident where US and Russian air forces engaged each other in Syria. According to the MOD today, December 9th, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesperson was quoted saying: 

 

“An American F-22 fighter actively prevented the Russian pair of Su-25 attack aircraft from carrying out a combat mission to destroy the Daesh stronghold in the suburbs of the city of Mayadin in the airspace over the western bank of the Euphrates River on November 23. The F-22 aircraft fired off heat flares and released brake shields with permanent maneuvering, imitating an air battle,”

In this critical statement, it was also highlighted that the Russian Federation, pursuant to international law and UN resolutions, considers the presence of US air-forces in Syria to be illegal.

With increased clarity over the US role in Syria, the MOD now more transparently explains that most of the near-misses between the two Air Forces, Russian and American, in Syria and Iraq were connected with Washington’s attempts to help ISIS avoid defeat. 

In response to this, US military representatives communicated with their Russian counterparts that there are certain parts of the airspace that belong to the US.

The MOD official responded to this, with:

“The statements of the US Army representatives that a part of the Syrian airspace belongs to the US is puzzling,” Konashenkov stated.

He went on to remind the Pentagon:

“Syria is a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations, therefore, the United States does not own any part of sky”.

The US F-22 pilot apparently panicked when a capable Russian Su-35 multi-role fighter approached, and immediately engaged in evasion maneuvers towards Iraqi airspace.

The general noted that the US has hitherto failed to give any explanation for these and similar activities, beyond general and illegal statements about ‘owning airspace’.

Today’s announcement by the MOD appears to be in response to a report in yesterday’s New York Times, where US military leaders were quoted expressing concerns about a possible  clash between the air forces.

Featured image is from the author.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

There’s nothing civil about Washington’s war on Syria, launched by the Obama administration in March 2011, orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, using ISIS and other terrorists as imperial foot soldiers, aiming for regime change, wanting the country transformed into another US vassal state.

Russia’s intervention in September 2015 changed the dynamic on the ground, turning likely defeat into triumph – ISIS smashed, pockets of its fighters being mopped up, attacks on al-Nusra terrorists continuing to eliminate them as a threat.

Most of Syria is now liberated. A US-controlled Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman falsely claimed the so-called “coalition” deserves credit for defeating ISIS in the country.

Days earlier Trump turned truth on its head, claiming US forces “knocked the hell out of them.” Pentagon terror-bombing “knocked the hell out of” Syrian civilians and vital infrastructure, supporting ISIS, not combating it.

America supports the scourge it claims to oppose – recruiting ISIS and other terrorist fighters, funding, arming, training and directing them.

Syrian and allied forces, greatly aided by Russian airpower, alone defeated ISIS. US forces tried obstructing their efforts.

On December 9, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov said a US F-22 warplane tried preventing two Russian Su-25s from bombing an ISIS position on the western bank of the Euphrates River on November 23, explaining:

“The F-22 launched decoy flares and used airbrakes while constantly maneuvering (near the Russian aircraft), imitating an air fight – ceasing its hostile action only after a Russian Su-35S interceded, adding:

“(M)ost close-midair encounters between Russian and US jets in the area around the Euphrates River have been linked to the attempts of US aircraft to get in the way (of Russian warplanes) striking against Islamic State terrorists.”

Konashenkov denounced US Air Force Central Command spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, claiming the eastern bank of the Euphrates River belongs to the US-led coalition – stressing all parts of the country are Syrian sovereign territory, America an illegal invader.

“Unlike the Russian Air Force, the US-led coalition is operating in Syria without any legal basis,” Konashenkov stressed.

Moscow opposes US plans to remain in Syria after conflict ends. The Trump administration intends to stay, wanting control over as much Syrian territory as possible, opposing conflict resolution efforts.

Restoring peace and stability in the country won’t be easily achieved as long as Washington keeps obstructing efforts.

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

According to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), during 2014 alone, Israeli forces killed 2,300 Palestinians. 17,000 were injured and 500,000 displaced.

• During the 1948 war after the Partition of Palestine, 11,047 were reportedly killed by Israel.
• In the 1975 and 1982 wars against Lebanon, the IDF killed over 20,000.
• During the First Palestinian Intifada 1987- 1991 against Israeli occupation, the IDF killed over 2,000.
• During the Second Palestinian Intifada 2000 – 2005 against Israeli occupation, the IDF killed 4,791.
• Between 2008 and 2012, in Gaza, the IDF killed 195.
• In 2009 IDF killed 1,418, including the documented deaths of hundreds of unarmed women and children

The total figure of Palestinian and Lebanese indigenous people killed, including women and children, is accepted to be in the region of between 40-50,000, the vast majority being non-combatant civilians.  Some of the figures quoted cannot be verified to be 100% accurate but are probably an under-estimate.

The total of those injured certainly runs into tens of thousands and those displaced into hundreds of thousands.  These horrific casualty and displacement figures have been caused by the US-armed IDF in order to continue the illegal occupation of Palestine.

The vast majority of the IDF Army of Occupation, from 1948 onwards, has been comprised of immigrant Israelis from Russia, Eastern Europe, America, Yemen and other foreign states. This was the Occupation Force that took the lives of indigenous peoples who were, and still are, fighting for the lands they have lived in continuously for over a thousand years, against the armed forces of an immigrant minority armed and funded by American Zionists to the tune of billions of dollars each year in order to subjugate the long-established Christian and Muslim majority Arab population. 

By any yardstick, it is a crime against humanity- a crime that is still today being openly perpetrated by a US-armed occupier against an unarmed indigenous population and in contempt of UN Resolutions, whilst Britain and Europe stay silent.

Featured image is from South Front.

Google is escalating its campaign of internet censorship, announcing that it will expand its workforce of human censors to over 10,000, the internet giant announced on December 4. The censors’ primary focus will be videos and other content on YouTube, its video-sharing platform, but will work across Google to censor content and train its automated systems, which remove videos at a rate four times faster than its human employees.

Human censors have already reviewed over 2 million videos since June. YouTube has already removed over 150,000 videos, 50 percent of which were removed within two hours of upload. The company is working to accelerate the rate of takedown through machine-learning from manual censorship, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in an official blog post.

The hiring drive by Google is yet another advance in the campaign against any expression of political opposition. Other social media giants have implemented measures against “fake news”; Facebook has altered its algorithms to reduce the visibility of certain news stories, and Twitter has banned the Russian-funded media outlets RT and Sputnik from advertising on the platform. While railing against “extremist content,” “child exploitation” and “hoaxes” in the interest of “public safety,” the ultimate goal of this campaign is the suppression of left-wing, anti-war sentiment.

Any censorship on YouTube will undoubtedly have an immense impact on online political discourse. According to a white paper by technology conglomerate Cisco, video will account for 69 percent of all consumer-based internet traffic in 2017; this is expected to rise to 80 percent by 2019. YouTube essentially operates a monopoly on prerecorded video sharing and general video monetization, with some 1.5 billion viewers who watch 1 billion hours of video each day on the platform; in 2015, Google policy manager Verity Harding informed the European Parliament, which was then pressuring YouTube to censor “terror-related” content, that 300 hours of video were being uploaded to the platform every minute.

YouTube began removing photographic and video documentation of war crimes in Syria in August, terminating some 180 accounts and removing countless videos from other channels, including footage uploaded by Airwars of coalition air raids that have killed civilians, according to Hadi al-Khatib, the founder of Syrian Archive. YouTube later stated that it would work to “quickly reinstate” any videos and channels that it “removed mistakenly.”

In November, YouTube removed over 51,000 videos concerning Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American imam who was assassinated via missile raid by the Obama administration on September 30, 2011. Awlaki was never charged with, let alone convicted of any crime. The mass removal was praised by the New York Times, one of the largest mouthpieces of the American ruling elite, as a “watershed moment.”

YouTube’s automated video removal system, implemented in August, places some videos under a “limited state” which makes it impossible for users to access the videos without already having the URL. Limited videos will not appear in search results, playlists, or viewers’ own histories. In addition, the videos can no longer be liked or disliked, commented on (all previous comments are hidden as well), monetized, embedded on other websites, or easily shared on social media through YouTube’s share buttons. YouTube has not revealed what criteria it uses to categorize a video as “extremist” and delist it.

The company has also begun using automated demonetization to financially censor video producers who upload content it deems “inappropriate” for monetization, including “controversial or sensitive subjects, war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown.” In August, the videos of “Ron Paul’s Liberty Report” were demonetized after a “manual review” by YouTube found it “unsuitable for advertisers.” Julian Assange referred to the action as “economic censorship,” noting that the “unsuitable” videos featured the former congressman’s criticism of president Donald Trump’s decision to send more American troops to Afghanistan, as well as criticizing the US Senate Intelligence Committee for branding Wikileaks a hostile foreign intelligence service.

YouTube has openly admitted on Twitter that it is censoring videos based on content, stating,

“if the video is also not suitable for a wider audience … then it might see poorer performance.”

The system may also pre-emptively flag videos as unsuitable for advertising even before it is uploaded. In the cases where the censorship system cannot evaluate the content of the video—because it doesn’t exist—it bases its decision on the video’s description, tags, and thumbnail.

The requirements to file an appeal against demonetization are extremely demanding, leaving most small producers with zero recourse. To file an appeal, the channel must either have more than 10,000 subscribers, or the video in question must have at least 1,000 views within the past seven days. Producers are also not informed of when or what in their video the system finds inappropriate. Both small and large producers have complained on Twitter of double-digit percentage drops in new views after their videos have been demonetized, making it even more difficult to meet appeal requirements.

Google is not alone in its expansion of automated censorship. Last week, Facebook announced its newly implemented system to scan users’ posts and contact police and other first-responders, ostensibly to prevent suicide.

Last month, Google admitted to “demoting” content from RT and Sputnik news in its search engine and news service, confirming allegations by the World Socialist Web Site that the company engages in mass political censorship in the name of fighting “fake news.”

It barely registered a murmur across the Australian press, though it caused the traditional ripples over the protester fraternity.  Christian activists, collectively known as the Pine Gap Pilgrims, had received sentences pursuant to the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 (Cth), a cold war relic used by the Australian government to conceal the nature of Canberra’s association with the joint US-Australian signals facility.

The prosecution of Margaret Pestorius, Paul Christie, Jim Dowling, Franz Dowling, Andy Paine and Tim Webb centred on their entering of the clandestine base in September 2016 had been obstinate and typical.

The grounds advanced by Michael McHugh SC for the government made weak reference to the history of peaceful protest that had marked the practice of Australian democracy. He even drew a curious precedent from the archives of history about how the Suffragettes had, in their day, shown the way on civil disobedience.  They, it should be noted, were deemed to have acted illegally, though ultimately successfully, in their cause.

The Crown certainly got what it wanted in terms of verdicts, but Justice John Reeves was not proving totally cooperative to the holy shrine of US power in Australia.  The judge had initially given an inkling that the charade around Pine Gap and its secrecy might continue.  For one, he found little to accept the defence made under the Commonwealth Criminal Code that the conduct of the six in trespassing had been in response to a sudden or extraordinary emergency.

The nature of that emergency was drawn from the targeting information for drone strikes supplied by the facility, disruption of which would purportedly save lives. The ruling effectively took a good deal of the carpet from under the protestors, given that the jury was disallowed form considering that evidence in reaching their verdict.

On December 4, the court refused to impose prison sentences, despite the guilty jury verdict.

“I do not accept the Crown’s submission,” said the judge dismissively, “that your offences potentially struck at the heart of national security.” 

All six were fined for unlawful entry to the tune of $1,250 to $5,000, and Paine was found guilty of the additional charge of carrying a photographic defence on the base.

The judge felt that the actions of the younger Pilgrims did not warrant custodial sentences.  Jim Dowling was a considered a more complex matter, him of the serial non-violent direct action type with a mischief making record dating back to 1986. 

Justice Reeves’ preference was not to flatter Dowling’s notoriety (he had been committed for 27 similar trespass offences), but to make him pay the highest fine of the six.

“If I imprison you, I think that would likely to make you a martyr to your cause, rather than to underscore the law breaking to which you were involved in.”

The role of these committed protestors can, in a broader sense, be seen as a fact-finding one.  Tipped with the express purpose of making sure Australia desists in its folly of being the unwitting janissaries of US-led war efforts, they seek to puncture the veil of secrecy that has made more than a mild mockery of Australian democracy and parliamentary credibility.

During the course of trial, testimony was elicited by various figures which formed the public record.  Former Greens Senator Scott Ludlam spoke with conviction from the stand. 

“There are moral and ethical questions,” he charged; “there are also deep legal questions about the authorities relied upon by the United States Government to undertake drone assassinations in at least six countries that I am aware.” 

Ludlam’s point has been made before: complicity expands rather than contracts, and Australian funding and hosting of the base invariably places risks to Australian citizens from the perspective of drone strikes, and, in another sense, the vantage point of future prosecutions for crimes against humanity.

With each provocation, with each daring exposure of the ludicrousness of secrecy, crumbs are filling the gaps, data filling the files.

“Since our action,” claims Paine, “more evidence has emerged detailing the role of Pine Gap in extrajudicial assassinations, in nuclear weapons targeting and in illegal mass surveillance.”

During the course of the trial, Paine insisted that the prosecution’s purpose was always going to be founded in the realms of dull and constipated procedure.

“While the prosecution has been concerned with facts about land titles and fences, we hope to ask deeper questions in the court about what is the moral and ethical responsibility of a person who is aware of extreme and unjustifiable violence happening within their own country.”

One of the most moving displays of the proceedings came from Pestorious herself, whose faith in moving minds remained powerful through the case.  In the final hearings, she appeared in her wedding dress, a tribute to her late husband who had been one of the Pine Gap Four found guilty for entering the prohibited surrounds, then acquitted on appeal in 2005.

She urged the jury to consider the silence and denial behind the making of war, its sowing of grief, its sheer relentlessness.  In everything, even the most depressing, and the most clandestine, was a crack, and that crack would, in time, let light in.

These prosecutions have only yielded some success for bureaucrats in Canberra.  The applecart on Australian-US relations has certainly not been upset, but the public is being supplied bigger, and juicier morsels about the risks posed by running the base.  To hide behind the petticoats of power – but at what cost?

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

It barely registered a murmur across the Australian press, though it caused the traditional ripples over the protester fraternity.  Christian activists, collectively known as the Pine Gap Pilgrims, had received sentences pursuant to the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 (Cth), a cold war relic used by the Australian government to conceal the nature of Canberra’s association with the joint US-Australian signals facility.

The prosecution of Margaret Pestorius, Paul Christie, Jim Dowling, Franz Dowling, Andy Paine and Tim Webb centred on their entering of the clandestine base in September 2016 had been obstinate and typical.

The grounds advanced by Michael McHugh SC for the government made weak reference to the history of peaceful protest that had marked the practice of Australian democracy. He even drew a curious precedent from the archives of history about how the Suffragettes had, in their day, shown the way on civil disobedience.  They, it should be noted, were deemed to have acted illegally, though ultimately successfully, in their cause.

The Crown certainly got what it wanted in terms of verdicts, but Justice John Reeves was not proving totally cooperative to the holy shrine of US power in Australia.  The judge had initially given an inkling that the charade around Pine Gap and its secrecy might continue.  For one, he found little to accept the defence made under the Commonwealth Criminal Code that the conduct of the six in trespassing had been in response to a sudden or extraordinary emergency.

The nature of that emergency was drawn from the targeting information for drone strikes supplied by the facility, disruption of which would purportedly save lives. The ruling effectively took a good deal of the carpet from under the protestors, given that the jury was disallowed form considering that evidence in reaching their verdict.

On December 4, the court refused to impose prison sentences, despite the guilty jury verdict.

“I do not accept the Crown’s submission,” said the judge dismissively, “that your offences potentially struck at the heart of national security.” 

All six were fined for unlawful entry to the tune of $1,250 to $5,000, and Paine was found guilty of the additional charge of carrying a photographic defence on the base.

The judge felt that the actions of the younger Pilgrims did not warrant custodial sentences.  Jim Dowling was a considered a more complex matter, him of the serial non-violent direct action type with a mischief making record dating back to 1986. 

Justice Reeves’ preference was not to flatter Dowling’s notoriety (he had been committed for 27 similar trespass offences), but to make him pay the highest fine of the six.

“If I imprison you, I think that would likely to make you a martyr to your cause, rather than to underscore the law breaking to which you were involved in.”

The role of these committed protestors can, in a broader sense, be seen as a fact-finding one.  Tipped with the express purpose of making sure Australia desists in its folly of being the unwitting janissaries of US-led war efforts, they seek to puncture the veil of secrecy that has made more than a mild mockery of Australian democracy and parliamentary credibility.

During the course of trial, testimony was elicited by various figures which formed the public record.  Former Greens Senator Scott Ludlam spoke with conviction from the stand. 

“There are moral and ethical questions,” he charged; “there are also deep legal questions about the authorities relied upon by the United States Government to undertake drone assassinations in at least six countries that I am aware.” 

Ludlam’s point has been made before: complicity expands rather than contracts, and Australian funding and hosting of the base invariably places risks to Australian citizens from the perspective of drone strikes, and, in another sense, the vantage point of future prosecutions for crimes against humanity.

With each provocation, with each daring exposure of the ludicrousness of secrecy, crumbs are filling the gaps, data filling the files.

“Since our action,” claims Paine, “more evidence has emerged detailing the role of Pine Gap in extrajudicial assassinations, in nuclear weapons targeting and in illegal mass surveillance.”

During the course of the trial, Paine insisted that the prosecution’s purpose was always going to be founded in the realms of dull and constipated procedure.

“While the prosecution has been concerned with facts about land titles and fences, we hope to ask deeper questions in the court about what is the moral and ethical responsibility of a person who is aware of extreme and unjustifiable violence happening within their own country.”

One of the most moving displays of the proceedings came from Pestorious herself, whose faith in moving minds remained powerful through the case.  In the final hearings, she appeared in her wedding dress, a tribute to her late husband who had been one of the Pine Gap Four found guilty for entering the prohibited surrounds, then acquitted on appeal in 2005.

She urged the jury to consider the silence and denial behind the making of war, its sowing of grief, its sheer relentlessness.  In everything, even the most depressing, and the most clandestine, was a crack, and that crack would, in time, let light in.

These prosecutions have only yielded some success for bureaucrats in Canberra.  The applecart on Australian-US relations has certainly not been upset, but the public is being supplied bigger, and juicier morsels about the risks posed by running the base.  To hide behind the petticoats of power – but at what cost?

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

Independence is once again attainable for South Yemen so long as prospective peace talks result in a coalition-enforced “buffer zone” with North Yemen and a “federal” transitional period that precedes an internationally recognized (re-)independence vote, and the restored country could avoid becoming a UAE satellite if it grants a third-party such as Pakistan a naval base in Aden as a friendly means of “balancing” out its patron’s potentially overbearing influence, which in this case could also serve the dual purpose of facilitating the south Arabian state’s integration into the New Silk Road.

Saleh’s slaying opens up both symbolic and substantial opportunities for South Yemen to resurface on the world map, taking into account that it was this former Yemeni President who presided over the 1990 unification and the North’s victory in the 1994 civil war. The author recently wrote about this in one of his latest analyses for The Duran, with the main takeaway being that the best outcome that the Cold War-era country could hope for in the short term is the institutionalization of a “federal” system that would give South Yemen de-facto independence from the North through what would essentially amount to an internal partition.

For as positive of a development as that would be, many South Yemenis are understandably yearning for more, seeing as how their patriotic sentiment has surged in the past couple of years due to the twists and turns of the ongoing War on Yemen inadvertently, though excitingly, giving them their most realistic shot at independence since it was regrettably surrendered in 1990. Furthermore, South Yemenis don’t want to survive as a satellite state of the UAE, but as a full-fledged independent member of the international community, which would therefore entail devising a creative political solution for “balancing” the influence of its patron and ensuring that the country’s sovereignty wouldn’t be superficial.

1. Hold An Unofficial Independence Referendum

Taking it one step at a time, however, South Yemen first has to get to the point where “federalization” is even an option, which is why it plans on holding an independence referendum in the near future so as to show the allied coalition that the majority of people truly want to break away from North Yemen. Presuming that this is indeed the case and that the Southern Movement (also known as Al-Hirak) is as popular among the masses as it visibly seems to be, then the next step would be in getting South Yemen’s monarchic partners to recognize the democratic will of the population, which is in principle a paradoxical challenge but one that could be surmounted by appealing to their geostrategic interests.

2. Convince The Coalition To Recognize The People’s Democratic Will

It’s at this point where South Yemen’s representatives in the governmental, military, and media fields need to successfully convince their coalition counterparts that the restoration of independence to their region would allow their allies to benefit much more than if they continued to waste their personal and financial resources trying to keep the Republic of Yemen together in vain. The main argument in favor of the South Yemenis is that their revived statehood would enable the coalition to craft the conditions for downscaling their expensive commitment to this disastrous conflict and therefore have a tangible basis for claiming a “face-saving” victory in the War on Yemen.

None of this can happen unless they’re made to believe that the threats that they perceive to be emanating from North Yemen could cost-effectively be contained as a result, which is why it’s necessary to explain to the coalition the importance of a “federal” transitional period for the country’s two halves. “Federalization” would permit Yemen’s two functionally independent parts to nominally remain united under President Hadi’s internationally recognized authority, which would thus grant him the right to request that the coalition enforce an internal “buffer zone” between North & South as well as sustain its naval operation along the Red Sea coast.

The point here is to put pressure on North Yemen for as long as possible until a governing bloc “acceptable” to the coalition is formed, such as one led by Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC) and involving “moderate” elements of the Houthi rebels, because this would make Saudi Arabia and its allies “comfortable” enough with devolving “federal” powers to it in the run-up to independence without losing too much face. That being said, the coalition must ensure that the humanitarian needs of the North Yemeni population are met during this crucial time, since doing otherwise would totally delegitimize this entire process and make it look like an excuse for “justifying” their collective punishment.

3. Incorporate “Federalization” Into A Third-Party-Brokered “Political Solution”

Once the coalition is convinced of the wisdom in moving forward with this plan, concrete proposals must then be offered by the Southern Movement in order to make it a reality. The peace talks that would logically lead to the “federal” transitional process would gain a strong degree of international legitimacy if they were brokered by a neutral third party such as Russia, possibly following the Syrian model that it spearheaded and is reportedly about to replicate in Libya. While it might be impossible to implement this process across the whole of formally unified Yemen right now due to the ongoing unrest in the North, that doesn’t mean that it can’t begin in the more peaceful Southern region first, just as how the Syrian reconciliation process first began in the liberated areas under Damascus’ control.

Remembering that President Hadi’s permission to initiate “federalization” talks is a legal prerequisite to this procedure, the native Southerner should be pressured by his people to allow this to proceed as the only way for him to ever hope for the possibility of partial redemption for his complicity in squashing their secessionist hopes during the 1994 civil war. So long as Hadi’s Saudi and Emirati patrons agree with the Southern Movement’s logic for “federalization”, then it shouldn’t be too hard for them to encourage their surrogate to permit it, which would accordingly extend the President’s support to a second independence referendum that would be internationally recognized. Once the vote takes place, and if it expectedly results in a positive outcome, then the coalition could assist with swapping out Saleh’s Northern-imposed “deep state” elite with the South’s democratically elected ones.

It’s important to emphasize that the “federal” transition could conceivably occur at an asymmetrical pace by proceeding much faster in the liberated south than in the war-torn north, and that there’s nothing irregular in this happening because similar post-conflict peacemaking developments have already occurred in Syria with international recognition. In fact, the application of the Syrian model modified for Yemeni conditions has a faster chance of succeeding in the Arabian country than the Levantine one because the entire international community (except possibly Iran) still recognizes Hadi as the official President, thus making his word the final authority on the matter. If he can be convinced to initiate third-party-brokered peace talks that begin in the South and lead to the asymmetrically paced implementation of a “federal” transitional solution, then there’s no legal reason why the world would oppose it.

4. Build A “Buffer Zone” And Request Peacekeeping Assistance

The coalition would only agree to South Yemeni “federalization” and subsequent independence if they were sure that the threats that they believe to be coming from North Yemen wouldn’t ever seep South once again, so they have self-interested military reasons for building a “buffer zone” roughly along the line of contact and as close to the pre-1990 borders as possible in setting the stage for the international re-division of the country. Because of the challenge inherent with this task, battle-hardened troops led by the UAE should take the lead in carrying this out, with the security vacuum that they leave in South Yemen prospectively being filled by a Pakistani-led peacekeeping mission there under the aegis of former General Raheel Sharif, the leader of the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition (IMCTC).

Pakistan refused to become a party to the conflict in 2015, unlike the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and this pairs with the South Asian state’s extensive UN peacekeeping experience in the “Global South” in making it the most logical country to preside over South Yemen’s “federal” transition into an independent state. South Yemen needs to rebuild its military capacity after it was suppressed by the North for the past 24 years since the civil war, and seeing as how Pakistan used to train the UAE right after its own independence, it’s only fitting that Islamabad teams up with its long-term partners in Abu Dhabi to cooperate in doing the same with Aden. But there’s another reason why it’s to South Yemen’s supreme advantage to request that Pakistan fulfill these two important roles, and that’s geopolitics.

5. “Balance” With Bases

South Yemen, whether as a de-facto independent “federal” unit or a legally sovereign state-level one, doesn’t want to be the UAE’s satellite, so it needs to “balance” the influence of its patron through the skillful employment of “military diplomacy”, preferably with Pakistan. The South Asian country has a grand strategic interest in the Arabian Sea-Gulf of Aden (ASGA) region and further afield in the Red Sea, as explained in the author’s two prior analyses about “Pakistan’s ASGA Strategy For The Afro-Pacific” and how “Sudan Is Indispensable To China’s Silk Road Vision For Africa”. This means that Pakistan could soon be looking for a naval base in the area in order to secure its Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC), and there’s no better place for it to deploy than Aden.

A handful of countries, including coalition leader Saudi Arabia and even China, already have military facilities in Djibouti, while the UAE has bases in Eritrea, “Somaliland”, and reportedly in the South Yemeni archipelago of Socotra. About the latter, it would be unrealistic to expect South Yemen to expel the UAE from these islands even if its forces were indeed deployed there, so this would essentially become a fait accompli that the country would have to inherit. Therefore, the focus should instead be on preventing the UAE from setting up a permanent base in the South Yemeni mainland so as to preserve the country’s sovereignty and prevent it from being smothered by its patron.

The coalition doesn’t need a permanent naval presence in Aden anyhow since the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s bases in the Red Sea (in Eritrea and Djibouti, respectively) are more than sufficient for controlling the North Yemeni coast. Instead of either of those two, South Yemen should court Pakistan as the ultimate “balancing” party capable of diversifying the country’s strategic dependency on the GCC. Per the aforementioned proposal, former General Raheel Sharif could lead the coalition’s peacekeeping efforts in South Yemen during the “federal” transition to independence, and his home state could build up the country’s military capacities during the interim. Pakistan is close with all the coalition members and understands through its own history the importance of partition, so it’s an ideal and inoffensive “balancing” partner for South Yemen to have.

6. Experience A Silk Road Renaissance

Most significantly, however, the deployment of the Pakistani Navy to Aden would turn the city into a crucial node along the New Silk Road, pairing it with nearby Djibouti as one of two ‘gatekeepers’ for the Bab el Mandeb and centrally positioning it along the ASGA-Red Sea SLOC between the CPEC mainland-maritime interface of Gwadar and its projected African counterpart in Port Sudan. The strategic twinning of the Pakistani base in Aden with China’s one in Djibouti would naturally lead to more robust Sino-Pakistani cooperation in South Yemen, which could eventually produce trilateral development projects that would accelerate the country’s post-war reconstruction and stabilization. The positive economic outcome that this might predictably engender would prove that the Southern Movement is indeed delivering on its promises to the population after independence.

The cordial competition in South Yemen between Saudi-Emirati GCC investment and Sino-Pakistani Silk Road initiatives would be to the advantage of all parties, and the four foreign powers could even prospectively cooperate with one another on the country’s territory in pioneering a new quadrilateral partnership framework between them. This could see South Yemen become the geopolitical bridge linking together both economic blocs and serving as the center of strategic gravity between them in the emerging Multipolar World Order. The end result of this plan would be a win-win for all and especially South Yemen, as the newly re-independent state could experience its long-awaited renaissance in having its capital of Aden become the “West Arabian Dubai” along the New Silk Road and ultimately compensating for the nearly three decades of neglect and pillage that it suffered at the hands of its North Yemeni occupiers.

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

All images in this article are from the author.

IT IS TWO AND A HALF MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2017: For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.” In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater, the need for action more urgent. It is two and a half minutes to midnight, the Clock is ticking, global danger looms. Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead the way.  See the full statement from the Science and Security Board on the 2017 time of the Doomsday Clock.

IT IS STILL 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2016: “Last year, the Science and Security Board moved the Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes to midnight, noting: ‘The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.’ That probability has not been reduced. The Clock ticks. Global danger looms. Wise leaders should act—immediately.” See the full statement from the Science and Security Board on the 2016 time of the Doomsday Clock.

IT IS 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2015: “Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.” Despite some modestly positive developments in the climate change arena, current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia have embarked on massive programs to modernize their nuclear triads-thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties. “The clock ticks now at just three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

IT IS 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2012: “The challenges to rid the world of nuclear weapons, harness nuclear power, and meet the nearly inexorable climate disruptions from global warming are complex and interconnected. In the face of such complex problems, it is difficult to see where the capacity lies to address these challenges.” Political processes seem wholly inadequate; the potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and South Asia are alarming; safer nuclear reactor designs need to be developed and built, and more stringent oversight, training, and attention are needed to prevent future disasters; the pace of technological solutions to address climate change may not be adequate to meet the hardships that large-scale disruption of the climate portends.

IT IS 6 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2010: “We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons” is the Bulletin’s assessment. Talks between Washington and Moscow for a follow-on agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty are nearly complete, and more negotiations for further reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenal are already planned. The dangers posed by climate change are growing, but there are pockets of progress. Most notably, at Copenhagen, the developing and industrialized countries agree to take responsibility for carbon emissions and to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.

IT IS 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2007: The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.

IT IS 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

2002: Concerns regarding a nuclear terrorist attack underscore the enormous amount of unsecured–and sometimes unaccounted for–weapon-grade nuclear materials located throughout the world. Meanwhile, the United States expresses a desire to design new nuclear weapons, with an emphasis on those able to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets. It also rejects a series of arms control treaties and announces it will withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

IT IS 9 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1998: India and Pakistan stage nuclear weapons tests only three weeks apart. “The tests are a symptom of the failure of the international community to fully commit itself to control the spread of nuclear weapons–and to work toward substantial reductions in the numbers of these weapons,” a dismayed Bulletin reports. Russia and the United States continue to serve as poor examples to the rest of the world. Together, they still maintain 7,000 warheads ready to fire at each other within 15 minutes.

IT IS 14 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1995: Hopes for a large post-Cold War peace dividend and a renouncing of nuclear weapons fade. Particularly in the United States, hard-liners seem reluctant to soften their rhetoric or actions, as they claim that a resurgent Russia could provide as much of a threat as the Soviet Union. Such talk slows the rollback in global nuclear forces; more than 40,000 nuclear weapons remain worldwide. There is also concern that terrorists could exploit poorly secured nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union.

IT IS 17 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1991: With the Cold War officially over, the United States and Russia begin making deep cuts to their nuclear arsenals. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty greatly reduces the number of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by the two former adversaries. Better still, a series of unilateral initiatives remove most of the intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers in both countries from hair-trigger alert. “The illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away,” the Bulletin declares.

IT IS 10 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1990: As one Eastern European country after another (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania) frees itself from Soviet control, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev refuses to intervene, halting the ideological battle for Europe and significantly diminishing the risk of all-out nuclear war. In late 1989, the Berlin Wall falls, symbolically ending the Cold War. “Forty-four years after Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, the myth of monolithic communism has been shattered for all to see,” the Bulletin proclaims.

IT IS 6 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1988: The United States and Soviet Union sign the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first agreement to actually ban a whole category of nuclear weapons. The leadership shown by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev makes the treaty a reality, but public opposition to U.S. nuclear weapons in Western Europe inspires it. For years, such intermediate-range missiles had kept Western Europe in the crosshairs of the two superpowers.

IT IS 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1984: U.S.-Soviet relations reach their iciest point in decades. Dialogue between the two superpowers virtually stops. “Every channel of communications has been constricted or shut down; every form of contact has been attenuated or cut off. And arms control negotiations have been reduced to a species of propaganda,” a concerned Bulletin informs readers. The United States seems to flout the few arms control agreements in place by seeking an expansive, space-based anti-ballistic missile capability, raising worries that a new arms race will begin.

IT IS 4 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1981: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hardens the U.S. nuclear posture. Before he leaves office, President Jimmy Carter pulls the United States from the Olympic Games in Moscow and considers ways in which the United States could win a nuclear war. The rhetoric only intensifies with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Reagan scraps any talk of arms control and proposes that the best way to end the Cold War is for the United States to win it.

IT IS 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1980: Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age and after some promising disarmament gains, the United States and the Soviet Union still view nuclear weapons as an integral component of their national security. This stalled progress discourages the Bulletin: “[The Soviet Union and United States have] been behaving like what may best be described as ‘nucleoholics’–drunks who continue to insist that the drink being consumed is positively ‘the last one,’ but who can always find a good excuse for ‘just one more round.'”

IT IS 9 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1974: South Asia gets the Bomb, as India tests its first nuclear device. And any gains in previous arms control agreements seem like a mirage. The United States and Soviet Union appear to be modernizing their nuclear forces, not reducing them. Thanks to the deployment of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV), both countries can now load their intercontinental ballistic missiles with more nuclear warheads than before.

IT IS 12 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1972: The United States and Soviet Union attempt to curb the race for nuclear superiority by signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The two treaties force a nuclear parity of sorts. SALT limits the number of ballistic missile launchers either country can possess, and the ABM Treaty stops an arms race in defensive weaponry from developing.

IT IS 10 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1969: Nearly all of the world’s nations come together to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The deal is simple–the nuclear weapon states vow to help the treaty’s non-nuclear weapon signatories develop nuclear power if they promise to forego producing nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapon states also pledge to abolish their own arsenals when political conditions allow for it. Although Israel, India, and Pakistan refuse to sign the treaty, the Bulletin is cautiously optimistic: “The great powers have made the first step. They must proceed without delay to the next one–the dismantling, gradually, of their own oversized military establishments.”

IT IS 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1968: Regional wars rage. U.S. involvement in Vietnam intensifies, India and Pakistan battle in 1965, and Israel and its Arab neighbors renew hostilities in 1967. Worse yet, France and China develop nuclear weapons to assert themselves as global players. “There is little reason to feel sanguine about the future of our society on the world scale,” the Bulletin laments. “There is a mass revulsion against war, yes; but no sign of conscious intellectual leadership in a rebellion against the deadly heritage of international anarchy.”

IT IS 12 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1963: After a decade of almost non-stop nuclear tests, the United States and Soviet Union sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which ends all atmospheric nuclear testing. While it does not outlaw underground testing, the treaty represents progress in at least slowing the arms race. It also signals awareness among the Soviets and United States that they need to work together to prevent nuclear annihilation.

IT IS 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1960: Political actions belie the tough talk of “massive retaliation.” For the first time, the United States and Soviet Union appear eager to avoid direct confrontation in regional conflicts such as the 1956 Egyptian-Israeli dispute. Joint projects that build trust and constructive dialogue between third parties also quell diplomatic hostilities. Scientists initiate many of these measures, helping establish the International Geophysical Year, a series of coordinated, worldwide scientific observations, and the Pugwash Conferences, which allow Soviet and American scientists to interact.

IT IS 2 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1953: After much debate, the United States decides to pursue the hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any atomic bomb. In October 1952, the United States tests its first thermonuclear device, obliterating a Pacific Ocean islet in the process; nine months later, the Soviets test an H-bomb of their own. “The hands of the Clock of Doom have moved again,” the Bulletin announces. “Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization.”

IT IS 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1949: The Soviet Union denies it, but in the fall, President Harry Truman tells the American public that the Soviets tested their first nuclear device, officially starting the arms race. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or year from now,” the Bulletin explains. “But we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.”

IT IS 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

1947: As the Bulletin evolves from a newsletter into a magazine, the Clock appears on the cover for the first time. It symbolizes the urgency of the nuclear dangers that the magazine’s founders–and the broader scientific community–are trying to convey to the public and political leaders around the world.

A video of a starving polar bear led to calls for climate change denialists to confront the real-world effects of global warming this week. Taken by a Canadian conservationist and photographer and posted to social media, the video offered a stark visual of the drastic impacts of climate change that have already begun taking root.

Paul Nicklen was traveling with the conservation group Sea Legacy in Canada’s Baffin Islands, located in the Arctic, when he spotted the emaciated animal struggling to walk across the dry land—historically covered with ice in December and home to seals that polar bears rely on for food. The bear searched in vain for sustenance in a trashcan before collapsing.

“When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like,” said Nicklen in an interview with National Geographic.“Bears are going to starve to death. This is what a starving bear looks like.”

Im so sorry angel?
This polar bear is starving to death, to the point where it’s hard for him to even get up/move around. If this hurts to see, then take a step back and acknowledge that if you consume animals you’re contributing to this polar bears suffering- pic.twitter.com/SqLQj5Ogci

— ??????? (@figsoverpigs) December 7, 2017

Nicklen received some criticism for filming the bear instead of feeding it, but he argued that sharing the image of the impact of global warming with the largest audience possible would be more productive than intervening by ending the animal’s life or feeding it a small amount of food.

“There is no band aid solution. There was no saving this individual bear,” he wrote on Instagram where he orginally posted the video.

In his interview with National Geographic, Nicklen added,

“it’s not like I walk around with a tranquilizer gun or 400 pounds of seal meat.”

Polar bears have officially been considered a threatened species since 2008, under the Endangered Species Act, due to the ongoing loss of their icy habitats in Arctic regions.

The bears are accustomed to going without food in summer months when ice dries up, but unusually warm temperatures have caused them to fast for unhealthy periods of time and potentially starving to death.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported earlier this year that the increasingly rapid rate of melting sea ice in the Arctic is an existential threat to polar bears.

On social media, viewers of Nicklen’s video called for political leaders like President Donald Trump, who has refused to take part in global efforts to minimize the warming of the Earth by reducing carbon emissions, to reconsider their climate-wrecking actions.

@realDonaldTrump @GOP @DNC This is a starving polar bear. This is how climate change kills… slowly, painfully. This is unacceptable. You have the ability to help. Please do. ?@cmittermeier pic.twitter.com/sxTyuUyPul

— Alexa Q. Shunner (@PantsCatPants) December 5, 2017

THIS is what we humans are doing to our planet, to animals that have lived here much longer than we have. Starving them to death.

What will it take for us to wake up?#climatechange #climateactionhttps://t.co/OOvQlEjYCN

— Dr Lauren Gavaghan (@DancingTheMind) December 8, 2017

They should show this video in congress https://t.co/1FzgZspjZ2 via @NatGeo

— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) December 8, 2017

For all of you still trying to hold a ridiculous "debate" about whether there's something wrong with our planet, please watch this, if you can. https://t.co/f4HcSIWNIt

— Kim Murphy, LA Times (@kimmurphy) December 8, 2017

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Following Trump’s pronouncement on Jerusalem, three days of rage left two West Bank Palestinians dead, 767 wounded (according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society), along with over two dozen Gazans injured and four killed by Israeli shelling and terror-bombing, continuing Saturday – the Palestinian Health Ministry reported.

During a Friday Security Council meeting, all members except America strongly criticized Trump’s move – none intending actions against it, none supporting Palestinian rights except rhetorically, none interceding on their behalf, none suggesting sanctions or other punishments on Washington and Israel.

Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya urged relaunching a “meaningful political process” to try resolving the Israel/Palestinian conflict through a two-state solution.

No political process exists, no legitimate peace process, no possibility of a two-state solution because Washington and Israel reject it on acceptable terms – namely, Palestinian statehood within June 1967 borders, 22% of historic Palestine with East Jerusalem as its exclusive capital.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniya called Trump’s pronouncement a “war declaration against Palestinians,” urging a new intifada against the Zionist enemy.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the PA won’t talk to Washington until Trump reverses his move – at least not until next week or next month.

Addressing the UN General Assembly on Friday, Iranian UN envoy Gholamali Khoshroo said

“(o)ccupation of the Palestinian land lies at the root of all crises in our region, and any action to deny the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including with regard to the holy city of al-Quds (Jerusalem) and particularly al-Aqsa Mosque, will only result in more bloodshed and rage”

Sergey Lavrov said Rex Tillerson “hinted…that the United States is expecting to strike a ‘deal of the century,’ which would resolve the Palestinian-Israeli problem in one swoop.”

Isn’t that what Oslo was touted to accomplish – what became a Palestinian Versailles masquerading as conflict resolution!

In October 1993 following the agreement, Edward Said commented as follows:

“Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to re-examine the Israeli-PLO agreement with the required common sense.”

“What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and, for most of the Palestinian people, more unfavorably weighted than many had first supposed.”

“The fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.”

Said died 10 years later in September 2003 from chronic lymphocytic leukemia. An uncompromising Palestinian human rights champion, his voice is sadly missed.

AIPAC gloated over Trump’s pronouncement, calling his action “historic…a long-overdue step…Jerusalem…to be Israel’s capital as part of any conceivable final status agreement.”

House and Senate Republicans, along with undemocratic Dem. leaders praised Trump’s move – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi calling Jerusalem “the eternal capital of the Jewish homeland,” others making similar comments.

US UN envoy Nikki Haley absurdly claimed

“(o)ur actions are intended to help advance the cause of peace.”

Trump expressed similar Big Lies.

His move flies in the face of conflict resolution, putting it further out of reach than already, assuring Palestinian rage, ongoing for three days – likely to continue, not end.

Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a contemptible provocation, exposing the peace process charade – what only existed in name only, pointless exercises each time initiated.

Palestinians’ liberating struggle continues, on their own like always.

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

In another indication of the advanced US preparations for war against North Korea, the Trump administration has suggested that US athletes might not participate in the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February for security reasons.

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley told Fox News on Wednesday that the US team’s participation was “an open question.” While Haley denied she had heard anything concrete, she intimated that “conversations are happening daily” about the protection of US citizens, “whether it’s about Jerusalem or North Korea.”

Far from clarifying the issue, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that “no official decision has been made” about whether the US will compete in the Winter Olympics. She said a decision would not be made until later and would involve multiple agencies, “but I think ultimately the president would certainly weigh in.”

Minutes later, Sanders sought to downplay the issue, tweeting that “the US looks forward to participating in the Winter Olympics.” Of course, prior to Haley’s remarks, no one had suggested that the US would not compete, and Sanders’ tweet hardly answered the question raised definitely.

Taken by themselves, the comments could appear innocuous. However, amid the extreme tensions on the Korean Peninsula generated by the Trump administration’s reckless and provocative threats against North Korea, the remarks point to a hothouse in the White House as war is being discussed daily.

Trump has repeatedly declared that he will not allow North Korea to build a nuclear missile capable of reaching the continental United States. Pyongyang has now tested long-range ballistic missiles that could potentially have that range.

Despite the many questions that remain about the viability of North Korea’s limited nuclear arsenal, Trump has created the conditions where to back down would damage his political standing and that of the US in the world.

An article in the Guardian on Tuesday by Mark Seddon, a speechwriter for former UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, was headlined “Have we got just three months to avert a US attack on North Korea?”

Seddon warned that “the drumbeat for a potentially devastating war on the Korean Peninsula, and one that could quickly spread with calamitous consequences, has grown louder” following North Korea’s most recent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last week.

The article noted that John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, had visited Britain last week, saying:

“His mission, whether official or not: to relay that CIA chiefs have told Donald Trump that he has a “three-month window” in which to act to halt the North’s ICBM program.”

Seddon continued:

“This apparent March deadline, for what can only be considered a pre-emptive strike, was also mentioned to a former European parliamentarian by a senior US commander a few days ago at Panmunjom on Korea’s demilitarised zone, which separates the North from the South.”

US ambassador Nikki Haley last week responded to North Korea’s ICBM test by warning that “if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.” Such a threat can only mean that the US is preparing a monstrous crime that will involve the leveling of North Korea’s military, industry and infrastructure and the killing of millions of people through conventional or nuclear weapons or both.

The US military have just completed another major joint war games with South Korea and Japan involving around 230 war planes and 12,000 military personnel. The presence of the latest American stealth fighters—the F-22 Raptors—as well as other hi-tech aircraft such as the F-35 underscore the purpose of the drills—a rehearsal for all-out war against North Korea.

The exercise—the largest of its kind—featured flights by B-1B supersonic strategic bombers on Wednesday and Thursday. Two of the B-1Bs that can carry a payload of more than 30 tonnes flew from the US Air Force base in Guam on Thursday to take part in simulated bombing runs in South Korea. Japanese and South Korean fighter jets have taken part in the exercises.

During a meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Vienna on Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that US military exercises were raising tensions on the Korean Peninsula and undermining any move towards negotiations. He indicated that Pyongyang was willing to hold direct talks with Washington as long as the US provided security guarantees.

Lavrov noted that Russia had condemned the latest North Korean missile launch, but blamed the US for creating the tense situation and suggested that the Trump administration wanted to goad Pyongyang into taking rash action. Following North Korea’s nuclear test in September, he said,

“[T]he United States acted as if they wanted to provoke them [Pyongyang] for a new risky venture. And so they did.”

To restart talks, Russia and China have both urged a so-called freeze-for-freeze—a halt to US-South Korean war games in return for a North Korean freeze on missile and nuclear testing. Washington has repeatedly rejected the proposal. Far from easing tensions, South Korean Defence Minister Song Young-moo this week said the joint drills would be conducted “two to three times a month.”

The Trump administration has deliberately created a powder keg on the Korean Peninsula in which a relatively minor incident or miscalculation could trigger a conflict that spirals out of control and drags in other powers. China and Russia are both deeply concerned that the US will provoke a devastating war on their doorstep.

Amid the joint US exercises in South Korea, the Chinese navy and air force has been conducting its own military drills. On Monday air force spokesman Shen Jinke announced that Chinese aircraft recently conducted exercises drills over the Yellow and East China seas near the Korean Peninsula using “routes and areas it has never flown before.”

The South China Morning Post reported that more than 40 warships from China’s navy took part in a major exercise in the East China Sea on Thursday. The vessels, from China’s North Sea, East Sea and South Sea fleets, demonstrated the navy’s growing anti-missile and emergency response capabilities in “all-weather conditions.”

We bring to the attention of Global Research readers, this carefully documented analysis of East Jerusalem published in May 2017, updated in early November, prior to the historical announcement by President Trump. 

***

Israel unlawfully annexed East Jerusalem to its territory. Since then, and despite its incursion upon their home, it has treated the Palestinian residents of the city as unwanted immigrants and worked systematically to drive them out of the area.

In June 1967, immediately upon occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel annexed some 7,000 hectares of West Bank land to the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and applied Israeli law there, in breach of international law. The annexed territory greatly exceeded the size of Jerusalem under Jordanian rule (about 600 hectares), encompassing approximately 6,400 more hectares. The additional land belonged, in large part, to 28 Palestinian villages, and some of it lay within the municipal jurisdiction of Bethlehem and Beit Jala. The annexed area is currently home to at least 370,000 Palestinians and some 280,000 Israeli settlers.

The new municipal boundaries of Jerusalem were drawn largely in accordance with demographic concerns, chief among them to leave out densely-populated Palestinian areas in order to ensure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. In keeping with this logic, Israel included some lands belonging to villages near Jerusalem within the city’s municipal jurisdiction, yet left the owners outside it. This occurred, for example, with Beit Iksa and al-Birah to the north, and with sparsely-populated areas within the municipal jurisdictions of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour to the south. In doing so, Israel divided Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, annexing only parts of them.

In June 1967, Israel held a census in the annexed area. Palestinians who happened to be absent at the time, lost their right to return to their home. Those who were present were given the status of “permanent resident” in Israel – a legal status accorded to foreign nationals wishing to reside in Israel. Yet unlike immigrants who freely choose to live in Israel and can return to their country of origin, the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have no other home, no legal status in any other country, and did not choose to live in Israel; it is the State of Israel that occupied and annexed the land on which they live.

Permanent residency confers fewer rights than citizenship. It entitles the holder to live and work in Israel and to receive social benefits under the National Insurance Law, as well as health insurance. But, permanent residents cannot participate in national elections – either as voters or as candidates – and cannot run for the office of mayor, although they are entitled to vote in local elections and to run for city council.

Permanent residents are required to submit requests for ‘family unification’ for spouses who are not residents themselves. Since 1967, Israel has maintained a strict policy on requests of East Jerusalem Palestinians for ‘unification’ with spouses from other parts of the West Bank, from Gaza or from other countries. In July 2003, the Knesset passed a law barring these spouses from receiving permanent residency, other than extreme exceptions. The law effectively denies Palestinians from East Jerusalem, who are permanent residents of Israel the possibility of living in East Jerusalem with spouses from Gaza or from other parts of the West Bank, and denies their children permanent residency status.

Israeli policy in East Jerusalem is geared toward pressuring Palestinians to leave, thereby shaping a geographical and demographic reality that would thwart any future attempt to challenge Israeli sovereignty there. Palestinians who do leave East Jerusalem, due to this policy or for other reasons, risk losing their permanent residency and the attendant social benefits. Since 1967, Israel has revoked the permanent residency of some 14,500 Palestinians from East Jerusalem under such circumstances.

Israel’s attempts to shape the demographic reality of East Jerusalem are concentrated in several spheres:

Land expropriation and building restrictions

While the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the settlement blocs on its outskirts enjoy massive development and substantial funding, Israel goes to great lengths to prevent development in Palestinian areas. As part of this policy, since 1967 the state has expropriated more than a third of the land annexed to Jerusalem – 2,450 hectares, most of it privately owned by Palestinians – and built 11 neighborhoods on them, earmarked for Jewish inhabitants only. Under international law, the status of these neighborhoods is the same as the Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank.

Immediately after the annexation, Israel cancelled all the Jordanian outline plans for the annexed areas but left those for the rest of the West Bank in place. This created a planning vacuum that took some time to fill. Only in the 1980s did the Jerusalem Municipality draw up outline plans for all Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The most striking feature of these plans was the designation of huge swathes of land as “open scenic areas” where development is forbidden. In 2014, after several amendments made to the plans over the years, these “scenic areas” made up about 30% of the land in Palestinian neighborhoods. Only some 15% of the land area in East Jerusalem (about 8.5% of Jerusalem’s municipal jurisdiction) is zoned for residential use by Palestinian residents, although Palestinians currently account for 40% of the city’s population.

Another measure Israel has employed to limit the amount of land available to Palestinians is declaring national parks where development is almost entirely forbidden. To date, four national parks have been declared in East Jerusalem, within the city’s municipal boundaries, including on privately-owned Palestinian land or on land that lies within or adjacent to the built-up areas of Palestinian neighborhoods and villages. The Jerusalem Municipality is planning more parks in East Jerusalem.

The unusually high number of national parks in East Jerusalem, some of which contain nothing of archaeological or natural importance, indicates that – unlike other parks declared by Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority – the purpose of these parks is not conservation. Instead, they are an instrument for sealing off large expanses of land in East Jerusalem in order to further political goals such as ensuring Jewish-only contiguity from the Old City to the planned settlement area of E1, while increasing Jewish presence in East Jerusalem.

In any case, the municipality consistently avoids drawing up detailed urban building plans (UBPs) – a prerequisite for receiving building permits – for Palestinian neighborhoods. As a result, Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem suffer an extreme shortage of housing, public buildings (such as schools and medical clinics), infrastructure (including roads, pavements, and water and sewage systems), trade services and recreational facilities.

With no land reserves for development, the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem – which has grown more than fivefold since 1967 – remains confined within increasingly crowded neighborhoods. According to statistics gathered by the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, in 2015 population density in Palestinian neighborhoods within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries was almost double that of Jewish neighborhoods: an average of 1.9 persons per room and 1 person per room, respectively.

Given this reality, Palestinians have no choice but to build without permits. The Jerusalem Municipality estimates that between 15,000 and 20,000 housing units were built without permits in Palestinian neighborhoods until 2004. An unknown number have been built since, including densely packed multi-story buildings east of the Separation Barrier. These structures are then issued demolition orders by the Israeli authorities, which wilfully ignore their role in forcing residents into this impossible bind. Thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem live under constant threat to their homes and businesses; in many cases, the authorities follow through on this threat or force residents to demolish the structures themselves. From 2004 to the end of September 2017, Israeli authorities demolished 730 housing units in East Jerusalem.

At the same time, various authorities encourage hundreds of settlers to take up residence in the midst of Palestinian neighborhoods, driving Palestinians out of their homes. Settlement pockets in East Jerusalem encircle the Holy Basin to the south (in Silwan and Ras al-‘Amud), east (in a-Tur and Abu Dis) and north (in Sheikh Jarrah), and some are strategically located along main routes leading to the Old City. Other pockets have been established within the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City. According to Israeli NGO Ir Amim, a total of approximately 2,800 settlers live within Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. These settler enclaves have altered the neighborhoods in which they were established, making the lives of the Palestinian residents unbearable, the latter having to contend with legal proceedings aimed at driving them from their homes, invasion of their privacy, financial pressure and daily harassment by settlers. All these lead to violent confrontations between Palestinians and settlers. The incursion of settlers has also brought increased presence of police, Border Police and state-paid private security personnel who use violence against the Palestinian residents, threaten them and arrest teens, thus exacerbating the disruption of life in the neighborhood.

Cutting East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank

Until 1967, Jerusalem under Jordanian rule was an economic, medical, cultural and religious hub for many residents of the West Bank, who continued to work, study and shop in the city after the Israeli annexation. However, in the early 1990s, during the first Intifada, Israel put up checkpoints deep within the West Bank, and since then has forbidden Palestinians from other parts of the West Bank to enter Jerusalem without a special permit. In addition, the Israel Police erected checkpoints at the entrances to several Palestinian neighborhoods in the city, curtailing residents’ movement. These restrictions weakened East Jerusalem’s position as a regional center.

In 2002, during the second Intifada, Israel began constructing the Separation Barrier in the area of Jerusalem, most of it in the form of a high concrete wall that in some parts passes right by Palestinian homes. The wall was completed in 2016. Unlike the checkpoints that the military erected some ten years earlier deep within the West Bank, the wall completely sealed East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank, heightening its separation. This was the intentional result of building as much of the barrier as possible along the municipal boundaries that Israel declared around Jerusalem in 1967, in order to ensure control over the annexed land. However, until the wall was built, these municipal boundaries were largely theoretical and had almost no effect on life in Jerusalem and its environs.

The wall cut through a vibrant fabric of Palestinian communities with ties that cut across municipal lines, including trade, culture, education and health services. Tens of thousands of Palestinians with permanent resident status who had moved to East Jerusalem suburbs were left on the other side of the wall, cut off from the rest of the city. The construction of the wall abruptly overturned their lives, forcing them to cross checkpoints every time they wish to enter the city, usually on a daily basis. As a result, many permanent residents moved back within city limits, driving up real estate prices and causing massive crowding. This severed East Jerusalem almost completely from the rest of the West Bank, and it lost its status as a regional hub for good.

The route of the Separation Barrier deviates from the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem in five locations, in keeping with the goal that governed the drawing of these boundaries in 1967 – to annex as much land and as few Palestinians as possible. This resulted in a winding route that adds up to some 202 kilometers in the area of Jerusalem.

Two areas were cut off from the city although they lie within the municipal boundaries: Kafr ‘Aqab to the north and Shu’fat Refugee Camp to the northeast. These areas include eight Palestinian neighborhoods, which are home to some 140,000 Palestinians, including an unknown number of West Bank residents. Residents of these neighborhoods pay municipal and other taxes, but both the Jerusalem Municipality and the various government ministries avoid entering these neighborhoods and ignore their needs. Consequently, these areas have become a no man’s land: The authorities do not provide basic municipal services such as waste removal, road maintenance and education, and there is a severe shortage of classrooms and day care facilities. The water and sewage systems fail to meet the population’s needs, yet the authorities do nothing to repair them. In addition, the residents suffer extreme restrictions on their movement due to the checkpoints separating them from the rest of the city.

In three areas, the route of the barrier – including the existing sections, those under construction and those awaiting construction – effectively expands the city without formally changing its municipal boundaries. This choice of route has added open areas, as well as settlements and land adjacent to them, to the city. The added land mass amounts to about 6,500 hectares in the area of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, to the south; some 6,000 hectares in the area of Ma’ale Adumim and nearby settlements to the east; and about 2,500 hectares in the area of Givat Ze’ev and nearby settlements to the north. The northern section has been completed. In the Gush Etzion area, only some 21% of the route (about 11 kilometers) have been built and another 14% (about 7 kilometers) are under construction. In the Ma’ale Adumim area, about 28% of the route (some 14 kilometers) are in various stages of construction.

Discrimination in budget allocation and municipal services

Palestinians in East Jerusalem are required to pay taxes like any other inhabitant of the city, but do not receive the same services that others do. The Jerusalem Municipality deliberately avoids significantly investing in infrastructure and services in the Palestinian neighborhoods – including roads, pavements, water and sewage systems, schools and cultural institutions. This policy affects almost every aspect of Palestinians’ lives in East Jerusalem. For example, Ir Amim estimates that as of 2017, there is a shortage of 2,557 classrooms in Palestinian neighborhoods, and about a third of the children do not complete twelve years of schooling. Only some 52% of the population in these neighborhoods has legal access to the water grid.

In addition, while Palestinians make up 40% of the Jerusalem population, the municipality runs only six family health centers in the Palestinian neighborhoods, as opposed to 27 centers in Jewish neighborhoods. The municipality also has only four social services offices in the Palestinian neighborhoods, as opposed to 19 in Jewish neighborhoods – although in the former, 76% of all residents and 83.4% of the children live below the poverty line.

Featured image is from B’Tselem.

US general says order to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if illegal —Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18

US nuclear commander would balk at any “illegal” order —MSNBC, Nov. 18

General heading Strategic Command says illegal nuclear launch order can be refused —NBC News, Nov. 18

Top general says he would resist “illegal” nuke order from Trump —CBS News, Nov. 18

Top US general says he would resist illegal nuclear strike order from Donald Trump —The Independent, Nov. 18

All these headlines give the direct impression that a nuclear attack could be legal in some circumstances. But is this possible?

Air Force General John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, told the Halifax International Security Forum Nov. 18, that an order from the president to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if that order is determined to be illegal. In the face of an unlawful order, Gen. Hyten said, he would tell Trump he couldn’t carry it out.

“If it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen?” Hyten asked the gathering. “I’m going to say, ‘Mr. President, that’s illegal.’”

Four days earlier, retired Gen. Robert Kehler, who previously held Gen. Hyten’s top job at Strategic Command, testified likewise to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that nuclear war commanders could “ignore any unlawful order by the president to launch a nuclear strike.”

Generals Hyten and Kehler both said in their unprecedented public comments that the legal principles of “military necessity,” “discriminate destruction,” and “proportionality” all apply to decisions about nuclear attacks. Senator Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, asked Gen. Kehler if he meant that Strategic Command could disobey a president’s ordering a nuclear attack. “Yes,” Kehler said.

That military officers “could” disobey, or “can” refuse unlawful orders are actually understatements in this context. US military service manuals explicitly require military personal to refuse illegal orders. As everyone sworn-in to the service is taught, disobeying illegal orders is mandatory; following them is a crime worthy of court martial. As CNN reported: “Under US military law, troops are obligated to not obey an unlawful order. If they received such an order, they could resign or force Trump to fire them.” The point was made during last year’s presidential campaign, when Trump promised to unlawfully torture prisoners, kill the families of suspected militants, and bomb civilians. CNN reported then that “Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook noted on [Nov. 17, 2016] that all US troops have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.”

Certain Weapons Effects Always Unlawful

But more importantly, there is a deep and startling absurdity and a shocking ignorance in these public nuclear war conversations. Any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and illegal by definition. Only the uninitiated, uninformed or willfully blind can still imagine that today’s nuclear weapons could be used “proportionately” to produce more military good than evil. The uncontrollable, unlimited, and unfathomable magnitude of nuclear weapons effects have been established as unlawful in countless text books, law journals, government studies and independent analyses.

The use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances would be illegal because international covenants, treaties, and protocols forbid indiscriminate destruction, attacks that are disproportionate to a military objective, and weapons’ effects that “treacherously wound,” harm neutral states, or do long-term damage to the environment.

In her book Thermonuclear Monarchy Professor Elaine Scarry of Harvard reminds us that as long ago as 1995, Sweden, Iran and Egypt argued before the International Court of Justice that since nuclear weapons cause disproportionate suffering, they are prohibited by the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg and the Geneva Protocols of 1925, 1949, and 1977. The Republic of the Marshall Islands argued that using nuclear weapons would violate the 1907 Hague Conventions prohibiting weapons with effects that cross into neutral states. Both North Korea and India, neither of which possessed nuclear weapons in 1995, wrote to the World Court insisting that it judge them unlawful. India argued that any use of nuclear weapons, including the mere possession of them, is illegal under the Charter of the United Nations and international “rules of proportionality.”

Charles Moxley, in his 813-page study Nuclear Weapons & International Law, puts this list of treaty violations in perspective:

“Nuclear weapons are not illegal just because they violate these laws of war, as exhaustively proven in this volume. They are illegal because they cause widespread and indiscriminate destruction without promoting the purpose of war: resolving conflict … They are not weapons but only wanton machines of symmetric destruction.”

Physical Effects: “Complete ruin”

What the generals and the congressional bureaucrats fail to grasp in their fantasies of legal nuclear attacks, is the vastness of the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, and that the latter cannot be used in war without slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians—that is, without committing war crimes. Some uncomfortable background information might be necessary.

Moxley’s Nuclear Weapons & International Law reports that,

“A nuclear detonation generates temperatures of 100 million degrees while a dynamite explosive about 3000 degrees.”

What this unimaginable heat does to cities is explained by Lynn Eden in her book Whole World on Fire.

“Mass fire and extensive fire damage would occur in almost every circumstance in which nuclear weapons were detonated in a suburban or urban area. …damage from mass fire would extend two to five times farther than blast damage.”

In 1977, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 653-page book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons notes with understatement, “persons in buildings or tunnels close to ground zero may be burned by hot gases and dust entering the structure…” In its lengthy consideration of radiation effects, taken from the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the FEMA study says in part, “Among them, apart from genetic effects, are the formation of cataracts, nonspecific life shortening, leukemia, other forms of malignant disease, and retarded development of children in utero at the time of the exposure.” As Ann Fagan Ginger reported in her book Nuclear Weapons are Illegal,

“They continue to maim and kill long after they explode in a test or in a war.”

A mass fire or “firestorm” Eden writes, is “the simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, which causes a great volume of air to heat, rise, and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery,” Eden notes.

“Within ten minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event—the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212°F, 100°C). This would produce a lethal environment over a vast contiguous area.”

Eden’s research is worth quoting at length.

“The first mass fire in history was created by allied incendiary raids at Hamburg on the night of July 27-28, 1943. Within 20 minutes, two of three buildings within an area of 4.5 square miles were on fire. In three to six hours, this fire so completely burned out an area of more than 5 square miles that the area was referred to by damage analysts as the ‘Dead City.’ Well-documented accounts describe wind speeds of hurricane force within the city. Air temperatures were calculated to be between four and five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hundreds of degrees above the temperature of boiling water. [Up to] 100,000 people were killed in the attack. A mass fire resulting from a modern nuclear weapon could be expected to burn out an urban or suburban area of considerably larger size in a similarly brief time.”

Legal scholar George Delf’s Humanizing Hell! The Law V. Nuclear Weapons is concise, bold, and direct.

“[A]rmed forces are committed by military, domestic and international law not to attack non-combatants. Any government which adopts a defense policy implying such an attack is therefore inciting its own forces to commit war crimes on a gigantic and suicidal scale.”

Featured image: Journalist James Foley shortly before he was executed by an Islamic State operative in August 2014. (Source: Consortiumnews)

When a Department of Defense intelligence report about the Syrian rebel movement became public in May 2015, lots of people didn’t know what to make of it. After all, what the report said was unthinkable – not only that Al Qaeda had dominated the so-called democratic revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for years, but that the West continued to support the jihadis regardless, even to the point of backing their goal of creating a Sunni Salafist principality in the eastern deserts.

The United States lining up behind Sunni terrorism – how could this be? How could a nice liberal like Barack Obama team up with the same people who had brought down the World Trade Center?

It was impossible, which perhaps explains why the report remained a non-story long after it was released courtesy of a Judicial Watch freedom-of-information lawsuit. The New York Times didn’t mention it until six months later while the Washington Post waited more than a year before dismissing it as “loopy” and “relatively unimportant.” With ISIS rampaging across much of Syria and Iraq, no one wanted to admit that U.S. attitudes were ever anything other than hostile.

But three years earlier, when the Defense Intelligence Agency was compiling the report, attitudes were different. Jihadis were heroes rather than terrorists, and all the experts agreed that they were a low-risk, high-yield way of removing Assad from office.

After spending five days with a Syrian rebel unit, for instance, New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers wrote that the group “mixes paramilitary discipline, civilian policing, Islamic law, and the harsh demands of necessity with battlefield coldness and outright cunning.”

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, assured the Washington Post that “al Qaeda is a fringe element” among the rebels, while, not to be outdone, the gossip site Buzzfeed published a pin-up of a “ridiculously photogenic” jihadi toting an RPG.

“Hey girl,” said the subhead. “Nothing sexier than fighting the oppression of tyranny.”

And then there was Foreign Policy, the magazine founded by neocon guru Samuel P. Huntington, which was most enthusiastic of all. Gary Gambill’s “Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists,” which ran on the FP web site just a couple of weeks after the DIA report was completed, didn’t distort the facts or make stuff up in any obvious way. Nonetheless, it is a classic of U.S. propaganda. Its subhead glibly observed: “So the rebels aren’t secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn’t much matter.”

Assessing the Damage

Five years later, it’s worth a second look to see how Washington uses self-serving logic to reduce an entire nation to rubble.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then Saudi ambassador to the United States, meeting with President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 27, 2002. (White House photo)

First a bit of background. After displacing France and Britain as the region’s prime imperial overlord during the 1956 Suez Crisis and then breaking with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser a few years later, the United States committed itself to the goal of defeating Arab nationalism and Soviet Communism, two sides of the same coin as far as Washington was concerned. Over the next half-century, this would mean steering Egypt to the right with assistance from the Saudis, isolating Libyan strong man Muammar Gaddafi, and doing what it could to undermine the Syrian Baathist regime as well.

William Roebuck, the American embassy’s chargé d’affaires in Damascus, thus urged Washington in 2006 to coordinate with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to encourage Sunni Syrian fears of Shi‘ite Iranian proselytizing even though such concerns are “often exaggerated.” It was akin to playing up fears of Jewish dominance in the 1930s in coordination with Nazi Germany.

A year later, former NATO commander Wesley Clark learned of a classified Defense Department memo stating that U.S. policy was now to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” first Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. (Quote starts at 2:07.)

Since the United States didn’t like what such governments were doing, the solution was to install more pliable ones in their place. Hence Washington’s joy when the Arab Spring struck Syria in March 2011 and it appeared that protesters would soon topple the Baathists on their own.

Even when lofty democratic rhetoric gave way to ominous sectarian chants of “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffin,” U.S. enthusiasm remained strong. With Sunnis accounting for perhaps 60 percent of the population, strategists figured that there was no way Assad could hold out against religious outrage welling up from below.

Enter Gambill and the FP. The big news, his article began, is that secularists are no longer in command of the burgeoning Syrian rebel movement and that Sunni Islamists are taking the lead instead. As unfortunate as this might seem, he argued that such a development was both unavoidable and far from entirely negative.

“Islamist political ascendancy is inevitable in a majority Sunni Muslim country brutalized for more than four decades by a secular minoritarian dictatorship,” he wrote in reference to the Baathists. “Moreover, enormous financial resources are pouring in from the Arab-Islamic world to promote explicitly Islamist resistance to Assad’s Alawite-dominated, Iranian-backed regime.”

So the answer was not to oppose the Islamists, but to use them. Even though “the Islamist surge will not be a picnic for the Syrian people,” Gambill said, “it has two important silver linings for US interests.” One is that the jihadis “are simply more effective fighters than their secular counterparts” thanks to their skill with “suicide bombings and roadside bombs.”

The other is that a Sunni Islamist victory in Syria will result in “a full-blown strategic defeat” for Iran, thereby putting Washington at least part way toward fulfilling the seven-country demolition job discussed by Wesley Clark.

“So long as Syrian jihadis are committed to fighting Iran and its Arab proxies,” the article concluded, “we should quietly root for them – while keeping our distance from a conflict that is going to get very ugly before the smoke clears. There will be plenty of time to tame the beast after Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions have gone down in flames.”

Deals with the Devil

The U.S. would settle with the jihadis only after the jihadis had settled with Assad. The good would ultimately outweigh the bad. This kind of self-centered moral calculus would not have mattered had Gambill only spoken for himself. But he didn’t. Rather, he was expressing the viewpoint of Official Washington in general, which is why the ultra-respectable FP ran his piece in the first place.

The Islamists were something America could employ to their advantage and then throw away like a squeezed lemon. A few Syrians would suffer, but America would win, and that’s all that counts.

The parallels with the DIA are striking. “The west, gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” the intelligence report declared, even though “the Salafist[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e. Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.”

Where Gambill predicted that “Assad and his minions will likely retreat to northwestern Syria,” the DIA speculated that the jihadis might establish “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality” at the other end of the country near cities like Hasaka and Der Zor (also known as Deir ez-Zor).

Where the FP said that the ultimate aim was to roll back Iranian influence and undermine Shi‘ite rule, the DIA said that a Salafist principality “is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

Bottle up the Shi‘ites in northwestern Syria, in other words, while encouraging Sunni extremists to establish a base in the east so as to put pressure on Shi‘ite-influenced Iraq and Shi‘ite-ruled Iran.

As Gambill put it: “Whatever misfortunes Sunni Islamists may visit upon the Syrian people, any government they form will be strategically preferable to the Assad regime, for three reasons: A new government in Damascus will find continuing the alliance with Tehran unthinkable, it won’t have to distract Syrians from its minority status with foreign policy adventurism like the ancien régime, and it will be flush with petrodollars from Arab Gulf states (relatively) friendly to Washington.”

With the Saudis footing the bill, the U.S. would exercise untrammeled sway.

Disastrous Thinking

Has a forecast that ever gone more spectacularly wrong? Syria’s Baathist government is hardly blameless in this affair. But thanks largely to the U.S.-backed sectarian offensive, 400,000 Syrians or more have died since Gambill’s article appeared, with another 6.1 million displaced and an estimated 4.8 million fleeing abroad.

War-time destruction totals around $250 billion, according to U.N. estimates, a staggering sum for a country of 18.8 million people where per-capita income prior to the outbreak of violence was under $3,000. From Syria, the specter of sectarian violence has spread across Asia and Africa and into Europe and North America as well. Political leaders throughout the advanced industrial world are still struggling to contain the populist fury that the Middle East refugee crisis, the result of U.S.-instituted regime change, helped set off.

So instead of advancing U.S. policy goals, Gambill helped do the opposite. The Middle East is more explosive than ever while U.S. influence has fallen to sub-basement levels. Iranian influence now extends from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean, while the country that now seems to be wobbling out of control is Saudi Arabia where Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is lurching from one self-induced crisis to another. The country that Gambill counted on to shore up the status quo turns out to be undermining it.

It’s not easy to screw things up so badly, but somehow Washington’s bloated foreign-policy establishment has done it. Since helping to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Gambill has moved on to a post at the rightwing Middle East Forum where Daniel Pipes, the group’s founder and chief, now inveighs against the same Sunni ethnic cleansing that his employee defended or at least apologized for.

The forum is particularly well known for its Campus Watch program, which targets academic critics of Israel, Islamists, and – despite Gambill’s kind words about “suicide bombings and roadside bombs” – anyone it considers the least bit apologetic about Islamic terrorism.

Double your standard, double the fun. Terrorism, it seems, is only terrorism when others do it to the U.S., not when the U.S. does it to others.

Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).  

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has condemned US President Donald Trump‘s decision to declare Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“Those who claim divine rights for themselves to physical property on earth are false prophets,” said Tutu.

“God is weeping over President Donald Trump’s inflammatory and discriminatory recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It is our responsibility to tell Mr Trump that he is wrong,” he added.

Meanwhile, The Israeli Embassy in Pretoria has welcomed Trump’s decision.

The embassy’s spokesperson said it’s a step closer towards peace negotiations.

Deputy Head of Mission of Israel to South Africa, Ayellet Black, said:

“Well ever since 1948, with a UN protection plan which we are now celebrating 70 years since the UN protection plan, Israel has always said Yes. It has said yes to the protection plan, it has said yes to every negotiation that came further while the Palestinian have continuously rejected such a notion. So here we are saying that this is the realisation of the obvious and that we are hoping that it will serve as a catalyst to re-install peace negotiations, to say we can sit at the table.”

“The obvious has already been put in place, the cards are on the table let’s have a conversation. Israel has always been open to dialogue and does not show away from a difficult conversation and we’ve placed many moves in the past to show that we are able to have long lasting peace agreements,” Black added.

The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) said it was in favour of a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel.

“South Africa maintains a principled position that unilateralism threatens the global balance of power, security and stability in a relatively volatile environment. International cooperation, dialogue and consultation is therefore critical to ensure peaceful interaction among states,” Dirco said in a statement.

“South Africa is deeply concerned that unilateral action by the United States undermines progress that has been registered within the context of Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). We believe that the MEPP seeks to secure a lasting sustainable peace between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. The decision to relocate the US Embassy to East Jerusalem is regrettable and is not constructive in advancing a sustainable solution in the MEPP,” it added.

Campaigners slam president Macri’s ‘draconian summit’ as civil society delegates returned from airport

Call for no deal on ‘new issues’ like e-commerce

Statement on the World Trade Organisation’s 11th Ministerial Summit in Buenos Aries, Argentina, which takes place from 10-13 December 2017.

On the summit:

“President Macri has excelled in his draconian approach to this summit. We’ve never before seen such a silencing and censoring of civil society voices. His attempts to block over 60 experts and campaigners from the host country are unprecedented, with observers now being returned home from the airport. This disgraceful display of power shows that Argentina should not host the G20 summit next year – Macri is unfit for that responsibility.”

On food and agriculture:

“The WTO’s rules on agriculture are pretty much the definition of double standards. We support India in standing up for its right to reduce poverty through protecting the food prices paid by its citizens. All countries should have this right. We absolutely reject the position of the US and EU in trying to clamp down on these poverty-reducing policies – but especially so when they show such hypocrisy. No one protects agriculture more than the US and EU. It’s time to end a system which means one rule for the rich and another for the poor.”

On e-commerce:

“The big new issue this year is e-commerce – supposedly making it easier to trade online across borders. But the e-commerce agenda is really about the power of Amazon, Google and the big tech companies. These gigantic corporations profit from data, the ‘new oil’ of the global economy, and they want rules to ensure they can use and abuse this data as they wish – moving it around the world without restriction or responsibility. This stops countries being able to adequately tax and regulate these companies so that all can benefit from new technology. It is also a disaster for our privacy and ability to control our data.”

On fisheries:

“Overfishing is a massive, global problem, but the approach of rich countries to simply lay down blanket rules on subsidies isn’t the answer. This is likely to reduce support for small, artisanal fisherfolk, who are not part of the problem at all, while continuing to allow industrial scale scouring of the ocean floors.”

On development:

“Agreement at the WTO broke down over 15 years ago because rich countries passed everything they wanted and ignored the needs of everyone else. If we’re to have global trade rules they need to work for the poorest most of all. In fact, they have simply become a way for big business to tell everyone else how to behave. We absolutely reject the opening of any new issues at the WTO before the development promises of a previous generation have been fulfilled.”

Source

Members of the Global Justice Now delegation are among the 63 civil society actors from 20 organisations who were last week banned from attending the summit by the government of Argentina. Petter Titland from Attac Norway has already been deported from the country. See this.

Featured image is from IndymediaUK.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Trump’s pronouncement ended the longstanding charade of a peace process – dead-on-arrival each time initiated.

It stripped the mask off Washington as an honest broker on any issues. It showed unforgivable contempt for Palestinian rights – revealed for the whole world to see, no longer lurking in the shadows, no pretense otherwise.

It assured continued occupation harshness, apartheid viciousness, land theft, ethnic cleansing, and cold-blooded murder at Israel’s discretion, supported and encouraged by Washington.

It leaves Palestinians struggling for liberation alone, the world community dismissive of their longstanding suffering for failing to intervene on their behalf.

There’s no joy in Occupied Palestine this holiday season. There never was before, just lingering hope for something better one day, nothing ahead in prospect.

The statement by Jewish studies scholars said the following:

“We write as Jewish Studies scholars to express our dismay at the Trump administration’s decision to reverse decades of bipartisan US policy by declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and authorizing the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv, outside of a negotiated political framework that ends the legal state of occupation and ensures respect for the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to Jerusalem.”

“Jerusalem is of immense religious and thus emotional significance to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. It is the focus of national aspirations for both Israelis and Palestinians.”

“We hope one day to see a world in which all inhabitants of the land enjoy equal access to the city’s cultural and material resources. Today, unfortunately, that is not the case.”

“As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has documented, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem endure systematic inequalities, including an inequitable distribution of the city’s budget and municipal services, routine denial of building permits that are granted to Jewish residents, home demolitions, and legal confiscation of property for Jewish settlement.”

“In addition, Palestinians in the West Bank, unlike Jewish Israelis residents in that territory, require a special permit to visit Jerusalem’s holy sites.”

“In this context, a declaration from the United States government that appears to endorse sole Jewish proprietorship over Jerusalem adds insult to ongoing injury and is practically guaranteed to fan the flames of violence.”

“We therefore call on the US government to take immediate steps to deescalate the tensions resulting from the President’s declaration and to clarify Palestinians’ legitimate stake in the future of Jerusalem.”

Signatories include:

1. Beverly Bailis, Brooklyn College
2. Mark Baker, Monash University
3. Elissa Bemporad, Queens College and The CUNY Graduate Center
4. Mara Benjamin, Mount Holyoke College
5. Matthew Berkman, University of Pennsylvania
6. Joel Berkowitz, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
7. Lila Berman, Temple University
8. David Biale, University of California, Davis
9. Jeffrey Blutinger, California State University, Long Beach
10. Ra’anan Boustan, Princeton University
11. Zachary Braiterman, Syracuse University
12. Francesca Bregoli, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
13. Emma Brodeur, Syracuse University
14. Samuel Brody, University of Kansas
15. Debra Caplan, Baruch College, CUNY
16. Jessica Carr, Lafayette College
17. Flora Cassen, UNC Chapel Hill
18. Geoffrey Claussen, Elon University
19. Aryeh Cohen, American Jewish University
20. Rebecca Davis, University of Delaware
21. Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Vancouver School of Theology
22. Barat Ellman, Fordham University
23. Barbara Epstein, University of California, Santa Cruz
24. Robert Erlewine, Illinois Wesleyan University
25. Sara Feldman, University of Illinois
26. Sandy Fox, New York University
27. Ben Freeman, Harvard Divinity School
28. Joshua Friedman, Duke University
29. Olga Gershenson, University of Massachusetts
30. Shai Ginsburg, Duke University
31. Evan Goldstein, Yale University
32. Andrew Gordon, University of Florida
33. Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California
34. Ronnie Grinberg, University of Oklahoma
35. Chaya Halberstam, Western University
36. Rachel Havrelock, University of Illinois Chicago
37. Elizabeth Heineman, University of Iowa
38. Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
39. Jonathan Hess, UNC Chapel Hill
40. Curtis Hutt, University of Nebraska at Omaha
41. Claire Katz, Texas A&M
42. Gwynn Kessler, Swarthmore College
43. Rebekah Klein-Pejsova, Purdue University
44. Michal Kofman, University of Louisville
45. Rachel Kranson, University of Pittsburgh
46. Chana Kronfeld, University of California, Berkeley
47. Jacob Labendz, Youngstown State University
48. Yitz Landes, Princeton University
49. Timothy Langille, Arizona State University
50. Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University
51. Daniil Leiderman, Texas A&M
52. Brian Leonard, Boston College High School
53. Maggie Levantovskaya, Santa Clara University
54. Daniel Levine, University of Alabama
55. Laura Levitt, Temple University
56. Lital Levy, Princeton University
57. Andrea Lieber, Dickinson College
58. Ari Linden, University of Kansas
59. Joe Lockard, Arizona State University
60. Ian Lustick, University of Pennsylvania
61. Lindsay Macumber, Saint Mary’s University
62. Shaul Magid, Indiana University
63. Charles Manekin, University of Maryland
64. Barbara Mann, Jewish Theological Seminary
65. Ibrahim Miari, University of Pennsylvania
66. Michael Miller, Liverpool Hope university
67. Sarah Anne Minkin, UC Berkeley
68. Leslie Morris, University of Minnesota
69. Eva Mroczek, UC Davis
70. Rachel Neis, University of Michigan
71. Judith Newman, University of Toronto
72. Anita Norich, University of Michigan
73. Jess Olson, Yeshiva University
74. Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Louisville
75. Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota
76. Vadim Putzu, Missouri State University
77. Shari Rabin, College of Charleston
78. Randi Rashkover, George Mason University
79. Elliot Ratzman, Lawrence University
80. Emily Rogal, Harvard Divinity School
81. Na’ama Rokem, University of Chicago
82. Kate Rosenblatt, Emory University
83. Jordan Rosenblum, University of Wisconsin-Madison
84. Bruce Rosenstock, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
85. Michael Rothberg, UCLA
86. Adam Rovner, University of Denver
87. Nora Rubel, University of Rochester
88. Elias Sacks, University of Colorado Boulder
89. Alison Schofield, University of Denver
90. Benjamin Schreier, Penn State University
91. Joshua Schwartz, New York University
92. Naomi Seidman, Graduate Theological Union
93. Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington, Seattle
94. Joshua Shanes, College of Charleston
95. Nathaniel Shils, University of Pennsylvania
96. Anne Shlay, Georgia State University
97. David Shneer, University of Colorado Boulder
98. Maeera Shreiber, University of Utah
99. Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania
100. Shana Sippy, Centre College
101. Andrew Sloin, Baruch College, CUNY
102. Rachel Smith, UCLA
103. Scott Spector, University of Michigan
104. Loren Spielman, Portland State University
105. Gregory Spinner, Skidmore College
106. Neta Stahl, Johns Hopkins University
107. Deborah Starr, Cornell University
108. Richard Steigmann-Gall, Kent State University
109. Mira Sucharov, Carleton University
110. David Teutsch, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
111. Irene Tucker, University of California, Irvine
112. Alana Vincent, University of Chester, UK
113. Burton Visotzky, Jewish Theological Seminary
114. Anika Walke, Washington University in St. Louis
115. Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College
116. Mira Wasserman, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
117. Dov Waxman, Northeastern University
118. Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania
119. Beth Wenger, University of Pennsylvania
120. Barry Wimpfheimer, Northwestern University
121. James Young, University of Massachusetts Amherst
122. Michael Zank, Boston University
123. Saul Zaritt, Harvard University
124. Sarah Zarrow, Western Washington University

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

The rumors of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s demise may finally not be greatly exaggerated.

A marked man, it was only about a month ago the media speculated on how soon United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley would replace Tillerson. Two weeks ago a trial balloon floated up with Mike Pompeo’s name in trail. But a burst of nearly-identical stories over the last few days, spearheaded by the New York Times, signals the end for Tillerson and names Pompeo, currently Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as his successor. What lies ahead?

The unique interplay between the Civil Service (non-diplomats largely stationed in Washington DC) and the Foreign Service (who have primary responsibility in Washington and who staff the embassies and consulates abroad) complicates Secretary of State transitions. Engaging both sides, with their different vested interests, can be tough. And unlike the military, where chains of command and internal procedures are written on checklists, State is a hybrid, half foreign and half domestic, with a structure that either conforms to a new Secretary or is conformed by a new Secretary. State is a vertically-oriented bureaucracy, with layers below the boss’ office waiting for bits of policy to fall so as to inform them of what their own opinions are. One academic referred to this as “neckless government,” a head and a body in need of an active connection.

A huge part of Tillerson’s failure was in missing that last point. The traditional way of engaging the bureaucracy is for a new Secretary to fill key positions with political appointees, who will shape the rank and file below them. Bonus points to the Secretary who can pluck out career Foreign Service people with the approved ideological bent to act as a virtual political appointees, a strong point of Hillary Clinton’s. Tillerson left too many slots vacant too long, and now finds himself without allies inside Foggy Bottom. Meanwhile, left on their own, his diplomats found ways to make trouble, including disclosing once-sacrosanct internal dissent memos. Soon after Tillerson took office his diplomats leaked a dissent memo opposing the State Department’s role in Trump’s immigration plans. Another dissent memo leaked some ten days ago, this time with Tillerson’s people claiming their own boss was in violation of the law.

Alongside building their version of the organization, it is incumbent on a new Secretary to aim the State Department at some goal. State is an agency without primary agency; under one administration it focuses on arms control. Under another, State tries to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, the emphasis has been on “soft power,” programs to empower women, the use of social media, promoting democracy, and the growth LGBTQ rights. Tillerson never articulated much of a goal beyond some unfocused thoughts on structural reform that will never again see daylight. Though it is fashionable to label Tillerson as the worst Secretary of State of modern times, in reality Tillerson will be remembered as perhaps the most pointless of Secretaries.

Based on my conversations with former State Department colleagues (I served 24 years as a diplomat) Tillerson’s successor will encounter a mood inside the State Department reminiscent of a rescue dog kennel; over there are the mutts who feel abused, wary of any new human. Off to the side are the ones who have given up; the need to log a certain number of years of service to get their generous pensions will keep many technically on the books but a new Secretary can expect very little from them. The majority of dogs will be open and waiting to see what happens (“Can’t be much worse, right?” is something many at State are saying.) But watch out for a few who feel newly empowered, the ones who think they helped drive a bad Secretary out of office. They may still bite.

It is unclear Mike Pompeo, the heir apparent, will be able to succeed where Tillerson failed. The climate for political appointees in Washington today feels more like that of late in a moderately successful president’s second term; the good people have already been selected-served-moved on, many of the old standbys are not interested in signing up for what may turn out to be short-run jobs, and that leaves a small pool for Pompeo to fill State Department jobs from. Pompeo’s tenure at Central Intelligence was brief enough that he is unlikely to bring over many loyalists, and most at Langley see working for State as a kind of step down anyway (many at the Agency view themselves as the lacrosse team, with State as the nerd club.) Who will Pompeo staff with? And how can he do it quickly while the dogs are still weighing out their next moves?

There is also the issue of culture. Pompeo began his tenure at Central Intelligence on a relatively positive note. However, his hard line stances soon rubbed many the wrong way, leaving them wondering if the boss could navigate the nuances that drive good decision making. How poorly that will play out at the State Department, with its culture of discussion and deliberation, its love of what-ifs and may-be’s, is easy to imagine.

And there’s the record: Pompeo caught Trump’s eye in part for his tough stance on Iran. Inside the State Department, the Iran Nuclear Accords are seen as one of the institution’s modern-day signature accomplishments. Pompeo is a conservative, and State has always been the most “liberal,” as in committed to the global system of trade and democracy, part of modern administrations. Tillerson, weakly but in line with State-think, pushed for some sort of talks with North Korea and supported the Iran deal. Pompeo opposes both. That’s a big chip to have on your shoulder your first day at work.

But at the end of the day, the mismatch between State and Pompeo, or State and Haley, or State and Tillerson for that matter, is not really about who is Secretary of State, but who is president. A lot of the anger directed at Tillerson was actually using him as a stand-in for Trump. The primary driver of foreign policy remains the White House, and the White House appears to have little love for its diplomats. If as an establishment Republican Tillerson had within him a bit of divergent thinking from Trump on issues like Iran and North Korea, Pompeo as an old school hawk is nothing but a loyalist, with a personal connection to Trump. If the president’s intention is indeed to dismantle the State Department, it is hard to imagine a person better suited to the task than a guy like Mike Pompeo. As the New York Times editorial board has already accused Tillerson of “making war on diplomacy,” it will be interesting to see what words they have left to label Pompeo’s opening shots.

Rex Tillerson is still Secretary of State, even as people inside and outside of Foggy Bottom cheer his demise. The irony will be if in a few months from now some of those same people start wondering if they had not been better off under his leadership.