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Yemen’s Houthis fired a cruise missile toward a nuclear power plant under construction in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates on December 3.

The cruise missile was identified as a “Soumar” missile, an Iranian-modified version of the Soviet-made Kh-55 cruise missile. With an operational range of 2500 km, the Kh-55s are equipped with guidance systems that allow them to maintain an altitude lower than 110 meters from the ground, thereby avoiding radar detection.

Local Yemeni sources confirmed that the cruise missile did not hit the target, having crashed in the northern Yemeni province of al-Jawf.

The UAE stated that it possesses an air defense system capable of dealing with any threat of any type or kind, adding that the nuclear power plant in Abu Dhabi was well-protected, state news agency WAM reported on its Twitter account. The crash reasons are still unclear, but most likely it was a technical failure.

This is the third launch from Yemen in a month, including the two missiles fired at Saudi Arabia. This differs from the missiles fired at Saudi territory as it was a cruise missile, instead of ballistic missiles used previously. This signifies that Houthis’ military capabilities grow by the second, making them more of a threat to Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-led coalition in general.

And they were already a threat enough, with missiles abound. They launched ballistic missiles towards Saudi Arabia multiple times in last year. The Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces intercepted ballistic missiles heading towards the southern city of Jizan on 17 and 20 March 2017, and also reported intercepting four ballistic missiles launched by the Houthis in Yemen toward the Saudi cities of Khamis Mushayt and Abha on March 28.

On 22 July 2017, the Houthis released video of its Burkan-2 (volcano 2) ballistic missile launch to strike Saudi Arabia’s oil refinery in Yanbu. It was reported the missile flew approximately 930 km, making it the longest distance travelled by a Houthi missile. They claimed that the ballistic missile hit the oil refineries in Yanbu, but Saudi officials reported that Saudi Aramco Mobile Refinery (SAMREF) at Yanbu was operating normally after a fire hit a power transformer at the gate of the facility.

Lately, Saudi Arabia’s air defense forces intercepted a ballistic missile from Yemen in northeastern Riyadh on 4 November 2017. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reacted to this attack by saying that Iran’s supply of missiles to the Houthis in Yemen was a “direct military aggression.” Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen accused them of “dangerous escalation (that) came because of Iranian support” after Saudi air defenses intercepted the ballistic missile heading toward Riyadh.

The latest missile fired at Saudi Arabia was intercepted on November 30. The Saudi Press Agency, quoting Colonel Turki al-Maliki, the official spokesman of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the war in Yemen, said the missile was headed towards the Saudi city of Khamis Mushait on its southwestern border. It was destroyed without causing any casualties, but there were no details on how the missile was intercepted. The Houthis in Yemen claimed success in the missile launch, saying it was a test firing, according to the pro-Houthi news agency SABA in Yemen.

The United States accused Iran on November 7 of supplying Yemen’s Houthi rebels with a missile that was fired into Saudi Arabia in July. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said that by providing weapons to the Houthis, Iran had violated two UN resolutions on Yemen and Iran. She said a missile shot down over Saudi Arabia on November 4 “may also be of Iranian origin.”

The Houthis are becoming a force to be reckoned with. The situation in the Middle East is anything but simple. It is a powder keg waiting to explode, and a single spark will do the trick. Yet no one really wants for it to explode just now, and Yemen is a dangerous playground where the sparks may come flying easily, with the Saudi-backed government in shambles, and the Iran-affiliated Houthis in control of the North of the country and the capital. Moreover, Iran has been reportedly sending the Houthis advanced weapons and military advisers. The further involvement of Hezbollah in the region, now that ISIS is nearly over and done with also doesn’t work in Saudi Arabia’s favor: if the kingdom decides to escalate the situation in Lebanon, Iran and Hezbollah may use Yemen as a pressure point, forcing the Saudis to go to war on several fronts.

The rise of Iranian predominance in the region, with Hezbollah becoming a formidable force in the recent years, puts a stop to a plan of military escalation from the US and especially from Israel and Saudi Arabia. If a new large-scale open conflict starts in the region, the pro-Israeli block would suffer unacceptable losses even in case of the victory.

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In his remarks on the recent International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – see ‘Violence Against Women is Fundamentally About Power’– United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres inadvertently demonstrated why well-meaning efforts being undertaken globally to reduce violence against women fail to make any progress in addressing this pervasive crisis.

Hence, while the UN might be ‘committed to addressing violence against women in all its forms’ as he claimed, and the UN might have launched a range of initiatives over the past twenty years, including awarding $129 million to 463 civil society initiatives in 139 countries and territories through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against women, his own article acknowledges that ‘Attacks on women are common to developed and developing countries. Despite attempts to cover them up, they are a daily reality for many women and girls around the world.’

And, without realizing it, the Secretary-General effectively nominated (by omission) why so little progress has been made on this vital issue: ‘As Prime Minister of Portugal, one of my most difficult battles was to win recognition that family violence and especially against women was a serious issue’. The omission here is appalling and yet few reading the line will be able to identify it.

While I want to acknowledge the commitment of those within and outside the UN who work on this critical issue, it is simply the case that if we do not understand the cause of violence against women then any ‘strategy’ to address the problem must fail, as the record in recent decades (since the issue gained a significant profile in response to feminist agitation) demonstrates.

In fact, of course, if we do not understand the fundamental cause of violence, then attempts to address it in any context must either fail outright or meet with only limited success.

So what is the cause of violence, including violence against women?

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The political leader who wages war suffered violence as a child. The man who inflicts violence on women suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist or religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child.

If we want to end violence against women then we must finally end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an additional incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behaviour is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to socialize children to fit into society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviours in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than this and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themselves thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themselves, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen.

Moreover, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorise a child into accepting certain information about themselves, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why some people are ‘climate deniers’ and most others do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe.

Of course, each person’s experience of violence during childhood is unique and this is why each perpetrator becomes violent in their own particular combination of ways. This explains, for example, why the violence of some men against women manifests as sexual violence, including rape.

So what is happening psychologically for the rapist when they commit the act of rape? In essence, they are projecting the (unconsciously suppressed) feelings of their own victimhood onto their rape victim. That is, their fear, self-hatred and powerlessness, for example, are projected onto the victim so that they can gain temporary relief from these feelings. Their fear, temporarily, is more deeply suppressed. Their self-hatred is projected as hatred of their victim. Their powerlessness is temporarily relieved by a sense of being in control, which they were never allowed to be, and feel, as a child. And similarly with their other suppressed feelings. For example, a rapist might blame their victim for their dress: a sure sign that the rapist was endlessly, and unjustly, blamed as a child and is (unconsciously) angry about that.

The central point in understanding violence is that it is psychological in origin and hence any effective response must enable both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s suppressed feelings (which will include enormous fear about, and rage at, the violence they have suffered) to be safely expressed. For an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Unfortunately, this nisteling cannot be provided by a psychiatrist or psychologist whose training is based on a delusionary understanding of how the human mind functions. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’. Nisteling will enable those who have suffered from trauma to heal fully and completely, but it will take time.

So if we want to end violence against women, we must tackle the fundamental cause. Primarily, this means giving everyone, child and adult alike, all of the space they need to feel, deeply, what they want to do, and to then let them do it (or to have the feelings they naturally have if they are prevented from doing so). See ‘Putting Feelings First’. In the short term, this will have some dysfunctional outcomes. But it will lead to an infinitely better overall outcome than the system of emotional suppression, control and punishment which has generated the incredibly violent world in which we now find ourselves.

This all sounds pretty unpalatable doesn’t it? So each of us has a choice. We can suppress our awareness of what is unpalatable, as we have been terrorized into doing as a child, or we can feel the various feelings that we have in response to this information and then ponder ways forward.

If feelings are felt and expressed then our responses can be shaped by the conscious and integrated functioning of thoughts and feelings, as evolution intended, and we can plan intelligently. The alternative is to have our unconscious fear controlling our thinking and deluding us that we are acting rationally.

It is time to end the adult war on children so that all of the other violence that emerges from this cause can end too.

So what do we do?

Well, if you are willing, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’.If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

You might also deeply consider, and act in response to, the extraordinary damage inflicted on children by sending them to school. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

Why are these so important? Because if you want a boy (or girl) who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of themselves and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous and powerful, then the boy (or girl) must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage and power.

So each one of us has an important choice. We can acknowledge the painful truth that we inflict enormous violence on our children (which then manifests in all directions) and respond powerfully to that truth. Or we can keep deluding ourselves and continue to observe, powerlessly, as the violence in our world proliferates until human beings are extinct.

In addition to addressing this violence, you are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that everyone has an ecologically viable planet on which to live. And, if you like, you can join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In essence, if you want a man who doesn’t inflict violence on women, then his mother and father should not inflict (visible, invisible and utterly invisible) violence on him as a boy.

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

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Escalated Israeli Aggression on Syria: Begging for War

By Stephen Lendman, December 05, 2017

On Monday evening, for the second time in three days, an Israeli warplane flying illegally in Lebanese airspace fired multiple missiles at Syria’s Jamarya military facility and research center, northwest of Damascus.

CIA Chief: Saudi, Israel May Set Up ‘Joint Military Headquarters’

By Press TV, December 05, 2017

CIA Director Mike Pompeo says Saudi Arabia is working directly with Israel on confronting “challenges” in the Middle East, suggesting that the two sides could go as far as setting up “a joint military headquarters.”

Trump and Netanyahu Conspire to Make Jerusalem Israel’s Capital as They Make Preparations to Attack Iran

By Hans Stehling, December 05, 2017

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is apparently now close to being indicted for corruption, is becoming increasingly desperate to cover up his alleged financial criminality. His strategy to deflect attention is to conspire with the Trump family for the US to collaborate in changing the status of Jerusalem from an ‘international city affording access to all faiths’, to being the political capital of Israel.

Israel and US Hide Names of Companies Supporting Israeli Settlements

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, December 05, 2017

Israel seeks to suppress the identities of the companies that support the settlements because it is feeling the pinch of the BDS movement. The United States thinks publication of the list would be “counterproductive” because it would fuel BDS, thereby negatively impacting Israel, the leading US client state and biggest recipient of US foreign aid.

How a Dubious BBC Report Gave Israel the “Green Light” for Last Night’s Attack on Syria

By Zero Hedge, December 04, 2017

Syrian state television has confirmed that Israel attacked a military base outside of Damascus overnight on Friday, which Israeli media reports involved both surface-to-surface missiles and airstrikes, while Syria says its air defense systems were engaged and intercepted two missiles. 

Israeli Attacks Reported Near Damascus, Israeli Media Removes Story

By Jason Ditz, December 04, 2017

Reports out of metro Damascus indicate that Israeli warplanes have carried out airstrikes in the area. Details of the attack are still unclear, as the first reports were in the Israeli media, and within a matter of hours were removed.

For decades most American Jews have claimed an “Israel exemption”: resolutely progressive on domestic issues, they are hawks on their cherished cause. Racism they would vigorously oppose if applied in the United States is welcomed in Israel.

Reports at the weekend suggested that Donald Trump is about to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, throwing a wrench in any peace plan. If true, the US president will have decisively prioritised support for Israel – and pro-Israel lobbies at home – over justified outrage from Palestinians and the Arab world.

But paradoxically, just as American Jews look close to winning the battle domestically on behalf of Israel, many feel more alienated from a Jewish state than ever before.

There has long been a minority of American Jews whose concerns focused on the occupation. But until now their support for Israel itself has been unwavering, despite its institutionalised racism towards the one in five of the Israeli population who are Palestinian.

A Law of Return denies non-Jews the right to migrate to Israel. Admissions committees bar members of Israel’s Palestinian minority from hundreds of communities. A refusal of family reunification has torn apart Palestinian families in cases where one partner lives in Israel and the other in the occupied territories.

Most Jews have justified to themselves these and many other affronts on the grounds that, after the European holocaust, they deserved a strong state. Palestinians had to pay the price.

Given that half the world’s Jews live outside Israel – the great majority in the US – their support for Israel is critical. They have donated enormous sums, helping to build cities and plant forests. And they have lobbied aggressively at home to ensure diplomatic, financial and military support for their cause. But it is becoming ever harder for them to ignore their hypocrisy.

The rift has grown into a chasm as Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government widens its assault on civil rights. It now targets not just Palestinians but the remnants of liberal Jewish society in Israel – in open contempt for the values of most American Jews.

The peculiar catalyst is a battle over the most significant surviving symbol of Jewishness: the Western Wall, a supporting wall of a long-lost temple in Jerusalem.

Jews in the US mostly subscribe to the progressive tenets of a liberal secularism or Reform Judaism. In Israel, by contrast, the hard-line Orthodox rule supreme on religious matters.

Since the 1967 occupation, Israel’s Orthodox rabbis have controlled prayers at the Western Wall, marginalising women and other streams of Judaism. That has deeply offended Jewish opinion in the US.

Trapped between American donors and Israel’s powerful rabbis, Netanyahu initially agreed to create a mixed prayer space at the wall for non-Orthodox Jews. But as opposition mounted at home over the summer, he caved in. The shock waves are still reverberating.

Avraham Infeld, a veteran Israeli liaison with the US Jewish community, told the Haaretz newspaper this week that the crisis in relations was “unprecedented”. American Jews have concluded “Israel doesn’t give a damn about them”.

Now a close ally of Netanyahu’s has stoked the fires. In a TV interview last month, Tzipi Hotovely, the deputy foreign minister, all but accused American Jews of being freeloaders. She condemned their failure to fight in the US or Israeli militaries, saying they preferred “convenient lives”.

Her comments caused uproar. They echo those of leading Orthodox rabbis, who argue that Reform Jews are not real Jews – and are possibly even an enemy.

According to a report in the Israeli far-right newspaper Makor Rishon, which is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a US casino billionaire and Netanyahu’s patron, the Israeli prime minister set out his rationale for sacrificing the support of liberal Jews overseas at a recent closed-door meeting with officials.

He reportedly told them that non-Orthodox Jews would disappear in “one or two generations” through low birth rates, intermarriage and more general assimilation. Liberal Jews were a “lost cause” in his view, and wedded to a worldview that was incompatible with Israel’s future.

Both on demographic and ideological grounds, he added, Israel should invest in cultivating stronger ties to Orthodox Jews and Christian evangelicals.

Netanyahu’s demographic predictions may turn out to be faulty, but they are clearly now driving his policy towards liberal Jews at home and abroad.

In fact, as Israel’s attacks on liberals in Israel echo Trump’s rhetoric and policies towards minorities in the US, American Jews are gradually being forced to reassess their longstanding double standard towards Israel.

For some time the Netanyahu government has tarred Israeli anti-occupation organisations like B’Tselem and the soldier whistle-blowing group Breaking the Silence as traitors. Last week it widened the assault.

The education minister, Naftali Bennett, accused the veteran legal group the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) – Israel’s version of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – of “supporting terrorists”. Forty years of ACRI programmes in schools are in jeopardy.

The move follows recent decisions to allow pupils to provide racist answers in civics exams and to expand gender-segregation to universities. Meanwhile, two new bills from Netanyahu’s party would crack down on free speech for Israelis promoting a boycott, even of the settlements. One proposes seven years in jail, the other a fine of $150,000.

New guildelines have empowered the police to bar media access to incident scenes to prevent critical coverage, especially of police violence.

Defence minister Avigdor Lieberman is seeking stronger powers against political activists, Jews and Palestinians alike, including draconian restraining orders and detention without charge or trial.

And for the first time, overseas Jews are being grilled on arrival at Israel’s airport about their political views. Some have signed a “good behaviour oath” – a pledge to avoid anti-occupation activities. Already Jewish supporters of boycotts can be denied entry.

The Netanyahu government, it seems, prefers as allies Christian evangelicals and the US alt-right, which loves Israel as much as it appears to despise Jews.

Israel is plotting a future in which American Jews will have to make hard choices. Can they continue to identify with a state that openly turns its back on them?

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

This article was taken from Jonathan Cook.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

Featured image is from Countercurrents.

Grandi opere sul nostro territorio, da nord a sud. Non sono quelle del Ministero delle infrastrutture e dei trasporti, di cui tutti discutono, ma quelle del Pentagono di cui nessuno discute. Eppure sono in gran parte pagate con i nostri soldi e comportano, per noi italiani, crescenti rischi.

All’aeroporto militare di Ghedi (Brescia) parte il progetto da oltre 60 milioni di euro, a carico dell’Italia, per la costruzione di infrastrutture per 30 caccia Usa F-35, acquistati dall’Italia, e per 60 bombe nucleari Usa B61-12.

Alla base di Aviano (Pordenone), dove sono di stanza circa 5000 militari Usa con caccia F-16 armati di bombe nucleari (sette dei quali sono attualmente in Israele per l’esercitazione Blue Flag 2017), sono stati effettuati altri costosi lavori a carico dell’Italia e della Nato.

A Vicenza vengono spesi 8 milioni di euro, a carico dell’Italia, per la «riqualificazione» delle caserme Ederle e Del Din, che ospitano il quartier generale dell’Esercito Usa in Italia e la 173a Brigata aviotrasportata (impegnata in Europa orientale, Afghanistan e Africa), e per ampliare il «Villaggio della Pace» dove risiedono militari Usa con le famiglie.

Alla base Usa di Camp Darby (Pisa/Livorno) inizia in dicembre la costruzione di una infrastruttura ferroviaria, del costo di 45 milioni di dollari a carico degli Usa più altre spese a carico dell’Italia, per potenziare il collegamento della base con il porto di Livorno e l’aeroporto di Pisa, opera che comporta l’abbattimento di 1000 alberi nel parco naturale. Camp Darby è uno dei cinque siti che l’Esercito Usa ha nel mondo per lo «stoccaggio preposizionato» di armamenti (contenente milioni di missili e proiettili, migliaia di carrarmati e veicoli corazzati): da qui vengono inviati alle forze Usa in Europa, Medioriente e Africa, con grandi navi militarizzate e aerei cargo.

A Lago Patria (Napoli) il nuovo quartier generale della Nato, costato circa 200 milioni di euro di cui circa un quarto a carico dell’Italia, comporta ulteriori costi a carico dell’Italia, tipo quello di 10 milioni di euro per la nuova viabilità attorno al quartier generale Nato.

Alla base di Amendola (Foggia) sono stati effettuati lavori, dal costo inquantificato, per rendere le piste idonee agli F-35 e ai droni Predator statunitensi, acquistati dall’Italia.

Alla Naval Air Station Sigonella, in Sicilia, sono stati effettuati lavori per oltre 100 milioni di dollari a carico di Stati uniti e Nato, quindi anche dell’Italia. Oltre a fornire appoggio logistico alla Sesta Flotta, la base serve a operazioni in Medioriente, Africa ed Europa orientale, con aerei e droni di tutti i tipi e forze speciali. A tali funzioni si aggiunge ora quella di base avanzata dello «scudo anti-missili» Usa, in funzione non difensiva ma offensiva soprattutto nei confronti della Russia: se fossero in grado di intercettare i missili, gli Usa potrebbero lanciare il first strike nucleare neutralizzando la rappresaglia. A Sigonella sta per essere installata la Jtags, stazione di ricezione e trasmissione satellitare dello «scudo», non a caso mentre, con il lancio del quinto satellite, sta per divenire pienamente operativo il Muos, il sistema satellitare Usa che ha nella vicina Niscemi una delle quatto stazioni terrestri.

Il generale James Dickinson, capo del Comando strategico Usa, in una audizione al Congresso il 7 giugno 2017 ha dichiarato: «Quest’anno abbiamo ottenuto l’appoggio del Governo italiano a ridislocare, in Europa, la Jtags alla Naval Air Station Sigonella». Era al corrente il Parlamento italiano di una decisione di tale portata strategica, che porta il nostro paese in prima linea nel sempre più pericoloso confronto nucleare? Se ne è almeno parlato nelle commissioni Difesa?

Manlio Dinucci

With the FCC set to vote on chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to kill neutrality in just over a week, a diverse coalition—ranging from consumer protection organizations to progressive lawmakers to Harvard professors—is denouncing the FCC’s proposals and scheduling nationwide protests to combat the agency’s move to let massive telecom companies “cash in on the internet” at the expense of consumers.

“This is the free speech fight of our generation and internet users are pissed off and paying attention,” Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement. “Ajit Pai may be owned by Verizon, but he has to answer to Congress, and lawmakers have to answer to us, their constituents.”

Since Pai revealed his plan to gut net neutrality rules just before Thanksgiving, public outrage has continued to grow—even as corporate media outlets have neglected to cover it. Adding to the already record-breaking number of public comments submitted to the FCC over the last several months, more than 760,000 calls have flooded congressional phone lines since November 21, according to Battle for the Net.

Furthermore, protests have been planned throughout the nation over the coming days in opposition to the FCC’s “scorched-earth” attack on net neutrality: More than 600 demonstrations are scheduled to take place at Verizon stores and congressional offices across the country on Thursday, exactly one week ahead of the FCC’s planned vote.

“With what would be a catastrophic vote by the FCC to repeal net neutrality looming, people are ready to take to the streets in protest and to offer Congress one last chance to answer the question: ‘Do you stand for your constituents’ ability to communicate and connect, or do you stand for Verizon’s bottom line?” said Mark Stanley, director of communications for Demand Progress, citing the overwhelming bipartisan support for net neutrality rules found in poll after poll.

Demonstrations against Pai’s plan have also taken place online. Last week, internet users took to Reddit’s front page to highlight their senator’s support—or lack of support—for net neutrality and detail how much money their representatives have taken from the telecom lobby.

REDDIT ? IS ? BLOWING ? UP ? LET'S ? KEEP ? GOING ?
Call lawmakers: https://t.co/xSJHbL8rxN
Join a 12/7 protest: https://t.co/OvdNJeij4P#NetNeutrality pic.twitter.com/I6H15TgCyZ

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) December 1, 2017

Building on the outrage expressed by the American public, a group of 27 senators including Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) delivered a letter to Pai on Monday demanding that the FCC vote be delayed in the face of evidence that the public “record may be replete with fake or fraudulent comments, suggesting that your proposal is fundamentally flawed.”

A coalition of over 40 consumer protection groups also called on the FCC to postpone its vote on repealing net neutrality in a letter to Pai on Monday, citing a pending court case that could ultimately “leave consumers at the mercy of internet service providers.”

The case under consideration by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit involves whether or not the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has the legal authority to regulate broadband providers.

Because one component of Pai’s plan is to give the FTC significant responsibility for shielding internet users from corporate throttling, any ruling that concludes the FTC does not have such legal authority would effectively leave telecom companies in charge of regulating themselves.

“If Chairman Pai and his fellow Republicans truly believe that the FTC will protect consumers, they have a responsibility to wait for the Ninth Circuit to decide if the FTC can actually do the job,” the groups’ letter concludes.

Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, told the International Business Times that even if the court rules in the FTC’s favor,

“[t]he idea that the FTC will come to the rescue if net neutrality is destroyed at the FCC is a bad joke.”

“The heads of the Trump FCC and FTC are defanging their own agencies, watchdogs which had just started to show some bite during the last years of the Obama administration,” Aaron concluded. “And that’s exactly how AT&T wants them: toothless, tied up, and with their tails between their legs.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Featured image is from Battle for the Net.

As stock markets continue to rise—Wall Street’s Dow Jones index hit a new record high yesterday following the US Senate’s passage of a massive tax cut bill—there are growing warnings that a new financial crisis is in the making.

In its quarterly review of financial conditions, issued on Sunday, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), sometimes known as the central bankers’ bank, said the situation bore similarities to that which prevailed in the lead-up to the 2008 crash.

Increases in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England had failed to choke off risky investments, and financial bubbles were growing, it warned. Financial investors were basking in the “light and warmth” of improving global economic growth, subdued inflation and soaring stock markets, while underlying risks were increasing.

Introducing the BIS review, Claudio Borio, the head of its monetary and economic department, said:

“The vulnerabilities that have built around the world during the long period of unusually low interest rates have not gone away. High debt levels, in both domestic and foreign currency, are still there. And so are frothy valuations.

“What’s more, the longer the risk-taking continues, the higher the underlying balance sheet exposure may become. Short-term calm comes at the expense of possible long-run turbulence.”

Last Friday, Neil Woodford, described as one of Britain’s most high-profile investment fund managers, issued a warning even sharper than that of the BIS. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said stock markets around the world were in a “bubble” that, when it burst, could be “bigger and more dangerous” than some of the worst market crashes in history.

This situation is the outcome of the policies adopted by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks of ultra-low interest rates and the pumping of trillions of dollars into the financial system, under the policy of quantitative easing introduced after 2008.

“Ten years on from the global financial crisis, we are witnessing the product of the biggest monetary policy experiment in history,” Woodford said. “Investors have forgotten about risk and this is playing out in inflated asset prices and inflated valuations.

“Whether it’s bitcoin through $10,000, European junk bonds now yielding less than US treasuries, historic low levels of volatility or triple-leveraged exchange traded funds attracting gigantic inflows—there are so many lights flashing red that I am losing count.”

Woodford commented that in a challenging global economic environment the few stocks capable of delivering dependable growth had become popular. However, that had manifested itself in “extreme and unsustainable valuations,” which meant the bubble had “grown even bigger and more dangerous.”

In his remarks on the quarterly review, BIS official Borio pointed to another reason for the soaring market valuations—the guarantee by the central banks that they stand ready to intervene to prop up the financial markets.

In the lead-up to the crash of 2008, he noted, the Federal Reserve had assured markets that any tightening of interest rates would be at a “measured pace.” Monetary policy in the present conditions had been, “if anything, even more telegraphed.”

“If gradualism comforts market participants that tighter policy will not derail the economy or upset asset markets, predictability compresses risk premia,” Borio said. “This can foster higher leverage and risk-taking. By the same token, any sense that central banks will not remain on the sidelines should market tensions arise simply reinforces those incentives.”

In other words, whereas in past periods, the mantra was that the role of the central banks was to take the punchbowl away as the party was getting under way, now it is to pour in more alcohol to keep it going.

Besides the monetary policies of the US Fed, the other major factor in boosting markets this year has been the promise of the financial bonanza resulting from the massive tax cuts for corporations and financial elites under the Trump administration.

The S&P 500 index has enjoyed its longest sustained run of consecutive record-breaking closing highs. It has risen by 18.6 percent for the year. The Dow is up by almost 24 percent and the Nasdaq index has risen by 26.7 percent.

When the Reagan administration introduced tax cuts 30 years ago, they were accompanied by the claim they would be paid for by the growth in the economy, fuelled by increased investment—the “snake oil” of “supply-side economics.”

While the Trump administration continues to proclaim that its measures will produce jobs and investment, it is an open secret that the major corporate beneficiaries will not use the financial jackpot for investment in the real economy. Rather they will use the money for yet more speculation, including takeovers, mergers and share buybacks to further boost stock prices.

The additional $1.5 trillion in the US federal deficit will be paid for by massive cuts in Medicare, the health program for the elderly, and the slashing of other social services, including what Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida described as “structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future.”

As the WSWS Perspective yesterday noted:

“Talk of ‘structural changes’ is political jargon for the privatization of these bedrock programs upon which hundreds of millions of people depend and their destruction as guaranteed entitlements.”

There is an underlying causal connection rooted in the very structure and functioning of the capitalist economy, and this is given voice by the political establishment.

The fabulous monetary gains in financial markets are the result of the operations of fictitious capital. That is, they are not the result of production of real wealth, achieved through expanded investment and production, but in the final analysis represent claims upon the surplus value extracted from the working population.

To the extent that the demands of fictitious capital increase, through the escalation of asset and financial valuations, they have to be met by increasing the mass of surplus value on which ultimately they are a claim.

Thus the rise of rise of financial markets is being accompanied by an escalating drive to force down wages and scrap social provisions, while at the same time creating the conditions for a collapse in the financial house of cards, with immense economic and social consequences.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Despite significant progress toward defeating US-supported terrorists in Syria, conflict resolution is far from achieved – not as long as Washington and Israel want war and regime change.

On Monday evening, for the second time in three days, an Israeli warplane flying illegally in Lebanese airspace fired multiple missiles at Syria’s Jamarya military facility and research center, northwest of Damascus.

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said

“(t)he army’s air defense confronted an Israeli attack with missiles on one of the military sites in Damascus countryside, destroying three of them.”

“An informed source told SANA that at 11:30pm (local time) Monday, the Israeli enemy launched a number of missiles targeting one of the military sites in Damascus countryside, adding that the army’s air defense intercepted the Israeli missiles, downing three of them.”

“On December 1st, the army’s air defense confronted an Israeli attack with surface-to-surface missiles on one of the military sites in Damascus countryside, destroying two of them.”

Lebanese sources said the Israeli warplane fired six air-to-ground missiles at the military/research center, three intercepted, others apparently detonating on the ground, loud explosions heard.

On Monday, Israel’s ambassador to Washington/close Netanyahu confidant Ron Lauder said

“(t)he chances of military confrontation are growing.”

“I can’t tell you by the year or by the month. I’d say even by the week. Because the more they push, we have to enforce our red lines.”

“So in taking action to defend ourselves, you don’t know what could happen. But I think (chances of Israeli war on Syria) is higher than people think.”

In early November, Israel threatened to launch an incursion into Syria – on the phony pretext of protecting a Syrian Golan Druze village supporting Damascus, an IDF spokesman saying at the time:

Israel’s military “is prepared and ready to assist the residents of the village and prevent damage to or the capture of the village Hader out of commitment to the Druze population.”

Washington and Israel support ISIS, al-Nusra and other terrorists in Syria. Netanyahu threatened war if Iran maintains a permanent military presence in the country – its legitimate right, invited by Damascus to be there.

Iranian military personnel are largely helping in an advisory capacity from Syrian bases, none of its own as falsely reported.

Netanyahu gave Damascus an ultimatum. If Iranian forces establish bases or use Syrian ones, Israel will attack Syrian army positions and other military targets – a near-declaration of war.

Two instances of Israeli aerial aggression on Syria in three days perhaps indicates stepped-up attacks coming.

Russia has sophisticated S-400 air defense systems protecting Syrian airspace. They’re able to strike targets up to 400 km away at altitudes up to 90,000 feet.

They’re protecting Russian facilities and personnel in the country. It’s time they’re used against incoming missiles by Israel or any other foreign source, aimed at striking Syrian targets.

The only language Washington and Israel understand is force. Destroying incoming IDF missiles and its attacking warplanes close to Syrian territory will show Netanyahu his aggression will be forcefully countered.

If nothing is done to stop Israeli attacks, they’ll continue, likely escalate, making conflict resolution harder to achieve.

Much depends on how Putin responds to increasing Israeli aggression. Failure to confront it assures more to come.

Sophisticated Russian air defense systems can destroy air-to-ground missiles with pinpoint accuracy.

It’s high time they’re used to defend Syrian territory from aerial aggression. Otherwise, it’s likely to escalate.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Trump imposed a travel ban on six predominantly Muslim countries, a presidential proclamation adding two more.

Targeted nations include Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, plus North Korea and Venezuela.

None of these countries or their citizens threaten US national security. Trump’s ban targets them for being predominantly Muslim nations ravaged by US aggression and/or for their sovereign independence and opposition to its imperial agenda – no legitimate reasons.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ban because of its “religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”

Its chief Judge Roger Gregory added:

“Congress granted the President broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute.”

“It cannot go unchecked when, as here, the President wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation.”

Law Professor Emeritus Marjorie Cohn argued against the ban, saying:

It “violates the Establishment Clause, the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.”

“It also violates the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); both are treaties the United States has ratified, making them part of US law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.”

Law Professor Jonathan Turley disagreed, claiming “case law support(s)” Trump. The High Court voted 7 – 2 in favor of the full ban – Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor the two dissenters.

The Supremes didn’t rule on the ban’s constitutional merits, supporting the administration’s argument that an emergency injunction against it was unnecessary.

The High Court will decide on the merits of the case later on. The Center for Constitutional Rights blasted yesterday’s ruling, saying:

“We will not allow this to become the new normal. Whatever the courts say, the Muslim Ban is inhumane and discriminatory.”

“We must continue to demonstrate that we reject and will resist the politics of fear, anti-Muslim racism, and white supremacy.”

Lower courts ruled that individuals able show a “credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States” were excluded from the ban. The High Court’s decision disagreed.

On Monday, the ACLU issued a statement, saying:

“The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily allow the latest Muslim ban to take full effect as the case is litigated.”

“Two federal appeals courts will soon hear separate challenges to the ban. The Ninth Circuit will hear Hawaii’s case on Dec. 6, and the Fourth Circuit will hear the challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and partner organizations on Dec. 8.”

ACLU immigrants rights project director Omar Jadwat added:

“President Trump’s anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret. He has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter.”

“It’s unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims.”

“We continue to stand for freedom, equality, and for those who are unfairly being separated from their loved ones. We will be arguing Friday in the Fourth Circuit that the ban should ultimately be struck down.”

Other groups supporting the ACLU’s International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump include the National Immigration Law Center, the Urban Justice Center’s International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), the Yemeni American Merchants Association, the Arab American Association of New York, and numerous individual plaintiffs.

The battle for the rights of refugees, asylum seekers and other immigrants isn’t over.

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

The People’s Deputy Anton Gerashchenko is ready to register a bill to supplement the Criminal Code that suggests to impose criminal liability up to 5 years for the denial of “Russian aggression”.

“In order to protect the information space of Ukraine from Murayev’s activity and to use the force of law, today I signed a bill to supplement the Criminal Code of Ukraine with Article 442-1, which I suggest to impose criminal liability (up to 5 years of imprisonment) for public denial of the fact of the Russian Federation’s military aggression against Ukraine. Tomorrow I will register this bill in the Verkhovna Rada and I suggest to put it on the agenda,” wrote Gerashchenko on his page on Facebook.

Gerashchenko noted that currently statements denying the fact of “Russian aggression” aren’t punishable under law.

“Murayev and those similar to him publicly repeatedly deny the fact of Russian aggression, they call the situation with the occupation of a part of Donbass by Russia a civil war, thus implementing the media agenda of Russian propaganda. From the point of view of the law statements such as the one made by Murayev and those similar to him aren’t punishable. They are covered by freedom of speech and pluralism of opinions. Yes, indeed, Article 34 of the Constitution of Ukraine guarantees freedom of thought and speech, the right to the free expression of views and beliefs. However, this same article provides the possibility of restriction via the law for the benefit of national security, territorial integrity, public morals,” said Gerashchenko.

He noted that

“in many countries of the world there is criminal liability for public denial of the Holocaust. And it isn’t considered an infringement of freedom of speech and freedom of thought”.

As a reminder, earlier the People’s Deputy Evgeny Murayev in the “Ukrainian Format” program called the “Revolution of Dignity” a coup d’etat. The present people’s deputies considered it an insult and left the studio.

Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard

The only voices allowed in the Washington Post on the subject of Venezuela over the past year have been those calling for the overthrow or sanction of its government. A review of 15 opinion pieces featured in the Post shows voices even remotely sympathetic to the government of President Nicolás Maduro are omitted entirely. For the capitol’s paper of record, Venezuela joins the status of Adolf Hitler or ISIS: a settled evil without any nuance.

Columns and editorials in the Post are uniformly pro–regime change, pro-intervention, pro-sanctions or outright pro-coup. Meanwhile, nations with deplorable human rights records that are in good standing with the US government, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, are routinely given puff piece op-eds (7/14/15), softball Q & A’s (8/7/17) and framed over and over again as “reformers” of their own abuses (FAIR.org, 4/27/17). The opinion pieces on the topic of Venezuela, however, range from pro-sanction to pro-invasion:

1. “Venezuela Is Lurching Closer and Closer to Chaos” (Editorial, 12/26/16)
2. “In Venezuela, We Couldn’t Stop Chávez. Don’t Make the Same Mistakes We Did” (Andrés Miguel Rondón, 1/27/17)
3. “The Organization of American States Decides to Have a Serious Talk With Caracas” (Francisco Toro, 3/29/17)
4. “What It’ll Take for Venuezela’s [sic] Protests to Work, According to an Opposition Expert” (Amanda Erickson, 4/26/17)
5. “Analysis: In Venezuela and Turkey, Strongmen Fear the Limits of Their Power” (Ishaan Tharoor, 4/27/17)
6. “Beware Maikel Moreno, the Hatchet Man Who Runs Venezuela’s Supreme Court” (Francisco Toro and Pedro Rosas, 4/28/17)
7. “Venezuela Is Heading Toward Cataclysm” (Editorial, 5/3/17)
8. “Goldman Sachs Makes an Irresponsible Deal With the Corrupt Venezuela Regime”  (Editorial, 6/4/17)
9. “The Region Cannot Just Stand By as Venezuela Veers Toward Civil War” (Editorial, 6/30/17)
10. “Why One Man’s Bizarre Attack on the Government Is Reverberating in Caracas” (Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez, 6/30/17)
11. “Venezuela’s Lawless Regime Staggers Toward a Coup”  (Editorial, 7/27/17)
12. “Venezuela Is Imploding. These Citizens Were Desperate to Escape” (Tamara Taraciuk Broner, 8/2/17)
13. “The Specter of Civil War in Venezuela” (Editorial, 8/13/17)
14. “Venezuela’s Warning to America: Beware the Populist-Turned-Dictator” (Federico Finchelstein, 9/18/17)
15. “The Odds of a Military Coup in Venezuela Are Going Up. But Coups Can Sometimes Lead to Democracy” (Ozan Varol, 11/15/17)

The last contribution on the list, from law professor and PR consultant Ozan Varol, suggests a coup could bring about “democracy,” despite Maduro winning in 2013 by roughly 1.5 percentage points (not exactly dictatorial numbers), in an election overseen and sanctioned by international election monitors—including the US-based Carter Center. While one can debate the democratic properties of measures taken since, few doubt Maduro won the election held in April 2013 after President Hugo Chávez’s death, nor can one easily explain how, if the elections were rigged, Maduro’s party overwhelmingly lost the Assembly election two years later. Maduro will face voters again in less than a year, in October 2018.

Since a CIA-backed coup in 2002 temporarily removed Chávez from office (a coup both the Post —4/14/02—and the New York Times—4/13/02—cheered on), every election has been contested by the opposition as unfair. Perhaps this is sometimes true, perhaps it’s not. But for the Post, it’s never discussed. It’s simply taken for granted Maduro is a cartoon dictator; the only question dissected is how best to kick him out—regardless of what voters may think. When it comes to Venezuela, the paper’s self-aggrandizing, Trump-era motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” reads less like a warning and more like advice.

The Post’s editorial board was no less bellicose than the op-eds—though it did stop short of outright calling for a military coup. In six editorials over the past year, the board routinely used the delegitimizing label “regime,” echoed the Trump administration’s arbitrary use of human rights language, and called, again and again, for “tougher” sanctions on both the Maduro government and its allies.

One editorial (6/30/17), mimicking Alex Jones, casually advanced a conspiracy theory that Maduro had assaulted his own government in a false-flag attack. (“Opposition leaders understandably wondered whether the incident was orchestrated by Mr. Maduro. If so, it wouldn’t be surprising.”)

The Post, always alarmed and morally superior in tone, constantly implored the United States government to “do something”—as, of course, has been Washington’s wont in Latin America for more than a century.

Without any clear criteria, the Post has decided the subject of political repression in Venezuela is a settled question, beyond debate; the Maduro “regime” is categorically evil and must go. Any assessment as to how US sanctions or Trump’s surly rhetoric or street violence by opposition extremists (including lighting black Chavistas on fire) or food-hoarding by wealthy industries may contribute to the unrest is never broached, much less discussed.

Essentially, the Post is curating a media conversation in which Venezuela is in the same moral category as Hitler or ISIS—unworthy of any defense. The paper presents only one side of that nation’s crisis—one in which a sizable percentage of the people, disproportionately the poor and indigenous, remain supportive of Maduro. Dozens of other controversial governments receive “both sides” coverage in the Post’s opinion pages—including the Trump administration, which has its own in-house PR rep on the Post’s staff. The only discernible criteria for why Venezuela doesn’t is that its government is out of favor with the US State Department.

Real provincial government healthcare funding per-person has fallen again this year in Ontario, the third year in a row. Since 2009 real funding per-person has fallen 2.6% – $63 per person.

Across Canada real per person funding is in its fourth consecutive year of increase. Since 2009, real provincial funding across Canada is up $89 – 3.6%.

In fact the funding gap between Ontario and Canada as a whole has gown consistently for years (as set out below in current dollars).

Ontario funds healthcare less than any other province – indeed, the province that funds healthcare the second least (B.C.) provides $185 more per person per year, 4.7% more.

Provincial healthcare spending in the rest of Canada (excluding Ontario) is now $574 higher per person annually than in Ontario.

Ontario has not always provided lower than average healthcare funding increases – but that has been the general pattern since 2005.

Private expenditures on healthcare have exceeded Ontario government increases for the last three years. Since 2011, private expenditures on health have increased 3.9% annually, while provincial expenditures increased 2.3% annually.

Starting in 2010, provincial government healthcare funding increases in Ontario began to fall, hitting just 1% in 2012. Hospital funding increases continued downward in 2013 hitting just above 0% in 2013, recovering somewhat in 2014 and 2015. Funding increases for doctors were quite a bit higher, despite the alleged attack on their incomes.

Below is a chart with the provincial government per person dollar funding since 2008 in real dollars (using constant 1997 dollars). In 2017, funding was still less than in 2008 although the Ontario economy is about 17% larger than it was in 2008.

The hysteria from the right about runaway healthcare cost is just that – hysteria.

Two-thirds of this dollar cut came from cuts to hospital funding. Since 2010/11 real provincial hospital expenditures have been cut 8.3%.

That is $81 per person per year in constant 1997 dollars, or $128 per person in today’s money.

In fact real provincial expenditures on hospitals are lower than they were in 1991 – despite an increase in the median age in Ontario from 33.3 years to 40.6 years and a doubling of the population over 65 (and even bigger increases in the population over 85).

In 1991, Ontario spent more per-person on hospitals than Canadian provinces and territories as a whole, but now Ontario falls far behind.

The provincial government has promised a 4.5% healthcare funding increase for 2018/19. That should result in at least a one-year real per-person funding increase for 2018. But it is not enough to reverse the decline of recent years. Worse, the government also quietly notes that it will revert to a lower increase in 2019/20 – once the provincial election is over.

The data for the charts above comes from the Canadian Institute for Health Information National Health Expenditure Trends 1975-2017 data tables with the relevant tables copied below:

• Chart Cihi Provincial Gov Health Funding 2017-11
• Chart Cihi Increases Health Expenditures Private Provincial 2017
• Chart Cihi provincial expenditure by sector 2017
• Chart Cihi Per Capita Provincial Expenditure 2017
• Chart provincial hospital expemditure percapita real 1997-1975-2017

See for all CIHI National Health Expenditure Trends 1975-2017 published data.

Other resources:

• Canadian Health Coalition
• Ontario Health Coalition

Doug Allan writes the blog Defend Public Healthcare.

We write as scholars of the Middle East and the Muslim world with long, collective experience on Gulf and Arabian Peninsula policy issues to express our amazement, concern and anger that the New York Times would publish Thomas Friedman‘s recent essay “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, At Last.”

We understand that opinion writing allows for some degree of license in the interpretation of events and issues. But Mr. Friedman’s description of the situation in Saudi Arabia is so divorced from reality as to call into question his competence as a journalist or opinion writer. The so-called “Arab Spring” was an attempt by young people and, soon thereafter, large sections of the population of several Arab countries to force their governments to democratize their political systems; to resist stifling of speech and expression; and to halt large-scale systematic torture and physical abuse of citizens by security forces. Not only has the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman not addressed any of these issues, all the evidence points to the opposite conclusion—that his growing power has been accompanied by a ramping up of censorship, arrests, imprisonments without (fair) trials and other forms of violent repression against dissent.

Even worse, Mr. Friedman has nary a word on the unmitigated disaster that is the Saudi war in Yemen, which has now surpassed Syria as the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The evidence for bin Salman’s leading role in executing this illegal, murderous war that has done immeasurable harm to tens of millions of Yemenis and thrown the entire Arabian peninsula and Gulf region into chaos is incontrovertible. We cannot understand how any professional journalist (which Mr. Friedman describes himself as at the start of the article) could engage in a long-form interview with bin Salman and avoid interrogating the issue in any detail, essentially giving him a pass for being the mastermind of an illegal war that has devastated the lives of millions, and today borders on genocide.

In this context, Friedman’s focus on the possibility of bin Salman’s “reform” and rebranding of the extremist Islam long fostered by the Saudis betrays either a complete ignorance of the history, religious and political dynamics, and present geostrategic ambitions of bin Salman’s agenda; or, worse, complicity in a completely false narrative of what is really happening on the ground. At the same time, his gullibility regarding bin Salman’s alleged efforts to fight corruption in his country defies credibility—as the New York Times itself reported last year, this is a prince who bought a $500,000,000 super yacht on a whim while vacationing in the Mediterranean. And while a Saudi woman might soon be able to drive, bin Salman has shown no willingness to clamp down on Saudi funding of many of the most extreme religious forces in the Muslim world.

Mr. Friedman’s empirically, factually and logically challenged columns have long provided a bit of comic relief for scholars of the Middle East and broader Arab/Muslim world. But with a horrendous war continuing apace in Yemen and a proxy conflict with Iran entangling the entire region in potentially explosive conflicts, the world’s paper of record must do better to ensure its readers and the global public get the most accurate and grounded reporting and opinions available. Friedman’s column, particularly in the context of decades of New York Times’ faithful reporting of faux-Saudi “reform,” “modernization” and “anti-corruption” efforts (as documented in detail by Georgetown scholar Abdullah al-Arian here) continues a dangerous history of the Times passing off the Saudi regime’s PR as if it represented at least a plausible and comprehensible take on reality. Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder whether there was some sort of quid pro quo between the writer and the prince for publishing such a ridiculous piece. This is not opinion writing; it’s pure propaganda.

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself for printing Friedman’s column; and Friedman should be investigated and perhaps even suspended for writing it.

Signed,

Sheila Carapico, University of Richmond
Lisa Hajjar, University of California Santa Barbara
Toby C. Jones, Rutgers University
Mark LeVine, University of California Irvine
Joshua Stacher, Kent State University
Bob Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania
Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University

Amid United Nations fears that genetic extinction technology could be used by militaries, a United States military agency has invested $100 million in the doomsday biological technology that can wipe out an entire species.

Scientists now have the knowledge and the tools they need to create and deliver Doomsday genes which can selectively target and exterminate an entire species. And to make matters worse, emails released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), suggest that the United States’s uber-secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has become the world’s largest funder of this “gene drive” research and will heighten international tensions further ahead of a UN expert committee meeting in Montreal beginning on Tuesday.

The UN is debating a ban on this technology as several southern countries fear the application of using extinction technology. The use of genetic extinction technologies in bioweapons is the stuff of nightmares, but so far, known research is focused entirely on pest control and the elimination of diseases.  The key word there being “known.”

UN diplomats confirmed that the new email release would worsen the “bad name” of gene drives in some circles. “Many countries [will] have concerns when this technology comes from DARPA, a US military science agency,” one said.

“You may be able to remove viruses or the entire mosquito population, but that may also have downstream ecological effects on species that depend on them. My main worry,” he added, “is that we do something irreversible to the environment, despite our good intentions, before we fully appreciate the way that this technology will work.”  

Jim Thomas, a co-director of the ETC group which obtained the emails, said the US military’s influence in furthering this technology would strengthen the case for a moratorium.

“The dual-use nature of altering and eradicating entire populations is as much a threat to peace and food security as it is a threat to ecosystems,” he said. “Militarization of gene drive funding may even contravene the Enmod convention against hostile uses of environmental modification technologies.”

But while we are on the subject of UN bans, the sanctions they placed on North Korea are being willfully ignored by the rogue regime.  It stands to reason that should a military seek the use of this technology, they will also defy the UN’s “authority.”

Todd Kuiken, who has worked with the GBIRd (genetic biocontrol) program, which receives $6.4 million from DARPA, said that the US military’s centrality to genetic technology funding meant that “researchers who depend on grants for their research may reorient their projects to fit the narrow aims of these military agencies,” which could include doomsday genetic weapons.  Between 2008 and 2014, the US government spent about $820 million on synthetic biology. Since 2012, most of this has come from DARPA and other military agencies, Kuiken says.

DARPA believes that a sharp decrease in the costs of gene-editing toolkits has created a greater opportunity for hostile or rogue actors to experiment with the technology.

“This convergence of low cost and high availability means that applications for gene editing – both positive and negative – could arise from people or states operating outside of the traditional scientific community and international norms,” the official said. “It is incumbent on DARPA to perform this research and develop technologies that can protect against accidental and intentional misuse.”

Interest in the technology among US army bureaus has shot up since a secret report by the elite Jason group of military scientists last year “received considerable attention among various agencies of the US government,” according to an email by Gerald Joyce, who co-chaired a Jason study group in June. A second Jason report was commissioned in 2017 assessing “potential threats this technology might pose in the hands of an adversary, technical obstacles that must be overcome to develop gene drive technology and employ it ‘in the wild’,” Joyce wrote.

The paper would not be publicly disclosed but “widely circulated within the US intelligence and broader national security community”, his email said.

Featured image is from the author.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

A previous article discussed the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) – covering healthcare for around nine million children and hundreds of thousands of pregnant women from low-income families – too high to qualify for Medicaid.

CHIP expired on September 30. Congress failed to renew it, states fast running out of funds to continue providing vital healthcare to needy recipients dependent on the program.

Social justice in America is being sacrificed to spend trillions of dollars on militarism and warmaking, trillions more on corporate handouts and tax cuts for them and super-rich households if congressionally passed legislation is signed into law – once differences between House and Senate bills are reconciled.

Sustaining CHIP requires authorizing $8 billion to fund it, pocket change compared what Congress hands war-profiteers and the nation’s privileged class.

Not according to GOP Senator Orin Hatch, saying

“(t)he reason CHIP is having trouble (passing) is because we don’t have money anymore.”

“We just add more and more spending and more and more spending, and you can look at the rest of the bill for the more and more spending.”

At the same time, he said “(w)e’re going to do CHIP…the right way” – meaning eviscerating the program, providing minimal funding, making it harder for needy families to qualify, and claim it continues as before – a shadow of what’s needed.

Hatch signaled what’s coming, adding he had a “rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Since enacted in 1997, funding never lapsed, except when GW Bush vetoed reauthorization of the program. Days later, Congress provided short-term funding, the program reauthorized in 2009.

If the GOP-dominated Congress fails to renew it, or guts the program, calling it reauthorization, millions of needy needy recipients could lose coverage.

According to Tricia Brooks, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center on Children and Families, if Congress fails to reauthorize funding for CHIP before the year-end holiday period, it’s “going to have a real chilling effect on our country’s historic progress in covering children,” adding:

Without congressional renewal this month, “(s)tates are either going to come up with more money to provide coverage for these kids or they are going to have to take steps to close down or temporarily freeze their programs.”

GOP and undemocratic Dems disagree on how to fund CHIP, Republicans wanting money taken from the Affordable Care Act to pay for it. Dems rejected the idea.

According to projections by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), two states will run out of money this month.

Five more (and the District of Columbia) will exhaust their funding in early January, another 22 by March. By July, they’ll all be out of funds except Illinois and Wyoming.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), responsible for administering CHIP, once states exhaust their funds, they’ll have to decide which program recipients qualify for Medicaid.

They’ll also have to choose between freezing enrollments in their healthcare programs or shutting them down entirely.

Millions of needy children and hundreds of thousands of pregnant women hang in the balance while Congress prioritizes helping the rich at the expense of the poor.

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

CIA Director Mike Pompeo says Saudi Arabia is working directly with Israel on confronting “challenges” in the Middle East, suggesting that the two sides could go as far as setting up “a joint military headquarters.” 

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, Pompeo cited Daesh, Iran and “failed states” as posing a challenge to both Saudi Arabia and Israel, advising the two sides to develop their relationship.

“We’ve seen them [Saudis] work with the Israelis to push back against terrorism throughout the Middle East, to the extent we can continue to develop those relationships and work alongside them – the [Persian] Gulf states and broader Middle East will likely be more secure,” he said.

“It is incredibly important that in the Middle East, where we have failed states, where you have ISIS, where you have Iran, that we have got to develop a stronger coalition of countries that are willing to work together to confront these challenges,” he added.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia are alarmed by the growing power of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement which has been key to breaking the grip of Takfiri terrorists and other militants on territories in Iraq and Syria.

Pompeo called for building “a strong coalition that can operate – frankly I think with a joint military headquarters that can… target the terrorists in that region, that can basically work together to try to provide stability.”

Saudi Arabia’s closeness to Israel has come in the wake of Riyadh’s aggressive policies under its new rulers who have launched a destructive war on Yemen.

The kingdom has also ratcheted up its hostile rhetoric against Iran, threatening to draw a possible future conflict inside the Iranian territory.

Saudi Arabia has further been associated with Takfiri groups wreaking havoc in Syria and Iraqi for years.

With Daesh almost eliminated, the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and their allies are said to be shoring up Nusra Front terrorists in Syria.

Last month, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said Tel Aviv had had covert contacts with Saudi Arabia, in the first official acknowledgement of such relations.

“We have ties that are indeed partly covert with many Muslim and Arab countries, and usually [we are] the party that is not ashamed,” he said in an interview on Army Radio.

Yaacov Nagel, who stepped down as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s internal security adviser earlier this year, said Saudi Arabia was ready to sacrifice Palestinians and their demands for closer ties with Israel.

“They don’t like [the Palestinians] more than us or less than us,” he said, adding the Saudis “don’t give a damn” about the Palestinians.

Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab governments that have official diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv and host Israeli missions. The rest of the Arab governments have no open diplomatic relations with the Israeli regime.

Netanyahu, however, has said his regime had ties with the Arab world, and that the relations were improving.

Featured image: Donald Trump and the Adelsons (Source: LobeLog)

On December 6, President Donald Trump may announce U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital while continuing to keep the U.S. embassy in in Tel Aviv. The move goes toward fulfilling his campaign promise, during a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to move the embassy to Jerusalem.

It’s still uncertain if Trump will go through with this plan, but the pressure on Trump goes deeper than a promise to voters. His biggest campaign contributor, billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is showing growing impatience with Trump’s slowness in moving the embassy, which would be a provocation to Palestinians who claim Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. For this reason, past presidents have refused to move the embassy on grounds that it would upset potential talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.

Before Trump was even sworn in as president, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, showed a remarkable willingness to follow directions from Israel’s far-right prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The transition team appears to have worked at the request of Netanyahu to defeat a UN resolution criticizing Israel’s ongoing settlement construction. Reporting on Friday advanced the story, revealing that Kushner told former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to call members of the Security Council in an effort to stop the vote, a potential violation of the Logan Act, which criminalizes negotiations by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the U.S.

When the Trump White House hasn’t been quick enough to back Netanyahu or Adelson’s proposals, Adelson, who was reportedly in close contact with Kushner during the campaign, has been quick to express his displeasure.

Adelson, who once accused Palestinians of existing “to destroy Israel,” was reportedly “furious” with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in May for suggesting in a Meet The Pressinterview that moving the embassy should be contingent on the peace process. Axios reported:

[S]ources say the Las Vegas billionaire doesn’t buy the argument that the embassy move should be contingent on the peace process. He has told Trump that Palestinians are impossible negotiating partners and make demands that Israel can never meet.

Adelson and his wife Miriam spent more than $80 million on Republicans in 2016, and he gave $5 million to Trump’s inauguration.

Adelson and his wife Miriam also contributed $35 million to help elect Trump.

The Las Vegas Review Journal, which is owned by Adelson, wrote in October,

“The Adelsons reportedly have been disappointed in Trump’s failure to keep a campaign pledge to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem on his first day in office.”

And before the funder got on the Trump bandwagon, candidate Trump was outspoken about Adelson’s intentions in putting his money behind candidates. He infamously taunted Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who in October 2015 was a frontrunner to secure Adelson’s backing, tweeting:

Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2015

As we’ve documented on LobeLog, Trump dramatically changed his message on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, saying that he would move the embassy to Jerusalem and wouldn’t call for a freeze on the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank, as he closed in on the nomination and sought to secure Adelson’s support for his general election campaign.

Unconditional support for Israel is Adelson’s “central value,” according to Newt Gingrich in 2012, when Adelson was funding his presidential campaign’s Super PAC.

That statement is worth revisiting now as Trump weighs a policy announcement on Jerusalem where his most generous campaign supporter is pushing for a change in U.S. policy that threatens to undermine the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and seriously throw into question the viability of a two-state-solution.

The signs of runaway anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) continue to mount with each passing month.

2016 saw a record surge in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, according to the World Meteorological Organization. This means that last year’s increase was a stunning 50 percent higher than the average over the last decade. Scientists said this makes obtaining global temperature targets — such as the often-mentioned 1.5°C and 2°C limits — largely unattainable. The combination of the increase of CO2 and El Niño have driven atmospheric CO2 to levels not seen for 800,000 years.

How is this playing out around the planet?

The Arctic Ocean is now starting to look more and more like the Atlantic Ocean, a shift that is threatening to turn the entire Arctic food web on its head. This is due to the fact that the summer Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly and the waters are warming, leading to encroachment by animals from warmer climates and a reorganization of Arctic biodiversity.

Meanwhile, a recent report highlights the fact that planetary warming of just 3°C (a level we are currently on a trajectory to easily exceed before 2100) will be enough warming to lock in irreversible sea-level rise that will impact hundreds of millions of people.

This year is already on track to be in the top three hottest years ever recorded, bearing in mind that the last three years have been the warmest three years ever recorded for the planet.

2017 has already seen some of the warmest temperatures ever recorded at many places around the world, in addition to unusually low Antarctic and Arctic sea ice levels, along with several instances of extreme droughts and wildfires.

Earth

Signs of abrupt climate disruption’s impact have been glaringly obvious of late.

The total area of global tree cover lost last year was equivalent to the area of the country of New Zealand (approximately 73.4 million acres). This was a staggering 51 percent increase over the previous year’s loss. The University of Maryland study that provided this data cited ACD-driven forest fires and deforestation as the two leading causes, and noted that the wildfires were responsible for the massive spike in coverage loss compared to the previous year.

Wildlife continues to provide us signals of the global imbalance. In the Arctic, the black guillemot seabird, which is dependent upon sea-ice for its survival, is likely on its way out, as has been the known case for species such as Arctic Fox, walrus, hooded seal and Narwhal for quite some time now.

And as usual, climate impacts on the human front are glaring. A recent study published in the Lancet showed how ACD is already damaging the health of millions of people around the world every year. Pollution, diseases and heat waves, all linked to ACD, are the primary drivers of the health impacts.

On the topic of ACD’s human impacts, some rare good news comes from New Zealand, where the government is considering creating a visa category to assist in relocating people from low-lying Pacific islands being submerged by rising seas. If this occurs, New Zealand will be the first country to create a visa for ACD refugees.

Demonstrating how ACD-fueled extreme weather events are hammering the economy, 2017 is on track to be one of the most expensive years ever recorded for the insurance industry in the US. In fact, the strain is evident for the entire global economy: There is currently a global protection gap (difference in how much insurance money is actually available and what is needed) of $1.7 trillion, the majority of which is being covered by civil society and governments.

Water

Speaking of ACD-driven natural disaster costs piling up, in November, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker declared a disaster in order to release funding to help pay for repairs of several roads that were damaged or obliterated from a massive fall storm. The storm had generated eight-foot waves that breached a dirt berm protecting the coastal town of Utqiagvik from increasingly intense waves and erosion. Melting permafrost, coupled with shrinking sea ice that is allowing winds to generate larger waves that lash the shores, is causing increasing problems for dozens of northern coastal villages that will, ultimately, have to be relocated entirely.

Meanwhile, an MIT professor of meteorology has warned that the type of “biblical” rainfall we saw during Hurricane Harvey will occur more frequently in the future. He explained in a recently published study that the chances of a hurricane flooding parts of Texas have increased sixfold in only 25 years, and will most likely triple again by 2100 as water and atmospheric temperatures continue to warm.

On that note, a study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that within the next 30 years, floods that used to hit New York City only once per 500 years could happen every five years.

Further complicating things, the real estate company Zillow recently released an analysis showing that nearly two million homes in the US could be flooded by 2100 if ocean levels increase six feet from ACD. The properties lost would total nearly $1 trillion, and would represent nearly two percent of the country’s homes.

The impacts of sea level rise are especially evident in Antarctica. A recent paper from the University of Melbourne showed that unless coal power is completely eliminated by 2050, that factor alone could cause melting in the Antarctic that would contribute 1.3 meters of sea level rise by 2100. In fact, a British research station there had to move its location earlier this year due to changes in the ice underneath. Now, it has had to close down for a second winter in a row, as cracks in the ice underneath continue growing. There is concern that the ice shelf upon which it is located could soon break off.

Also in Antarctica, the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, considered critical in regards to sea level rise, are accelerating toward the sea. They alone are holding back ice that will increase global sea levels by nearly four feet in the coming centuries, an amount that is enough to submerge several coastal cities.

Meanwhile, another recently published study shows the Totten Ice Shelf in Eastern Antarctica is melting at an accelerated rate into the Southern Ocean. This glacier alone has enough ice to raise global sea levels 11-13 feet, enough to submerge every coastal city on the planet.

On the other side of the water coin, we continue to see ACD-fueled droughts worsening around the world. A recent example of this is in Sri Lanka, where droughts are forcing farmers to move into cities to find work as there is no longer enough money to be made in agriculture. Meanwhile in Somalia, drought has killed 75 percent of the livestock and a pre-famine alert has been issued.

Fire

2017 was an incredible year of wildfires for California: Nearly 9,000 fires scorched more than one million acres, killed at least 40 people and destroyed thousands of structures.

University of California researchers are predicting that in the coming decades, due to increasing temperatures and intensifying droughts, the climate in Northern California, along with that region’s wildlife and vegetation, will come to more closely resemble that of Southern California.

That state’s firefighting agency recently announced that 2017 was California’s worst-ever year on record, in terms of fires.

Across Europe, an area nearly the size of Rhode Island burned this year. In one weekend in June, 60 people died across Portugal as wildfires raged out of control.

Wildfires also raged across Siberian Russia, as well as vast areas of Brazil, South Africa and New Zealand.

Air

A new report from the Associated Press confirms what has been long known: Winter is arriving later and leaving earlier as the seasons continue their ACD-driven shifts.

The University of Hawaii released results of research showing there are at least 27 physiological pathways by which a heat wave can kill a human being. The study also shows that if current CO2 emission rates continue, by 2100, 74 percent of people on the planet will be exposed to deadly heat waves. Even with dramatic reductions, the number of people exposed to them will hit 48 percent, according to the research.

Meanwhile, the globe continues to bake under swaths of record-setting late fall temperatures. Northeastern Siberia has seen temperatures soar to 30°C above average, and overall Arctic temperatures have been predicted to average 4.4°C above the norm for this time of year. Even Eastern Antarctica saw temperatures reach a stunning 20°C above average recently.

Denial and Reality

The Trump administration-backed ACD-denial efforts continue apace as of late.

Oil and gas lobbyist-turned-EPA-head Scott Pruitt recently prevented EPA scientists from speaking out about climate disruption at an event in Rhode Island. Pruitt, a former fracking lawyer, is also in the process of weakening EPA technical committees that have traditionally been beyond the political fray.

Meanwhile, the Interior Department, headed by Rick Perry, has scrubbed ACD from its strategic plan, and now is saying it is committed to attaining “American energy dominance.” And the Interior Department is not the only place this is happening. The Trump administration has removed the words “climate change” from the websites of the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, the EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Furthermore, a US Forest Service scientist who was scheduled to discuss the role ACD is playing in wildfires at a conference was recently denied approval to attend the event.

Trump’s climate-denying machinations have also included nominating a GOP congressman to head NASA who blames ACD on the sun.

However, fortunately, there are still those in government who are sounding the alarm bells of reality.

The most comprehensive report on climate science from the US government to date was released on November 3. It stated it is “extremely likely” that human activities were the “dominant cause” of ACD.

In late October, the Government Accountability Office released a report showing how ACD impacts are already costing US taxpayers billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, senior US military and security experts have warned that climate refugees could number in the tens of millions in the next decade alone, creating the “world’s biggest refugee crisis.”

Lastly for this month’s dispatch, in the middle of November, 15,000 scientists provided a catastrophic “warning to humanity” about ACD impacts and overpopulation, and how humankind is facing an existential threat. They warned that the globe faces untold amounts of human misery and catastrophic losses of biodiversity without rapid and immediate actions.

The group pointed out how in just the last quarter century, the human population has increased 35 percent while the total number of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish have fallen 29 percent. Global CO2 emissions and average temperatures have consistently increased, nearly 300 million acres of forest have been lost, and oceanic “dead zones” have increased 75 percent.

It is made more clear with each passing month that humans have pushed the planet off a precipice, and nothing short of immediate, global actions on a dramatic scale will be able to even slightly mitigate runaway ACD.

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Featured image is from Ghost Presenter and edited by LW / TO.

The Military-Industrial Complex has loomed over America ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of its growing influence during his prescient farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961. The Vietnam War followed shortly thereafter, and its bloody consequences cemented the image of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) as a faceless cadre of profit-seeking warmongers who’ve wrested control of the foreign policy. That was certainly borne out by the war’s utter senselessness … and by tales of profiteering by well-connected contractors like Brown & Root.

Over five decades, four major wars and a dozen-odd interventions later, we often talk about the Military-Industrial Complex as if we’re referring to a nefarious, flag-draped Death Star floating just beyond the reach of helpless Americans who’d generally prefer that war was not, as the great Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler aptly put it, little more than a money-making “racket.”

The feeling of powerlessness that the MIC engenders in “average Americans” makes a lot of sense if you just follow the money coming out of Capitol Hill. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated all “defense-related spending” for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The “defense-related” part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn’t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.

It’s a phenomenon that noted Pentagon watchdog William Hartung has tracked for years. He recently dissected it into “no less than 10 categories of national security spending.” Amazingly only one of those is the actual Pentagon budget. The others include spending on wars, on homeland security, on military aid, on intelligence, on nukes, on recruitment, on veterans, on interest payments and on “other defense” — which includes “a number of flows of defense-related funding that go to agencies other than the Pentagon.”

Perhaps most amazingly, Hartung noted in TomDisptach that the inflation-adjusted “base” defense budgets of the last couple years is “higher than at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s massive buildup of the 1980s and is now nearing the post-World War II funding peak.” And that’s just the “base” budget, meaning the roughly $600 billion “defense-only” portion of the overall package. Like POGO, Hartung puts an annual price tag of nearly $1.1 trillion on the whole enchilada of military-related spending.

The MIC’s ‘Swamp Creatures’

To secure their share of this grandiloquent banquet, the defense industry’s lobbyists stampede Capitol Hill like well-heeled wildebeest, each jockeying for a plum position at the trough. This year, a robust collection of 208 defense companies spent $93,937,493 to deploy 728 “reported” lobbyists (apparently some go unreported) to feed this year’s trumped-up, $700 billion defense-only budget, according to OpenSecrets.org. Last year they spent $128,845,198 to secure their profitable pieces of the government pie.

And this reliable yearly harvest, along with the revolving doors connecting defense contractors with Capitol Hill, K Street and the Pentagon, is why so many critics blame the masters of war behind the MIC for turning war into a cash machine.

The Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department, as viewed with the Potomac River and Washington, D.C., in the background. (Defense Department photo)

But the cash machine is not confined to the Beltway. There are ATM branches around the country. Much in the way it lavishes Congress with lobbying largesse, the defense industry works hand-in-glove with the Pentagon to spread the appropriations around the nation. This “spread the wealth” strategy may be equally as important as the “inside the Beltway” lobbying that garners so much of our attention and disdain.

Just go to U.S. Department of Defense’s contract announcement webpage on any weekday to get a good sense of the “contracts valued at $7 million or more” that are “announced each business day at 5 p.m.” A recent survey of these “awards” found the usual suspects like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. The MIC was well-represented. But many millions of dollars were also “won” by companies most Americans have never heard of … like this sampling from one day at the end of October:

• Longbow LLC, Orlando Florida, got $183,474,414 for radar electronic units with the stipulation that work will be performed in Orlando, Florida.
• Gradkell Systems Inc., Huntsville, Alabama, got $75,000,000 for systems operations and maintenance at Fort Belvoir, Virginia
• Dawson Federal Inc., San Antonio, Texas; and A&H-Ambica JV LLC, Livonia, Michigan; and Frontier Services Inc., Kansas City, Missouri, will share a $45,000,000 for repair and alternations for land ports of entry in North Dakota and Minnesota.
• TRAX International Corp., Las Vegas, Nevada, got a $9,203,652 contract modification for non-personal test support services that will be performed in Yuma, Arizona, and Fort Greely, Alaska,
• Railroad Construction Co. Inc., Paterson, New Jersey, got a $9,344,963 contract modification for base operations support services to be performed in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
• Belleville Shoe Co., Belleville, Illinois, got $63,973,889 for hot-weather combat boots that will be made in Illinois.
• American Apparel Inc., Selma, Alabama, got $48,411,186 for combat utility uniforms that will be made in Alabama.
• National Industries for the Blind, Alexandria, Virginia, got a $12,884,595 contract modification to make and advanced combat helmet pad suspension system. The “locations of performance” are Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Sharing the Largesse

Clearly, the DoD is large enough, and smart enough, to award contracts to companies throughout the 50 states. Yes, it is a function of the sheer size or, more forebodingly, the utter “pervasiveness” of the military in American life. But it is also a strategy. And it’s a tactic readily apparent in a contract recently awarded to Raytheon.

On Oct. 31, 2017, they got a $29,455,672 contract modification for missions systems equipment; computing environment hardware; and software research, test and development. The modification stipulates that the work will spread around the country to “Portsmouth, Rhode Island (46 percent); Tewksbury, Massachusetts (36 percent); Marlboro, Massachusetts (6 percent); Port Hueneme, California (5 percent); San Diego, California (4 percent); and Bath, Maine (3 percent).”

Frankly, it’s a brilliant move that began in the Cold War. The more Congressional districts that got defense dollars, the more votes the defense budget was likely to receive on Capitol Hill. Over time, it evolved into its own underlying rationale for the budget.

As veteran journalist William Greider wrote in the Aug. 16, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone,

“The entire political system, including liberals as well as conservatives, is held hostage by the politics of defense spending. Even the most well intentioned are captive to it. And this is a fundamental reason why the Pentagon budget is irrationally bloated and why America is mobilizing for war in a time of peace.”

The peace-time mobilization Greider referred to was the Reagan build-up that, as William Hartung noted, is currently being surpassed by America’s “War on Terror” binge. Then, as now … the US was at peace at home, meddling around the world and running up a huge bill in the process. And then, as now … the spending seems unstoppable.

And as an unnamed “arms-control lobbyist” told Grieder, “It’s a fact of life. I don’t see how you can ask members of Congress to vote against their own districts. If I were a member of Congress, I might vote that way, too.”

Essentially, members of Congress act as secondary lobbyists for the defense industry by making sure their constituents have a vested interest in seeing the defense budget is both robust and untouchable. But they are not alone. Because the states also reap what the Pentagon sows … and, in the wake of the massive post-9/11 splurge, they’ve begun quantifying the impact of defense spending on their economies. It helps them make their specific case for keeping the spigot open.

Enter the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which notes, or touts, that the Department of Defense (DoD) “operates more than 420 military installations in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico.” Additionally, the NCSL is understandably impressed by a DoD analysis that found the department’s “$408 billion on payroll and contracts in Fiscal Year 2015” translated into “approximately 2.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).”

And they’ve become a clearinghouse for state governments’ economic impact studies of defense spending. Here’s a sampling of recent data compiled on the NSCL website:

• In 2015, for example, military installations in North Carolina supported 578,000 jobs, $34 billion in personal income and $66 billion in gross state product. This amounts to roughly 10 percent of the state’s overall economy.
• In 2014, Colorado lawmakers appropriated $300,000 in state funds to examine the comprehensive value of military activities across the state’s seven major installations. The state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs released its study in May 2015, reporting a total economic impact of $27 billion.
• Kentuckyhas also taken steps to measure military activity, releasing its fifth study in June 2016. The military spent approximately $12 billion in Kentucky during 2014-15. With 38,700 active duty and civilian employees, military employment exceeds the next largest state employer by more than 21,000 jobs.
• In Michigan, for example, defense spending in Fiscal Year 2014 supported 105,000 jobs, added more than $9 billion in gross state product and created nearly $10 billion in personal income. A 2016 study sponsored by the Michigan Defense Center presents a statewide strategy to preserve Army and Air National Guard facilities following a future Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round as well as to attract new missions. 

Electoral Impact

But that’s not all. According to the DoD study cited above, the biggest recipients of DoD dollars are (in order): Virginia, California, Texas, Maryland and Florida. And among the top 18 host states for military bases, electorally important states like California, Florida and Texas lead the nation.

President Trump speaking at a Cabinet meeting on Nov. 1, 2017, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Trump’s right and son-in-law Jared Kushner seated in the background. (Screen shot from whitehouse.gov)

And that’s the real rub … this has an electoral impact. Because the constituency for defense spending isn’t just the 1 percent percent of Americans who actively serve in the military or 7 percent of Americans who’ve served sometime in their lives, but it is also the millions of Americans who directly or indirectly make a living off of the “defense-related” largesse that passes through the Pentagon like grass through a goose.

It’s a dirty little secret that Donald Trump exploited throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Somehow, he was able to criticize wasting money on foreign wars and the neoconservative interventionism of the Bushes, the neoliberal interventionism of Hillary Clinton, and, at the same time, moan endlessly about the “depleted” military despite “years of record-high spending.” He went on to promise a massive increase in the defense budget, a massive increase in naval construction and a huge nuclear arsenal.

And, much to the approval of many Americans, he’s delivered. A Morning Consult/Politico poll showed increased defense spending was the most popular among a variety of spending priorities presented to voters … even as voters express trepidation about the coming of another war. A pair of NBC News/Survey Monkey polls found that 76 percent of Americans are “worried” the United States “will become engaged in a major war in the next four years” and only 25 percent want America to become “more active” in world affairs.

More to the point, only 20 percent of Americans wanted to increase the troop level in Afghanistan after Trump’s stay-the-course speech in August, but Gallup’s three decade-long tracking poll found that the belief the U.S. spends “too little” on defense is at its highest point (37 percent) since it spiked after 9/11 (41 percent). The previous highpoint was 51 percent in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was elected in no small part on the promise of a major build-up.

So, if Americans generally don’t support wars or engagement in the world, why do they seem to reflexively support massive military budgets?

Frankly, look no further than Trump’s mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” He says it when he lords over the sale of weapon systems to foreign powers or he visits a naval shipyard or goes to one of his post-election rallies to proclaim to “We’re building up our military like never before.” Frankly, he’s giving the people what they want. Although they may be war-weary, they’ve not tired of the dispersal system that Greider wrote about during Reagan’s big spree.

Ultimately, it means that the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex isn’t just a shadowy cabal manipulating policies against the will of the American people. Nor is the “racket” exclusive to an elite group of Deep State swamp things. Instead, the military and the vast economic network it feeds presents a far more “complex” issue that involves millions of self-interested Americans in much the way Eisenhower predicted, but few are willing to truly forsake.

JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, radio co-host, documentary filmmaker and former broadcast news producer in Washington, D.C. He blogs at Newsvandal.com or you can follow him on Twitter, http://twitter/newsvandal.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is apparently now close to being indicted for corruption, is becoming increasingly desperate to cover up his alleged financial criminality. His strategy to deflect attention is to conspire with the Trump family for the US to collaborate in changing the status of Jerusalem from an ‘international city affording access to all faiths’, to being the political capital of Israel.

It is also alleged that he is colluding with the White House in making preparations for Israeli forces to attack Iran, presumably together with US troops and American F-35 strike aircraft. That would be a catastrophic political and military error that would have dire consequences for both the Middle East and Europe.

A New York Times Op-Ed article earlier this year by Larry Derfner, warned that

 “Counter-intuitive though it may be to Israeli and most Western minds, Israel, not its Islamic enemies .. is the aggressor in these .. wars”

As for the US shift on the status of Jerusalem, Donald Trump has been given specific warnings by France and many other countries of both the East and West, that to change the status of the Holy City to the political capital of the Israeli state would be a disastrous mistake and a decision that would be immediately designated as illegal by the international community as, indeed, are the existing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem which are currently a violation of international law.

Netanyahu and Trump are playing with fire, and unless stopped, the flames could tragically burn us all.

I have already written a lot about Cambodia, but each time I return to this ancient and scarred country, I get so outraged by the cynicism that confronts me there, at every corner, that I have to start writing again, re-addressing the same essential issues that I have already been covering for years and decades.

One question always comes back to my mind:

‘How could a nation that suffered so much, losing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of sons and daughters (official number stands at 1.7 million), accept a totally twisted narrative fabricated in Washington, London, Paris and other Western capitals? And not only ‘accept’ – Cambodia is actually profiting greatly from helping to spread vitriolic anti-Communist propaganda on behalf of its lethal handlers.’

In all the bookstores around the country, the official Western propaganda narrative (‘Khmer Rouge killed them all’ – style) is on display and on sale: Pol Pot’s biographies, gruesome accounts from the so-called Killing Fields, from the torture chambers at the former high school ‘S-21’ in Phnom Penh, as well as countless and detailed testimonies of the victims.

I asked the owner of a bookshop in Siem Reap:

“What about some books about the atrocities committed by the West? Do you have some volumes about the U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodian countryside, which alone killed several hundreds of thousands of people?”

“Me, not have,” she replied, somehow defiantly.

“Do you have books about how millions of Cambodian people were displaced by the carpet bombing of the U.S. and its allies;how they were forced to flee because of unexploded bombs and so-called ‘bombies’? Anything about those people starving to death?”

“No have,” came the answer.

“Why not?” I asked, politely.

“I don’t know”, she said, by now clearly annoyed.

Outside, my local driver was ready to pitch his services, taking me around, in search of the minefields. He thought I was European. “Chinese mines, Russian mines…” He took long breath, made dramatic pause, and exhaled: “Khmer Rouge no good.”

Rice fields which are also mine fields

Instead of engaging in a historical debate, I simply asked: “This city – Siem Reap – has 230,000 inhabitants. Is it producing anything?”

The driver hesitated for a while:

“Why should we produce anything? It is cheaper to import goods from Thailand, China and Vietnam. Well, there is some farming outside of the city…”

He was correct. I checked several sources. Even Wikipedia describes the situation in no uncertain terms:

Economy: Tourism is a very important aspect of the economy of Siem Reap – it was estimated in 2010 that over 50% of jobs in the town were related to the tourism industry… A large number of NGOs and other not-for profit organizations operate in and around Siem Reap, and they play a vital role in the economy, as well as helping to develop it for the future. Thousands of expatriates call the city home and they also have a significant impact on the economy…

Siem Reap is fully dependent on Westerners; on millions of tourists visiting the nearby Angkor, but also on the ‘experts’ who come here to tell locals how to run their communities, how to think and how to perceive their own present and the past.

The entire country is dependent on handouts, and shamelessly subservient. Most of its teachers, journalists and artists are producing what they are told to produce, say what they are expected to say. Most of them have already lost ability to form their own opinion.

What I never told my driver was that I had already covered almost the entire country, for more than 20 years, visiting all of its corners, talking to the victims, to former Khmer Rouge soldiers, even to personal Pol Pot’s guards. I worked in the minefields near Vietnam, and on Thai-Khmer border, and at the ill-fated and until now disputed temple of Preah Vihear. In Cambodia, like in Rwanda, I wanted to understand how the Western narrative is born, how it gets manufactured, how it gets alimented and finally, how it domesticates, managing to dominate the brains of people all over the world.

*

When in 2014 I was visiting a stronghold of the former commander Ta Mok (once a right-hand man of Pol Pot, who later split the Khmer Rouge movement) deep in a jungle, a friend of mine – a leading international lawyer Christopher Black –contributed to my report, basically confirming what many victims in Cambodia had already said to me:

“The UN-backed war crimes trials of Khmer Rouge leaders are show trials designed to once again demonize communists, and to scapegoat them for the millions of Cambodians who were killed by the American bombing of Cambodia. What the world needs are trials of the American leaders and officers for war crimes for the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (We had the Bertrand Russell war Crimes Tribunal in the 70s but it could not enforce its judgments).”

San Reoung

San Reoung, a former personal security man of Mr. Ta Mok, confirmed that all that propaganda about ‘Communist massacres’ by Khmer Rouge was absolute nonsense:

“It was really not about the ideology… We did not know much about it. I was, for instance, very angry with the Americans. I became a soldier at the age of 17. And my friends were very angry, too. They joined Khmer Rouge to fight Americans, and especially the corruption of their puppet dictator Lon Nol, in Phnom Penh.”

Had the killings taken place; did people die during the Khmer Rouge reign? But of course! But the proportions were totally different: many more died because of the bombings and starvation, which followed the displacement of the peasants. In the area of the so-called Killing Fields, 20,000 graves were found. That is a lot; that is truly terrible. But we were told that 1.7 million Cambodian people died. The numbers somehow do not match. The B-52’s were clearly incomparably deadlier than the rifle butts of Khmer Rouge.

After almost a quarter of a century, I’m convinced that since I first began writing about Cambodia, the world public is fully and irreversibly indoctrinated by clichés and half-truths coming from Western mainstream media and academia.

It is time to revisit a few facts and testimonies that I collected in the past. Some of them are already included in my book “Exposing Lies of the Empire”.

After one of the visits to the notorious and above-mentioned ‘S-21’, I wrote:

“After Vietnam ousted Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh at the end of 1978, this torture center was converted to a ‘Museum of genocide’ by the Vietnamese and East Germans, who were using their experience from setting up Auschwitz Museum in Poland. They kept interrogation cells (originally classrooms) intact, with bloodstained floors, chains and shackles, as well as primitive machines for electric shocks. Thousands of black and white photographs of inmates eerily stare at visitors, their eyes expressing horror and resignation.

Some of the most terrifying images are those created by Vann Nath, a painter and former prisoner of S-21, one of the very few who managed to survive because of his talent and ability to draw complimenting portraits of Pol Pot and of officials who were in charge of the interrogation center. After the Vietnamese invasion, Vann Nath transferred the most terrifying memories onto canvases; a mosaic depicting the barbarity and insane brutality of interrogators — a mother whose baby is being assassinated in front of her eyes, a man whose nails are being extracted by pliers, a woman having her nipple cut off.

But even Van Nath, in a conversation we had almost ten years ago, claims that Khmer Rouge killed around 200,000 people during its reign, a number which he also uses in his book “A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21” (White Lotus Press). And among Khmer survivors, there is a consensus that the majority of people died not because of Communist ideology and not because of direct orders from Phnom Penh to exterminate millions, but because of the officers and local cadres in the provinces who ran amok, taking their personal vengeance out on deported city-dwellers and “elites” whom they blamed for both the savage American bombing from the past, and for supporting the corrupt and savage pro-Western dictatorship of Lon Nol.”

It was more than 20 years since I sat down with Mr. Vann Nath, and since we had a series of long and frank talks.

I spoke to many people in Cambodia, from the poorest peasants to the PM Hun Sen’s wife, inside the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh.

EU and Cambodian authorities

The testimonies that convinced me about the total erroneousness of the official narrative did not come exclusively from Cambodian people, both the victims and perpetrators. At some point I realized that the official narrative is designed for the general public only: not even Western ideologues themselves believe in it. In 2006 for instance, I spent an entire evening discussing the issue with a high-level EU official, during his long work visit to Phnom Penh. He did not want to be identified (if his name were to appear under such statements, he claimed, it would mean the end of his career), but he asked me to use his testimony anonymously:

“Khmer Rouge killing more than a million Cambodians? Impossible! They had no capacity to kill so many people. Sure, between one and two million people died between 1969 and 1978, but that number includes 500,000 or more of those massacred by the U.S. carpet bombing before Khmer Rouge took over… Then, most of the people died because of starvation and illnesses. Furthermore, terrible massacres did not happen because of the communist ideology of Khmer Rouge. It was never on that level. U.S. carpet-bombing and Lon Nol’s brutal dictatorship fully sponsored by the West pitched local people against each other. Killings were performed out of vengeance, not on ideological bases. Peasants went insane from enduring B-52 carpet bombings. Many were tortured, massacred and disappeared during Lon Nol’s reign. Country folks hated city dwellers, blaming them for all misfortunes and horrors they had to endure, as well as for collaborating with foreigners. And most Khmer Rouge soldiers and cadres came from the countryside.”

*

After Vietnam liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge, the West, particularly the U.S. kept supporting Pol Pot and his clique, demanding at the United Nations the “immediate return of legitimate government.”

The West was willing to do basically anything to prevent the Communist and pro-Soviet Vietnam from becoming a truly regional power. The U.S. unscrupulously supported a ruthless, corrupt and fascist government in Phnom Penh; it murdered hundreds of thousands of Cambodian peasants by brutal carpet-bombing, and even supported the deranged and confused Khmer Rouge army… It would have done much more if ‘needed’; it would have done anything, to stop the real Asian left from taking power! ‘If necessary’, it would have arranged for the killing of further millions, as it already had done in Indonesia, after the 1965 coup.

As a result of this policy, at least 1.5 million Cambodian people died. Not as a result of some imaginary ‘Communist genocide’, but because of the single-minded policy of terror, which the West has been implementing everywhere–a policy designed to prevent Communist movements from winning elections as well as revolutions; a policy that has already killed tens of millions all over the world, but particularly in Asia and Latin America.

*

Now the chief (and very well paid) job of Cambodian ‘intellectuals’, as well as of book publishers, booksellers, teachers, journalists and tour guides, is to uphold the official Western narrative about their country’s past.

Promoting Washington’s interpretation of the “Khmer Rouge Genocide” is tremendous business, while exposing the true genocide committed by the U.S. and its allies here and all over Southeast and North Asia is something that pays absolutely nothing and could easily ruin lives and careers; to make a person unemployable, or worse.

Mass tourism brings millions of already indoctrinated, instructed individuals, who are ready for hair-raising stories and genocide monument selfies. In Cambodia, they encounter thousands of willing ‘guides’ who will provide, for a fee, further details and pre-approved stories.

Like this, nothing will ever change.

The truth can be found far away from the monuments and museums; it is hiding in the jungle, in humble villages all over the country, and near the border with Vietnam.

There, people know, they remember and are willing to talk. But no one, it appears, lately,is willing to listen to them.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

This article was originally published by New Eastern Outlook.

All images in this article are from the author.

The crystal ball gazers, astrologers and tea leave readers have been suffering a lingering fever of late. Bitcoin recently romped through the $10,000 barrier, an event that sent speculators swooning and conservative voices into a gloomy mood of pessimism. Bitt founder and director Gabriel Abed was rushing to declare the imminent funeral oration for cash, a newly founded digital frontier that would envelop all before it. “All currencies will be digitized. Cash has seen its days.”

James Altucher, a tech investor with the usual grammatically challenged credentials (he runs Choose Yourself Financial), was given time on CNBC to spout several theories about how strength would beget strength in the currency revolution.

The mainstay of his prediction is the way currency is altering (remarkable!) and how there have only been a few periods in history when this has happened. Gold came after barter; then paper money made its appearance, to be followed by the rise of the cryptocurrency.

His stab at value, taken with the kind of abandon a lecherous drunk unconcerned about consequences would have, is that bitcoin will reach a million dollars a coin.

“There’s $200 billion in cryptocurrencies out there and over $200 trillion in demand for money – that’s the amount of paper currency and gold bullion in the world.”

What are some of Altucher’s other predictions? A currency will fail – take your pick. (He suggests Argentina or Venezuela as appropriate victims.) Banks will fold, caving in to the bitcoin mania. A dotcom equivalent bust will be repeated, the US government will secretly stash a cryptocurrency of its choice, and the story will go on.

A sense about the dangers felt in traditional communities can be gathered by the remarks of Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz. Outlaw it, he urges.

“Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.”

Unfortunately for Stiglitz, this would assume that traditional currencies are somehow stable, immune to the speculative bubble. 

“It’s a bubble that’s going to give a lot of people a lot of exciting times as it rides up and then down.”

Certain institutions held with understandable contempt and suspicion are the ones most concerned with where these digital currencies will go. Much of this is self-interest: transactions in digital currencies tend to be associated with subversion rather than conformity. Banks, after all, were the first big rogues in the business, likely to catch a cold the moment the term “regulation” was mentioned. 

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon goes even further: dealing in such currencies is tantamount to lunacy, a breach deserving the harshest treatment from the firm. Any employee trading in bitcoin, suggested Dimon, should see them packing.

“I’d fire them in a second. For two reasons: It’s against our rules, and they’re stupid. And both are dangerous.”

A world without banks would be a world without a certain species of gargantuan crime, but the astrologers prefer to see them as ultimately accepting the value of such currencies. Eventually, the use of blockchain technology underpinned by secure cryptography will find its way into more conventional circulation.

“I see a different future where central banks are issuing digital dollars,” fantasises Abed, “a new economic age of digital dollars.”

States are also on the cryptocurrency march, hardly surprising given the prospects open to control, regulation and monitoring. Every heresy, in time, encourages incorporation, domestication, adaptation. Kyrgyzstan and Russia (it will be called the CryptoRuble, according to such figures as Nikolay Nikiforov, the country’s minister for communications) are working on the project.

Other states are taking a different stance, suggesting the opening up of a future fault line of disagreement.

“The government’s position is clear,” suggests Arun Jaitley, Indian finance minister, “we don’t recognise this as legal currency as of now.” 

Chinese authorities have taken a dim view of the currency. Deputy governor of China’s People’s Bank, Pan Gongsheng, who also doubles as head of the State Administration for Foreign Exchange, claimed it necessary to ban bitcoin trading and initial coin offerings (ICO), a move that Beijing made some three months ago.

“If things were still the way they were at the beginning of the year, over 80 percent of the world’s bitcoin trading and ICO financing would take place in China – what would things look like today?”

The words of frightened officialdom could also be found in the utterances of US Federal Reserve vice-chairman for supervision, Randal Quarles.

“Without the backing of a central bank asset and institutional support, it is not clear how a private digital currency at the centre of a large-scale payment system would behave, or whether the payment system would be able to function, in times of stress.”

The truest test of whether such currencies will survive must lie in their ultimate acceptance by the authorities. But there is a fundamental paradox at work here. Traditional banks and officials, with exceptions, do not like this alternative currency culture, fearing volatility. Yet it is precisely this volatility and unregulated conduct that underpinned the subprime mortgage collapse and the governance of US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. 

Regulation through the late 1990s was a dirty term, an unwarranted fetter on inventiveness in finance. The partial repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under the Clinton administration separating commercial and investment banking was the brightest of green lights to speculators, even if debate continues about its actual effects. Now, the very individuals who saw the predations of rampant capitalism come back to roost find a mirror of themselves: the crypto currency rebel keen to upset the order. In time, the sceptics may well be won over, and the prospects for more crashes, unstable deals, and a rocky economy, will come full circle. Plus ça change.

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

Featured image: US B-26 Invaders bomb logistics depots in Wonsan, North Korea, 1951. (USAF photo/National Archives)

It’s time to find a path to end the 67-year-long Korean war. As the threat of military conflict looms, the American public is largely unaware of the sobering facts about America’s longest unresolved war and one of the world’s bloodiest. The 1953 armistice agreement engineered by President Eisenhower—halting a three-year-long “police action” that resulted in two million to four million military and civilian deaths—is long forgotten. Struck by military leaders of North Korea, the United States, South Korea, and their United Nations allies to halt fighting, the armistice was never followed up by a formal peace agreement to end this conflict of the early Cold War.

A State Department official reminded me of this unsettled state of affairs before I traveled to the Youngbyon nuclear site in November 1994 to help secure plutonium-bearing spent reactor fuel as part of the Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea. I had suggested that we take space heaters to the spent fuel pool storage area, to provide warmth for the North Koreans who would be working during winter to place highly radioactive spent fuel rods in containers, where they could be subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. The State Department official became upset. Even 40 years after the end of hostilities, we were forbidden to provide any comfort to the enemy, regardless of the bitter cold interfering with their—and our—task.

How the Agreed Framework collapsed. In the spring and summer of 1994, the United States was on a collision course with North Korea over its efforts to produce the plutonium to fuel its first nuclear weapons. Thanks in large part to the diplomacy of former President Jimmy Carter, who met face-to-face with Kim Il Sung, the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the world pulled away from the brink. Out of this effort sprang the general outlines of the Agreed Framework, signed on October 12, 1994. It remains the only government-to-government accord ever made between the United States and North Korea.

The Agreed Framework was a bilateral non-proliferation pact that opened the door to a possible end of the Korean war. North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for heavy fuel oil, economic cooperation, and the construction of two modern light-water nuclear power plants. Eventually, North Korea’s existing nuclear facilities were to be dismantled and the spent reactor fuel taken out of the country. South Korea played an active role in helping prepare for the construction of the two reactors. During its second term in office, the Clinton administration was moving towards establishing a more normalized relationship with the North. Presidential advisor Wendy Sherman described an agreement with North Korea to eliminate its medium and long-range missiles as “tantalizingly close” before negotiations were overtaken by the 2000 presidential election.

But the framework was bitterly opposed by many Republicans, and when the GOP took control of Congress in 1995, it threw roadblocks in the way, interfering with fuel oil shipments to North Korea and the securing of the plutonium-bearing material located there. After George W. Bush was elected president, the Clinton administration’s efforts were replaced with an explicit policy of regime change. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, Bush declared North Korea a charter member of the “axis of evil.” In September, Bush expressly mentioned North Korea in a national security policy that called for preemptive attacks against countries developing weapons of mass destruction.

This set the stage for a bilateral meeting in October 2002, during which Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly demanded that North Korea cease a “secret” uranium enrichment program or face severe consequences. Although the Bush Administration asserted the enrichment program had not been disclosed, it was public knowledge—in the Congress and in the news media—by 1999. North Korea had strictly complied with the Agreed Framework, freezing plutonium production for eight years. Safeguards over uranium enrichment had been deferred in the agreement until sufficient progress was made in the development of the light water reactors; but if that delay was seen as dangerous, the agreement could have been amended. Shortly after Sullivan’s ultimatum, North Korea ended the safeguards program for its spent nuclear fuel and began to separate plutonium and produce nuclear weapons—igniting a full-blown crisis, just as the Bush administration was poised to invade Iraq.

In the end, the Bush administration’s efforts to resolve the impasse on North Korea’s nuclear program—aka the Six-Party Talks—failed, largely because of the United States’ adamant support for regime change in North Korea and persistent “all or nothing” demands for a complete dismantlement of the North’s nuclear program before serious negotiations could take place. Also, with the US presidential election nearing, the North Koreans had to have remembered how abruptly the plug had been pulled on the Agreed Framework after the 2000 election.

By the time President Obama took office, North Korea was well on its way to becoming a nuclear weapons state and was reaching the threshold of testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Described as “strategic patience,” Obama’s policy was to a large extent influenced by the pace of nuclear and missile development, particularly as Kim Jong-un, the founder’s grandson, ascended to power. Under the Obama administration, economic sanctions and increased-duration joint military exercises were met with intensified North Korean provocations. Now, under the Trump administration, the joint military exercises by the United States, South Korea and Japan—intended to demonstrate the “fire and fury” that could destroy the DPRK regime—appear to have only accelerated the pace at which North Korea has stepped up its long-range missile testing and detonation of more powerful nuclear weapons.

Dealing with the nuclear weapons state of North Korea. The seeds for a nuclear-armed DPRK were planted when the United States shredded the 1953 Armistice Agreement. Beginning in 1957, the US violated a key provision of the agreement (paragraph 13d), which barred the introduction of more destructive armaments to the Korean peninsula, by ultimately deploying thousands of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, including atomic artillery shells, missile-launched warheads and gravity bombs, atomic “bazooka” rounds and demolition munitions (20 kiloton “back-pack” nukes). In 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush withdrew all the tactical nukes. In the 34 intervening years, however, the United States unleashed a nuclear arms race—among the branches of its own its own military on the Korean Peninsula! This massive nuclear buildup in the South provided a major impetus for North Korea to forward-deploy a massive conventional artillery force that can destroy Seoul.

Now, some South Korean military leaders are calling for the redeployment of US tactical nuclear weapons in the country, which would do nothing but exacerbate the problem of dealing with a nuclear North Korea. The presence of US nuclear weapons did not deter a surge in aggression by North Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, an era known as the “Second Korean War,” during which more than 1,000 South Korean and 75 American soldiers were killed. Among other actions, North Korean forces attacked and seized the Pueblo, a US Naval intelligence vessel, in 1968, killing a crew member and capturing 82 others. The ship was never returned.

North Korea has long pushed for bilateral talks that would lead to a non-aggression pact with the United States. The US government has routinely spurned its requests for a peace agreement because they are perceived as tricks designed to reduce the US military presence in South Korea, allowing for even more aggression by the North. The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl echoed this sentiment recently, asserting that North Korea is not really interested in a peaceful resolution. While citing a statement by North Korean Deputy UN Ambassador Kim In Ryong that his country “will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table,” Diehl conveniently omitted Ryong’s important caveat: “as long as the US continues to threaten it.”

Over the past 15 years, military exercises in preparation for war with North Korea have increased in extent and duration. Recently, Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s much-watched The Daily Show, asked Christopher Hill, chief US negotiator for the Six-Party talks during the George W. Bush years, about the military exercises; Hill declared that “we never have planned to attack” North Korea. Hill was either ill-informed or dissembling. The Washington Post reported that a military exercise in March 2016 was based on a plan, agreed to by the United States and South Korea, that included “preemptive military operations” and “‘decapitation raids’ by special forces targeting the North’s leadership.” In the Washington Post article, a US military expert did not dispute the plan’s existence but said it has a very low probability of being implemented.

Regardless of how likely they are to ever be implemented, these annual wartime planning exercises help perpetuate and perhaps even strengthen the brutal coercion by the North Korean leadership of its people, who live in constant fear of an imminent war. During our visits to North Korea, we observed how the regime inundated its citizens with reminders about the carnage caused by napalm that US aircraft had dropped during the war. By 1953, US bombing had destroyed nearly all structures in North Korea. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said several years later that bombs were dropped on “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” Over the years, the North Korean regime has developed a vast system of underground tunnels used in frequent civil defense drills.

It’s probably too late to expect the DPRK to relinquish its nuclear arms. That bridge was destroyed when the Agreed Framework was discarded in the failed pursuit of regime change, a pursuit that not only provided a powerful incentive but also plenty of time for the DPRK to amass a nuclear arsenal. Secretary of State Tillerson recently stated that “we do not seek a regime change, we do not seek collapse of the regime.” Unfortunately, Tillerson has been drowned out by coverage of belligerent tweets by President Trump and sabre-rattling by former military and intelligence officials.

In the end, a peaceful resolution to the North Korean nuclear situation will involve direct negotiations and gestures of good faith by both sides, such as a reduction or a halt of military exercises by the United States, South Korea, and Japan, and a reciprocal moratorium on nuclear weapon and ballistic missile testing by the DPRK. Such steps will generate a great deal of opposition from US defense officials who believe that military might and sanctions are the only forms of leverage that will work against the North Korean regime. But the Agreed Framework and its collapse provide an important lesson about the pitfalls of the pursuit of regime change. Now, a nuclear arms control agreement may be the only way to bring this over-long chapter of the Cold War to a peaceful close. It’s difficult to persuade someone to make a deal, if he is certain you’re planning to kill him, no matter what he does.

Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Phase two is to maneuver the inept Democrats in Congress into passing a temporary budget deficit-debt extension in order to allow the tax cuts to be implemented quickly. That’s already a ‘done deal’.

Deficits & Debt: Resurrecting Old Lies and Misrepresentations

Food stamp costs have also risen sharply since 2008. But that’s because real wages have stagnated or fallen for tens of millions of workers, making them eligible under Congress’s own rules for food stamp distribution. Now Ryan and his friends want to literally take food out of the mouths of the poorest by changing eligibility rules.

The Real Causes of Deficits and the Debt

So if social security, medicare-medicaid, SSI, food stamps, and other social safety net programs are not the cause of the deficits, what then are the causes?

Notwithstanding all these facts, what we’ll hear increasingly from the Paul Ryans and other paid-for politicians of the rich is that the victims (retirees, single moms, disabled, underemployed, jobless, etc.) are the cause of the deficits and debt. Therefore they must pay for it.

This article was originally published by Jack Rasmus.

The risk of war between the United States and North Korea is “increasing every day”, U.S. National Security Adviser Herbert Raymond McMaster has said, adding that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is working to advance his country’s nuclear capability against the United States.

“The greatest immediate threat to the United States and to the world is the threat posed by the rogue regime in North Korea, and his continued efforts to develop a long range nuclear capability,” McMaster told Fox News Saturday, after Pyongyang’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile last November 29.

This missile test, North Korea’s first since mid-September, came after Pyongyang had denounced Trump’s decision to relist it as a State sponsor of terrorism, calling it a “serious provocation and violent infringement.” Kim Jong-un claimed it as a “breakthrough” that will allow it to strike the mainland United States.

“After watching the successful launch of the new type ICBM Hwasong-15, Kim Jong-un declared with pride that now we have finally realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force, the cause of building a rocket power,” a statement read on state television said.

In the statement, North Korea described itself as a “responsible nuclear power,” saying its strategic weapons were developed to defend itself from “the U.S. imperialists’ nuclear blackmail policy, and nuclear threat”.

President Trump has said repeatedly that all options, including military ones, are on the table in dealing with North Korea, and has traded insults and threats with Kim. In September, the U.S. president said that Washington would have no choice but to “totally destroy” North Korea if forced to defend itself or its allies.

North Korean state media has repeatedly called President Trump an “old lunatic,” as the American leader called Kim Jong-un “a sick puppy” last week.

On Nov. 30, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, said that the regime in Pyongyang would be “utterly destroyed,” if war were to break out in the wake of the latest ballistic missile test by Pyongyang.

“We have never sought war with North Korea, and still… we do not seek it,” Nikki Haley said.

“If war does come, it will be because of continued acts of aggression like we witnessed… And if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed. No one can doubt that this threat is growing.”

The UN ambassador also called on all nations to “cut ties” with North Korea.

“Yesterday the North Korean regime made a choice. It chose to feed its nuclear aggression” and to “thumb its nose” at the world, she said.

The Finnish Professor of International Relations Timo Kivimäki, Director of Research at the University of Bath in England, told teleSUR that

“while Ambassador Haley feels that North Korea is begging for a war, and that it is blackmailing the region with nuclear weapons, North Korea can, actually, be begging for peace. It may be building a nuclear deterrent to react to what it sees as U.S. nuclear blackmail.”

“The North Korean situation is very dangerous. We’ve got to irresponsible, impulsive, reckless, bullying, threatening leaders with access to nuclear weapons. They’re playing an apocalyptic game of chicken,” pointed out to teleSUR the American nuclear expert, Peter Kuznick.

“Both keep escalating the rhetoric and the provocations. This might end very, very badly. Neither wants to back down and look weak. They both base their reputations on being strong and always winning, regardless of the costs or how much suffering they cause”.

President Trump has repeatedly and openly dismissed efforts to start talks with North Korea. In early October, he said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man [Kim Jong-un]” in putting out feelers for negotiations with Pyongyang.

On Oct. 9, Defence Secretary James Mattis declared that the armed forces had “to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our president can employ if needed.”

During a Moscow conference dedicated to peace on the Korean peninsula, and the future reunification of its two states on Sept. 30, North Korean Ambassador to Russia Kim Yong-jae said:

“If the U.S. behaves in ways that deny our state’s right to exist, our republic, as our supreme leader Kim Jong-un has said, will make them pay in full by the just power of our nuclear arsenal.”

Prof. Dr. Kivimäki said that

“only with dialogue can both sides see that what both see as nuclear blackmail, could actually be just deterrence.”

“Unfortunately, it seems, North Korean leader has been unable to understand that his provocative moves not only deter, but also provoke, and instead of provocations, both North Korea and the US should focus on dialogue, so that the core interests of both countries could be secured.”

Lofted trajectories of Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In mid-October, the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier along with a guided-missile cruiser, nearly 80 aircraft on board and a nuclear-powered submarine, arrived in the Korean Peninsula to prepare for a potential war with North Korea.

Since then, US and South Korea are conducting joint drills to detect, track, and intercept ballistic missiles, in addition to anti-submarine warfare training.

Prof. Dr. Kuznick said that the world lives under a deep uncertainty.

“We know what the ultimate solution will have to be. The world will have to accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, as odious as that prospect might be,” the expert said, adding that a peace treaty ending the Korean War is fundamental, as both parties has signed an armistice agreement at the end of the war on July 27, 1953.

“The U.S. will have to reduce its military presence and training exercises in South Korea and stop threatening regime change. It may have to also ease its sanctions,” the Director of Nuclear Studies at the American University added. “North Korea will have to halt its missile and nuclear weapons tests and freeze its programs. It will have to stop making threats. This is what we call the ‘freeze for freeze’ option.

“Something like that was in place between 1994 and 2002 and it was largely successful though neither side fully met its responsibilities. It can work again. But it doesn’t look like Trump and Kim are capable of working this out.

“Therefore other international leaders will have to take the initiative. I hope this happens quickly because the situation gets more dangerous by the day. And this is the closest we’ve come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the possible exception of the dangerous standoff between India and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, another crisis that continues to fester,” observed Prof. Dr. Kuznick.

U.S. human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy Director of Project South and past president of the National Lawyers Guild, spoke to teleSUR considering that Washington has no right to a preemptive attack against North Korea.

“From a legal point of view, the launch of a military attack against North Korea will be very problematic,” she pointed out.

“The U.N. Charter only allows the use of military force by states for self defense or when there is collective action by the UN Security Council. Neither of these pre-requisites are met here. As a result, US military action against North Korea under current conditions should be considered illegal under international law.”

U.S. Historian Kuznick observed that North Koreans would rather “eat grass” than give up their nuclear weapons, as Russian President Vladimir has said.

“They feel under attack from the United States. They vividly remember what the U.S. did to them in the Korean War, when the U.S. burned down every city in both North and South Korea.”

“The U.S. dropped four times as many bombs on Korea as it did against Japan in World War II. They know that the Korean War never officially ended.”

Prof. Dr. Kivimäki pointed out to the same direction, reminding that North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Yong Ho claimed in his paper at the ASEAN Regional Forum on August 7, that

“North Korea’s fear is rational. given that the U.S. has actually used nuclear weapons against civilians, that it has placed nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula, that it keeps on practicing war operations that simulate regime change, that it has changed regimes in several authoritarian non-nuclear countries and that it has refused the commitment to non-use of nuclear weapons against countries with no nuclear weapons.”

“None of this can be read from the world media,” stated the Finnish researcher.

Concluding his analysis, International Relations expert Kivimäki considered that Pyongyang’s fear is not irrational, given that president Nixon actually once gave an order for a nuclear attack against North Korea.

“The CIA’s top Vietnam specialist, George Carver, reportedly said that in 1969, when the North Koreans shot down a U.S. spy plane, ‘Nixon became incensed and ordered a tactical nuclear strike.’

“Someone has said that Nixon was like Trump but without the Twitter. Trump, again, was like Nixon, but without Kissinger. Hopefully, the obvious conclusion is not a nuclear strike against North Korea.”

On the other hand, Prof. Kuznick warned, deeply concerned:

“we don’t know what to expect. These situations can not be allowed to turn into nuclear holocausts, from which our species and our planet may never recover.”

Featured image: Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is located in Ethiopia (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Tensions are rising between Egypt and Ethiopia over the latter’s Grand Renaissance Dam.

Cairo recently reiterated its longstanding position that it’s against Addis Ababa’s construction of this megaproject on the Blue Nile river through which it receives most of its water, believing that the dam would allow Ethiopia to control downstream Egypt’s access to this resource and thus place it in a strategically vulnerable position. The Horn of African state hit back at the latest criticism by stating that it won’t be thwarted in carrying out this nationally important development project, and it also refuted the rumors which claimed that Qatar was partially funding the dam. Egypt’s latest infowar campaign against Ethiopia’s initiative is thought to be fueled in part by Sudan’s strategic realignment towards Addis Ababa in this dispute and more broadly in a larger Silk Road context, which has totally changed the dynamics and correspondingly placed Cairo on the defensive.

This simmering situation is much bigger than its trilateral format would suggest because it’s taken on contours of the Gulf Cold War over the past couple of months. Qatar worked quickly to patch up its previously rough relationship with Ethiopia ever since the Saudi-led but Emirati-orchestrated effort to “isolate” Doha on purported anti-terrorist pretexts, while at the same time its pro-Egyptian UAE former partner doubled down on its military presence in Ethiopia’s neighboring rival of Eritrea and the self-declared statelet of “Somaliland” on the pretense of using their territories to aid in the disastrous War on Yemen. Altogether, a dangerous trend is emerging whereby the Gulf Cold War is expanding to the Horn of Africa in seeing an Emirati-aligned Egypt encouraged by its GCC partners to behave more bellicosely towards a Qatari-backed Ethiopia, with the Grand Renaissance Dam becoming a transregional symbol of proxy discord.

Egypt knows that it will forever remain dependent on Ethiopia in the event that the project is completed, which would in turn place the world’s most populous Arab state and the GCC’s top non-Gulf ally under the influence of Qatar’s allies in Addis Ababa, something which is unacceptable for both President Sisi and his monarchic sponsors so long as Doha is perceived as supporting the Muslim Brotherhood that threatens them all. Short of any formal state-to-state conflict, Egypt and the UAE could use Eritrea as a launching pad for organizing anti-government destabilization efforts against Ethiopia, something that Cairo is already suspected of doing when it comes to Addis Ababa’s concerns that they’ve been manipulating the country’s centrally positioned and most populous plurality of the Oromo to that end.

Should proxy warfare operations heat up in the Horn of Africa, then the implications could be geopolitically profound because they could endanger China’s Silk Road railway through Djibouti to the Ethiopian capital, which could in turn offset the spread of multipolarity to this strategic region. Amidst all of this, Sudan’s crucial position between the two most directly competing parties will become all the more important as a “balancing” force, but it will more than likely take China’s discrete Great Power diplomatic involvement to alleviate interstate tensions just like it decisively did between Bangladesh and Myanmar last week.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Dec 1, 2017:

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.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled Yemen despotically from May 1990 until ousted in February 2012 – earlier ruling North Yemen from 1978 to 1990.

He sided with Houthi fighters against Saudi Arabia until betraying them – shifting his allegiance to the kingdom, saying:

“I call upon the brothers in neighboring states and the alliance to stop their aggression, lift the siege, open the airports and allow food aid and the saving of the wounded and we will turn a new page by virtue of our neighborliness.”

The Houthi controlled interior ministry accused him of “creating chaos by working with militias of aggression, helping extremist militants,” the group’s political bureau adding:

“It is not strange or surprising that Saleh turns back on a partnership he never believed in. The priority has been and still is to confront the forces of aggression.”

On December 4, Houthi fighters blew up his home in Sanaa, media reports saying he was killed en route to Marib, his death confirmed by a senior aide, a video of his alleged body posted online by the Houthis, showing a severe head wound.

On Monday, Houthi al-Masriah television said

“(t)he leader of treason has been killed.”

Its media official Abdel-Rahman al-Ahnomi said he was killed, trying to flee to Saudi Arabia through Marib.

Heavy fighting has been ongoing in Sanaa for days, Saudi terror-bombing striking Houthi positions. Their fighters now control the city, according to reports, many Saleh loyalists defecting to their forces.

The UN called for a humanitarian halt in fighting to let civilians get out of harm’s way, enabling aid workers to reach them, the wounded able to get medical treatment.

UN humanitarian coordinator in Yemen Jamie McGoldrick said streets in Sanaa are “battlegrounds.” Aid workers “remain in lockdown.”

Sanaa-based Norwegian Refugee Council protection and advocacy advisor Suze van Meegen said fighting in the city “completely paralyz(ed) humanitarian operations,” adding:

“No one is safe in Sanaa at the moment. I can hear heavy shelling outside now and know it is too imprecise and too pervasive to guarantee that any of us are safe.”

Regional ICRC director Robert Mardini tweeted:

“The night was tough. Massive urban clashes with heavy artillery and airstrikes. Yemenis stuck in their homes, too scared to go out. Reduced access to water, health care, food and fuel.”

An unnamed woman said

“(i)t’s like horror movies. I have lived through many wars but nothing like this.”

Explosions rock the city, defenseless civilians at risk of death or severe injuries. Bodies of dead and wounded lie in streets unattended, fighting too fierce for anyone to venture out, hundreds killed or wounded since last Wednesday.

Defection of loyalist Saleh forces to the Houthis marks a significant turn in the war, ongoing for nearly three years, causing the world’s gravest humanitarian crisis.

On Monday, Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam claimed significant gains in the battle for Sanaa, saying:

“With the aid and approval of God, the security forces backed up by wide popular support were able last night to cleanse the areas in which the militias of treason and betrayal were deployed.”

Will Trump order aerial attacks on Houthi fighters in Sanaa, aiding Saudi terror-bombing? Will US-orchestrated aggression escalate, intensifying the humanitarian crisis?

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

The former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been killed today. He was 75 years old but still very active in Yemeni politics. Video of his dead body being thrown onto the back of a pickup is making the rounds. One hears Houthi slogans shouted in the background. The pictures show a gun wound on the chest and at the side of the head. The face is easily recognizable. There are also pictures of his ID card.

Though several media report his death there is no confirmation yet from his GPC party or his family.

Over the last few days Houthi media had announced several times that Saleh had been killed. This morning Saleh’s house was blown up. This time the Houthi news proved right. The circumstances of Saleh’s death are not yet known, but it was said that he was fleeing Sanaa when fate caught up with him.

As we wrote in our recap on Saturday, Saleh had suddenly made peace with the Saudis and asked his followers to take up arms against his former allies. For more than two years he had allied with the Houthi against the U.S. and UK supported Saudi invasion and proxy forces. On Friday, after several days of local clashes with the Houthi, he had called for his followers to throw the Houthi out of the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

For a day his fighters, led by some 1,000 soldiers of Saleh’s personal guards, were successful and the Houthi were kicked out of many of their positions. But they were not defeated. They called up more of their troops and on Sunday regained the lost ground and buildings. They occupied Saleh’s media. His TV station started to transmit his enemies chants. Over the last night and throughout today they defeated Saleh’s troops.

It is yet a mystery why not more of Saleh’s supporters came to his help. Sanaa is his home turf and whenever he had called for demonstrations in the city, hundreds of thousands attended. For much of his 34 years of rule as president and even after his forced resignation Saleh could call on the seven “collar tribes” who’s territory surround the capital. This time they did not come to his aid. Saleh also continued to command significant parts of the former Yemeni army. These currently hold positions far outside of Sanaa against Saudi proxy forces who try to conquer the mountainous territory of northwest Yemen. One wonders why he had not called them back in time.

It may be that his unexpected turn-on-a-dime towards a new alliance with the eternal enemies of Yemen, the Saudis, has alienated his followers.

The Saleh family and clan is quite big and resourceful. Many of his relatives have held high military positions in the Yemeni army and keep enough money to pay for their troops loyalty. Some nephew of his may take up his banner. It is unsure though if such a replacement could gain the following of the former army units Ali Abdullah could call on.

The Saudis had recently bet on Saleh to end the stalemate in their war on Yemen. Had he won out, it could have meant a pause in the war and probably its end. With the Houthi now having the upper hand in Sanaa, the war, the permanent Saudi bombing and the blockade of Yemen are likely to continue. The Houthi will continue to attack within Saudi Arabia and the fight against the Saudi proxy forces on the ground will go on.

It will need another breakthrough event for the war to stop.

Update:

In previous pieces on Yemen MoA had quoted Haykal Bafana and Iona Craig. Both live in Yemen. Here are their first thoughts on Ali Abdullah Saleh’s death:

@BaFana3 – 6:49 AM – 4 Dec 2017I cannot describe the deep grief I feel. Ali Abdullah Saleh was the greatest leader #Yemen ever had. He never surrendered: He died a martyr in his homeland Yemen, as a Yemeni fighting for Yemen’s cause. I salute Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, both in life and in death.

@ionacraig – 6:13 AM – 4 Dec 2017I was 1st foreign journalist to interview Saleh after he stepped down. He said his memoirs wouldn’t be published until after his death as they contained secrets about many people. I responded “So a lot of people should be afraid the day that you die?” He laughed & said “InshAllah”

Followers of Saleh and his family will now consider revenge against the Houthi for Saleh’s death as their highest priority:

@SaadAbedine – 2:21 PM – 4 Dec 2017Unconfirmed reports that Ahmed, #Saleh’s eldest son & former commander of #Yemen’s Republican Guard, will be addressing the nation tonight at 9 PM local & that he was released from his house arrest in #UAE, en route to Marib to lead the fight & seek revenge from #Houthi rebels

In December 2016 the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution reaffirming that Israel’s Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are illegal and calling on Israel to stop settlement activities in the OPT. Resolution 2334 says the settlements have “no legal validity,” calls them “a flagrant violation under international law,” and demands Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities.”

Nine months earlier, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in Resolution 31/36, had ordered the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights to “produce a database of all business enterprises” that “directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of the settlements.”

The database was scheduled for release in December 2017. Meanwhile, the Israeli and US governments have been trying to prevent that list — which reportedly includes at least 150 local and international companies — from becoming public.

“We will do everything we can to ensure that this list does not see the light of day,” Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon told The Associated Press.

US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said,

“We just view that type of blacklist as counterproductive.”

The UNHRC has reportedly delayed the release of the list until “early next year.”

“[Israeli] officials say they are taking the so-called ‘blacklist’ seriously, fearing its publication could have devastating consequences by driving companies away, deterring others from coming and prompting investors to dump shares of Israeli firms,” AP reported.

An Israeli official told The Washington Post that the companies include Israeli banks, security firms, supermarkets, restaurant chains, bus lines, and multinational corporations that provide services and equipment to build and maintain the settlements.

Resolution 31/36 also called on states to take “appropriate measures to help to ensure that businesses domiciled in their territory and/or under their jurisdiction, including those owned or controlled by them, refrain from committing or contributing to gross human rights abuses of Palestinians.”

Publication of the list of companies would make the UNHRC “the world’s biggest promoter of BDS,” Danon opined. In a statement, Danon said,

“The Human Rights Council has turned into an accomplice of the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement and its conduct is both anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic.”

In fact, the BDS movement is not anti-Israeli, as it targets the policies, not the people, of Israel. And actions against Israel’s policies, including BDS, do not equate to anti-Semitism, as I explain elsewhere.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)

Representatives of Palestinian civil society launched the BDS movement in 2005. They called upon “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era … [including] embargoes and sanctions against Israel.”

The call for BDS specified that “these non-violent punitive measures” should last until Israel fully complies with international law by (1) ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab territories and removing the barrier wall; (2) affirming the human rights of Israel’s Arab-Palestinian citizens to full equality; and (3) affirming the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as required by UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

Israel seeks to suppress the identities of the companies that support the settlements because it is feeling the pinch of the BDS movement. The United States thinks publication of the list would be “counterproductive” because it would fuel BDS, thereby negatively impacting Israel, the leading US client state and biggest recipient of US foreign aid.

BDS was a major factor behind the 46 percent decrease in foreign direct investment in Israel in 2014, according to a UN report. A World Bank report revealed that Palestinian imports from Israel dropped by 24 percent in the first quarter of 2015.

Several investors, including Bill Gates, George Soros, TIAA-CREF and the Dutch pension company PGGM, have divested from companies doing business in the illegal settlements. Venezuela and Brazil cut diplomatic ties with Israel. Companies that have pulled out of the settlements and the Israeli market include SodaStream, the French telecom Orange and the French multinational corporation Veolia. G4S — the London-based security company that assists with Israeli checkpoints, unlawful detention and torture of Palestinian prisoners — is selling its Israeli subsidiary due to millions of dollars in lost contracts as a result of the BDS campaign.

The European Union promulgated rules prohibiting funding of Israeli companies based in illegal Israeli settlements and has cautioned about the risks of doing business with illegal Israeli settlements.

Israel Maintains “Apartheid Regime”

In March 2017 a UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia report concluded that Israel maintains an “apartheid regime” and recommended that national governments support BDS activities to challenge Israel’s illegal system of oppression of the Palestinians. The report was co-authored by Richard Falk, an international law expert and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the OPT.

Mandla Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela, concurs. He said at a November 27 press conference in the West Bank,

“Palestinians are being subjected to the worst form of apartheid.” Mandela noted, “The settlements I saw here reminded me of what we had suffered in South Africa because we also were surrounded by many settlements and were not allowed to move from one place to another freely.”

“What we have experienced in South Africa is a fraction of what the Palestinians are experiencing,” Mandela told Royal News English. “We were oppressed in order to serve the white minority. The Palestinians are being eliminated off their land and brought out of their territories, and this is a total human rights violation. I think it is a total disgrace that the world is able to sit back while such atrocities are being carried out by apartheid Israel.”

Jewish Voice for Peace and other human rights organizations have called for “increasing grassroots pressure on Israel, through Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns, until full human rights of Palestinians are realized.”

Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian official, said the forthcoming UNHRC list of companies is an “important step” in the campaign against the illegal settlements.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is co-author (with Kathleen Gilberd) of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. The second, updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was published in November. Visit her website: MarjorieCohn.com. Follow her on Twitter: @MarjorieCohn.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Featured image is from The Hindu.

«Che il futuro dell’Europa si giochi anche in Africa credo sia molto chiaro soprattutto a noi italiani, per ragioni storiche e geografiche»: lo ha dichiarato il presidente del Consiglio Paolo Gentiloni nel suo tour africano, dal 24 al 29 novembre, attraverso Tunisia, Angola, Ghana e Costa d’Avorio. In tal modo, non volendo, ha detto la verità: l’Italia e l’Europa considerano oggi l’Africa molto importante per le stesse «ragioni storiche e geografiche» del passato, ossia di quando essa era sotto il loro dominio coloniale. L’Africa è ricchissima di materie prime: oro, diamanti, uranio, coltan, rame, petrolio, gas naturale, manganese, fosfati, legname pregiato, cacao, caffè, cotone e molte altre. Queste preziose risorse, sfruttate dal vecchio colonialismo europeo con metodi di tipo schiavistico, vengono oggi sfruttate dal neocolonialismo europeo facendo leva su gruppi di potere e governanti africani corrotti, manodopera locale a basso costo e controllo dei mercati interni e internazionali.

Lo conferma il viaggio d’affari del premier Gentiloni, in veste di piazzista dell’Eni, multinazionale che in Africa opera in Algeria, Libia, Tunisia, Egitto, Kenya, Liberia, Costa d’Avorio, Nigeria, Ghana, Repubblica del Congo, Angola, Mozambico, Sudafrica. La Tunisia, prima tappa del viaggio di Gentiloni, è importante base Eni non solo per il giacimento di El Borma, ma anche quale via di transito del gasdotto Transmed che porta in Italia il gas algerino. In Angola Gentiloni ha presenziato, insieme al presidente Lourenço, alla firma di un lucroso accordo che assegna all’Eni il 48% dei diritti sul grande giacimento Cabinda North. In Ghana ha visitato la maxi piattaforma galleggiante Eni di produzione e stoccaggio, per lo sfruttamento di giacimenti offshore di oltre 40 miliardi di metri cubi di gas e 500 milioni di barili di petrolio.

In Costa d’Avorio – dove l’Eni ha acquisito il 30% di una grande area offshore ricca di idrocarburi, tramite la sua controllata Eni Côte d’Ivoire Limited con sede a Londra – Gentiloni ha partecipato al quinto vertice Unione europea – Unione africana, insieme alla Mogherini, rappresentante esteri della Ue, al presidente francese Macron e alla cancelliera tedesca Merkel. Al centro del vertice, nuovi investimenti europei in Africa per il nobile scopo di «dare nuove speranze ai giovani africani». Tali investimenti sono però, in genere, finalizzati a formare élite africane funzionali agli interessi neocoloniali.

Anche nei paesi con i maggiori introiti dall’export di materie prime, la maggioranza degli abitanti vive in povertà. Secondo dati Onu, si trovano in tale condizione oltre i due terzi della popolazione dell’Africa subsahariana e oltre il 40% vive in povertà estrema. Emblematico l’esempio della Costa d’Avorio e del Ghana, visitati da Gentiloni: non solo hanno grandi risorse energetiche, ma sono i primi due produttori mondiali di cacao (con quasi il 60% della produzione totale). Esso viene coltivato per la maggior parte da piccoli contadini, che vivono in povertà poiché sono costretti a vendere a prezzi bassissimi i semi di cacao, da cui le multinazionali del cioccolato ricavano alti profitti. Così, come ha detto anche Renzi, «si aiutano gli africani a casa loro».

Nel quinquennio 2010-2015, i maggiori investimenti in Africa sono stati effettuati da Stati uniti, Gran Bretagna, Francia, Cina, Sudafrica e Italia. Ma nel 2016 è passata in testa la Cina, seguita da Emirati Arabi Uniti e Italia che, ha dichiarato con orgoglio Gentiloni, è stata l’anno scorso il maggiore investitore europeo in Africa con circa 12 miliardi. Stati uniti e Unione europea vedono il loro ruolo dominante nelle economie africane messo sempre più in pericolo dalla Cina, le cui società offrono ai paesi africani condizioni molto più favorevoli e costruiscono le infrastrutture di cui essi hanno bisogno: finora circa 2300 km di linee ferroviarie e 3300 km di strade. Allo stesso tempo, Stati uniti e Unione europea vedono i loro interessi minacciati da movimenti armati, come quello dei «Niger Delta Avengers» che attaccano gli impianti della statunitense Shell e di altre companie petrolifere tra cui l’Eni, responsabili del disastro ambientale e sociale nel delta del Niger.

Poiché perdono terreno sul piano economico, gli Stati uniti e le maggiori potenze europee gettano la spada sul piatto della bilancia. Il Comando Africa degli Stati uniti, con la motivazione ufficiale della lotta al terrorismo, sta estendendo e potenziando la sua rete militare sul continente, con operazioni delle forze speciali, uso di droni armati, addestramento e armamento di forze speciali africane. La Francia, che negli ultimi cinquant’anni ha compiuto nel continente oltre cinquanta interventi militari ufficiali più molti altri segreti, sta intensificando le operazioni in Africa occidentale, centrale e orientale, dove mantiene circa 7 mila soldati e diverse basi militari soprattutto in Mali, Senegal, Gabon e Costa d’Avorio. L’Italia – che ha una presenza militare in Libia, Mali, Somalia e Gibuti – sollecita la Nato a intervenire in Africa. «La Nato – sottolinea il premier Gentiloni – deve guardare verso il Sud. Se la più grande alleanza militare della storia non lo fa, oggi rischia di non essere all’altezza delle sfide contemporanee». La Nato si sta preparando a guardare ancora verso il Sud, come quando nel 2011 ha demolito lo Stato libico con la guerra.

Manlio Dinucci

We bring to the attention of Global Research readers the selection of articles below which reveals the actions of the Trump administration to provoke North Korea into a nuclear war.

Please help us spread this selection of articles by forwarding it far and wide, discussing it within your circle of friends and colleagues, reposting our articles on blog sites and social media, etc.

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Will Trump Launch a Nuclear Holocaust? US Hysteria Blooms in Wake of North Korean Missile Splashdown

By William Boardman, December 03, 2017

The most dangerous thing about the North Korean missile launch is the reaction of the unprincipled, under-informed, white identity extremist sitting in the Oval Office. If there’s a nuclear war coming out of this manufactured “crisis,” the buck will have stopped with him. Not that President Trump doesn’t have other fools egging him on to risk global chaos and destruction in response to an imaginary, inflated threat from an impoverished nation of 25 million people. Sadly, this is not a surprising development after more than sixty years of aggressive US behavior toward North Korea.

US and South Korea Begging for War with North Korea. Preparation for Military Onslaught under Operation “Vigilant Ace”

By Carla Stea, December 03, 2017

This preparation for military onslaught against the DPRK, called “Vigilant Ace,” will begin on December 4, and this “Sword of Damocles,” which the U.S. and South Korea hold over North Korea is a perpetual form of terrorism. Confronted with these constant and deadly military threats and intolerable provocations, the DPRK had no alternative but to increase its defense, and on November 28 tested another ballistic missile.

The US-North Korean Crisis and Japan’s Responsibility

By Prof. Wada Haruki, December 03, 2017

They talked about the North Korean issue for “a great deal of time”. The content of their talks was not disclosed. In the final press conference after the Summit Prime Minister Abe stated that he and President Trump “were in complete agreement as to the measures to be taken upon the analysis of the latest situation of North Korea”.

North Korea Open to Talks if Recognized as Nuclear Power – Russian Delegation to Pyongyang

By RT News, December 01, 2017

North Korea is ready to sit at the negotiating table for peace talks if it is recognized as a nuclear power, the Russian delegation to Pyongyang said, adding that the North claims that it was forced to be aggressive and will not stop its nuclear program.

North Korea and the Dangers of Nuclear War: Towards the Implementation of a Peace Project

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 30, 2017

Fire and Fury” was not invented by Donald Trump. It is a concept deeply embedded in US military doctrine. It has characterized US military interventions since the end of World War II.

Nuclear Weapons and ICBM Capabilities: Ninth U.N. Security Council Meeting This Year on North Korea

By Stephen Lendman, November 30, 2017

The DPRK genuinely fears possible US aggression, knowing these weapons are its most important deterrent. Given the ominous threat from the Trump administration, it would be madness to give them up, leaving the country defenseless.

Donald in Command of Nuclear Weapons: Reconsidering the “Nuclear Demigod” Called “Mr. President”

By John Mecklin, November 29, 2017

A Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on nuclear use authority included clear expressions of concern, most pointedly from Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who said he and others were concerned “that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with US national security interests.”

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The Cafetal Angerona, located at about 5 kilometers from the current town of Artemisa a city with about 80 thousand people, the capital of the newly formed Artemisa Province of Cuba prior part of the Pinar del Rio province, was declared a National Monument in June 1989.  Little could be done, however, to bring the monument back to its previous splendor without financial resources. Cuban volunteers did what they could without funding and cleaned the area of vegetation that was blocking access and accelerating the deterioration of the site.

In Angerona, the site of a coffee plantation, history and archaeological field work are coming together to hopefully help us understand a little bit better life under slavery dehumanizing conditions and giving life to the drowned voices of slaves. Looking into slave trade, slavery and the lives of slaves can be a challenging experience for all of us, and one that forces us to reflect and question racial prejudices and privileges. Furthermore, slavery is not over as it continues to besiege the world; thus field work in Angerona can have a role in enriching our reflections on slavery and on encouraging us to challenge it and work towards stopping it wherever we find it in the world today.  .

Peculiarities of Angerona

Angerona may have differed from other plantations as it may have offered slaves a marginally better existence than anywhere else in Cuba. For example, in Angerona slaves may have benefitted from working under better conditions, in covered areas protected from the weather, the afternoon tropical Sun or very strong rains; slaves may have benefitted from not working at night and being better rested. Angerona may have included an infirmary; slaves may have lived in units with kitchens and with their family members rather than in barracks divided by gender. Such concepts are part of the Cuban folklore regarding Angerona but they need to be proven by research. In 2018 a team of archaeologists from St Mary’s University, in Nova Scotia, is planning to explore such questions under the supervision of Aaron Taylor.

And yet, regardless of whether, or how far, Angerona departed from the typical model of plantations Angerona was still a plantation. And, the plantation economy target was the exploitation of slaves, and, slaves suffered the most cruel, barbaric and dehumanizing system known to us. There was physical violence against slaves in Angerona and slaves were locked in their quarters behind walls and a gate and watched from the Watchtower at all times to prevent them from escaping. The mud floors of the slaves’ quarters were covered with limestone, Taylor shared in a presentation about his field work in Angerona this past November 28^th, to prevent slaves from eating mud, a method slaves used in attempting escape slavery by killing themselves. We can only guess about their desperation and anguish.

Angerona came into existence in 1822, the work and idea of Cornelio Souchay Escher, a German, of French Huguenot, background who bought the land on which it would be build (530 hectares) in 1813 for, arguably, for 14 thousand pesos. Souchay arrived in Cuba from Germany in 1806 and at the age of 22. He was born in October 21^st, 1784. Souchay stayed in Havana from 1806 until 1822 when he moved to Angerona with her lover, a black woman born in Haiti, Ursula Lambert. Cornelio had met Ursula in Havana and they have done business together. Ursula, 6 years her junior, had been born in 1790 in Haiti, the free daughter of slave parents. She and her parents arrived with her parents’ owners in Cuba in one of the last migration waves the result of people fleeing the war of liberation which was raging in Haiti since Ursula’s birth. They settled in Guantánamo, Eastern Cuba.

The historical context

A number of relevant episodes were taking place in the world at this time. For example, from 1770 the British colonies of North America had been fighting for their independence from Britain, which was recognized in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris. In Haiti, the “Societe des Amis des Noirs” (The Society Friend of Blacks) was established in 1878 following the steps of Wilberforce, the British abolitionist. In 1789 the French people stormed the Bastille, liberating the incarcerated and launching the French Revolution, focused on bringing the monarchy down to create a republican government but also in the rights of men with the proclamation of the declaration of the Human Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Haiti, a French colony, located close to Cuba, a colony of Spain, both with plantation economies exploiting slaves. In the case of Haiti, 20 thousand white men dominated and controlled more than 400 thousand slaves. The power of the King was being challenged in France and threatened to be replaced by a republican system and, naturally, at the colonies the colonial power and structure was bound to be challenged. In fact, Haiti becomes the second colony fighting for its independence, after the United States (1776) but Haiti also becomes the center of a rebellion of black slaves. When in 1791 the Slave Rebellion starts in Haiti Toussaint Louverture was 50 years old, a slave born of African parents working at the Breda plantation; he had learned to read thanks to the teachings of an older slave. Initially the Rebellion of the Slaves takes the side of the King knowing that only the King could warrant their freedom but soon this will change and the rebellion will side with the Republic. Louverture, a self taught naturist, had enrolled in the army of the King as a doctor and only after ensuring the safety of his master and his family who he put in a ship for Baltimore and to whom he regularly sent means for survival. An interesting point because it shows that the dehumanizing treatment slaves received did not cause them all to forget their humanity; in fact, most black generals involved in the Rebellion of the Slaves ensured the safety of their masters and their families.  Soon Louverture and his generals realize that the king is not planning to comply with his promise and they stopped supporting the monarchy, thus, in 1794 Louverture and his army join the forces of the Republic wearing the tricolor rosette. (2)

Cuban colonials become increasingly concerned when Haitians started to immigrate to their island, some with their slaves with a focus on establishing and working there. Haitians immigrants fleeing the Rebellion of the Slaves made Cuban colonials increasingly concerned about the Rebellion expanding to Cuba and the propaganda the Haitian slave owners spread in Cuba contributed to this because they wanted the Cubans to believe that Louverture had plans for attacking Cuba to liberate the slaves there too. The details are complex and Louverture is taken prisoner in 1802 under Napoleon directive, a directive Napoleon himself regretted later in writing. Louverture is sent to Fort de Joux where he dies of hunger in April 1803 but the fight for Haiti’s independence continues and Haitian independence is granted in January 1804 after the island was burned to the ground by the rebels, who set fire to everything in their efforts to be free. (2)

A lovestory: the daughter of slaves, the slave owner

When, in 2014, Berta Serafina Martínez Páez completed her biography of Ursula Lambert, the Cuban movie “Roble de Aroma/The Scent of Oak” (2005) had already portrayed Ursula as a sophisticated and attractive black young woman with a taste for music and a flair for organizing and very much in love with Cornelio Souchay, the owner of Angerona.  But, a film has limitations in terms of what can and cannot share with an audience regarding the complexities of interpersonal relations between slaves and their owners. Berta had, as a writer, more time and space to reflect and consider complexities and pay more attention to detail. Berta had collected an impressive number of documents about Ursula and Berta herself is a woman of color. She explains during an interview that she reflected much on the complexities of life in the Angerona coffee plantation and investigated the life of Cornelio Souchay almost as much as Ursula´s life.  When Berta published Ursula’s biography and presented it at the Havana Book Fair in 2015 she had already visited with living descendants of Souchay in Germany, her hope was to write a biography on him as well.

Angerona functioned as a coffee plantation between the years 1822 and 1837, she argues, that year Cornelio Souchay dies and at this point, or few years later, the plantation passed to the hands of Andre Souchay, Cornelio´s nephew. Soon after that the coffee plantation is unable to function for a number of reasons, one of them, she believes, had to do with both Cornelio Souchay and Ursula Lambert been extremely good managers who paid much attention to detail, while Andre was not. The plantation suffered their absence. At its height, Angerona had 450 slaves who took care of 750 thousand coffee plants; by 1837 the number of slaves was less than half, close to 200. Ursula moved to Havana after Souchay died and continued to work and live there until 1860. She died at the age of 70 a rich woman with a fortune of her own making and 20 slaves to her name.

The main challenges Berta faced in writing the biography had to do with her own feelings about slavery, the brutality of slave work and the plantation system but also the questions arising in connection with the intimate relationship between Lambert, a black woman daughter of slaves, and Souchay, a slave owner. Berta was challenged too by the reality of Ursula Lambert owning slaves herself until her death. To complete her work, she explains, she had to be able to “put things in its place, reclaiming their lives with their virtues and challenges,” she had to understand them as imperfect human beings and find value in the work they did in bringing to life the most productive and sumptuous coffee plantation of Cuba (“towering over more than 130 existing ones in San Marcos and Cayajabos at the time of cafetal splendor”). (1)

Berta is passionate about the history of Artemisa, her community. She learned about Angerona in 1959 but could not start her research until 1982. Her knowledge of the plantation economy and of the history of the area helped her. Berta is dismayed in finding that Cubans may not be as interested as she is in history or in Angerona. Her book is an attempt to share knowledge, to inform and engage others with her passion. Her research, detailed and demanding, was recognized because of its quality by the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana who published her book.  The book she wrote is available outside of Cuba and it can be found in a number of American libraries on loan (the New York Public Library or the Columbia University Library of New York).

Beyond Angerona

Then dealing with a subject like slavery we cannot escape asking difficult questions. Facing challenges of the past can help us deal with questions and challenges of the present connected to oppression, exploitation, abuse, discrimination, racism, classism, as well as with views accepting, and even admiring, power and money and of those who hold it without paying due attention as to how it is obtained, held and maintained and at what costs. Most of us and most of the times we live unexamined lives, there is either little time to reflect on them or very little incentive in society for us to do so. There is also strong bias benefitting the rich and powerful and many prejudices against the poor, the week and the vulnerable. We rarely examine how power is achieved or how money is accumulated, or if they are achieved and accumulated in ethical ways or in oppressing, exploiting and abusing others. We rarely consider whether the powerful, rich people at the top of our societies deserve our admiration or should be questioned and condemned for abusive actions against others, and for holding a relentless unlimited ambition.

Angerona is the setting where 450 slaves worked, without rights, to enrich a couple who lived luxurious lives and had much power over the lives of their slaves. This couple exhibited a love for music and refinement, and hopes for creating an orchestra of slaves to show the slaves capacity for growth and refinement. This does not change, however, the reality of slave work, the treatment of slaves as not-human, the fact that they were supervised from a watchtower and locked behind a gate every night.  Even if research were to proof that Angerona was less oppressive than other plantations, a lesser evil, it was evil nevertheless. A few concessions to slaves can provide slave owners some moral relief while they still receive most of the economic benefits of their exploitative enterprise. Still, slavery, slave trade and the existence of slaves is a criminal enterprise that colonizers learned to live with to ensure and maintain their privileges. They ignored the costs to their own humanity, and to the humanity of their own children raised in that form of hell on earth that turned them into corrupted devils pretending to be better that they were. But, often, exploiters forget, or oversee, how exploitation corrupts them more than it corrupts the exploited.

When looking into what shape slavery may have taken in Angerona we are looking into more than the past because slavery exists today. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) there are more than 40 million people victims of modern slavery worldwide.  The term, “modern slavery” includes practices such as forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage and human trafficking. These are situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception or abuse of power. In addition to the 40 million adults victims of slavery there are 150 million children subjected to child labour, almost 1 in 10 children around the world. Of the 40.3 million adults forced into slavery, about 24.9 million are in forced labour while the remaining 15.4 million are in forced marriage. Of the 24.9 million in forced labour, 16 million are exploited in the private sector (domestics, construction and agricultural workers), 4 million are in forced labour imposed by state authorities, and 4.8 million are in forced sexual exploitation.

Women and girls are disproportionately affected by forced labour, accounting for about 99% of the victims in commercial sex industry and for about 58% of the victims in other sectors. There are 5.4 victims of slavery for every 1000 people in the world. The United Nations has proclaimed December 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. This year the 50 for Freedom Campaign aims to persuade at least 50 countries to ratify the Forced Labour Protocol by 2018. (3)

There was much outrage when CNN made public a video where Africans were sold in a public auction in Libya.  People protested and questions were asked to the Libyan government that had to admit their lack of control over the country and recognize the challenges Libya faces since western powers attack and dismantled Gaddafi´s government. Slavery today is cheap and disposable. In 1850 an average slave in the American South cost the equivalent of 40 thousand dollars in today’s money, but, today, and worldwide, the cost of a slave is on average 90 dollars. Modern slaves are not considered investments worth maintaining so they are disposable and easily killed. At the tape CNN showed from an auction in Libya a slave is shown to be sold at 300 dollars. (4)

Thus, when the team of archaeology students and professors from St Mary University visits Angerona this summer of 2018, and, as part of their field research posse the question of whether at the coffee plantation the slave quarters were barracks, separating slaves by gender, or a village, favouring family units, we will be waiting for the answer. We will be waiting not because of what it tells us about the past but because of what it can tell us about ourselves as people, our present and future, and the future of our humanity which makes us who we are. We will be eager to posse new questions to understand, and bring to life, the silenced voices of the slaves of Angerona for what they can contribute to our understanding of the cruel, dehumanizing system human created and labeled “plantation economy”, and imposed in our continent and in our world by the relentless love of money and profit of some of us.

Notes

1. Interview by Teresa de Jesùs Torres Espinosa en Habana Cultural, on “Ursula Lambert: la singular haitiana del Angerona” book author Berta Serafina Martínez Pàez, February 16, 2015. http://habanacultural.ohc.cu/?p=15656

2. Josè Luciano Franco (2010) “Historia de la Revolucion de Haiti. La batalla por el dominio del Caribe y el Golfo de Mexico.” Alba bicentenario, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Instituto Cubano del Libro.

3. United Nations, 50 For Freedom Campaign, December 2, 2018. http://www.un.org/en/events/slaveryabolitionday/

4. Slavery Today, https://www.freetheslaves.net/about-slavery/slavery-today/

All images in this article are from the author.

I deplore the tax cut that has passed Congress. It is not an economic policy tax cut, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with supply-side economics. The entire purpose is to raise equity prices by providing equity owners with more capital gains and dividends.

In other words, it is legislation that makes equity owners richer, thus further polarizing society into a vast arena of poverty and near-poverty and the One Percent, or more precisely a fraction of the One Percent wallowing in billions of dollars. Unless our rulers can continue to control the explanations, the tax cut edges us closer to revolution resulting from complete distrust of government.

The current tax legislation drops the corporate tax rate to 20%. This means that global corporations registered in the US will be taxed at a lower income tax rate than a licensed practical nurse making $50,000 per year. The nurse, if single, faces in 2017 a 25% marginal tax rate on all income over $37,950.

A single person is taxed at a rate of 33% on all income above $191,651. 33% was the top tax rate extracted from medieval serfs, and approaches the tax rate on US 19th century slaves. Such an upper middle class income as $191,651 sounds extraordinary to most Americans, but it is so far from the multi-million dollar annual incomes of the rich as to be invisible. In America, it is the shrinking middle and upper middle class incomes that bear the burden of income taxation. The rich with their capital gains from their equity holdings are taxed at 15%.

Even single individuals who earn between $1 and $9,325 are taxed at 10% on their pittance.

The neoliberal economists who are the shills for the rich, Wall Street, and the Banks-Too-Big-Too-Fail claim, erroneously, that by cutting the corporate income tax rate to 20% all sorts of offshored profits will be brought back to the US and lead to a booming economy and higher wages. This is absolute total nonsense. The money won’t come back, because it is invested abroad where labor costs are lower, if invested at all instead of buying back the corporation’s stock or buying other existing companies. After 20 years of offshoring US manufacturing and professional tradable skills and the incomes associated with the jobs, who is going to invest in America? The American population has no income with which to purchase the goods and services from new investment, and the American population’s credit cards are maxed out.

All that is going to happen is that Wall Street will calculate the lower tax rate into a higher equity price. Wall Street can do this without any of the offshored earnings coming home. Suddenly, everyone who owns equities will experience a boost in wealth, or the boost has already occurred in anticipation of the handout.

The deficit-conscious Republicans have put into the Bill for Enhancement of the Rich’s Wealth, cuts in social services in order to “save workers from higher interest rates from budget deficits.” This is more dishonesty. If the Fed lets real interest rates rise to any meaningful amount, derivatives will unwind, and the Fed will have to create trillions more in new dollars to keep its ponzi scheme in place. The deficit that results from the tax cut will be covered by the Fed purchasing the Treasuries, not by a rise in interest rates.

What we are witnessing in the US and indeed throughout the western world is the total failure of capitalism. Capitalism is now merely a looting machine. The financial sector no longer supplies capital for production. What the financial sector does is to turn discretionary consumer income into interest and fee payments to banks. Aggregate demand can only grow through debt expansion, and the consumers reach a point where they cannot expand their debt.

Capitalism, hiding behind “globalism,” which is misrepresented as a good thing when it is death itself, locates production where labor is cheapest, thus depriving First World labor of good wages and work opportunities and putting First World countries on the path to becoming Third World countries. Short-term profits and executive and board bonuses and stock options are maximized at the cost of the destruction of the domestic consumer market.

Plunder Capitalism also privatizes as much of the public sector, such as the military, as possible, thus driving up the cost of the Pentagon’s budget. Jobs that the soldiers themselves formerly did are given to politically-connected firms. What was once KP (kitchen patrol) is now provided by an outside private service. Private mercenaries hired by the Pentagon collect as much in a month as troops in the line of fire earn in a year. I don’t know that the army any longer has a supply organization other than the private business that has the contract.

Medicare and Medicaid are the next to be privatized, along with Social Security. The tax cut will result in deficit and high interest rate hype, and these lies will be used to save the workers from high interest rates on their mortgage, credit card, and student loan debt by scaling back or privatizing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The environment and public lands will be sacrificed to the private profits of timber, mining, and energy companies. Grizzly bears and wolves are losing their protection under the endangered species act so that states can sell trophy hunting licenses to men who have to prove their manhood by killing an animal with a high-powerful rifle at a safe distance.

What we are witnessing is the complete looting of America and the entirety of the West. While the Western World collapses, the insouciant, submissive people sit there sucking their thumbs while they are being ruined.

Nothing is left of the West except looters at work.

This tax bill is an abomination, an act of brutal plunder. Its sponsors should be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, if not hung from a lamp post.

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

On December 2, US Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo revealed that he has sent a letter to General Qassem Soleimani, a commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force to warn him that the US will hold Iran responsible for any attacks on its troops in Iraq, according to Reuters.

“What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we will hold him and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control… We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear,” Pompeo said during a Reagan National Defense Forum in Southern California.

However, according to Pompeo, Gen. Soleimani refused to receive or open his letter, in a move that shows high tensions between the US and Iran in Iraq and Syria.

On November 30, Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, head of the Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced that Soleimani refused to receive a letter that was sent by the CIA director thought a mediator. Back then, many news outlets doubted Golpayegani’s statement and described it as a propaganda.

“I will not take your letter nor read it and I have nothing to say to these people,” Golpayegani quoted Gen. Soleimani as saying, according to the Lebanese al-Mayadeen TV.

Al-Mayadeen revealed that Pompeo’s message was sent to Gen. Soleimani when he was leading the battle against ISIS in the Syrian city of al-Bukamal on the Syrian-Iraqi border.

The message timing reflects the US fear of the advance of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The liberation of al-Bukamal poses a great threat to the US and Israeli interests in the region, according to many experts, because it allows Iran to open a land route from Tehran to Beirut.

Tala Silo former spokesman of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) revealed during an interview with the Turkish Anadolu Agency that the US pushed the SDF to launch Deir Ezzor attack in order to capture the Syrian-Iraqi border before the SAA and its allies reache it. However, the US plan “failed” according to Silo.

Featured image is from South Front.

Featured image: A screengrab from a video reportedly showing the body of Ali Abdullah Saleh

The former president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was killed on Monday in a reported RPG and gun attack while trying to flee fierce fighting between his loyalists and his former allies the Houthis in the capital Sanaa.

Graphic video shared on social media showed the body of Saleh being carried in the back of a pick-up vehicle. The man had suffered a large head wound.

The Houthi-aligned television station, al-Masirah, stated:

“The interior ministry announces the end of the crisis of the treason militia and the killing of its leader and a number of his criminal partisans.”

Warning: the following pictures contain images of death and injury.

#BREAKING NEWS
Warrning Graphic
Footage of the body of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh
Who was killed in a road in Khawlan east #Sanaa
Its reported he was on his way to #Marib east #Yemen pic.twitter.com/0iJKbGZH3p

— Hussain Albukhaiti (@HussainBukhaiti) December 4, 2017

Officials in Saleh’s GPC party confirmed to Reuters that he was killed outside Sanaa, in what sources in the Houthi group said was an RPG and gun attack.

The GPC officials said Saleh was killed south of the capital Sanaa along with the assistant secretary-general of the GPC, Yasser al-Awadi.

Sources in the Houthi group said fighters stopped his armoured vehicle with an RPG rocket and then shot him dead.

Al-Masirah stated that Saleh was killed while trying to flee the capital for Marib province.

Footage of Saleh showed Houthi fighters unfurling a blanket containing the corpse and shouting, “praise God!” and “hey Ali Affash!”, another last name for Saleh.

Media channels in Iran, whose government backs the Houthis, and al-Arabiya, a Saudi channel, also announced Saleh’s death.

Al Arabiya quoted a source in Saleh’s GPC party as saying he was killed by a sniper.

The reports came amid intense fighting and claims from the Houthis, who control Sanaa, that they had destroyed Saleh’s house in the centre of the city.

In a speech late on Sunday, apparently his last, Saleh formally annulled his alliance with the Houthis.

The Houthis had branded him a traitor for allegedly striking a deal with Saudi Arabia.

Saudi coalition aircraft had supported Saleh’s troops in fighting over the last five days.

Salehg ruled for 33 years before being toppled in 2012 during popular protests.

However, he soon allied with the Houthis, with whom he had fought six wars while president, to fight the new Saudi-backed government of Abd Rabbuh Hadi, his former vice-president.

Syrian state television has confirmed that Israel attacked a military base outside of Damascus overnight on Friday, which Israeli media reports involved both surface-to-surface missiles and airstrikes, while Syria says its air defense systems were engaged and intercepted two missiles. 

Like other recent strikes inside Syria, the Israeli jets reportedly fired from over Lebanese airspace, in order to avoid both Syrian anti-aircraft missile systems and provoking a Russian response. Though the extent of the damage or casualties is not yet known, Syrian media has confirmed material damage to the base, and other reports indicate mass power outages in some of parts of Damascus occurred immediately after the attack, which SANA says happened at 12:30am local time. 

It appears the base is likely the same one featured in a November BBC report which showed satellite images detailing the purported construction and renovation of an “Iranian military base” near El-Kiswah, which lies 14 km (8 miles) south of Damascus.

As we’ve noted before, the BBC report was dubiously sourced to “a Western intelligence source” and the story was quickly utilized by Israeli leaders to ratchet up rhetoric in preparing its case before the international community for further attacks on the supposed Iranian targets. Israel has long justified its attacks inside Syria by claiming to be acting against Hezbollah and Iranian facilities and arms depots.

#Syria Another Video allegedly showing Syrian Anti Air Defense intercepting one of the Israeli Missiles launched towards the countryside of Damascus pic.twitter.com/xIeS4MTjJI

— Ivan Sidorenko (@IvanSidorenko1) December 1, 2017

Indeed, BBC itself used ambiguous language in saying the satellite images “seem to show” construction activity at the site referenced by the intelligence source between January and October this year. However, the images don’t actually show much at all related to an Iranian military presence, but merely a series of two dozen large low-rise buildings – likely for housing soldiers and vehicles, which would be expected of any state army or sovereign nation.

Furthermore, the very title of the November piece – “Iran building permanent military base in Syria – claim” – underscores the complete lack of evidence for such a claim, which the BBC notes in the article is “impossible to independently verify.”

Yet in reporting last night’s Israeli strike on Syria, the BBC uncritically referenced its own prior unconfirmed “claim” to paint a picture that Israel is actually taking action against Iran and Hezbollah: “Israel has hit weapons sites before, in a bid to prevent arms being transferred to Syria’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah. Arms convoys in particular have been singled out by the Israeli air force.”

And the BBC followed this with:

Last month the BBC revealed a claim that Iran was building a permanent military base near the town. A series of satellite images showed construction at the location of the alleged base, which was made known to the BBC by a western intelligence source.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously warned that Israel would not allow Iran to establish any military presence in Syria.

So it appears the BBC is playing war propagandist for Israel, instead of including any level of critical inquiry regarding Israel’s unprovoked act of aggression against its neighbor. In short, the BBC spread what it acknowledged to be a mere “claim” based solely on an unnamed “Western intelligence source”. Then Israel used that claim to attack Syria, after which the BBC in circular fashion justified the attack based on its own original dubious “claim”.

Israeli media and politicians are currently using BBC published satellite images as “proof” that Israel attacked an “Iranian base” in Syria last night. Image source: BBC

Meanwhile, just about every major Israeli newspaper in today’s reporting is prominently featuring the prior BBC report as justification for the latest attack on Syria. The Times of Israel provides one such example among many when it says:

The alleged Israeli attack came three weeks after the BBC reported that Iran was building a permanent military base in Syria just south of Damascus. The British broadcaster commissioned a series of satellite pictures that showed widespread construction at the site.

Or see this op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today which references the BBC report as a watershed moment:

The attack raises several questions. Why wait so long to strike the Iranian base? What did “western intelligence sources” hope to accomplish by publishing information on the Iranian base? Why were the Iranians at the site given time to leave by their base becoming so public? The month’s activity appear to be part of a complex game being waged by Iran to entrench itself in Syria and Israel’s attempts to warn the Iranians off. Whatever was taking place at El-Kiswah had plenty of time to be wrapped up and moved if the Iranians were concerned about it being struck. If the reports about Israel’s threats to target sites between 40-60km from the Golan are accurate then it would indicate that the warnings have been manifested.

And nearly every major Israeli media source is also republishing the BBC satellite images as part of their reporting on the overnight strikes.

As we’ve long pointed out, anytime that Israel carries out acts of aggression against Syria, it can just blame Iran or Hezbollah and escape international criticism or condemnation. International media and Western governments have already demonstrated a penchant for towing the Israeli line whenever Iran can be conceivably blamed as a culprit – evidence or no evidence – this as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it official Israeli policy to oppose Iranian presence in Syria.

Yet what key facts do the BBC and others leave out?

On Tuesday Israel’s own Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that there are no Iranian military forces in Syria, but instead merely stuck to acknowledging “Iranian experts and advisers”. In comments to Israel’s Ynet news, Lieberman admitted, “It is true that there are a number of Iranian experts and advisers, but there is no Iranian military force on Syrian land.”

Clearly, Defense Minister Lieberman’s statement flies in the face of claims made by Netanyahu in his speech before the UN General Assembly this year when Netanyahu said, “We will act to prevent Iran from establishing permanent military bases in Syria for its air, sea and ground forces. We will act to prevent Iran from producing deadly weapons in Syria… And we will act to prevent Iran from opening new terror fronts against Israel along our northern border.”

In other words, Israel’s top military chief very publicly contradicted both Netanyahu’s and the BBC’s claims of Iranian military bases on Syrian soil, yet the BBC neglected to mention such essential information. Thus, it appears that the mainstream media is preparing us for war… but sadly, this is nothing new.

Featured image is from SANA.

“The New York Times is a great newspaper, but arguably this very fact helps make it a great instrument for the engineering of consent to lots of problematic and sometimes very nasty policies and pieces of reality.”

– Edward S. Herman [1]

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It is interesting to compare media treatment of the countries of Syria and Yemen.

Both countries have been rife with armed conflict for years. Both in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Millions in both countries are food insecure and lacking access to basic goods and services. [2]

Yet, while Syria has gotten extensive coverage in the press, the Yemen tragedy remains largely hidden from view.

The media’s coverage seems to reflect the status of the named perpetrators as allies or rivals of the U.S. Hence, Syrian casualties of Bachar Al Assad are ‘worthy victims.’ Yemeni casualties of U.S. allied Saudi Arabia and its coalition bombing are ‘unworthy victims.’

This differential treatment could make for a vital contemporary case study of what a seminal media analysis published in 1988 called a ‘Propaganda Model.’ The thesis, in a nutshell, is that media reporting will inevitably conform to the needs, desire and world view of the corporate and government power players that dominate social discourse in Western nations.

The publication was called Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. One of the authors of that influential work, Edward Herman, passed away from cancer on November 11.

Edward Samuel Herman was Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He attained notoriety however as a media analyst and critic, specializing in the corporate, regulatory and political economy of the media. His views have been expressed in about twenty books, including not only Manufacturing Consent (co-authored by Noam Chomsky), but The Global Media: The Missionaries of Global Capitalism (with Robert McChesney, 2000) and most recently, Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later (with David Peterson, 2014).

Edward Herman’s work was influential to a generation of activists, this author included. Over the course of this program, first broadcast on December 1st, a range of individuals who have connected or collaborated with Professor Herman will share their thoughts about the man, his theories and influence, and the legacy he leaves behind.

Stephen Lendman is a writer, broadcaster, and independent journalist. Edward Herman had contributed to Lendman’s 2014 volume: Flashpoint in Ukraine. How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III. Lendman’s November 16th commemoration of Edward Herman appears on his site stephenlendman.org.

Jeff Cohen is the founder of the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College in New York. Cohen is author of the November 14th article Edward S Cohen: Master of Dissent, published at Fair.org.

Ann Garrison is a writer, journalist and reporter with KPFA Pacifica Radio in Berkeley CA. A contributor to numerous online media outlets including Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Digital Journal. Pambazouka News, Counterpunch and Global Research, Ann has interviewed Edward Herman on several occasions. Their last recorded interview focused on the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mickey Huff is the current director of Project Censored, the media research project headquartered out of Sonoma State University in California. PC’s Censored 2018, released in October contains a chapter authored by Edward Herman updating the Propaganda model on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Manufacturing Consent.

One final note, Edward Herman’s articles have been published at Global Research for almost as long as the site has been in existence. An archive of his articles can be found at this link.

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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:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/new-york-times-great-paper-great-propaganda-organ/5308591
2.  https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-humanitarian-overview-2018

The first round of Chile’s presidential election was held on November 19. The right-wing candidate, ex-president Sebastian Pinera, won with 36% of the votes. He will compete in the second round against centre-left candidate Alejandro Guiller.

But the big surprise was the result for the Broad Front (Frente Amplio, FA), a heterogeneous left coalition headed by Beatriz Sanchez. The FA candidate came in third, with 20% of the vote (just two points short of making the second round).

The coalition also won 18 deputies and a senator, which is unheard of for an anti-neoliberal force outside of the traditional parties.

Viento Sur’s Brais Fernandez spoke with Luis Thielemann, an activist with Autonomous Left (one of the organizations with parliamentary representation within the FA), about the elections and the rise of this new left formation.

Brais Fernandez (BF): What is your analysis of the results of Chile’s elections?

Luis Thielemann (LT): First, it’s clear that the result, for any observer, was a complete surprise. Although looking at it now we can see that there were many signs pointing to the possibility of a high vote for the FA, the truth is that no one believed it was possible to go into double digits. Polls showed it with about 8% support, and the history of the left in the past three decades in Chile is one in which it has never surpassed this limit.

Moreover, the FA went to the elections without the backing of the biggest left force in the country – in terms of history, number of activists and organising capacity: the Communist Party. In this context, the first point is the surprise factor.

The second is the political chaos that has been generated in Chile. If the FA is seeking to alter the balance of forces that has dominated Chile for almost three decades since the final years of the dictatorship, it has still not achieved this. But [the election] was a big step forward in this direction: it created electoral uncertainty, not only in terms of the second round, but for years to come in Chile.

In this way, the FA went from being ignored by the traditional political forces, to being the third political force in a system accustomed to only two players. And it is not just any third force, but one whose program is based on the big anti-neoliberal social struggles of the past decades.

Lastly, it was a gratifying vote for the FA, which had been accused of elitism by Communist and Socialist Party activists, due to its origins on the university campuses and middle-class neighbourhoods.

In the poorest neighbourhoods of Santiago, the FA vote was surprisingly high, in many cases beating the candidate of the New Majority (Nueva Mayoría), Alejandro Guillier.

This demonstrated grassroots work among the popular classes that, perhaps because of its incipient and discreet nature, had been missed by many observers, including those from the left.

BF: What is the FA, where does it come from, who is part of it?

LT: The FA was officially created in 2017, but the idea of its formation has been broadly shared by the left since the 2011 student mobilizations [for free education].

That it was broadly held does not mean that there were no important tactical and strategic differences between the different forces, as its formation has been one of the main discussion points within the left for the past few years.

It is made up of 13 organizations, that go from the small but important Liberal Party to Marxist and libertarian organizations.

The broadness of the FA reflects two aspects of Chilean politics: how far to the right politics has shifted (to the point where the Liberal Party feels comfortable in a coalition to the left of [incumbent New Majority president Michelle] Bachelet), where a minimal reform of neoliberalism is seen by the Chilean right as a Jacobin proposal.

And second, the social and political diversity of the opposition to neoliberalism and the authoritarian democracy inherited from the dictatorship [as part of the post-dictatorship transition pact between the parties of the right and centre-left].

The FA was the result of a maturing of various experiences. The first was the defeat of the 2006 student movement, which was defeated by the technocratization of its conflict by [the parties of] the transition pact in 2008.

Then there was the process of learning that the student and social movements of 2011 went through as a result of the creation of its own autonomous political leadership and its open rupture with the transition pact parties.

These movements – in particular the student movement – set up a series of radical left political organizations before, during and after 2011. Some of them have since disappeared, been refounded, split or fused.

The stand out organizations are Democratic Revolution (the strongest group in the FA), Autonomous Left (iA) and Autonomist Movement (a group that emerged out of a split from iA), among others. To these groups we can add those small parties that come from the extra-parliamentary left that emerged during the decades of the transition, such as the Humanist Party, the Green Ecologist Party, Equality Party, etc.

A third camp includes those parties that were formed as split-offs from the Coalition of Parties for Democracy [the centre-left coalition known as Concertacion, which predates the New Majority]. They saw in the FA the possibility of having a political impact, even if they do not have a clear or ideologically coherent left position. Within this group are parties such as Power or the Liberal Party.

The unifying element has been, on the one hand, the political window of opportunity that the crisis of the transition pact represents. Within this is seen the possibility of imposing or pushing forward the demands of the social movements that have challenged neoliberalism. These include the movement for public education, the university professors strikes, the movement against the AFPs (private administrators of pension funds), environmental struggles, to renationalize water and natural resources, etc.

What these struggles have tended to unite a social layer that has decided to stop looking to the Concertacion as a vehicle for potentially putting an end to the enduring legacy of the dictatorship; who got tired of seeing promises for reforms converted into the deepening of the model. This layer revealed itself on November 19 to be the third political force and 20% of voters.

Beatriz Sanchez launches her candidacy for the Chilean presidential election, in Santiago on April 3.

BF: What position will the FA take in the second round?

LT: This is the main issue of debate for the coming weeks. The second round will be on December 17, which means we don’t have much time.

We knew there would not be any time to debate this issue, nor peace of mind, as the level of political pressure placed on the FA since [November 19] has been enormous. But of course, no one thought that the FA would be key to the outcome of the presidential elections, as no one expected we would win 20% of the vote.

Given all this, some forces, such as iA, argued that the issue of negotiating with Guillier on the basis of the programmatic points put forward by FA candidate Beatriz Sanchez, and that have emerged out of the social struggles (end AFPs, free education, etc.), should have been resolved before the first round.

Despite there being no debate, the FA has shown clarity on two important points: it will not accept positions in any eventual Guillier government, and will only support him on the basis of Guillier publicly committing to aspects of the FA program and with the aim of avoiding a right-wing government.

We are not dealing here with left forces that are debating among themselves on a university campus, but a political alliance in which one out of five voters has deposited their faith. These voters have not asked the FA to adopt a maximalist anti-everyone position, or to give carte blanche support to Guillier and the transition pact.

Instead, voters want us to, as much as possible, put an end to the legacy of the dictatorship, and begin a new cycle of democratization and expel the market from peoples’ everyday lives.

We know that this is very little and mediocre compared to the dreams of those in Petrograd 100 years ago [during the Russian Revolution]. But before dreaming about storming the Winter Palace, before even thinking whether it makes sense to storm palaces, we have to at least build the conditions to make this possible; we have to at least recuperate the possibility of doing left politics in Chile.

But the FA is 13 groups. Some have already said that they will decide their position internally and without discussing it with others, abusing their parliamentary hegemony within the left.

Others have said that they will not negotiate at all, which also prevents us from doing politics this month.

It is important to make a point here: left politics is not about remaining pure, about being the best martyrs.

Left politics is about provoking chaos, the decomposition of the forces of capital, and at the same time, rebuilding a force capable of imposing another politics, new relations of power, that tend towards expelling capitalism and building communism.

It is a slow process, but it is fought at every step, no matter how institutional or unimportant they seem to be.

Refusing to support Guillier in the second round might seem like the most radical position, but in reality it is a conservative position: it gives the political initiative to those who have always held it, reducing the FA’s electoral result to a mere protest vote.

The FA should propose a negotiation tha, whether accepted or rejected, will produce chaos among the neoliberal parties and the party system that has maintained them for decades.

If Guillier accepts the proposal for a government that pushes genuinely anti-neoliberal reforms, the transition pact will end up being destroyed; if, on the other hand, he makes no changes that are of interest for the FA, he will not be able to win the presidential elections.

What the FA is seeking in the second round is the possibility of directly impacting on the level of decomposition of the transition pact, and perhaps even beginning the process of its open destruction.

Translated from Spanish by Federico Fuentes (Socialist Project).

Major changes are roiling the states, societies and ruling classes of the biggest industrial economies, oil regimes and military complexes.

China is re-allocating its economic wealth toward building the most extensive modern infrastructure system in history, linking four continents.

Saudi Arabia is transferring a trillion dollars of pillage from princes to princes, from old business parasites to up-to-date versions, from austere desert mirages to fantasies of new mega-cities.

The United States is emptying the swamp of the Capital’s corruption and immediately replenishing it with the scandal of the day.

One Cabinet Secretary is fired; another Secretary is hired; one enemy is embraced; an ally denounced; the stock market flourishes and trade agreements are abandoned.  One tax is sliced and pleases the powerful; another is spliced and chokes the consumers.

Turmoil, some would say; chaos, others would claim. And the stouthearted argue, that’s the way the world turns round.

But for all the world’s current ‘shaking’, there is substance and direction:  There are models for the shaking-up and paradigms for the shaking down.

‘Shaking up’ occurs where visions of wealth and prosperity accompany science and discovery.

‘Shaking down’ is where the science of palace coups and the art of bloody intrigues fleece the poor while enriching and amusing the powerful.

The Art and Artist of the Shake Down

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), pursues a new policy of scientific, systematic, large-scale and long-term shakedown (SD).  Science is evident in these procedures, in their rigorous identification of targets and their efficient methodology of securing subjects and achieving success.

MBS and his associates launched their policy of SD in several well-planned stages.

First, they cloaked the entire SD operation as part of the vast transformation of the Kingdom, accompanied by a string of Western buzzwords:  modernization of a traditional society; cleansing the suites of corruption; diversifying the oil dependent economy; privatizing ARAMCO; and replacing camels and tents with a state-of-the-art mega city in the desert.

MBS thus moved to seize state power as the final act in an operation starting with a wave of shakedowns.

The Princes-in-waiting experienced the initial shakedown.

In orderly fashion, MBS wielded his royal sword on behalf of righteousness (according to his adoring fans in the Western press, like Thomas Friedman): Scores of corrupt princes and hundreds of the business and military elite were arrested (or abducted for ransom . . . and safe keeping).

The ‘shakedown’ was underway, but the captives were held in circumstances worthy of their status.  The abduction, imprisonment and plea-bargaining for ransom and release took place in the 5-star Riyadh Ritz-Hilton.

The MBS meritocratic modernizers (MM) held the highest degrees in finance and accounting and were adept at calculating appropriate ransoms from each and every captive.  The MM demanded hundreds of millions from the billionaires while the generals settled for an early retirement, stripped of pensions and commands.  Upon payment and release, the newly fleeced Saudi Princelings fled to the brothels of Beirut to receive un-brotherly comfort.  They were freed on one condition:  They would return some of the Kingdom’s pillage to fund a ‘New Class’ in a ‘New Arabia’ under the Crown Prince MBS.

However, Western investors, who quietly kept their snouts in the ‘traditional trough’ of Saudi wealth, were not sure where they stood with MBS and his meritocratic modernizers.  They needed to know, for the sake of their stockholders: Were they victims or beneficiaries of the big shakedown? Were they condemned to suffer among the corrupt billionaires or granted entry into the new realm of the virtuous Prince?

MBS may have carried out the largest shakedown in recent times, in the name of justice, but there are still no signs of a diversified, modern and prosperous society arising on the Arabian Peninsula. In some places, there rose a more diverse variety of shakedown artists and plotters: Many, who applaud the Crown Prince, await their share the loot.  In other parts of the peninsula, MBS continues to deliver famine, cholera and desperation and rain down bombs on the people of Yemen.  If Israel could turn the remnant of Palestine into an open-air prison for periodic slaughter, MBS could find his own ‘Palestinians’ in Yemen for target practice. 

China: The Shake Up

China is in the throes of one, two, many upheavals:  Over one million high and low ranking officials and millionaires, who levied their own ‘private tax’ on the public treasury, will celebrate another Chinese New Year – in jail.

Meanwhile, over 25 billion dollars has been spent on innovative high tech projects, reshaping the economy, reducing pollution and expanding the welfare state.

Over one trillion dollars is being spent on huge global infrastructure projects linking China to four continents in an integrated network of trade – The One Road-One Belt Network.

China is the polar-opposite of Saudi Arabia:  In place of state-sponsored ransom and blackmail (the ‘shakedown’) China is experiencing a monumental ‘shake-up’ – spending money in multiple directions.  There are overseas projects to promote trade relations; upward projects linking business to high technology and greater profits; downward projects to train and expand the skilled labor force, reduce pollution, increase social welfare, save lives and increase productivity.

Unlike the US, China has nourished its manufacturing sector, and not starved it of investment.  The average factory in the US is twice as old as those in China.  To even dream of catching up with Chinese production, the US would have to invest over $115 billion a year in manufacturing for the next three decades.

Limited access to investment capital will condemn the tens of thousands of small and medium size manufacturing enterprises in the US to low productivity and reduced exports.

In contrast, the Chinese government directs investment capital widely to manufacturers of all sizes and shapes.  Moreover, local Chinese manufacturers connect readily to the supply chain with big exporters.  China provides explicit incentives to exporters to work with local suppliers to ensure that profits are re-invested in the home market.

In the US, the multinational suppliers are located out of the country and their earnings are hoarded overseas. Whenever profits return to the US, these are directed into buybacks of shares and dividends for the stockholders —not into new production.

Beijing manages debt, raising and limiting it to promote dynamic development with a level of efficiency unmatched in the US.

China keeps a close eye on excessive debt, speculation and investment, in contrast to the unrestrained chaos of the so-called ‘free market’ of the US and its parasitical allies, the Saudi coupon–clipping shakedown artists.

The US: The Political Economy of Scandalous Conspiracies and ‘Flight Capitalism’

The chaotic free-for-all in the US political economy is manipulated by scandalmongers, conspirators and flight capitalists.   Instead of preparing an economic plan to ‘make America great again’, they have embraced the political blackmailers and intriguers of Saudi Arabia in a sui-generis global political alliance.  Both countries feature purges, resignations and pugnacious politicos who have never been weaned from the destructive bosom of war.

As a point of history, the United States didn’t start out as a bloated, speculative state of crony capitalists and parasitical allies:  The US was once a powerful industrial country, harnessing finance and overseas investments to securing raw materials for domestic industries and directing profits back into industry for higher productivity.

Fake, or semi-fake, political rivalries and electoral competition counted little as incumbents retained their positions most of the time, and bi-partisan agreements ensured stability through sharing the spoils of office.

Things have changed.  Overseas neo-colonies started to offer more than just raw materials: They introduced low-tax manufacturing sites promising free access to cheap, healthy and educated workers. US manufacturers abandoned Old Glory, invested overseas, hoarded profits in tax havens and happily evaded paying taxes to fund a new economy for displaced US workers.  Simultaneously, finance reversed its relation to industry:  Industrial capital was now harnessed to finance, speculation, real estate, insurance sectors and electronic gadgets/play-by-yourself ‘i-phones’ promoting isolated ‘selfies’ and idle chatter.

Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood replaced Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago.  Stockbrokers proliferated, while master tool-and-die makers disappeared and workers’ children overdosed on ‘Oxy’.

In the transition, politicians, who had no connection to domestic industry, found a powerful niche promoting overseas wars for allies, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and disseminating domestic spats, intrigues and conspiracies to the voters.  Vietnam and Watergate, Afghanistan and Volker, Iran-Contra and Reaganomics, Yugoslavia and Iraq, daily drone strikes and bombings and Bill Clinton’s White House sex scandals giving salacious birth to Special Prosecutors . . .

In this historic transformation, American political culture put on a new face:  perpetual wars, Wall Street swindles and Washington scandals.  It culminated in the farcical Hillary Clinton – Donald Trump presidential election campaign:  the war goddess-cuckquean of chaos versus the crotch-grabbing real-estate conman.

The public heard Secretary of State Clinton’s maniacal laugh upon her viewing the ‘snuff-film’ torture and slaughter of the wounded Libya’s President Gadhafi: She crowed: ‘We came, we saw…and he died’ with a sword up his backside.  This defined the Clinton doctrine in foreign affairs, while slaughter of the welfare state and the bloated prison industry would define her domestic agenda.

Trump’s presidential election campaign went about the country pleasuring the business and finance elite (promises of tax cuts, deregulations, re-contamination and jacking up the earth’s temperature with a handful of jobs), and successfully pushed aside the outrage over his crude rump grabbing boasts.

Wars, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood all gathered to set the parameters of the United States’ political economy:  The chase was on!

The Clinton sleuths uncovered an army of Russian conspirators running Trump’s electoral campaign, writing his speeches, typing his ‘Tweets’, designing his tactics and successfully directing the votes of millions of duped ‘deplorables’ – the rural and rust-belt poor.

The entire media world auto-pleasured their friends and allies with the Trump Administration’s political strip tease, shedding appointees, dumping nominees and misdirecting policies with a string of revelations.  According to dubious anecdotes, the Special Prosecutor uncovered Russian conspiracies to enlist Salvation Army bell ringers and Washington lobbyists.  The ‘deplorables’ meanwhile tuned out in disgust.

Trump retaliated with midnight Tweets and appointed a clutch of retired Generals, who had been battle-seasoned in Obama’s seven losing wars and even found a loudmouth South Carolina belle to evoke visions of mushroom clouds in the United Nations. Naturally, there was the coterie of Zionist advisers from the ‘think tanks’ and from his own family working double time to set US-Middle East policy on the road to new wars.

Trump’s Generals and Zionists on the one hand and the Democrats, liberals, anti-fascists and leftists formed the ‘resistance’ and fought fiercely for freedom: Freedom to direct the state to censor alternative news or informed discussion debunking the canard about Russian meddling, exposing Ukraine’s land grabs, proving Iran’s compliance to the nuclear deal and Tel Aviv’s baseless warnings about Tehran.  Bolstered by the President’s Chief Advisor Son-in-Law, Jared Kushner, the Saudi Crown Prince was praised for kidnapping the Lebanese Prime Minister and forcing his resignation. Everyday there was a new scandal, conspiracy upon conspiracy and, of course, fake news blaring out from all sides of corporate media and NPR.

The threat of war spreads across the Middle East:  How many families would the unholy trinity of Saudi Arabia-US-Israel slaughter, starve or incarcerate in Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan?  Drowned out by domestic scandals and conspiracies – this carnage did not happen – in the news.  While scores of thousands in Yemen suffered from cholera amidst a brutal Saudi blockade, The Washington Post – NY Times CBS-NBC-ABC published the same front-page photo of Trump’s clumsy handshake at the APEC Conference.  At least, the trillion-dollar corporate-oligarch tax cut merited a jolly Tweet from the Donald.

The Big Shakedown is all about the swindles and the sex designed to keep Wall Street safe, the Pentagon at war and the public distracted.

Conclusion

Three countries are shaking the world in different directions:

In Saudi Arabia, MBS is engaged in a region-shattering shakedown, picking the pockets of Princes for a trillion dollars of unearned and pilfered oil rents to finance more cholera, starvation and mass murder in Yemen and beyond.

Through China, there is a Eurasian ‘shakeup’ as Beijing expands modern Silk-Roads everywhere and with everyone to connect markets, develop supply chains and increase prosperity at home and among its trade partners.

And the US just shakes . . . and trembles as its leaders rush to further enrich the ultra-rich, conspire to uncover conspiracies upon plot, scandalize the scandalmongers and tell us that freedom really means the freedom to expose and gnaw over the sordid acts of petty perverts while hiding much greater truths and reality. Official truth has become a stinking mound of offal.

One can only hope for a great ‘shaking off’.

In the wake of the guilty plea filed Friday by retired General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor in the early days of the Trump administration, Trump’s opponents among congressional Democrats, the media and the intelligence apparatus have stepped up pressure on the White House.

Several leading Democrats suggested on Sunday television interview programs that the investigation into alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 US presidential election, headed by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller, was likely to conclude that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice, an impeachable offense.

The lenient character of Flynn’s guilty plea to a single felony count of lying to the FBI—with the promise of a sentence of no more than six months in prison and a $9,500 fine—has been universally interpreted to mean that Mueller plans to use Flynn’s testimony against higher-ranking officials in the White House and the Trump campaign: Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., and the president himself.

Senator Diane Feinstein of California, one of the wealthiest and most influential Democrats in the upper house, appeared on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” where she discussed the investigations by Mueller and by the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which she is the ranking Democrat. She declared,

“I think what we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice. I think we see this in the indictments, the four indictments and pleas that have just taken place, and some of the comments that are being made.”

Feinstein was referring to the step-by-step ratcheting up of the Mueller investigation: the guilty plea by a lower-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials; the indictments of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Richard Gates on charges of money-laundering, conspiracy and filing false statements; and now the guilty plea by Flynn, the first former White House official to be charged in the investigation.

The alleged obstruction of justice took place when Trump importuned then FBI director James Comey to drop the ongoing investigation into Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials during the transition period. In the course of that investigation, as Flynn now admits, he lied to FBI agents in an interview on January 24, 2017, four days after Trump’s inauguration. He was fired two weeks later, allegedly for telling the same lie to Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump repeatedly urged Comey to “go easy” on Flynn, and when it became apparent the investigation was continuing, he fired him. This triggered a political uproar that led Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to name Mueller, himself a retired FBI director, as a special counsel to run the Russian investigation, now expanded to include the actions of the Trump White House in seeking to block the probe.

Despite the hysterical allegations of “treason” and “Russian takeover” of the Trump administration, voiced by columnists at the New York Times and Washington Post, among others, no section of the political establishment seriously believes that the Kremlin is in charge of the White House. These sentiments are voiced to channel popular opposition to the Trump administration in a right-wing and pro-war direction.

The real concern in sections of the ruling elite is that Trump’s effort to establish a more collaborative relationship with Moscow cuts across the confrontational posture adopted by the Obama administration and the military-intelligence apparatus, beginning with the effort to subvert the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, the lone Russian ally in the Middle East, and intensifying with the US-backed ultra-right coup that removed a pro-Russian government in Ukraine.

It is significant that Feinstein, long one of the most cautious Senate Democrats on the question of potential impeachment of Trump, is now hinting at support for an effort to remove him, mainly citing his impact on foreign policy.

“We’ve got major problems in the world with our allies now, in the Middle East, with North Korea,” she said on “Meet the Press.” “It goes on and on. And I think that this president is just precipitating more and more angst that’s going to lead to serious discord.”

In response to a direct question from interviewer Chuck Todd,

“When do you hit your ‘enough is enough’ moment,” Feinstein replied, “Well, it happened about a month ago, and I can’t give you any particular event,” adding that it was the accumulation of reports of Trump’s increasingly erratic statements and actions.

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, adopted a similar stance in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. Asked about Trump’s latest tweet, in which he denied telling FBI Director Comey to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, Warner said,

“I believe FBI Director Comey. I think he was very credible in his testimony and his private meetings with us.”

CNN interviewer Jake Tapper cited another tweet, in which Trump said he had fired Flynn because he had lied to both Pence and the FBI:

“That would seem to suggest that President Trump knew that Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI, which is, of course, a crime, when he fired Flynn and also when he, according to Comey, asked Comey to back off. That seems to be in the territory of obstruction of justice.”

Warner concurred, saying,

“And, again, that’s why I think you’re going to see much more coming from the special prosecutor.”

He continued,

“We also have mounting evidence, almost every week, of additional contacts between the Russian government or Russian officials and officials connected to the Trump campaign, under the guise of trying to improve relations … there has never, there has never been, in modern American history, a political campaign that had this much outreach to a foreign government, and a foreign adversary in this case, throughout the campaign and throughout the transition.”

Warner is, like Feinstein, a charter member of the Democratic political establishment. A former telecommunications mogul, he is personally the wealthiest member of Congress, represents the state of Virginia, home of the CIA and Pentagon, and has the closest ties with the military-intelligence apparatus. He flirted with a presidential candidacy in 2008 before pulling back, and is expected to explore a 2020 candidacy as well.

Representatives of the super-rich like Warner and Feinstein are not targeting Trump because of his racist attacks on immigrants and Muslims, his gigantic tax-cut for American corporations—to be paid for through savage cuts in social spending—or his readiness to use US American military power around the world. Instead, they regard Trump as a destabilizing factor, in both domestic and international politics, whose provocative behavior undermines the long-term interests of the capitalist ruling class.

A handful of House Democrats have begun raising the possibility of impeachment, more as a campaign slogan for the 2018 elections than as a practical possibility, given the current Republican majority in the House of Representatives. But the Mueller investigation seems more tailored to put pressure on Trump to resign to avoid legal measures against his own family as well as himself.

There is no sign at this stage of Trump acquiescing to such demands. On the contrary, the right-wing media outlets aligned with the White House, including Fox News and Breitbart News, have unleashed a fusillade of counterattacks against his critics. Some of their missiles have struck their targets.

Special counsel Mueller was compelled to reassign an FBI official playing a major role in his investigation after it became known that he and another member of the investigative team had exchanged anti-Trump emails. Peter Strzok, deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, has been demoted to a human resources position.

The top investigative reporter for ABC News, Brian Ross, was suspended without pay by the network Friday after he made a false report that Trump had told Flynn to contact Russian officials during the election campaign rather than during the transition, when such contacts between foreign governments and those about to assume office in Washington are routinely carried out.

However, the White House is increasingly bogged down in the response to the investigation, and sinking deeper into crisis. According to press reports, over the past ten weeks at least two dozen campaign or White House aides have been questioned by FBI agents and attorneys working as part of the Mueller probe. These include Jared Kushner, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, former press secretary Sean Spicer, former foreign policy adviser J. D. Gordon, White House communications director Hope Hicks, and Gen. Keith Kellogg, chief of staff of the National Security Council. Trump’s White House lawyers, Donald McGahn and James Burnham—who do not represent him as a personal client but as president—have also been summoned to testify.

Featured image is from The Intercept.

Reports out of metro Damascus indicate that Israeli warplanes have carried out airstrikes in the area. Details of the attack are still unclear, as the first reports were in the Israeli media, and within a matter of hours were removed.

The Israeli reports claimed the strikes targeted the “Iranian base” south of Damascus. This military facility has never been confirmed by anybody as actually belonging to Iran, but Israeli outlets played that narrative up as part of the “Iranian threat.” Ironically, one Haaretz analysis piece which makes tangential reference to the incident, but the news article it was clearly meant to accompany is gone.

This isn’t entirely unusual within Israel, as the military censors often compel the media not to report stories. It is unusual, however, for them to let the story out and then recall it after the fact.

Media outlets outside of Israel reporting on the incident make no mention of a “Iranian base,” saying that what was targeted was an Army ammunition depot. Israel fired several missiles from warplanes in Lebanese airspace. One report claimed Syrian air defense shot down one of the missiles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already widely used by tech firms worldwide for everything from search engines to social media. It is also increasingly being developed for other applications including monitoring systems and decision making. Experimental platforms are already being tested that can review medical records and images to diagnose patients. There are also autonomous AI agents being developed and tested that carry out and defend against cyberattacks.

While the US is perceived to hold a large advantage in this crucial and ever-emerging technological field, Russian and Chinese leadership have publicly recognized the importance of AI and the need to prevent any one nation from monopolizing it.

Russian media would report regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regarding the future of AI that:

Vladimir Putin spoke with students about science in an open lesson on September 1, the start of the school year in Russia. He told them that “the future belongs to artificial intelligence,” and whoever masters it first will rule the world. 

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

Honduras is in crisis. Results from the election last Sunday have been delayed day after day but could be announced any moment. There have been streets protests for the past several days with several people killed. Constitutional rights have been suspended and a curfew imposed. 

The current president and National Party candidate, Juan Orlando Hernandez, has reportedly flown to Washington DC for consultation. Honduras is a US ally and the only Central America country to host US military base and forces. If Juan Orlando Hernandez is declared winner of the election it will likely result in increased mass protests and violence.

Background

The current National Party government derives from the 2009 military coup which overthrew President Manual Zelaya. When Zelaya was kidnapped in the coup, he was flown directly from Tegucigalpa to the US Palmerola Air Base just 40 miles from the capital. After time on the ground there, with the coup leaders presumably consulting with Washington, the kidnapped President was taken to Costa Rica. In the face of massive resistance to the coup government, five months later there was a sham election which, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, made the coup a “moot point”. The election was widely boycotted within Honduras but given the seal of approval by Washington.

Four years later, in 2013, there was a Presidential election which included a new party: the Liberation and Refoundation Party known as LIBRE. This party represented popular forces which supported the ousted President Manual Zelaya and his progressive policies. They emerged out of the popular resistance and quickly surpassed the traditional Liberal Party. In 2013 they presented a serious challenge to the National Party. They claimed they won the contest but it was stolen from them.

Ahead of the 2017 election LIBRE forged a coalition with two smaller parties. They decided to name themselves the Coalition Against the Dictatorship and to support Salvador Nasralla as their candidate. Former President Zelaya is a prominent leader in the coalition.

TSE Logo

David Matamoros Batson, previous Secretary General of the National Party and member of Congress, is president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). He has been responsible for overseeing the elections in 2013 and 2017.

Evidence of Election Fraud before the Election

Days before the Honduras election The Economist published a blockbuster article titled “Is Honduras Ruling Party Planning to Rig an Election?” They report “The Economist has obtained a recording that, if authentic, suggests the ruling party has plans to distort results in the upcoming election.” The two hour recording is from a National Party training session. It details five tactics used to influence election results: buy the credentials of small party delegates who are supposed to verify the local polling place, surreptitiously allow National Party voters to vote more than once, spoil the votes for other candidates, damage the tally sheet which favors their opponent so it cannot be transmitted electronically to election headquarters. and expedite the tally sheets favoring their party.

Evidence of Misconduct by TSE in the Election

Examination of the official twitter feed from the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal (@tsehonduras) and comparison with the previous 2013 national election procedures reveals that the TSE has operated with bias and lack of transparency. Given that the President of the TSE, David Matamoros Batson, is also the former Secretary General of the National Party, there should be more not less scrutiny.

Following are examples indicating bias in the election proceedings: 

1 – TSE delayed posting initial results that favored the opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla.

In the 2013, the TSE started posting the election results at 6:13 pm when just 24% of the total votes had been received. Those returns gave the National Party candidate Juan Orlando Hernandez a 5% lead.

This election, TSE acted differently. At 7:55 pm , TSE President Matamoros tweeted

“We have received 40% of the results …. We have two options: to show the results now …or wait to receive real data.”

A few minutes later he tweeted

“We are late giving results because we met with the technical team to review and be sure the data is representative of the country.”

Still TSE did not post the results.

TSE did not post results until just before midnight. The TSE results showing challenger Salvador Nasralla with a 5% lead. With 57.2 % of total votes counted the results were:

– Salvador Nasralla (Opposition Coalition Against the Dictatorship) with 855,847 votes = 45.17% of total.

– Juan Orlando Hernandez (National Party) with  761,892 votes  = 40.22%

– Luis Zelaya (Liberal Party, no relation to ousted Manuel Zelaya ) with 260,994 votes = 13.77% of total.

– Several other candidates had less than 1%.

Prior to the election, TSE claimed they expected to post the results from 70% of the electorate on election night.  This claim was silently forgotten.  With the polls closing at 4 pm and the ballots then being counted locally and tally sheets filled out, the TSE claimed they had received 40% of the tally sheets before 8 pm .  TSE claims they only received an addition 17% over the next four hours.  This is curious since this should have been a time when a significant majority of tally sheets were transmitted electronically to the TSE headquarters for inclusion in the vote count. 

2 – TSE changed the election procedure.

The Honduras election procedure is to count and tally the paper ballots at each voting station (‘mesa’). After the tally sheet (‘acta’) is signed off by representatives from each party, the tally sheet is scanned and transmitted electronically to the TSE headquarters in the capital for inclusion in national totals. Normal procedure is for the TSE to determine the election on the basis of the results received electronically.

Following the posting of results showing the opposition candidate with a significant lead, at about midnight on election day, the TSE changed the procedure and stopped posting results for the next 36 hours.

The explanation was given by TSE President Matamoros at 1:39 pm on Monday 27 November:

“Today we are going to start opening the ballot boxes coming in from across the country to understand the ballots and results.”

Five minutes later, at 1:44 pm, he added

“We cannot give results until all the missing tally sheets come in.”

The situation was questioned by Spanish election observer Ramon Jauregui who noted

“There is no technical reason that explains the delay, because the tallies from all 18000 polling places were transmitted electronically to the @tsehonduras on the day of the election.”  

3 – TSE falsely reported the number of tally sheets received.

The only justification for not updating the election results would be if the tally sheets (“actas”) were not received.

At 1:56 pm on Monday TSE President Matamoros announced that they had received 13,000 of the total but are still missing 6,000.  “

We have received 13,000 tallies from across the country ….. we are missing 6,000 actas”.

Over two hours later, at 4:17 pm, the number of missing tally sheets mysteriously increased by 25% to 7500. TSE Matamoros announced

“We are missing 7500 actas”.  

The contradictory numbers coming from the official TSE calls into question either their competence or integrity. 

4 – TSE officials give contradictory results

While TSE President Matamoros was issuing conflicting information about the number of missing ‘actas’, another election official was saying something very different. As reported in this Reuters story:

“Election official Marcos Ramiro Lobo told Reuters on Monday afternoon that Nasralla was leading by a margin of five points, with about 70 percent of ballots counted.  Lobo said Nasralla appeared certain to win, signaling that experts at the electoral body regarded his lead as irreversible.”

Also on Monday the third place Liberal Party candidate, Luis Zelaya (NOT the former President Zelaya) recognized Nasralla as the winner and urged the National Party leader to concede defeat.

About noon on Tuesday the TSE resumed posting election results after the 36 hour interruption. The new data showed Nasralla’s lead steadily declining and by Wednesday the National Party candidate and current President Juan Orlando Hernandez was edging ahead. At this point in time, one week after the election, the TSE shows 95% of the votes tallied with Juan Orlando Hernandez ahead with 42.9% of the vote versus 41.4% for Salvador Nasralla.

Where Are Things at Now?

For the past several days TSE has said they are performing extra scrutiny of the ballots and ballot tallies.  They have invited contending parties to observe the process but the opposition parties have declined. TSE may release their results and claim that Hernandez won the election at any moment. Opposition candidate Nasralla is calling for a new election under international observation and control.

Honduras is important to US foreign policy and the White House is closely following events. In mid November Foreign Policy magazine ran an article titled The United States has a lot Riding on the Honduras Election” The article says “losing Hernandez would be a real setback.” On Wednesday the US State Department spokesperson said the US looks forward to working with the new Honduran President.

Clearly the Honduran people have even more riding on the Honduras election. The coup of 2009 led to increased crime and violence along with massive repression of landless campesinos, environmental and indigenous communities. From the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean, the domestic policies of Honduras have been skewed to benefit foreign corporations, plantations, the local oligarchy and neighbor to the north.

The current situation calls into question the objectivity of the US and Organization of American States (OAS). Will the US and OAS issue token criticisms but ultimately rubber stamp this Honduras election which has so many glaring problems?  If so, it will highlight the double-standards with Venezuela where the US and OAS  have aggressively criticized elections and refused to acknowledge the results even after full recounts and verification. The Honduras election process offers the potential of verification but only if the data from each and every polling place is compared with the data recorded at the TSE headquarters. The secret National Party training described by The Economist specifically called for disruption of the transmission of unfavorable “actas” (tally sheets) to the headquarters.

As protests and repression continues and threatens to explode in Honduras, one question is whether Washington and the OAS will issue token criticisms and make a “moot point” of the 2017 electoral coup as they did the military coup in 2009.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who was an official election observer in the 2013 Honduras election. He can be contacted at [email protected]. 

Featured image is from Honduras News.

Edward Herman was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of Business. He was also a well-known writer and historian, who co-wrote a number of books with “the World’s top public intellectual“, Noam Chomsky.

Herman says that fatcats launch a Red Scare every 20 to 30 years in order to roll back any gains in wealth and rights gained by the public, and to browbeat everyone into allowing policies which redistribute power back to the fatcats:

“Terrorism” and “Red scares,” separately or in combination, have been long-standing features of the U.S. political landscape, recurring in roughly 20-30 year cycles from the Haymarket affair of 1886 [to the “Great Red Scare of 1919 to 1920”, to the McCarthy hearings] to [Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff Alexander] Haig’s demagoguery of 1980-1982. They have served an important role at home and abroad in helping the … elite in their struggle against labor organization and reformist political threats, in favor of unconstrained business domination, enlarged arms budgets, and imperial expansion.

***

Red scares have all had the effect of weakening labor and reform movements by unleashing irrational forces that divert attention from real issues and cast doubts on the patriotism and purposes of unionists and reformers.

***

Red scares have all featured alleged radical conspiracies usually linked to some foreign power, whose existence and importance are “proved” by evidence that is partially or wholly fabricated. This evidence may be easily demonstrated to be false or defective, but during the “age of terrorism” the national media disseminate the required line without serious criticism, feature the fabricated and inflated claims as news, and contribute to the hysteria and “cleansing” of the dissident elements. Subsequently, and long after the Red scare has taken its toll, it is discovered that the conspiracies were a mirage; [in] the scare of 1919-20, millions of people had been induced to believe in and take drastic actions to counter a massive conspiratorial threat “when no such threat existed.” As in the case of the “gaps” in our military arsenal—of bombers, missiles, “throw-weight,” and vulnerable “windows”—discovered by the arms lobby whenever there is a perceived opportunity for a killing [for example, during the Reagan administration, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld helped generate fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of Cold War spending, and see this article], the repeated discovery that  weapons gaps and terrorist conspiracies were fraudulent never interferes with the media playing the same role in the next phase of elite need for a gap or terrorist scare.

***

It took the Free Press years to start lifting the lid on outright perjury and coached disinformation, and the assumptions of the Red scare were never seriously questioned. Thus, the Great Fear was effective in creating an ideological groundwork for rearmament, Vietnam and the spread of the National Security State in the U.S. sphere of influence.

***

Terrorism and the Red menace never die, they merely ebb and flow in accordance with the propaganda requirements of the moment. The era of McCarthy and the Great Fear was associated not only with a need to roll back union power and welfare state advances, but also with perceived elite needs for rearmament and a forward policy abroad, most vividly expressed in the Truman Doctrine, with its Orwellian complement in the concept of “Containment.” The United States was “containing” somebody else as it established 3000 overseas bases and made one of the most dramatic external advances in power since the era of the Roman Empire. In the late 1970s and early 1980s new terrorist networks and Red menaces were called into play once again to serve the traditional functions ….

***

A new Red Scare in the form of a “Soviet-backed international terror network” has been vigorously pushed in the United States during the past decade, reaching new heights in 1980-1981.  It was badly needed by the [fatcats].  One effect of the Great Society and Vietnam war was to stimulate populism – the belief on the part of many formerly apathetic people that they had legitimate claims that could be pursued both in private bargaining and in the political arena.   Protest and demands extended from civil rights marches and war protests to more material claims on the part of the poor, the disabled, the old, women, Indians and others.  Establishment spokesmen expressed open dismay at the weakening of traditional restraints on the masses, and their assertive demands to share political power with the elite ….  A durable method by which the U.S. business and upper class contends with such problems is by means of a refurbished Red Menace.

Herman makes clear that each of the above-described Red Scares took place in response to growing demands for increased rights and a bigger slice of the pie for the little guy.

The powers-that-be branded anyone who advocated for such things as Russian sympathizers.

The current Red Scare (you know, the Ruskies stole our election, brainwashed our people, etc.) is happening approximately 30 years after the last one.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Beijing and Moscow urge the world community unite against war on the Korean peninsula, going all-out to resolve contentious issues diplomatically.

According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang,

“China and Russia have a common stance on the Korean peninsula issue…”

“Both countries have come up with initiatives to resolve the issue peacefully, putting forward clear and understandable projects, which may help find a way out of the current situation.”

“We hope that all the interested parties will adopt a sincere and positive attitude, pooling their efforts to ease tensions…return(ing) to the negotiating table as soon as possible.”

Key is deescalating tensions, not heightening them further, going all-out to avoid catastrophic war, a likely nuclear one if launched.

Sergey Lavrov criticized Washington, saying

“(i)f somebody is very eager to use force to wipe out North Korea,” as US neocon UN envoy Nikki Haley pressed for in her “very bloodthirsty (Security Council) tirade,” he believes it’s an unacceptable mistake, recklessly “play(ing) with fire.”

He added Russia will do everything possible to prevent events on the peninsula from spinning out-of-control, China’s position identical.

Both countries want things resolved peacefully. America seems hellbent for war, on top of all others it’s waging, part of its permanent war on humanity, its diabolical scheme to own planet earth, risking its destruction.

Lunatics infest Washington, a bipartisan criminal class. Undemocratic Dems are as ruthlessly lawless as Republicans, both right wings of America’s duopoly governance in lockstep on imperial wars, corporate empowerment, and cracking down hard on nonbelievers – strongly against peace and democracy at home and abroad.

Is North Korea the Trump administration’s next target? On Sunday, neocon Senator Lindsey Graham said Washington is heading closer to “preemptive war” on the DPRK, adding “(i)f there’s an underground nuclear test (by the North), then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States.”

He urged moving spouses and children of US military personnel in South Korea back to America because we’re “getting close to military conflict” with Pyongyang.

At the fifth annual Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, at the Reagan Presidential Library near Los Angeles, Trump’s National Security Advisor HR McMaster said chance for war on the Korean peninsula is “increasing every day.”

He lied claiming the DPRK poses “the greatest immediate threat to the United States.” It’s the other way around, Washington a major threat to North Korea and all other independent countries.

It’s why Pyongyang continues developing its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, genuinely fearing US aggression – knowing America prefers attacking weak countries, not strong ones able to strike back, making Washington pay a stiff price for its aggression.

McMaster urged a total oil embargo on the DPRK, calling it “appropriate at this point,” ominously saying “there’s not much time left.”

Attacking North Korea would be madness – yet possible given Trump’s rage for war.

On Monday, provocative US/South Korean military exercises begin, continuing for five days, including simulated precision airstrikes on mock North Korean nuclear and missile targets.

Pyongyang justifiably believes Washington is rehearsing for war, why it’s expediting development of its most potent military capabilities – strictly for defense, not offense, not how America operates.

Make your own judgment on which country poses a real threat, which one urges regional peace and normal relations with all countries.

America deplores peace, waging endless wars on humanity, the greatest threat we all face.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

It’s a work in progress, yet to be released. Prepared by Trump’s national security team, it’s nearing completion, expected out soon.

It’s designed as a blueprint for administration foreign policy. Sources familiar with it call it “hard-nosed” and “realistic.”

Reportedly, it’ll focus more on protecting the homeland than strategies of previous administrations – despite the nation facing no threats except ones it invents as pretexts for endless wars of aggression.

It’ll stress economic competitiveness, America first, calling it a national security imperative, especially regarding Sino/US relations.

Trump mistakenly believes Beijing steals American jobs. US corporations offshore them to China and other low-wage countries for greater profits, notably over the past few decades.

Blame them and US economic policies, not foreign nations for what’s going on, hollowing out America, most domestic jobs largely low-wage/low or no benefits service ones today – world’s different from when the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, no longer.

Trump’s NSS reportedly will also stress increasing technological and cyber threats, including Russia’s hybrid warfare capabilities and advances in the militarization of space.

On December 3 at the Reagan National Defense Forum, National Security Advisor HR McMaster hinted at what his NSS will contain, saying:

It’ll represent “a dramatic rethinking of American foreign policy from previous decades.”

“Today as we approach the unveiling of the Trump administration’s national security strategy, we are at a…crossroads” similar to Reagan’s “rethinking of America’s role in the world and a dramatic renewal of American confidence.”

Paul Craig Roberts served as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy – no one in Washington like him today, not at Treasury or any other branch of government.

He explained

“(t)he Cold War was a time when leaders focused on reducing tensions between nuclear powers” – world’s apart from current US policies, hugely dangerous ones, recklessly challenging Russia and China, risking unthinkable nuclear war.

Roberts explained JFK “worked with Khrushchev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Nixon “negotiated SALT I” and the ABM treaty, along with opening China, major constructive policies.

SALT II came under Jimmy Carter. Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War. World tensions were easing under these leaders.

Today they’re heading toward spinning out-of-control, beginning in the neoliberal 90s with the Gulf War and rape of Yugoslavia, accelerated post-9/11 by Bush/Cheney, Obama and Trump.

US foreign policy features endless imperial wars, all sovereign independent countries threatened.

Russia and China are the final obstacles to be overcome for Washington to achieve unchallenged global dominance – perhaps nuclear war on both countries the strategy to accomplish its objective.

Madness under bipartisan neocons defines America’s agenda, undemocratic Dems as bloodthirsty as Republicans.

Obama waged wars of aggression on seven nations threatening no one, supported by cheerleading media scoundrels.

Trump escalated what he began, threatening new conflicts against North Korea and Iran. Claiming a nonexistent “Russian threat” is part of gaining public acceptance for unthinkable war on the country.

McMaster turned truth on its head, claiming Russia and China are “revisionist powers subverting the post-WW II political and security orders” at our expense.

Both countries seek cooperative relations with all other nations. They’re not advancing their own interests at the expense of America, as McMaster falsely claimed.

Nor are North Korea and Iran. Neither country threatens its neighbors. Nor do they violate their sovereignty or export terror, as McMaster claimed – US specialties, not theirs.

Saying ISIS and other jihadist groups “threaten all civilized people in every corner of the world,” McMaster failed to explain Washington created them for use as imperial foot soldiers in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

America is a pariah state, losing, not gaining influence, perpetually at war, disdaining peace, Trump’s NSS a policy agenda for more of the same.

Possible catastrophic US nuclear war against one or more countries is ominously real. If launched, we all may be doomed.

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

TruePublica editor: 

After Donald Trump’s election last year, the new president often seemed to be at war with the CIA and the 16 other U.S. intelligence agencies. He often likened them to Nazis and fascists. Trump often mocked their judgment that Russia had intervened in the election campaign to help him into the Whitehouse. And he repeatedly accused them of leaking to the media in an attempt to embarrass him and then undermine his administration at the White House.

Those important relationships have come under such strain that both the Trump administration and the CIA are considering a plan to privatise some covert operations because between both parties has effectively broken down. IntelNews and Buzzfeed News report the following story.

***

The United States Central Intelligence Agency and the White House are considering several proposals to hire private companies to carry out covert operations abroad, according to a report.

BuzzFeed News said on Thursday that the proposals were communicated to the White House in the summer. The news site, which described the proposed plans as “highly unusual”, quoted “three sources who have been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals”. The sources told BuzzFeed that, if approved, the plans would include the establishment of large intelligence networks in so-called “denied areas” —namely foreign environments deemed hostile. The networks would recruit and handle local agents, carry out psychological operations, capture terrorism suspects and rendition them to the US or third countries. “Islamic extremism” is mentioned as the primary target of the proposals.

According to BuzzFeed, one of the proposals involves Amyntor Group, a private company headquartered in the remote town of Whitefish, in northwestern Montana. The company is staffed by former members of the US Intelligence Community who have security clearances. It specialises in intelligence training and risk assessment. But it also collects and analyses intelligence and provides counterintelligence services for government agencies in America and what it calls “friendly foreign governments” abroad.

The company has reportedly been holding discussions with senior officials in the administration of President Donald Trump in recent weeks, according to two of BuzzFeed’s sources. The same sources say that the move toward privatisation of some intelligence operations is being led by a feeling in the Trump administration that the CIA has a negative view of the White House. They claim that the CIA is not prepared to go along with the Trump administration’s efforts to make the agency’s operations more aggressive and, in the words of its new director, Mike Pompeo, “much more vicious”. They therefore see privatisation as a way to bypass the resistance and skepticism of the CIA’s upper management.

BuzzFeed said it contacted the CIA about the Amyntor Group proposal, but the agency preferred not to comment. A press officer for the National Security Council, which is chaired by President Trump, said that its members were not aware of the privatisation proposals.

Amyntor Group commented through one of its lawyers, who told BuzzFeed that any contract signed between the company and the US government would be directed and controlled “by the proper government authority”.

Featured image is from TruePublica.

Jordan is moving to convene an emergency meeting ahead of Donald Trump’s expected decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, according to diplomats. The Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister has also reportedly urged a meeting.

We bring to the attention of our readers Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s, important initative to “criminalize war”. It started twelve years ago in December 2005 with the Kuala Lumpur Declaration to Criminalise War, which subsequently led to Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) and the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCC) which initiated the indictment against George W. Bush  et al  “for crimes of torture and war crimes”. (Judgement of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT), 11 May 2012). 

In a subsequent judgment, The State of Israel was indicted on “crimes of genocide”  (Judgement of the Tribunal, November 25, 2013).

Needless to say, these two important judgements based on expert legal opinion and witness testimonies from Iraq and Palestine, were not the object of mainstream media coverage

Chaired by Tun Dr. Mahathir, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) included three foreign members who worked with their Malaysian counterparts on the Commission: Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations Dennis Haliday and former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. Dr. Hans von Sponeck and  Prof. Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

From Left to Right: Francis A.Boyle, Helen Caldicott,  Denis J. Halliday, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Hans-Christof Von Sponeck, Michel Chossudovsky, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

To consult the text of the Declaration, click here.

***

A decade ago, an elder Malaysian statesman had a dream. Just like centuries ago when someone had a dream that slavery would be abolished, this Malaysian statesman had dreamt that one day, wars, too, would be abolished.

So, he gathered several people to join him in realising that dream. Many like-minded individuals from the four corners of the globe eagerly joined him in embarking on this extremely challenging quest. They met at a Peace Conference in Malaysia in December 2005 to deliberate further and as a result, the Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War came into being.

That elder statesman is Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a young medical doctor from Kedah, who later became the fourth prime minister of Malaysia. That historical Peace Conference, held from Dec 14 to 17, 2005, was attended by more than 2000 people from all the five continents.

Following that historical event, the groundwork was laid out to put the KL Initiative into action. Two years later, in February 2007, another international conference was held at the Putra World Trade Centre, themed “Expose War Crimes, Criminalise War”. It was attended by more than 3,000 people from all over the globe. It was at this conference that a decision was made for the establishment of a formal body, known as the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War (KLFCW).

The foundation quickly drew up its charter, under which three organs came into being — the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) that acts as an investigative arm of the foundation, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) that acts as a Tribunal of Conscience with its own rules of evidence and procedure consistent with the highest standards comparable to the International Courts of Justice and other national courts of law, and finally the Legal Team, headed by the chief prosecutor.

Over the last eight years, the commission held several sessions, hearing complaints from victims of armed conflicts in several war zones, testimonies from former detainees of Guantanamo Bay and medically trained personnel who were involved in treating victims of the war in Iraq, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon (the massacre in Sabra and Shatila). Following these sessions by the commission, the chief prosecutor had filed charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against several individuals, as well as the state of Israel.

(From left) Datuk Mukhriz Mahathir, Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad listening to the testimony of 15-year-old Mahmoud Al-Sammouni during the hearing by Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission in Kuala Lumpur on Nov 21, 2012. The commission is the brainchild of Dr Mahathir. (Source: New Straits Times)

The tribunal, comprising an international panel of seven judges, heard direct evidence and testimony from witnesses and legal submissions by both the prosecution team and the amicus curiae team (the latter representing the accused, as provided in the charter and the rules of procedure) and in the end, delivered its reserved judgment. In all, the three cases heard by the tribunal (affecting the wars in Iraq, Gaza and the massacre in Sabra and Shatila), the accused were found guilty and declared as war criminals.

The full record of these criminal proceedings had been carefully and painstakingly compiled and the full text of the findings and judgment of the tribunal were submitted to the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague and the heads of government of several states.

Last weekend, on April 18 and 19, KLFCW hosted its latest international forum at the PWTC in Kuala Lumpur to take stock of what it had achieved so far and to deliberate what it should do in the next decade to take the quest to criminalise war to the next level.

On the first day of the forum, themed “Peace with Justice: Constructing the Road Map”, several distinguished speakers (local and foreign) spoke on various critical issues including, inter alia, proxy wars, torture, regime change, false flag operations, the use of drones on civilian populations and the road map ahead for KLFCW.

On the second day of the forum, Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin delivered his keynote address under the theme, “Engaging the Young to Criminalise War and Energise Peace”.

Expressing his agreement that the theme of the forum was “most appropriate”, Muhyiddin said it sent out a clear and precise message that the young generation must assume an important role in the shaping of their future, free of war and armed conflict.

Muhyiddin added that

“in many war-torn countries…. we have seen how children suffered the most. Look at the Middle East, Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. How many of the young ones have had their lives snatched away because of war.”

The deputy prime minister, in his speech, gave a positive endorsement and encouragement from the Malaysian government that the board of trustees and the working staff of KLFCW found most satisfying and gratifying.

The road ahead to criminalise war may take several decades or even centuries. But as the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said,

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, KLFCW had been able to take several steps over the past decade.

It is now time to fine-tune the road map ahead.

Salleh Buang formerly served in the Attorney-General’s Chambers before he left for private practice, the corporate sector and then academia.

Trump has ostensibly compromised by promising Turkish President Erdogan that he’ll stop arming the Syrian Kurds.

The US and Turkish leaders spoke by phone last Friday, during which time Trump allegedly gave his counterpart his word that he will stop giving arms to the Syrian Kurds. The Turkish side reported that Trump called the previous policy of arming the YPG “nonsense” and promised to end it, while the official White House readout was more ambiguous and said that he “informed President Erdogan of pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria”.

The discrepancy between both side’s interpretation of the conversation prompted the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister to state that the US “would be deceiving the whole world” if it went back on its pledge, while the Pentagon reiterated that it is “reviewing pending adjustments to the military support provided to our Kurdish partners in as much as the military requirements of our defeat-ISIS and stabilization efforts will allow to prevent ISIS from returning.”

In addition, it should be reminded that reports have been circulating that the US might officially acknowledge that up to 2000 of its troops are in Syria, which would be around 4x more than what it previously admitted, and that the Pentagon is moving towards more of an “open-ended” mission in the war-torn country now that Daesh – it’s supposed reason for being there – is defeated. What all of this means is that the US will probably not withdraw from Syria, and there’s a chance that arms shipments to the Kurds might continue.

No matter what Trump may or may not have said to President Erdogan, he’s on record in early April saying that he’s given the US military “total authorization” to do what it wants, so if the Pentagon decides that there’s a need to continue arming the Syrian Kurds, then that’s exactly what the US will likely end up doing. Furthermore, nobody knows the exact terminology that Trump might have used during his phone call, so there’s a chance that he might try to employ a “technical loophole” by selling weapons to the Syrian Kurds instead of “loaning” them like the US is presently doing.

In any case, the unlikelihood of the US military withdrawing from Syria means that the Pentagon could still extend a defense umbrella to its on-the-ground allies, thus staving off a Turkish military intervention and creating the pretext for forming a so-called “air bridge” in the event that the neighboring states attempt to blockade this region like they did to Iraqi Kurdistan. The key difference between the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian ones is that the former didn’t have 2000 US troops and reportedly 10 American bases on their territory, hence why Washington “betrayed” them.

In addition, Iraq is already an internally partitioned country for the most part due to its “federal” status, while Syria has yet to formally follow in its footsteps, so the indefinitely prolonged US military presence there is designed to advanceWashington’s preferred “political solution” by pressuring Damascus, while Trump’s talk about supposedly discontinuing weapons shipments to the Syrian Kurds is meant to give Turkey a “face-saving” excuse for passively accepting what they had previously said would be a clear red line for them.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Dec 1, 2017:

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.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Capitol Hill arm-twisting failed to enact Trumpcare – so far at least. It succeeded overnight Friday for passage of grand theft Senate legislation – the misnamed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

House and Senate versions of the measure have nothing to do with economic growth or jobs creation – everything to do with grand theft and public betrayal.

It continues the longstanding transfer of the nation’s wealth from ordinary Americans to corporate predators and super-rich households – thirdworldizing the country, already unfit to live in, serving its privileged class exclusively.

Commenting on last night’s Senate passage, an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) email press release said:

“Senate Republicans just voted to hand tax breaks to millionaires, billionaires and corporations on the backs of working families.”

“They claim that their tax plan will boost wages for American workers. But real-world evidence suggests otherwise.”

“Cutting corporations’ taxes is not a recipe for increasing workers’ wages. It’s a recipe for exacerbating income and wealth inequality.”

Ballooning the federal deficit over the next decade will mean “higher interest rates, an overvalued US dollar and growing trade deficits.”

“US manufacturing and other traded goods industries (including agricultural products and other traded commodities) will be hard hit by the Republican tax plan, because it is financed through a large increase in the government budget deficit.”

Cutting taxes for corporate predators and high net worth households won’t contribute to economic growth. Nor will the GOP scheme create jobs or boost worker wages.

It’ll “simply redistribute income from the bottom up…(a) Robin Hood-in-reverse plan…disast(ous) for most working families…a payoff to the Trump family and the the wealthy individuals and big business that helped put him in office,” EPI explained.

It’s a slap in the face to millions of voters who elected Trump, expecting better, betrayed instead.

Expecting either wing of America’s duopoly governance to serve everyone fairly is wishful thinking.

Americans for Tax Fairness said the following about passage of the Senate tax cut bill:

“All but one Republican in the Senate just voted to raise taxes on 87 million middle-class families, add a trillion dollars to the deficit, and trigger automatic cuts to Medicare. All so that their corporate campaign donors and billionaire benefactors can get massive tax cuts.”

“Medicaid, education and other critical services will soon be on the chopping block. Corporations will be encouraged to ship more jobs and profits offshore, while their foreign shareholders will see a windfall. That’s anything but America First.”

“It’s no coincidence that corporate sources contributed massive amounts to the campaign coffers of members of Congress who sit on the tax committees. Corporations and wealthy businesses get most of the tax breaks given by this bill.”

“That’s quite a return on investment. Meanwhile, Donald Trump will personally save millions of dollars in taxes each year while working families will continue to struggle to make ends meet.”

“This fight is not over. We will fight tooth and nail to protect working families from this wealth grab. And every single member of Congress who voted for this sham will answer to their constituents.”

If the GOP tax cut becomes law, social justice in America will be the big loser, especially Medicare Medicaid and education, followed by Social Security later on.

They’re essential programs, fundamental for everyone besides the nation’s privileged class, benefitting hugely from capital gains and other investment income.

They’ll get more ahead from a GOP agenda of putting ordinary Americans last, privileged ones alone first.

House and Senate tax cut legislation made America’s deplorable state worse, a race to the bottom for the poor and eroding middle class – the nation’s wealthy doing better than ever under a system rigged to serve them exclusively.

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

Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams—a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told—sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. — Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964

The anti-Trump “resistance” campaign alleges that the Russian government tried to “influence” the U.S. election. It insinuates that Trump “colluded” with the Russians in these alleged attempts. It has no evidence for any of its claims. The intent of this campaign is to handicap the Trump administration as much as possible and to prevent better U.S. relations with Russia.

A witch hunt was launched in which the Mueller investigation in the alleged election manipulation as well as Congress hearings are used to throw as much dirt as possible into the direction of the Trump administration to then see what might stick.

While retired army-general Michael Flynn worked for the Trump campaign he was also a lobbyist for a rich person near to the Turkish government. He made $600,000 off that gig. The Trump campaign did not know about this. Flynn also attended an anniversary celebration for Russia Today in Moscow. He had been hired as a paid speaker for the occasion and his speaker agency charged $40,000 for it.

Flynn was fired from the job as National Security Advisor 24 days after Trump#s inauguration. He had been stupid enough to announce that he wanted to reform the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. Those agencies made sure that such would not happen.

Flynn was questioned by the FBI in connection with the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian influence on the 2016 election campaign. He lied to the FBI about some diplomatic contacts he had made on request of the then incoming Trump administration. The FBI managed to prove that he had lied. In the U.S. lying to the FBI is a serious crime. (I am not aware of other country that has such a stupid rule.) Flynn was offered a plea deal. He is supposed to tell Mueller what Mueller wants to hear in exchange for a lower penalty for his “crime” of lying to the FBI.

But look what the real issues were Flynn lied about:

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and authorities indicated in court he was acting under instructions from senior Trump transition officials in his dealings with the diplomat.

Flynn contacted the senior Russian diplomat in Washington DC. He was surely aware that the NSA and CIA notice and listen in to all such contacts. Flynn had no reason to believe that such contacts were out of norm because they ain’t. Incoming administrations need such contacts to prepare their polices.

There are two different issues about which Flynn contacted the Russian ambassador:

In one of the conversations described in court documents, the men discussed an upcoming United Nations Security Council vote on whether to condemn Israel’s building of settlements. At the time, the Obama administration was preparing to allow a Security Council vote on the matter.
…
Mr. Mueller’s investigators have learned through witnesses and documents that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries to help Israel, according to two people briefed on the inquiry. Investigators have learned that Mr. Flynn and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, took the lead in those efforts. Mr. Mueller’s team has emails that show Mr. Flynn saying he would work to kill the vote, the people briefed on the matter said.

The Security Council vote was on December 23 2016. The Israeli government lobbied the incoming administration to influence that vote in the Israeli government’s interest. The Trump administration in-waiting could not influence the Obama administration which had decided to abstain. It contacted the Russian ambassador to influence the Russians to block the vote in the UNSC. The Russian’s did not do such.

The “collusion” here is between the Israeli government and the Trump campaign. The “influence” is two part. A successful Israeli attempt to influence the incoming Trump administration and an unsuccessful attempt by Trump people to influence the Russian UNSC vote. The issue has absolutely zero to do with the U.S. election.

Now onto the second issue:

In the other discussion, according to court documents, Mr. Flynn asked Mr. Kislyak that Moscow refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions announced by the Obama administration that day against Russia over its interference in the presidential election. And Mr. Kislyak told Mr. Flynn that Russia “had chosen to moderate its response,” the documents said.The following day, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said Moscow would not retaliate against the United States in response to the sanctions.

Mr. Trump praised the Russian leader in a Twitter post.

“Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!” Mr. Trump wrote.

Throughout his election campaign Trump had loudly argued for better relations with Russia. He said it would be easier to solve global problems if the U.S. and Russia cooperate.

The Obama administration had a generally hostile attitude towards Russia. It walked the relations towards a new cold war. Clinton’s loss of the election which she blamed, without evidence, on Russia amplified his moves. According to the book ‘Shattered’, which describes the Clinton campaign, the decision to blame Russia for her loss was made a day after Trump’s victory:

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

At the end of 2016 Obama sanctioned Russian officials over allegedly influencing the U.S. campaign. No evidence was ever presented that such “influencing” was attempted or happened. Obama just willfully tried to worsen the relations with Russia.

The incoming administration tried to prevent more damage in the relations between the U.S. and Russia by contacting the Russian ambassador. It was a smart and well reasoned measure. There was no “collusion” in this. The “influence” was again from the Trump campaign into the direction of the Russian government, not the other way around. It had nothing to do with the election.

The Clinton fan-boys and girls seem happy with the Flynn’s plea deal and are fretting about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. But how this is supposed to show that something nefarious was going on is not discernible.  How the issues Flynn lied about (for whatever stupid reason) are supposed to prove “Russian influence” on the election or “collusion” with Trump during the election campaign is beyond me.

Suppose an opportunity for peace arrived – could the US see it?

The most dangerous thing about the North Korean missile launch is the reaction of the unprincipled, under-informed, white identity extremist sitting in the Oval Office. If there’s a nuclear war coming out of this manufactured “crisis,” the buck will have stopped with him. Not that President Trump doesn’t have other fools egging him on to risk global chaos and destruction in response to an imaginary, inflated threat from an impoverished nation of 25 million people. Sadly, this is not a surprising development after more than sixty years of aggressive US behavior toward North Korea.

But first, what about that November 29 missile launch, widely and dishonestly played as showing that that North Korea could hit any point in the US, even Washington or Mar-a-Lago? That meme is a speculative fear-tactic. In the fine print, none of the experts, not even hawkish defense secretary General Jim Mattis, one of the last supposed grown-ups in Trumplandia. The North Korean missile went higher – roughly 2,800 miles – than any previous North Korean missile, but it didn’t go very far, about 600 miles, landing in the ocean short of Japan.

Based on this scant information, mostly provided by the North Korean government, experts like David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists extrapolated the missile’s potential range from the actual 600 miles to an estimated 8,000 miles. This is not a scientific measurement but a speculative conjecture based on science as well as the unknown assumptions that the tested missile was carrying an actual warhead. Wright allowed for the possibility that the missile’s high performance was because it carried a dummy warhead of almost inconsequential weight. Wright concluded, according the New York Times, that “the distance traveled, while impressive, does not necessarily translate into a working intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a thermonuclear warhead.” That’s something of a non-threat threat lurking in a hypothetical future. For General Mattis, the projected possible threat, free of historical or strategic context, was all too real in his hyperbolic projection:

The bottom line is, it’s a continued effort to build a threat — a ballistic missile threat that endangers world peace, regional peace, and certainly, the United States.

This isn’t General Mattis prematurely overreacting to just one unevaluated missile test. General Mattis engages in the standard military operating procedure of threat-inflation on a regular basis, which does not distinguish him from two generations of other official military and executive branch fearmongers scaring us with apparent North Korean intentions, even while driving those intentions with real, constant American threatening. As General Mattis put it in late October:

North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbors and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs…. I cannot imagine a condition under which the United States would accept North Korea as a nuclear power….

He said, “unnecessary.” He must know that’s absurdly Orwellian. The United States and North Korea have been in a state of war since 1950. The armistice of 1953 suspended the fighting but did not end the war. From then until now, North Korean sovereignty has been irrelevant to American leaders. So here we are, with North Korea already a nuclear power and the US refusing to accept a new reality, never mind US responsibility for creating that new reality through decades of open bellicosity. The times called the most recent missile launch “a bold act of defiance against President Trump,” which is a laughably unaware acceptance of the American assumption that it has any right to any authority over another sovereign state.

American denial of the North Korean perspective is the driving force in this largely artificial confrontation. North Korea has already been overrun by American forces once in living memory, in a war with largely unexamined American atrocities (we’ve propagandized their atrocities to a fare thee well). Overrun by Americans, only to be counter-overrun by the Chinese, North Koreans might well want to be left alone. The US and its allies, especially South Korea and Japan, have maintained unrelenting hostility to North Korea, whose best friend is an unreliable China. Why wouldn’t North Korea want a nuclear deterrent? Deterrence is the American justification for a nuclear arsenal that dwarfs all others but the Russians’.

But American leaders insist on calling North Korea a threat. North Korea was a threat in 1950. and that turned out very badly for them. Today, North Korea is a credible threat to no one except perhaps its own people. A North Korean attack on anyone would be met with overwhelming force up to and possibly including nuclear obliteration. North Korea is in check, and any honest observer knows that. Some even say so. Defense Dept. spokesman Colonel Robert Manning, in striking contrast to his shrill boss General Mattis, said:

We are working with our interagency partners on a more detailed assessment of the launch…. the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America, our territories or our allies…. We remain prepared to defend ourselves and our allies from any attack or provocation.

That is so rational and basic that it should hardly need saying. We don’t live in a time when basic and rational get much attention. American arrogance and paranoia toward North Korea are longstanding, untreated pathologies that continue to worsen. As our Trump tweeted in early October, with his usual fact-free, threatening bombast:

Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid … hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, makings fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!

Our Trump coyly avoided saying what he thought that one thing was, but his Secretary of State still says, “Diplomatic options remain viable and open for now.” Not that anyone pays much attention to Rex Tillerson these days as he guts the State Dept. of effective, experienced personnel. Much greater play goes to the crazy ranters who are already blaming the victims if it turns out we have to attack them (sounds like domestic violence, doesn’t it?). Case in point is Lindsey Graham, who plays a deranged Republican Senator from South Carolina, saying:

If we have to go to war to stop this, we will. If there’s a war with North Korea it will be because North Korea brought it on itself, and we’re headed to a war if things don’t change.

Or as the battering husband puts it: “She just wouldn’t listen to me!” Echoing the blame-the-victim mantra, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (famous for saying “women don’t care about contraception”) told the UN Security Council the missile launch was an act of “aggression” with serious potential consequences:

… make no mistake the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed…. The dictator of North Korea made a decision yesterday that brings us closer to war, not farther from it. We have never sought war with North Korea and still today we do not seek it.

But they just won’t listen!

In North Korea, after the missile launch, leader Kim Jong Un said that his country has “finally realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force.” A nuclear deterrent, in other words. This may or may not be entirely true. But they may or may not be beside the point. As writers in Japan Times note, this missile launch and its accompanying official statements could be an olive branch:

[North Korea] then said its pursuit of the “strategic weapon” had been intended to “defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country from the U.S. imperialists’ nuclear blackmail policy,” and emphasized that it would “not pose any threat to any country and region as long as the interests of the DPRK (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) are not infringed upon…. The DPRK will make every possible effort to serve the noble purpose of defending peace and stability of the world.”

Does it matter whether this is true as long as everyone acts like it’s true? Our Trump has a random relationship with truth, and his spokeswoman says it doesn’t matter whether his racist tweets are real or fake news. So what we have here is an excellent opportunity for the mocker-in-chief of his Asian allies to seize the opportunity to make white identity extremism great again and— oh, never mind.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Netanyahu may be Israel’s most unpopular prime minister in the nation’s history, his far-right Likud party getting only 23.4% of the popular vote in 2015 elections.

Israeli governance is always by coalition, the party winning the largest percentage of votes forming it, if able.

Likud has 30 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, a mandate to govern only with enough coalition partners for a majority – a razor thin margin for Netanyahu to remain prime minister with 61 seats.

According to Haaretz,

“(t)ens of thousands of people rallied in protest on Saturday night in Tel Aviv against government corruption and new legislation that critics say is intended to shield Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from police investigations.”

Others rallied in Jerusalem, Haifa and elsewhere, protesting against the “Recommendations Law” – called the “anti-police law” or “Netanyahu law” by critics.

Protests against Israeli government corruption on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Blvd., December 2, 2017. (Source: Meged Gozany)

It prohibits police from recommending prosecution of Israel officials after conducting an investigation into their shady practices – a virtual Netanyahu protection act.

He’s been investigated for alleged bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

He inappropriately or illegally accepted lavish gifts from wealthy supporters, amounting to possible bribery.

He was caught on tape red-handed, negotiating a quid pro quo with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon Mozes for more favorable broadsheet coverage in return for legislation prohibiting distribution of the free daily Israel Hayom, YA’s main competitor, owned by Netanyahu supporter Sheldon Adelson.

On November 26, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved the proposed bill – despite strong objections from Israel’s law enforcement community.

It passed its first reading, two more required for it to become law. Likudnik MK David Amsalem introduced the measure with Netanyahu in mind.

In Tel Aviv, thousands protested against it near Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s home – under the banner “March of Shame,” carrying signs criticizing Netanyahu regime corruption.

Zionist Union opposition leader Isaac Herzog tweeted protesters were motivated by a “strong sense of unfairness, from disgust with corruption and strong moral opposition to a law tailor-made for one man.”

Herzog urged them to lay siege to the Knesset to prevent the bill’s passage, second and third readings expected early this week.

On Facebook, Labor party leader Avi Gabby urged MKs to oppose the bill, saying

“(t)he recommendations bill will determine what side of history you stand on: on the side of corruption or the side of the Israeli people.”

Amsalem fast-tracked the measure for swift Knesset passage. After several cabinet members expressed reservations, it was revised.

It now lets police continue making recommendations to prosecutors, short of explicitly calling for indictments – in all cases except ones overseen by a prosecutor, usually high-profile ones like ongoing investigations into alleged Netanyahu bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

In its current revised form, still a work in progress, police are prohibited from making recommendations based on evidence for an indictment of Netanyahu – or any other high-level Israeli official.

Mandelblit, State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan and Israel Police oppose the legislation. So do other Israelis believing no one is above the law.

Under every coalition regime in its history, Israel governed lawlessly, brutalizing Palestinians, stealing their land and resources, mass-incarcerating them for not being Jews, waging war on its neighbors, partnering with US high crimes.

Bribery, fraud, breach of trust and other civil crimes are minor by comparison – yet important enough to demand prosecution for offenders, including Netanyahu.

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

Featured image: Ousted Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak (Source: TG Post/Facebook)

Secret British documents have revealed that deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had agreed to resettle Palestinians in Egypt over three decades ago. According to the documents, obtained exclusively by the BBC following a Freedom of Information Act disclosure request, Mubarak was responding to an American request when he made his offer. The former president stipulated that in return for agreeing to the move, an agreement to end the Arab-Israeli conflict must be reached.

The documents show that Mubarak revealed the US request and his response during talks with the then British Prime Minister, the late Margaret Thatcher. The talks were held during his visit to London on his way back to Washington, in February 1983, where he met with the late US President Ronald Reagan.

The two visits occurred eight months after Israel had invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982 under the pretext of waging a military operation against the PLO. This was prompted by an assassination attempt against the Israeli ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov.

In light of the very tense situation in the Middle East, Mubarak sought to convince the US and Israel to accept the establishment of a Palestinian entity in the context of a “confederation” with Jordan, in order to lay the foundations for establishing a future independent Palestinian state. According to the record of his meeting with Thatcher, Mubarak said that when he had been asked to accept Palestinians from Lebanon, he told the US he could do so only within the context of a comprehensive plan to resolve the conflict. The former president expressed his willingness to host Palestinians from Lebanon despite his awareness of the dangers of such a step. He also insisted that, “A Palestinian state will never pose a threat to Israel.”

Thatcher replied to this by hinting that regardless of any future agreement, the Palestinians could never return to Palestine.

“Even establishing a Palestinian state cannot lead to absorbing all Palestinians in the diaspora,” she warned.

Egypt’s Foreign Affairs Minister at the time, Boutros Ghali, replied to Thatcher.

“The Palestinians will have their own passports at that point,” he explained, “and they will have different positions. We don’t only have to have an Israeli state and Jewish diaspora, but also a small Palestinian state with Palestinian diaspora.”

Mubarak mentioned the Palestinians in Kuwait to Thatcher as an example.

“They would never return to an independent Palestinian state.”

According to the BBC, when the late British Prime Minister’s secretary took notes of the meeting with Mubarak, he stressed that they should not be widely distributed.

Mubarak’s political advisor at the time, Osama Al-Baz, presented a proposed future solution, noting that the first step would be a federation between Jordan and a Palestinian state, which would develop into an independent state within 10 to 15 years. Thatcher expressed reservations about the establishment of a Palestinian state independent of Jordan: “Some feel that an independent Palestinian state would be under the influence of the Soviet Union.”

“This is a mistaken idea,” said Al-Baz, “as there will be no Palestinian state under Russian influence. This state will rely economically on the oil-rich Arabs who are very opposed to the establishment of a state loyal to the Soviets in the region. Saudi Arabia, for example, would never allow this to happen.”

He also pointed out that a Palestinian state “must” be demilitarised, and therefore would not obtain Soviet weapons.