Global Research

Qatar has been making waves for some weeks now, and in the deluge, it has also strung along a few companions. One is the UK bank Barclays, which prided itself for having avoided a government bailout in the financial crisis of 2008. In the ensuing chest thumping, executives could claim to have spared the British tax payer the need to fork out for private deals gone wrong.

In a statement by the bank, it was revealed that the UK Serious Fraud Office had filed charges “in the context of Barclays’ capital raisings in June and November 2008.” The statement from the bank continues to note how it “awaits further details of the charges from the SFO.”[1]

The charges relate to three alleged offences constituting what has been termed financial assistance – effectively, a bank loaning itself money via its own investing instruments. The first two charges assert that former senior officers and employees of Barclays had committed fraud by false representations regarding two advisory service agreements entered into with Qatar Holding LLC. The third centres on a claim of unlawful financial assistance from a loan from the State of Qatar in November 2008.

The aftermath of the 2008 crisis did much to give capitalism – at least of the bankster variant – a blackened name. This was made even more acute by the mild response from authorities indifferent to culpability in the banking system. Rotten financial decisions did not necessary entail rotten criminality. Financial colossi of such standing as John Varley, Barclays’ former chief executive, were deemed untouchable.

“There is little doubt,” suggested David Wighton in the Financial News, “that the lack of legal action against individuals linked to the financial crisis has fuelled the populist backlash against free market capitalism that has swept the western world.”[2]

It is instructive to cast an eye on the four chief figures involved in the efforts of the fraud office. Varley has tended to be considered the Old School version of the City banker, linked by marriage to the founders of Barclays, a solid though unspectacular figure.

Scotland-native Roger Jenkins had all the smells and bells, doing well out of the bank. In 2005, he pocketed 75 million pounds, making him the highest-paid individual in the FTSE 100.[3] Deemed the “deal maker” in the set, he was vital in the 2008 Qatar deal.

Jenkins had company in the deal making stakes: the bold wealth magician Thomas L. Kalaris, who did much for the American side of the bank’s operations. He proved an important figure in the Qatar talks, nudging matters along to their ultimate conclusion.

The quartet is completed with the fallen Richard Boath, who claimed in 2014 that he was fired by Barclays after supplying the Serious Fraud Office confidential material about the bank’s policies. His insistence that he had little to do with those decisions, a mere cog in a degenerate machine, comes as little surprise.

“I repeatedly raised concerns about the decisions taken by the bank with both senior management and senior lawyers and was reassured that those decisions were lawful.”

What became standard policy for governments in the US and Europe after 2008 was the socialisation of losses: the issuing of government bailouts that effectively led to the ownership of bad debt, not to mention decisions, by the tax payer. The Lloyds Banking Group did well out of this. Wall Street banks were also delighted, essentially being force fed liquidity from the public purse to keep them afloat.

The issue of funds came with natural fetters, those nasty little things banks dread when it comes to making financial decisions. Bonuses would be capped and curbed; operations would be curtailed. (Since 2008, Barclays has rewarded employees with 18 billion pounds worth in bonuses.)

Barclays executives were aware that joining the bailout bandwagon would see government scrutiny enter the boardroom, with the British Treasury insisting on a possible trimming of investment operations specific to its operations. “Incentive pay” options would be cut. The City Minister in 2008, Paul Myners, suggests that the red spectre of nationalisation was feared by the higher-ups in the bank, who “didn’t want to have anything to do with a Labour government.”[4]

The heads at Barclays could certainly point out the fate of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The RBS, having accepted the government as virtual majority owner after the bailout run, saw decisions made on its investment bank. The battle between financial-driven desire and taxpayer directed interests persists as an ideological hallmark of the modern market system.

A considerable problem in this affair is whether the SFO is up to the task. The body’s record on keeping financial deviancy in check is patchy, even lamentable. Attempts to prosecute alleged manipulations of the Libor system, the benchmark interest rate, have shown it up as a body with less than sharp teeth.

The office will have to assess whether the regulatory bypassing by the Barclays executives was tantamount to illegality, or something short of it. Was this merely exotic round tripping, with transactions that were not entirely connected? The pudding has yet to be baked, but evidence is strong.

The SFO will also have to convince such figures as Jonathan Pickworth of the law firm White & Case, who argues that prosecuting a former management team over decisions made “years ago” would merely “hurt the current shareholders and today’s hardworking employees.”[5]

The spin in such arguments turns banking organisations into noble toilers who defend, rather than undermine, the public interest. Having crossed their Rubicon, the SFO will test the viability of a system that may well have legislative backing, but has, thus far, failed to yield much by way of results.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.newsroom.barclays.com/r/3489/sfo_charges_barclays_regarding_matters_which_arose_in_the

[2] https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/was-barclays-wise-to-take-qatari-money-to-avoid-bailout-20170620

[3] https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/the-ceo-broker-musketeer-and-whistleblower-meet-the-barclays-four-20170620

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/20/paul-myners-barclays-realised-taxpayer-bailout-would-hit-bonuses

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/business/dealbook/barclays-executives-charged-fraud-qatar.html

Featured image: PageOne.ng

An idiot American pilot shot down a Syrian fighter that was attacking ISIS, thus confirming that Washington is not fighting ISIS, as Washington claims, but is protecting ISIS, its agent sent to Syria by Obama and Hillary to overthrow the Syrian government. General Michael Flynn revealed on a TV interview that Obama and Hillary had, over his objection as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, made the “willful decision” to send ISIS to Syria.

Washington’s pretense that Washington is fighting ISIS, rather than supporting it, is the excuse for Washington’s illegal presence in the Syrian conflict. Russia and Iran are in Syria legally, invited there by an elected government. The Americans are there uninvited as war criminals. Under international law established by the Americans themselves, it is a war crime to initiate aggression against a country that has not raised a fist against you.

So, to be in Syria, Washington has to pretend to be “fighting terrorism” rather than supporting it. The lie has been given to this claim many times, but now that an American pilot has proven that the US is in Syria to support its agent, ISIS, not even a Megyn Kelly presstitute can honestly claim to believe that Washington is fighting ISIS.

The Russians, Syrians, and Iranians have known this from the beginning. However, these official sources are all suspect in the presstitute Western media. So with the presstitutes’ complicity, Washington’s lie has stood until the idiot American pilot blew the lie out of the sky along with the Syrian fighter and its pilot.

Washington, of course, will lie through its teeth. It is the only thing Washington knows how to do. Washington will claim that it was a “coalition fighter,” that is, some one else was flying the US F-18. It wasn’t us. Or they will claim that the Syrian fighter was attacking women and children, or a transgendered compound or a maternity ward for women raped by Assad’s “brutal troops.” Washington will spin it in some way to make an aggressive war crime into an heroic defense of a victim group.

One question is: Did the idiot US pilot do this on his own, a hot shot playing Top Gun, or was this a planned provocation of the military/security complex outside of channels to begin a conflict between the US and Russia that would prevent any possibility of President Trump reviving his goal of defusing the high level of tensions with Russia? A $1 trillion, 100 billion annual military/security budget paid by American taxpayers is at stake.

We don’t know if the pilot acted on his own or on orders.

What we do know is that it did not go down well with the Russians. The Russian Defense Ministry said today that it regards the decision by

“the US command as an intentional violation of US obligations in the framework of the memo on avoiding incidents and the safety of aviation flights during operations in Syria signed on October 20, 2015.”

Surprise! Surprise! The Americans broke yet another agreement Washington signed with Russia.

How many agreements with Russia does Washington have to break before the Russians finally understand that a signed agreement with Washington is meaningless? Will the Russians ever learn? The American Indians never did. There is a famous American T-shirt: “Sure you can trust the government: Just ask an Indian.”

Perhaps the Russians finally have learned that any agreement with Washington is worthless at best and a death warrant at worst. The Russian Defense Ministry announced today that Russia is halting all interactions with the US within the framework on the memorandum of incident prevention in Syrian skies. Additionally, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that Russian missile defense will intercept any aircraft in the area of operations of the Russian Aerospace Forces in Syria and:

“In areas where Russian aviation is conducting combat missions in the Syrian skies, any flying objects, including jets and unmanned aerial vehicles of the international coalition discovered west of the Euphrates River will be followed by Russian air and ground defenses as air targets.”

In other words, in Russia’s understated way, Russia has declared a no-fly zone over all areas of Syria in which Syrian and Russian forces are operating. Any intruder into that area will be blown out of the sky. American, Israeli, whoever, they are dead meat.

As it is Russia, not Washington, who has air superiority in Syria, all that is required is one more dumbshit American pilot, who will get his stupid ass blown out of the sky, and the utter morons in Washington will have to back off or make a mistake. As stupid as Washington is and as full of hubris, the morons will make a mistake.

There is no intelligence in Washington. Only arrogance and hubris. The quarter century I spent there was with the most utterly stupid people on the face of the earth.

I expect Russia to win this, because Russia has intelligent leadership, and Washington does not.

Nevertheless, perhaps mistakenly, as no one can know everything, I blame Russia for letting the Syrian crisis develop. Russia and Syria would have won the war long ago, except Russia kept declaring premature victory, pulling out, having to go back, always hoping to reach an agreement with Washington. Indeed, reaching an agreement with Washington was more important to the Russian government than winning the war or anything else.

Regardless of the evidence, the Russian government’s hope simply could not die that Russia and Washington could reach an agreement to fight terrorism together. What utter nonsense. The terrorism in the Russian province of Chechnya was instigated by Washington. The Russian government does not seem to understand that there are no independent terrorists. Terrorism is a Washington weapon. So how can the Russian government make a pact against terrorism with the country that is using terrorism as a weapon against Russia?

What does Russia think the neoconservatives’ plan to conquer Syria and Iran is about if not to bring more terrorism to Russia.

President Vladimir Putin (credits to the owner of the photo)

Vladimir Putin is a knowledgeable, strong, and able leader of a country. Perhaps he is the only one outside of China. Clearly there are none in the West, a wasteland of leadership.

Little doubt that Putin is a moral leader who is opposed to war and wants the best for all countries. However, by sacrificing the advantage every time he gains it to the nonsensical idea of making an agreement with Washington simply conveys to Washington weakness. Washington thinks Putin is just another person who Washington can walk over. This is a miscalculation, and it will result in war. It would be much better if Putin laid down the gauntlet and made it completely clear that “if you want war, it will be there in 30 minutes.” Suddenly, Russia would be taken seriously.

I admire Putin. But he is playing the wrong game. Instead of parrying Washington’s aggression, he should be aggressive and force Europe and Washington to come to him for a solution.

Putin, the leader of the free world, should not be on the defensive from a bankrupt, two-bit punk, washed up government in Washington that wallows in evil.

Featured image: credits to the owner

The situation escalates in Syria following the US aviation attack against an Su-22 belonging to the country’s national air force.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that the US move may be considered an “act of aggression,” and announced that it is halting all interactions with the US within the framework on the memorandum of incident prevention in Syrian skies.

Now, Russian missile defenses will track any US-led coalition aircraft west of the Euphrates River.

“In areas where Russian aviation is conducting combat missions in the Syrian skies, any flying objects, including jets and unmanned aerial vehicles of the international coalition discovered west of the Euphrates River will be followed by Russian air and ground defenses as air targets,” the ministry announced.

At the same time, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) also joined the blame game by attempting to justify the act of aggression.

SDF Spokesman, Talal Selo, announced that Syrian government forces “have mounted large-scale attacks using planes, artillery, and tanks” against the SDF in the province of Raqqah.  Selo threatened the Syrian Army with retaliation if government forces attack the SDF again.  However, the SDF representative was not able to provide any info about these “large-scale attacks.”  Furthermore, no local sources reported such attacks in recent days, reducing the claim to mere propaganda on the part of the US-led campaign against Damascus.

Meanwhile, SDF units reportedly killed about 10 ISIS members and destroyed 2 ISIS vehicles.

The Syrian army and its allies launched attacks against ISIS from Ithriyah in the direction of Resafa, aiming to clear the road linking these [two] towns.

If government troops link up with their allies south of Tabqah, they will strengthen positions of army troops in the western part of Raqqah province.  This will allow the clearing of area east of Khansir from the vestiges of ISIS forces in order to boost security of the strategic Ithriyah-Khanasir-Aleppo road.

In the Palmyra countryside, government forces attacked ISIS positions east of the T3 pumping station and near the Arak area. Heavy clashes are ongoing. ISIS terrorists are attempting to prevent the progress of government forces towards Deir Ezzor.

Voiceover by Harold Hoover

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Featured image: credits to the owner

“I’ll never forget that day—it was the day of his mother’s funeral. I’d heard the news of Kennedy’s death on the TV and I’d gone into the living room, where the adults were consoling one another, to let everyone know. I was fourteen at the time and the first person I told was my grandfather, who didn’t hear a word I said, and who, when I repeated myself, pulled away from me and said, ‘I don’t care.’ Next I told my father the awful news, ‘Dad’ I said excitedly, ‘The President’s been shot and they got the guy who did it.’ More kindly than bitterly, he replied, ‘the guy they got didn’t do it, Doug. You can count on that.”

Unlike untold many of that generation, Douglas Valentine did not become obsessed with the question “who shot Kennedy?” At the age of 14, he could not imagine why his father had reacted in that way to news of the Dallas assassination. Yet he went on to publish his first book 24 years later in which he discovered the roots of his father’s reaction that day.

The Hotel Tacloban recounts the story of a 16-year-old high school dropout who, like many of his generation, lied about his age to get into the Army and go fight the “Good War”, for flag and country as an Eagle Scout should. He could have no idea that he would spend about one month in combat and the following three years in a Japanese POW camp.

Joining the Army was not only patriotic it was an escape from home. He was shipped to the Pacific where his unit was assigned and to a campaign with Australians that officially never took place. Generalissimo and Viceroy of the Philippines Douglas MacArthur had agreed to deploy secretly to New Guinea a contingent of US Forces to assist the Australians in obstructing the Empire of Japan from staging an invasion of Australia from New Guinea’s southern coast. There the unit to which Douglas Valentine Sr. was assigned was sent and there is where MacArthur forgot about them.

Douglas Valentine with his father, Douglas Valentine, Sr. (Source: douglasvalentine.com)

Douglas Valentine became a writer by first recovering everything his father had been commanded officially to forget some 40 years previously. The literary transcription covers events that “did not happen”. The mission on which his father was sent ended in a patrol where everyone in his squad but him was killed. There were no American troops in New Guinea at the time and hence there could also be no US POWs. He was the only US soldier in a camp otherwise holding only Australian and British prisoners—and at age 16 he was more than somewhat out of place. The events in three years of Douglas Sr.’s youth didn’t happen and even as they were happening, were entering historical oblivion—pushing the participants into an oblivion—albeit in a place and time less renowned than Dallas in 1963.

Lying about his age to do his patriotic duty: does the lie or the duty or the patriotism come first in the Boy Scout law?[1] especially when one has reached the pinnacle of the paramilitary organisation Baden-Powell launched in support of British imperialism during the Boer War. After three years of imprisonment, this Eagle Scout came back to the US physically broken and denied every recognition, benefits or assistance due to veterans of US wars. What is worse he had to give his consent to this denial, obstructing later recourse. Naturally the actions of MacArthur, Patton and Eisenhower toward the WWI veterans of the “Bonus Army” could have shown what the ordinary private soldier has to expect when in need after having served his country. However, the machine for selling the military and war has always been rather successful at masking the real divisions between those who command and those who die. Even today it is the supposed military virtue attributed to these generals, their supposed loyalty and concern for their troops, their supposed (imagined) bravery at the head of enormous bureaucratic organisations which is allowed to overshadow their actual conduct as officers in the military class and caste system.

The history of the prisoner-of-war camp known as “Hotel Tacloban”, because of its proximity to the eponymous provincial capital of the Philippine island of Leyte, might never have been told. Douglas Jr. and Douglas Sr. were not on the best of terms—quite aside from the generational conflict and the political turmoil caused by the war against Vietnam. The author’s father was not among those proud veterans with stories or anecdotes (real or fabricated) from their days in “the War”. He belonged to none of the typical veterans organisations, viewing them more with contempt than respect. Had Douglas Sr.’s GP not prescribed telling his story as a way to relieve his illnesses– after multiple heart attacks, open heart surgery and decades suffering from malaria (which officially he never had), he may never have lived to tell. Father and son had to create a basis of communication virtually from scratch. This is probably why the book is so successful in its aim to present the story accurately and why it is free from the sentimentality that makes treacle out of most memoirs. Although unsentimental The Hotel Tacloban is saturated with unstated but real empathy for the person whose story is recorded. In fact this empathy was so powerful that former CIA director William Colby granted Douglas Valentine the key interview that would lead to his landmark study The Phoenix Program.[2]

One reason this story is so remarkable is that the narrator was already on the verge of taking the secrets with him to the grave. He had been spared a kangaroo court by the Army high command on the condition that he never tell the story to anyone and also consent to having his entire service record “sheep-dipped”. This seems strange given that he was a POW in an enemy camp for whom mere survival had been the only accomplishment of his three-years in the Pacific Theatre on behalf of the USA. This had been an official war against a declared enemy—just like the US Constitution prescribed, unlike every US war since then. In the “Good War” where so much nostalgia and patriotic humbug prevails to this day and where every US veteran is supposed to have been a hero in the face of the yellow savagery of the Japanese imperial forces, the brutally inhumane treatment of a 16-year-old for three years should have been one more glorious sacrifice for freedom and democracy about which every patriotic American should know. Why was Douglas Valentine Sr. not to be immortalised like the POWs of Bataan?

Another remarkable quality of The Hotel Tacloban is that it goes beyond mere transcription. After years of abysmal health, Douglas’ father had to recount events, which by his own standards filled him with shame. The story he told his son could not be uplifting or evidence that indeed the father’s conservative ideals had triumphed or were in any way worthy of emulation. Of course some of the feelings burdening the principal in the story cannot be attributed to ideology or personal opinion but must be seen in the overall trauma of war. Where soldiers are taught to obey, kill or die, the failure to die while comrades are killed or the inability to kill when ordered to do so or even to kill when there have been no orders but necessity is worse than original sin. One can cease to believe in God, but the military remains and with it all the capacity to punish those who violate its codes of conduct. The book that resulted is a small effort to transcend that closed immoral world and the control it exercises over the souls of those who have spent any serious amount of time in it. It is not a story of familial or generational reconciliation but a partial purging of the military parasite that like the malaria parasite had destroyed the youth and most of the adult life of Douglas Valentine Sr.

The Hotel Tacloban is a short book, 173 pages comprising nineteen chapters. In the beginning the background to the deployment that brought the 16-year-old to New Guinea is told. Intermittently the exploits of the big Douglas, the great self-promoting warrior chieftain and third generation mass murderer in the commission of the United States, MacArthur are summarised for context.[3] This serves to remind the reader of the difference between the war story for public consumption and the war stories that are suppressed because they neither flatter the mass murdering class nor make good advertising for cannon fodder. At the same time it is important to see that Douglas Valentine Sr.’s suffering is a direct result of the uncontrollable egotism, class and caste arrogance, and blood lust of the Big Mac, who was fond of posing as a soldier’s soldier but in fact considered any and all servicemen who did not immediately benefit his career to be worthless. Douglas MacArthur was probably the most theatrical of the mass murdering class in his day and so it might be unfair to make him a bigger, easier target than he already was. Eisenhower liked to keep a low profile; letting generals like Patton “play Macbeth”. From a stylistic point of view it is highly appropriate to focus on MacArthur also because of the coincidence of their first names.

The story is an investigation in the depravity of war, not only for those upon whom it is waged but also for those who are just there to obey, kill and die. It is also something like what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, a novel in which the protagonist is educated and developed into the character central to the narrative. At the same time this book has the brilliance of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.[4] Douglas Valentine Sr. is not executed like Melville’s hero but the story is full of the contradictions of class and caste in the military (the only place in American society where both class and caste are even acknowledged). Beginning with Valentine’s landing in New Guinea and the patrol in which all but him are brutally killed, the story includes details that suggest explanations for events but remain riddles unsolved. For instance, before going out on patrol the lieutenant leading the squad orders Valentine to remove a military patch displaying crossed swords (perhaps a cavalry badge) from his uniform. Grudgingly he assents but apparently forgets to actually do it. When the squad is ambushed, every soldier is brutally bayonetted until the Japanese come to him. The Japanese officer commanding appears to recognise the crossed sword patch and Douglas’ life is spared. Yet the story offers no explanation for this anywhere, leaving the attentive reader to wonder what the significance of this trivial detail has if any.

To arrive at the prison camp, the young Douglas Sr. has to be transferred by ship from New Guinea to Leyte and is blindfolded the entire route. Here again we notice that a fact becomes a narrative device because the capture and transfer were alienating but the reader has to understand how alienation occurs in the person who experiences it. This use of detail to construct preponderance in a situation has become a characteristic of Douglas Valentine’s work. Although there is nothing sinister in the transfer itself, the stages of entering the hell that Valentine Sr. would inhabit for three years are just as important because the violence of war is not accidental activity. It is planned and depends on a myriad of ordinary operations, which if viewed in isolation conceal the concept of mass murder to which these acts also belong.

In The Phoenix Program, Valentine applies this attention to detail masterfully by presenting the organisation of operations and their components—to reveal structure in which facts first acquire any useful meaning.[5]

MacArthur Landing Memorial Park, Palo, Philippines (Source: Trover)

Douglas Sr. arrives in a camp, originally constructed by the US colonial regime to detain Filipinos and hence woefully “undersized” for white folks, the Australian and British inmates. Because he is a private and still a youth and because he is the only American he is taken under the wing of the Australian majority in the camp. Thus we learn about the way Australians behave, at least in contrast to the expectations of this youth from upstate New York, and the lack of filial love between HM Australian Forces and the British Army. Douglas begins to learn about social organisation in this sweltering and infested, disease ridden patch of earth. The British are the best organised and therefore dominate the camp despite their inferior numbers. However this organisation is based on rigid class distinctions and the capacity to demand not only military discipline but also fealty and subservience according to rank and station. If there is a hell and it is organised then it will be commanded by a regular British Army officer of at least field grade (major or above). This plot of hell is commanded by the graduate of HM Royal Military College Sandhurst, Major R L Cumyns.[6]

As Valentine Sr. related it:

“I suppose it’s a cultural foible with the English (certainly any nation that nurtures and glorifies a royal family, at huge public expense, necessarily develops an unnatural devotion to figures of authority), but it was embarrassing to watch the Brits grovel at the Major’s feet. For their part the Aussies looked down upon the Brits with disgust and wondered how any self-respecting man, especially a soldier, could allow himself to accept such a demeaning, subservient role. No Aussie in his right mind would ever play the toy soldier, or yield to someone regardless of his merits. Aussies rendered their loyalty to individuals of proven worth, not to abstracts like office or rank.”

Of course what also separated the British from the Australians (and Valentine) was the fact that most of the British were professional soldiers—the Army was their business. The Australians were serving because Japan—at least New Guinea—was on their doorstep. When the war was over the Australians would return to Civvy Street.[7] The sergeant major, those company grade officers and NCOs had to play by the rules—the rules of the mass murdering elite who control the professional armed forces. They could not afford Australian libertarianism—even had it occurred to them.

Valentine also learned a subtle lesson—one which is not openly taught, but essential for survival. All militaries are organised hierarchically and the most salient distinction is between officers and men. Major Cumyns was first and foremost an officer and then he was British—at least as far as ordinary soldiers were concerned. This may be extreme in the British Army but it is common to virtually all war machines. Valentine was to learn at high cost to himself what it meant to violate the rules of this hierarchy—of class in an absolute system like the Army.

At this point it is important to note that although war is essentially a lawless condition—organised murder and destruction, in which the criminals who run the State authorise those they rule to commit virtually unlimited violence against chosen targets with whatever state of the art weaponry prevails—there has been a tradition in most societies that regulate even the limits of this authorised murder—if only to keep the organised hordes from turning on their leaders or interfering with the State’s objectives by mere wanton violence. This lawlessness is governed by what are generally called the “laws of war”. In ancient times, i.e. before industrial mass slaughter (middle of 19^th century), these mainly unwritten rules were based on the sentimentality of chivalry. Knights were supposed to be subject to codes of conduct including respect for the unarmed or those who surrender in battle. However with the abeyance of “knightly combat” new instruments were developed. In fact the chivalric codes for war only applied to combatants of equal rank and station and never extended protection to foot soldiers of the rank and file.

The unpleasantness of the British war in the Crimea led to the establishment of the Red Cross, which among other things was supposed to ameliorate the conditions of soldiers sick or wounded and later those captured in combat.[8] This was initially only a national solution intended to dampen public disgust at the British Army’s mismanagement of the war. Eventually this model was extended to cover most countries for whom professional trans-border murder and mayhem were standard. (Needless to say little aid was afforded those in the colonies or wherever non-whites were resisting conquest by force of arms.) The exceptional slaughter among white folks in the years 1914 – 1917 served to reinforce arguments for rules to govern the conduct of mass murder by uniformed servants of the State. Today we still have The Hague and Geneva Conventions [9] governing the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners of war.

Part of this law was pragmatic. Neither belligerent had an interest in the wholesale slaughter of captives. If recalcitrant union members were to be massacred by machine guns and mortars at the Somme, the terrified survivors should be kept alive to return to work in the mines in a more disciplined manner when hostilities ceased. Just as important however was the need of the State to maintain morale and recruitment quotas for mass armies. If it were clear that death was the only result of mobilisation even the most patriotic peasant would sooner or later say “no”. At the same time, strict obedience is necessary to get thousands to run, crawl or walk to their deaths. Were war to mean utter lawlessness, soldiers could abandon their duty upon capture or surrender so it was necessary to assure that capture and non-combatant status did not eliminate class control.

As a result the laws of war codified the practices of class (and race) distinctions too. In a POW camp it is generally prohibited to assign officers to manual labour. Officers are to be accorded the courtesies and privileges due to their rank even in captivity—within the scope of the camp’s resources. US soldiers remain subject to military law (UCMJ – Uniform Code of Military Justice) while in captivity.[10] De facto they also remain subject to every kind of brutality and chicanery that the military hierarchy has ever invented for the subordination of the ordinary soldier. One could argue even more so than in combat. The officer in prison is no longer able to simply order his subordinates into battle from which he can expect they will not return—a common practice during the so-called Great War. He is leader in a defeated unit. The imputed bravery which is the officer’s ritual claim to authority not only cannot be exercised, it can be seriously questioned as having been inadequate to prevent captivity in the first place. For these reasons it is all the more urgent that officers maintain those class and caste distinctions of rank since they have been deprived of any other sort of legitimation and by their own subordination to the enemy also their freedom to arbitrarily dispose of unpleasant members of the lower ranks.

Neither the victorious nor the vanquished among the officer class (and the larger class of mass murderers to whom they belong) can afford to risk breach of discipline—especially since unlike in peacetime, the rank and file have already been issued a license to kill.

Hence Major Cumyns was afforded all the privileges of his class, rank and station, even in the hell of Hotel Tacloban. Conversely the ordinary soldiers were subject to whatever routine abuse they would have to accept in peacetime—aggravated by the war and the virtually unrestricted violence of those waging it.

At Hotel Tacloban this was no exception. The Japanese captain commanding knew as well as Major Cumyns that officers belong to the ruling class and are to be treated accordingly. Major Cumyns also knew that the proper conduct of an officer is always to kiss ass upward and to kick ass downward. Hence in the management of the camp both Major Cumyns and Captain Yoshishito behaved essentially as if they were in the same army while only the ordinary soldiers were prisoners—to be treated accordingly.

Although The Hotel Tacloban is not written as an allegory or even a history of British intra-imperial relations, it is easy to surmise that the antagonism between the British, with Cumyns at the apex, and the Australians, led by Lieutenant Duffy, has its own history pre-dating the camp. Ordinary Australian military history records the anger of many soldiers who fought in the First World War and died gratuitously under British command. [11] The ethnic composition of Australia—leaving aside other immigration—included not just those stigmatised by penal servitude and transportation for “crimes” but also the components of the British population which the English upper classes (and before them their Norman forebears) had been taught to despise—esp. Scots and Irish.  Douglas Sr. was dumped into this pot of dysentery-inducing gruel for three years.

And when it all seemed over, when the US Army collected him from the camp after Leyte had been returned to MacArthur’s control, the next round began. His very existence became an indictment, but of a crime he could not imagine. Here The Hotel Tacloban may remind the reader of Caleb Williams.[12] The eponymous hero of William Godwin’s novel is accused of a crime by the principal landowner on whose estate he works. Not only is the charge unfounded but also the machinery by which he is to be tried and judged is so blatantly corrupt that he cannot be acquitted. Having been decreed a criminal his subsequent life becomes one endless flight from treachery to treachery, to the point where the reader is forced to ask is there not one person, one instance capable of acknowledging the blatant injustice and that the perpetrator both of the supposed crime but of all the consequences is none other than the master of the estate from which Williams was forced to flee. Nowhere in the great hierarchy is there a hope of appeal. Godwin argued that there can be no appeal since the hierarchy cannot condemn itself.

The Hotel Tacloban is remarkable in one last sense, too. The author was able to grasp in his conversations with his father the scepticism toward any official description or explanation or report of the “facts” while retaining the respect needed to let those speaking tell their story. That has been the overwhelming strength of all his later work. It studiously avoids all tendentiousness whether in form or argument. “Facts” do not speak for themselves, but people do. What is needed is careful attention to detail, organisation and presentation. This makes it possible to discern fact and fiction, insight and deceit. Ultimately the listeners and therefore the reader have the ultimate responsibility for making sense out of history. An honest and comprehensive presentation with an intelligent structure is what makes The Hotel Tacloban and all Douglas Valentine’s subsequent work good history.

This article first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Notes

1 The Boy Scout Law: “A Scout is: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.” There have been different formulations since the first one promulgated in Scouting for Boys (1908). This is the version I learned.

2 William Colby (1920-1996) Director of Central Intelligence, i.e. head of the CIA (1973-1976) Prior to that he had served as chief of the Far East Division and Chief of Station in Vietnam, with particular responsibility for the creation of what became known as the Phoenix Program.

3 Douglas MacArthur (1880 – 1964), just to avoid any confusion. MacArthur had served under his father Arthur MacArthur while the latter was Military Governor of the Philippines, a colony in the US Empire until 1948, when it became a puppet state under US suzerainty. Prior to the outbreak of World War II Douglas held a commission from the nominally independent Commonwealth of the Philippines by which he had de facto command of Philippine colonial forces. The West Point graduate from Arkansas came from a long line of professional mass murderers. He would become the virtual military governor of the US dominated Pacific from 1945 until he was relieved of duty by Harry Truman in April 1951. MacArthur’s career was one of ruthless self-promotion both in battle and in the political sphere. He is probably the epitome of the military officer caste as it developed in the US.

4 Herman Melville, Billy Budd, an apparently unfinished last prose work by Melville (1819-1891). Published posthumously in 1924.

5 Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, reviewed elsewhere by this author.

6 Sandhurst is the name given to the British Army’s officer training college: RMA Sandhurst. In status it is the United Kingdom’s equivalent of USMA West Point. The main differences are that Sandhurst is not a degree-granting university like West Point and of course the graduates of Sandhurst take the Queen’s commission, defending the monarchy and not just the nation. In day-to-day operations this does not affect the lethality or banality of the officers each institution produces. However, in the United States the ultimate subordination is to the bureaucratic chain of command. In Britain this is personified in the quasi-feudal subordination to the British sovereign and its extensive system of rank and honours.

7 Civvy Street is military jargon for demobilisation and return to civilian life and civilian life as opposed to life in the military.

8 Crimean War (October 1853 – February 1856) fought by Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire against the Russian Empire in the Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea. Russia was defeated but at enormous cost of life to the belligerents. Much of this was due to conditions on the battlefield and less to actually combat deaths. Florence Nightingale became famous in Britain for her contributions to organised nursing of wounded and sick soldiers. In 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in Switzerland.

9 The Hague Conventions (1899) and (1907) Laws and Customs of War on Land; the four Geneva Conventions: First “for the amelioration of the condition of the wounded and sick in the armed forces in the field” (1864, 1906, 1929, 1949); Second (1949) “for the Armed Forces at Sea”; Third (1929, 1949) “relative to the treatment of prisoners of war”; Fourth (1949) relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war (based on 1800 and 1907 Hague Conventions updated.

10 During WWII, the Articles of War would have applied. On 5 May 1950, Harry S. Truman signed 64 Stat. 109 which codified US military and naval law for the entirety of the US Armed Forces as the UCMJ.

11 The Australian and New Zealand Establishment commemorate annually the slaughter of their soldiers in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli (February 1915 – January 1916) as ANZAC Day. Some 30,000 Australians were killed or wounded in this campaign, one of the more notorious catastrophes of the long class war. The unrepentant patriots and royalists treat this as a kind of bloodbath for national identity. Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister while Douglas Sr. was wasting away on Leyte, was largely responsible for the political decision to attack Turkey on these insurmountable slopes. Churchill’s last active military rank before leaving the British Army was also that of major.

12 William Godwin, Things as They Are or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794.

Featured image: Goodreads

The foreign ministry of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Sunday, demanded the arrest of a Jewish Rabbi, who called on Israeli settlers to poison water used by Palestinians in hundreds of towns and villages across the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian national office for the defense of land and resistance of settlements warned of the dangers and consequences of such calls.

In its weekly report, it explained that Rabbi Shlomo Mlmad, the chairman of the so-called Council of Rabbis in West Bank settlements, called on settlers to poison Palestinians through their water supply, which came to light by the Israeli organization ‘Breaking the Silence’.

Group member Yehuda Shaul said, according to WAFA, that the aim behind poisoning water in the West Bank is to push Palestinians out of their towns and cities in order to allow settlers to take over Palestinian lands.

The ministry of foreign affairs said, in a press release, that Palestinians have grown used to Israelis stealing from their water sources then selling it back to them. Recently, Israeli authorities cut off water supplies from the northern cities of the West Bank during the hottest days of the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise till sunset.

While Israel continues to pose multiple restrictions on Palestinians who try to dig water wells, this call by Rabbi Mlmad is considered a crime against humanity because it targets humans, animals, crops and all forms of life in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).

The ministry held the Israeli government fully responsible for the consequences of such calls. It demanded the arrest of the Rabbi for inciting murder, and the enforcement of necessary procedures to protect Palestinians from individuals who might attempt to poison water sources.

“What is the international community waiting for to interfere; the death of thousands of Palestinians of thirst? To meet such incident with silence and ignore the war Israel is waging against Palestinians is a cause of shame for the international community.”

Featured image: IMEMC News

The EU Council extended last Monday the restrictive measures against the Syrian government up to a year, until June 1, 2018. The event occurred against the background of the latest Syrian Arab Army’s success when a weak hope for the end of the conflict in Syria was born. It seems that you shouldn’t wait for resolving the conflict, as well as for lifting the the sanctions. However, it is time right now for the Syrians to really think about the restoration and post-war development of the country.

Here we should talk not only about food supplies, deliveries of cloth and basic necessities provided entirely free of charge but also about the development of trade and economic ties between the states. But what are the ways to restore the Syrian economy at this stage, today?

Total damage by city according to the World Bank Group

The Iranian Way

Not so long ago, at a meeting held in Damascus between Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis and Iranian Ambassador to the country Javad Torkabadi bilateral relations in various fields, including in the sphere of economy, were discussed. Imad Khamis made it clear that Syria needs to overcome the full-scale economic war unleashed against the country by Western states and their accomplices in the Middle East. In his turn, the Iranian ambassador confirmed that the relations between Tehran and Damascus have become a model of strategic cooperation between the countries. Probably, Torkabadi even indicated to his colleague that Syria can rely on Iran economically. In addition, Iran has accumulated vast experience in countering ‘sanctions war’ which also would not hurt to adopt. However, the economic ties between Iran and Syria alone will not solve the problem of Syrian economy’s degradation.

Qatari Scheme

Given the situation in Qatar, it would be quite a promising option to consider Qatari investments into the Syrian economy. However, it is necessary to create some political tools to settle the conflict and to stimulate investors from Doha first. The possibility of providing certain zones of influence or certain economic niches for Qatar could also contribute to the cardinal turn of the Doha towards Damascus.

Qatar is largely responsible for what is happening in Syria, and this issue is being actively discussed now in business circles from around the world. It would be nice if Qatar, in addition to Syria’s allies, would help with its financial capabilities to raise the Syrian economy. It’s time for Qatar to address directly Syria, to offer something like Marshall Plan to ensure economic stability. It would calm the economic situation in the post-war period and could bring profit to Qatar in the future.

Such a policy will not allow Qatar to become an outcast No. 1 in the region and responsible for all the evil committed by the radicals on the Syrian soil, especially as the strategy of dismembering Syria seems to have been in limbo for the sixth year and proved ineffective. But these are not all the he mutual benefits of cooperation with Syria.

In general, such a policy will undoubtedly strengthen the position of Doha in the Islamic world; allow them to bypass the Saudi barrier and to provide a new source of potential revenue. Finally, cooperation with Syria will make it possible to become more independent of the U.S. and the EU. In fact, Doha has its hands untied, because the relations with the competitors are spoiled by diplomatic scheming and the pipelines Turkey are willing to take gas from the kingdom.

What remains is to agree with Iran on purchasing some LNG from Qatar for onward transport to external consumers. Iran is now getting closer to Qatar and has strong positions in Syria, so it can become an excellent intermediary.

Economic Ties Are the Main Guarantee of Success

Despite the ongoing fighting in Syria, the country’s economy moves on. When eliminating sources of instability, terror and the break-up of the state, a number of countries can really help Syria economically.

Syria is rich in energy resources and minerals including rare-earth metals. At the same time, the country has an advantageous geographical location. Many potential ways of transporting goods to the Mediterranean pass through its territory. All this shows that Damascus can develop rapidly and may reach a new economic level in a relatively short period of time.

The stability in the region and the development of trade and economic ties would allow the Syrians to have a source of stable foreign direct investment. The country has been in the grip of war for more than six years, but is full of enthusiasm to rebuild the economy. The hope of a new life and the Syrian Arab Army delivering battlefield successes inspire optimism on the part of Syrian citizens as well as the support of such countries as Iran, China, India, Russia and Armenia.

Qatar could also join this friendship if realized considerable mutual benefits from collaborative effort and counted the losses from the economic boycott declared to the emirate by its ‘friendly’ neighbors. According to recent Reuters reports, for example, Qatar has already shut down its plants producing inert gas in this regard.

Follow the latest developments by reading Inside Syria Media Center.

Sophie Mangal is a special investigative correspondent and co-editor at Inside Syria Media Center.

All images in this article are from the author.

Nell’immaginario collettivo le armi spaziali sono quelle dei film di fantascienza della serie «Star Wars». Non ci si accorge, perché sui media quasi nessuno ne parla, che sono divenute reali. La corsa agli armamenti, compresi quelli nucleari, si è da tempo estesa dalla Terra allo spazio. In testa sono gli Stati uniti, che puntano sempre più al controllo militare dello spazio.

La neosegretaria della U.S. Air Force, Heather Wilson, subito dopo aver assunto l’incarico, annuncia il 16 giugno la riorganizzazione del quartier generale per potenziare le operazioni spaziali integrandole ancor più in quelle dell’Aeronautica. Scopo dichiarato: «Organizzare e addestrare forze in grado di prevalere in qualsiasi futuro conflitto che possa estendersi allo spazio». Responsabile dei sistemi spaziali militari è il Comando strategico (StratCom), che allo stesso tempo è responsabile delle armi nucleari e delle cyber-armi. «Abbiamo superiori forze spaziali e cyber-spaziali che sono fondamentali per lo stile di guerra americano in ogni teatro in tutto il globo», scrive lo scorso febbraio il generale John Hyten, comandante dello StratCom, sottolineando che «le nostre forze nucleari sono sicure e pronte in qualsiasi momento» e che «se la deterrenza dovesse fallire, siamo pronti a usarle».

Per gli strateghi del Pentagono, detenere la superiorità nello spazio significa avere la capacità di attaccare un avversario militarmente forte, paralizzare le sue difese, colpirlo anche con armi nucleari e, nel caso sia anch’esso dotato di tali armi, neutralizzare la sua risposta. A tal fine armi nucleari, sistemi spaziali e cyber-armi vengono integrate dal Pentagono nella «intera gamma delle capacità globali di attacco», sia sulla terra che nello spazio.

Il 7 maggio, dopo essere stato 718 giorni in orbita attorno alla Terra, è atterrato a Cape Canaveral lo shuttle robotico X-37B della U.S. Air Force, in grado di manovrare nello spazio e rientrare alla base autonomamente. Lo X-37B, alla sua quarta missione «top secret» nello spazio, serve probabilmente (secondo il parere dei maggiori esperti) a sperimentare armi per distruggere i satelliti avversari e «accecare» in tal modo il nemico al momento in cui esso viene attaccato. Sono allo stesso tempo in fase di sviluppo armi laser, già testate dalla nave USS Ponce nel Golfo Persico. La Lockheed Martin ha comunicato il 16 marzo di aver messo a punto un potente laser, che tra qualche mese sarà installato su uno speciale autoveicolo dello U.S. Army per una serie di test. Sempre in marzo, il generale Brad Webb ha dichiarato che, entro l’anno, un aereo AC-130 sarà armato di laser per attacchi a obiettivi terrestri. Il 3 aprile, scienziati della Macquarie University hanno annunciato di aver creato in laboratorio un superlaser, simile a quello della «Morte Nera» di Star Wars, per future applicazioni spaziali.

In questo settore gli Stati uniti sono in vantaggio, ma, come avviene per ogni altro sistema d’arma, altri paesi, soprattutto Russia e Cina, stanno sviluppando analoghe tecnologie militari. Nel 2008 Mosca e Pechino hanno proposto un accordo internazionale per impedire lo spiegamento di armi nello spazio, ma prima l’amministrazione Bush, poi quella Obama si sono rifiutate di aprire una trattativa in tal senso.

Così, mentre alle Nazioni Unite si svolge il negoziato per la proibizione giuridica delle armi nucleari (al quale non partecipano le potenze nucleari né i paesi Nato, tra cui l’Italia), si accelera sotto spinta Usa la corsa alla militarizzazione dello spazio funzionale alla preparazione della guerra nucleare.

Manlio Dinucci

One of the aspects that is easiest to forget about the Yemenite children affair is that it is not a historical one. The disappearance of hundreds of Yemenite babies is not an old story, but rather a continuing injustice — even today. For the families who lost their children, who still do not know their fate, it has been a festering wound for nearly 60 years.

This means living an entire life of pain and doubt, of knowing that you wake up in the morning and drive to work, go to the supermarket, pay taxes, while your country remains silent over the disappearance of your child or your sister. That the doctors who treat you were educated by those who took part in disappearing children. That politicians deliberately prevent the state from formally recognizing the injustice, from apologizing, from compensating the family, and from supporting the attempt to find the children. That one of your close family members, whom you have never met, could pass you by on the street without knowing they have another family.

It is an unbearable burden to have to carry for 60 years. To understand the pain, all one needs to do is listen to just a few of the hundreds of testimonies published by Amram, an Israeli NGO dedicated to researching and exposing the disappearance of the Yemenite children. Through the tears of the parents, sisters, and brothers, one can understand how every day without answers is another day that the children are kidnapped — all over again.

Over the past few years, a small group of dedicated activists from Amram and other organizations have been able to break through the silence. They do not organize in a vacuum — it was the decades-long struggle by the families that led them to the journey toward recognition. Exposés published in newspapers such as HaOlam HaZeh in the 1960s and Haaretz in the 90s also broke that silence. The heroic struggle of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, who led a campaign to try and force the state to come clean about the affair, further raised public consciousness.

An employee at the Israel State Archives looks at classified documents related to the Yemenite Children Affair, at the Israel State Archives offices in Jerusalem, December 22, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Over the years, however, the establishment repeatedly denied the allegations. Commissions of inquiry worked to bury the issue, while many of the testimonies remained classified for dozens of years.

In the years since it was founded, Amram has done incredible work: through recording and publishing testimonies, holding discussions and conferences to raise public awareness, they have been able to significantly influence public opinion on the Yemenite children affair, to reach new audiences and successfully force the state to release a trove of previously-classified documents.

These activists succeeded in putting together a broad political coalition, including feminist and Mizrahi organizations, the Activestills photojournalist collective, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Ethiopian-Israeli activists, and members of Knesset from both Meretz and the Joint List.

Photo of Yemenite children who were taken from their parents and disappeared.

On Wednesday of this week, Amram will hold a demonstration in Jerusalem, which will focus on three demands: first, that the state formally recognize that kidnappings indeed took place, apologize to the families and the children, and hold an annual day of recognition to mark the affair. Secondly, the activists demand that the state invest the necessary resources to unite the families who were torn apart. Amram has already succeeded — through D.N.A. tests, perusing adoption files, and public activism — to unite two families with children who were kidnapped and given up for adoption. There is no doubt that the state, with all its resources, will be able to do more. And lastly, Amram demands the state retroactively acquit Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, who was sentenced to six years after being convicted of violent offenses as part of his struggle to raise awareness over the affair.

These are modest demands. Like my colleague Noam Sheizaf, who researched the topic and made a film about Meshulam’s struggle, I also believe that recognition and reunification are not enough. The state owes these families real compensation. It won’t bring back the children, nor will it undo the injustice, but it will be the way to show that the state not only talks about responsibly and regret — it actually does something about it.

Just last week, the government rejected a bill by opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) — along with 37 MKs from Likud, Meretz, Shas, and the Joint List — to hold an annual memorial day for the sake of “solidarity and humaneness,” and to stand alongside the families. The government, it seems, isn’t willing to allow even that.

All images in this article are from the author.

Operating without any form of invitation from Damascus, or any resolution under international law, a US F-18 Super Hornet downed a Syrian Su-22 fighter-bomber over eastern Syria as it engaged targets in territory occupied by the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS).

It was the latest in a series of direct military strikes carried out by the US against Syrian government forces as they attempt to retake positions from terrorist organizations operating in their territory.

The move was categorically condemned by the Syrian government and its allies, including Russia.

The Washington Post would report in its article, “Russia threatens to treat U.S. coalition aircraft as targets over Syria,” that:

On Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry said its warplanes had been operating in the area of the encounter between the U.S. and Syrian jets. It said the coalition had not used the deconflicting hotline to warn the Russian jet.

“Multiple military actions of U.S. aviation under the guise of fighting terrorism against the legal military of a state that is a member of the United Nations are a flagrant violation of international law and constitute de facto military aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic,” the ministry said.

The Washington Post also made mention of, “the possibility that the U.S. could be forced to deviate further from its stated policy in Syria, which only involves targeting Islamic State militants,” betraying 6 years of reporting even by the Washington Post itself admitting America’s role in Syria as primarily focused on regime change, not fighting terrorists – as the Russian Defense Ministry alluded to.

Regime Change, Continuity of Agenda

The Washington Post and other Western media outlets are also contradicting a now infamous US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memo (PDF) from 2012 which stated:

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran). 

The DIA memo also explains exactly who the “supporting powers” are (and who would oppose a Salafist principality):

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

With the United States now responsible for multiple strikes against the Syrian military as Syrian forces battle ISIS militants and attempt to retake eastern territory, it is clear that the US is willing to risk wider war in pursuit of the 2012 agenda of using ISIS to “isolate the Syrian regime.”

By hindering Syrian forces attempting to move east toward Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and beyond, the US hopes to continue stationing both its own forces, and armed proxies creating a de facto state within a state separate and opposed to the government in Damascus.

From this carved out territory – having long-since failed the outright overthrow of the Syrian government – the US plans to incrementally expand westward from ISIS-held territory – while Turkish forces and their proxies move south, and another contingent of US forces from Jordan attempt to move north-northeast – in an attempt to eventually consume the Syrian state.

US policymakers from the corporate-financier funded think tank, the Brookings Institution, have repeatedly published papers over the years detailing this plan. In a 2016 paper aptly titled, “Deconstructing Syria: A Confederal Approach,” it’s stated clearly that;

…the United States and partners would seek to help local allies expand de facto safe havens and bring governance to them. It would not declare safe havens formally in the beginning, but could offer warnings to Assad not to bomb certain areas and neighborhoods lest his air force face reprisal action later. Over time, ISIS and related groups would have to be defeated. Assad or his close associates could be tolerated within a sector consisting mostly of Alawites and Christians. (Perhaps Assad could even nominally remain president for a time, if truly necessary, as long as he did not deploy security forces in those parts of Sunni-dominant Syria granted autonomy.)

The Brookings paper also clearly contradicts both the Washington Post and the US military spokespeople it is citing, making it clear that the US aims to remove the Syrian government from power, and are not merely “targeting Islamic State militants.” The report clearly states:

When appropriate, the safe zones would also be used to accelerate recruiting and training of additional opposition fighters who could live in, and help protect, their communities while going through basic training.

It is clear that this plan, verbatim, began in earnest under the administration of US President Barack Obama and is being aggressively expanded under US President Donald Trump.

It is also clear that Syria and its allies are challenging it to the point where the US finds it necessary to use overt military force to establish its “de facto safe havens” before expanding them and launching a larger scale regime change campaign from them.

Deterring US Aggression 

For Syria and its allies, finding an appropriate deterrence to impede or even role back this effort by the US and its proxies is essential. Also a possible necessity is correctly calculating a line the US will be unable to cross and presenting US forces illegally operating in Syria with this line.

With Russia withdrawing – at least temporarily – from a memorandum of understanding regarding US and Russian air operations over Syria, plausible deniability regarding the potential and accidental targeting and downing of US warplanes illegally operating over Syrian territory becomes a distinct possibility. Because of the precedent set by the US itself regarding rogue geopolitical behavior and unwarranted military aggression worldwide, the US will find itself with few sympathizers globally should it begin suffering losses in Syria following its own increasingly reckless behavior.

Ultimately, however, strategic planners in Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran must determine how much territory Syria can afford to lose during this process of US-driven Balkanization, how sustainable it will be for the US and its proxies to hold this territory – let alone expand it – and if it will be possible to let time work against US designs in the region and take the territory back at a later time with less risk and cost involved.

In the meantime, the US should be expected to carry out more strikes on Syrian forces and their allies as it attempts to establish de facto “safe havens” admittedly aimed at regime change – with fighting ISIS merely a pretext for US involvement in Syrian territory. A lack of a robust response from Damascus and its allies is more likely owed to a longer-term strategy of dealing with US aggression in an attempt to avoid granting the US and its regional collaborators a wider pretext for a more direct application of military force against the Syrian government.

However, the US itself – while crafting narratives to enable its Syrian policy – claims that regime change at this point would only empower extremist groups in Syria including the Islamic State – thus it would be most beneficial to Syria and its allies for alternative media sources to remind the public of this fact and what both current and wider US aggression against Damascus would mean in terms of enabling, not ending the Islamic State’s reign of terror both in the region, and around the globe.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.   

All images in this article are from the author.

We didn’t believe it at first, but it’s true: Russia’s Defense Ministry says it will target any aircraft from the US-led coalition flying west of the Euphrates.

“In the areas of combat missions of Russian air fleet in Syrian skies, any airborne objects, including aircraft and unmanned vehicles of the [US-led] international coalition, located to the west of the Euphrates River, will be tracked by Russian ground and air defense forces as air targets,” the Russian Ministry of Defense stated.

The announcement comes after the US shot down a Syrian jet near Raqqa. Washington says the Syrian jet had dropped bombs near US-backed forces, but Damascus insists the plane was downed while flying a mission against Islamic State militants.

Coalition’s airborne objects in Russian Air Force’s Syria missions areas to be tracked as targets – Moscow https://t.co/6722N0VpQ6 pic.twitter.com/PHqYQjI6Yo

— RT (@RT_com) June 19, 2017

This basically means that Russia is now taking complete control of most of Syria’s airspace:

Moscow has also cut its military communication line with the US in Syria.

#BREAKING Russia says US did not warn its military on downing Syrian plane

— AFP news agency (@AFP) June 19, 2017

We hope Washington gets the memo this time. Because it doesn’t sound like Russia is bluffing. Planes will be “painted”. And is the US prepared to risk it?

Featured image: Russia Insider

The International Criminal Court has demanded that Libya hand over former leader Muamar Gaddafi‘s son Saif after his release by an armed militia last week, but it is the Court, not Saif, which should be on trial.

One word tells you all you need to know about the ICC, and that’s ISIS: These terrorists have perpetuated the most appalling crimes in Libya, not least the ritual execution — filmed and uploaded onto its website — of Egyptian Coptic Christians on a beachfront two years ago. The result? No indictments from the ICC.

The ICC is a kangaroo court if ever there was one, and its pursuit of Saif smacks of politics. Consider that for years he pushed for reforms in Libya, and consider also that he commanded no military nor police units. Indeed he was not in a position to commit war crimes. And yet the Hague wants him for crimes against humanity.

As to the Saif prosecution, where is the evidence? Leaked emails show his role in trying to hold back the fighting in the 2011 revolution.

One of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails “UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05792027 Date: 01/07/2016 RELEASE IN PART B6 states:

From: [email protected]

Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 10:10 AM “The moderates, led by Saif al-Islam Qaddafi favor aggressive police anti-riot tactics but are opposed the use of deadly force. Saif is also calling for negotiations with tribal leaders in the East, including members of the former royal family.”

Additionally, consider how the ICC treated Abdullah al Senussi, Gaddafi senior’s former intelligence chief, who was also charged by the ICC. However, the ICC agreed Libya could try him, and raised no objections when that “trial” degenerated into a free for all with militias guarding the courtroom and intimidating witnesses.

That Tripoli “trial” went from bad to farce when the militia group Zintan, who to be fair never mistreated Saif, refused to hand him over to Tripoli. So instead, Tripoli court officials arranged for a video link with Zintan so he could be “tried.” That video link broke down multiple times and in the end Saif and Zintan just refused to take part.

No matter; the Tripoli judges sentenced him to death, with no public evidence ever produced.

Detractors argue correctly that the ICC is “Africa-focused” and ignores Syrians, Iraqis, Sri Lankans, Israelis, British and Americans who are deemed “safe.”

After all, you don’t hear of the ICC considering bringing Tony Blair to justice!

Clearly, the ICC is broken. Outside legal interference by a moribund ICC is negative, and supporters of such a move are exhibiting exceedingly poor judgment.

This is not an academic matter because Saif Gaddafi, newly free and at an undisclosed location in Libya, has a part to play in ending the civil war.

The ICC pursuit of Saif is a travesty of justice. The only reason ICC judges make outrageous rulings is because it is in effect ruling against Africa; because against Africans, you can do anything without fear of a backlash. The Hague-based bogus ICC is a dishonourable court doing dishonourable things. What a tragedy for international criminal justice.

It has been said that the ICC is a political court; a political court that must be fought politically. The ICC has nothing to do with international criminal justice. It is a “kangaroo” court covertly receiving direct instructions from powerful Western neocolonial powers that jokingly don’t themselves accept the rulings of the ICC.

Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (Source: Wikipedia)

In a way, the ICC is Europe’s equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. A court – calling itself such in name only. Its judges, prosecutors et al, should resign instead of shamelessly drawing huge salaries and engaging in outrageous, procedural, racist, illegal, unnecessary and meaningless activities, which are politically motivated.

Several newspapers, including Reuters, reported on or about the 20th of February 2011, that Saif Gaddafi advocated holding back in fighting with rebels in Libya and of his hopes for a ceasefire.

Saif may well help unify Libya and bring peace to the war-riven country. He should be free of meddling by the Hague and Western powers to do so if he so chooses.

The US is not a party to the Rome Statute. Therefore the ICC cannot conduct investigative activities in the United States of America nor have any real jurisdiction over its citizens except under extraordinary circumstances which to date has never occurred.

The seven countries that voted against the treaty were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States and Yemen. Following 60 ratifications, the Rome Statute entered into force on 1st July 2002 (their 15th Anniversary is coming soon) when the International Criminal Court was formally established. The UK’s position as regards the ICC is selective and ambiguous.

So in conclusion in the name of justice, the ICC must be reformed and restructured, because it is there where the core problem lies.

Featured image: The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

Our last summary said that the end of the war in Syria is now in sight:

Unless the U.S. changes tact and starts a large scale attack on Syria with its own army forces the war on Syria is over.

There are a few civilian lunatics in the White House who push for widening the war on Syria into an all out U.S.-Iran war. The military leadership is pushing back. It fears for its forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the larger area. But there are also elements within the U.S. military and the CIA that take a more aggressive pro-war position.

Yesterday a U.S. F-18 jet shot down a Syrian air force bomber near the city of Raqqa. The U.S. Central Command ludicrously claims that this was in “self defense” of its invading forces and its Kurdish proxies (Syria Democratic Forces – SDF) within a “deconflicting zone” after the SDF was attacked in the town of Jardin.

Those were lies. Neither is there any agreed upon “deconflicting zone” in the area nor was the town of Jardin held by SDF forces at the time of the attack. The attack was clearly illegal:

The U.S.[…] has no legal right to protect non-state partner forces who are pursuing regime change or other political objectives. There is no right of collective self-defense of non-state actors, …

The Syrian government as well as witnesses on the ground refute the U.S. claims. The Syrian Observatory in Britain, often cited as authoritative about events in Syria, says no Syrian attack on the SDF took place. The U.S. jets attacked the Syrian one in support of Islamic State forces:

A regime warplane was targeted and dropped in the skies of the al-Resafa area […] the warplane was shot down over Al-Resafa area of which the regime forces have reached to its frontiers today, and sources suggested to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that warplanes of the International Coalition targeted it during its flight in close proximity to the airspace of the International Coalition’s warplanes, which caused its debris to fall over Resafa city amid an unknown fate of its pilot, the sources confirmed that the warplane did not target the Syria Democratic Forces in their controlled areas located at the contact line with regime forces’ controlled areas in the western countryside of Al-Tabaqa to the road of Al-Raqqah – Resafa.

Here is an overview of the situation in south-east Syria:

Map via Peto Lucem – see bigger picture here

On the bottom left is the area of Palmyra on the right is Deir Ezzor, at the top is Raqqa. The dark areas are occupied by the Islamic State. A hundred thousand civilians and a small Syrian army garrison in Deir Ezzor is besieged by the Islamic State. The Syrian army is moving east from two directions to relieve the city. One thrust is from the Palmyra area along the road towards the north-east to Deir Ezzor. The distance still to go is about 130 kilometer and a major Islamic State held city, Al-Sukhnah, will have to be taken before the advance can proceed.

A second thrust is from the south of Raqqa.

UPDATE: The evil SDOC aka Weekend Warrior created this excellent map of what reminds him of World War II “island hopping”. The eastern Syrian desert has few inhabited places connected by roads which are of upmost important to control the huge areas in between. It shows the potential of the thrust axes and the importance of Resafa which was the focus of yesterday’s incident.

Map via Weekend Warrior – see bigger picture here

[End update]

Raqqa is currently besieged by the U.S. supported Kurdish forces of the SDF. Those forces (yellow) have taken parts of the southern bank of the Euphrates around the city of Tabqa. The Syrian army is moving to the south of these forces from west towards the east. Its current target is the town of Resafa at the crossing of road 6 and road 42. If it takes the crossing it can move south-east along the major roads towards Deir Ezzor. It will also cut off a retreat route for Islamic State forces who are fleeing south to escape the Kurdish Raqqa attack. The distance to go to Deir Ezzor is about 100 kilometer and there are no major impediments along the way. Taking the crossing is immensely important for the relieve operation of the besieged eastern city.

see bigger picture here (Source: Moon of Alabama)

Raqqa is to beyond the upper right of this detail map of the Tabqa area. The Kurdish forces are marked in yellow, the Syrian army in red. The Syrian army was moving very fast towards the east to capture the three-way crossroads at Resafa (mid-right on the map). A few hours before the Syrian jet was shot down it had already taken the town of Jardin:

Yusha Yuseef ??‏Verified account @MIG29_
Breaking , SAA Tiger Forces liberate Jaadeen جعيدين village North of Al-Easawii South #Raqqa CS
3:36 PM – 18 Jun 2017

The U.S. killing of the Syrian jet occurred hours later:

Dr Abdulkarim Omar‏ abdulkarimomar1
International coalition drops a military aircraft to the Syrian regime in the Raqqa after bombing the sites of S D Forces In the Tabqa area
5:18 PM – 18 Jun 2017

—

Yusha Yuseef ??‏Verified account @MIG29_
I can confirm that we lost Syrian Jet East of Rassafeh and Far of SDF Points
No more info if US do it
6:14 PM – 18 Jun 2017

The U.S. now claims that the Syrian jet attacked Kurdish forces in Jardin. But there were none left there when the incident happened. The town was already confirmed to be in the hands of the Syrian army. The Syrian jet attacked Islamic State forces near Resafa. The Syrian army was in the process of taking the town Resafa from the Islamic State and to reach the crossroad that would allow it to proceed to the ISIS besieged Deir Ezzor. The Syrian air forces jet bombed Islamic State forces in Resafa. The U.S. shot the jet down falsely claiming that it attacked its Kurdish proxy forces.

One can only interpret this as an attempt by the U.S. to prevent or hinder the Syrian forces from reliefing Deir Ezzor as soon as possible. The U.S. is, willingly or not, helping the Islamic State forces who are engaged in heavy attacks on the besieged Deir Ezzor garrison. The Russian government called the U.S. attack an “act of aggression” in “breach of international law” and in “assistance for the terrorists” of the Islamic State. It will halt its air space coordination with the U.S. operations command in Syria. Additionally:

In the areas of combat missions of Russian air fleet in Syrian skies, any airborne objects, including aircraft and unmanned vehicles of the [US-led] international coalition, located to the west of the Euphrates River, will be tracked by Russian ground and air defense forces as air targets,” the Russian Ministry of Defense stated.

If I were a U.S. pilot, I would try to avoid the area …

Whatever the U.S. intent was it did not stop the Syrian army. Resafa has just now been taken (map) by the Syrian army forces. The shot down pilot, Ali Fahed, has been extracted from behind enemy lines by a team of the Syrian Tiger Force.

***

Independent of the events near Raqqa the Iranian Revolutionary Guard launched medium range ballistic missiles from within Iran on Islamic State forces near Deir Ezzor in Syria. The distance was about 600 kilometers. The launch was billed as revenge for the June 7 terrorist attacks on the parliament in Tehran, Iran. The missiles hit their targets.

The message sent with them was larger than just a pure revenge act. Iran demonstrated that it can reliable hit far away targets from within its own state. The Wahhabi Persian Golf states and all U.S. forces in the area will have to take note of this. They are not safe from Iranian retaliation even when no Iranian forces are nearby. Iran emphasized that it can repeat such attacks whenever needed:

“The Saudis and Americans are especially receivers of this message.” Said [Revolutionary Guard Gen. Ramazan] Sharif. “Obviously and clearly, some reactionary countries of the region, especially Saudi Arabia, had announced that they are trying to bring insecurity into Iran.”

***

As described in our last summary U.S. forces are occupying the border station of al-Tanf between Syria and Iraq in the south-east of Syria. The station and the U.S. trained Arab “rebels” there were stopped from moving further north by a Syrian army push towards the border with Iraq. From the Iraqi side militia under the command of the Prime Minister joined in and al-Tanf is now isolated. Several reports yesterday claimed that the U.S. has flown in Kurdish proxy forces from the north-east of Syria to defend al-Tanf. It obviously does not trust the Arab “rebel” forces it had trained for occupying south-east Syria. A few hundred Kurdish forces do not change the tactical situation. There is no reasonable use for those forces and the U.S. (supported) contingent will eventually have to move out and retreat towards Jordan.

***

Israel has long supported al-Qaeda “rebels” in the south-west of Syria near and on the Golan heights. This has been known at least since 2014 and the Israeli support was even documented by UN observer forces in the area. But somehow U.S. media “forgot” to report it and the Israelis were reluctant to comment on it.

That has changed. There is now a flood of reports about Israeli support and payments to “rebels” in the Golan next to the Israeli occupied parts of Syria. Few mention though that the forces Israel supports are al-Qaeda terrorists. There are also Islamic State groups in the area who “apologized” to Israel after a clash with Israeli forces. It is clear that Israel is now openly supporting the terrorists.

Someone is intentionally pushing out these reports. I presume that Israel does this in preparation of the political landscape for an even large occupation of Syrian land. The reports compare the Israeli maneuvers with the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon in the 1980s and 90s. They neglect to tell the whole story. The Israeli occupation of south-Lebanon led to the growth of Hizubullah and the eventually defeat of the Israeli forces. By the year 2000 they had to retreat from the occupied land and Hizbullah is now Israels most feared enemy. It seems that Israel wants to repeat that experience.

Featured image: Business Insider

The last thirty days have shown another kind of world that is engaging in cooperation, dialogue and diplomatic efforts to resolve important issues. The meeting of the members of the Belt and Road Initiative laid the foundations for a physical and electronic connectivity among Eurasian countries, making it the backbone of sustainable and renewable trade development based on mutual cooperation. A few weeks later, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Astana outlined the necessary conditions for the success of the Chinese project, such as securing large areas of the Eurasian block and improving dialogue and trust among member states. The following AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) meeting in ROK will layout the economical necessities to finance and sustain the BRI projects.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have many common features, and in many ways seem complementary. The SCO is an organization that focuses heavily on economic, political and security issues in the region, while the BRI is a collection of infrastructure projects that incorporates three-fifths of the globe and is driven by Beijing’s economic might. In this context, the Eurasian block continues to develop the following initiatives to support both the BRI and SCO mega-projects. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CTSO) is a Moscow-based organization focusing mainly on the fight against terrorism, while the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a Beijing-based investment bank that is responsible for generating important funding for Beijing’s long-term initiatives along its maritime routes (ports and canals) and overland routes (road, bridges, railways, pipelines, industries, airports). The synergies between these initiatives find yet another point of convergence in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Together, the SCO, BRI, CTSO, AIIB, and EEU provide a compelling indication of the direction in which humanity is headed, which is to say towards integration, cooperation and peaceful development through diplomacy.

On the other side we have the “old world order” made up of the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union, the UN, NATO, the WTO, with Washington being the ringmaster at the center of this vision of a world order. It is therefore not surprising that Washington should look askance at these Eurasian initiatives that threaten to deny its central and commanding role in the global order in favor of a greater say by Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi and even Tehran.

One of the most significant and noteworthy events in the last month, or even in recent years, has been the admission into the SCO of India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers with a history of tension and conflict between them. These two countries are critical to the peaceful and fruitful integration of Eurasia. The slow, two-year process of India and Pakistan’s admission into the SCO benefited greatly from China and Russia’s mediation, culminating in the historical agreement signed by Modi, Sharif, Putin and Xi. This is not to mention Afghanistan’s Ghani being at the same table with Modi and Sharif, representing one of the most infamous locations where Eurasian powers have clashed with each other, acting as an obstacle to the integration and development of the region. The main goal of the new SCO organization is a peaceful mediation between New Delhi and Islamabad, and certainly to reach a wider agreement that can include Afghanistan. Kabul is a good example of how the SCO can offer the ideal framework for achieving a definitive peace settlement. This reflects the sentiment that was expressed during the meeting that took place a few weeks ago in Moscow between Pakistan, India, China, Russia and Afghanistan over the complicated situation in the country. Clearly there are conflicting interests, and it is only through the mediation of Beijing and Moscow that it will be possible to reach a wider agreement and end the 16-year-old conflict.

Afghanistan is a good example of how the SCO intends to support the BRI. In this sense, it is important to note that Moscow and Beijing have decided to engage in a partnership that looks more like an alliance with long-term projects planned deep into 2030. The extent to which Russia and China are committed to common initiatives and projects can be seen in the BRI, SCO, AIIB and CTSO.

Security and Development

Beijing is fully aware that it is impossible to defeat terrorism without laying the foundation for economic growth in underdeveloped countries in Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia. Terrorist organizations are generally better able to recruit from populations suffering from low income and poor schooling. The SCO is required to manage and control its members’ most unstable areas (Central Asian republics, Afghanistan, India-Pakistan border, Beijing-New Delhi relations) and mediate between parties. The BRI and SCO go hand in hand, one being unable to operate without the other, as Xi and Putin have reiterated.

(credits to the owner of the photo)

The SCO and BRI are both capable of meeting the challenges of economic growth through development and progress. Just looking at the BRI’s major projects helps one understand the level and extent of integration that has been agreed. The Eurasian Land Bridge begins in Western China and ends in Western Russia. The China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor begins in Northern China and arrives in Eastern Russia. Central Asia will be connected to Western Asia, which practically means China linking with Turkey. The China-Indochina corridor runs from Southern China to Singapore; and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar corridor starts in Southern China and arrives in India. The nearly completed China-Pakistan corridor starts in south-western China and reaches Pakistan. Finally, the maritime route running from the Chinese coast through to Singapore will reach the Mediterranean in Greece or, in the future, Venice.

What is evident is that countries like India, Singapore, Turkey and Myanmar, just to name a few, do not wish to miss the opportunity to join this initiative that promises to revolutionize trade and globalization as we know it. Today’s main economic problems, as well as the problem posed by terrorism, stems from the lack of economic growth brought on by a globalization that enriches the elites at the expense of ordinary people. The BRI aims to reinvent globalization, avoiding the protectionist drift that many countries today adopt in response to an aggressive and failed approach to globalization. Beijing intends to bring about a radical change to its industries by restructuring its production and boosting its investment in technology, generating more internal consumption, and becoming a country that offers services and not only manufacturing. For this process to be successful, it will be fundamental to reorganize the regional supply chain by transferring production to more competitive countries that will play important roles in sectors such as agriculture, energy, logistics and industrial projects. Southeast Asia in particular seems to offer ideal destinations for transferring Chinese industries.

In this process of transforming a good part of the globe, some countries currently outside of the SCO organization are nevertheless fully part of the integration schemes and will play a decisive role in the future. In particular, Iran, Turkey and Egypt are the main focus when one looks at their geographical position. The importance of these three countries vis-a-vis the SCO arises mainly from the need of the organization to pursue its work of political expansion and, in the future, to counter militarily the problem of terrorism and its spread. Naturally, countries like Iran and Egypt already devote a large part of their resources towards counteracting the terrorist phenomenon in the Middle East and North Africa. Their entry into the SCO would be seen by many protagonists of the BRI, especially China, as providing the opportunity to expand their projects in areas in North Africa and the Middle East that are currently tumultuous.

This should not come as a surprise, since even countries like Jordan and Israel have been taken into account by Beijing for important infrastructure projects related to the transport of desalinated water to regions with a high rate of drought. With Israel, the Chinese partnership is stronger than ever, counting on various factors such as technological development and the expansion of several Israeli ports to connect more Chinese maritime routes with destinations in the Mediterranean like Piraeus in Greece and probably Venice in Italy. Turkey’s entry into the SCO is mainly aimed at gathering the region’s major oil and gas suppliers and consumers under a single umbrella guaranteed by the SCO. These operations take time and a degree of cooperation that is hard to maintain, although the resolution of the situation in Syria, in addition to the crisis in the Gulf between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, could accelerate synergies and easily facilitate them.

The entry of Iran, Egypt and Turkey into the SCO is inevitable, receiving the strong encouragement of China and Russia, especially as regards the future connection between BRI and other infrastructure projects that are part of the EEU. The advantages are quite obvious to everyone, bringing about greater integration and infrastructure links, the increase of trade between nations, and general cooperation in mutual development. Products can travel from one country to another based on conditions determined bilaterally, something that often favors bigger nations rather than smaller ones. The intention of ​​China’s Globalization 2.0, coupled with a Eurasian revival of the EEU, is to change the future of humanity by shifting the global pole of globalization and development towards the east. The BRI is immense and mind boggling in its scope, given that it embraces realities ranging from Panama (focused on the extended channel and the Nicaragua project for a new channel) to Australia, passing through Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Persian Gulf.

Naturally, in this delicate balance, Europe is called on to play a decisive role in the future. The United States, with its “America First” policy, has already burned bridges with the Chinese BRI revolution, and indeed hopes to throw a spanner in China’s works. European countries including England, France, Germany and Italy have already begun to sign onto various Chinese proposals. It looks as if America’s allies are no longer listening to their former boss. The European Central Bank has for the first time diversified $500m into Yuan currency, and London, together with Rome, Berlin and Paris, was present in Beijing for the launch of the BRI. France, Germany and England sent high-level representations and delegations, Italy directly the Prime Minister. For Europe, the largest exporter to China and the second-largest regional block importing from China, it is inevitable that it will be an integral part of the BRI, looking to reach Iran, Turkey and Egypt for energy supplies and diversifying sources, all within the framework of the BRI.

In this process of Eurasian integration, there are some key countries to keep in mind, but the first steps have already been made with almost indissoluble ties having been made between Moscow and Beijing, as well as the monumental inclusion of Pakistan and India at the same table. With an understanding between India, Russia and China, as well as a lack of hostility to the project in Iran, Israel, Germany, England, Turkey and Egypt, it will be possible to speed up this global change, bringing it to the African countries, Gulf monarchies, South Asian countries, and even South and Central America. Even Washington’s historic allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the EU vacillate in the face of such an opportunity to broaden their horizons with significant gains. As far as their alliance with the United States, in this world rapidly heading towards a multipolar world order, not even Riyadh, Tel Aviv or London can afford the luxury of ignoring the project that perhaps more than any other will revolutionize the future of humanity in the near future. Not being a part of it is simply not an option.

The United States has two diametrically opposed options before it. It can operate alongside the BRI project, trying to fashion its own sphere of influence, albeit smaller than the countries residing within the Eurasian continent; but of course for Washington, simply being part of a grand project may not be enough, since it is used to getting its own way and subordinating the interests of other countries to its own. If the US decides to try and sabotage the BRI with their normal tools like terrorism, it is very likely that the countries historically aligned with Washington in these affairs (such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) will be subjected to Chinese economic pressure and encouraged to instead participate in a more positive manner.

Cooperation against Threats

The main question is the extent to which Chinese economic persuasion will succeed in overcoming US military threats. In this respect the SCO will be a decisive factor as it expands its influence beyond the Eurasian bloc into Africa and the Middle East. To date, the SCO cannot be considered a military bloc opposed to NATO. Everything will depend on the pressures that the United States will bring to bear on participating countries. Therefore, it is likely that the SCO will evolve to include a strong military aspect in order to counter American destabilization efforts.

Source: International Man

It is difficult to predict whether the US will be neutral or belligerent. But considering recent history, American hostility is likely to force Moscow and Beijing into an asymmetric response that will hit Washington where it hurts most, namely its economic interests. Aiming at the dollar, and in particular the petrodollar, seems to be the best bet for advancing the BRI, threatening a massive de-dollarization that would end in disaster for Washington. This is the nuclear option that Beijing and Moscow are looking into, with more than a desire to accelerate this economic shift.

The future of humanity seems to be changing in exciting and unprecedented ways. The full integration of the Eurasian bloc will eventually end up changing the course of history, allowing nations that are currently weak and poor to withstand colonial pressures and broaden their cooperation and dialogue. Peace as a method for developing synergies and prosperity seems to be the new paradigm, contrasting with war and destruction as has been the case in the last decades.

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

Featured image: Strategic Culture Foundation

In response to the US-led coalition downing of a Syrian Su-22 warplane in its own airspace, a lawless aggressive act, Russia’s Defense Ministry issued the following statement:

“As of June 19 this year, the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation has ended its interaction with the US side under a memorandum for preventing incidents and providing for safe flights during operations in Syria, and demands that the US command carry out a careful investigation and report about its results and the measures taken.”

“The shooting down of a Syrian Air Force jet in Syria’s airspace is a cynical violation of Syria’s sovereignty. The US’ repeated combat operations under the guise of ‘combating terrorism’ against the legitimate armed forces of a UN member-state are a flagrant violation of international law, in addition to being actual military aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.”

Strong stuff, badly needed, the ministry adding:

“Any aircraft, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected in the operation areas west of the Euphrates River by the Russian air forces will be followed by Russian ground-based air defense and air defense aircraft as air targets.”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov minced no words, saying Sunday’s downing of a Syrian aircraft is “another act of defiance of international law by the United States.”

“What was it if not an act of aggression? It was also an act of assistance to those terrorists whom the United States is ostensibly fighting against.”

CENTCOM didn’t use the communication channel with Russia – established to avoid incidents like the Sunday downing of a Syrian aircraft, a flagrant violation of what both countries agreed to.

Henceforth, Russia’s sophisticated S-300 and S-400 missile defense systems will intercept foreign aircraft and drones operating in areas where it’s conducting combat missions in Syrian airspace.

Russia is committed to continue combating the scourge of terrorism in Syria, wanting it prevented from operating in its own territory.

Unlike America, Moscow respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations. Part of its mission is preserving them in Syria.

Its military operations scrupulously try avoiding confrontation with US-led coalition warplanes and ground forces.

Repeated US incidents of naked aggression against Syria’s military and its civilian population head things toward Pentagon warplanes potentially clashing with Russia’s – risking possible war between the world’s dominant nuclear powers.

A Final Comment

On June 16, Foreign Policy magazine, owned by a neocon/CIA-connected Washington Post division, said two Trump administration officials urge escalating US military operations in Syria more than already.

National Security Council senior director for intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick and the NSC’s top Middle East advisor Derek Harvey want greater US military operations in southern Syria.

So far Defense Secretary Mattis and Pentagon commanders haven’t upped the stakes this much – maintaining the fiction of focusing operations on combating ISIS, the scourge Washington supports.

In the wake of Sunday’s downing of a Syrian warplane in its own airspace while striking ISIS targets, it’s unclear if America intends getting more aggressive in northern and southern parts of the country than already.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman)

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Featured image: Sputnik

On June 18, 2017, the Syrian Army General Command announced that U.S. F/A-18E Super Hornet had shot down one of aircraft the Syrian Air Force fighter jet. Syrian Ministry of Defense also stressed that the incident had taken place near a village called Rasafah while the aircraft had been carrying out a combat mission against ISIS terrorists.

In their turn, the representatives of the Coalition Command traditionally said the jet had dropped bombs near the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

It should be mentioned that it isn’t the first time when the U.S.-led Coalition attacks the government forces in Syria. Over the past month, the U.S. Air Force has struck at the pro-government forces for three times in the city of At-Tanf.

In this regard, the Coalition is accused of supporting terrorists. Besides, it seems quite strange that since the beginning a ‘counter-terrorist” operation in Raqqa, ISIS terrorists often hand over occupied areas to the SDF and the U.S. Special Forces without any fight, and then they freely go towards the Syrian Army’s positions.

Syrian Ministry of Defense also claimed that the U.S. aggression confirmed that Washington supported terrorism and, at the same time, tried to weaken the capability of the Syrian Army (SAA), which together with its allies was the only effective force fighting terrorism in the country.

It is noteworthy that not only Damascus strongly criticized the actions of the U.S.-led Coalition. Despite all the statements of the Central Command, Iran and Russia said that the Western Coalition prevented the prompt destruction of ISIS terrorists.

Nowadays, it becomes obvious that the U.S. main aim is not elimination of the terrorists. Washington intends to take full control over Raqqa. Providing terrorists with the right to leave the city is another confirmation of that.

According to many Syrian experts, if Washington manages to capture Raqqa, it will be able to justify an impressive number of civilian casualties suffered as a result of the Coalition’s indiscriminate air strikes.

Moreover, to achieve its main goal Washington uses the SDS troops. However, the question arises – what price of such cooperation will be for Kurds?

According to sources, carrying out the U.S. orders, the SDS units intend to cut the Syrian Army off from the road to Deir ez-Zor. They plan to launch an offensive from the town of Resafa. This will make it more difficult for the government forces to attack positions of ISIS terrorists.

In addition, clashes between the Syrian army and the Kurdish units of the SDF also take place in the Jaidin village south of Raqqa.

Most likely, Washington plans to turn the government forces and SDF against each other. Certainly, it will help terrorists in strengthen their capability and escalate the situation not only in Syria, but throughout the Middle East.

Anna Jaunger is a freelance journalist at Inside Syria Media Center.

Featured image: credits to the owner

Following Theresa May’s loss of majority the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP, from Northern Ireland has suddenly come to international prominence. Who are they, what do they want, and what does their propping up of a UK government mean for that country and all the others who have to deal with it?

Very few people in mainland UK could answer these questions. Everyone has a vague idea about Northern Ireland being divided into Protestant and Catholic, Loyalist and Republican, but few want to know any more because everyone of voting age has lived through The Troubles and their aftermath.

For most people living in the UK Northern Ireland equals violence, terrorism, extremism and intractable political differences. But few nowadays want to think about Northern Ireland, because it is too complicated to understand and too unpleasant to try to understand. However now they are being forced to, as their futures are bound up with whether the DUP reaches an agreement with the Conservatives, and if so, what these Northern Ireland people will want in return from a country already long sick of them.

It is impossible to summarise what the DUP are, and why they have come to prominence, in one article. But whatever you try and say, it doesn’t look good. The very existence of the DUP is an admission of failure on behalf of the British government and of humanity. May now finds a common language with a coalition with homophobic, racist, anti-abortion, and in simple language, “anti-women rights bigots” and that is just for starters.

Former Austrian Politician Jörg Haider (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Bedfellows of convenience do make for a witches brew. For instance, when Jörg Haider turned the Austrian Freedom Party into a neo-fascist organisation and it became part of that country’s government the world said “how on earth did this happen?” Well it happened in Northern Ireland long ago, and many of its voters have little choice but to support it because no one else even vaguely speaks for them – not because the locals are extreme or bigoted, but because so many people have got so much wrong for so long that the emergence of the DUP is the natural consequence of an obscene record of failure.

Living history with all its claws

A quick recap: when the whole of Ireland was ruled by the British the ruling class were almost entirely Protestant and everyone else Catholic. The official religion of the UK as a whole had swung between Catholic and Protestant several times before the Church of England gained the upper hand. The English conquest of Ireland took place around the same time, but Ireland remained Catholic regardless, and was thus thought to be a backward region that needed to be civilized.

As part of this civilizing process Protestants from Scotland and England were financed to take land in Ulster, provided they spoke English and only allowed other English-speaking Protestants to live and work on their land. This separate transplanted community saw itself as British, not Irish, and obviously sought to maintain the privileged position into which it had been put. We are going back to the early seventeenth century, but Northern Irish politics is still deeply bound up with events of that era and before.

Very few of these Loyalists supported Irish Home Rule, which became a big issue in the nineteenth century. Both sides developed paramilitary forces to try and impose their opinion on the other, and both accused the British of being sympathetic to the other for not stopping such activity. This was the start of a long tradition of fighting violence with violence, which each side justified by saying that if the other side gave up murder, so would they.

Home Rule for Ireland passed the UK parliament in 1914, over the armed objections of these “Ulster Unionists” as they became known. The First World War prevented Home Rule from being implemented, but the end result was an independent Irish Free State. When this was formed by an act of the UK parliament, the devolved Parliament of Northern Ireland was given the right to opt out of the new state if it asked the British monarch for permission to do so, which it did on the first day it could. This established the principle that Northern Ireland will remain in the UK for as long as the majority of its people want that.

The new dominion of Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, but with certain local quirks designed to pacify the majority. Catholics were discriminated against in jobs and public housing, and the electoral system was rigged to produce eternal Protestant majorities even in majority Catholic areas. It had the same political parties as the rest of the UK, but with a local slant – the Labour Party was the Catholic party, while the “Conservative and Unionist Party” (which is what the UK Conservatives are still officially called) represented Protestants, although Labour Unionists also existed.

Northern Ireland now has different parties because its own local parliament tried to address this discrimination. The more radical Protestants, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley and his very small Free Presbyterian Church, saw granting Catholics civil rights as a threat to their community’s supremacy, while the Catholics felt that only uniting with the Irish Republic would give them any guarantees. Both sides developed paramilitary groups to protect them from the other, and these groups came to be seen as terrorist.

Consequently Irish politics split into independent, right-wing Unionist parties with local concerns, effectively divided by how far they supported paramilitary activity, and localised left-wing Catholic parties, such as the SDLP and Sinn Fein, which were divided in the same way. The DUP was the most radical of the Protestant parties. It was Ian Paisley’s creation, and emerged from another brainchild of his, the Protestant Unionist Party, whose name demonstrates where he saw mainstream Unionism heading.

Northern Ireland’s DUP leader and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church Rev. Ian Paisley interupts Pope John Paul II at the start of his allocution at the European Parliament in Stasbourg, France, Oct. 11, 1988. (Source: Anorak)

The DUP has long had a common membership with terrorist paramilitary groups. Paisley and many of his followers were arrested many times for public order offences concerning protests against Catholics, and against the authorities and police for defending Catholics. On one famous occasion Paisley, by this time both an MP and MEP, interrupted a speech Pope John Paul II was making to the European Parliament by shouting “You are the Antichrist” and was removed from the chamber with difficulty.

During The Troubles it was the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party which dominated. As soon as peace was finally agreed Northern Ireland did not return to its previous, extension-of-the-UK political pattern. Instead the DUP, and its Catholic counterpart Sinn Fein, became the dominant parties within their respective communities. Now they weren’t killing each other, each community wanted the more radical parties to give them the strongest possible voice in the new, very separate, reality, such was the common alienation from what the British had done in Northern Ireland, whichever way that was seen.

Now the DUP is dictating the future of the UK, and possibly Europe. We all deplore the fact that Al Capone ran the government of Chicago at one time. What sort of world are we living in when the UK government depends for its survival on the DUP?

Leopards who are all spots

As you might expect, the DUP regards itself as “socially conservative”. It opposes abortion and homosexuality, promotes Creationism and denies climate change. Many Conservative MPs and members share these views. But on other questions the two parties are fundamentally opposed.

The DUP is pro-Brexit but entirely against a hard border with the Republic of Ireland. As many Unionists cross that border daily for work or family reasons this is not surprising. But it is now in a position were it can demand the measures its supporters want most before agreeing to prop up Theresa.

The Conservatives say they want a “hard Brexit” but have consistently refused to say exactly what that means. The DUP may well want an explicit, public guarantee on the border question, which Theresa is unlikely to give them, even behind closed doors.

More importantly, the DUP is big on welfare. Unlike in the rest of the UK, it seems to regard the poor and elderly as an important constituency, and is determined to ensure that pensions rise, and a range of social services are provided for its often older, working class supporters.

Theresa is happy to tell users of food banks that there is no “magic money tree”. This is not surprising, as for many years her party has had no social welfare dimension whatever: it says in effect that if the economy is right social welfare measures aren’t necessary. Theresa is no more likely to agree to welfare expansion, in the part of the UK which already receives more public money than any other, than she is to jump off Westminster Bridge.

The DUP also staunchly defends traditions which have been the focus of endless problems. One of these is marches held by the Orange Order, and similar institutions which celebrate the Protestant supremacy. These annual marches through towns, and sometimes Catholic residential areas, with banners flying and pipes and drums playing are seen as triumphalist by the Catholic community, and many have been banned as a result. But they are seen as a fundamental expression of civil rights by the DUP, and banned marches will have to be reinstated for the DUP to convince its members that they are getting something out of a deal with the British government.

No UK government would agree to these terms in other circumstances. During the election the Conservatives sought to capitalise on Jeremy Corbyn talking to the IRA during The Troubles, and probably did gain some votes by linking him with terrorists in this way. They will soon discover however that it is involvement with Northern Irish politics which turned the public off, not the spectre of terrorism, which people want to believe has vanished from the place they don’t want to think about.

Shooting herself in other people’s feet

Despite all this, Theresa needs to cut a deal with the DUP to “govern in the national interest”, she says. First it was “Brexit means Brexit”, then it was “strong and stable”. What does “govern in the national interest” actually mean?

Under the Good Friday Agreement which ended The Troubles, the UK and Irish governments act as “honest brokers” in Northern Ireland, both able to make suggestions about how the place should develop and mediate between the sides. They also agreed that they would be entirely impartial in Northern Ireland, and not align themselves with any one side against another.

If the UK government reaches an agreement with the DUP, and not all Northern Ireland parties working together, to stay in power it is in breach of the peace accords. Is starting all the violence in Northern Ireland again “governing in the national interest”?

The number of people in either Northern Ireland or mainland UK who think that the breakdown of peace in Northern Ireland is in the “national interest” is very small. If this is the scenario which unfolds, and there are those on all sides who also secretly harbour such ambitions, it will take a long time before the global public forgives Theresa for allowing this to happen

Most of Northern Ireland’s politicians still have intractable positions. However they get on personally in most cases. The power-sharing executive set up after the peace agreement saw Ian Paisley installed as First Minister with Sinn Feiner Martin McGuinness as his deputy. Though diametrically opposed politically, the two men worked so well together they became known as “the Chuckle Brothers” for their obvious delight in each others’ company .

If violence breaks out again after such a beginning to the peace era, it will be hard to blame “those bigots in Northern Ireland” as usual. Though there are those who might want to sacrifice peace, Theresa’s actions in calling the unnecessary UK election, and then talking to the DUP in defiance of the peace agreement, would be more responsible than anything else, and the world would know it.

Not in anyone’s name

The electors of Northern Ireland have the right to vote for the DUP. Their opinion should be respected. But very few DUP voters would have ever wanted a situation to exist where this party was the nearest thing they had to an expression of their opinions.

Only about 1% of Northern Ireland’s population were members of Ian Paisley’s church. Yet he exercised such huge influence on Northern Irish affairs that his followers, who were originally all obliged to belong to this church, have now become the local majority. After all Northern Ireland has seen, the DUP he founded, with 10 out of 650 seats in the UK parliament, is being given the chance to do the same to the whole UK it so vocally supports.

The distinguished art critic Peter Brooke was brought up in Northern Ireland just prior to The Troubles. He has said,

“Our generation thought that these Protestant-Catholic divisions were a thing of the past. Then some atrocity was committed and my Catholic friends would interpret it one way and I would interpret it another. So we wouldn’t talk about that issue for fear of arguing, but soon we couldn’t talk to each other at all, about anything!”

The DUP was happy to help create this process. That’s who Theresa is happy to work with, at just the time she is trying to renegotiate the UK’s post-Brexit relations with the rest of the world. Most countries would consider this their worst nightmare, and here it is, in broad daylight, with this once-great superpower seemingly unable to do anything about it.

Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image: New Eastern Outlook

The Federal Prison Industries (FPI) under the brand UNICORE operates approximately 52 factories (prisons) across the United States. Prisoners manufacture or assemble a number of products for the US military, homeland security,and federal agencies according to the UNICORE/FPI website. They produce furniture, clothing and circuit boards in addition to providing computer aided design services and call center support for private companies.

UNICORE/FPI makes its pitch for employing call center support personnel to firms thinking about off-shoring their call center functions. The logic is that, hey!, they may be prisoners, but it’s keeping the jobs in the USA that matters. Fair enough. That approach cuts out the middleman though, those Americans desperate for any kind of work but, through no fault of their own, are not behind prison bars and employable by UNICORE/FPI.

Sure, it seems a heartless statement and there are any number of angles to take on why the USA is the world’s number one incarcerator: Capitalism, racism, social and political injustice, a pay-as-you-go legal system, bone-headed policy makers, prison lobbyists, the death penalty, employment/unemployment, drugs, gangs, costs/prices and a host of behavioral, psychological and environmental issues that I have missed.

Inevitably the black hole that is money eventually sucks in and corrupts everyone from those in local communities desperate for the work a prison facility provides to those investors who profit from the prison industry. They earn their livelihoods and take their profits from the misery and labor squeezed from theirhuman property–those prisoners who self-destructed and others who are serving terms way too long for the crime committed.

For the Love of Money

From October 2016 through March 2017, UNICORE/FPI sold $252,414,987 million worth of goods and services.

The prison labor industry is very keen on promoting its role in assembling the US military’s widely used Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS). In January defense contractor Harris Corp. was awarded a $403 million contract by the US Defense Logistics Agency for spare parts supporting tactical radio systems, which includes SINCGARS.

“UNICOR/FPI is a major supplier of SINCGARS radios, mounts, antennas, and installation and repair kits and when hard-mounted, our SINCGARS equipment meets rigorous military standards for shock and vibration in aircraft and tactical vehicles, such as Bradley’s and Humvees. Through our nationwide network of factories and trained technicians, we have successfully met aggressive production and distribution needs for this crucial communication equipment in Middle East military operations.”

Some of the purchases by the US Department of Defense include $14.8 million for electronic components, $887 thousand for communications equipment, $26.7 million for office furniture, $27.1 million for special purpose clothing and $7.5 million for body armor. The Department of Homeland security spent $372,255 on administrative support. The Executive Office of the US President spent $389 for signs and identification plates.

Source: Ray Downs

Fight Fire with Inmates

According to a Mother Jones article in 2015 somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of California’s forest firefighters are state prison inmates with some 4,000 working at any one time on fire lines. So dependent on the inmates was California that prison reforms that would see the release of some of the incarcerated firefighters were put on hold for fear of losing the manpower to fight California blazes. Then California attorney general Kamala Harris, now a US Senator, was behind the effort to keep the “cheap” firefighters behind bars,

“Prison reform advocates have raised concerns that the state is so reliant on the cheap labor of inmate firefighters that policymakers may be slow to adopt prison reforms as a result. The concern was magnified last fall, when lawyers for state Attorney General Kamala Harris argued that extending an early prison-release program to “all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.” Harris has since said she was “troubled” by the argument, and the state has ruled that minimum custody inmates, including firefighters, are eligible for the program so long as it proves not to deplete the numbers of inmate firefighters.”

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains women, men, children, and LGBTQI individuals in over 200 county jails and for-profit prisons, according to the grass roots group CIVIC. Some of these individuals include legal permanent residents with longstanding family and community ties, asylum-seekers, and victims of human trafficking.

It was former President Bill Clinton (Democrat) who started to load up detention centers and jails with immigrants, CIVIC noted.

“In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which doubled the number of people in immigration detention from 8,500 each day in 1996 to 16,000 in 1998.Today, the detention population has increased fourfold to approximately 34,000 individuals each day, due in part to a congressionally mandated lock-up quota”

President Donald Trump’s (Republican) animosity to immigrants is well known. He and his aptly named attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions will make sure detention centers and prisons are overfilled with men, women and children from Mexico, Central and South America. Trump and Session’s maniacal quest wage war on crime, drugs and terrorism will likely ensure that many thousands more will find themselves locked away and working for UNICORE/FPI or lining the pockets of private prison company owners.

Immigrants Too

The non-profit group Towards Justice reported that a lawsuit is moving forward pitting private prison corporation against immigrants who were forced into labor while in detention.

“For the first time in history, a federal court allowed a class of immigrant detainees to jointly proceed with forced labor claims against the country’s second-largest private prison provider. Judge Kane in the District of Colorado certified a class of between 50,000 and 60,000 current and former immigrant detainees held at GEO’s Aurora, Colorado detention facility since 2004. These individuals, some of whom were found to legally reside in this country after months in detention, allege that they were forced to clean the detention center without pay and under threat of solitary confinement. This practice allowed GEO to reduce labor costs at the Aurora facility, where it employs just one custodian to maintain a detention center that houses up to 1,500 people at a time.”

Everyone Has Their Hands in the Pie

Source: ThinkProgress

In January 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative (prisonpolicy.org) worked up a study titled Following the Money of Mass Incarceration. It shines the light on some of the unsettling reasons why the USA will never be able to reduce its reliance on mass incarceration. Those who depend on money that the prison industry provides will never give it up. It’s not just private companies but local communities, bondsmen, unions all the way up to the US Department of Defense who collect fees or purchase UNICORE/FPI products and services at dirt cheap prices.

“Bail bond companies that collect $1.4 billion in nonrefundable fees from defendants and their families actively work to block reforms that threaten its profits, even if reforms could prevent people from being detained in jail because of their poverty. Specialized phone companies win monopoly contracts and charge families up to $24.95 for a 15-minute phone call. Commissary vendors that sell goods to incarcerated people — who rely largely on money sent by loved ones — is an even larger industry that brings in $1.6 billion a year. 38 towns and cities in the U.S., more than 10% of all revenue is collected from court fines and fees. In St. Louis County, five towns generated more than 40% of their annual revenue from court fines and fees in 2013.”

The over-incarceration of Americans is just one more vexing issue, piled on many—Afghanistan, Syria, education, Trump, Clinton’s, health care, taxes–in which US citizens find themselves trapped and unable to reach across the pro/con divide and cause change.

John Stanton can be reached at jstantonarchangel.com.

Featured image: The Most Revolutionary Act

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Trump Cuba Policy: What Will Happen in Coming Months?

By Arnold August, June 20, 2017

The official June 16 statement was barely uttered when the majority nationwide opposition to the Trump Cuba policy was once again reignited. Indeed, it was already extremely active and vocal before the Little Havana, Miami venue and date were announced on June 9. By stage-managing the event in Little Havana, Trump was preaching to the choir, one that does not even include the rest of Florida, where the majority of Cuban-Americans oppose the blockade, or at least support the Obama policy of making the blockade somewhat more flexible.

Behind the London Tower Block Fire Which Left Many Dead, Injured and Displaced

By Abayomi Azikiwe, June 20, 2017

Residents through their organizations had complained for several years about concerns related to the lack of sprinklers, fire alarms and effective maintenance of the structure. Apparently these complaints were not addressed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) Council which is said to be the owners of the flats.

Upping the Stakes in Syria. Towards Military Confrontation with Russia?

By Stephen Lendman, June 20, 2017

Russia’s only response so far was Sergey Lavrov calling on the Trump administration to respect Syrian territorial integrity and refrain from unilateral actions in the country – comments falling on deaf ears in Washington.

Downing a Syrian warplane after earlier US attacks on its military ups the stakes in the country, escalating conflict Russia continues going all-out to resolve diplomatically.

UK and France Propose Automated Censorship of Online Content

By Ed Johnson-Williams, June 20, 2017

Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron’s plans to make Internet companies liable for ‘extremist’ content on their platforms are fraught with challenges. They entail automated censorship, risking the removal of unobjectionable content and harming everyone’s right to free expression.

The Ineffable Reality of American Democracy. Who is Interfering in US Politics? Russia or Israel?

By William Hanna, June 20, 2017

Part of the ineffable reality of American democracy as Helen Thomas — American reporter, author, and longtime front row member of the White House press corps — once observed, is that “you cannot criticise Israel in this country and survive.”

Featured image: William Hanna

The Government announced this morning that Theresa May and the French President Emmanuel Macron will talk today about making tech companies legally liable if they “fail to remove unacceptable content”. The UK and France would work with tech companies “to develop tools to identify and remove harmful material automatically”.

No one would deny that extremists use mainstream Internet platforms to share content that incites people to hate others and, in some cases, to commit violent acts. Tech companies may well have a role in helping the authorities challenge such propaganda but attempting to close it down is not as straightforward or consequence-free as politicians would like us to believe.

First things first, how would this work? It almost certainly entails the use of algorithms and machine learning to censor content. With this sort of automated takedown process, the companies instruct the algorithms to behave in certain ways. Given the economic and reputational incentives on the companies to avoid fines, it seems highly likely that the companies will go down the route of using hair-trigger, error-prone algorithms that will end up removing unobjectionable content.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British PM Theresa May (Source: BT.com)

May and Macron’s proposal is to identify and remove new extremist content. It is unclear whose rules they want Internet companies to enforce. The Facebook Files showed Facebook’s own policies are to delete a lot of legal but potentially objectionable content, often in a seemingly arbitrary way. Alternatively, if the companies are to enforce UK and French laws on hate speech and so on, that will probably be a lot less censorious than May and Macron are hoping for.

The history of automated content takedown suggests removing extremist content without removing harmless content will be an enormous challenge. The mistakes made by YouTube’s ContentID system that automate takedowns of alleged copyright-infringing content on YouTube are well-documented.

Context is king when it comes to judging content. Will these automated systems really be able to tell the difference between posts that criticise terrorism while using video of terrorists and posts promoting terrorism that use the same video?

There are some that will say this is a small price to pay if it stops the spread of extremist propaganda but it will lead to a framework for censorship that can be used against anything that is perceived as harmful. All of this might result in extremists moving to other platforms to promote their material. But will they actually be less able to communicate?

Questions abound. What incentives will the companies have to get it right? Will there be any safeguards? If so, how transparent will those safeguards be? Will the companies be fined for censoring legal content as well as failing to censor illegal content?

And what about the global picture? Internet companies like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have a global reach. Will they be expected to create a system that can be used by any national government – even those with poor human rights records? It’s unclear whether May and Macron have thought through whether they are happy for Internet platforms to become an arm of every state that they operate in.

All this of course is in the context of Theresa May entering a new Parliament with a very fragile majority. She will be careful only to bring legislation to Parliament that she is confident of getting through. Opposition in Parliament to these plans is far from guaranteed. In April the Labour MP Yvette Cooper recommended fines for tech companies in a report she headed up on the Home Affairs select committee.

Featured image: credits to the owner

The Canadian Network On Cuba (CNC) denounces the violation of the sovereignty of Canada by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Treasury Department. OFAC fined the American Honda Finance Corporation (AHFC) $87,255 for approving and financing between February 2011 and March 2014 the leasing by Honda Canada Finance Inc. of 13 cars to the Embassy of Cuba in Canada.

Recent developments in Serbia and Poland have prompted many in the Alt-Media Community to rethink their attitude towards each respective government.

Serbian Surprise

Governments don’t always represent the people, and nowhere is this clearer nowadays than in Serbia. Pro-Western Prime Minister-turned-President Alexander Vucic just appointed a Croatian and former USAID employee, Ana Brnabic, to run the government, pending her expected confirmation by parliament next week. This completely contradicts the conservative values-based and multipolar identity that the majority of Serbs adhere to. In an of itself, Brnabic’s ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity are her personal affairs, with only her political views and work history being most directly relevant to the majority of Serbs due to her proposed leadership position, but nevertheless, the ‘full package’ is concerning to many because of what it represents.

Ana Brnabic (Source: Oriental Review)

Disregarding the dogma of “political correctness”, the fact is that Brnabic’s nomination shocked many Serbs because of how radical it is in the symbolic – and possibly soon, substantial – sense. Some people fear that the alignment of her sexual identity, work history, and political views with the preferences of the ruling EU elite (her gender and ethnicity aren’t an issue to the average person) will lead to the accelerated imposition of neoliberal “values” on Serbia, thereby completing the post-communist transformation of the country into the West’s archetype vassal state. In addition, Serbia has rightly been regarded for a long time as the center of gravity in the region, and Vucic’s nomination of Brnabic as Prime Minister sends the very strong message that she’s the sort of politician who Brussels wants to rule over the rest of the Balkans.

Polish Populism

What’s taking place in Serbia is nothing short of tragic from the perspective of the country’s conservatives, though interestingly enough, individuals of the said ideological-value predisposition are experiencing an unexpected renaissance of sorts in Poland, of all countries. The Law and Justice Party, popularly known by its abbreviation PiS, swept to power in late-2015 in an unprecedented parliamentary landslide and gained full control of the country. The new government swiftly moved to emulate Hungarian Prime Minister’s conservative agenda, which instantly prompted the country’s identity crisis to go international after the emergence of large-scale pro-EU protests and Western liberal condemnation. In defense of PiS, the new government is simply implementing the forgotten will of the people, the very same socio-economic and cultural populism which had been trampled upon by former premier and current EU Council President Donald Tusk’s pro-Brussels Civil Platform (PO) party.

It’s very curious that Poland has risen as a conservative icon in Europe given its historical tutelage as a pro-American military proxy in Eastern Europe, but this just goes to prove how suddenly things are changing in the world. At the time of the party’s reentrance into power, it stood in stark opposition to the Obama-led neoliberal transatlantic order, though following Trump’s inauguration, Warsaw is more in tune with Washington’s socio-cultural wavelength. Poland’s post-communist governments, and especially PiS, have always been heavily in favor of limitless NATO involvement in the country, so that’s certainly a point of variance with most people in the Alt-Media Community. Even so, Warsaw’s tremendous progress in restoring traditional religious-based values, promoting a mild form of economic populism, and resisting the existential transformation of the state via the uncontrollable influx of civilizationally dissimilar “Weapons of Mass Migration” throughout the Immigrant Crisis has earned it loud praise in the very same Alt-Media circles.

Comparing Apples and Oranges?

As for Serbia, the situation is somewhat different. Genuine anti-imperialists all across the world laud the country for its proud history of resisting external dominance and fighting against all odds, and they generally saw Serbia as a pillar of Orthodox values in spite of its pro-Western government. While the wholehearted respect for Serbia’s history and people still remains, their support of the nation’s government has seriously eroded over the past couple of years, with Vucic’s nomination of Brnabic being the last straw.

While it can be said that Serbia isn’t a NATO member like Poland is, and certainly isn’t anywhere near as Russophobic, it shouldn’t be overlooked that Belgrade agreed to a controversial Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the bloc in 2016 which allows for the free movement of troops and vehicles through the country, among other unilateral concessions. Therefore, while Serbia is legally a militarily neutral country, it’s in fact moved to more closely associate itself with NATO.

The difference between Poland and Serbia’s NATO relationships is obvious – Warsaw is much more important for Washington’s military strategies vis-à-vis Moscow because it can more directly threaten Russia’s national security, while Belgrade is nowhere near as significant in this regard because no direct (key word) Russian interests are threatened by SOFA. Moreover, the scale of cooperation is qualitatively different, since Poland is NATO’s frontline launching pad in Eastern Europe and is hosting part of the so-called “missile defense shield’, while Serbia has no such relationship to NATO and could only realistically function at this point as a highway between Croatia & Hungary to Albania & Greece (potentially even the Republic of Macedonia if its de-facto coup government joins the bloc in the coming year or two). Therefore, if one evaluates Poland and Serbia back-to-back, then Belgrade is infinitely more attractive than Warsaw if NATO cooperation is the only form of criteria.

Serbians protest against SOFA (Source: Oriental Review)

Nonetheless, other factors of comparison are certainly in play because socio-cultural principles are now becoming just as important as military posturing to many people, which holds the potential of reversing the status of Poland and Serbia in the Alt-Media Community when it comes to how others assess their governments. In that case, Poland’s authorities are much more appealing than Serbia’s in light of PiS’ defense of traditional socio-cultural values and Vucic’s undeclared opposition to them. Neither country is friendly to civilizationally dissimilar illegal immigrants, but Serbia has been pressured into the position of becoming a temporary “parking lot” for some of them, whereas Poland ardently refused to accept even a single one and is now being sanctioned by Brussels because of it. However, it must be said that the Polish authorities have no qualms about irresponsibly facilitating the massive migration of Ukrainians to their country, which in spite of this group’s civilizational similarity could still pose a looming and very dangerous threat in the long run.

Apart from that, another point of contrast between the two states is that everyone took for granted that Poland’s government will always be pro-Western, which is why it came as a pleasant surprise that its new authorities clashed with Obama and Merkel, although they do admittedly have a lot in common with Trump nowadays. From the other side, it was a disappointment to many that Serbia’s government kowtowed to the West as quislings in spite of their proud national history of resistance, and Brnabic’s nomination is understood by some Serbs as an unforgettable self-inflicted humiliation to the highest degree and even an outright capitulation to the (failing) neoliberal world order.

Comparatively, however, Poland’s government is still much more pro-American than Serbia’s, though this too becomes a matter of moral subjectivity when considering that Belgrade is a lot closer to the EU. From the multipolar perspective, both are undesirable, but Trump’s America is championing conservative values at home (though not necessarily abroad, as Macedonia proves), while the EU is forcing its underlings to submit to neoliberal ones just like Serbia did. If one had to choose, the socio-cultural positions being promoted by Poland are more attractive than those being forced upon Serbia.

Concluding Thoughts

All in all, this thought exercise isn’t meant in any way whatsoever to justify or whitewash either country’s (especially Poland’s) relationship to the unipolar forces of NATO, the US, and the EU, nor to attack Brnabic’s personal affairs or infer anything negative about the nationwide constituency which she’s slated to represent, but just to demonstrate the increasing complexity of International Relations in the present time and show how difficult it is for observers to “support” one actor or another entirely. There’s no such thing as a “perfect government” or “perfect politician”, and there will always be elements in both which clash with one’s principles, but the important thing is to differentiate between the state and the citizenry, and never judge either of them based on the other.

That being said, while the vast majority of sincere anti-imperialists in the Alt-Media Community will always stand with the Serbian people and respect their government’s nominal non-alignment in military affairs, there’s an unmistakable tendency to distance themselves from its present government because of the embarrassment that it’s become and to instead recognize the defense of socio-cultural values undertaken by Poland’s, however unexpected that may sound at first. This doesn’t mean that such individuals “support” PiS in the conventional sense of the word, but just that they are gaining more respect for its principled position against the illegal immigration of civilizationally dissimilar individuals and Brussels’ neoliberal “values”, though of course consistently condemning Warsaw’s frontline position in NATO, Polish society’s widespread Russophobia, and the government’s short-sighted policy towards Ukrainian migration.

Therefore, what it ultimately comes down to then is whether an individual feels more strongly about a given country’s/government’s role in NATO or its position on socio-cultural values and the Immigrant Crisis. If it’s the former, then Serbia and its authorities are rightly heralded as having a much milder position than Poland’s, though if it’s the latter, then Warsaw is regarded as progressive whereas Belgrade is perceived as rapidly moving down the path of regression.

Featured image: Crossed Flag Pins

The official June 16 statement was barely uttered when the majority nationwide opposition to the Trump Cuba policy was once again reignited. Indeed, it was already extremely active and vocal before the Little Havana, Miami venue and date were announced on June 9. By stage-managing the event in Little Havana, Trump was preaching to the choir, one that does not even include the rest of Florida, where the majority of Cuban-Americans oppose the blockade, or at least support the Obama policy of making the blockade somewhat more flexible. Trump’s  trademark manner of hand-picking events to spread the word across the country will not work. His Cold War rhetoric will not detract the forces that want to increase trade and travel to Cuba. 

However, Trump’s policy is not yet set in stone. According to the June 16 White House Fact Sheet on Cuba Policy, the Treasury and Commerce Departments will begin the process of issuing new regulations only in 30 days. His policies cannot take effect until the new regulations are established, a process that, according to the Fact Sheet, “may take several months.” A lot can happen within this time frame.

Why Now? 

In order to evaluate the current situation, we need to backtrack. Trump had a lot on his domestic and international agenda in the first 100 days and could not deal with Cuba. This country was and is very controversial. There are contradictions within his own party. A large number of Republican members of Congress, politicians at the state and municipal levels as well as Republican voters support the Obama policy and even want to go further in opening trade and travel. This has been and still is a formidable obstacle for Trump.

Thus, it was only last month, on May 3 (six months into his mandate), that he convened a special meeting on Cuba at the White House, including his top officials and Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart whom initially favoured breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba and shutting down the U.S. Embassy in Havana. In this meeting, it was clear that the upper-level civil servants at Homeland Security and the State Department wanted to continue the Obama policy. In fact, State Department Secretary Rex Tillerson, during his January 2017 Congressional confirmation hearing, was quite ambiguous with regard to any major change to the Obama policy. In another hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just last June 13, Tillerson was likewise obscure regarding a major rollback in Cuba policy. According to some American press sources, Tillerson has privately expressed support for the Obama policy.

Sen. Marco Rubio and Pres. Donald Trump (Source: Pinterest)

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and the White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus agreed with the Trump/Rubio “from the top-down approach” to by-pass opposition. Thus, Trump handed over the task of drafting the policy to the White House staff and National Security Council whose advisor H.R. McMaster also agreed with the Trump/Rubio orientation (instead of entrusting Homeland Security Secretary John Kelley and  Tillerson’s State Department), with Marco Rubio  and Diaz-Balart as the main advisors. Now, how did Marco Rubio go from “Little Marco,” as Trump ridiculed him during the primaries, to Big Marco the Playmaker on Cuba policy? The Senator sits on the Congressional Intelligence Committee and was one of the few who exonerated Trump during the Comey hearings earlier this month. Is this one of the reasons that Rubio was provided this privileged position? How indispensable will Rubio be in the next few months?

Trump’s Policy Is a Compromise Between Hardliners and Anti-Blockade Forces 

Despite Rubio and Miami’s Little Havana Batista followers wanting to break relations, it did not happen, and no one complained. Although Trump previously alluded to an about-face on diplomatic relations, he did not announce the breaking of relations, even though it is a cornerstone of the Obama policy. This is very good. However, to compensate for this, Trump substantially ratcheted up the rhetoric against Cuba and introduced important restrictions in trade and travel for Americans that roll back the Obama initiative. This is his compromise. Nevertheless, now that Trump is back in Washington and back to earth, he has to face the widespread opposition to his Cuba policy across the country, in diametrical opposition to Little Havana.

Some Economic Contradictions That the Trump Administration Must Confront 

One of rollbacks concerns the right of Americans to travel to Cuba as long as they do so in one of 12 categories, such as for religious or cultural purposes. Obama loosened that restriction by allowing the Americans to do so in good faith. Under the Trump policy, they will have to prove it before leaving and travel as part of a group. This complicates the matter not only for U.S. citizens but also for the Treasury Department. How is it going to enforce this, especially at a time when Trump wants to cut back on this type of expense? According to White House sources who were permitted to brief reporters on the condition of anonymity, other categories of authorized travel will remain open to individuals. Is Trump caught in a bind, or is he showing some light between Rubio and himself?

Rubio, in promoting the Trump policy, gave the example that they are trying to enforce the patronization of privately owned bed-and-breakfast establishments rather than state-run hotels. However, if, in a few months’ time, the Trump policy is allowed to complicate travel to Cuba, how will these potential B&B customers get there? In addition, the powerful accommodations-networking firm Airbnb is not expected to take this lying down, nor are the major U.S. airlines companies or the giant online travel company Expedia, which just concluded a deal with Cuban hotels.

Four Points Sheraton Havana: The Only US Branded Hotel in Havana, Cuba (Source: TravelUpdate)

With regard to the new Trump policy of outlawing stays at hotels owned by the Cuban Armed Forces Business Enterprises Group (GAESA, Spanish acronym), what will the drafters of the new rules do over the next several months? Hotel giant Starwood recently opened a Sheraton Four Points Hotel in Havana in collaboration with Gaviota, one of the Army’s main tourist companies. (The Four Points Hotel is 49% Hyatt-owned and 51% Gaviota-owned.) If the eventual new rules effectively annul this deal, Robert Muse, one of the most important American lawyers dealing with the blockade, contends they will be in contravention of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It stipulates that no one can be deprived of property without compensation. Perhaps Trump is seeing the writing on the wall, as it seems that he is not going to interfere in this transaction. Even if the hotel is allowed to continue operating as it does now, Trump will be faced with the ridiculous spectacle of Americans being barred from staying at the only American hotel in Cuba!

Likewise, what would the U.S. Treasury Department do if American visitors were to enjoy a snack or a drink at the iconic Sloppy Joe’s Bar or the equally emblematic Floridita in Old Havana, unaware that they are both run by the Army enterprise group? If Treasury foolishly goes through with Trump’s June 16 directive, the U.S. will be depriving American visitors from access to these landmark restaurant/bar reminders of U.S. presence in Havana before the Revolution.

While the Rubio-fuelled new Cuba policy is destined to gain support from Cuban-Americans, GAESA also controls much of Cuba’s finances, including remittances. Thus, inadvertently, Trump can even face off against some Cuban-Americans who were charmed by the Trump Cuba policy as announced on June 16, but will wake up soon to find that it even goes against their own family interests.

Secretary of State Tillerson may not be the only one in the Trump Cabinet who seems to be in at least partial contradiction with the new policy. As recently as May 17, 2017, after the May 3 White House meeting, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue pledged his support for expanding agricultural trade with Cuba at a House Agricultural Committee hearing. Secretary Perdue has long been a supporter of expanding agricultural trade to Cuba, having expressed his support at his Senate confirmation hearing as well as during his time as Governor of Georgia following a trade delegation trip to Cuba. This is just part of a larger picture whereby Midwestern farm states that voted for Trump also want to seek out the Cuban market for their exports.

GAESA also controls the new modern Mariel container port on Cuba’s north west shore. Meanwhile, U.S. Gulf Coast ports and the Port of Virginia have signed letters of intent to work with this new terminal. What will they do? 

And the Political Inconsistencies 

Trump insisted on June 16 on the need to strictly enforce U.S. legislation on the blockade. He is undoubtedly referring to, among others, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, signed by Bill Clinton. It extended the blockade even further toward being extra-territorial than its 1992 predecessor, the Torricelli Act. The 1996 act punishes third countries that deal with Cuba, as seen recently, for example, by the Trump Administration’s fining of Honda Canada for dealing with Cuba, thus challenging Canada’s sovereignty.

President Bill Clinton signs the Helms-Burton Act into law in 1996. (Source: cubaninsider)

However, the Helms-Burton Act also stipulates that the U.S. government cannot reach any agreement with Cuba while Fidel or Raúl Castro is in power. Well, Raúl is Head of State; does this mean that Trump is violating this piece of legislation? While this is a tongue-in-cheek question, the situation shows that the Trump policy is a compromise and that he is on the defensive, camouflaged by his rhetoric. Perhaps the most obvious political contradiction is that if the Cuban regime is so terrible, as he went over the top to describe it, why maintain diplomatic relations and an Embassy in Havana and even invite Cuba to the negotiating table, no matter how this reeks of hypocrisy?

On June 16, Trump made a point to single out Venezuela as well. It was another instance of gross interference in the internal affairs of a Latin American country, as he did with Cuba. The Organization of American States (encompassing all 35 countries in the hemisphere except Cuba) is meeting June 19–21 in Cancun, Mexico. It is a regular session of all foreign ministers, thus the U.S. is being represented by Secretary of State Tillerson. What will the reaction of the member states be? Will Trump’s arrogant outpouring on June 16 push more and more countries against U.S. interference in the region and thus have a boomerang effect on Trump’s announcement? On June 18 it was announced on that Tillerson himself is not attending the OAS Summit in Cancun. He is being replaced by Kevin Sullivan, U.S. Interim Representative to the Organization of American States and Michael J. Fitzpatrick, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Andean, Brazilian, and Southern Cone Affairs.

One should recall that the unanimous opposition by Latin American and Caribbean nations to the decades-long U.S. Cuba policy was one of the factors that pushed Obama to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba in December 2014. During the June 16 Trump performance in Miami, the body language of Tillerson in listening to Trump seemed to indicate a very reluctant approval of the new Cuba policy. Did he have in mind the Cancun meeting and what he may face as a result of Rubio’s ill-advised Cuba policy?

Still Time to Act 

As soon as the Trump speech was over, Engage Cuba, the main coalition against the blockade with the backing of bipartisan political and business support across the nation, issued a statement. It concluded, “Today was the speech. Tomorrow we get back to work.” This is the main message of my words today, as a very initial reaction to Trump policy. The forces in the U.S. – from business to the travel industry, and from scholars/educators, community and politicians to the grass roots – still have several months to strive to influence the situation in favour of more open travel and trade with the goal to lift the blockade altogether. It can be carried out by taking advantage of the contradictions within the Trump Administration and his entire party, and be inspired by the across-the-board majority American opposition to the blockade. This is supported by peoples around the world who support Cuba’s right to self-determination and sovereignty. They strongly oppose the U.S. attempt to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs to force it to “change” in conformity with U.S. desires.

In the meantime, only several hours after Trump’s announcement, the Cuban government issued a strong statement that indicates, as it has since 1959, that Cuba refuses to bow to U.S. threats. The government also said that it is willing to continue a respectful dialogue with the U.S. on topics of mutual concern on the basis of mutual respect. This option of sitting down at the table would not have been possible if Trump were not forced to compromise, and thus maintain diplomatic relations with Cuba. Furthermore, Cuba being very aware of American domestic politics, did not single out Trump, but rather mentioned that he was once again ill-advised.

On June 19, at a special Press Conference from Vienna where he was visiting, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez passionately detailed the real terrorist nature of those Cuban Americans from Miami lauded by Trump. He stated that the Trump policy “will reinforce our patriotism, dignity and determination to defend national independence in the spirit of José Martí, Antonio Maceo and Fidel Castro.” However, he reiterated that Cuba will continue to deal with the U.S only on the basis of mutual respect.

This situation of possible dialogue and the fact that the process will take several months in the face of increasing anti-blockade pressures are the positive points on an otherwise very bleak June 16.

Arnold August is a Canadian journalist and author of three books on Cuba, the most recent being Cuba–U.S. Relations: Obama and Beyond, which includes an analysis of the unfolding Trump Cuba policy. www.CubaUSRelations.com.

Featured image:  [email protected] / Fotolia

A US Navy F-18 shot down a Syrian military aircraft over Syrian territory Sunday, marking the first time the US has engaged in air to air combat since the US attack on Yugoslavia in 1999. US claims that the Syrians were targeting US-backed rebels were undermined by reporting by the generally pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which stated that according to its sources on the ground the Syrian aircraft was not attacking US-backed anti-government forces. The Russians, who also had military aircraft near the shot down Syrian jet, claim the US did not provide warning via the hotline to prevent accidents between the US and Russia. As a result, the Russian defense ministry announced that it would track any flying object flying in its area of operations as potential targets. How high will this new tension rise? Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

Featured image: credits to the owner

Authorities in London, England announced on June 19 that 79 deaths have been officially recorded resulting from a fire which quickly swept through the Grenfell housing complex in North Kensington on June 13-14.

Immediately after the fire erupted many media outlets began to raise serious questions about the level of safety and preparedness inside the building.

Residents through their organizations had complained for several years about concerns related to the lack of sprinklers, fire alarms and effective maintenance of the structure. Apparently these complaints were not addressed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) Council which is said to be the owners of the flats.

Hundreds of residents and their supporters attempted to storm the RBKC Council proceedings on June 16 demanding answers to their questions. The doors of the building where the Council was meeting were locked as demonstrators rallied outside.

Residents and their family members who were interviewed by the press spoke to the abject failure of the owners and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization which was supposed to oversee the conditions in the building. These entities did not provide proper fire prevention and rescue operation protocols at Grenfell Towers. After the fire started some residents reported that they were instructed by municipal employees to remain within the building.

Nonetheless, hundreds of the residents were able to escape without being severely injured. Others remain in hospital with some under critical care.

Later people rendered homeless went to makeshift relief centers seeking food, clothing, water, blankets and counseling. Volunteers from throughout the community donated supplies and food to the affected residents.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan visited the area of the fire the following day and was met with loud protests by residents and community members. The criticism centered on the absence of information related to transitional housing, clothing and food. Other concerns voiced by residents were the desire of many who were burned out that they could remain in the same neighborhood. Impacted tenants felt that these issues were not satisfactorily addressed by municipal and national governmental officials.

Grenfell Tower Council protest on June 16, 2017 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

British Prime Minister Theresa May was admonished as well for failing to meet with residents and their families. She did visit the fire scene however the prime minister only spoke with firefighters and the police. Later she visited some of the injured victims in hospital.

Eyewitnesses, Community Organizations and Experts Blame Authorities for Disaster

Even the state-sponsored British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) could not conceal or minimize the culpability of the municipal officials in creating the conditions for the fire and subsequent deaths. Although North Kensington is considered a high-income area of London undergoing rapid gentrification, there are still large numbers of marginalized residents many of whom are from people of color communities with heritages in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Middle East.

This racialized aspect of the disaster at Grenfell Tower became evident to readers and viewers of the media since a disproportionate number of people being interviewed were from nationally oppressed groups and the lower rungs of the working class. Anger is burgeoning among these groups who are saying the fire, its swift expansion, and the resulting injuries and deaths, were unnecessary. The general consensus is that if adequate safety precautions had been taken the fire may have never started or been confined to a small area of the housing block.

According to a post on the Grenfell Action Group website hours after the fire erupted, it says:

“Watching breaking news about the Grenfell Tower fire catastrophe. Too soon (5am) to even guess at numbers of casualties and fatalities. Our heartfelt and sincere condolences (go out) to all who have perished, to the injured, to those who are bereaved or are still searching for missing loved ones. Regular readers of this blog will know that we have posted numerous warnings in recent years about the very poor fire safety standards at Grenfell Tower and elsewhere in RBKC. ALL OUR WARNINGS FELL ON DEAF EARS and we predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time.” (www.grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com)

The channeling of marginalized and oppressed groups into what is called “social housing” in Britain is clearly a manifestation of the class and racial oriented approach to urban planning that permeates London and other major cities. Many of these social housing complexes are located in ageing buildings which have been refurbished in recent years utilizing substandard materials creating a tinderbox.

Experts have cited the use of cladding at Grenfell Tower as a possible cause of the rapid spread of the fire. With this being a 24-story building firefighters did not have the equipment to reach the higher levels of the structure leaving people helpless in the face of imminent death.

Although higher-income housing developments are within the same general area as Grenfell Tower, the safety of the poor and working class residents are not treated with the same sense of urgency and necessity. Despite the fact that residents had repeatedly expressed their fears related to structural problems within the block no serious efforts by the municipal authorities were enacted.

Bloomberg, one of the world’s most widely-read financial publications, admitted in a report written by Leonid Bershidsky on the tragedy at Grenfell Tower that:

“As in much of Europe, the use of tower blocks as public housing in the U.K. began in the 1950s with a decision to provide public subsidies based on building height. The 1965 Housing Subsidy Act spawned 4,500 tower blocks by 1979. It wasn’t a great idea for a lot of social reasons. By the end of the 1970s, a growing body of research showed that the social alienation of living in a high-rise increased psychological stress, that toxic materials used in industrial construction and insufficient thermal insulation led to health problems, and that widespread crime and disaffection was linked to the faulty urban planning.” (June 16)

Placing low-income residents from oppressed groups in high-rise tower blocks serves two obvious purposes. The buildings serve as a mechanism to contain the demographic shift of British and other European municipalities restricting the geographic spread of people of color communities.

From a financial perspective, by concentrating African, Asian, Middle Eastern and other working class residents in confined spaces where maintenance and safety costs are de-emphasized, it provides the capacity for urban governments to channel tax revenue as incentives for private housing and commercial developments which is far more lucrative for corporations which specialize in these projects. What remains to be seen is whether the British government will learn from this calamitous event providing policy imperatives to construct housing units which are safer and more humane for the working poor and immigrants.

Tower Block Fire Compounds Political Crisis for the Conservative Government

Prime Minister Theresa May had good reason not to want to meet residents of Grenfell Towers and their neighbors. A recent election in the country, which many political pundits say was unnecessary, resulted in the Conservative Party losing its absolute majority in parliament forcing the ruling group to seek an alliance with the small Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to form a government. The prime minister could not afford to be seen on British and world television being heckled and denounced.

Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to members of the fire service as she visits Grenfell Tower (Source: New Statesman)

It is questionable whether May will be able to survive in her position in the coming weeks and months. Britain has been the site in recent months of several high-profile terrorist attacks in London and Manchester where many people have died.

On June 18, a crowd of Muslims coming from the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London were targeted by a white racist who drove his van into pedestrians. One person died in the attack and several others were seriously injured. People in the area said the assailant remarked that he was intent on killing Muslims.

The following day on June 19, Britain began negotiations with the European Union (EU) over its delinking from the continental organization. Brexit stemmed from another miscalculated election in June 2016 where the voters decided to withdraw from the EU, costing former Prime Minister David Cameron his position and triggering a recession inside the country due to the economic uncertainty going into the future.

Britain along with other western capitalist states will continue to experience political instability in light of the growing class and sectional differences among the populations. As long as the wealthy elites enhance their status with disregard for the majority of the people within society, the mounting social contradictions will undoubtedly prompt further economic turbulence and protracted ideological conflict.

Featured image: Abayomi Azikiwe

On Sunday, a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22 warplane near Ja’Din in the western part of the province of Raqqah. Ja’Din is located in the area south of the town of Tabqah controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The Su-22 was supporting the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) advance towards the ISIS-held town of Resafa located at the Ithriyah-Resafa-Raqqa road.

“At 6:43pm, a Syrian regime SU-22 dropped bombs near SDF fighters south of Tabqah and, in accordance with rules of engagement and collective self-defense of Coalition partnered forces, was immediately shot down by a US F/A-18E Super Hornet,” the US-led coalition said in a statement on the issue.

In turn, the Syrian Defense Ministry said that the attack was attempt to undermine the SAA effort against ISIS.
The US attack came amid the rapid SAA advance in the Resafa area. With the liberation of Resafa, the SAA controls one of the important roads heading to Deir Ezzor besieged by ISIS terrorists. In this case, the US move is another attempt to draw red lines for the internationally recognized government of Syria. Washington sees successful SAA operations against ISIS as a threat to the US influence in the war-torn country.

Following the incident, the Iranian Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) launched medium-range ground-to-ground missiles at ISIS targets in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor. According to the IRGC, the missiles were launched from the western Iranian provinces of Kermanshah and Kordestan, flied through Iraq’s airspace and hit terrorists targets in Syria. Iran reportedly used Zolfaqar missiles.

The IRGC statement said that the missile strike was a response to the recent ISIS-claimed terrorist attack in Tehran. However, it’s clear that this missile strike was a message to the US-led coalition and US-backed forces in Syria. The missile strike shows that Iran is capable to conduct a missile strike on joint garrisons of the US-led coalition forces and US-backed militant groups located near the villages of At Tanf and al-Zquf at the border with Iraq.

Meanwhile, according to some sources, sporadic firefights appeared between the SAA and the SDF south of Tabqah after the SDF had opposed government forces attempt to conduct a pilot rescue operation in the area.

Reports also appeared that US-led coalition forces are setting up a military facility in the town of Tabqah. US forces are reportedly aiming to build a command center and residential buildings for its troops. According to opposition sources, the US wants to adopt the new base as a long-term base in Syria.

Despite tensions with the US-led coalition, the SAA continued operations against ISIS in the eastern Hama countryside where government forces liberated Jab al-Saad, Rasm Amoun, Hanita and Hassou al-‘Albawi and continued advancing with aim to shorten the frontline in the area.

The recent events show that the US and its allies lost a tactical initiative in the conflict and now they are attempting to stop ongoing or prevent expected SAA operations in the provinces of Raqqah and Deir Ezzor, and along the border with Iraq.

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

Featured image: South Front

After over six years of US aggression in Syria, falsely called civil war, nothing surprises.

On Sunday, Syria’s military said the so-called US-led “international coalition” downed one of its warplanes during a combat mission against ISIS terrorists about 30 km south of Raqqa.

The pilot is missing. It’s unknown if he’s alive or dead. A Syrian military statement said the following:

“The attack stresses coordination between the US and ISIS, and it reveals the evil intentions of the US in administrating terrorism and investing it to pass the US-Zionist project in the region.”

“Such aggressions would not affect the Syrian Arab army in its determination to continue the fight against ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist organizations and to restore security and stability to all Syrian territories.”

A US-controlled so-called Operation Inherent Resolve statement lied, saying

“a Syrian regime SU-22 dropped bombs near SDF fighters south of Tabqah and, in accordance with rules of engagement and collective self-defense of Coalition partnered forces, was immediately shot down by a US F/A-18E.”

The action was the latest US-led lawless attack on Syria’s military, fighting to liberate the country from US-backed terrorists – ISIS and all other anti-government forces. No so-called “moderate rebels” exist.

Syrian forces expanded operations in northern areas, liberating three villages near the Atreya-Resafa-Raqqa highway.

Washington wants Syrian sovereignty destroyed, the country balkanized, northern and southern areas separated from Damascus under US control.

Sergey Lavrov (credits to the owner of the photo)

Russia’s only response so far was Sergey Lavrov calling on the Trump administration to respect Syrian territorial integrity and refrain from unilateral actions in the country – comments falling on deaf ears in Washington.

Downing a Syrian warplane after earlier US attacks on its military ups the stakes in the country, escalating conflict Russia continues going all-out to resolve diplomatically.

On Monday, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, international affairs advisor to Iranian parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, blamed Saudi Arabian security services for the June 7 terrorist incidents in Tehran, saying:

“The existing documents are proof of the US and Saudi Arabia’s continued manipulation of terrorism in the region and the world. Their strategy and policy (are) to draw out regional crises in order to carry out their own agendas…”

After the Tehran incidents, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said his country’s intelligence shows Riyadh “actively” supports terrorist groups along Iran’s eastern and western borders.

In retaliation for the June 7 attacks, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) launched ground-to-ground missiles, targeting an ISIS Deir Ezzor command post.

An IRGC statement said

“(t)he spilling of innocent blood will not go unanswered. (N)o efforts (will be spared) to defend (Iran’s) national security and obviate plots as well as anti-security phenomena.”

Along with Russia, Iran actively aids Syrian and allied forces combat the scourge of US-backed ISIS and other terrorist groups in the country.

Self-defense is a universally recognized right – naked aggression the highest of high crimes. America and its rogue allies stand guilty as charged. Their alliance is humanity’s greatest threat.

On Monday, Almasdar News reported “(i)ntense clashes…between” Syrian and US-backed forces west of Raqqa, saying:

Government troops “attempted to cross (their) front lines…to rescue their fallen pilot (if alive). (T)hey were turned” back.

Fierce fighting is ongoing between both sides “near the key town of Resafa in western Al-Raqqa.”

Hawkish generals running Trump’s military operations in Syria and elsewhere want endless wars continued – at some point, risking direct confrontation with Russia.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Featured image: WFAA-TV

Part of the ineffable reality of American democracy as Helen Thomas — American reporter, author, and longtime front row member of the White House press corps — once observed, is that “you cannot criticise Israel in this country and survive.”

Thomas was subsequently obliged to step down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” It is equally true that while the imposing United States Capitol Complex on the left is theoretically the seat of the U.S. government, it is in fact in the building on the right at 251 H St. NW — the soon to be dramatically expanded American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) headquarters — where much of America’s domestic and foreign policy is determined.

(http://www.countercurrents.org/hanna200814.htm)

This unmentionable reality was highlighted by a recently published article in The Duran, which reported that during an interview on The Late Show by host Stephen Colbert, Oliver Stone remarked that Israel had far more influence over U.S. elections than any of the surmised influence Russia may have had. When Stone referred to the  alleged and yet to be substantiated Russian interference: 

“Israel had far more involvement in the U.S. election than Russia, why don’t you ask me about that?”

Colbert — who also hypocritically sniped about Vladimir Putin’s alleged suppression of press freedom in Russia — abruptly ended that topic of conversation by saying:

“I will ask you about that when you make a documentary about Israel.”

Though Stone’s above assertion was valid and irrefutable, it was — in keeping with the best of the American media’s relentless quest for, and reporting of, the truth — nonetheless censored and omitted from the actual broadcast.

(http://theduran.com/oliver-stones-israel-remarks-censored-by-stephen-colberts-late-show/)

This was particularly hypocritical considering that since the issue of the Trump team’s connections to Russia — and that country’s alleged interference in the U.S presidential election — The Late Show and Colbert have enjoyed a surge in ratings by constantly harping on the issue of “Russian skulduggery” while as always failing to mention the subversive influence on America of the all-powerful and well funded pro-Israel lobby. Despite his undoubted talent and popularity, Colbert nonetheless failed during the interview to disguise the hypocrisy of his subservient silence — the hallmark of the “free” American press — with regards to Israel’s subversive activities and  violations of international law including crimes against humanity with arrogant impunity.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6XQOD-7VhA&t=3s)

In the meantime, while an endless saga including the Russian “threat” to an American democracy that is a sham; the firing of former FBI Director James Comey; and the appointment of a special council is dominating the news, the pro-Israel lobby’s undemocratic efforts to influence U.S. lawmakers at federal, state and local levels —with generous financial incentives, political intimidation, and expense-paid trips to Israel — have continued unmentioned and unabated. 

Such tactics have resulted in the Israeli government reportedly committing 100 million shekels (about $26 million) to fight BDS on as many fronts as possible with emphasis on the targeting of academic institutions and legislative bodies at the national, state and local levels; Congressional rejection of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation of international law . . . ”; and a proliferation of laws, bills and non-binding resolutions — particularly in U.S., Canada, and the UK — against the global Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement which according to numerous international academics and legal experts is “lawful exercise of freedom of expression.”

(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/israel-boycott-bds-movement-lawful-exercise-freedom-expression-lawyers-academics-human-rights-a7466501.html)

Israel’s ability to control the media dialogue with an endless stream of propaganda lies — otherwise known as Hasbara and meaning “explanation” — has been successful only because the U.S. corporate media has simply followed the example of the U.S government by also accepting without question or conscience the heinous propaganda from an Israel which has no qualms about stooping to any level in its rejection of Palestinian identity, history, and presence in Palestine as is evident from the following Israeli government video: 

(http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israels-latest-propaganda-video-is-offensive-it-paints-a-dark-picture-of-the-governments-views-a7363021.html)

The apparently successful, illegal, and brutal occupation of Palestinian land by an Apartheid Jewish state has only been possible as a consequence of Israel’s total but unmentionable occupation of the American mind . . . The extent of that occupation is made evident in The Occupation of the American Mind documentary narrated by Roger Waters as outlined is this short video clip.

William Hanna is a freelance writer with published books the Hiramic Brotherhood of the Third Temple, The Tragedy of Palestine and its Children, and the forthcoming Hiramic Brotherhood: Ezekiel’s Temple Prophesy. Purchase information, sample chapters, other articles, and contact details at (http://www.hiramicbrotherhood.com/)

Featured image: William Hanna

Hillary Clinton may find herself behind bars sooner than anyone expects; however, it’s not her private email server or much discussed “pay-to-play” scheme that is her main Achilles’ heel.

The financial and founding documents of the Clinton Foundation are most damning.

“Let’s start from the very beginning,” Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst who has been investigating the alleged charity fraud for about two years and publishes his findings on his website, says.

How It All Began

“The United States has precise rules governing how ‘charities’ spring into life legally and then operate. Most charities are organized in a given US state (or Washington, D.C.) as nonprofit corporations. After completing this step, they frequently apply for federal tax exemption – here, they must complete a detailed application truthfully that explains, among other things, the specific purposes they intend to carry out,” Ortel explained in an interview with Sputnik.

“These ‘purposes’ must, in fact, be tax-exempt in line with statutory provisions that define which purposes serve the public, and which may not,” he stressed.

“The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, Inc. is somewhat different in that it was organized to comply with the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955, as later amended, to house ‘Presidential Records’ (this is a statutorily defined term that means items created or received during Bill Clinton‘s presidential terms that ran from January 20, 1993, through January 20, 2001), to operate a research facility for those who wish to study these records, and to raise a capital endowment,” Ortel clarified.

In addition, to operate a charity lawfully across the US or the whole world, one must comply with solicitation requirements in each of our 50 states and in certain other jurisdictions, which require charities to register and report before raising funds.

Wall Street Analyst Charles Ortel (Source: Youtube / CGTN America)

The analyst underscored that many states and places levy taxes on charities and their potential donors, who are not exempt unless state and local registrations are completed truthfully.

“Long before 2002, when Bill Clinton, Ira Magaziner and others illegally began soliciting funds, allegedly to ‘fight HIV/AIDS internationally,’ the original Clinton Foundation failed to register truthfully in numerous states and localities. In addition, the Clinton Foundation filed raise and materially misleading federal tax forms concerning the status of their state and local filings, and other matters,” the analyst highlighted.

He emphasized that under applicable rules a “charity” must be organized lawfully and then operated lawfully at all times thereafter.

“So, material defects in public filings for the Clinton Foundation – which was founded on October 23, 1997, in Arkansas – began long before 2002, and have escalated right to the present,” Ortel told Sputnik.

Audit Problems

Yet another problem brought to light by the analyst is that the Clintons’ charity has never been audited in full compliance with the law.

In this Sept. 22, 2014 file photo, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton address the audience at the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City. (Source: PolitiFact)

Thus, from December 31, 1997, through December 31, 2009, the Clinton Foundation attempted to pass off accounting work performed by a firm called “BKD, LLP” as “audits,” Ortel recalled, stressing that BKD couldn’t be considered “independent” since it had certain ties to the charity.

“Afterwards, from December 31, 2009, forward, no purported ‘audit’ prepared by any accounting firm for any part of the Clinton Foundation opens with a formal ‘audit’ of the starting position on December 31, 2009. This may be because no part of the Clinton Foundation was lawfully organized by December 2009,” Ortel pointed out and added that, in his opinion, “the financial statements put into the public domain by Clinton Foundation trustees define reckless misconduct and seem actionable to me, on many levels.”

Indeed, the charity’s financial documents contain suspicious gaps and omissions.

“Also missing is proof that each of these foreign operations was registered lawfully in any foreign nation where the Clinton Foundation operated or solicited donations,” he highlighted.

What Lies at the Root of the Gaps and Omissions in the Documents

The question then arises what lay behind these obvious discrepancies and negligence.

Is it ignorance of the law on the part of the Clintons? Unlikely.

According to the analyst, one could not exclude that these discrepancies point to potential fraud and mismanagement of funds.

For example, back in 2015, Charles Ortel exposed the scheme, which was potentially used by the Clinton Foundation to defraud air travelers within the framework of the charity’s HIV/AIDS initiative. According to the analyst, the Clintons could have defrauded an unsuspecting international public of hundreds of millions of dollars for personal gain.

This is big, the analyst notes, calling attention to the fact that “the penalties under the US state and federal law for charity fraud, particularly involving disaster relief, are incredibly stiff.”

Rep. Corrine Brown with Hillary Clinton (Source: The American Mirror)

One of the shining examples is Rep. Corrine Brown‘s case: the 69-year-old Democrat has been recently indicted for a $800,000 charity fraud including mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, obstruction and filing of false tax returns. She is facing decades in jail.

“Normally, the IRS and Department of Justice look at the public filings to determine how much ‘private benefit’ may have been generated through the operation of a supposed ‘charity’ – this test is performed on a ‘collective’ basis. In other cases, a collective private benefit of $1,000 or more has been held to be disqualifying,” the analyst explained.

What Prevents IRS, FBI From Catching the Clintons Red-Handed

So, what prevented the IRS and FBI from catching the Clintons given their suspicious charity record?

“Normally, the IRS holds enormous power when it chooses to investigate a charity whose public filings seem suspect,” Ortel noted, adding that, similarly, the FBI has enough sophisticated resources to “scan” a charity.

There were reports that the Clinton Foundation had been investigated by the IRS and FBI but, surprisingly, these inquiries have not borne any fruit.

“The first investigation of the Clinton Foundation that I find mentioned in the public domain was conducted by the FBI from 2001 through 2005. … During this time, two gentlemen now in the news were involved: James Comey was US attorney and then deputy attorney general of the Justice Department, while Bob Mueller was head of the FBI,” Ortel said.

Maybe here is the answer to the question.

“The Clintons have had decades to insert their allies into the IRS, the FBI and Justice, as well as into key state government positions,” the analyst noted, “So, until now, the Clintons, the Obamas and others have been able to blunt comprehensive inquiries that likely will expose bipartisan wrongdoing.”

In this light, Donald Trump’s words that former FBI Director Comey was “the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton” acquires a new meaning.

That also means that the Clintons charity case could become especially explosive given the fact that so many operatives, trustees, donors, companies and even foreign government officials could have been involved in the suspected fraud.

How the International Community May Contribute to the Charity Probe

To tackle the issue and conclude an investigation into the Clintons’ alleged charity fraud one needs to “clean the house” first, the analyst stressed. According to Ortel, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the best-qualified official to carry out this work.

Furthermore, the international community can also join the effort and contribute to the investigation.

“I am already in contact with certain governments concerning the apparent legal status of the Clinton Foundation and the nature/amount of sums solicited and received by Clinton interests, supposedly for charitable pursuits,” the analyst said.

“Around the world, the Clintons claim to have operated their charities towards noble-sounding aims. I would be most grateful to receive any information concerning potential infractions,” Ortel stressed.

Featured image: credits to the owner

According to local sources, US-led coalition forces have begun setting up a new military base in Tabqah town in the province of Raqqah.

The new base will be located in the military housing area, the Mohammed Fares school as well as the military and security buildings in the third district of the town. US forces reportedly intend to build a command center and residential buildings for its troops. According to opposition sources, USA wants to adopt the new base in Tabqah town as a long-term base in Syria.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports from Kurdish sources appeared arguing that a new agreement between the USA and YPG was made. The agreement will allegedly allow the US military to stay in the YPG-held areas for 10 years. In turn, the US will continue providing military aid to YPG. However, no official sources have reported about this.

Source: South Front

The Turkish News Agency Anadolu announced that Washington has supplied YPG and YPJ Kurdish forces in Syria with modern weapons within the last ten days. On June 16 , 50 trucks loaded with weapons arrived through Kurdistan Region border crossings. On June 5, 60 trucks loaded with arms arrived to the SDF-held areas. 20 more trucks arrived on June 12, according to the agency.

According to the Anadolu report, the Kurds received: 12,000 rifles, 6,000 machine guns, 3,500 machine guns, 3,000 RPG-7 bombers and 1,000 grenade launchers of the AT-4 type produced by the United States and LNG grenades, besides near 235 mortar rounds, 100 sniper rifles and 450 7PV night vision sights.

Featured image: credits to the owner

An American fighter jet on Sunday shot down a Syrian warplane that the US-led coalition said attacked its allies in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group in the war-torn country.

The escalation comes as Syria’s six-year-old war becomes ever more complex, with US forces and their allies converging on the northern IS bastion of Raqqa in close proximity to Russian-backed government troops.

Further complicating matters, Iran said it launched missile strikes on Sunday against “terror bases” in Syria’s northeastern Deir Ezzor province in revenge for deadly attacks on its capital claimed by IS.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces – an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters – is battling to oust the militants from Raqqa, and broke into the IS stronghold city last week.

U.S. Navy fighter jet shoots down Syrian jet that had dropped bombs on rebel forces fighting ISIS in Syria. https://t.co/PySH8EBkde pic.twitter.com/r1T295UJTs

— ABC News (@ABC) June 18, 2017

Government forces are not involved in the battle for Raqqa, but they are advancing in an area southwest of the city, skirting around SDF fighters, their eyes set on the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor.

“Aircraft from the ‘international coalition’ targeted one of our fighter planes in the Resafa region of southern Raqqa province this afternoon while it was conducting a mission against the terrorist Islamic State group,” the Syrian army said.

It warned of “the grave consequences of this flagrant aggression”.

The US-led coalition later confirmed it shot down the Syrian warplane that it said had dropped bombs near SDF forces.

“At 6:43 pm (1743 GMT), a Syrian regime SU-22 dropped bombs near SDF fighters… in accordance with rules of engagement and in collective self-defence of Coalition partnered forces, was immediately shot down by a US F/A-18E Super Hornet,” the Combined Joint Task Force said in a statement.

It said that two hours earlier, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad had attacked the SDF in Jaaydine, south of Tabqa, “wounding a number of SDF fighters and driving the SDF from the town”.

Coalition aircraft stopped the advance of Syrian pro-government troops with a “show of force,” the coalition added.

Before it downed the plane, the coalition had “contacted its Russian counterparts by telephone via an established ‘de-confliction line’ to de-escalate the situation and stop the firing.”

The coalition does “not seek to fight the Syrian regime, Russian or pro-regime forces” but would not “hesitate to defend itself or its “partnered forces from any threat,” the statement said.

The US-led coalition has in recent weeks escalated its aerial bombing campaign in northern Syria and Raqqa province.

The Syrian army said the “aggression” against it came as government troops and their allies made up ground in the battle against IS “on several fronts in the badiya“.

It was referring to a large stretch of desert that extends over some 90,000 square kilometres from central Syria to the borders with Iraq and Jordan to the east and southeast.

Since 2015, much of the badiya has been held by the militant group, but Syria’s army has been chipping away at it for months.

Looks like the @realDonaldTrump Administration is fighting a war in Syria with no congressional authorization & no explanation to the people https://t.co/1BU6kb17y8

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 18, 2017

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting broke out in two villages, Jaaydine and Shouwayhane, some 40km south of Raqqa.

The Observatory said the clashes came after government troops had reached the edges of Resafa, also in the same area, as part of an offensive to reach Deir Ezzor.

“The regime is trying to reach the oil province of Deir Ezzor through Raqqa,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

The regime has lost control of many oil and gas fields since the start in 2011 of Syria’s conflict, especially in the provinces of Homs and Deir Ezzor.

Most of the province is held by IS, including parts of the provincial capital, Deir Ezzor city, and the militants are besieging government-held parts of the city.

SDF fighters entered Raqqa on 6 June after months of heavy clashes to encircle it, and the US-led coalition has been backing them with air strikes, equipment and special forces advisers.

Since then they have seized a few neighbourhoods, including one in the east and one in the west, and are battling to push into the Old City of Raqqa.

312 ISIS militants killed, four districts liberated in Raqqa operation so far: SDF https://t.co/Q16ZlL4N32

— Teoman Başbuğ (@TeomanBasbug) June 18, 2017

The Syrian army has also taken territory from retreating IS militants in the western Raqqa countryside and seized back some oil fields and villages that had been under the militants’ control for almost three years.

An estimated 300,000 civilians were believed to have been living under IS rule in Raqqa, including 80,000 who fled there from other parts of the country.

IS seized Raqqa in 2014, transforming it into the de facto Syrian capital of its self-declared “caliphate”.

More than 320,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began with anti-government protests in March 2011 before turning into a complex war involving regional and international players.

Featured image: AFP via Middle East Eye

ISIS, al-Qaeda and like-minded groups thrive from foreign support – from America, NATO, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other regional rogue states.

Washington created these groups, supports their fighters with funding, weapons, munitions, training and direction, deploys them to its war theaters as imperial foot soldiers.

They can show up in any nation Washington targets for regime change – most recently in the Philippines, perhaps for that purpose.

America’s so-called war on terror is a fabricated hoax. Its alleged anti-ISIS campaign supports the scourge it claims to oppose.

A Free Syrian Army trainer addresses fellow fighters as he conducts a demonstration on how to use anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons at a training camp in the northern countryside of Aleppo March 31, 2014. (credits to the owner of the photo)

In Mosul, it provided a corridor to redeploy thousands of its fighters to Syria. In nothern Syria, something similar appears planned to facilitate a southern withdrawal from Raqqa to a new location.

According to Tass,

“(c)ommanders of the Russian group of forces in Syria ha(ve) taken measures to avert the withdrawal of the Islamic State militants from Raqqa (southward) towards Palmyra.”

“The terrorists have received an opportunity for unimpeded withdrawal on the condition they will head toward Palmyra.”

On Friday, Sergey Lavrov blasted Trump administration policy in Syria, saying

“(t)he US-led coalition is behaving the same way it did under President (Barack) Obama’s administration.”

It’s “doing everything to shield Jabhat al-Nusra from strikes. This is a very alarming issue. We often ask about this during our contacts with American partners (sic), and we don’t get any clear answers, but would like to have them.”

US and Russian objectives are world’s apart – America waging war OF terror, claiming otherwise, supporting ISIS, al-Nusra and similar groups.

Russia alone among major powers is combating terrorism in Syria effectively – respecting the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity Washington and its rogue allies want destroyed.

On Friday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov criticized US reluctance to cooperate with Russia in combating terrorism. Instead of a common struggle against a universal scourge, both nations are on opposite sides of the war in Syria.

On May 28, Russian warplanes struck an ISIS command post in northern Syria where its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and others in his chain of command were discussing exit routes for its fighters from Raqqa through a southern corridor.

According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, al-Baghdadi is believed to have been “killed in the airstrike” along with other high-ranking ISIS commanders and hundreds of its fighters.

Sergey Lavrov said he hasn’t gotten “100% confirmation” of al-Baghdadi’s death. Earlier reports of his elimination proved untrue, Lavrov adding:

“(A)ll examples of…actions to ‘decapitate’ terror groups had always been presented with great enthusiasm and pomp, but experience shows that later these groups restored their combat capabilities”

They and their “numerous reincarnations are still active” – because of support from Washington and its rogue allies. Without it, these groups can’t exist.

Their heavy weapons, munitions and other material support come from foreign sources. They need regular resupply to sustain themselves like all fighting forces.

Cut it off entirely and these groups will wither and fade away – the only way to defeat them.

As things now stand, they remain a serious threat to all countries where they’re deployed, with or without al-Baghdadi and other commanders like him – because Washington wants them used to serve its imperial interests.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: credits to the owner

Straightaway after Trump’s January 20 swearing in ceremony, a White House statement said defeating ISIS and other terrorist groups is the administration’s “highest priority,” adding:

“To defeat and destroy these groups, we will pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations when necessary.”

“In addition, the Trump Administration will work with international partners to cut off funding for terrorist groups, to expand intelligence sharing, and to engage in cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable propaganda and recruiting.”

Instead of “defeat(ing) and destroy(ing) these groups,” the Trump administration actively supports them.

Photographic evidence shows ISIS firing US-made TOW-guided anti-tank missiles against government forces.

In last year’s battle for Aleppo, al-Nusra terrorists used these weapons, according to Russian General Sergei Rudskoi – supplied by the Obama administration.

ISIS was earlier supplied with shoulder-launched, man-portable, easy to operate, surface-to-air missiles (SAMS), able to down helicopters and low-flying aircraft.

These weapons are still likely being supplied to the group and other anti-government forces. Washington and its rogue allies covertly support the scourge they claim to oppose.

Numerous times Bashar al-Assad accused Western and regional countries of supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups combating government forces.

On Saturday, his political and media advisor Bouthiana Shaaban accused Washington of arming and financing ISIS, flagrantly violating Security Council Resolution 2253 (December 2015) – sponsored by Russia and America, unanimously adopted.

It covers an asset freeze, travel ban, arms embargo and lists criteria for designating ISIS, al-Qaeda, and “associated individuals, groups, undertaking and entities” as terrorist groups.

It states parties responsible for committing, organizing or supporting terrorist acts must be held accountable. It called on member states to cooperate fully in investigating incidents involving these groups.

It stressed the obligation of member states to prevent their nationals or persons in their countries from aiding them economically and/or militarily.

Russia and Iran scrupulously observe its principles. America and its rogue allies repeatedly violate them.

Separately, according to Libya’s Al-Manar TV, Iraqi forces regained control of the strategically important al-Waleed checkpoint on the Syria border – located near the al-Tanf border crossing, along the important Syrian/Iraqi/Jordanian triangle.

Last week, Syrian Defense Ministry officials held talks with their Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad on coordinating border security and combating “a common enemy, which is the terrorist Daesh (ISIS) organization,” adding:

“We discussed holding Syria-Iraq borders to maintain pressure on the terrorist enemy and establishing a joint operations center through which both sides can coordinate.”

On Saturday, Syrian General Mohammad Issa said

“(s)ending US missiles to al-Tanf is (part of a) US (plan) to create a small ISIL state along the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders to separate Syria from Iraq and Iran, and turn it into a marginalized country which doesn’t play any role in the region.”

A similar scheme is planned for northern Syria to separate it from Damascus control – part of a diabolical US plot to destroy the country’s sovereignty.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: credits to the owner

Neither oversight, negligence, nor malfeasance lies at the root of the Glenfell Tower fire in West London. Strip away the sickening obfuscation and platitudes, peddled by the usual coterie of confected politicians, and the roots of this disaster lie in the virulent disdain, bordering on hatred, of poor and working class people by the rich in a society which in 2017 is a utopia for the few and a dystopia for far too many.

What will future historians say about a culture in which there is more than enough money to pay for nuclear weapons, to finance the bombing of other countries, to fund tax cuts for the rich, but not enough to provide decent housing for people whose only crime is that they happen to be poor and on low incomes? Given the scathing nature of the evidence, it’s a fair bet that the verdict issued will be a scathing one —and rightly so.

If this mind numbingly awful event do not mark the end of 7 long years of callous cruelty that describes the previous and current Tory government — unleashed in obeiscance to the god of austerity — then nothing will and we deserve to end up in the abyss where, make no mistake, we are headed unless we rise up with a collective and resounding cry of “No more!”

No more living in a country in which cruelty has been raised to the level of a virtue and compassion relegated to the status of a vice, in which foodbanks, benefit sanctions, zero hours contracts, homelessness, and crumbling public services are justified on the basis of moral rectitude and fiscal responsibility, when in truth they are symptoms of the class war unleashed by the Tories on working people and which up to now working people have been losing.

The hollowing out of the state, deregulation, the near free rein accorded to property developers and private landlords, all at the expense of people’s wellbeing and safety, is tantamount to a crime committed by the rich people who govern us in the interests of other rich people. Don’t politicise the Grenfell Fire, they tell us. Are they serious? Are they having a laugh? This event is verily dripping in politics. Indeed it could not be any more political, coming as it does as the logical conclusion of decades of under investment in social housing that is a badge of shame and refutes any claim by Brexit Britain to the status of a civilised country.

Theresa May speaking to emergency services personnel at the Grenfell Tower scene on Thursday. (Source: BuzzFeed)

The one hope we can cling onto is that despite the inordinate and sustained efforts by the Tories and their rancid media cohort to pit working and poor people against one another in recent years — Muslim against non-Muslim, low waged against unwaged, migrant against non-migrant, refugee against native — it has failed. Out of Grenfell, along with the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London, has come incontrovertible evidence of the innate solidarity of people of every background, ethnicity, faith, and creed when the chips are down. The outpouring of kindness, support, and humanity in response stands as a rebuke to those who want us to believe there is no such thing as society, that we are not connected by a common humanity but instead are merely a vast agglomeration of individuals, just like so many atoms spinning in the air.

Then, too, as a further rebuke to these rotten Tory values we have our emergency services. Made up of men and women who have no hesitation in risking their lives when tragedy strikes, they deserve better than a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich — and so do we. They stand in sharp contrast to a Prime Minister who cannot even summon the decency to face angry and traumatised residents during her recent visit to the scene of what bears all the hallmarks not of a disaster or a tragedy but a crime.

In memory of those who perished and whose deaths are indistinguishable from the fact they were poor and working class, let Grenfell be the line over which Tory greed and mendacity does not pass.

Yes Theresa May you are right: enough is enough.

John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1.

Featured image: LaunchGood

Yesterday a US F/A-18E Super Hornet is reported to have shot down a Syrian Army SU-22 jet near the village of Rasafah, south of Raqqa. Washington claims it was an act of ‘collective self-defense’ because the Syrian jet had dropped bombs “near US-backed forces.” Syrian officials in Damascus deny the US claims, stating that their plane was downed while conducting a strike on an ISIS position. 

According to a statement released by Damascus, the US act of aggression in Syria airspace was a

 “flagrant attack was an attempt to undermine the efforts of the army as the only effective force capable with its allies… in fighting terrorism across its territory.” Officials added that, “this comes at a time when the Syrian army and its allies were making clear advances in fighting the (ISIS) terrorist group.”

US officials are claiming that “pro-Syrian regime forces” on the ground attacked the US-backed Kurdish militias under the ‘SDF’ brand (Syrian Democratic Forces) near Tabqa outside Raqqa, after which time the US-led Coalition planes engaged Syrian military. US officials then claim that a Syrian planes “dropped bombs near the US-backed forces.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issue this statement:

“We call on the United State and all others who have their forces or advisors on the ground [in Syria] to ensure the coordination in our work. Zones of de-escalation are one of the possible options to jointly move forward. We call on everyone to avoid unilateral moves, respect Syrian sovereignty and join our common work which is agreed with the Syrian Arab Republic’s government.”

21WIRE reported earlier this week how the presence of US and UK troops on the ground inside of Syrian sovereign territory may be provoking an escalation of an already tense situation in both Raqqa and in the region around al-Tanf. US-led coalition forces are supposedly there to train and assist ‘anti-ISIS’ militias, but also anti-Assad ‘rebel’ militias too. The US also also trying to impose self-styled ‘deconfliction zones’ around al-Tanf.

In recent months, the Syrian Army have been making huge advances against ISIS positions. This latest US attack on Syria indicates that the US do not want the Syrian Army involved in the liberation of Raqqa – presumable to be able to stage-manage and control the operation and media coverage for its global audience, as the US did previously with Mosul in Iraq.

A clear pattern has emerged with almost every US strike against Syrian forces inside of Syria – in each and every instance, the main beneficiary appears to be ISIS.

Based on past incidents where US forces have attack Syrian military assets, in each instance the US attacks have benefited ISIS on the ground – leading many to conclude that the US Coalition forces are helping ISIS to gain strategic advantage against the Syria Army on the ground.

Back in September 2016, US had attacked and massacred over 80 Syrian military soldiers after a ‘Coalition’ airstrike on Dier Azor – a US attack which allowed ISIS to strategically advance past Syrian Army defensive positions. In addition to aiding ISIS on the ground, this act by the US also ruined any chance of a viable ceasefire agreement with Russia and Syria at the time.

A similar events took place on June 5, 2017 when US-led coalition forces attacked what they called “pro-Syrian regime forces” near the town of al Tanf in southeast Syria, claiming the Syrian forces including some 60 troops, had somehow entered what the US claim was a “well-established de-confliction zone.” The US strike helped to take pressure off of a retreating ISIS in the region.

In addition to this, the US cruise missile strike Syria’s Sharat airbase near Homs killed some 80 people, supposedly in response to an alleged ;chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province.

According to Aleppo MP Fares Shehabi, the US missile attack should be viewed as “… an act against an airport that is solely dedicated to fighting ISIS in Syria. And this attack is illegal, it’s stupid.”

As it stands the US presence in Syria is in violation of both US and International Law.

Featured image: 21st Century Wire

In a series of tweets Friday morning, President Trump confirmed that he is under investigation by the special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, appointed by his own Department of Justice to look into allegations of collusion between the Trump election campaign and Russian government officials.

Trump seemed to threaten the Justice Department official who appointed Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, tweeting,

“I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”

The president was referring to the fact that Rosenstein drafted a memo on why FBI Director James Comey should be fired, and that special counsel Mueller is reportedly including the firing of Comey within the scope of his investigation, as an instance of possible obstruction of justice.

Trump’s latest tweets suggested that the raging conflict within the American ruling class—spawned by differences over foreign policy, in relation to the Syrian war but more generally involving US-Russian relations—could be reaching a new point of explosion.

The conflict between Trump and his own Justice Department has become increasingly tense and public. Last week, it was widely reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had offered to resign because of Trump’s criticism of his decision to recuse himself from all investigations related to the Russia and the Trump election campaign, in which Sessions had played a prominent role.

The recusal by Sessions left decision-making authority in the hands of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. Eight days after Trump fired Comey, Rosenstein named Mueller special prosecutor, giving him significant independent resources to continue the Russia investigation.

It was widely reported Thursday that Mueller has expanded the scope of the investigation beyond the question of possible collusion between Trump campaign aides and alleged Russian involvement in hacking attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The Washington Post reported that Mueller had sought the testimony of several top intelligence officials, including Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, about Trump’s requests that they intervene with Comey to block the Russia investigation.

The New York Times reported that former members of Trump’s transition team were given “preservation orders” Thursday to safeguard documents, including electronic records like email, related to the ongoing Russia investigation. A memo from the general counsel of the transition team, cited by the Times, required preservation of records relating to Russia, Ukraine and five former Trump aides, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort. It was not clear whether these records would be sought by Mueller, or the various Senate and House committees investigating alleged Russian interference in the US election, or all of these.

The Post also reported that Mueller was looking into possible financial connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a top White House adviser, and a Russian bank, as well as other financial dealings with Russia on the part of others in the Trump entourage.

Trump’s thinly veiled attack on Rosenstein could be a precursor either to Trump demanding that Rosenstein fire Mueller—which he would likely refuse—or Trump’s firing Rosenstein himself. Or Rosenstein might seek to forestall such a confrontation by recusing himself from further involvement in the Mueller-led probe, on the grounds that his own actions in firing Comey were now a subject of the investigation.

Any of these alternatives would have the same outcome: decision-making authority over Mueller and the Russia investigation would pass into the hands of the third-ranking official in the Department of Justice, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand, a former Bush administration official who later served as chief counsel for the US Chamber of Commerce.

There were several unconfirmed press reports Friday, citing unnamed sources in the Justice Department, that Rosenstein was preparing to recuse himself. ABC News reported that Rosenstein had already notified Brand that she would take over if he did so.

Right-wing media backers of Trump have been preparing the ground for Trump to fire Rosenstein, Mueller or both. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich this week called Mueller

“now clearly the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency.”

The Republican National Committee denounced the Washington Post report on Mueller now targeting Trump for a potential obstruction of justice charged, declaring,

“This story is nothing more than an example of even more leaks coming out of the FBI and special counsel’s office in an effort to undermine the President.”

President Trump cannot invoke executive privilege in relation to the Mueller investigation because it is being conducted by the Justice Department, an arm of the executive branch itself. As determined by the Supreme Court during the Watergate crisis of 1973-74, executive privilege can only be cited in relation to congressional investigations, since it stems from the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches. Trump’s only recourse is to dismiss Mueller outright.

Senior congressional Republicans, alarmed that Trump might touch off a new political firestorm, have warned him against firing Mueller. These included House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Republican senators John Thune, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins.

Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigation that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, wrote in an op-ed column in the Washington Post,

“Mueller should be allowed to do his work unhindered and unimpeded. Absent the most extreme circumstances, the president would be singularly ill-advised to threaten, much less order, Mueller’s firing.”

Featured image: credits to the owner

Do not underestimate the capacity of the US to maintain its “superpower” status. It is committed to exhaust whatever means to achieve its ends. From its unsolicited military intervention in Syria to economic sanctions imposed in Russia and Cuba, Global Research brings to your attention the following articles on US international relations.

The global media — to their credit – are focusing on the brutality of the US-backed Raqqa campaign, though they’re avoiding any serious reporting about how and why the Kurds are ethnically cleansing Arabs from Raqqa. (Andrew Korybko)

*     *     *

US Backed YPG Kurds Are Ethnically Cleansing Arabs From Raqqa, and the World Is Silent

By Andrew Korybko, June 19, 2017

Combined with the heavy and indiscriminate airstrikes being carried out against the city, 160,000 civilians have been forced to become refugees and flee their homes as internally displaced people. This works out to more than half of the city’s pre-war population of 220,000, and it confirms what independent journalist and associate editor at 21stcenturywire.com Vanessa Beeley told RT just recently about how the US is making no attempt whatsoever to protect civilians.

Trump Reaffirms the Blockade, Takes US Policy Towards Cuba One Step Back

By ACN, June 19, 2017

Although diplomatic relations – re-established on July 20, 2015 – will continue, the new actions of the Trump administration are a step backwards towards the normalization of bilateral ties, and come loaded with old anti-Cuban rhetoric.

Trump to Reverse Cuba Policy, Reinstate ‘Regime Change’ Goals

By Telesur, June 19, 2017

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to fulfill his campaign promise to curtail the 2014 re-engagement deal between Washington and Havana, tightening pressure on Cuba and dashing the hopes of those who had hoped for a thaw in relations between the two neighbors.

US to Send Up to 5,000 More Troops to Afghanistan

By Jordan Shilton, June 19, 2017

Secretary of Defence James “Mad Dog” Mattis is set to announce the deployment of up to 5,000 additional troops to wage war in Afghanistan in the coming weeks, following a decision Tuesday by President Trump granting Mattis authority to set troop levels.

Germany Issues Stinging Rebuke of US Sanctions Against Russia

By Johannes Stern, June 18, 2017

Republicans and Democrats agreed almost unanimously, by 97 votes to 2, to impose new sanctions on Russia in the Senate on Wednesday. The Senate justified the measure as a punishment for Moscow’s alleged meddling in the US presidential election, the annexation of Crimea and its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The bipartisan bill was “the package of sanctions the Kremlin deserves for its actions,” said Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

*     *     *

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Featured image: Global Village Space

If humans are ever to achieve a stable global society in the future, they will have to become much more modest in their economic behavior and much more peaceful in their politics. For both modesty and peace, Gandhi is a useful source of ideas. The problems with which he struggled during his lifetime are extremely relevant to us in the 21st Century, when both nuclear and ecological catastrophes threaten the world.

Avoiding escalation of conflicts

Today we read almost every day of killings that are part of escalating cycles of revenge and counter-revenge, for example in the Middle East. Gandhi’s experiences both in South Africa and in India convinced him that such cycles could only be ended by unilateral acts of kindness and understanding from one of the parties in a conflict. He said,

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

Ends and means

To the insidious argument that “the end justifies the means”, Gandhi answered firmly:

”They say that ‘means are after all means’. I would say that ‘means are after all everything’. As the means, so the end. Indeed, the Creator has given us limited power over means, none over end… The means may be likened to a seed, and the end to a tree; and there is the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. Means and end are convertable terms in my philosophy of life.”

Steps towards a nonviolent world

23rd April, 1930, Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi accompanied by Mrs. Sarojini Naidu at Dandi, India en route to breaking the Salt Laws at the end of his long march to inaugurate the Civil Disobedience campaign against the British rule in India (Source: Pinterest)

Gandhi’s advocacy of non-violence is closely connected to his attitude towards ends and means. He believed that violent methods for achieving a desired social result would inevitably result in an escalation of violence. The end achieved would always be contaminated by the methods used. He was influenced by Leo Tolstoy with whom he exchanged many letters, and he in turn influenced Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

The power of truth

Gandhi was trained as a lawyer, and when he began to practice in South Africa, in his first case, he was able to solve a conflict by proposing a compromise that satisfied both parties. Of this result he said,

“My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”

When Gandhi became involved with the struggle for civil rights of the Indian minority in South Africa, his background as a lawyer once more helped him. This time his jury was public opinion in England. When Gandhi led the struggle for reform, he insisted that the means of protest used by his followers should be non-violent, even though violence was frequently used against them. In this way they won their case in the court of public opinion. Gandhi called this method of protest “satyagraha”, a Sanscrit word meaning “the power of truth”. In today’s struggles for justice and peace, the moral force of truth and nonviolence can win victories in the court of world public opinion.

Harmony between religious groups

Gandhi believed that at their core, all religions are based on the concepts of truth, love, compassion, nonviolence and the Golden Rule. When asked whether he was a Hindu, Gandhi answered,

“Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.”

When praying at his ashram, Gandhi made a point of including prayers from many religions. One of the most serious problems that he had to face in his efforts to free India from British rule was disunity and distrust, even hate, between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Each community felt that with the British gone, they might face violence and repression from the other. Gandhi made every effort to bridge the differences and to create unity and harmony. His struggles with this problem are highly relevant to us today, when the world is split by religious and ethnic differences.

Solidarity with the poor

Today’s world is characterized by intolerable economic inequalities, both between nations and within nations. 18 million of our fellow humans die each year from poverty-related causes. 1.1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, 2.7 billion live on less than $2. Gandhi’s concern for the poor can serve as an example to us today, as we work to achieve a more equal world. He said,

“There is enough for every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed.”

Voluntary reduction of consumption

After Gandhi’s death, someone took a photograph of all his worldly possessions. It was a tiny heap, consisting of his glasses, a pair of sandals, a homespun cloth (his only garment) and a watch. That was all. By reducing his own needs and possessions to an absolute minimum, Gandhi had tried to demonstrate that the commonly assumed connection between wealth and merit is false. This is relevant today, in a world where we face a crisis of diminishing resources. Not only fossil fuels, but also metals and arable land per capita will become scarce in the future. This will force a change in lifestyle, particularly in the industrialized countries, away from consumerism and towards simplicity. Gandhi’s example can teach us that we must cease to use wealth and “conspicuous consumption” as a measure of merit.

Gandhian economics

In his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi says:

“Three moderns have left a deep impression on my life and captivated me: Raychandbhai (the Indian philosopher and poet) by his living contact; Tolstoy by his book ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’; and Ruskin by his book ‘Unto This Last’.”

Ruskin’s book, “Unto This Last”, which Gandhi read in 1904, is a criticism of modern industrial society. Ruskin believed that friendships and warm interpersonal relationships are a form of wealth that economists have failed to consider. He felt that warm human contacts are most easily achieved in small agricultural communities, and that therefore the modern tendency towards centralization and industrialization may be a step backward in terms of human happiness. While still in South Africa, Gandhi founded two religious Utopian communities based on the ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin, Phoenix Farm (1904) and Tolstoy Farm (1910).

Because of his growing fame as the leader of the Indian civil rights movement in South Africa, Gandhi was persuaded to return to India in 1914 and to take up the cause of Indian home rule. In order to reacquaint himself with conditions in India, he travelled tirelessly, now always going third class as a matter of principle.

During the next few years, Gandhi worked to reshape the Congress Party into an organization which represented not only India’s Anglicized upper middle class but also the millions of uneducated villagers who were suffering under an almost intolerable burden of poverty and disease. In order to identify himself with the poorest of India’s people, Gandhi began to wear only a white loincloth made of rough homespun cotton. He traveled to the remotest villages, recruiting new members for the Congress Party, preaching non-violence and “firmness in the truth”, and becoming known for his voluntary poverty and humility. The villagers who flocked to see  him began to call him “Mahatma” (Great Soul).

1940, Gandhi is seen weaving thread on a spinning instrument (Source: PatnaBeats)

Disturbed by the spectacle of unemployment and poverty in the villages, Gandhi urged the people of India to stop buying imported goods, especially cloth, and to make their own. He advocated the reintroduction of the spinning wheel into village life, and he often spent some hours spinning himself. The spinning wheel became a symbol of the Indian independence movement, and was later incorporated into the Indian flag.

The movement for boycotting British goods was called the “Swadeshi movement”. The word Swadeshi derives from two Sanskrit roots: Swa, meaning self, and Desh, meaning country. Gandhi described Swadeshi as

“a call to the consumer to be aware of the violence he is causing by supporting those industries that result in poverty, harm to the workers and to humans or other creatures.”

Gandhi tried to reconstruct the crafts and self-reliance of village life that he felt had been destroyed by the colonial system.

“I would say that if the village perishes, India will perish too”, he wrote, “India will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost. The revival of the village is only possible when it is no more exploited. Industrialization on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers as problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use. Provided this character of the village industry is maintained, there would be no objection to villagers using even the modern machines that they can make and can afford to use. Only they should not be used as a means of exploitation by others.”

“You cannot build nonviolence on a factory civilization, but it can be built on self-contained villages… Rural economy as I have conceived it, eschews exploitation altogether, and exploitation is the essence of violence… We have to make a choice between India of the villages that are as ancient as herself and India of the cities which are a creation of foreign domination…”

“Machinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace necessary human labour. An improved plow is a good thing. But if by some chances, one man could plow up, by some mechanical invention of his, the whole of the land of India, and control all the agricultural produce, and if the millions had no other occupation, they would starve, and being idle, they would become dunces, as many have already become. There is hourly danger of many being reduced to that unenviable state.”

In these passages we see Gandhi not merely as a pioneer of nonviolence; we see him also as an economist. Faced with misery and unemployment produced by machines, Gandhi tells us that social goals must take precedence over blind market mechanisms. If machines are causing unemployment, we can, if we wish, and use labor-intensive methods instead. With Gandhi, the free market is not sacred; we can do as we wish, and maximize human happiness, rather than maximizing production and profits.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist on January 30, 1948. After his death, someone collected and photographed all his worldly goods. These consisted of a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals, a pocket watch and a white homespun loincloth. Here, as in the Swadeshi movement, we see Gandhi as a pioneer of economics. He deliberately reduced his possessions to an absolute minimum in order to demonstrate that there is no connection between personal merit and material goods. Like Veblen, Mahatma Gandhi told us that we must stop using material goods as a means of social competition. We must start to judge people not by what they have, but by what they are.

Mahatma Gandhi, Great Soul Gandhi, we need your voice today!

This article is a chapter of John Avery’s new book “We Need Their Voices Today”. Rest of the chapters can be read HERE.

John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. Fellowships, memberships in societies: Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.  In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, April 2004. http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm.

Featured image: Countercurrents

If humans are ever to achieve a stable global society in the future, they will have to become much more modest in their economic behavior and much more peaceful in their politics. For both modesty and peace, Gandhi is a useful source of ideas. The problems with which he struggled during his lifetime are extremely relevant to us in the 21st Century, when both nuclear and ecological catastrophes threaten the world.

Avoiding escalation of conflicts

Today we read almost every day of killings that are part of escalating cycles of revenge and counter-revenge, for example in the Middle East. Gandhi’s experiences both in South Africa and in India convinced him that such cycles could only be ended by unilateral acts of kindness and understanding from one of the parties in a conflict. He said,

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

Ends and means

To the insidious argument that “the end justifies the means”, Gandhi answered firmly:

”They say that ‘means are after all means’. I would say that ‘means are after all everything’. As the means, so the end. Indeed, the Creator has given us limited power over means, none over end… The means may be likened to a seed, and the end to a tree; and there is the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. Means and end are convertable terms in my philosophy of life.”

Steps towards a nonviolent world

23rd April, 1930, Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi accompanied by Mrs. Sarojini Naidu at Dandi, India en route to breaking the Salt Laws at the end of his long march to inaugurate the Civil Disobedience campaign against the British rule in India (Source: Pinterest)

Gandhi’s advocacy of non-violence is closely connected to his attitude towards ends and means. He believed that violent methods for achieving a desired social result would inevitably result in an escalation of violence. The end achieved would always be contaminated by the methods used. He was influenced by Leo Tolstoy with whom he exchanged many letters, and he in turn influenced Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

The power of truth

Gandhi was trained as a lawyer, and when he began to practice in South Africa, in his first case, he was able to solve a conflict by proposing a compromise that satisfied both parties. Of this result he said,

“My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”

When Gandhi became involved with the struggle for civil rights of the Indian minority in South Africa, his background as a lawyer once more helped him. This time his jury was public opinion in England. When Gandhi led the struggle for reform, he insisted that the means of protest used by his followers should be non-violent, even though violence was frequently used against them. In this way they won their case in the court of public opinion. Gandhi called this method of protest “satyagraha”, a Sanscrit word meaning “the power of truth”. In today’s struggles for justice and peace, the moral force of truth and nonviolence can win victories in the court of world public opinion.

Harmony between religious groups

Gandhi believed that at their core, all religions are based on the concepts of truth, love, compassion, nonviolence and the Golden Rule. When asked whether he was a Hindu, Gandhi answered,

“Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.”

When praying at his ashram, Gandhi made a point of including prayers from many religions. One of the most serious problems that he had to face in his efforts to free India from British rule was disunity and distrust, even hate, between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Each community felt that with the British gone, they might face violence and repression from the other. Gandhi made every effort to bridge the differences and to create unity and harmony. His struggles with this problem are highly relevant to us today, when the world is split by religious and ethnic differences.

Solidarity with the poor

Today’s world is characterized by intolerable economic inequalities, both between nations and within nations. 18 million of our fellow humans die each year from poverty-related causes. 1.1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, 2.7 billion live on less than $2. Gandhi’s concern for the poor can serve as an example to us today, as we work to achieve a more equal world. He said,

“There is enough for every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed.”

Voluntary reduction of consumption

After Gandhi’s death, someone took a photograph of all his worldly possessions. It was a tiny heap, consisting of his glasses, a pair of sandals, a homespun cloth (his only garment) and a watch. That was all. By reducing his own needs and possessions to an absolute minimum, Gandhi had tried to demonstrate that the commonly assumed connection between wealth and merit is false. This is relevant today, in a world where we face a crisis of diminishing resources. Not only fossil fuels, but also metals and arable land per capita will become scarce in the future. This will force a change in lifestyle, particularly in the industrialized countries, away from consumerism and towards simplicity. Gandhi’s example can teach us that we must cease to use wealth and “conspicuous consumption” as a measure of merit.

Gandhian economics

In his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi says:

“Three moderns have left a deep impression on my life and captivated me: Raychandbhai (the Indian philosopher and poet) by his living contact; Tolstoy by his book ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’; and Ruskin by his book ‘Unto This Last’.”

Ruskin’s book, “Unto This Last”, which Gandhi read in 1904, is a criticism of modern industrial society. Ruskin believed that friendships and warm interpersonal relationships are a form of wealth that economists have failed to consider. He felt that warm human contacts are most easily achieved in small agricultural communities, and that therefore the modern tendency towards centralization and industrialization may be a step backward in terms of human happiness. While still in South Africa, Gandhi founded two religious Utopian communities based on the ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin, Phoenix Farm (1904) and Tolstoy Farm (1910).

Because of his growing fame as the leader of the Indian civil rights movement in South Africa, Gandhi was persuaded to return to India in 1914 and to take up the cause of Indian home rule. In order to reacquaint himself with conditions in India, he travelled tirelessly, now always going third class as a matter of principle.

During the next few years, Gandhi worked to reshape the Congress Party into an organization which represented not only India’s Anglicized upper middle class but also the millions of uneducated villagers who were suffering under an almost intolerable burden of poverty and disease. In order to identify himself with the poorest of India’s people, Gandhi began to wear only a white loincloth made of rough homespun cotton. He traveled to the remotest villages, recruiting new members for the Congress Party, preaching non-violence and “firmness in the truth”, and becoming known for his voluntary poverty and humility. The villagers who flocked to see  him began to call him “Mahatma” (Great Soul).

1940, Gandhi is seen weaving thread on a spinning instrument (Source: PatnaBeats)

Disturbed by the spectacle of unemployment and poverty in the villages, Gandhi urged the people of India to stop buying imported goods, especially cloth, and to make their own. He advocated the reintroduction of the spinning wheel into village life, and he often spent some hours spinning himself. The spinning wheel became a symbol of the Indian independence movement, and was later incorporated into the Indian flag.

The movement for boycotting British goods was called the “Swadeshi movement”. The word Swadeshi derives from two Sanskrit roots: Swa, meaning self, and Desh, meaning country. Gandhi described Swadeshi as

“a call to the consumer to be aware of the violence he is causing by supporting those industries that result in poverty, harm to the workers and to humans or other creatures.”

Gandhi tried to reconstruct the crafts and self-reliance of village life that he felt had been destroyed by the colonial system.

“I would say that if the village perishes, India will perish too”, he wrote, “India will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost. The revival of the village is only possible when it is no more exploited. Industrialization on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers as problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use. Provided this character of the village industry is maintained, there would be no objection to villagers using even the modern machines that they can make and can afford to use. Only they should not be used as a means of exploitation by others.”

“You cannot build nonviolence on a factory civilization, but it can be built on self-contained villages… Rural economy as I have conceived it, eschews exploitation altogether, and exploitation is the essence of violence… We have to make a choice between India of the villages that are as ancient as herself and India of the cities which are a creation of foreign domination…”

“Machinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace necessary human labour. An improved plow is a good thing. But if by some chances, one man could plow up, by some mechanical invention of his, the whole of the land of India, and control all the agricultural produce, and if the millions had no other occupation, they would starve, and being idle, they would become dunces, as many have already become. There is hourly danger of many being reduced to that unenviable state.”

In these passages we see Gandhi not merely as a pioneer of nonviolence; we see him also as an economist. Faced with misery and unemployment produced by machines, Gandhi tells us that social goals must take precedence over blind market mechanisms. If machines are causing unemployment, we can, if we wish, and use labor-intensive methods instead. With Gandhi, the free market is not sacred; we can do as we wish, and maximize human happiness, rather than maximizing production and profits.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist on January 30, 1948. After his death, someone collected and photographed all his worldly goods. These consisted of a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals, a pocket watch and a white homespun loincloth. Here, as in the Swadeshi movement, we see Gandhi as a pioneer of economics. He deliberately reduced his possessions to an absolute minimum in order to demonstrate that there is no connection between personal merit and material goods. Like Veblen, Mahatma Gandhi told us that we must stop using material goods as a means of social competition. We must start to judge people not by what they have, but by what they are.

Mahatma Gandhi, Great Soul Gandhi, we need your voice today!

This article is a chapter of John Avery’s new book “We Need Their Voices Today”. Rest of the chapters can be read HERE.

John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. Fellowships, memberships in societies: Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.  In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, April 2004. http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm.

Featured image: Countercurrents

Michel said the decision would be formally confirmed during the next session of the Council of Ministers in Brussels. The small European country has earmarked another 17 million euro for the operation.

The current mission mandate was coming to a close in June, but it will be extended for another six months. Under the new mandate, some 100 personnel and four fighter jets will be stationed in Jordan.

Michel said this would show that Belgium is

“a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism”. He added: “This is a strong signal towards our partners. Belgium is a reliable partner in an international coalition. We also want to show we are operational. After the NATO summit, this proves we are taking up our responsibility within Europe.”

The Belgian government and military have, not unlike its “partners” been ambiguous about the legal mandate for the mission. The deployment of Belgian troops was approved by the Belgian parliament, but questions about the status of the mission under international law remain unanswered.

Belgium has no mandate from the Syrian government – at least no overt mandate. Belgium has no mandate based on a UN security Council resolution either. In this regard it can be interesting to look at how the Norwegian government “constructed the legality” of Norwegian troops role in Syria.

A document from Norway’s Ministry of Defense from April 29, 2016, entitled contribution of Norwegian forces to the fight against ISIL in Syria – a memo on international law states that:

• Iraq, in 2014, had requested help from the UN Security Council to combat ISIL, including attacks by ISIL launched from Syrian territory. Moreover, it states that the Norwegian presence in Iraq today is based on the Iraqi request for help based on the UN Charter’s Article 51 on collective self-defense.
• That ISIL can’t be defeated by limiting the fight to Iraq.
• That UN Security Council resolution 2249 from November 20, 2015 concludes that ISIL poses an extraordinary threat to international peace and security.
• That the UNSC called on its members to fight ISIL everywhere, including its enclaves in Syria.
• That self-defense against non-state actors who operate on the territory of another state while this state is unwilling or incapable of combating such non-state actors, is legal and covered by the provisions of UNSC resolution 2249.

Moreover, there is a press release from Norway’s Defense Ministry quoting Defense Minister Eriksen Søreide repeating the above mentioned. The third document is a memo styled to the Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Affairs Council, repeating the same arguments UNSC resolution 2249  UN Charter Article 51 and the claim of self-defense against ISIL because Syria is unwilling or incapable. The document is from January 20, 2016. The fourth and final clue is another press release from March 27, 2017, in which Norway’s Defense Ministry announced that it has extended its operations against ISIL.

Featured image: Al-Alam

These videos explore the situation of Canadian contract academic faculty and compares their situation to the even poorer conditions American contract faculty face, highlighting the need to more firmly address working conditions in Canada. The second film, “Contract Faculty: Injustice in the University,” focuses on not only the injustice faced by contract faculty but the implications of this injustice for students, the University and higher education in general. The story is primarily told through the words of contract faculty themselves. Where there is injustice there is usually both tragedy and dark humour and the film presents both.

Sources

Links to educational and activist resources

Tracy MacMaster, “Shaking Off the Part-Time Blues: Fighting for the Rights of Ontario College Workers,” The Bullet No. 1117, 18 May 2015.

“#StrikeTown: Why Are Toronto University Workers On Strike?,” The Bullet No. 1091, 19 March 2015.

David Bush and Doug Nesbitt, “Austerity Strangles Ontario: the TA strikes in Context,” The Bullet No. 1088, 6 March 2015.

Alan Sears and James Cairns, “Austerity U: Preparing Students for Precarious Lives,” The Bullet No. 932, 29 January 2014.

David Mandel, “The Struggle Has Its Own Dynamic: The Professors’ Strike at the Université du Québec à Montréal,” The Bullet No. 223, 4 June 2009.

Tyler Shipley, “Demanding the Impossible: Struggles for the Future of Post-Secondary Education,” The Bullet No. 215, 10 May 2009.

Besmira Alikaj, “Labour Turmoil and the Fight for Public Education,” The Bullet No. 168, 19 December 2008.

Eric Newstadt, “The Neoliberal University: Looking at the York Strike,” The Bullet No. 165, 5 December 2008.

Featured image: Screen Capture from the first video

At Saturday, the 17.06.2017, a new group of plaintiffs, consisting of the human rights activist (according to UN resolution 53/144) Sarah Luzia Hassel-Reusing, Gabriela Schimmer-Göresz, and Wolfgang Effenberger, has filed a constitutional complaint against the resolution by the Bundestag (lower house of the German national parliament) of the 09.11.2016 (file number 18/9960) on the prolongation and extension of the Syria deployment of the Bundeswehr (German army). The Federal Government, the fractions of the Bundestag, and the Constitutional Court have already been informed at the 07.04.2017 regarding this constitutional complaint.

The complaint wants to prevent the escalation of the Syria conflict to thermonuclear war and to reach the prohibition of the circumvention, by means of “humanitarian interventions”, of the prohibition of aggressive war.

In addition to that, it wants to put through, that two biased judges move aside to achieve an orderly procedure.

The escalation to thermonuclear war is currently impending particularly by the one-sided illegal no-fly zones / safety zone, which the USA are trying to establish starting from the Syrian-Jordanian border town Al-Tanf. For that purpose, the international alliance in the fight against Isis has, in May and in June 2017, already made two airstrikes against the Syrian army and its Shiite allies, which are progressing towards Al-Tanf. The ad hoc alliance international alliance in the fight against Isis has been created for the fight against Isis, not to attack the Syrian army. And now the Bundeswehr even shall be relocated from the Turkish Incirlik to Jordan. So the direct involvement of the Bundeswehr with ground forces, with reconnaissance for airstrikes of the international alliance in the fight against Isis, and by means of joint staffs, into the escalation at Al-Tanf is impending.

Particularly, as the Iranian news agency Farsnews is worrying, if it comes to a bigger invasion by USA, Great Britain, and Jordan at Al-Tanf. The current American behaviour gives the impression not to have been discussed with His Excellency, US President Donald Trump – similarly to the attempt by general John Allen (CNAS and then coordinator of the international alliance in the fight against Isis) in July 2015 for a no-fly zone in the North of Syria.

The papers by the think tanks CNAS (“Defeating the Islamic State – A Bottom-Up Approach”) and Brookings Institution (“Deconstructing Syria – Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country”) and the article “The Right Way to Create Safe Zones in Syria” of the 11.05.2017 in Foreign Affairs (the magazine of the think tank CFR) are advertising (whilst downplaying the escalations risks) for no-fly zones / safety zones directed to escalation. Also the deescalation zones settled by Russia, Iran, and Turkey mean an escalation risk, because it is unclear, in how far the other countries involved in the Syria conflict will respect them.

Airstrike in Syria (credits to the owner of the photo)

The enforcement of any of these zones means in last consequence the downing of those fighter jets, which disrespect them, up to the danger of direct escalation with Russia respectively with the USA. Already in October 2016, there have been deliberations in the National Security Council of the USA, to abuse the international alliance in the fight against Isis for attacks against the Syrian army. Also the threat by Russia in October 2016, to down planes which are threatening the Russian troops in Syria, show the escalation risk.

Isis and Al Qaida, which have received their Armageddon ideology from the Muslim Brotherhood, are striving for the escalation of the Syria conflict to world war, because they regard themselves as chosen to provoke the final battle described in the Islamic Revelation, in order to bring about this way until 2020 the global caliphate, which also the Muslim Brotherhood is striving for. And it is completely obscure, which State and / or private actors really command Isis and Al Qaida. In addition to that, there are significant publicly visible pieces of evidence signalling, that the extortion networks (organized via human trafficking) of the international “deep state”, with its branches into secret services, into organized crime, into jihadism, into banks, and into armageddon-believing and occult groups, are able, to pressure also Western security policy deciders into the escalation of this conflict. Furthermore, the escalation of the Syria conflict is impending by attempts to split the country, and by the lacking coordination of the countries, which are militarily involved in Syria, with each other and particularly with the Syrian government. The nuclear powers USA, Russia, Great Britain, France, Israel, Saudi-Arabia, and China, are involved in the conflict, with different interests and to different extents. Also the joining of NATO into the international alliance in the fight against Isis has increased the escalation risks. Escalations risks originating from Germany, are also deployment of German soldiers in the Kurdish areas of Syria (which has been prohibited by the Syrian government) and the two biased constitutional judges.

The constitutional complaint shows these escalation risks for the German Syria deployment.

The Syria conflict has, already several times, nearly escalated, among them the prevention just in time at the 31.08.2013 and the proposal by Saudi-Arabia in February 2016 (rejected by NATO) to invade into Syria and Iraq with an international Sunni ad hoc alliance.

And the repeated airstrikes by the international alliance in the fight against Isis against Syrian troops and Shiite troops allied with them, which are progressing towards Al-Tanf, seem to be short before escalation.

The deployment violates objectively the prohibitions of aggressive war and disturbs the peaceful coexistence of the peoples (art. 26 Basic Law, art. 2 par. 4 UN Charter). See also the definition of “aggression” in the resolution by the UN General Assembly of the 14.12.1974. In June 2016, the protest by the Syrian government has proven, that it rejects also the German deployment, which has neither been requested by it nor been coordinated with it. The parliamentary reservation (art. 115a Basic Law) is violated, because the consent of the Bundestag also had to be requested for before the case of mutual defence resolution at the EU level of the 16./17. 11.2015 (file number 14120/15).

The EU clause on mutual defence (art. 42 par. 7 TEU) is still invalid, because, as the Lisbon Judgment of the 30.06.2009 has decided, the EU would have to decide before, that it wants a common defence policy, which then would have needed the consent by all national parliaments of the EU member states (art. 42 par. 2 subpar. 1 TEU); at least the latter has never taken place. In addition to that, the EU is, without a valid clause on mutual defence, (in contrast to NATO) no system of mutual collective security; the Bundeswehr may be used for combat deployments only for the defence of the own country and within system of mutual collective security (art. 24 par. 2 Basic Law). And the international alliance in the fight against Isis is an ad hoc alliance without any ratified treaty and so obviously without any clause on mutual defence. Also the Syria resolutions by the UN Security Council do not legalize the deployment, since they just do NOT state according to art. 42 UN Charter, that peaceful means were unsuccessful or without any chance, and so they do NOT authorize military means, since they in the contrary set on negotiations and on ever harder sanctions against Isis, against Al Qaida, and against ever more groups of their supporters.

The terrorist attacks at Paris of the 13.11.2015 have remained below the treshold of a militarily armed attack. The resolution on the case of mutual defence has only disattracted the attention from the fact, that the Syria deployment is a military intervention for values and interests (art. 42 par. 5 TEU) and for crisis intervention (art. 43 par. 1 TEU) – according to the ideology of the “humanitarian intervention”. That ideology has developed from the study “Self Determination in the New World Order” of the year 1992 by the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and it provenly aims at making circumventable the prohibition of aggressive war (art. 2 par. 4 UN Charter) and the responsibilities of the UN Security Council. It abuses the human rights against peace and so violates art. 29 no. 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The ideology of the “humanitarian intervention” has been, in the latest 24 years, responsible for “regime changes” called “colour revolutions” and for wars (with the Kosovo war as the first bigger experiment) including the nearly escalation of the Syria conflict to thermonuclear war, which has been narrowly prevented at the 31.08.2013. And the escalation attempts are still going on, as the current aggravating situation at Al-Tanf shows.

The resolution by the Bundestag of the 09.11.2016 and the resolution by Their Excellencies, the Defence Ministers of the EU member states, of the 16./17.11.2015, have disregarded the provisions of the Lisbon Judgment for the interpretation of the Common Foreign and Safety Policy (CFSP) of the EU into conformity with the UN Charter. Thus the constitutional complaint applies, in order to reach legal safety for the peace order of the United Nations and for the existence of the European Union, to oblige the Federal Government to apply in the UN General Assembly for an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the following question:

“How exactly has the interpretation of the norms of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) on military interventions for values and interests (art. 42 par. 5 TEU), on military interventions for interference into crises (art. 43 par. 1 TEU), and the EU clause on mutual assistance (art. 42 par. 7 TEU), which is still not ratified according to art. 42 par. 2 subpar. 1 TEU, each to be limited into conformity with the UN Charter and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), in order to completely exclude any possibility to violate art. 2 par. 4 UN Charter, art. 103 UN Charter, or art. 29 no. 3 UDHR, by means of these norms, and in order to, at the same time, exclude the risk of voidness of the TEU according to art. 53 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties because of incompatibility with the UN Charter and with the UDHR, which belong to the ‘jus cogens’ ?”

Bundeswehr (Source: Zeit Online)

The constitutional complaint applies to prohibit the Syria deployment of the Bundeswehr, because it violates the human dignity in connection with the peace principle (art. 1 par. 1+2 Basic Law) and the basic right to vote (art. 38 Basic Law) (because of the missing legal bases for large parts of the deployment). The peace principle (art. 1 par. 2 Basic Law), which is formulated as a confession of the German people, is entrenched in the human dignity (art. 1 par. 1 Basic Law) and has been included into the Basic Law inspired by the famous “speech of hope” of His Excellency, the then US Foreign Minister James F. Byrnes. In order to ensure, that there will be never again world war, and that Germany never again contributed to the increase of world war risks, all Germans have been, by means of the confession in art. 1 par. 2 Basic Law, obliged and entitled to peace by the Parliamentarian Council, which has concluded the Basic Law. The existence of the peace principle has been confirmed by the Lisbon Judgment of the 30.06.2009 of the Constitutional Court.

The constitutional complaint applies, in view of the undemocratically big influence of the think tank SWP and, besides that, of the Bilderberg conference, on the German position on Syria, to exclude think tanks from international conferences with German participation on foreign and safety policy, and to allow the counselling to German institutions regarding foreign and safety policy only to those think tanks, whose recommendations do neither violate the Basic Law nor the UN Charter, with particular attention to the prohibitions of aggressive war and its preparation (art. 26 Basic Law, art. 2 par. 4 UN Charter) and to the inviolable peace principle (art. 1 par. 2 Basic Law), and which do not at the same time counsel other countries.

The constitutional complaint applies, that the Constitutional Court has to make provisions, as far as foreign and safety policy are concerned, for the application of the conscience of the members of the parliament, which is included in the basic right to vote (art. 38 par. 1 s. 2 Basic Law). Also before the resolution of the 09.11.2016 (file number 18/9960), the legal bases and the world war risks of the Syria conflict have still not been carefully investigated by the members of the parliament.

The constitutional complaint explains legal question furthering the constitutional jurisdiction, showing that the hitherto interpretation by the Constitutional Court of the norms on bias (art. 18 and 19 of the law on the Constitutional Court) is intenable and is an open door for lobbyists even up to possible endangering of the Basic Law, because it, in contrast to the wording of the law, defines bias much narrower, and it allows, in contrast to the wording of the law, judges to participate in decisions on rejections directed against themselves.

The complaint invokes the violation of the human dignity (art. 1 par. 1 Basic Law) in connection with the peace principle (art. 1 par. 2 Basic Law), of the basic right to vote (art. 38 Basic Law), of the basic rights to life, to physical integrity, and to freedom (art. 2 Basic Law), and of the basic right to function reservation (art. 33 par. 4 Basic Law), as well as the violation of the universal human rights to security (art. 9 ICCPR), to health (art. 12 CESCR), and to prohibition of war propaganda (art. 20 ICCPR).

The constitutional plaintiffs and their representative applied for in the constitutional complaint according to art. 22 par. 1 s. 4 BVerfGG, are available for interviews to domestic and foreign, conventional and alternative, media.

Featured image: White Helmets

GM crops in Argentina are approved by people from the same companies that produce and market them, a new investigation by the journalist Dario Aranda reveals.

The agency in which these people are collected is called the National Advisory Committee on Agricultural Biotechnology (Conabia). According to Aranda, it is composed of representatives of Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Indear/Bioceres, Pioneer/DuPont, Don Mario, ASA (Seed Companies’ Association), Aapresid (Association of No-Till Producers – farmers who grow GM crops and use herbicide applications to control weeds), Argenbio and INTA (National Institute of Agricultural Technology). Out of 34 members, 26 belong to the same companies that produce seeds or are scientists with conflicts of interest.

Aranda writes that Conabia is a select and secretive group that decides which seeds are approved yet avoids responsibility for the resulting impacts: massive use of agrochemicals, land clearance, evictions, and health conditions. They are presented as “scientists”, “technicians” or “experts”, and hide their links with the companies that produce transgenics.

This corrupt system is having a devastating impact on the environment and the health of rural populations – just to supply GMO animal feed to factory farms in Europe.

Secrets

Conabia was created on October 24, 1991, when the government of Carlos Menem made the decision to introduce GM crops in Argentina. It defined its profile as “scientific-technical”. Its composition was kept secret until 2014, when the information was leaked to MU, the magazine of the cooperative organization Lavaca. Of 47 members, more than half (27) were employed by GMO seed companies and had conflicts of interest.

An example was Martin Lema, the head of Conabia and current director of Biotechnology in the Ministry of Agriculture, who published scientific papers with the very same companies that Conabia was supposed to be regulating: Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF and Dow Agroscience.

This news was not taken up by any of the hundreds of agricultural journalists, who recycle information from those same companies and often repeat the slogan “GM crops are safe”.

Intacta

Those within Conabia felt exposed for the first time: they refused to give interviews, nor did they attempt any explanation. The revelations impacted a legal case brought by the NGO Naturaleza de Derechos (Natural Rights) over the approval of Monsanto’s Intacta GM soybeans. The lawyer Fernando Cabaleiro was able to show that Conabia worked for two decades without internal regulations and without the participation of citizens, who had objected to the whole procedure.

Last year the Commission celebrated its 25th anniversary. As part of the festivities, they announced “the approval of two biotechnological events”, according to a notice put out by the Ministry of Agroindustry on November 2, 2016.

The Secretary for Added Value [sic. – El secretario de Agregado de Valor], Néstor Roulet, stressed “the contribution of Conabia to the technological development of agricultural activity”. The celebration was held at the Buenos Aires Cereals Exchange. There they approved new soybean and corn seeds tolerant to the herbicides 2,4-D, glyphosate and glufosinate ammonium. The beneficiary was the US company Dow AgroScience.

“No recording”

Martín Lema, director of Biotechnology in the Ministry of Agroindustry, and head of he Conabia, has three points in common with the Minister of Science, Lino Barañao: they are strong proponents of the GMO model; they have links with, and work with, companies in the sector; and both moved from positions in the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to that of her successor, Mauricio Macri.

Lema does not talk to the press. MU attempted to interview him repeatedly, but only once did he propose a meeting, specifying that there must be no recording or note-taking. “I want to clarify some things”, he said. MU insisted that it would only agree to meet for the purposes of an interview. The meeting was never held.

Lema did speak with the rural supplement Clarín on November 4, 2016. The article was titled: “Argentina is a world benchmark in agricultural biotechnology”. Lema stressed that Conabia

“guarantees the safety for the environment and for people of all products used in the Argentine countryside”.

He said that the criticisms of GM crops originate from “those who spread disinformation because they serve various interests and have a political agenda”.

Lema welcomed the fact that Argentina is the third biggest grower of GMOs after the United States and Brazil.

“This week two more soybean events were approved. Close to 40 have been authorized in the country, a third of them under my mandate,” he said. And he described the future: GMO “trees that produce better wood, improved flowers, more nutritious rice and plants resistant to drought”.

Conabia Conference (Source: INTA)

The winners

Through a former member of Conabia, MU was able to access an updated list of the current members. To the old squad have been added other officials with conflicts of interests:

* Natalia Ceballos Ríos. General Coordinator of the Biotechnology Group or “Bio Group”, which includes and is financed by seed companies, cereal firms and agrochemical companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dow, and Pioneer/DuPont, among others.
* Alejandro Tozzini, former manager of Monsanto, currently of Syngenta.
* Gustavo Abratti, head of “regulatory” affairs for DuPont-Pioneer.
* Miguel Rapela and Fabiana Malacarne (Asociación de Semilleros de Argentina/Association of Seed Companies of Argentina, which brings together all the multinational companies that market GM seeds).
* Gabriela Levitus of Argenbio, a scientific and political lobbying organization founded by Syngenta, Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Bioceres, Dow, Nidera and Pioneer.
* Claudio Gabriel Robredo, Monsanto’s “director of regulatory affairs” between 2000 and 2011. He currently owns his own company, AgroReg, where he provides “advisory and management services in the crop and seeds regulatory area”. AgroReg is a member of ASA (Asociación de Semilleros Argentinos/Association of Seed Companies of Argentina).
* Silvia Lede, from the multinational BASF.
* Mariano Devoto, agricultural engineer and professor of botany at the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He works within the framework of an agreement with Syngenta in the research project, “Pollination of soybeans: a study at different scales”.
* Jorge Zavala, agricultural engineer and professor of biochemistry. He works alongside Eduardo Pagano, the former vice-dean and one of the representatives of agribusiness in the Faculty of Agronomy at the UBA. Zavala is also deputy director of the Institute of Research in Agricultural and Environmental Biosciences (INBA, of Fauba), where he and Pagano work in collaboration with GMO companies.
* Santiago D’Alessio, director of wildlife at the Undersecretariat of Planning and Environmental Policy of the Nation.
* Abelardo Portugal. Agronomist, former president and representative of Aianba (Association of Agronomic Engineers of Buenos Aires North) and part of the organization Maizar, in which all the companies in the sector participate. Aianba is sponsored by Bayer, Dow and Monsanto, among other companies.
* Mauro Meier, of the Argentine Cooperatives Association (la Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas), which defines itself as “one of the main grain operators in the country in the commercialization of cereals and oilseeds”. It’s part of the GMO industry.
* Elba María Pagano is another INTA representative, responsible for the promotion of transgenics. Linked to Red Bio Argentina (Biotechnology Network of Argentina), a forum where scientific-technical agribusiness drivers converge.
* Mariano Podworny, of the Coordination of Special Projects of Biotechnology at the National Institute of Seeds (Inase).

Old acquaintances

The following people continue to occupy their seats in Conabia:

* Dalia Marcela Lewi (INTA). Part of the Institute of Genetics of INTA. Author of the book Biotechnology and Plant Breeding II, with co-author Clara Rubinstein of Monsanto Argentina. He also investigated the resistance of transgenic maize to cold and salinity together with the agribusiness company Bioceres and was a member of ILSI’s Biotechnology Committee, along with researchers from Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow Agrosciences.
* Miguel Alvarez Arancedo, director of regulatory affairs at Monsanto.
* Magdalena Sosa Beláustegui, manager of regulatory affairs and seeds for Bayer Cono Sur.
* Mirta Antongiovanni, regulatory affairs manager for the seed company Don Mario.
* Gerónimo Watson, technology director of Bioceres/Indear, where Gustavo Grobocopatel (chairman of Grupo Los Grobo, one of the largest agribusiness companies in Argentina) is a Board Member. Víctor Trucco (honorary president of Aapresid) is director and the chief executive officer at Bioceres.
* Fernando Bravo Almonacid (Conicet) is an independent researcher at the Conicet Institute of Research in Genetic Engineering and Molecular Biology (Ingebi-UBA) and works on the genetic improvement of the potato. After six years of work, in 2013 he developed a new variety which is intended to be more resistant to viruses. In 2015 he obtained the approval of Conabia – of which he is himself a member – for a potato resistant to a virus. The company in charge of the transgenic potato is Tecnoplant, part of the Sidus Group.
* Monica Liliana Pequeño Araujo and Ana Vicario (for Inase).
* Silvia Passalacqua and Leonardo Gorodsky (Senasa, the Argentine National Food Safety and Quality Service).
* Gustavo Schrauf, from the Faculty of Agronomy at the UBA.
* Sara Maldonado (Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the UBA).
* Hugo Permingeat, of the Faculty of Agrarian Sciences of Rosario. As secretary general of the Faculty and along with the dean (Liliana Ramirez), he openly justified the private presence in the public university: “Monsanto trains its employees here. They are agronomists who provide them with postgraduate training and Monsanto values ​​the training we offer.” This was the way he justified the fact that Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta had “donated” a laboratory of biotechnology to the Faculty, along with equipment worth USD 300,000.
* Lucas Lieber, of the Faculty of Agrarian Sciences of the University of Rosario. His CV details his work at the Indear/Bioceres company.
* Andrés Venturino, from the Center for Research in Environmental Toxicology and Agrobiotechnology at the University of Comahue.
* Atilio Castagnaro is an expert at the Estación Experimental Agro industrial Obispo Colombres (EEAOC). In 2011 he was part of a team of Mercosur scientists who created a robot that looks for those soybean plants that best withstand drought. Two companies participated in the working group (and patenting): Nidera (one of the big agro-multinationals) and Indear/Bioceres (Rosario Agrobiotechnology Institute).
* Alejandro Petek, of the business organization Aapresid (Association of No-Till Producers), a lobbying forum that promotes the GMO model of agriculture. He now has a position in the Ministry of Agroindustry.
* Luis Negruchi, also from Aapresid.

No critical voice

In 2017 Conabia, which according to its official announcements supports “transparency”, has 34 members for the approval of GMO seeds. A large majority of them – 26 – belong to companies that produce GM crops or are scientists/entrepreneurs with conflicts of interest.

That is: they sit on both sides of the counter, both as a regulator and as a part of the industry that directly benefits from a favourable opinion on the GM crop.

The body responsible for releasing seeds of soybeans, maize, cotton, potatoes and sugar cane and for the growing crops has no scientist critical of the development of GMOs. It also has no representatives of civil society.

In private hearings and without public records, 34 people decide that the future of 24 million hectares will be to grow GM crops that involve the massive use of pesticides.

They also conceal the approval dossiers for these GM crops.

If a university, research institute, social organization or journalist wants to access the approval dossiers for soybeans, maize, cotton or transgenic potatoes, they cannot: they are “confidential”.

The results are well known: since 1996, 41 GM soybean, maize, cotton and potato “events” have been approved in Argentina. The beneficiaries were Syngenta, Monsanto, Bayer, Indear, Dow, Tecnoplant and Pioneer and Nidera, among others – the very same companies that dominate Conabia.

Featured image: GMWatch

Several years ago when the Federal Reserve had its Fed funds rate at zero to 25 basis points (one-quarter of one percent—0.25%), there was a great deal of talk, somehow presented as urgent, whether the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates.

RT asked me if the Fed was going to raise interest rates. I answered that the purpose of low interest rates was to restore the solvency of the balance sheets of the “banks too big to fail” by raising debt prices. The lower the interest rate, the higher the prices of debt instruments. The Fed drives bond prices up by purchasing bonds, and the Fed raises interest rates by selling bonds, or by purchasing fewer of them than previously.

I told RT that a real increase in interest rates would undercut the Fed’s policy of rescuing the balance sheets of the big banks whose balance sheets were loaded up with bad debt that desperately needed a rise in debt prices for the banks to remain solvent.

When shortly thereafter the Fed raised the overnight funds rate, it blew my credibility with RT. RT did not understand that real interest rates had not increased. Indeed, two days after the “rate increase” the nominal interest rate had not changed. It was still 18 basis points. The announced rate had gone from the old range of zero to 25 basis points to a new range of 25 basis points to 50 basis points. The former max was the current minimum.

Moreover, over the long time period in which there was such well marketed concern over whether such an inconsequential interest rate rise would occur, inflation had risen, making the real interest rate negative well below the 18 basis points official interest rate. By the time the Fed raised the nominal rate, the real rate was already more negative. Thus, there was no rise in real interest rates.

The financial press did not explain this, either from incompetence or collusion. RT accepted the fake news as reality and wrote off my credibility. I am often interviewed by RT, but no longer on economic matters, about which I know the most.

A couple of days ago, after a long period of waiting for another interest rate rise, an announcement from the Fed, amidst further indication of US economic decline, announced another 25 basis point increase in the target range for the Fed funds rate.

Inflation aside, in fact interest rates declined, as my sometime co-author Dave Kranzler reports. http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/has-the-fed-actually-raised-rates-this-year/
Despite this publicized “rise” of the Fed funds rate, the 10-year interest rate on Treasuries “has declined 30 basis points this year. Thus for certain borrowers, the Fed has effectively lowered the cost of borrowing.”

Kranzler goes on to point out that

“the spread between the 30-day Treasury Bill and the 10-yr Treasury has declined this year from 193 basis points to 125 basis points – a 68 basis point drop in the cost of funding for borrowers who have access to the highly engineered derivative products that enable these borrowers to take advantage of the shape of the yield curve in order to lower their cost of borrowing.”

Kranzler provides a chart that shows that the spread between the 30-day Treasury bill and the 10-year Treasury bond is narrowing. As the short-term rate rises, the long term rate is falling, and the spread between the long and short rate has declined 68 basis points from almost two percentage points to one and one quarter percentage point.

Clearly, this is not a rise in interest rates.

Clearly also, a rise in the Fed funds rate no longer signals a rise in all interest rates.

Why is the Fed raising short rates when the long rates are falling?

Why do “democratic Western democracies” have central banks that do nothing except protect big banks at the expense of the people?

How long will the insouciant peoples of the West continue to conspire in their own demise?

Featured image: credits to the owner

At his 90^th birthday, Fidel Castro wrote that for three years after going away for first grade, no one took him to the movies. Cinema was a novelty. Keeping young children from culture is the greatest damage that can be done to them, Castro remarked. He regretted not having written about this. 

The anecdote introduces Ernesto Limia’s Cuba: the end of history? It is discussed at concerts across the island by beloved musician, Raúl Paz. 1 The final book presentations – with theatre, dance and visual arts – occurred in Havana, June 8, 9 and 14. They are “wandering dialogues: for connection with feelings”.

Ernesto Limia’s Cuba: the end of history? (Source: Cubadebate)

Limia argues that the international left has failed to replace post modernism. It justifies globalized greed, claiming there’s no truth, just myths and fictions. As long as my life feels right to me, I am living well. After all, “there’s only one life.”

James Williams (Oxford University), winner of the prestigious Nine Dots Prize in Information Technology, argues that the goal of new technologies is to distract us. 2 That’s what they compete to do: dominate our attention. Yet if asked, no one admits wanting their attention so dominated.

We might wonder why this argument is novel.

One of the first acts of the new revolutionary government in Cuba, after taking power in 1959, was to create an institute for film and television. People had to see themselves, to tell their own stories. Since the start of the Cuban Revolution, culture, including philosophy, has had priority.

The insight is that without cultivating sensitivity and critical awareness through culture, our thinking is dominated by forces we don’t understand, or even identify. Castro said in Caracus 1998,

“They discovered smart bombs. We discovered that people think and feel.”

He didn’t mean short-lived feelings of pleasure generated by trillion dollar industries promoting glamour and sensuality.

Post-modernist culture takes feelings at face value. It ignores, as Limia, argues, that every new bit of fun and pleasure carries with it deadeningly dehumanizing values: consumerism, exaltation of self-image, gain as the measure of all things.

Williams quotes Aldous Huxley: Defenders of freedom in the US ignored our almost infinite appetite for distraction. José Martí, leader of Cuba’s last independence war against Spain, didn’t ignore it. He couldn’t, knowing imperialism as he did.

But it wasn’t just appetite for distraction he worried about. It was Liberalism’s glorification of appetite into a view of freedom. In his famous “Our America”, Martí claimed a bigger barrier to independence (than the colossal neighbour to the north) was a false idea of what it means to learn. Writing books is relatively easy. The harder task, Martí wrote, is forming people.

It is done through cultural institutions, the creation of humanist values like solidarity. It is what the wandering dialogues are advocating. Martí said elsewhere that the only way to be free to realize unique human potential is through culture, in his broad sense, including education toward sensitivity.

Cuba 2017 International Book Fair opens in Havana (Source: CubaSi)

This year, at the iconic Havana Book Fair, there were brand-name T-shirts. Despite a culture of anti-capitalist resistance developed for 60 years, Cuba cannot escape the onslaught of capitalist values. The point to note, though, is that there are questions: Such values are discussed, and seriously challenged.

Students and teachers at the wandering dialogues want the educational system to better use students’ creativity to counter the smothering apathy of elite pseudo-culture. They want to take up the reins of transformative culture that can nurture young people toward genuine human response.

In a square near the University of Havana is a large replica of Don Quixote. Some on the left say Cuba should now give up chasing windmills. Cubans should not bear the “burden” of keeping impossible dreams alive.

Cuba: the end of history? shows the “burden” is more than two centuries old. Féliz Varela, a priest, began transforming the educational system in the early nineteenth century. He insisted on observation, experience and creativity as foundations for philosophy. He wanted independence for Cuba.

Cuba has resisted world empires. In Varela’s time, there were four: Spain, the UK, the US and the “necessary evil” of slavery. Varela inspired generations of students to take seriously, for politics, the need to create philosophy, from experience. Otherwise, imperialism would think for them.

This is what Cuban students discussed in the wandering dialogues. It is expression of a centuries-old struggle for freedom. It opposes the distorted liberal/libertarian view that individuals somehow, mythically, “seize our destiny”, by looking “within”, following dreams, because they’re ours.

For some, persuaded there are only myths and fictions, none true just all different, the wandering dialogues are like Don Quixote’s strange mixture of “madness and intelligence”. And they’ll decide, as many did about the man of the Mancha, that it is more madness than intelligence.

But the domination of liberalism and post-modernism, infecting even much feminism, queer theory and academic marxism, means there is not a lot to choose from in what is considered philosophy in the distracted, dominated, “developed” North. It might not be so bad to consider windmills.

Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014) and José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Global Development Ethics (Palgrave MacMillan 2014).

Notes

1. “Conectados, dialogando”, http://lajiribilla.cu/articulo/conectados-dialogando

2. CBC FM 1 “Spark”, June 7 2017

Featured image: credits to the owner

Speaking to the media in his latest tour to the US, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister insisted that there was no blockade of Qatar, yet he insisted that the latter was not allowed to use their, as also of their allies’, air space and territorial waters. Standing next to the rather reticent US secretary of the state, Rex Tillerson, he said that “Qatar was free to go” and yet the Qatar airways was not allowed to use Saudi air space. Whereas the delicate difference the Saudis seem to be making between their policy and those of other countries, who the former would have wanted to impose identical restrictions on Qatar, is a reflection of Saudia’s limits, it also shows that the House of Saud has rather shot itself in the foot by opening a solo-front against Qatar, a country that nevertheless has a big American military base and has on its side a powerful Arab ally, Turkey. What the whole episode has brought unmistakably to the forefront is that there exist a number of countries within the “Sunni coalition” who do not see eye to eye with Saudi policies and are more comfortable in following rather independent course of action.

Prince Muhammad Bin Salman (credits to the owner of the photo)

Apart from Turkey, whose president Erdogan went to the extent of relating the Qatar-blockade to a “death sentence”, a number of other countries both from Asia and Africa have refused to follow the House of Saud in its footsteps, marking yet another defeat for the king-to-be prince Muhammad bin Salman, who is not only known to have masterminded the Yemen war but also known particularly for injecting a new ideological framework to Saudi Arabia’s regional ambitions, a framework premised upon surgical weakening of countries that have the potential to challenge Saudi hegemony. This is becoming evident from the way people in Turkey have started to point fingers to UAE for spending US$3 billion for funding coup attempt in Turkey, a possible scenario which certainly points to the increasing Saudi dissatisfaction with the way regional politics has tilted to its disadvantage.

The list of countries who have joined Turkey in openly defying the House of Saud has expanded. As such, out of the six African countries (Senegal, Chad, Niger, Comoros, Mauritius, and Djibouti), who were on top of the Saudi expectation to boycott Qatar, only Mauritius severed its diplomatic ties with Qatar. Senegal, Chad, Niger and the Comoros restricted themselves to recalling their ambassadors from Doha while Djibouti, like Jordan, simply reduced the level of its diplomatic relations. Countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan and Somalia have so far rejected Saudi overtures and instead called for dialogue between Qatar and its detractors.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Source: VOA News)

Somali media moreover reported that President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed had rejected a Saudi offer of $80 million in return for his government breaking off diplomatic relations with Qatar. Somali planning, investment and economic development minister Jamal Mohamed Hassan announced nonetheless this week that Saudi Arabia had agreed to increase Somalia’s haj quota by 25 percent. Somalia’s strategic importance to the Gulf in commercial as well as military terms would seem to be the only logical explanation for it being rewarded despite refusing to join the Saudi-UAE campaign.

Kuwait, far from cutting relations with Qatar, is now acting as a peacemaker between Qatar and the Saudis and Emiratis. The emirate of Dubai is quite close to Iran, has tens of thousands of Iranian expatriates, and is hardly following Abu Dhabi’s example of anti-Qatari wrath. Oman was even staging joint naval maneuvres with Iran a couple of months ago. And now it has opened its ports to Qatari shipping that no longer can access key Saudi and UAE ports. Qatar, as such, continue to maintain its access to international shipping lanes and can refuel its LNG vessels at alternative ports, including Singapore.

Pakistan had long ago declined to send its army to help the Saudis in Yemen, because the Saudis had asked for only Sunni soldiers, thus outraging the Pakistan army who saw in it a Saudi attempt to sectarianize its military personnel. Besides it, Pakistan’s former army commander, General Raheel Sharif, is rumoured to be on the brink of resigning as head of the Saudi-sponsored Muslim alliance to fight “terror”.

Turkey and Iran are helping Qatar meet its food and water needs after Saudi Arabia closed the two countries’ land border, preventing one third of the Gulf state’s food and water imports from reaching it. Turkey, moreover, is sending troops to Qatar, which is home to the largest US military base in the Middle East, shedding light on the possible reason for the US’ potential reluctance to go beyond mere verbal support for Saudi Arabia against Qatar and explaining how Saudi Arabia fell a prey to its wrong assessments about its supposed allies’ response to their call for Qatar’s boycott.

What the countries’ response shows is that there are more countries on the opposing side of Saudia than those standing with it in supporting its regional games, the roots of which go as deep inside the rift piercing through the “Sunni coalition” as in the role such competing states as Saudia and Qatar are playing in regional conflict zones, such as Syria.

Some reports have already appeared claiming Qatar’s plan to extend its influence to the post-war Syria by funding its post-war reconstruction. Such a plan not only takes Qatar potentially beyond the redundant question of Assad’s stay or exit from power, but also allows it to tap into the reconstruction opportunity to keep the ‘new Syria’ in its own regional axis. This would simply mean that Qatar would not only extend its largesse to the Syrian territories, but would also allow it to accommodate various oil companies who would like to use it as a pipeline route from the Gulf to Europe via Turkey, or via tankers from the Syrian port of Lattakia.

What, in this context, the Saudi blockade of Qatar has done is that it has unwittingly injected strength in the opposition block within the otherwise “Sunni coalition” and allowed its members to drift further towards the arch Saudi rival, Iran.

Nothing else perhaps could have explained the drastic failure yet another Saudi plan has faced within days of its execution. The big question, therefore, is: how far can the Saudis go before the list of its allies shrinks down to a handful of tiny Gulf States? There is no way that the House of Saud, along with its allies, can sustain a long-drawn game of isolation or even draw Qatar into a conflict. Muslim world’s general response has effectively eroded whatever the possibility of conflict had existed earlier. Time for the Saudis to do a deep re-think over the extent to which their influence goes, or doesn’t go, in the Muslim world!

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image: New Eastern Outlook

The new U.S. policy towards Iran includes regime change, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson was asked on Wednesday whether the United States supports regime change inside Iran. He replied in the affirmative, saying that U.S. policy is driven by relying on “elements inside of Iran” to bring about “peaceful transition of that government.”

He made the comments in a hearing on the 2018 State Department budget before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) asked Tillerson about U.S. policy towards Iran, including whether the U.S. government would sanction the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and whether the U.S. supported “a philosophy of regime change.”

“They are doing bad things throughout the world, on behalf of terrorism and destroying human rights of many people,” Poe said, referring to the IRGC. “I’d like to know what the policy is of the U.S. toward Iran. Do we support the current regime? Do we support a philosophy of regime change, peaceful regime change? There are Iranians in exile all over the world. Some are here. And then there’s Iranians in Iran who don’t support the totalitarian state. So is the U.S. position to leave things as they are or set up a peaceful long-term regime change?”

“Well our Iranian policy is under development,” Tillerson replied. “It’s not yet been delivered to the president, but I would tell you that we certainly recognize Iran’s continued destabilizing presence in the region, their payment of foreign fighters, their export of militia forces in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, their support for Hezbollah. And we are taking action to respond to Iran’s hegemony. Additional sanctions actions have been put in place against individuals and others.”

“We continually review the merits both from the standpoint of diplomatic but also international consequences of designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in its entirety as a terrorist organization,” he added. “As you know, we have designated the Quds [Force]. Our policy towards Iran is to push back on this hegemony, contain their ability to develop obviously nuclear weapons, and to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government. Those elements are there, certainly as we know.”

Trump’s foreign policy team is filled with hawks on Iran, but Tillerson is the first administration official to advocate for regime change in his official capacity.

The Iranian government was quick to condemn Tillerson’s remarks. On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi called Tillerson’s comments “interventionist, in gross violation of the compelling rules of international law, unacceptable and strongly condemned.”

“Since the 1950s, the United States tried to meddle in Iranian affairs by different strategies such as coup d’état, regime change, and military intervention.” Qassemi said, referring to U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Iran, dubbed Operation AJAX by the CIA.

These efforts have all failed, Qassemi said, adding that the new U.S. government was “confused” and could be “easily manipulated by wrong information.”

Tillerson’s focus on nuclear weapons in his comments on Wednesday are notable, given that he has previously acknowledged that Iran is in full compliance with the Iranian nuclear agreement (as has the International Atomic Energy Agency).

Last week, Iran suffered an attack claimed by the Islamic State that killed at least 17 people and injured dozens. The White House response implied that Iran deserved the attack.

“We grieve and pray for the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in Iran, and for the Iranian people, who are going through such challenging times,” the statement read. “We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”

The next day, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a vocal Trump supporter, praised the attack in Tehran and suggested that the United States should work with the Islamic State to counter Iran.

On Thursday, the Senate passed an Iran sanctions bill, despite former Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning that new sanctions could threaten the Iranian nuclear agreement.

Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani is an associate editor at ThinkProgress.

Featured image: Investopedia

HAVANA — Making good on his deal with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Florida), President Donald Trump announced Friday that he plans to roll back some of the steps Barack Obama took to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba.

In 2015, Obama weakened restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba and eliminated some of the economic prohibitions between the two countries. He removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and loosened the export of US internet hardware and telecommunications. He also set up increased cooperation in intelligence-gathering, drug interdiction, scientific research and environmental protection.

Obama made it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba. Nearly everyone can now visit Cuba without applying for a specific license. US airlines can fly there directly with cheaper fares; only general licenses are required for most travel to Cuba.

In his Presidential Policy Guidance on Cuba, Trump reinstituted some restrictions on US travel to Cuba and US business relations with the island. He did not touch Obama’s loosened limits on Cuban-American travel and remittances to Cuba, however, because that would anger a significant voter base in Florida.

Trump also left in place the US embassy in Havana and the Cuban embassy in Washington, DC, that Obama established. And Trump did not end direct flights to Cuba by US airlines.

Trump’s Restrictions Will Hurt Americans and Cubans Alike

On June 1, Engage Cuba released a report concluding that a reversal of Obama’s Cuba policies could cost the US economy $6.6 billion and affect nearly 13,000 jobs during Trump’s first term. Obama’s 2015 policies have led to significant economic growth and job creation throughout Cuba. So much for the dealmaker-in-chief’s commitment to creating jobs.

René Esquivel, who sang with the Buena Vista Social Club, is a bellhop at the Havana Libre hotel. Esquivel told Truthout he couldn’t believe Trump would jeopardize the US economy to the tune of $6 billion.

Darian Hernandez Rojas, a Cuban law student at the University of Artemisa, concurs.

“I thought that since Trump is a businessman, he would not step back from the progress of the Obama administration, that he would seize the Cuban market.”

In an interview with Truthout, he added,

“The initiative that Obama and [Cuban president] Raul Castro took on December 17, 2014, was a breakthrough. But to make a deep transformation, two years is not enough time. The new hotels and stores are not meant for the Cuban people; they are meant for tourists. But it helps the economy and that should help the Cuban people to develop. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

Cuban law professor Gabriela Torres Romulo, who teaches at University of Holguín, informed Truthout that increased currency from tourism helps Cubans because there is more money in the country for social programs, such as education, health, culture, sports and scientific research.

Cubans who run private restaurants called “paladares” and Airbnbs will be hurt by Trump’s crackdown.

“In short, many Cubans believe that the Trump administration’s new policy will hurt those it is ostensibly meant to help: the average Cuban who has struggled under the weight of a battered economy for decades,” according to the New York Times.

“Since 2015, American companies have undertaken significant efforts in identifying opportunities and cultivating appropriate connections in Cuba. Many are now well positioned to take advantage of continued relaxations in restrictions and further market openings,” according to Louis A. Dejoie, chairman of the International Law Practice Group at McNees Wallace & Nurick LLC. “To reverse course at this point would only benefit our foreign competitors, none of whom are under the same restraints. If the Trump Administration truly wants to put Americans first, the choice seems clear.”

When Truthout informed Alejandro, a 26-six-year-old Cuban taxi driver, about Trump’s changes, he said,

“Things got better for Cuba; now they will get worse.”

Last year, the US and Cuba signed a bilateral agreement to respond to oil spills and hazardous pollution in the Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

Cuban President Raul Castro tries to lift up the arm of President Obama at the conclusion of their joint news conference in Havana, Cuba in 2016. (Source: NPR)

Since Obama’s détente with Cuban President Raul Castro, US airlines, hotel chains and cruise ship lines have started doing business in Cuba. Agricultural producers in Kansas and Louisiana have exported tons of goods to Cuba. And Cuban people have obtained access to the internet.

According to a Pew Research Center poll, 75 percent of people in the US support the policies Obama instituted. Those changes have created jobs and income for the US economy. Last year, more than 60,000 Americans visited Cuba, an increase of 34 percent over 2015. US airlines and cruise lines now travel directly to Cuban cities.

“Airbnb also now lists hundreds of privately owned houses where open-minded Americans can stay and interact with locals, and last week it said its connections have helped place $40 million in the pockets of Cuban owners of private bed-and-breakfasts,” Christopher Sabatini wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Since 2015, individual Americans have been able design their own trips under “people-to-people” educational exchanges that no longer need to be organized by a US organization. Under Trump’s new rules, Americans must qualify under one of 12 permitted travel categories. The Trump administration will also tighten enforcement of travel under the authorized categories.

These categories include professional research or attendance at professional meetings relating to the traveler’s profession, professional background or area of expertise; educational, religious, humanitarian, journalistic, athletic or artistic activities; visiting a relative in Cuba; support for the Cuban people; business visits for exchanges of information, telecommunications and Internet hardware and software, and exportation of agricultural products and building materials; foundations, research or educational institutions interested in international relations collecting information about Cuba; and official US government business, including visits to Cuba by foreign diplomatic staff residing in the United States.

Trump’s order prohibits American travelers and businesses from participating in financial transactions with entities owned or largely controlled by the Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA (GAESA), a holding company run by the Cuban military, which poses no threat to US security. Now Americans will be barred from spending money in state-run hotels or restaurants connected with GAESA.

“This is a new way to enforce the old embargo,” John S. Kavulich, president of US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, told Politico. He says about 60 percent of the Cuban economy and 80 percent of Cuba’s tourism economy are controlled by GAESA.

The new rules will not apply to travelers who have booked trips or to business deals already concluded with the military. But Americans will be barred from staying at new properties such as the Gran Hotel Manzana, which is managed by Kempinski Hotels but owned by Gaviota, a Cuban military-run company.

Trump wrote that his policy “will be guided by key US national and security interests and solidarity with the Cuban people.” His changes, however, have nothing to do with national security and will only hurt the Cuban people.

“We must ensure that US funds are not channeled to a regime that has failed to meet the most basic requirements of a free and just society,” Trump’s directive says.

Trump’s Human Rights Hypocrisy

Trump’s rollbacks of Obama’s policies are ostensibly aimed at improving human rights in Cuba, which is curious in light of Trump’s treatment of “human rights considerations as an impediment to trade and partnerships that create jobs in the United States,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis wrote in the New York Times.

Indeed,

“given [the Trump administration’s] complete lack of concern for human rights around the world, it would be a tragic irony if [they use] that to justify policies that harm the Cuban people and restrict the freedom of Americans to travel and do business where they please,” Benjamin Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser to Obama who negotiated the 2014 deal with Raul Castro, told the Times.

For example, Trump is enamored of Saudi Arabia. Critics of the Saudi government and clerics have been tortured, beheaded, crucified and lashed. Even lawyers who question government policy are imprisoned. In spite of its egregious human rights violations, Trump sold a record $110 billion in arms to the monarchy.

In fact, Cuba has surpassed the United States in its guarantee of economic, social and cultural rights, which constitutes a category of human rights under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Cubans enjoy universal health care, free education, equal pay rates and paid maternity leave.

Unlike in the United States, health care is considered a human right in Cuba. Universal health care is free to all. Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors to patients in the world at 6.7 per 1,000 people. The 2014 infant mortality rate was 4.2 per 1,000 live births — one of the lowest in the world.

In Cuba, free education is a universal right up to and including higher education. Cuban law guarantees the right to voluntarily form and join trade unions. Unions have the right to stop work they consider dangerous and the right to participate in company management. Women make up the majority of Cuban judges, attorneys, lawyers, scientists, technical workers, public health workers and professionals.

As of 2018, the date of the next general election in Cuba, there will be a limit of no more than two five-year terms for all senior elected positions, including the president. Anyone can be nominated to be a candidate.

Trump and Rubio: The Quid Pro Quo

But Trump’s cutbacks really constitute a thank you to some Cuban-American lawmakers for their support of his policies, including repealing Obamacare and shielding the president from consequences for his malfeasance.

Notably, Rubio’s questioning of former FBI director James Comey during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing was designed to undercut Comey’s testimony that implicated Trump in wrongdoing.

“I am confident the president will keep his commitment on Cuba policy,” Rubio declared after the hearing.

Trump’s rollbacks of some of Obama’s Cuba policies were developed during several meetings between the president and Rubio.

In addition, Trump thinks the Cuban-American vote in Florida was key to his election victory, although many have disputed its significance. In 2015, Trump had supported Obama’s overtures to Cuba, telling The Daily Caller,

“I think it’s fine. I think it’s fine, but we should have made a better deal. The concept of opening with Cuba — 50 years is enough — the concept of opening with Cuba is fine. I think we should have made a stronger deal.”

The 57-Year-Old US Economic Blockade of Cuba Remains

President Bill Clinton signs the Helms-Burton Act into law in 1996. (Source: cubaninsider)

Obama was unable to lift the longstanding US economic blockade of Cuba because Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, which codified the blockade so that only Congress could revoke it. Díaz-Balart’s brother, Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart, was instrumental in securing Bill Clinton‘s signature on the Act.

The US embargo of Cuba, now a blockade, was initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the Cold War in response to a 1960 memo written by a senior State Department official. The memo proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Castro] government.” That purpose was never realized.

Nevertheless, USA Today reports,

“Supporters of Trump’s changes said they are designed to hurt Cuba’s communist government economically, and encourage people to rise up against the regime that has been in power since 1959.”

Don’t hold your breath.

The US blockade has hurt the Cuban people. They are unable to obtain equipment to test pregnant women for birth defects and medicines for children with liver disease. Cubans are also denied access to life-saving medical equipment, such as kidney dialysis machines, and antibiotics.

And Cubans have trouble getting new software. Liober Rodrigues Guerra, a 29-year-old educational video games designer, told Resumen Latinoamericano,

“it is difficult to keep updated with the latest software we need for work. When we try to download these updates, our access is denied with a message that says it is not available because we come from, ‘a region under an embargo.'”

Moreover, the blockade also hurts people in the US. Cuba has developed pioneering medicines to treat and prevent lung cancer and diabetic amputations. Because of the blockade, however, we in the United States cannot take advantage of them.

Esquivel joked that when Obama was president, he used to call Esquivel every day and tell him to “take care of my people.” But when Trump became president, Esquivel quipped, Trump called him every day and told him to be on the lookout for Americans who come to Cuba against the blockade, gather their particulars, and send them to Trump so he could arrest them. Trump has no feeling for what it means to be human, Esquivel added.

There is a long history of friendship between the Cuban and American people that neither Trump nor anyone else can destroy, according to Esquivel. He suggested that one of the most significant cultural/historical exchanges between the two peoples would be for the US to help Cubans repair the vintage US cars some still drive. It’s not an economic issue, Esquivel said, but would be an important cultural interchange between the two countries.

Writing in The Nation, Cuba expert Peter Kornbluh cites a recent study concluding that the US travel industry stands to lose $3.5 billion and more than 10,000 jobs as a result of increased travel restrictions. Kornbluh notes:

Trump is threatening to undermine years of concerted effort — inside and outside of government — to establish a civil, peaceful coexistence with an island neighbor after more than a half century of intervention, embargoes, and assassination plots. At stake is a model of responsible US foreign policy — to be emulated, not repudiated.

Most people in the US, including 6 in 10 Republicans, favor expanded travel and trade with Cuba. A new Morning Consult national poll found 65 percent of US voters support Obama’s Cuba policy. Sixty-four percent of Republicans support relaxed travel and trade restrictions. And 61 percent of US voters favor a total end to the blockade.

A Florida International University biannual poll published in September 2016 found that 63 percent of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County, historically the center of opposition to engagement with Cuba, support lifting the blockade.

Esquivel said Cubans love Americans. But of everyone he has encountered from the United States in the course of his employment, not one supports Trump’s policies.

In order to establish complete normalization of relations, Cuba would require lifting the blockade and returning Guantánamo to Cuba. Trump’s new order is a step backward, not forward.

The future of real progress toward normalization of US-Cuba relations, which will help people in both countries, lies with Congress. Several bills have been introduced in the legislature to challenge the blockade. The Freedom for Americans to Travel to Cuba Act (S.1287) would guarantee Americans the right to travel to Cuba. The bill already has 55 co-sponsors, including nine Republicans.

Legislators respond to public pressure. Calls, letters, emails and demonstrations aimed at improving the United States’ Cuba policy can be most effective. Contact your congress members and demand that they vote to lift travel restrictions on Cuba and end the US blockade.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her books include The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse; Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Visit her website: MarjorieCohn.com. Follow her on Twitter: @MarjorieCohn.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Featured image: Al Drago / The New York Times via Truthout

This essay examines a relatively new genre in Chinese literature: migrant worker poetry. These are poems written by rural migrant workers who have, since the economic reform and opening up of the early 1980s, moved to China’s booming cities in search of work in factories, mines and construction. The difficulties that these workers face are manifold, from exploitation of their labor and lack of welfare protection to an inability to make their voices and hardships heard. How best to represent this vast and oppressed demographic (an estimated 280 million rural migrants) has been at the heart of China’s social and political debate for the last 30 years. I argue that migrant worker poetry has been both overlooked and underestimated, not only for its emergent quality, but for its ability to address problems of representation – these worker poets eloquently represent themselves.

By making use of online platforms they not only bear witness to the damaging myth of social mobility that motivates so many to seek work on the assembly lines, but they are able to challenge it directly, publishing their own sublimated suffering for each other and for society at large. The scope of this study is limited to the poems in Iron Moon, a 2017 anthology of migrant worker poems translated into English by Eleanor Goodman; it excludes novels, short stories or autobiographies by migrant workers that could be included in the wider genre of “worker literature”. I hope, however, that an examination of these poems demonstrates that the simultaneous emergence of the internet with China’s rapid industrialization has both created and enabled a vital new movement in the history of China’s working-class literature.

It’s hard to think of anywhere in the world where becoming a poet is a canny career move, but this is especially true for the poorest and most disadvantaged trying to gain a foothold in the factories of China’s frenzied special economic zones.

There have been a flurry of documentaries in recent years highlighting the hardships of China’s migrant workers, but the 2015 film Iron Moon drew attention to a very specific figure: the migrant worker poet. It follows several young writers battling economic and cultural prejudice in their attempts to sublimate 14-hour shifts on assembly lines into lines of poetry.

We see the young, tender-minded Wu Niaoniao (whose given name means Blackbird) wandering from stand to stand in Guangzhou’s vast strip-lit Southern China Job Market, enquiring about editorial positions on internal factory newspapers. With a knowing mix of fatalism and hope that seems to permeate the poetry of China’s migrant workers, he reads a poem and awaits their responses with a sheepish smile.

“I know young people want to follow their dreams, but…” says one cynical recruiter without finishing the sentence. Another peers over his glasses and enquires “but what do you do? You can make a lot of money with an education. Without an education you can’t do business, get it?”

One recruiter simply wonders if Wu ever considered writing things that were a little more upbeat.

While no one would expect construction and factory tycoons to be on the look out for the next Charles Bukowski, their collective response, paying lip service to impersonal pragmatism and business savvy, inadvertently reinforces Wu’s humble, unprofitable ambitions.

The plight of rural migrants is not new to Chinese fiction. The New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 20s, driven by concerns about how to modernize China and highlight those marginalized by the old feudal society, inspired Lu Xun, arguably the greatest Chinese writer of the 20^th century, whose pioneering use of vernacular Chinese in The Real Story of Ah Q detailed the life of a rural peasant in the city. He was followed by Lao She’s rural orphan in Beijing in Rickshaw Boy and Zhang Leping’s long-running cartoon serialization of the “aimless drifter” San Mao in the 30s and 40s. And yet, these were still migrant stories written at a remove. And even though the three decades of revolution that followed enforced the centrality of the worker, peasant and soldier in fiction, it produced for the most part a state-controlled literature that did little to convey the lived experiences of those it claimed to represent.

That all changed in the 1980s. Since China’s reform and opening era of agricultural de-collectivization, privatization of industry and the formation of a self-styled socialist market economy, it is estimated that 274 million Chinese migrants have moved from the countryside to work in mines, construction sites, and urban assembly lines. It is not surprising, therefore, that the migrant worker has also become the central protagonist in China’s New Left Critique in which the term “subaltern” or diceng (i.e. “lower strata”) specifically focuses upon this new post-socialist figure: the rural-worker-in-the-city who lives on the sharp edge of market capitalism.

Once celebrated by the Communist revolution, political terms such as “the working people” (laodong renmin), the working masses (laodong dazhong) or simply workers (gongren) have been replaced by increasingly pejorative nomenclature. The migrant worker (mingong, yimingong, nongmingong) is someone who does not belong. This “floating population” (liudong renkou) by definition lacks agency. With mass layoffs in state enterprises in the late 1990s, growing numbers of rural migrant workers and disadvantaged urban workers have again become people who “work for the boss” (dagongzai, dagongmei – male and female workers respectively), a retrograde step in the quest for subjectivity and autonomy.

This rapid degradation of the laborer’s (laodongzhe) status, stripped of lifetime employment and bereft of many of the welfare benefits and the security of an earlier generation of state workers, is skillfully captured in a poem by former construction worker Xie Xiangnan. Here a young migrant compares the glorious image of “Lenin on the Rostrum” from his school days with the sight of forlorn hordes of migrants at the Guangzhou railroad station, carrying their possessions in plastic bags “like packages of explosives.” And again in the last lines of Ji Zhishui’s “Old World” in which “freedom’s great victory/in the end meant having nothing.”

Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “In the Hardware Factory” addresses directly the absurdity of old hopes and dreams:

I haven’t made it to the 21^st century’s low slope of prosperity

the mountains are so high, but the body rots; how many years will it take

to reach utopia, I pity myself as I age

unable to squeeze aboard communism’s last train

but living in a scorching workshop in a sweatshop

(…) time begins to defect

it laughs at our memories and enthusiasm as they slip away

In the early post-socialist years, such disenchantment wasn’t always there. Migrant worker literature and poetry (which must not be confused with the official “worker poetry” of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution) was one of many genres to sprout in the cultural wasteland following Mao’s death in 1976. But unlike the better-known elite (and beguilingly named) genres of “scar literature” and “misty poetry”, it’s one that, until recently, has been largely overlooked.

Early migrant worker literature mainly reflected a continued allegiance to state policy. In the early 80s, this meant formulaic self-help narratives of success-through-hard work in line with the government’s drive towards urbanization, of which Anzi’s Posthouse of Youth: The True Life of Migrant Women in Shenzhen is perhaps the most impressive. (Anzi became a model female migrant worker, whose entrepreneurial success in Shenzhen, site of the first China’s Special Economic Zone, codified the urban dream as reality.) Her legacy has been so influential that some critics have prematurely concluded that working girl (dagongmei) fiction such as this proves that women workers do not in fact lack agency. Unsurprisingly, these autobiographies and stories of social mobility in Shenzhen were also embraced by newspapers and state-run TV channels as handy proof that those rural workers who bore the heaviest burdens of the country’s early economic transformation were also its beneficiaries.

In 2004, the migrant worker-turned-writer Sheng Keyi transformed these narratives of plucky dagongmei ambition into one that upset government censors with its racy content and scenes of forced sterilizations in her critically and commercially acclaimed autobiographical novel Northern Girls. The headstrong albeit naïve protagonist, 16-year-old Qian Xiaohong, whose large breasts and demanding libido make her the target of unwanted male attention, courageously fights exploitative employers, corrupt policemen and crooked officials, refusing to let her body be appropriated or commodified. Despite staying true to her resolute moral code as she works her way up from salon girl to hospital administrator, the emotional and near metaphysical collateral damage of these years in Shenzhen leaves a heavy cloud hanging over the novel’s final pages. In the work of most recent migrant poets, this fatalistic bleakness is there from the start.

As Xie Xiangnan laments in his poem “Production, the Middle of Production, Is Soaked by Production,” reality doesn’t accord so neatly with one’s hopes:

This is a rectangular dream

Which inevitably brings forth a rectangular waiting

a floating country can’t pillow a broken dream

and I’ve never dared say goodnight to this enormous world.

Today the most famous migrant worker poet is 24-year-old Xu Lizhi who committed suicide in 2014. He worked at the Foxconn electronics mega-factory in Shenzhen famed not only for manufacturing Apple products and those of other international electronic giants, but for a spate of suicides in 2010 that exposed the sinister myth of opportunity and social mobility on the assembly line: “To die is the only way to testify that we ever lived,” wrote one blogger at the factory. (Foxconn subsequently erected netting to prevent not the despair but the death toll.) But when Xu threw himself from the seventeenth floor of a building four years later, having published much of his work online, it was not his death that made headlines, but his achievements as a poet.

Time magazine published his brief life story alongside his work under the headline: “The poet dying for your phone”. In China, the host of a national culture show marveled at the depths of this uneducated worker’s feelings. In giving shape to his experiences through poetry, Xu highlighted our own automated disconnect from the people who manufacture the clothes we wear and the electronics we consume, as conveyed in the final lines of his poem “Terracotta Army on the Assembly Line”:

 (…) these workers who can’t tell night from day

wearing

electrostatic clothes

electrostatic hats

electrostatic shoes

electrostatic gloves

electrostatic bracelets

all at the ready

silently awaiting their orders

when the bell rings

they’re sent back to the Qin.

In 1956 Erich Fromm warned that “the danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.” Robot-like human slaves—dubbed iSlaves—are fueling the growth of Apple and other transnational corporations. Migrant workers in Xu’s poetic universe represent both the entombed foot soldiers of the ancient Qin dynasty and, when at work, the automata of the future. They have become the dehumanized, chillingly synchronized embodiment of Fritz Lang’s once futuristic Metropolis.

The plight of young rural migrants has not been ignored by the country’s higher profile authors. At the heart of recent critical literary debates in China have been the imperatives of “working class literature” or diceng wenxue – fiction that is both concerned with the conditions of ordinary people and takes a critical stance towards the society that oppresses them. Wang Anyi for example, one of the many young intellectuals to be sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, is an author whose focus has historically been largely about people like herself, other intellectuals (notably in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Love in a Small Town). But in 2000 she shifted focus to those on the periphery with her Shanghai migrant narrative Fuping. Can Xue, a writer best known for her experimental narrative style and subject matter also changed tack with her story The Migrant Worker Corps (mingongtuan). Both writers broke rank with their usual experimental narrative modes, resorting instead to a realism in keeping with a tradition set in motion by the May Fourth Movement as the literary technique that could most accurately convey social transformation and lower class lives.

However, when it comes to debates regarding who can and can’t speak on behalf of the diceng or lower classes, even intellectuals and authors who wish to contribute to this particular genre can still, as Gayatri Chakravorky Spivak argues, be complicit in “the muting” of worker voices. Which is what makes migrant worker poetry so valuable – as literature by and about workers that conveys a sense of their struggles, hopes and torments.

In spring 2017 the first translated anthology of migrant worker poetry was published. The book, also called Iron Moon, was compiled to accompany the documentary, both of which were curated by the poet and critic Qin Xiaoyu. Expertly translated by Eleanor Goodman (whose translations have been used for this essay), the collection includes work by 31 poets drawn from more than 100 in the Chinese original. These young migrant poets debunk the myth of social mobility; they are aware of their own exploitation. Since the mid-90s, their experience of powerlessness has fortified their literature with a fresh, compelling strength and honesty. The title, a visual metaphor taken from one of Xu Lizhi’s most well-known poems:

I swallowed iron
they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young

I swallowed labor, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life

I can’t swallow any more
everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat

I spread across my country
a poem of shame

Given the primacy of the moon in classical Chinese poetry ­– as an image of solitude, of longing, of romance, of companionship – linking it with iron, says Goodman, conjures “a head-on collision of traditional Chinese culture with an explosion of capitalism, of humanity with mechanization, romance with an unromantic world – it becomes an amalgam of extremes. And these poets are dealing with this very consciously.” They are using poetic imagery, in line with China’s most treasured and esteemed classical art form, to counter the brutalizing experience of modernity.

More than a thousand years ago two of China’s most beloved Tang dynasty poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, pondered the moon’s ability to evoke a longing for home and distant family in “Quiet Night Thought” and “Moonlit Night”. Today, for several of these migrant poets, its eerie illumination during ghostly nightshifts becomes an equally melancholy companion. In Hubei Qingwa’s “Moon’s Position in the Factory,” it’s an inhuman co-worker: “under the moon,” he writes, “I regret my entire life.” Alu sees the moon as a “chunk of homesick iron”, a kindred loner, longing for its origins. Zheng Xiaoqiong sees it as a lonely light that obscures rather than exposes suffering:

And the tears, joy, and pain we’ve had

our glorious or petty ideas, and our souls

are all illuminated by the moonlight, collected, and carried afar

hidden in rays of light no one will notice.

Zheng, one of the finest poets in the collection, has pioneered her own distinctive “aesthetic of iron”, a peculiarly expansive and pliable metaphor to convey a life that is mercilessly cold and hard. Having worked for years in a die-mold factory and as a hole-punch operator, it is clear from the opening lines of “Language” how seamlessly she forges the physical and intellectual symbiosis of man and metal:

I speak this sharp-edged, oiled language

of cast iron–the language of silent workers

a language of tightened crimping and memories of iron sheets

a language like callouses fierce crying unlucky

hurting hungry language back pay of the machines’ roar occupational diseases

language of severed fingers life’s foundational language in the dark place of unemployment

between the damp steel bars these sad languages

……….. I speak them softly

It’s a theme that pervades the collection, including miner Chen Nianxi’s “Demolition’s Mark,” in which he writes,

“I don’t often dare look at my life/it’s hard and metallic black/angled like a pickaxe.”

Just as there is a noticeable splicing of rich, sophisticated imagery in some poems and a lean, resolute use of the vernacular in others, there are fascinating common themes: a nostalgia for a life not lived, the futility of language (“we can’t bear to put our tears and pain into our letters…. The blank spaces of years” writes Xie), a mourning for lost limbs and one’s truncated youth: “My finest five years went into the input feeder of a machine,” Xie records.

“I watched those five youthful years come out of the machine’s/asshole – each formed into an elliptical plastic toy.”

Just as the industrial revolution in England enforced a whole new concept of time, severing workers from seasonal rhythms, so these poets speak of disrupted menstrual cycles, damaged fertility, the blurring of night and day and the sense of unbelonging, where both countryside and city are rendered uninhabitable (several refer to themselves as “lame ducks”, maimed and unable to complete their journey back home).

The missed youth of their children, left behind with grandparents in country villages while they futilely try to make their way in the city haunts several of the poets. Chen Nianxi splices beautifully the small distances he covers down a mineshaft with the vast expanse his work puts between him and his family:

your dad is tired

each step is only three inches wide

and three inches take a year

son, use your math to calculate

how far your dad can go

At times, there is no greater reminder of solitude than an application form. Without a credible address or residence permit, without qualifications, connections or verifiable recommendations, this blank page is a visual exaggeration of their hopelessness. Alu writes of the feelings hidden behind tyrannical facts:

Ideas: He suddenly thinks of fire. The shadows penetrate his thoughts.

Education: The shadows begin to flee. The stars twinkle.

Place of birth: He shuts the window, hides in a suitcase and sobs.

Language is often, ironically, perceived as an insufficient tool. Of the poets who write about the severing of limbs – seven in total in this collection – all evoke the silent fatalism with which injury is experienced. Pain, both physical and emotional, leaps out from these pages.

Of course, migrant worker writers are not the only ones concerned with the spiritual vacuum of China’s brutish capitalist economy or the devastating destruction of the environment, but what makes their poetry so vital is that they are not writing from a distance, but at the coalface, at the cutting edge of the assembly line.

They work hellish hours without job security, drink water from rivers infused with pollutants, inhale air fouled by poisonous gases. They risk injury from merciless, vampiric machines that consume not only their youth, but their body parts (with numerous incidents of severed fingers). And they find the time outside of the interminable shifts and the space in their crowded dorm rooms to engage, to write about their lives and publish online using a basic cell phone (of the many forums they use, the most established is the Worker’s Poetry Alliance.) The internet has not only helped to raise awareness of what is happening to them, it has galvanized them to take action and make others aware of their adversity. In April 2017, I am Fan Yusu, a memoir published by a female migrant worker in Beijing on the online platform Noonstory.com became an overnight sensation, praised for the ability of its “sincere and simple words” to resonate with ordinary people. Having left her daughters in Hubei to work as a nanny for a rich tycoon’s mistress she wonders how the children of migrant workers can be protected from becoming “screws in the world’s factory” and being “lined up like Terracotta warriors, leading a puppet-like life” (translation from What’s on Weibo). Although the life stories of the rich and famous such as Alibaba magnate Jack Ma still monopolise the nonfiction market, Fan Yusu’s candid account, shared more than 100,000 times within 24 hours of posting before being deleted, could suggest that people’s awareness is also broadening to those on the margins. What’s indisputable is that the confluence of China’s industrialization with easy internet access has created an unprecedented opportunity for the creation and dissemination of working class literature, a literature by and for workers.

“No one, of course, would envy this opportunity. Xu Lizhi’s father, who still mourns his son’s death three years on, has little faith in the ability of poetry to improve the lives of the lower classes – spiritually or economically: “If this [his death] hadn’t happened,” he says tearfully in the documentary, “we wouldn’t” know he wrote poetry. But I don’t think there’s any future in poetry. It can’t compare with science and technology. Poetry was important in dynastic times, when it was part of the civil service exam… you could be an official if you wrote good poetry. But society has changed a lot. It’s not that I don’t support him, but in today’s world if you don’t have money or power it’s really hard.”

As Goodman points out, these poets not only face discrimination as unskilled workers, they are up against “a really deep prejudice that someone who doesn’t have a formal education can’t write poetry. Poetry has always been an essential part of the formal education structure; it was part of the civil service exams. When you talk to people in China there is a sense that someone is cultured or not-cultured – to broader society these workers are “uncultured.”’ Yet some of these worker poets are gaining a wide audience among workers and beyond.

The more “intellectual” writers of the Chinese avant-garde such as Mo Yan, Han Dong, Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Can Xue have turned to a Kafka-esque surrealism or magical realism to broach thorny subjects.

By contrast, in reading Iron Moon, one realizes how intimate and personal these young migrant writers can be, even when their writing is at its most dispassionate and restrained. In “Obituary for a peanut” Xu Lizhi’s presentation of the label on a jar of peanut butter becomes metamorphic in light of its title. For others, the language is wonderfully evocative, whether it’s Alu recalling his childhood (“The quiet nights/ were like a pine cone lying in the grass”) or Chi Moshu’s depiction of perverted circadian rhythms: “The stars are all asleep/and the 24-hour machines are still there/like sleeping babies shaken awake.” Their micro-narratives of mechanization, as self-identified screws, filaments, nails, discarded rocks, atoms of dust, unite as a powerful chorus. For they are, as Xie contends below, writing for themselves and each other:

Let’s have more

poets like Xie Xiangnan

they don’t come from storm clouds above

but from the belly of the earth

from those workers just stopping for the day

carrying shovels and hammers, from that sloppily dressed

group of men.

Their poems offer a deeper and more meaningful connection between the grand narrative of economic prosperity and the unheard stories of the millions who sacrifice their health, youth and sanity for our benefit.

One of the most forgiving and hopeful of the migrant worker poets is Wu Xia, whose disarming benevolence towards beneficiaries of her labor is heartbreaking:

I want to press the straps flat

so they won’t dig into your shoulders when you wear it

and then press up from the waist

a lovely waist

where someone can lay a fine hand

and on the tree-shaded lane

caress a quiet kind of love

last I’ll smooth the dress out

to iron the pleats to equal widths

so you can sit by a lake or on a grassy lawn

and wait for a breeze

like a flower

The very act of writing these poems is a way for those without a voice to counter the detachment they feel from each other, from their work, from the things they make, and to reclaim their own sense of humanity. It is also a communicative act, a cri de coeur, a call for social action. The personal is political: these poems can be read as searing critiques of an alienated epoch in which the state has sold out the rights of working people in return for foreign-investment fueled growth, in which labor and social protections are sacrificed. The poems also provide an opportunity for us not to lazily point fingers at China’s human rights abuses, but to think about our own casual complicity in these workers’ hardship. Their eloquent commitment to poetry and to life provides another way of understanding the cost of sweatshop labor that stretches beyond cold, unfeeling economics.

Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry

Ed.: Qin Xiaoyu, Trans.: Eleanor Goodman White Pine Press, Buffalo New York

Iron Moon documentary (also known as The Verse of Us) dir. Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue

This is an expanded version of an essay that originally appeared on lithub.com

All images in this article are from the author except for the featured image which is from Oberlin College.

The General Election in Britain is over. After less than a year in the job of Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party; with a working majority of 12 in the House of Commons (the first Tory majority secured since 1992) and stratospheric opinion polls recording Conservative leads of between 20-22%, the Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party the Rt. Hon. Mrs. Theresa May MP and her Downing Street/campaign team managed to some how squander one of the biggest leads in modern British opinion polling and go from a working majority in their own right to no majority with a split Parliament and the Labour Party under the remarkable leadership of Jeremy Corbyn resurgent, breathing down their neck. How could this have happened?

This was a General Election the Prime Minister did not need to call. One was not legally scheduled until 2020. Mrs. May repeatedly said over and over again after taking the keys of Downing Street last July that there would be no snap election. That the country – already in a deep mess and badly divided and exposed after the ghastly EU Referendum – needed a period of stability and to get on with delivering the near split decision of the British electorate to cut off their nose in order to spite their face by quitting the European Union.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Source: Wikipedia)

Yet despite her pathetic attempts to compare herself to the true Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, Mrs. May has displayed a tendency to continue to flip-flop, doing U-turn after U-turn and going back repeatedly on her word and on stated positions. She also displayed a remarkable lack of ease with the British people and lack of spine in refusing to take part in debates with her opponent Mr. Corbyn. Mrs. May called this pointless, needless General Election ostensibly because she said she wanted “strong and stable” Government heading into the Brexit negotiations when in reality her party and Government’s position was fine in the House of Commons and no matter what the size a British Government’s majority in the House of Commons is, it is Brussels who hold all the cards in the impending divorce talks.

No, the real reason Mrs. May called this dreadful election was because she and her toxic advisors, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, were punch drunk on here today gone tomorrow opinion polls; power crazed, arrogant and hubristic and decided to put short term party political power grabs ahead of the national and international interest. So strange for a Leader whose mantra was that politics was “not a game” and that she liked nothing more than to just “get on with the job“. Yet, they did not seem to understand the forces they were grappling with and the political law that once you call an election you simply cannot control what happens and the outcome, no matter how much of a control-freak one may be in Downing Street. As the excellent former Director of Communications for Mrs. May, the lovely Katie Perrior, who quit the day she called the election put it:

“I have written before about a whiff of arrogance emanating from No 10. It turns out the public couldn’t just detect a whiff, the place bloody well stank”.

So have other like minded people such as myself who been writing exactly the same thing for months now.

It has backfired on Mrs. May, her party and her advisors in spectacular fashion and has not only damaged Mrs. May’s credibility and that of her clique of immature, conflict driven apparatchik advisors, but it has once again as with the monstrous EU Referendum, damaged the country, badly divided it and left it in a mess just as it is embarking a year on after the ridiculous EU Referendum with the biggest constitutional, economic, political enterprise since Britain went into what was then called the EEC or perhaps even since the onset of World War II. Mrs. May and her advisors managed to do something quite astonishing in modern British politics: turn a Commons majority secured less than two years ago in their own right into no majority. They managed to destroy a massive lead in the opinion polls to the point were in terms of the national share of the vote the Labour Party are only 2% behind and have improved massively their share of the vote under Jeremy Corbyn at 40% unlike the 35% under Tony Blair in 2005, 29% under Gordon Brown and 35% under Ed Miliband.

The whole message, theme and overarching rationale of the May/Timothy/Hill 2017 General Election was to deliver “strong and stable” Government. Yet they have in fact delivered the opposite. Now the Conservatives are a minority Government – the largest single party – but with no working majority of their own and reliant on the truly nightmarish, ghastly, sinister crackpots of the fascist, antediluvian, stone age DUP who are some of the most uneducated, un-intellectual, crude, primitive, provincial bigots in the UK if not Europe. The DUP are well and truly modern day peasants and it is they that the British Conservative Government of Theresa May and her Tory Party will now be reliant on.

Former Chancellor George Osborne (Source: International Business Times)

As the brilliant former Chancellor George Osborne put it Mrs. May is a: “dead woman walking“. It is now only a question of not if but when her party chuck her out. What a laughing stock she is and what a laughing stock she has made the UK in the eyes of the EU and the World, which it had already become after the horrendous EU Referendum and its pathetic result. So much for strong and stable leadership. So much for that massive 100-seat majority she thought she was going to grab. A split Parliament with no one party in over all control during what was already a shambles of self-induced Brexit madness! What a mess. What chaos. Brexit Britain in further chaos. Theresa May will be gone by the autumn. The Tory Party are the most ruthless political party in Britain if not Europe. They will now turn in on themselves and once the Summer Parliamentary Recess kicks in the anti-May rebels will move against her.

You see the problem is the issue of loyalty and how you treat people. Loyalty is a two way street. From the moment she entered Downing Street Theresa May started wielding an axe and treating people with such contempt and such nastiness. This is why none of her Ministers or Backbenchers will show any loyalty to her and she will not be able to count on her Cabinet colleagues. Because she showed no loyalty to them and treated them so poorly. Very English. Yet when you treat people so badly, sooner or later, they will turn on you and administer a dose of the same medicine which had been administered to them. As Nick Clegg put it:

“When you live by the sword, you die by the sword”.

So where Britain now for? A split Parliament with a strengthened Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party which picked up seats for the very first time in rock solid, true blue places like Canterbury and Kensington and a badly weakened and diminished Tory Party in office but not in power beholden to the wack jobs of the DUP. It has been nearly a year since the result of the EU Referendum and yet the British Government is no further on in sorting out its negotiating position. A soft Brexit? A Nick Timothy Hard Brexit? To stay in the Single Market or not to stay? What on earth is it to be? How ironic for all the anti-European, anti-Brussels propaganda of the Leavers that the EU is so slow, inefficient and incoherent it is now the Brits who are rightly seen as the inefficient, confused and incoherent.

The clock is ticking thanks to Mrs. May and her advisors. She has triggered Article 50 and there is no going back. We all know thanks to the EU when the negotiations will end. Yet no one because of the procrastinate, arrogance and obfuscation of the British Government know when the talks will start. They where due to start on June 19th but we shall see. A lot of us in Britain have been extremely angry and concerned at the direction the country has been headed in. Hopefully this election result will put paid to any notions of a Hard Brexit and any “cheap talk” of “no deal is better than a bad deal“. Perhaps thanks to some of us, this whole Brexit madness may even be stopped firmly in its tracks. Or not.

What is clear is that the Conservative Party and the British Government need a new leader. Someone with real life experience outside of the Westminster village who have their finger on the national pulse and is intellectually and politically confident enough to think on their feet and does not need to completely rely on two dead weight toxic know nothings such as Timothy and Hill. A Leader who understands foreign policy and international relations and is not in the pocket of MI5. As Phillip Stevens writing in the Financial Times put it recently: “In Whitehall code Mrs. May is more 5 than 6“. This means she is guided by, if not controlled, by people who know little about and do not understand the world and life beyond Britain or even the Home Counties and are not the most highly educated and cosmopolitan of individuals.

We must have a British Prime Minister who is more MI6/Foreign Office and is advised by MI6/Foreign Office. A Prime Minister who will smooth relations with the European Union and negotiate the best possible deal in good faith and amicably with Britain’s European friends and partners, her brothers and sisters . A Prime Minister who will reinvigorate the “Golden Age” in relations between the UK and the amazing China, the second largest economy in the world, a fabulous country who are so keen to partner with Britain and work closely with Britain based on mutual respect, mutual trust and mutual cooperation. George Osborne understood this with his strategically brilliant geopolitical policy of becoming China’s “best friend in the West” and moving closer to China which would lead to greater inward investment into Britain at a time the UK so desperately needs critical foreign investment and enhanced trading relationships.

If Britain is to leave the EU Single Market and Customs Union then a new geo-strategic economic framework could be the full participation and engagement with the wonderful President Xi Jinping‘s visionary project of the New Silk Road: the Belt and Road Forum. This is a fantastic project and Britain could reap great benefits from it. And the Chinese really want Britain to be a strong and full partner on this project. As the splendid Chinese Ambassador to London recently wrote in the Telegraph:

“for more than 2,000 years, the Silk Road has borne witness to exchange and friendship between the East and West. With its tales of trade and travel down the ages, the route has traditions that have become a source of inspiration for those who seek new opportunities for common development. Now, China is looking to work with Britain in a new partnership, on a new Silk Road for today: the Belt and Road Initiative”.

This project of President Xi Jingping (one of the greatest leaders on the planet today) aims to harness the potential of countries on the old Silk route – countries in Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe – to develop economic and trading partnerships through greater infrastructure and cultural links. Some of the fruits of this approach can already be seen with the first freight train from China’s eastern town of Yiwu arriving in London in January, extending the Belt and Road (B&R) to the far western end of Europe. This was something Mrs. May heavily influenced by her xenophobic, Sinophobic toxic advisor Nick Timothy simply did not understand or was too MI5 prejudiced to see the bigger global strategic picture and the enormous benefits it could bring to Britain. The toxic Timothy went out of his way with some help from his friends in the Home Office/MI5 to do everything possible to undermine, if not destroy, George Osborne’s excellent work on strengthening UK-China relations and taking them to a new level in the “Golden Age”.

After writing the most ridiculous and appalling Manifesto for the Conservatives 2017 General Election which helped ruin their chances it should be remembered that it was Nick Timothy, a Home Affairs advisor, who wrote the biggest load of rubbish I have ever read regarding China and the Golden Age in relations between the UK and the PRC. It was also Nick Timothy who nearly scuppered the Hinkley Point C deal. Well, at least now he is gone. But it remains to be seen if a new Conservative leader and Prime Minister will pick up where George Osborne left off regarding the critically important strategic relationship for Britain with the Chinese. Perhaps Mr. Osborne should reconsider his departure from front line politics and return in a by-election? I’m sure that could be arranged.

Matthew Jamison is a Senior Parliamentary Researcher at the House of Commons. He holds two degrees from Cambridge University.

Featured image: Strategic Culture Foundation

Justin Trudeau certainly did not run on a military-strength platform. Nowhere on the campaign trail did Liberals talk about increasing military spending or using “hard power” abroad. The recent speech by Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, alongside the announced 70% increase in military spending should ring alarm bells. Stephen Harper wouldn’t have dared such an announcement. Canadians wouldn’t have accepted it. Not with our hospitals, schools and infrastructure in such sorry shape. Not with indigenous communities left abandoned by our entire economic system. Not without real action on climate change. Harper couldn’t have gotten away with shovelling an extra $14-billion a year into military spending. Why should we let Trudeau?

The recent revelation that the Liberals planned their “international pivot” before they even took office serves as a stark example of what this government represents. They knew they would make this turn, but kept it secret from the public. The reason for this is obvious. Nobody would have believed the Liberal “sunny ways” if they knew the truth: that the Liberals planned to massively increase military spending and project military power around the globe. How can anyone that believes in democracy justify keeping such a major shift in policy secret? The Liberals should not be trusted.

Iron Fist of the Ruling Class

A government that prioritizes military spending is a government that intends to use it. Nobody elected Liberals to run military adventures. But the writing is on the wall. It is a matter of time before the Liberal government begins sending Canadian troops abroad to fight in wars that have nothing to do with defending this country from invasion. Freeland admitted as much in her speech.

Beneath the velvet glove of the Liberal government lies the iron fist of the Canadian ruling class… the same people that Harper worked for, the same interests that try to push down wages and working conditions, the same corporate elite that destroys our environment, violates treaties with indigenous nations and ruthlessly exploits working people around the globe. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The proposed $14-billion a year increase in military spending is money directly taken from urgently needed social spending. This money could provide free university education to every student. This money could provide clean drinking water to every reserve. This money could take every homeless person off the street. But the priorities of the government are clear.

Those who stand for peace and justice must seriously think of revitalizing the anti-war movement. It is clear that it will be needed.

Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) is a public sector trade union representing postal workers employed at Canada Post as well as private sector workers outside Canada Post. This article was first published on their website.

Featured image: Socialist Project

No country on earth is more devastated by US imperial viciousness – complicit with Saudi Arabia doing its dirty work.

Yemenis are threatened by endless war, famine, cholera, and other horrendous issues, the lives of millions endangered.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), famine conditions approach “biblical proportions.”

After visiting Sana’a, Aden and Amran, NRC’s Secretary General Jan Egeland expressed

“shock to my bones by what I have seen and heard here…”

“The world is letting some 7 million men, women and children slowly but surely, be engulfed by unprecedented famine” – a “man-made” preventable catastrophe, adding:

“This is a gigantic failure of international diplomacy. Men with guns and power inside Yemen as well as in regional and international capitals are undermining every effort to avert an entirely preventable famine, as well as the collapse of health and education services for millions of children.”

“Nowhere on earth are as many lives at risk.”

Land, sea and air blockade caused economic collapse and catastrophic conditions “in a country of 27 million people.”

The world community failed to intervene responsibly to stop what’s going on and deliver enough crucial to survival humanitarian aid to its long-suffering people.

Yemen is the “largest food security crisis in the world…An entire civilian population” is being “strang(led),” Egeland stressed.

Boys eat at a rubbish dump outside Yemen’s Red Sea port city of Houdieda © Abduljabbar via RT

Cholera continues raging out of control. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 140,000 cases were identified from April 27 through June 14, numbers rising exponentially.

The agency said suspected cases reached 151,000. The outbreak affected 20 of Yemen’s 22 governorates in seven weeks.

Over 1,000 deaths are known, likely many more not reported. Lack of access for millions to clean, safe water and proper sanitation are responsible for the massive outbreak – sure to grow and cause many more deaths.

“Countries facing complex emergencies and particularly vulnerable to cholera outbreaks,” the WHO explained – none more disastrous than conditions in Yemen.

Using money from its emergency fund, UNICEF is paying Yemeni doctors, nurses and other health workers salaries they haven’t received for months to help combat cholera.

Its regional director Geert Cappalaere called the outbreak “massive” in a country never before experiencing something this severe.

Cappelaere and others predict the disease could affect 300,000 or more Yemenis in the coming weeks.

UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Jamie McGoldrick called what’s happening “heartbreaking…Humanity is losing out to politics,” he explained.

Conditions are devastating for millions in a nation on the verge of collapse.

Less than half of its hospitals are operating. They face shortages of everything, unavailability of much of what’s needed to treat illnesses, diseases and injuries.

America’s war on Yemen, complicit with Riyadh, bears full responsibility – Trump escalating what Obama began.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: Alwaght

Nel 1917, contro la volontà della schiacciante maggioranza della popolazione americana, gli Stati Uniti fanno il loro ingresso nella guerra a fianco dell’Intesa e contro la Germania. Non lo fanno per gli attacchi dei sottomarini tedeschi contro le navi come il «Lusitania» e ancor meno per difendere la causa della democrazia contro la dittatura e l’ingiustizia. Lo fanno perchè l’élite americana – al pari delle élite europee nel 1914 – si aspettava da questa guerra ogni sorta di vantaggi, ad esempio, enormi profitti aggiuntivi e maggiore docilità da parte dei lavoratori …

Il 1917 non fu un anno buono per nessuno dei paesi belligeranti ma, per i membri dell’Intesa fu il più catastrofico di tutti. Le ragioni principali furono gli ammutinamenti nell’esercito francese, che accrebbero particolarmente la precarietà della situazione militare sul fronte occidentale, oltre alla doppia rivoluzione in Russia che minacciava di mettere fuori gioco questo paese in quanto alleato. Aggiungete il fatto che molti soldati e civili sia in Francia che in Gran Bretagna ne avevano abbastanza di questo conflitto e che volevano la pace a qualsiasi prezzo e si capirà che le autorità politiche e militari di Londra e Parigi non facevano male a preoccuparsi. Queste avevano voluto questa guerra e ne avevano sperato molto, volevano vincerla assolutamente per questo avevano bisogno del sostegno della popolazione e certamente anche dei loro alleati. Nel 1917,tuttavia, la vittoria non era ancora in nessun modo in vista. La sensazione era di essere ancor lontani da una conclusione. Cosa sarebbe successo se non si fosse vinta la guerra? Una risposta stava arrivando dagli avvenimenti in Russia e sotto forma di un macabro auspicio: la rivoluzione! La sola buona nuova, nel 1917, almeno dal punto di vista dell’Entente, fu che in aprile di quell’anno, gli Stati Uniti avevano dichiarato guerra alla Germania, cosa che si sperava da molto tempo sia a Parigi che a Londra. Si doveva, comunque, aspettare dell’altro tempo ancora prima che le truppe americane potessero sbarcare in Europa di modo che la marea si potesse invertire a favore dell’Intesa, ma almeno la speranza di una vittoria finale poteva riaccendersi. Per la schiacciante maggioranza della popolazione degli Stati Uniti, l’entrata in guerra del loro  paese non presentava la benchè minima speranza di cose buone. La gente era perfettamente al corrente di come il conflitto in Europa fosse una catastrofe e che i civili e i soldati dei paesi belligeranti non desideravano altro che il ritorno della pace. Se gli europei volevano uscire da questa guerra il più rapidamente possibile, allora perchè gli americani volevano entrarci? Il fatto che molti americani si ponessero questa domanda era dovuto ai seguenti fattori. Da molto tempo, gli Stati Uniti intrattenevano relazioni molto buone con i tedeschi. Non era la Germania, ma la Gran Bretagna il nemico tradizionale e il grande rivale dell’Uncle Sam (Zio Sam). I britannici erano i vecchi padroni coloniali contro i quali, nel decennio 1770, si era condotta una guerra d’indipendenza e con cui, più tardi, dal 1812 al 1815, si era stati ancora impegnati in un conflitto. (Questa guerra del 1812 era finita con un trattato di pace concluso a Gand.) Ancora successivamente nel XIX secolo, era sorte tra americani e britannici delle tensioni sia a proposito delle frontiere con l’America del Nord britannica, chiamata Canada a partire dal 1867, che sull’influenza e sul commercio nell’Oceano Pacifico, in America del Sud e nei Caraibi ed anche per le simpatie britanniche verso gli Stati confederati durante la guerra di Seccessione. Fino alla vigilia della Seconda Guerra mondiale, a Washington ci furono sempre dei piani pronti per una eventuale guerra contro la Gran Bretagna. Gli americani non vedevano affatto nei britannici dei simpatici fratelli gemelli «anglo-sassoni», come talvolta ci si vorrebbe far credere. La maggioranza degli americani – contrariamente all’élite del nord-est del paese, costituita in gran parte da WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant, bianchi anglo-sassoni protestanti ) – non era assolutamente «anglo-sassone», ma originaria di ogni paese europeo e soprattutto dell’Irlanda e della Germania. Nel 1914, quando scoppiò la guerra in Europa, questi americani di origini irlandesi o tedesche avevano buone ragioni di incrociare le dita per la Germania e di desiderare una sconfitta britannica. Altri americani, tuttavia, erano di ascendenza inglese e di conseguenza simpatizzavano per gli alleati. Per quanto riguarda la Francia, dopo la loro dichiarazione di guerra, i soldati d’oltre Atlantico sarebbero sbarcati sventolando la bandiera al motto di «Lafayette, eccoci!». Con questo si voleva alludere all’aiuto francese agli americani all’epoca della loro guerra d’indipendenza contro la Gran Bretagna, aiuto impersonificato dal marchese di Lafayette. Quello slogan voleva far comprendere che gli Stati Uniti erano venuti a restituire ai francesi il servizio che dovevano loro. Perchè, tuttavia, non si erano affrettati a venire in aiuto dei loro cari amici francesi già nel 1914? In realtà, la riconoscenza vera o presunta nei confronti dei francesi non aveva nulla a che fare con l’entrata in guerra degli americani, tanto più che molti di loro erano molto religiosi e provavano poca o nessuna simpatia per quella repubblica gallica atea o perlomeno anticlericale. I protestanti americani propendevano per la Germania, diretta dagli Hohenzollern, dei luterani, mentre i cattolici avevano un debole per l’Austria-Ungheria, la cui dinastia regnante, gli Asburgo, era passata fin dall’epoca della Riforma (e dell’imperatore Carlo V) ad essere il grande campione del cattolicesimo. L’impero russo, d’altronde, era considerato da molti americani come un bastione delle monarchie autocratiche fuori moda e quindi il contrario della repubblica democratica che, almeno in teoria, erano gli Stati Uniti. Numerosi americani erano peraltro dei rifugiati provenienti dall’impero degli zar, ad esempio ebrei e ucraini che, nei confronti dei russi in generale e dello zar e del suo regime in particolare, provavano pressochè gli stessi sentimenti di avversione degli irlandesi verso i britannici. Negli Stati Uniti, non si dimostrava nei confronti della Germania la medesima ostilità e neppure rivalità o avversione e numerosi americani, come Theodore Roosevelt, che ritenevano di far parte della «razza nordica», si sentivano vicini e amici di questi tedeschi «ariani» presunti superiori. Il fatto che la Germania non fosse una democrazia non costituiva un problema per personalità che apprezzavano e sentivano di far parte delle classi «superiori» come Roosevelt che, quanto alle masse popolari, non provava sentimenti particolarmente caritatevoli. Gli americani meno elitisti o quanto meno più favorevoli alla democrazia, anch’essi, su questo piano non si formalizzavano sulle condizioni esistenti in Germania. Con la sua legislazione sociale e il suffragio universale, il Reich era sotto numerosi aspetti più democratico della Gran Bretagna, ad esempio, ed anche degli Stati Uniti. La democrazia americana era, in effetti, una sorta di «democrazia dei signori» da cui erano risolutamente esclusi gli indiani e i neri che, insieme, costituivano una percentuale considerevole della popolazione. In questa «democrazia per pochi» (democracy for the few), come l’ha definita il politologo e storico Michael Parenti, regnava una sorta di apartheid anticipato, dove i neri venivano sottoposti a linciaggio e gli indiani erano tenuti a distanza in miserabili riserve. In confronto, la Germania di Guglielmo II era un paradiso sulla terra. Non solo l’affermazione del presidente Woodrow Wilson secondo cui gli Stati Uniti erano andati a combattere per la democrazia, una affermazione alla quale si é sempre accordato troppo credito – anche attualmente – era completamente falsa, ma anche ridicola. Se Wilson avesse veramente voluto promuovere la democrazia, avrebbe potuto iniziare dal proprio paese dove, su questo piano, c’era ancora molto da fare. Si può dire che all’inizio del 1917, la popolazione americana era divisa riguardo alla guerra. Alcuni americani – e soprattutto i già citati WASP e altri americani di origine inglese – incrociavano le dita per l’Entente, altri simpatizzavano per le potenze centrali. Molti, invece, non avevano probabilmente alcuna opinione su quello che succedeva nella lontana Europa. La simpatia, comunque, è una cosa, partire per combattere un’altra. La schiacciante maggioranza degli Yankees erano senza dubbio contrari all’entrata in guerra del loro paese ed era di tendenza pacifista e «isolazionista» e non voleva avere nulla a che fare con la guerra in Europa. Fu in questo contesto che già nel 1915 era nata una canzone che ebbe grande successo anche in Gran Bretagna, ma che, negli Stati Uniti, divenne il simbolo musicale del pacifismo e dell’isolazionismo, ossia I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier, già menzionata. La canzone fece arrabbiare in particolare gli americani che erano ferventi partigiani di un intervento in guerra, quel genere di americani di cui «Teddy» Roosevelt era la figura di punta. Le elezioni presidenziali del 1916 furono vinte da Wilson, il presidente già in carica, che era considerato un partigiano della pace, contrario all’entrata in guerra. Come avviene abbastanza spesso per numerosi presidenti americani, Wilson fece esattamente il contrario di quello che ci si aspettava da lui: il 2 aprile 1917, convinse il Congresso a dichiarare guerra alla Germania. Le ragioni avanzate dal presidente furono che la guerra avrebbe potuto significare la fine della civiltà «occidentale» e minacciare persino la sopravvivenza dell’umanità se gli Stati Uniti non fossero intervenuti per rimettere le cose a posto. Una volta che gli Stati Uniti vi fossero coinvolti, fece sapere, la guerra diventava una «guerra per la democrazia», una «guerra che avrebbe messo fine alle guerre». È a giusto titolo che gli storici non prendono molto sul serio queste dichiarazioni di Wilson e cercano altrove le ragioni che l’hanno spinto a coinvolgere gli americani a malincuore nella guerra. Abitualmente, si getta la colpa sulla Germania perchè, a partire dal 1917, il Reich reagì al blocco navale britannico – e al fiasco della battaglia dello Jutland nel 1916 – con una intensificazione nella guerra sui mari mediante l’uso dei sottomarini. Con questo nuovo genere di guerra Berlino sperava di poter fare capitolare i britannici in sei mesi. Tra il gennaio e l’aprile del 1917, i tedeschi affondarono un importante tonnellaggio di naviglio britannico ma, dopo che in maggio Londra introdusse il sistema dei convogli, le perdite diminuirono nettamente. La guerra dei sottomarini, tuttavia, danneggiava anche le potenze marittime neutrali, compresi gli Stati Uniti e inasprì le relazioni tra Washington e Berlino. È in questo modo che numerosi storici tentano di spiegare l’entrata in guerra degli Stati Uniti. In questo contesto, di solito si fa il nome del Lusitania. Questo grande piroscafo britannico, partito da New York per Liverpool, era stato fatto colare a picco dai tedeschi e questo dramma aveva provocato vittime americane. Negli Stati Uniti, questo fatto aveva fortemente riattizzato i sentimenti anti-tedeschi. L’attacco portava acqua al mulino degli «interventisti», i partigiani dell’entrata in guerra, e avrebbe così inesorabilmente condotto a una dichiarazione di guerra americana alla Germania. Il problema con questo scenario è che il Lusitania era stato affondato il 7 maggio 1915, cioè pressochè due anni prima che Washington dissotterrasse l’ascia di guerra. E, tra le 1198 vittime, c’erano non più di 128 americani. Il resto erano britannici e canadesi. Inoltre, il Lusitania trasportava munizioni e materiale bellico, cosa che, secondo i criteri giuridici del diritto internazionale dell’epoca, autorizzava i tedeschi ad affondarlo. Il consolato tedesco di New York aveva d’altronde avvertito i potenziali passeggeri che questo evento avrebbe potuto accadere. Infine, è molto verosimile che le autorità britanniche, tra cui Churchill, avessero intenzionalmente fatto caricare la nave con delle munizioni nella speranza che, per questa ragione, i tedeschi l’affondassero e ciò provocasse l’entrata in guerra degli americani. Si comprende come, in circostanze tanto dubbie, il governo americano non si sia lasciato tentare da una dichiarazione di guerra alla Germania. All’inizio del 1917, l’atteggiamento statunitense verso la Germania si inasprì, naturalmente, per l’intensificazione da parte di Berlino della guerra sottomarina, ma non è quantomeno per questa ragione che Wilson fece la sua dichiarazione di guerra in aprile. Non era il popolo americano, ma piuttosto l’élite degli Stati Unti, di cui Wilson era un rappresentante tipico, che voleva la guerra, e più precisamente una guerra contro la Germania. La ragione stava nel fatto che, nel 1917, anche questa élite, al pari di quelle europee nel 1914, pensava di potersi aspettare vantaggi considerevoli da una guerra contro la Germania e credeva allo stesso tempo di poter scongiurare in questo modo anche un grande problema che la minacciava. In primo luogo, gli Stati Uniti, esattamente come Gran Bretagna, Francia, Russia e Germania, erano una grande potenza imperialista. Con una piccola differenza, ma non senza importanza, che consisteva nell’aver sviluppato una nuova strategia imperiale: il neocolonialismo. Con questa nuova modalità la potenza imperialista tenta di acquisire materie prime, mercati di sbocco, mano d’opera a buon mercato, non attraverso un controllo coloniale diretto, ma mediante una penetrazione indiretta, innanzitutto economica, di questi paesi, che veniva fatta andare di pari passo con una sorta di influenza egemonica che richiedeva la collaborazione delle élite locali. Agli Stati Uniti, in questo modo, non servivano più le colonie e i protettorati che le potenze europee continuavano ad utilizzare. La Grande Guerra si riassunse in un conflitto tra grandi potenze imperialiste. Era chiaro che quelle che ne fossero uscite vittoriose sarebbero state anche, inevitabilmente, le vincitrici sul piano degli interessi imperialisti. Era anche evidente che, esattamente come in una lotteria, chi non giocava non avrebbe potuto vincere. È molto probabile che, nel momento della sua dichiarazione di guerra alla Germania, il governo statunitense si sia posto sul piano della dichiarazione fatta poco prima, ossia il 12 gennaio 1917, dal primo ministro francese, Aristide Briand, dopo averla accuratamente meditata e averne tratto le conclusioni. Facendo chiaramente allusione agli Stati Uniti, Briand aveva fatto sapere che «sarebbe stato auspicabile, nella futura conferenza di pace, escludere le potenze che non avevano partecipato alla guerra». Si prospettava, di contro, che molto avrebbe avuto da guadagnare chi avesse partecipato a quella conferenza. I vasti possedimenti dei perdenti sarebbero stati divisi come il mantello di Cristo, ad esempio, i possedimenti «immobiliari» tedeschi in Africa e soprattutto le ricche regioni petrolifere dell’Impero ottomano. Era in gioco anche l’influenza sulla Cina. Tutti gli attori imperialisti avevano messo gli occhi su questo paese gigantesco, ma enormemente debole ed erano interessati ad essere presenti nel momento in cui ci sarebbero state concessioni da ricevere, diritti di sfruttamento minerario, permessi di posa di linee ferroviarie e, comunque, possibilità di penetrazione economica nei modi più vari. Su questo piano, il Giappone aveva già scoperto le sue carte facendo man bassa delle concessioni tedesche in Cina. Il paese del Sol levante aveva già cominciato a delinearsi come un piccolo rivale, che si pretendeva fosse di razza inferiore, ma che comunque si dimostrava aggressivo e pericoloso per gli interessi degli Stati Uniti nell’Estremo Oriente. Grazie alla loro recente guerra contro la Spagna, questi ultimi erano riusciti a mettere piede in quella parte del mondo con una sorta di tutela sulle Filippine che avevano «liberato». Se gli Stati Uniti fossero rimasti fuori dal conflitto e non fossero, quindi, stati presenti alla distribuzione dei premi in Cina, il pericolo sarebbe stato che il Giappone, attraverso una versione asiatica della dottrina dell’americano Monroe, potesse monopolizzare la Cina sul piano economico e che di conseguenza gli uomini d’affari americani non vi avessero trovato la «porta aperta» che fortemente desideravano. A questo proposito, su Wikipedia si può leggere: Se gli alleati avessero vinto la guerra senza l’aiuto americano, il pericolo sarebbe stato che questi si sarebbero spartiti il mondo tra loro senza prendere in considerazione gli interessi commerciali dell’America. Con la sua dichiarazione di guerra alla Germania nell’aprile del 1917, Wilson eliminava esattamente questo pericolo. Successivamente, durante gli anni trenta, una commissione d’inchiesta del Congresso americano sarebbe giunta alla stessa conclusione, ossia che la dichiarazione di guerra di Wilson alla Germania fu motivata dal desiderio di essere presente quando fosse giunto il momento «della spartizione dei possedimenti imperiali». (Gli Stati Uniti entrarono in guerra non esclusivamente, ma di sicuro certamente, e probabilmente soprattutto, al fine di poter trarre vantaggio, dopo la guerra, della spartizione del bottino tra le potenze imperialiste. Rimanere neutrali, non voleva dire solo non poter approfittare della vittoria, ma comportava anche il rischio di diventare vittima dell’appetito imperialista dei vincitori. Il 9 marzo 1916, il Portogallo decise di entrare in guerra a fianco dell’Intesa al fine di evitare che i suoi possessi coloniali diventassero preda delle potenze vincitrici. I portoghesi avevano soprattutto paura dei britannici, che in effetti avevano questa intenzione e cercavano, di conseguenza, di mantenere il Portogallo fuori dal conflitto. La partecipazione alla guerra, cui la gran parte della popolazione era assolutamente contraria, costerà al Portogallo 8.000 morti, 13.000 feriti e 12.000 prigionieri di guerra, ma non portò al paese alcun beneficio. Gli altri paesi, dunque, dovevano ben riflettere sui vantaggi e gli svantaggi della neutralità. L’Olanda poteva attendersi, come gli Usa, che l’abbandono della neutralità portasse dei vantaggi. D’altronde, come per il Portogallo, il suo governo poteva temere che mantenerla potesse essere dannoso per il paese. Schierandosi a fianco della Germania, i Paesi Bassi potevano forse guadagnare le Fiandre, idea che veniva incoraggiata da Berlino attraverso la sua ambivalente «politica fiamminga» (Flamenpolitik) nel Belgio occupato. Per contro, restare neutrali avrebbe potuto significare che, dopo la guerra, si sarebbe stati costretti dai vincitori a cedere delle colonie o una parte del proprio territorio. Durante la guerra e nel corso della Conferenza di pace di Parigi alcuni politici belgi proposero in effetti – anche se invano –l’annessione della Fiandra zelandese e del Limburgo olandese.) Una seconda ragione spiega perchè l’élite americana che, vale sottolinearlo, era costituita pressochè esclusivamente di grandi industriali e banchieri del nord-est del paese, voleva la guerra. Negli anni precedenti il 1914, gli Stati Uniti erano stati colpiti da una pesante recessione economica. La guerra scoppiata in Europa, tuttavia, aveva fatto arrivare ordini per materiali di ogni tipo e a causa di questa crescita della domanda, la produzione e i profitti erano cresciuti parecchio. Tra il 1914 e il 1917, la produzione industriale aumentò del 32 per cento e provocò una crescita del PIL di almeno il 20 per cento mentre le esportazioni americane verso i paesi belligeranti salivano vertiginosamente. Si esportavano, naturalmente anche dei prodotti agricoli, ma erano soprattutto gli industriali americani – per farla breve, i capitalisti – a guadagnare fortune in questa guerra che stava sconvolgendo l’Europa e che pareva voler durare indefinitamente. Cos’è che poteva andare bene per loro in questa guerra dove, ogni giorno, 6.000 uomini in media perdevano la vita e innumerevoli altri restavano mutilati? I profitti, che erano diventati faraonici. Per illustrarlo, si possono indicare il guadagno (in dollari) realizzati da molte grandi imprese americane all’inizio e alla fine della Grande Guerra:

Già fin dall’inizio della guerra, nel 1914, si era visto che, a causa del blocco navale britannico, erano meno gli affari che si realizzavano con l‘Austria-Ungheria mentre, al contrario, le cifre dei contratti che si stipulavano con i paesi dell’Intesa, e soprattutto con la Gran Bretagna, stavano segnando dei continui record. Tra il 1914 e il 1916, le esportazioni americane verso la Gran Bretagna e la Francia passarono da circa 800 milioni di dollari a 3 miliardi, mentre il volume di quelle verso la Germania e l’Austria-Ungheria precipitavano a un magro milione o due di dollari. L’embargo imposto dai britannici in pratica impediva di continuare a sviluppare affari con le potenze centrali, anche se lo si sarebbe fatto di buon grado. Alla fine, cosa importava, da questo punto di vista, che il cliente fosse un vecchio amico o un nemico, un paese democratico o autocratico, un parente «anglo-sassone» o meno? C’era, comunque, anche un piccolo inconveniente. Si facevano affari con i britannici e, in misura minore, con i francesi, ma una grande parte di questi acquisti venivano pagati con dei crediti concessi agli europei da banche americane. Nel 1917, gli istituti di credito Usa avevano già accordato crediti per un totale di 2,3 miliardi di dollari. I prestiti alla sola Francia sarebbe aumentati in modo spettacolare nel corso della guerra, dai 0,05 miliardi di franchi francesi nel 1914, ai 1,9 nel 1915, 1,6 nel 1916, 7,5 nel 1917, 5,3 nel 1918 e 9,2 nel 1919. Cruciale in questo contesto fu il ruolo della J. P. Morgan & Co., banca che veniva indicata anche con il nome di House of Morgan (Casa Morgan). Con filiali a Londra e a Parigi, questa società di Wall Street occupava una posizione ideale per finanziare gli affari transatlantici e, già nel 1915, Morgan venne designato come agente unico per l’acquisto a nome della Gran Bretagna di prodotti come munizioni, derrate alimentari, ecc. negli Stati Uniti. (Inoltre, i britannici compravano negli Stati Uniti anche per conto dei loro alleati, soprattutto francesi e russi.) In questo modo, sorse negli Stati Uniti una specie di «circolo di amici» di Morgan, costituito da imprese come DuPont e Remington, che tramite Morgan si accapparravano molti contratti e guadagnavano delle fortune. Morgan si metteva in tasca il 2 per cento di commissione su tutti gli acquisti. (Dato che nel 1917, il totale di questi acquisti raggiunse i 20 miliardi di dollari, è facile calcolare quanto guadagnò Morgan.) Fu, d’altronde, in questo modo che gli Stati Uniti diventarono sempre più forti sul piano finanziario, anche più della Gran Bretagna, e che Wall Street di New York avrebbe sostituto la City di Londra come capitale finanziaria del mondo mentre il dollaro avrebbe detronizzato la sterlina britannica. Per Wall Street, la guerra poteva ancora durare a lungo ma, ai suoi occhi, diventava sempre più importante che l’Intesa vincesse la guerra. Detto diversamente, «gli interessi economici schieravano chiaramente gli Stati Uniti nel campo alleato». Si può anche dire che gli accordi finanziari citati in precedenza equivalevano ad una violazione di fatto della legislazione americana sulla neutralità, come avevano sottolineato certi politici pacifisti americani e come avrebbe riconosciuto la Commissione Nye (Nye Committee) del Congresso negli anni trenta. È in ogni caso comprensibile che la Germania, visto come andavano le cose, dimostrasse una crescente ostilità nei confronti degli Stati Uniti. Morgan non se n’era mai impensierito ma, a Wall Street, già nel 1916, ci si era iniziati a preoccupare per il volume sempre crescente dei debiti britannici. All’inizio del 1917, la situazione appariva veramente inquietante. Con la rivoluzione in Russia era venuto alla luce lo spettro di un ritiro dei russi dalla guerra, probabilmente seguito da una vittoria tedesca. In questo caso, la Gran Bretagna non avrebbe verosimilmente potuto rimborsare i suoi debiti, cosa che, per Morgan, avrebbe significato una catastrofe finanziaria. Divenne, pertanto, sempre più chiaro che solo un’entrata in guerra degli Stati Uniti a fianco dei britannici avrebbe potuto scongiurare una tale catastrofe. Nel marzo del 1917, l’ambasciatore degli Stati Uniti a Londra, avvertì Wilson che «la crisi imminente» costituiva una grande minaccia per Morgan e che «una dichiarazione di guerra alla Germania era probabilmente l’unico modo per preservare l’eccellente situazione commerciale e di prevenire il panico». Morgan e la sua potente cerchia di amici, naturalmente, cominciarono anch’essi ad esercitare pressioni nella stessa direzione. Qualche settimana più tardi, ad inizio aprile del 1917, gli Stati Uniti dichiararono guerra alla Germania e , così, lo scopo della potente lobby di Wall Street era raggiunto. «Il denaro parla» (Money talks), dicono gli americani: nel 1917, fu questo che effettivamente fece e il presidente Wilson l’ascoltò. I critici radicali di Wilson erano già convinti all’epoca che «la vera ragione per cui gli Stati Uniti erano entrati in guerra per aiutare gli alleati a vincere, era quella di assicurare che i massicci crediti di guerra americani a Gran Bretagna e Francia sarebbero stati rimborsati». Con questa decisione, ha scritto Niall Ferguson, Wilson salvò non solo la Gran Bretagna e l’Intesa in generale, ma anche e soprattutto Casa Morgan. Il fatto che i sottomarini tedeschi infrangessero le regole della neutralità servì semplicemente da paravento per nascondere l’immoralità della verità. D’ora in avanti, Morgan avrebbe potuto guadagnare ancora attraverso la vendita delle obbligazioni di guerra (war bonds, chiamate con un eufemismo liberty bonds) il cui volume, nel giugno del 1919, si sarebbe attestato a 21 miliardi di dollari. Al contrario dell’élite industriale e finanziaria del paese, il popolo americano non dimostrò il minimo entusiasmo per la guerra. Soprattutto i neri americani «esitavano a dare il loro appoggio ad un progetto che consideravano ipocrita». Uno di loro, un residente del quartiere newyorkese di Harlem, dichiarò sarcasticamente che «i tedeschi non mi hanno mai fatto niente di male e se, per caso, me l’avessero fatto, li perdono». Alludendo allo slogan di Wilson, il quale pretendeva che l’entrata in guerra degli Stati Uniti avesse lo scopo di ristabilire la democrazia dovunque nel mondo, alcuni leader neri gli chiesero pubblicamente di pensare di «cominciare ad introdurre la democrazia in America». Pochissimi furono i volontari che si presentarono per servire da carne di cannone sull’altra sponda dell’Atlantico. Le autorità avevano previsto che sarebbero accorsi ad arruolarsi almeno un milione di uomini, invece furono solo 73.000. Di conseguenza, già il 18 maggio, venne votata una legge, il Selective Service Act o Selective Draft Act, che introduceva un sistema di servizio militare obbligatorio selettivo, il draft. Anche così non si riuscì a reclutare il numero di soldati neccessari. Al draft, comunque, molti si opposero e più di 330.000 persone sarebbero state classificate come draft evaders, vale a dire, renitenti al servizio. Non ci deve, in ogni caso, sorprendere il fatto che i membri delle classi superiori, oltre agli operai qualificati, di cui si poteva difficilmente fare a meno nelle fabbriche, erano in gran parte esentati dal draft. Furono soprattutto i poveri ad essere reclutati, dato che si considerava la loro presenza non necessaria. Come in tutti gli altri eserciti dei paesi belligeranti, gli effettivi statunitensi provenivano in grande maggioranza dalle classi inferiori della popolazione. Si trattava soprattutto di neri, di immigrati arrivati di recente, di anafabeti, di altre persone con poca o nessuna istruzione, ecc. I neri furono reclutati in gran numero, ma dovettero prestare servizio soprattutto in battaglioni di lavoro distinti, di modo che i soldati bianchi non dovessero mai considerarli loro eguali. Ricevevano anche vestiario, vitto e alloggio di qualità nettamente inferiore. Dei 370.000 afro-americani in servizio nell’esercito, 200.000 furono in Europa, ma solo 40.000 di loro ebbero delle armi e fecero parte di una delle due divisioni da combattimento nere. Fu in questo modo che venne messo insieme un esercito che si pretendeva andasse in guerra per la democrazia. Che l’America partisse in una crociata a favore della democrazia e/o a una guerra che mettesse fine a tutte le guerre, questo era quello che Wilson voleva fare accettare al popolo americano e al mondo intero. Per portare a termine con successo questo progetto, venne messa in piedi un’enorme macchina propagandistica che utilizzava articoli di stampa, oratori, manifesti, produzioni hollywoodiane, ecc., per far entrare questo messaggio nelle famiglie americane. Il centro nevralgico di questa macchina fu quella che si chiamò con un eufemismo il Committee on Public Information (CPI – Commissione di informazione pubblica), diretta dal giornalista presunto «progressista» George Creel. Si trattava di rendere gli americani inclini – o addirittura entusiasti – a una guerra che non volevano, da cui non avrebbero ricavato il minimo vantaggio, ma che avrebbero pagata a caro prezzo, in termini di sangue e denaro, o detto in modo diverso, di arrivare a «potersi compiacere dell’approvazione e dell’accordo» della pubblica opinione. Un collaboratore di Creel, il giornalista Walter Lippmann, battezzò l’iniziativa «manifacture of consent» (la fabbrica del consenso) – un’espressione che sarebbe stata ripresa in seguito da Noam Chomsky. Quello che si doveva fare, prima di tutto, era suscitare nell’opinione pubblica un sentimento anti-tedesco e per fare questo ci si ispirò all’esempio britannico che si basava soprattutto sull’atrocitymongering, vale a dire su una vergognosa esagerazione delle atrocità commesse dai tedeschi nel 1914, nel piccolo Belgio. Creel e il suo gruppo fecero un lavoro eccellente e ben presto si radicò nel paese una vera isteria anti-tedesca. Il cavolo, che si chiama in inglese e anche in tedesco Sauerkraut e che era molto popolare all’epoca sia negli Stati Uniti che in Germania, venne ribattezzato freedomcabbage, «cavolo della libertà» e la malattia virale rosolia, che si chiamava anche Germanmeasles, «rosolia tedesca», diventò liberty measles, «rosolia della libertà». Hollywood venne indotta a produrre una collezione di film propagandistici tra i quali, ad esempio, una grossa produzione dal titolo eloquente fu Il Kaiser, la bestia di Berlino. (Più tardi, altri nemici degli Stati Uniti come Saddam Hussein e il Colonnello Gheddafi saranno «demonizzati» allo stesso modo.) Più grave, tuttavia, fu il fatto che gli americani di origine tedesca vennero obbligati a portare un segno distintivo giallo e che, in molti casi, i loro averi furono confiscati, una sorte che, più tardi, sarebbe toccata agli ebrei nella Germania nazista. Anche le chiese facevano propaganda a favore della guerra. Soprattutto le chiese protestanti proclamavano che il conflitto era una «crociata» contro la Germania imperiale. La chiesa cattolica si dimostava un po’ meno entusiasta in questo senso, perchè il Vaticano simpatizzava discretamente con le potenze centrali e soprattutto con l’impero asburgico. Inoltre la Chiesa non si permetteva di turbare i numerosissimi americani cattolici di origine tedesca o irlandese, perchè era chiaro che sostenevano l’asse Berlino-Vienna. C’era ancora un’altra ragione per la quale l’élite americana aspirava fervidamente alla guerra nel 1917. Esattamente come le élite europee nel 1914, l’élite americana nel 1917 si era convinta che una guerra avrebbe rafforzato il suo potere e il suo prestigio, avrebbe bloccato e forse anche fatto arretrare la tendenza alla democrazia del XIX secolo e, infine, eliminato davvero – probabilmente – il pericolo di cambiamenti rivoluzionari. In effetti, anche negli Stati Uniti, gli anni precedenti il 1914 avevano visto l’élite assai preoccupata per le gravi tensioni sociali, i numerosi scioperi e la crescita apparentemente irresistibile del Socialist Party e del sindacato militante IWW. Queste agitazioni raggiunsero un punto culminante in aprile del 1914 con quello che si chiamò il «massacro di Ludlow». Un accampamento di scioperanti vicino a una miniera di carbone dei Rockefeller a Ludlow (Colorado) era stato attaccato dall’esercito e più di venti persone erano state ammazzate, tra cui mogli e bambini degli scioperanti. Tutto il paese ne era stato turbato e, a Denver, un’unità di soldati aveva rifiutato di venire impegnata contro gli scioperanti. Fortunatamente, l’attenzione dell’opinione pubblica potè essere rapidamente sviata dalla decisione del presidente Wilson il quale ritenne di colpo necessario – con un ridicolo pretesto – di far bombardare il porto messicano di Vera Cruz e di condurre una piccola guerra contro questo paese vicino dove, inoltre, era in corso una rivoluzione. Lo storico Howard Zinn ritiene che ciò non avvenne per caso e suggerisce che «il patriottismo e il militarismo rimisero nuovamente nell’ombra la lotta di classe», che «il rombo dei cannoni sviò l’attenzione» e che «un nemico esterno assicurava l’unità del paese». Zinn conclude affermando che l’aggressione contro il Messico «fu una reazione istintiva del sistema, con l’obiettivo di ricostruire l’unità in seno a un popolo lacerato dai conflitti interni». La guerra contro il Messico può in definitiva essere considerata come un episodio della lotta di classe. Si trattava, in effetti, di un conflitto tra due «classi» del paese, che rifletteva l’oppressione e lo sfruttamento di un paese povero e impotente da parte di un paese ricco e potente. In ogni caso, la dichiarazione di guerra di Wilson alla Germania si può ritenere, allo stesso modo, come una maniera di rinsaldare la pace sociale interna con una guerra all’esterno. Wilson non è certamente entrato in guerra per questa ragione, ma ha avidamente approfittato dell’occasione che gli venne offerta per reprimere ogni forma di radicalismo in parole ed atti – a profitto dell’élite disturbata dal radicalismo – per governare in modo molto più autoritario e meno democratico. In effetti, Wilson, un «democratico» esclusivamente nel significato di appartenenza al Partito democratico, si attribuì ogni sorta di poteri speciali che gli permisero, in un modo che si pretendeva legale, di mettersi sotto i piedi i diritti democratici degli americani. Nel maggio 1917 venne promulgata una severissima legge sullo spionaggio (Espionage Act), un provvedimento ufficialmente destinato a combattere lo spionaggio tedesco e, nel 1918, il Congresso avrebbe conferito ulteriori poteri speciali al presidente con la «legge anti-sedizione» (Sedition Act). Queste leggi rimarranno in vigore fino nell’estate del 1921, vale a dire sino al momento in cui gli Stati Uniti concluderanno ufficialmente la pace con la Germania. Alcuni storici hanno detto che queste leggi facevano parte della «legislazione più repressiva del paese», che si trattava di misure «quasi totalitarie che ridicolizzavano la pretesa di far credere che eravamo entrati in guerra per la libertà». Da allora in avanti, il governo poteva censurare a suo piacimento, chiudere giornali, arrestare e incarcerare, con la ragione che si stava facendo guerra a un nemico particolarmente malvagio il quale poteva disporre di ogni sorta di spie e agenti negli Stati Uniti. Chi si opponeva alla guerra, si opponeva all’America, in altri termini, era «anti-americano» (un-American). Da allora il pacifismo e il suo gemello, il socialismo, venivano catalogati come i nemici dell’«americanismo». Queste leggi, comunque, miravano chiaramente a inculcare nel popolo americano la paura e la pressione per vincere la guerra, a reprimere ogni dubbio sulla legittimità del conflitto, ad eliminare ogni protesta e l’evasione dal servizio militare (draft). Con questa legislazione, diventava un reato parlare «in modo sleale, cattivo o offensivo» del governo, della bandiera e dell’esercito degli Stati Uniti. Era rischioso non essere d’accordo con la politica messa in atto dal governo Wilson. Anche l’espresione di una critica moderata alla sua politica di guerra poteva concludersi con la prigione. (L’EspionageAct venne emendato molteplici volte dopo la guerra, ma mai completamente soppresso; Chelsea/Bradley Manning – per le rivelazioni che mettevano in guardia sui pericoli connessi alla macchina spionistica Usa – è stato accusato sulla base di codici militari che, almeno in parte, si basano su quella legge.) Durante la Prima Guerra mondiale, più di 2.500 americani furono presi di mira dalla giustizia sulla base di queste leggi draconiane e circa un centinaio di loro vennero condannati a pene tra i 10 e i 20 anni di prigione. Non si tratta indubbiamente di un grande numero in rapporto alla popolazione, ma il fatto importante è che la paura di un procedimento giudiziario a proprio carico fece disimparare alla gente a pensare e a esprimersi (oralmente e per iscritto) in modo critico, a vantaggio di un conformismo miope – e ciò nel paese ove si è sempre molto glorificato dell’«individualismo totale» (rugged individualism). In questo modo, innumerevoli giornalisti finirono per autocensurarsi per timore della propria sicurezza. La legislazione repressiva venne utilizzata in modo selettivo, soprattutto contro i radicali e i dissidenti appartenenti alle classi inferiori, la versione americana delle «classi pericolose», e in particolare i neri e gli ebrei. I radicali e dissidenti per eccellenza erano i socialisti americani, all’epoca ancora numerosi e militanti, che operavano in favore di riforme democratiche rivoluzionarie e che erano, allo stesso tempo, oppositori della guerra. Esattamente come i loro compagni riformisti in Europa, certi socialisti americani si schierarono a favore del conflitto, ma la maggior parte dei socialisti rimasero nondimeno pacifisti convinti, cosa che pagheranno a caro prezzo. La grande figura di punta dei socialisti americani, Eugene Debs, si espresse apertamente contro la guerra e incoraggiò i suoi partigiani a fare lo stesso. Nel giugno 1918, sulla base dell’EspionageAct, sarebbe stato gettato in prigione e la stessa sorte capitò a centinaia di altri socialisti in quanto colpevoli di tradimento, incitazione alla rivolta, spionaggio, ricorso alla violenza, ecc. I grandi sindacati, ad esempio l’American Federation of Labor (AFL), erano tradizionalmente alleati del Partito democratico di Wilson e, in quanto presidente, quest’ultimo aveva difeso fino ad un certo punto i loro interessi in cambio del loro sostegno. Con loro non ci furono difficoltà nel 1917, essi sostennero la sua guerra esattamente come nel 1914 i sindacati dei paesi europei avevano sostenuto i loro governi quando questi erano entrati in guerra. Su questo piano, il celebre dirigente sindacale Samuel Gompers si rivelò un alleato particolarmente utile a Wilson e collaborò strettamente con Creel e la sua Commissione d’informazione pubblica. C’era, tuttavia, anche un’altro sindacato, presso il quale Wilson non godeva  di grande successo, quello radicale e persino rivoluzionario dell’IWW, già citato in precedenza. Il suo capo, «Big Bill» Haywood finì in prigione, come Debs, per aver osato criticare la guerra. Da parecchio tempo, l’IWW costituiva un fastidioso problema per l’establishment americano, che approfittò della guerra per distruggere questo nido di rivoluzionari attraverso attacchi lanciati contro il loro quartier generale, sequestri di documenti, arresti arbitrari di dirigenti e loro condanne sulla base di prove fabbricate di sana pianta, ecc. Negli Stati Uniti, come anche in Europa, il socialismo, almeno nella sua versione radicale, non riformista, andava mano nella mano con il pacifismo. La maggior parte dei socialisti erano dei pacifisti e una percentuale importante dei pacifisti erano socialisti. Non tutti i pacifisti erano socialisti, c’erano anche innumerevoli pacifisti borghesi di convinzioni progressiste o – come si dice negli Stati Uniti – liberals. Anche tra loro c’erano persone coraggiose che si esprimevano apertamente contro la guerra di Wilson e che, in molti casi, la pagheranno molto cara, perdendo il lavoro o anche il seggio nell’assemblea legislativa del loro stato. Paul Jones, un vescovo protestante (episcopale) dello Utah, venne destituito dalla sua alta carica ecclesiastica perchè si era espresso contro la guerra. Nelle università, che si riveleranno dei «focolai d’intolleranza», la libertà accademica tanto lodata fu de facto soppressa per tutta la durata della guerra e i professori pacifisti vennero sistematicamente allontanati dalle loro cattedre. Gli Stati Uniti sono il paese della libera impresa, cosa che significa che lo stato crede, almeno in teoria, ai benefici del tradizionale approccio liberale del lasser-faire e che, di conseguenza, interviene il meno possibile nella vita economica e sociale e «lascia fare» il più possibile a quello che si chiama settore privato. Nel contesto dell’entrata in guerra degli Stati Uniti nel 1917, ciò significava che la repressione nei confronti di pacifisti, di socialisti, di dirigenti sindacali, ecc. era stata «privatizzata», almeno in parte, vale a dire lasciata a persone e gruppi favorevoli alla guerra che, in generale, erano allo stesso tempo anti-democratici, anti-socialisti, anti-semiti e anti-camiti (ostili ai neri) e si presentavano come i campioni dell’«americanismo». Ben noti, tra questi gruppi, figuravano l’American Patriotic League (Lega patriottica americana), il Patriotic Order of Sons of America (Ordine patriottico dei figli dell’America), i Knights of Liberty (Cavalieri della Libertà), una branca del Ku Klux Klan. Tra i mezzi utilizzati da questi vigilantes si trovano le denuncie, le bastonature, la tinteggiatura in giallo delle case dove viveva un pacifista, angherie corporali consistenti ad esempio nel cospargere i corpi delle vittime di catrame e piume (tarring and feathering) e le esecuzioni illegali o linciaggi (lynchings). Questi vigilantes prendevano di mira soprattutto i Wobblies (membri del sindacato IWW): uno dei loro dirigenti, Frank Little, venne linciato nel Montana nell’agosto 1917. Sull’altra sponda dell’Oceano Atlantico imperversava, pertanto, una sorta di guerra gemella, che consisteva, da una parte, in una guerra «verticale», nella quale gli Stati Uniti in quanto stato se la prendeva con la Germania e, dall’altra, una guerra «orizzontale», in cui le due grandi classi della società americana – l’élite e i proletari – si affrontavano reciprocamente. Per quanto riguarda quest’ultimo fronte, l’élite, guidata da Wilson, passò immediatamente all’offensiva e attraverso le leggi repressive e le organizzazioni «vigilanti», respinse le forze proletarie esattamente come i tedeschi nel 1914 avevano respinto i francesi e i britannici. La lotta, comunque, non era ancora terminata, ma vedremo tra breve come si sviluppò nel seguito. Per quanto riguarda la guerra «verticale» contro la Germania, l’élite pareva avere meno fretta e si dovette attendere ancora qualche tempo, ossia l’inizio del 1918, prima che le truppe americane sbarcassero in numero consistente sul fronte occidentale e cominciassero realmente a fare la differenza.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons

The global media — to their credit – are focusing on the brutality of the US-backed Raqqa campaign, though they’re avoiding any serious reporting about how and why the Kurds are ethnically cleansing Arabs from Raqqa.

The Race for Raqqa is over, and the US-backed “Syrian Democratic Forces”, the majority of which are comprised of the Kurdish YPG militia, are on the verge of capturing Daesh’s self-declared “capital”. The operation is proceeding at a lightning pace after the Pentagon and its proxies carefully squeezed the terrorists for months, but it must also be said that the rapid battlefield “successes” are also due in part to the Kurds cutting a deal with Daesh. This isn’t a fringe conspiracy theory either, but a documented fact reported by Sergey Surovikin, the commander of Russia’s forces in Syria, who told the media just last week that

“According to available reliable information, in early June ISIL terrorists entered into collusion with the command of the Kurdish armed units, which are part of the Democratic Forces Union, left the populated localities of Tadia and al-Hamam located 19 kilometers southwest of Raqqa offering no resistance and headed toward Palmyra.”

I wrote about this relationship in my article about the Kurdish-Daesh-Saudi connection in Syria and Iran, which also makes it abundantly clear that my professional use of the word “Kurd”, unless otherwise and explicitly specified, always refers solely to Kurdish militant groups, NOT the peaceful and law-abiding majority of this demographic.

Chemical Weapons And Ethnic Cleansing

Alleged sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun (A White Helmets photo, credits to the owner)

Taking into account the logical limits of what’s being referred to when I talk about the “Kurds”, it’s now time to take a closer look at their role in the US’ Raqqa campaign. Reports have come out that the US is supporting the SDF-YPG through the illegal use of white phosphorus, which is a banned chemical weapon. Combined with the heavy and indiscriminate airstrikes being carried out against the city, 160,000 civilians have been forced to become refugees and flee their homes as internally displaced people. This works out to more than half of the city’s pre-war population of 220,000, and it confirms what independent journalist and associate editor at 21stcenturywire.com Vanessa Beeley told RT just recently about how the US is making no attempt whatsoever to protect civilians. In fact, it can be cynically suggested, the large-scale population exodus taking place in Raqqa is actually a deliberate ethnic cleansing of the majority-Arab population of the city on a much larger scale than any of the similar crimes that the Kurds have been accused of before.

This conclusion isn’t as far off as one might initially think since the Kurds proudly proclaimed before the battle started that they will annex the city to their self-proclaimed “Democratic Federation of Northern Syria” once it’s in their hands. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone because the Kurds have been openly talking about their plans for months. In fact, I’ve been writing about the Kurdish-American unipolar strategy to internally partition Syria for over the past year and a half, and I listed off 13 of my most relevant articles in a piece that I wrote in January about the Russian-written “draft constitution” for Syria. The reader is strongly encouraged to check out those articles if they’re unfamiliar with what the Kurds have been plotting this entire time, as it’s really important to learn the background context about what’s motivating these “Neo-Marxists” to cooperate hand-in-hand with the US and geopolitically re-engineer a “New Middle East”.

“Hacked Elections” In “Kurdistan”

To get back to the urgent issue at hand – the ethnic cleansing of over half of Raqqa’s majority-Arab population – this is a “godsend” to the Kurds’ plans to “Balkanize” Syria through the expansion of their “federation”. It’s extremely doubtful to imagine that Arabs of any political disposition would rather live in a Kurdish-dominated statelet as second-class citizens than as equal ones within the Syrian Arab Republic, so the chances of the Kurds peacefully annexing Raqqa into their “federation” via a plebiscite are close to nil. However, if the Arabs were forced out of their homes due to egregious war crimes by the US such as indiscriminate bombing and the widespread use of chemical weapons, then it becomes much easier to “hack the vote” and create a public/international pretense of “legitimacy”.

The proportion of Arabs in the city would dramatically drop, which could comparatively increase the ratio of Kurdish inhabits which choose to stay. Moreover, many of the fleeing Arabs might be replaced by settler Kurds from the north, which could come to Raqqa to colonize it or simply do as emigrated Albanians frequently resort to in the Republic of Macedonia and arrive only long enough to vote before departing once again. Either way, the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Raqqa works in favor of the Kurds’ geopolitical designs for Syria, which in turn advance the joint American-“Israeli” Yinon Plan of dividing and ruling the Mideast along a modified “Identity Federalism” form of Ralph Peters’ 2006 “Blood Borders”. Most fleeing Arabs would naturally feel unsafe reentering to their home city and living as second-class apartheid citizens in a minority-dominated “federation”, so they’ll probably relocate elsewhere for their own safety and make the Kurdish colonization of Raqqa a fait accompli.

Speaking of colonization, the abovementioned developments vindicate all those – include the author himself – who previously warned that the Kurds were carving a “second geopolitical ‘Israel’” in the heart of the Mideast out of the territories of neighboring states, strategically employing “Weapons of Mass Migration” just like “Israel” did during the advent of its massive post-World War II colonization of Palestine. The only difference between what the Kurds are doing nowadays in Raqqa and the “Israelis” did in Palestine is that the former had been present in Syria for decades longer than the latter before they made their geopolitical power play. Apart from that, the “Kurdistan” and “Israel” models are identical and they also serve the same grand strategic goals of promoting unipolarity in the tri-continental pivot space of West Asia. Nevertheless, for as obvious as this is to any objective observer, it’s failed to generate any significant media attention, whether from the Mainstream Media or even its Alternative counterpart, and this deserves some further elaboration.

“See No Evil”

Regarding the Mainstream Media, they’re coy about recognizing the fact that the US is midwiving the de-facto birth of “Kurdistan” in Syria because Washington formally agreed to UNSC Resolution 2254 which nominally respects the territorial integrity of the war-torn country. This explains why any Kurdish statelet in Syria would remain sub-national for the time being and not lead to any formal independence such as what appears to be imminent in Iraq later this year following Erbil’s promised referendum. At the same time, however, this hasn’t stopped the US from promoting the “federalization” of Syria as a ploy to achieve the same outcome in form before the fact. Everything that the US is doing is an “open secret”, yet Washington has yet to give the signal to its media proxies that it’s time to “let the cat out of the bag” and officially declare the plan for what it is.

As for Alt-Media in general (key qualifier), there’s a certain embarrassment inherent with openly calling things for what they are because it would confirm that Russia was caught flat-footed in stopping this geopolitical plot. There are many reasons why Russia has been unable to prevent the internal fragmentation of Syria, but the most reasonable ones are that Moscow is strictly abiding by its military mandate to solely fight terrorism, its leadership has no political will to commit the forces necessary for reversing the political realities on the ground in northeastern Syria (which would ultimately lead to a tense standoff with the US that the Kremlin is doing everything in its power to avoid), and that there are certain unstated geopolitical “benefits” that Russia might be hoping to reap from the Kurds.

Each of these factors could take entire articles to explain, but thankfully for the reader, I ended up writing about this on several occasions in the past. My two articles about the Russian-written “draft constitution” for Syria, my piece about how Russia’s “de-escalation zones” are laying the groundwork for Syria’s “decentralization”, and my analysis about Russia’s energy diplomacy in the Mideast should hopefully answer any questions that the reader might have about these three motivations. To succinctly summarize, Russia adheres to its military mandate in order to avoid what its leadership seriously fears could become another Afghan-like mission creep, and it also doesn’t want another Caribbean Crisis (known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis” in the West) to develop over Syria. In addition, some in Russia (naively?) believe that leveraging Moscow’s historical relations with the Kurds could lead to their country fulfilling its grand strategy of becoming the ultimate balancing force in Eurasia.

Concluding Thoughts

Smoke rises after what activists said were airstrikes by forces loyal to Syria’s President Assad in Raqqa, which is controlled by the Islamic State (credits to the owner of the photo)

There’s no “delicate” way to say it – what’s happening in Raqqa right now is the large-scale ethnic cleansing of the city’s majority-Arab population through chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing in order to create the on-the-ground conditions for “legitimizing” the expansion of the Kurds’ “federalized” statelet (the “second geopolitical ‘Israel’”). The Mainstream Media is holding back from openly announcing the obvious in a frail attempt to obscure its grand strategic plans until the day arrives when they’re undeniable, but also of course out of the self-interested pursuit to avoid being implicated in worsening the Immigrant Crisis.

As for most of the Alt-Media, they’re very reluctant to recognize that Russia’s policy of engagement with the Syrian Kurds has totally failed to pry them away from the Pentagon, so there’s a certain degree of wounded pride involved which is taking some time to overcome. Furthermore, by recognizing the US-Kurd campaign in Raqqa as ethnic cleansing, it would put enormous pressure on Russia to stage a “humanitarian intervention”, which to remind the reader, is beyond Moscow’s military mandate and could dangerously draw it into an Afghan-like quagmire and potentially lead to nuclear brinksmanship with the US, both of which the Kremlin will do anything to avoid.

Sadly, what this translates to in reality is that the Arab cleansing of Raqqa will probably go unnoticed in most of the global media, though it might emerge as a politicized subject after the campaign is completed. For now, however, it seems like both the Mainstream and Alternative Medias are content with only discussing the US’ chemical weapons use and indiscriminate bombing during this campaign, which is interesting to note because Western Mainstream Media usually never talks about such truths. Therefore, this in and of itself should be a glaring indication for all observers that the West is desperately trying to deflect from the ongoing ethnic cleansing that’s happening on the ground, though hopefully, Alt-Media will call them out on it sooner than later.

Andrew Korybko is a political analyst, journalist and a regular contributor to several online journals, as well as a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia.

Featured image: Global Village Space

The Abandonment of a Community

Initially, I wasn’t going to write anything on this tragedy, I figured there would be plenty of analysis as to the whys and the wherefores of a building turned into a funeral pyre but I’ve yet to see the word Austerity used once, just once, in connection with this tragedy, which as usual in this world always impacts the most on working class communities, especially the poor, wherever it occurs.

Instead, we got endless hours, days of BBC hand-wringing, focusing almost exclusively on the (heroic) efforts of a devastated community, ignored and forgotten by their council and the government, with those damn cameras peering into peoples’ grief and ultimately, anger, made all the worse by the state’s total indifference to this calamity.

It took three days for the Prime Minister, Theresa May to visit the site and she had to do it under police guard! It’s only today, now four days later, that the government has finally set up some kind of command centre to deal with distraught relatives and friends of the dead, injured and missing (estimates now put the number of dead as at least 70).

If there’s anything that illustrates the murderous endgame of neoliberalism and what it does to people, this is it! But this is also Baghdad and it’s Damascus and a dozen other places around the globe getting a dose of democracy. Here it’s simple neglect powered by greed but it’s committed by the same governments, the same people who have abandoned wholesale, millions of people in their own backyards and slaughtered millions around the planet.

It’s no accident that the (former) inhabitants of Grenfell Tower are mostly people of colour and the deadly irony of their location is that they’re surrounded by people who live in properties worth millions, in one of the richest boroughs in the country, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Years of neglect, starved of funding at virtually every level, with cutbacks to the Fire Service, the closure of fire stations, massive cuts to councils, the privatisation of publicly owned housing maintenance and refurbishment, handing over public housing to so-called housing associations. It’s been feast for business but death for the recipients of their ‘largesse’.

Sitting on top of it all is a remote and indifferent maze of digital bureaucracy that walls itself off behind a defensive shield, many layers deep, of computerised answering machines and online websites that never do what they’re intended to to do. Cut off from the cause of the pain, people eventually explode.

THERE IS SOMETHING SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH A BUREAUCRACY THAT IS INCAPABLE OF REACTING TO SERIOUS NEGLIGENCE, AFFECTING FIRE SAFETY IN A DENSELY OCCUPIED TOWER BLOCK, WITH ANY SENSE OF URGENCY .

DOES ANYONE ACTUALLY GIVE A DAMN? – Grenfell Action Group, 5 March 2013

Obviously not and that was four years ago and it’s only got worse in the interim as Austerity bites deeper and deeper into peoples lives. The newly ‘refurbished’ building (at a cost of ten million quid) went up like a torch in less than an hour. Ten million pounds? They could have put up a new one for that price!

This is gangster capitalism, where money is God and the people are ignored when they don’t have any, as is the case with the hapless (former) tenants of this monumental mausoleum to greed.

And the state and its media mouthpiece, the BBC, wonders why the citizens are angry, indicative of the fact that the media vultures too, are totally divorced from the reality that millions of people have to suffer through every day of their lives. Treated like criminals, the poor have to justify their existence to  remote and antagonistic private corporations that peer into their lives without comprehension or caring, guided only by computerised forms; do you meet the criteria?

Whose High Rise is Flammable?

Where I live in South London, on the horizon in all directions, the cranes are flying! At least thirty are visible to me as I write. (Photo: © 2015 William Bowles)

Currently, there are some 220 high rise apartment buildings either finished or under construction in London. All are expensive, the former inhabitants of Grenfell Tower wouldn’t be able to afford them and note that nobody seems concerned about the safety of these towers. Perhaps because they are all built to high standards and have adequate fire safety systems? Some their inhabitants would have been close enough  to see Grenfell Tower burn from their (fireproof) apartments.

I’ve kept the original sources.

Grenfell Action Group

ALL OUR WARNINGS FELL ON DEAF EARS and we predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time. Below is a list of links to previous blogs we posted on this site trying to warn the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who own this property, and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation who supposedly manage all social housing in RBKC on the Council’s behalf:

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/fire-safety-scandal-at-lancaster-west/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/kctmo-playing-with-fire/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/more-on-fire-safety/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/another-fire-safety-scandal/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/kctmo-feeling-the-heat/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/why-are-we-waiting/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/grenfell-tower-from-bad-to-worse/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/more-trouble-at-grenfell-tower/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/the-disempowered-of-grenfell-tower/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/tmo-still-asleep-at-the-wheel

Featured image: Investigating Imperialism

HAVANA, Cuba, Jun 16 (ACN) US President Donald Trump today unveiled a new US policy toward Cuba from the southern state of Florida that reinforces the extraterritorial economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by that government on the island.

The president signed a document setting out the priorities of his government, including compliance with US law on the Cuban nation, in particular the provisions that govern the blockade and the prohibition of the citizens of that country to visit Cuba.

Trump “laid the foundations” for supposedly “empowering the Cuban people and developing greater economic and political freedom,” regarding the prohibition of companies from that nation to establish business with Cuban state companies.

Although diplomatic relations – re-established on July 20, 2015 – will continue, the new actions of the Trump administration are a step backwards towards the normalization of bilateral ties, and come loaded with old anti-Cuban rhetoric.

He reinstated the ban on individual travel by Americans to Cuba, and those who venture to do so will have to do so-as during George W Bush Administration-through non-governmental organizations and in groups.

Meanwhile, it leaves intact what Barack Obama has established that Cubans living in that country can visit their family on the island without restrictions and send remittances.

The blockade is reaffirmed, said the president in his speech in Miami, while he ignored the calls at the United Nations and other international forums for the termination of extraterritorial politics, which in 2016 had at the UN with the support of all the member countries of that body and where for the first time the United States and Israel themselves abstained.

Donald Trump, in a unilateral and interfering attitude, conditioned the improvement of relations to the “will of the Cuban government to improve the lives of the people, including the promotion of the rule of law, respect for human rights and economic freedoms.”

In the policy memorandum signed by the President, the Treasury and Commerce departments are instructed to begin the process of issuing new regulations within the next 30 days.

The White House clarified that the policy changes will not take effect until the corresponding Departments publish the new regulations, a process that can take time.

While the Americans are still banned from touring on the largest island in the Caribbean, the expansion of the categories that the Obama administration led to an impressive increase in the number of trips to Cuba.

Some 284,997 Americans visited the island in 2016, for a 74 percent growth over the previous year, according to official figures.

The trend for growth has been maintained during 2017, and by this date of the year the figure is around the same amount as in the previous calendar.

The decline in ties comes despite the overwhelming support of the Americans for their right to visit Cuba, and the recent filing of a bill sponsored by 55 senators that defends the freedom to travel to the neighboring nation.

The adoption of this position by the US government reaffirms the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, which the administration of Barack Obama declared at the time as a failed and inoperative policy, after more than half a century since its establishment.

Featured image: ACN

Trump plans to announce the policy change at a Miami theater named after Manuel Artime, a Cuban exile leader of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Featured image: credits to the owner

Secretary of Defence James “Mad Dog” Mattis is set to announce the deployment of up to 5,000 additional troops to wage war in Afghanistan in the coming weeks, following a decision Tuesday by President Trump granting Mattis authority to set troop levels.

The move will mark a dramatic escalation of the longest war in US history, which has already claimed the lives of thousands of US troops and hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians, and is increasingly developing into a wider regional conflict.

The additional forces are desperately needed to prop up Washington’s crisis-ridden puppet regime in Kabul, which is facing an ever-expanding insurgency led by the Taliban. According to conservative estimates, the Islamist group controls around 40 percent of Afghan territory and is initiating new offensive operations.

Mattis acknowledged in congressional testimony this week that the outlook for US imperialism in Afghanistan is bleak.

Secretary of Defence James Mattis (credits to the owner of the photo)

“We are not winning in Afghanistan right now,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, before vowing to change that “as soon as possible.” In what was clearly a criticism of the Obama administration’s drawdown of troops in Afghanistan to the current level of some 9,800, Mattis went on, “It’s going to require a change in our approach from the last several years.”

As well as sending more US forces, Washington is expected to urge its NATO allies to step up their troop commitments. There are currently approximately 5,000 NATO forces deployed in the country.

The corrupt, widely-hated government of President Ashraf Ghani is barely able to exert its authority outside the capital, and even there suicide bombings and other militant attacks occur regularly. A massive suicide bomb exploded two weeks ago, claiming the lives of at least 90 people in the embassy district of Kabul.

On Thursday, a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the capital claimed a further two lives.

The Afghan armed forces, which has been trained and equipped at a cost of billions of dollars, is struggling to cope with the insurgency. Last weekend, three American soldiers died when a Taliban sympathizer, who had infiltrated the army, opened fire on them during a training exercise.

Casualty rates among Afghan troops are high, as shown by figures documenting over 800 deaths in the first two months of 2017. In April, the Taliban launched its bloodiest attack since the beginning of the war, killing some 200 Afghan military personnel at an army base in the north of the country.

While the additional US troops to be deployed will be officially designated as “advisers” to the Afghan forces, it is clear that they will increasingly engage in combat operations. A New York Times report on Tuesday noted that proponents of the deployment hoped that the personnel increase would enable US forces to “advise” their Afghan counterparts closer to the frontline of battle. They are also urging an expansion of the use of US air power to strike more targets.

In Iraq and Syria, similar special forces “advisers” have directed fighting and conducted artillery barrages, including with illegal weapons such as white phosphorus, on civilian centers such as Raqqa and Mosul, leading to the deaths of thousands of innocent residents. Trump’s decision earlier this year to grant more latitude to commanders on the ground to carry out operations is now being repeated in Afghanistan and will have similar results.

The expansion of the air war can only add to the carnage. Just two months ago, the US dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on a remote mountainous region in the east of the country in what was clearly meant as a warning to its geopolitical rivals and a sign of its determination to use all methods to retain its control over Afghanistan. The bomb was dropped on the eve of Russian-sponsored peace talks with the Taliban.

According to US Air Force statistics, the pace of air strikes has already intensified. More strikes have been conducted over the past four months than at any time since the summer of 2014.

Launched in the wake of 9/11 under the bogus pretext of the “war on terror,” Washington intervened in Afghanistan above all to cement its geostrategic hegemony in the strategically crucial Central Asian region. Control over Afghanistan places the US in close proximity to the energy-rich former Soviet republics to the north, and within striking distance of its main rivals for regional dominance: China, Russia and Iran.

These broader considerations were underscored in an interview given to PBS by retired General David Petraeus, who served as commander of US forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He referred to news of the latest troop deployment as “heartening,” before insisting that the US had to remember why they had intervened.

“This is a generational struggle. This is not something that is going to be won in a few years,” he declared, before making a comparison with the US presence in Europe following World War II or in Korea following the Korean War.

The New York Times, in a typical war-mongering editorial, urged Trump to assume responsibility for the 16-year-old conflict, declaring,

“Mr. Trump, Afghanistan is your war now.”

The imminent escalation of the Afghan war will only lead to a deepening of the crisis confronting US imperialism. Even pro-war stalwarts like Republican Senator John McCain were compelled to point out during Mattis’s Senate testimony earlier this week that the Trump administration has yet to present a strategic plan for Afghanistan.

Taliban gunmen attacked a military compound in the northern province of Balkh (Source: The Shia Post)

Mattis vowed to present the strategy by mid-July, but promised to take interim measures, which could include the troop deployment, to halt what he referred to as a Taliban “surge.”

The Times noted that the development of an Afghan strategy is being complicated because discussions in Washington have been widened to include the US stance towards neighbouring Pakistan, which has long provided a safe haven for Taliban fighters and other Islamist militants like the Hakani Network.

Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan are high. In May, at least a dozen people died when clashes broke out between the two countries over their disputed border. Without citing evidence, Afghan officials accused Pakistan of being involved in the Kabul suicide bombing that killed 90 earlier in June. Kabul and Islamabad have traded accusations of backing terrorist groups, with Afghanistan accusing Pakistan of assisting the Taliban-aligned Hakani Network. In turn, Islamabad has charged that the Pakistan Taliban enjoys aid from its neighbor.

At the same time, Washington’s relations with Pakistan, which were close throughout the Cold War, have deteriorated as the US has moved over recent years to woo India as a strategic partner as it seeks to encircle and isolate China in the Asia-Pacific. This has included partnership agreements between the US and Indian militaries and efforts to encourage New Delhi to assert its regional authority. Pakistan has reacted with deepening concern and increasingly looked to China for economic and trading relations. Tensions have surged between India and Pakistan over recent months, raising the danger of war between south Asia’s nuclear rivals.

The Trump administration’s strategic review, according to the Times, has thus also had to consider how Washington can manage tensions between Islamabad and New Delhi, with the result that “the Afghan review has turned into a larger review of American policy towards Southwest Asia.”

This only underscores the reckless character of US imperialism. As it escalates the conflict in Afghanistan, plans are already well advanced to ensure it can retain its unchallenged hegemony throughout Central and South Asia, a strategy which raises the prospect of a wider military conflagration, potentially with nuclear-armed adversaries.

Featured image: credits to the owner

O discurso cada vez mais difundido – e agressivo – de que progressistas o são por terem sido “doutrinados” é insustentável por motivos bastante simples, tão simples quanto a baixa estatura intelectual dos setores reacionários, particularmente no Brasil (não que nossa “esquerda” seja uma grande coisa, dona de grandes engenharias intelectuais e morais: pelo contrário).

Sem entrar no mérito da questão progressista, ou mais precisamente da visão de políticas focadas na inclusão social, a primeira grande imbecilidade do mencionado discurso reside no óbvio fato de que elas vão na mais absoluta contramão da “visão” predominante, no Brasil e em praticamente todo o mundo ocidental, contaminado pela grande mídia de idiotização das massas.

O discurso corrente trata de alegar uma tal “liberdade” através do modelo de diminuição do Estado em favor do livre-mercado, a ditadura do capital, e de ridicularizar e até agredir opiniões divergentes.

Portanto, andar em sentido contrário já evidencia, por si só, conscientização e não um cérebro lavado: geralmente, e justamente pela mídia e materiais didáticos predominantes (estes últimos também, nenhuma novidade, elaborado pelas oligarquias nacionais mundo afora, cujos métodos e histórias são ditados pelos donos do poder), dá-se exatamente o oposto, mais uma inversão de papeis neste mundo que prima pela distorção dos fatos.

Neste universo, a posição mais cômoda, evidentemente, é manter-se adequado à “visão” preponderante, sendo o contrário uma árdua tarefa que vale adjetivos pejorativos e, não raras vezes, muita agressão (repita-se: não se trata, até aqui, de uma defesa de nenhum dos espectros políticos).

Assim, pode e deve haver certo número dos chamados doutrinados (popularmente, “cabeça feita”) no campo oposto, mas a porcentagem é sem dúvida nenhuma muito inferior, por questões lógicas, à dos doutrinados pelo discurso predominante, principalmente quando se leva em conta quem lava seus cérebros: uma grande mídia sabidamente desinformativa, e métodos de “ensino” projetados, nas palavras de Noam Chomsky, para imbecilizar indivíduos, preparados apenas para votar e não incomodar os porões do poder. Jamais este sistema visa à formação de cidadãos, na acepção do termo.

Agora sim, aprofundando-se na atmosfera conservadora e progressista, um exemplo de irracionalidade pode facilmente ser observado nos discursos reacionários – e o Fez-se buque do Zückerberg, laranja da CIA, pode ser uma útil ferramenta na checagem do pé que anda a estupidez reaça tupiniquim.

A lista do cúmulo da ignorância neste sentido é vastíssima, portanto fiquemos com uma das últimas postadas pelas “cabeças mais pensantes” da direita tupinica, exatamente os que acusam seus “inimigos”, assim considerados abertamente por eles, de serem sem exceção vítimas de “doutrinação”: O Brasil é comunista, e quem, para ela, iniciou este processo de “comunização” à brasileira? Prepare a gargalhada: nada menos que ele, Fernando Henrique Cardoso!

Para completar esta “análise” que anda difundida, a solução, é claro, não poderia ser outra: intervenção militar já! O que evidencia outra imbecilidade neste festival da ignorância: essa mesma ditadura esteve por 21 anos no Brasil, sem trazer o avanço democrático prometido, sem educar e politizar a sociedade como prometiam em sua “Revolução Democrática” iniciada com o golpe contra o então presidente João Goulart, em 1964. Se a ditadura fosse eficiente, hoje esses mesmos setores reacionários não estariam rosnando tão ferozmente contra a sociedade e a política brasileira.

Outra difundida postagem (in)digna de menção pela inigualável estupidez, alega que após o final da ditadura todos os governos brasileiros foram incompetentes e corruptos (o que não se trata de mentira, é verdade), com a devida foto dos presidentes da República sendo o primeiro da fila nada menos que ele: José Sarney, presidente exatamente da Arena, da mesma ditadura que os mais incautos agora defendem! Parece piada, não? É a direita brasileira “apolítica”, “não-doutrinada”!

Mais uma dentre as inúmeras evidências do “quem é quem” nesta questão, a qual a direita tenta a todo custo transformar em belicista a começar pela difusão da ideia de que progressistas arquitetam aprovação de uma PEC para trocar as cores da “sagrada” bandeira nacional, do “amado” verde e amarelo pelo vermelho “do demônio”, é que os capitalistas defendem concorrência e acúmulo de bens, onde valha a lei do mais forte e poderoso, enquanto os “comunistas comedores de criancinhas” (para eles, qualquer um que defenda políticas sociais), esperam nada mais que um mundo em que haja solidariedade e não competitividade, igualdade e não uns com excesso e outros na miséria (essência do capitalismo).

Diante desse “resumo da ópera”, que cada um possa tirar suas conclusões – que se não forem tiradas por si só, diante desses fatos que falam muito por si mesmos – de nada adiantará se estender em mais análises sócio-econômicas.

Nada disso, contudo, é uma defesa da “esquerda” brasileira de péssimo gosto, em grande parte a outra face de uma mesma moeda politiqueira, demagoga, esquizofrênica, ignorante e corrupta em relação à direita nacional. E aí está a realidade, de novo, para não nos deixar mentir…

Porém, outro Brasil é possível – ainda uma bela utopia sem luz no final do túnel, sem nada em que se apoiar concretamente sendo necessário o que, em inglês, diz-se “OK to be OK”, ou seja, uma grande transformação que torne possível uma profunda mudança nas relações de poder do País e, consequentemente. na estrutura social; mas é possível…

Edu Montesanti

Fonte da foto : http://zonacurva.com.br/sim-outro-brasil-e-possivel/

Germany’s Foreign Ministry published a sharply-worded press release Thursday from Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democrats, SPD) and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern (Social Democrats, SPÖ) denouncing the United States’ foreign and economic policies.

Republicans and Democrats agreed almost unanimously, by 97 votes to 2, to impose new sanctions on Russia in the Senate on Wednesday. The Senate justified the measure as a punishment for Moscow’s alleged meddling in the US presidential election, the annexation of Crimea and its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The bipartisan bill was “the package of sanctions the Kremlin deserves for its actions,” said Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

Gabriel and Kern brusquely rejected the US Senate’s measure. The bill was really about “the sale of American liquefied gas and the sidelining of Russian gas supplies in the European market,” according to the two social democratic politicians. That emerges from the text “particularly explicitly.” The goal was “to secure jobs in the American oil and gas industries.”

The US and Europe had since 2014 “side by side and in close joint consultation answered Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which is illegal under international law, and its actions in eastern Ukraine. … But the threat to impose extraterritorial sanctions which violate international law on European companies participating in the expansion of European energy supplies” could not be tolerated. Europe’s energy provision was “a European affair, and not one for the United States of America!”

Gabriel and Kern went on to warn,

“Instruments of political sanctions should not be connected with economic interests.”

Threatening European companies “in US markets with punishments” if they participate in or finance projects like the Nord Stream II oil pipeline with Russia would introduce “an entirely new and extremely negative quality to European-American relations.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel explicitly backed her Foreign Minister on Friday. There was “very strong agreement in terms of content with Gabriel’s statement,” stated government spokesman Stefan Seibert.

“It is, to put it mildly, an unconventional action by the US Senate.”

It was troubling that European businesses were being targeted by sanctions to punish Russian behaviour.

“That cannot be allowed,” added Seibert.

The bipartisan action by the US Senate and the sharp response from the German government make clear that the conflicts between the US and Germany are not simply intensifying as a result of President Donald Trump, but have deep objective roots. Twenty five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the conflicts between the major imperialist powers, which resulted in two world wars during the 20th century, are erupting into the open once again.

Following the G7 summit three weeks ago, Merkel, in a speech delivered in a Munich beer tent, called into question the alliance with the United States, which formed the basis of Germany’s foreign policy in the post-war era.

“The times in which we could completely depend upon others are long past,” she stated and advanced on this basis the demand, “We Europeans really have to take our fate into our own hands” and “fight for our own future.”

The German government has since worked systematically to expand its global political and economic relations. After Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Berlin at the beginning of the month, and Merkel visited Argentina and Mexico last week, the government organised a major conference on Africa in Berlin earlier this week.

As Berlin moves to fulfil Gabriel’s pledge to “use the spaces vacated by America,” the tensions with Washington are rising. Already last week, Gabriel criticised the US-backed action taken by Saudi Arabia against Qatar, which is aimed above all at Iran. In a statement, Gabriel defended the emirate and warned against a “Trumpification” of relations in the region. The “latest gigantic arms deals between US President Trump and the Gulf monarchies” intensified “the danger of a new arms race.” This was “a completely wrong policy, and certainly not Germany’s policy.”

Gabriel, Kern © EXPA / Michael Gruber via kleinezeitung.at

Gabriel’s statements against the United States have nothing to do with pacifism. He is not concerned with “peace,” but the enforcement of German imperialist interests, which are increasingly at odds with those of the United States. While the United States under Trump is ever more openly heading in the direction of war with Iran, the German government is striving for a further opening up of the country’s economy to secure new markets for German corporations in the Middle East and new investment opportunities for German capital.

The same applies to Russia. Although the German government supported the right-wing coup against Viktor Yanukovitch alongside the US in Ukraine in 2014, and stationed troops on the Russian border, it opposed open conflict with Russia over Ukraine. In his new book “Remeasurements,” Gabriel boasts that “with the Minsk Accord, France and Germany, on behalf of Europe, while not resolving an escalating conflict, curbed it significantly for the first time,” and had done so “without the United States.”

Washington, at that time, had been “close to…supplying weapons to Ukraine,” the Foreign Minister stated.

“With the cynical idea that although Russia could not be defeated militarily, it would be pressurised into peace talks more rapidly if it paid a high ‘price in blood’. The war in Ukraine would have become a war over Ukraine.” But Europe was “grown up enough…to foresee this and to let Germany and France negotiate.”

Following Brexit, the election of Trump and the victory of pro-European President Emmanuel Macron, Berlin seemingly feels it is “grown up enough” to increasingly distance itself from the US and to press ahead with the construction of a European army under German leadership.

“Europe’s security is Europe’s own responsibility,” noted Gabriel in his book. “We must become capable of acting strategically in foreign and security policy, because we don’t do so enough. That includes us defining our European interests and articulating them independently of the US. This obstinacy requires to some extent an emancipation from the direction adopted in Washington.”

He goes on,

“Whoever has their own goals also should develop their capabilities to achieve them. The EU needs to see itself as a greater security policy power. Our defence budgets must be adjusted accordingly. The armaments of the European armies need to be modernised, made operationally deployable and reoriented to military tasks.”

Gabriel’s declared goal is the building of a veritable European combat power capable of enforcing its global imperialist interests independently of NATO and the US, and, if necessary, against them. The issue is not “just to buy new weapons. It is about integrating the arms industry more in Europe and pooling forces. It is about creating a joint European security identity, which opens the way to a European army through ever more closely integrated structures.”

This policy, which is supported by all of Germany’s parties, from the CDU/CSU to the SPD, Greens and Left Party, has an irresistible logic. As in the first half of the 20th century, the deepening rivalries between the imperialist powers over raw materials, markets and geostrategic influence are leading once again to a war between the great powers, unless the working class intervenes on the basis of its own socialist strategy.

Featured image: credits to the owner

The latest bulletins concerning the health of ex-president Mohamed Morsi of Egypt are terrible.

Morsi has been held in custody since the July 2013 military coup which saw him overthrown and brought Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to power.

In cases criticised by Western governments, human rights groups and the UN, Egyptian courts have handed him lengthy prison sentences several times, including on charges of spying for Qatar and Hamas and killing protesters during demonstrations in 2012.

The former president is suffering from fainting fits and has twice collapsed into a coma. His health is severely damaged and I am told there is even reason to fear for his life.

This news has just emerged. Last week, his family visited for first time in four years and were shocked by what they saw – and so should we all be.

But I’m also shocked by the inertia of the British government.

Where is the protest?

Three hundred years ago, the English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton declared:

 “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

But John Casson, the British ambassador to Egypt, is stretching this advice rather too far. 

I can assure Casson that he has not been sent abroad to betray everything that Britain stands for: tolerance, decency, freedom, the rule of law.

Three years have passed since Casson was dispatched to Egypt as British ambassador.

As far as I can discover, he has not yet described the military takeover of Egypt by Field Marshall Sisi as a coup d’etat, which is what it was.

I have examined Casson’s record. I can find no complaints about the mass murder of Egyptian citizens by the Sisi regime. I can find no protests about torture and rape of political prisoners in Egyptian prisons.

At one I assume satirical moment, Casson praised Sisi’s Egypt for “building a more stable, more prosperous and more democratic future”. 

Soon after the Rabaa Massacre in August 2013, when Egyptian security forces violently cleared two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo killing at least 1,000 protesters, the UK government suspended 49 military export licenses to prevent British military goods from being used to repress Egyptians.

An Egyptian riot policeman points his gun at stone-throwers during clashes that broke out as Egyptian security forces moved in to disperse supporters of Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Morsi by force in a huge protest camp near Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque. (Source: Middle East Eye)

“As a result of the developing situation in Egypt, we have agreed with EU partners in this instance to go further and suspend all export licences for goods which might be used for internal repression,” Vince Cable, UK’s business secretary, said at the time.

“By acting together, we want to send a clear signal that we condemn all violence in Egypt.”

Slowly but surely, this stance has eroded as Britain has quietly resumed arms deals.

Time to speak out

Even if we accept – and we should not – that Britain, for cynical, base, amoral, commercial reasons, is unable to confront any of the above actions, we return to the basic humanity of the situation.

Ex-president Morsi is ill. He is not receiving proper medical attention. He desperately needs help. Britain should do everything it can to ensure he gets it, including speaking out publicly and putting harsh pressure on the regime.

On Tuesday, I spoke at an emergency press conference called by the Egyptian Revolutionary Council to draw attention to the plight of Mohamed Morsi.

My fellow speakers spoke eloquently.

Anas Al-Tikriti, founder of the Cordoba Foundation, pointed out that Britain is “a nation which prides itself on the values of human rights and freedoms” adding that “it is irresponsible of our government…to be absolutely dismissive and silent on the horrendous abuses committed on a daily basis.

“Not only in the prisons, but on the streets of Egypt every day. The closing down of media outlets, of free speech, of political dissent, and the crushing of any popular movement that might air a trace of dissent against the ruling military regime. “

The renowned British lawyer Toby Cadman pointed out that deprivation of medical treatment under international law is equivalent to torture. It is time, he said, to contemplate sanctions against the regime in Cairo, adding that

“Egyptian leaders when they travel to Britain should be arrested.”

It is time for the British government to ponder such measures.

A matter of indifference

We are guilty of gross double standards.

When Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi was illegally held under house arrest, British diplomats pressed for her release.

But when ex-president Morsi is deprived of medical attention he needs, this is apparently a matter of indifference to Her Majesty’s Government.

Of course, Egypt is not the only place where Britain seems to have forgotten our fundamental values. We are deeply complicit in the tragedy in the Yemen, for exactly the same reasons.

In the Yemeni conflict, as in Egypt, we are pathetically beholden to Saudi Arabia. It’s time Britain remembers we are a great country, with proud values and one that stands up for decency.

That means lifting a finger for Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected president of Egypt.

Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in 2017 and was named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He also was British Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran.

Featured image: AFP via Middle East Eye