Global Research

“I love Wikileaks,” candidate Donald Trump said on October 10th on the campaign trail. He praised the organization for reporting on the darker side of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was information likely leaked by a whistleblower from within the Clinton campaign to Wikileaks.

Back then he praised Wikileaks for promoting transparency, but candidate Trump looks less like President Trump every day. The candidate praised whistleblowers and Wikileaks often on the campaign trail. In fact, candidate Trump loved Wikileaks so much he mentioned the organization more than 140 times in the final month of the campaign alone! Now, as President, it seems Trump wants Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sent to prison.

Last week CNN reported, citing anonymous “intelligence community” sources, that the Trump Administration’s Justice Department was seeking the arrest of Assange and had found a way to charge the Wikileaks founder for publishing classified information without charging other media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post for publishing the same information.

It might have been tempting to write off the CNN report as “fake news,” as is much of their reporting, but for the fact President Trump said in an interview on Friday that issuing an arrest warrant for Julian Assange would be, “OK with me.”

Trump’s condemnation of Wikileaks came just a day after his CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, attacked Wikileaks as a “hostile intelligence service.” Pompeo accused Assange of being “a fraud — a coward hiding behind a screen.”

Pompeo’s word choice was no accident. By accusing Wikileaks of being a “hostile intelligence service” rather than a publisher of information on illegal and abusive government practices leaked by whistleblowers, he signaled that the organization has no First Amendment rights. Like many in Washington, he does not understand that the First Amendment is a limitation on government rather than a granting of rights to citizens. Pompeo was declaring war on Wikileaks.

But not that long ago Pompeo also cited Wikileaks as an important source of information. In July he drew attention to the Wikileaks release of information damaging to the Clinton campaign, writing,

“Need further proof that the fix was in from President Obama on down?”

There is a word for this sudden about-face on Wikileaks and the transparency it provides us into the operations of the prominent and powerful: hypocrisy.

The Trump Administration’s declaration of war on whistleblowers and Wikileaks is one of the greatest disappointments in these first 100 days. Donald Trump rode into the White House with promises that he would “drain the swamp,” meaning that he would overturn the apple carts of Washington’s vested interests. By unleashing those same vested interests on those who hold them in check – the whistleblowers and those who publish their revelations – he has turned his back on those who elected him.

Julian Assange, along with the whistleblowers who reveal to us the evil that is being done in our name, are heroes. They deserve our respect and admiration, not a prison cell. If we allow this president to declare war on those who tell the truth, we have only ourselves to blame.

The differing electoral support across social classes, races and ethnic groups for populist candidates and policies raises a number of questions. Why do some rather than others respond favorably to the populist appeal? Is there some rational calculus of benefits and costs for their adherence to populism?

In some local, immediate, context (like the workplace) are there situations that generate emotional support for populism? The last question is the primary focus of this essay. Many authors have noted the particularly strong emotions expressed by populists during political campaigns: fear,anger, frustration, and resentment (Judis, p. 59). Answers to the question of emotional support for populism progress through three topics: 1. populism’s relationship to democracy, 2. the emergence of today’s “populist explosion”and populism’s opposition to pluralism, 3. the relationship of pluralism to a sense of injustice in the workplace.

1. Is populism democratic?

Professors Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, both political scientists, have resolved a current controversy about whether or not populism is democratic. Much of their argument hinges on the distinction between “electoral” and “Liberal democracy”. Populism supports electoral democracy, understood as majority rule and popular sovereignty (no higher authority than “the will of the people”). Populism opposes Liberal democracy that includes three additional principles: protection of fundamental minority rights, constraints on the “tyranny of the majority” by independent institutions such as constitutional courts, and checks and balances (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, pp. 80-82).

Müller, also a political scientist, is in agreement with these authors, however he employs a somewhat different set of terms. Electoral democracy for Müller is “illiberal democracy” (pp. 50,51, 54, 55). Many debates end here without considering the context of the political system. The authors point out that populism supports the transition to electoral democracy from authoritarian rule.

Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser define populism as an ideology and a “populist logic” that views society as divided into two homogeneous subcultures, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite” and that politics should reflect only the general will of “the people”. Understood in this way, it becomes clear that populism opposes Liberal democracy and pluralism. Müller states that populists are always anti-pluralist (Müller, pp. 3, 20).Populists sometimes combine populism with a host-ideology. Left-wing populists often adopt socialism as a host-ideology while right-wing populists may espouse nationalism, authoritarianism or nativism.

2. Why are “the people” opposed to neoliberalism?

The history of populism as protest traverses several successive periods of the changing “underlying consensus about the government’s role in the economy and abroad” (Judis, p. 19). This begins with the period of laissez-faire capitalism (until 1929), followed by New Deal liberalism begun under Roosevelt (1932-1968), then neoliberalism since the early 1970s. The latest is the period of anti-neoliberalism beginning in the crisis of 1991 and exacerbated by the global financial crisis in 2008 (Judis, pp..46, 59).

The most recent years of the populist explosion up to the 2016 US election can be understood as taking place within an ever-growing reaction to the failures of globalization and its neoliberal policies. Who has lost most in terms of its failed promises? Are these “the people” whose complaints have least been heard by the “establishment”? What are their complaints? What have these complaints to do with their social identity as “the people”? My answers to these questions will help explain how they experience distributive injustice and why they oppose pluralism.

According to Judis, the period beginning in the late 1980s saw growing disappointments in the promises of globalization: growing inequality of wealth, unemployment, trade deficits, de-industrialization, and illegal immigration (Judis, p. 45). The neoliberal ideology underpinning globalization endorses free trade, free flow of capital, free flow of migration-workers, de-regulation of markets, and more.

Populists have increasingly spoken out against neoliberal policies and in favor of those who have had the most to lose. This trend only deepened with the Great Recession of 2008 enabling many to comprehend the flaws in neoliberal policies and programs. One of the long-term complaints of “middle American radicals” MAR (Judis, 35, 38), a term often used to characterize “the people”, is that immigration has been used consciously by “the elites” to push down wages and weaken unions by the influx of cheap labor (Judis, 42). The MAR considers that recent immigrants have taken away jobs from native-born Americans (Judis, 57). They oppose having to subsidize lower classes or recent legal immigrants for health care through their tax increases (Judis, pp. 43, 57). They resent Obama’s policies to address the Great Recession that appeared to favor lower income groups while neglecting middle-income groups (Judis, p. 55).

Fareed Zakaria emphasizes the predominance of culture over economics in the explanation of support for current American populism. He cites survey research that shows economic concerns to be less important than cultural issues such as massive immigration in generating “an assault on their civilization” (Zakaria, Foreign Affairs, Nov. 2016, p. 13). The cultural fears of populists produce racism, xenophobia and ethnic nationalism (Zakaria, pp. 14-15).

The most recent attempts by populists to mobilize “white Americans left behind by globalization and post-industrialism” are found in the 2016 Trump campaign (Judis, p. 75). His support base can be described as Republican, White working and middle-class voters (MAR) (Judis, p. 75). Based on several polls carried out in 2016, it is possible to identify “the people” supporting Donald Trump. They were less educated, less wealthy, and predominantly blue collar or service workers. Of the Trump voters 70.1% were not college graduates, 50% earning under $50,000 per year. Predominantly they were descendants of White-working class voters whose alienation from Washington began in 1972 (Judis, p. 75). Their alienation deepened since the Great Recession as their economic prospects declined and as policies favored the upper- and middle-class and the rich (Judis, p. 75). They opposed Obamacare because it favored minorities and the poor and would place a further tax burden on the middle class (Judis, p. 77).

It should come as no surprise, then, that Trump supporters, the most recent populist movement in the US, oppose the “Washington consensus” that endorses neoliberalism (the latest stage in the relation of the economy to government). “The people” lose job opportunities, have stagnating wages, anticipate higher taxes to support minorities and immigrants, and feel anxious about their economic future, all because of the “corrupt elites” who pursue neoliberal policies and neglect “the people’s” complaints.

3. How does the workplace generate support for populism?

Müller and other observers of the populist phenomenon consistently refer to the emotionality of populist supporters. Most often they refer to populists being driven by resentment, anger, and frustration (Müller, pp. 1,9, 12,15,16). Some of these emotions may be traced to the above discussion of the uprising against neoliberal policies (of globalization) that clearly have had negative impacts on certain parts of the population (inequality, stagnating wages, higher tax burdens, unemployment). And further, the “corrupt elites” in industry and government pursue their neoliberal policies to the neglect of the marginalized “people”.

Another trait of the “populist logic” explains further the emotionality of its supporters. That logic, once again, is that a “morally pure people” challenges a “corrupt elite” (Müller, pp. 3, 19-20, 63). In stronger words, “the hardworking people” oppose “the very bottom of society (those who do not really work and live like parasites off the work of others)” (Müller, p. 23). Müller speaks of the populists in power who claim to be “the exclusive moral representation of the people” (Müller, p. 48) and claim further a “moral justification” for populist policies (Müller, p. 44). This leads Müller to refer to populism’s “political morality” (Müller, pp.23, 24). When morality enters political discourse one can expect emotions to be activated.

Now, in the light of these conditions (the adverse reaction of “the people” to neoliberal policies and the moralistic “logic of populism”), how can one’s emotional experience of distributive injustice in the workplace make one a populist? Aristotle’s view on distributive justice helps to produce an answer. But before addressing Aristotle’s ideas,a few preliminary words are necessary on the basic notion of distributive justice.

Overview of distributive justice. We can understand distributive justice as the rationale for the distribution (equal or unequal) of rewards in society. According to the principle of equity, “rewards” such as wealth, opportunity and privilege, are distributed unequally yet proportionately according to a consensual criterion or criteria.

Then the distribution is said to be just. Whether the valuables are material, such as wealth, or immaterial such as opportunities (job, security,promotion), an individual may receive his or her “fair” share by these criteria, or otherwise perceive relative deprivation in invidious comparisons with others. From the perspective of social psychology, the criteria for the unequal distribution are labelled, “investment statuses” and the outcomes, “reward statuses” (wealth, etc.). Furthermore, the investment statuses may be achieved, that is acquired (e.g. education, skills) or ascribed, that is inborn (e.g. race, religion, nationality, ethnicity). In a meritocracy, rewards are distributed unequally according to achieved investment statuses. In an aristocracy the unequal distribution corresponds to ascribed statuses (Alschuler, pp. 135-139).

Aristotle on distributive justice. When a social comparison results in perceived injustice in the distribution of “awards,” this generates “quarrels and complaints,” according to Aristotle. He describes several situations in which this may happen.

If they are not equal, they will not have what is equal – hence the quarrels and complaints when either equals have and are awarded unequal shares or unequals equal shares (Barnes and Kenney, p. 96). Further, this is plain from the fact that awards should be according to worth; … though they do not all specify the same sort of worth – democrats identify it with the status of freeman, supporters of oligarchy with riches (or with high birth)… The just, then, is something proportionate… It is the “equality of ratios” (of the worth of persons to the things awarded).(Barnes and Kenney, p. 97)

Aristotle’s abstract formulation can be translated into two situations that describe a typical worker in today’s America. Let us imagine two carpenters with equal job qualifications, co-workers on the job, one of whom is a White, Christian, native born American while the other is a member of an ethnic minority (non-White, non-Christian, immigrant). They engage in social comparisons in two situations.

Situation A: in a Liberal democracy
“If they are not equal, they will not have what is equal” (Barnes and Kenney, p. 96)

The White supremacist carpenter considers “worth” to be based on ascribed statuses: White race, Christian religion, and nativism. In comparison to the minority ethnic carpenter, the White supremacist considers his worth to be greater. For him it is “fair” to receive a greater wage. Yet, the two earn equal wages. The proportion of worth to award, (higher ascribed status to same wage) for the supremacist is not equal to the ethnic carpenter’s proportion of worth to award (lower ascribed status to same wage). As Aristotle says, “hence the quarrels and complaints”, due to a perception of injustice or unfairness. It ought to be evident already that pluralism (rights for minorities) is operative in a Liberal democracy, allowing the ethnic worker to receive the same earnings as the supremacist worker for the same occupation and same qualifications. After all, pluralism means the protection of rights of minorities (equal rights protected by law). It goes without saying that the ethnic carpenter finds Situation A to be fair (equal pay for equal work).

Situation B: in an Electoral democracy
“equals have or are awarded with unequal shares” (Barnes and Kenney, p. 96)

The ethnic carpenter bases his “worth” on achieved statuses: education, skills, experience. He views his worth as equal to that of the supremacist carpenter. So the ethnic carpenter expects a fair wage to be equal to that of the supremacist carpenter. Yet, the supremacist worker earns more. The ethnic worker perceives this as unjust. “Hence the quarrels and complaints”. Under electoral democracy minority rights are not being respected. Indeed, this is job discrimination. From the supremacist worker’s perspective, he has greater worth in terms of his ascribed investment statuses and consequently finds his greater wage to be justified. Situation B confirms that the ethnic job discrimination is “fair”.

The political context (electoral democracy versus Liberal democracy) goes a long way toward understanding the emotional responses of these two carpenters to their perceived injustices (relative deprivation). The supremacist carpenter experiences moral indignation (“a complaint”) in situation A (under Liberal democracy) and contentment in situation B (under electoral democracy). The ethnic carpenter experiences contentment in situation A and resentment (“a complaint”) in situation B. It is evident that the differing political contexts influence their contrasting “definitions of the situation” in A and B, and as a consequence, their distinct emotional reactions.

Conclusion

Returning to the focus of this essay, what situation generates emotional support for populism? In a Liberal democracy a chain of causality begins in the workplace with the racism of the White supremacist worker. Given a sense of racial superiority, the higher ascribed investment status of a supremacist worker who receives pay or other rewards equal to that of a minority ethnic worker leads to the perception of DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE. The emotional experience of moral indignation makes him receptive to the appeal of POPULISM. 1. The “populist logic” opposes pluralism, the protection of minority rights, since government should reflect only the general will of “the people”. 2. Populism opposes NEOLIBERALISM that unduly benefits minorities at the expense of “the people”.

References

Alschuler, Lawrence. (1978). Predicting Development, Dependency and Conflict in Latin America: A Social Field Theory. Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press. pp. 135-139.

Barnes, Jonathan and Anthony Kenney, eds. (2014). Aristotle’s Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. “Eudemian Ethics”, chap. 5, pp. 96-97, para. 1131a.

Judis, John. (2016).The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports.

Mudde, Cas. and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2017). Populism: a Very Short Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Müller, Jan-Werner. (2016). What is Populism? Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Zakaria, Fareed. (2016, November,) “Populism on the March: Why the West is in Trouble.” Foreign Affairs, 95, 6, pp. 9-15.

Two of the world’s seemingly most unlikely partners, Russia and Qatar, have been moving closer to one another over the past year in spite of their polar opposite views towards the War on Syria. It’s well known among the global public how Moscow supports the democratically elected and legitimate leadership of President Assad, while Doha has been behind Al Nusra and countless other “moderate rebel opposition” (terrorist) groups since day one, though the time appears to be coming where both state sponsors are making inroads towards reaching a fabled so-called “political solution”. 

Russia has made it abundantly clear on many occasions that the War on Syria can only be wrapped up with a political, not military, solution, which therefore infers some sort of vague power-sharing agreement between President Assad and the “opposition”. The Astana format brokered between itself, Iran, and Turkey is a step in that direction, and Moscow’s peace-making efforts have won the acceptance of Damascus, although the lengthy process has only just begun and many important issues still remain unaddressed at this moment.

In principle, accepting that Russia has officially eschewed a military solution and is totally dedicated towards achieving a political one for whatever its self-interested purposes may be (e.g. avoiding mission creep, lack of political will to militarily “go all out”, etc.), the only way that it can reach this ambitious goal and make it sustainable is to enter into a complex series of deal-making with the most prominent patrons of the “moderate opposition rebels”, ergo the importance of Qatar in this framework.

As a prelude to pragmatically bringing Qatar into the fold, Russia sold nearly 20% of oil giant Rosneft to the Kingdom and a Swiss firm in a joint deal announced at the end of last year, a power move which instantly brought the two competing powers together on a separate apolitical plane guided by common economic self-interests. This major move completely changed the calculations which had hitherto gone into analyzing the nature of Russian-Qatari relations, and it’s thus no surprise that Russia shortly thereafter began talking about including its new Mideast partner into the Astana format.

Iran, however, has been reluctant to see either energy rival Qatar or sectarian foe Saudi Arabia added to Astana, and it’s due to Tehran’s objections that neither “rebel” sponsor is officially a part of those negotiations, though that doesn’t mean that Russia hasn’t nevertheless engaged them outside this context. In fact, largely unbeknownst to many casual observers, Russia and Saudi Arabia are in the midst of a slow-moving rapprochement with one another which has been facilitated by Moscow’s newfound partners in Ankara and Islamabad (the so-called “Keys to the Kingdom”, as they’re seen in Russia), though the specific details of this intriguing development lay outside the focus of the present article.

Whether it’s Saudi Arabia or Qatar, however, both Gulf Kingdoms have global energy interests and play a leading role in the War on Syria, just as Russia does, and this resultantly provides two separate platforms for Moscow to interface with them in seeking to surmount their previously intractable divergences so as to reach a series of compromises which ultimately advance their respective interests.

Russia’s Rosneft deal with Qatar sought to minimize the strategic market rivalry between Moscow and Doha much as the OPEC deal aimed to do the same between Russia and the Saudis, with the final outcome evidently being that both energy-related arrangements succeeded in cultivating enough goodwill between all sides that their sensitive (and somewhat secret) dual-track Syrian diplomacy was able to progress.

This is seen most evidently by the two top-level events which took place on the weekend of 15-16 April, when the Qatari Foreign Minister visited Moscow and the speaker of the upper house of Russia’s parliament (and legally the third most powerful person in the country) Valentina Matvienko traveled to Saudi Arabia. Both interconnected summits dealt with Syria and visibly proved that Russia is indeed engaged in active diplomacy with these two “rebel” sponsors despite their omission from the Astana framework.

Moreover, Russia’s shrewd politicking with Qatar and Saudi Arabia over Syria also confirms that Moscow is behaving according to the precepts of what the author has previously termed the “19th-Century Great Power Chessboard”, the consummate Neo-Realist paradigm whereby Russia prioritizes its engagement with similarly sized Great Powers at the perceived (key word) expense of its smaller- and medium-sized partners such as Syria in order to promote what it believes to be the “greater good”.

To explain, Syrian officials might understandably feel uncomfortable negotiating with known terrorist groups such as Jaysh al-Islam, though this must occur in one form or another (such as the indirect template spearheaded by Astana) if the desired “political solution” is to be reached, which in and of itself isn’t possible in the first place without the group’s foreign sponsors agreeing to such a development. Had it not been for Russia’s pragmatic diplomacy with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Jaysh al-Islam would never have been “allowed” by its backers to attend Astana, and the entire Tripartite arrangement would have been for naught.

There are definitely serious image issues involved with Russia rubbing shoulders with what had up until this moment been its chief geopolitical rivals in the region, though to refer back to the “greater good” that it’s trying to obtain, there is little else that Moscow can do if it sincerely wants to advance a political solution to the War on Syria. However awkward it may appear, such a move is ultimately necessary so long as Russia refuses to commit to a military solution, thereby making these diplomatic advances more pragmatic than paradoxical in hindsight.

The Astana arrangement between Russia, Iran, and Turkey has yielded moderate and realistic successes so far given its obvious constraints, though it’s because of its limitations and Tehran’s outright rejection of Riyadh and Doha’s participation in this format that a separate Tripartite needs to emerge in parallel between Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. There is no other way for a lasting and sustainable political solution to be reached unless Damascus’ chief ally diplomatically intercedes on its behalf in reaching Great Power deals with these two troublesome Gulf Kingdoms.

As can probably be rightly inferred, the previous clinching of energy partnerships such as the Rosneft sale to Qatar and OPEC agreement with Saudi Arabia made each of Russia’s counterparts more amenable to speaking with it, therefore setting up the present diplomatic situation leading up to the unannounced Parallel Tripartite between Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia over Syria. This in turn advances Russia’s vision of playing the role of Eurasia’s chief geopolitical balancer and therefore strengthens its grand strategic plans in the New Cold War.

Having said that, however, there still remains a lot that can go wrong, and there aren’t any solid precedents to go by in forecasting whether each side can truly trust the other. Rather, what’s presently unfolding is an exercise of mutual goodwill guided by pragmatic self-interests over Syria and the broader dynamics of the global energy market, the latter of which has made it considerably easier to reach a compromise understanding over the former.

Russia will therefore have to tread very carefully as it seeks to cut political-energy deals with its wary partners/rivals in the Parallel Tripartite, but if Moscow is ultimately successful, than the outcome would inevitably be a game-changing re-division of the Mideast’s balance of power which sees Russia emerge as the region’s chief kingmaker to the US’ comparative expense.

Disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution. 

The UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) warned about possible nuclear war, by design or accident, calling the risk highest since the end of the Cold War.

Nine nations have nukes: America, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Given heightened world tensions, especially in East Asia, the Middle East, and US hostility toward multiple countries, possible nuclear war may be inevitable, perhaps just a matter of time.

In 1982 testimony before Congress, founder of America’s nuclear navy Admiral Hyman Rickover said

“(t)he lesson of history is when a war starts, every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon(s) it has available.”

“I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible (nuclear) force and try to eliminate it.” His warning went unheeded.

Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell warned about the same thing, Russell saying

“(s)hall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war.” The risk is eventual annihilation. 

Historian Arnold Toynbee and HG Wells warned about either ending wars or they’ll end us.

America intends spending over a trillion dollars upgrading its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years – instead of responsibly eliminating it along with other nations to end the threat of mass annihilation.

A new Pentagon Nuclear Posture Review being prepared is expected to stress adversarial relations with Russia, North Korea, Iran and other nations, heightening the threat of nuclear confrontation.

On Sunday, joint US/Japanese naval exercises began, a Pentagon statement saying they’re

“starting on April 23. The exercises are held in the western part of the Pacific Ocean.”

“The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and other” US warships are involved, along with two Japanese destroyers.

On April 14, Trump warned about possible military confrontation with North Korea if it conducted more nuclear weapons and ballistic missile tests.

On Saturday, China’s Xinhua news agency said Pyongyang rejects dialogue with Washington as long as it’s hostile to its government.

It quoted a DPRK Korean Workers’ Party commentary, saying Washington

“openly reveal(ed) its intention not to rule out the use of military force including unilateral preemptive attack, to say nothing of multilateral military and diplomatic pressure and high-intensity economic sanctions and redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea.”

US policymakers ruled out

“dialogue with the DPRK. Meanwhile, the US is pressurizing countries around the DPRK to join it in putting diplomatic pressure and high-intensity economic sanctions on the DPRK.” 

“It even threatens that it would seek out an independent way of preventing the DPRK from bolstering nuclear deterrence.”

On April 25, senior US, Japanese and South Korean diplomats will discuss heightened Korean peninsula tensions in Tokyo – focused on containing Pyongyang

War on the Korean peninsula would be disastrous. Anything is possible with neocon generals in charge of US geopolitical policies.

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. 

Fresh calls for a Greater Albania, incorporating the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, have led to an angry backlash from politicians in Belgrade.

Sputnik Radio’s Mark Hirst talked to Marko Djuric, Director of the Government Office for Kosovo and Metohija.

Such a move by Albania, if acted upon, could plunge the entire region back into a bloody and costly war on a scale not seen since the 1990s.

Marko Djuric said that Serbia will not allow the creation of a Greater Albania in its southern province and that it is not alone in opposing the idea, which stems from the times of Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.

When asked whether this inflammatory statement by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama was a tactical move, rather than a serious claim, Djuric said that if it was actually translated into concrete action, then it would be a blatant violation of international law.

“For us and for a large part of the international community, including the UN, Kosovo and Metohija are an integral part of Serbia. There was no kind of a democratic procedure in Kosovo’s secession from Serbia,” he emphasized.

Meanwhile, the EU, a body to which both Serbia and Albania eventually hope to join, remains silent over the Albanian prime minister’s controversial comments.

“Unfortunately, we saw silence when Pristina decided to stop the dialogue, and we don’t see a sufficient EU reaction to these claims. During the past years the Pristina authorities have failed to bring about any economic growth in the region where the unemployment rate is 65 percent and 45 percent of ethnic Albanians live below the poverty line even though the EU has invested over 60 billion euros into our southern province,” Marko Djuric continued.

He added that the local Serbs, who have suffered numerous pogroms in the past 20 years, were “terrified” by the prospect of being “swallowed” into “Greater Albania.”

“We should also bear in mind the fact that two-thirds of Kosovo’s pre-war Serbian population remain refugees and only about 120,000 still live in Kosovo and Metohija in poor economic conditions and political isolation, while over 200,000 now live in central Serbia,” Djuric pointed out.

He added that the EU was doing nothing to help the Serbs to return to Kosovo.

“The return of Serbs who were expelled from Kosovo has been an utter failure by the international community. The rate of their return is the lowest in any post-conflict zones in modern history, even lower than in Rwanda and Burundi.”

Marko Djuric added that whatever assistance the returnees get comes from Serbia, which pays monthly allowances to those who want to return.

“What we can’t provide without the assistance of the international community, however, is a political climate and access to property.

Over 80,000 houses and apartments in Kosovo are now used by other people and, together with security problems, these are the biggest obstacles preventing the Serbs’ return to Kosovo,” Marko Djuric said.

Earlier in the week, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama made a statement that Albania and the partially recognized republic of Kosovo, also inhabited by Albanians, could reach a “union.”

Soon afterward, President of Kosovo Hashim Thaci said that if Brussels “closed [the] door on Kosovo,” all Albanians in the region would unite into one state.

The Albanians are one of the Balkan peoples constituting the majority of population in Albania. However, significant numbers of Albanians live in the territories of former Yugoslavia, neighboring Albania itself, such as Kosovo and Montenegro.

A number of politicians, such as Rama, have voiced the idea of a Greater Albania in order to unify all the territories inhabited by the Albanians within a single state.

Kosovo unilaterally proclaimed independence in 2008 and is recognized by over 100 UN member states. Serbia, as well as Russia, China, Israel, Iran, Spain, Greece and some other countries do not recognize Kosovo’s independence.

Executive Summary

For the first time, research shall focus on NATO’S so-called “secret armies”, and explain the notion of the Stay-Behind networks by shedding light on the architecture of cooperation that supported those networks. The study highlights the ongoing “criminalization” of the Stay-Behind networks since the 1990s, in part a result of the extreme confusion in public opinion about these structures established at the end of World War II, and the lack of knowledge of how NATO operates as well as its intelligence capabilities.

The difficulty in understanding the notion of the Stay-Behind networks results from the way revelations about the Italian network were released, leading to a series of press investigations that purported to show the collusion of these networks with the Italian far-right. Such a story was an attractive explanation, but it was far from the truth. Indeed, there never was any such collusion. In order to understand these clandestine structures, one must first take into account the geopolitical contingencies that existed at the end of the Second World War.

The Stay-Behind networks were first a solution that emerged from the lessons learnt by the European Chiefs of Staff during the conflict. Accordingly, a French-British model appeared in North Western Europe, aimed at intelligence work and the infiltration/exfiltration of agents, rather than any attempts at sabotage or guerrilla warfare. It was quite different from the networks developed by the Americans in Germany and Italy that were more action-oriented. An attempt to combine the two concepts was made by the Clandestine Planning Committee, a structure that brought together the intelligence services of NATO but it did not succeed; this failure invalidates somewhat the idea of “NATO’s secret armies”. Indeed, the states concerned found themselves in very different geographical situations and were confronted with specific national political contingencies.

They thus took action according to their means and their objectives, which restricted NATO-level coordination between the intelligence services involved in the Stay-Behind networks.

It was at the heart of the Western European Union (WEU) and not NATO that the intelligence services of Great Britain, France, Benelux and Scandinavia hid the existence of the Western Union Clandestine Committee. This body was not aimed at coordinating but rather supporting the establishment of Stay-Behind networks. The United States received a makeshift role, but they continued to run networks they had founded in Germany and Italy in their own way, that served US objectives. At the heart of NATO, they sought to turn the Clandestine Committee into a coordination center, but the intelligence services of Northern and Western Europe in return presented an Allied Coordination Committee, aimed at exchanging best practices with regard to member state Stay-Behind networks.

Though they managed to preserve the initial concept that combined intelligence, infiltration/exfiltration and action, they however failed to stop NATO from developing a new concept, that of the Special Forces. This shift can be explained by the growing influence of the Americans within the integrated military organization and their desire to prepare the fight against the Warsaw Pact. But this evolution would not always be of concern for the United Kingdom, France, Benelux and the Scandinavian countries. These countries were to be impacted by the reduction in US funding for the Stay-Behind program as of 1965 and they would have to undergo the consequences of the revelations, first revealed by Soviet spies, then by the media, that would lead to the gross misunderstandings surrounding the Stay-Behind concept.

Click here to read the full report. (pdf)

Trump, within a span of a week, has made a U-turn; from a coward to hero.

So, the MSM; his aggressive violence, his murderous killing spree in Syria, Yemen and threatening North Korea with a nuclear ‘take-out’ – turns Trump from a coward to a macho.

Overnight, so to speak, Trump has become the darling of the mainstream media.

That tells you who is controlling the ‘brainstream’ of the masses. Just look at the 24 April 2017 edition of the US Inquirer – “Trump Declaring War on Dictators”, depicting photographs of Presidents Putin, Assad, and Kim Jong Un, with the caption “Dead Men Walking”. What this paper says – if the term ‘paper’ even applies – is the opinion of a large segment of the US population – and the west in general, led by the puppets of Europe.

After attacking Syria for a false flag Sarin gas attack on mainly women and children, pretending sending the nuclear aircraft carrier Carl Vinson to the shores of North Korea – and taking over from the Saudis, the most vicious war against helpless Yemen, killing thousands of civilians, women and children, soon exceeding Obama’s murders – and plunging this poverty struck country into further misery and famine – Trump has finally ascended to the level corporate America and their corrupt media requires a US president to command the world. Bravo!

Actually, with all the hoopla of the new warrior Trump, there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding his turn-around politics in Syria, and especially with the aircraft flotilla sailing towards North Korea. According to the NYT, the Navy released photographs of the Carl Vinson off the coast of Indonesia to take part in a joint Navy exercise with Australia, thousands of miles away from the Korean peninsula. Trump then corrected himself saying the vessel would arrive in North Korea by this weekend, whereas the Pentagon speculated it would reach its destination more likely towards the end of April. And a few days ago, the White House reported sending two more carriers and flotillas to North Korean waters? – What is actually going on in the waters off the Korean peninsula?

Not least, as Trump’s heroic bravura, he inaugurated the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) – the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Blast Bomb, by dropping it – an 11,000-ton bomb equivalent of TNT – on Afghanistan’s villages – killing dozens of innocent people. Even within his first 100 days in office, Trump has joined the club of murderers, assassins and war criminals of his predecessors. Just to see whether MOAB behaves as expected, busting bunkers and other underground structures, causing earthquake like explosions up to 200 m below the surface, capable of destroying nuclear reactors. Its reported to be the most devastating bomb, other than a nuclear bomb. It is the most vicious and devastating test since the nuclear Hiroshima blast.

The MOAB is mainly intended for nuclear reactors. The thought goes to North Korea, and Iran. Afghanistan, already a wasteland, complements of the horrid west, was not chosen by accident for the test. Afghanistan, in addition to the country of transit still planned for the infamous and highly disputed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline, also possesses uncountable riches of rare earths and minerals – worth billions and especially needed for the ever-growing war industrial complex – which already today uses up more than half of the extractive industry’s output, worldwide.

Imagine – first devastation of mother earth by plundering her unrenewable resources; then doubling up with destruction and merciless killing and maiming of countries, cities, cultures and entire populations. All for dominance, power and – greed. And Trump goes along with all of that – at least for now, as he needs the support of the Neocons to survive.

Yes, Trump, after just 100 days in office has proven that he is up to the task that his masters have carved out for him. He had a choice of sticking to his campaign promises of seeking peace not war, of not interfering in other countries’ businesses – and risking being impeached or even killed – there are precedents of neutralizing inconvenient politicians, including in the history of the United States, as we know – by the deep establishment. Well, The Donald chose to live and bask in the sun of his success. Who wants to blame him?  But turning from an eccentric billionaire to an outright mass murderer, makes him a first-degree assassin. If there was an independent Nuremberg style court on this globe, their fate would be sealed.

Justice in our western world is nothing but a pipedream. And unless, We, the People, stop believing in the fakeness of the UN System, of international institutions, including the International Court of Justice – once designed as balancing organisms, as peace and justice seeking institutions – we are actually contributing to the fraud played out in front of our eyes.

Now let’s face it. Would Washington and its masters be stupid enough to risk a nuclear war over North Korea, or Syria for that matter? – I doubt it. Not even Trump would be stupid enough to risk destroying the world as we know it, with no known outcomes, other than probable and likely total or close to total destruction. That’s not good business. That’s not good for profits. On the other hand, keeping wars and conflicts as vicious and chaotic as possible and as long as possible, that’s good business, bringing high profits for the war industry and its sub-contractor, the extractive industry.

Mr. Trump, you are a businessman. Your sable-rattling scares people. Scared people do not invest. But you know such things. Do you? – So, you can’t really believe that you will scare Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping onto their knees? – They are much stronger than you, intellectually, spiritually and even compared to your war-mongering armada displayed around the globe. And you and your masters know it. But you hope more deception-propaganda may help postpone your faltering empire’s demise.

Talking to Americans of all walks, talks and beliefs – the Inquirer, mentioned above, may at least partially reflect the opinion of a large a segment of people. Though, one thing is crystal clear and unites pretty much all US citizens I talked to – whether they voted for The Donald or not – none of them wants war. They are all scared of another war; they want peace, work and a livelihood that allows them to feed their families.

President Trump take note. They elected you. Most of them are sick and tired seeing their tax dollars being spent on wars and endless conflicts around the globe – while at home they are suffering unemployment at rates way above the official labor statistics – around 22% – and decapitation of social services at rates similar to those of Spain and Greece. They all may like the MSM hammered and brainwashed slogan of “America First” and “Making America Great Again” – but they do not see the connection to wars. None of those that I talked to think that the Inquirer’s ‘dictators’ – Messrs. Assad, Kim Jong Un and Putin are a threat to US national security.

President Trump wake up! Your co-citizens are waking up. They want an America of Peace, not of bombs and blood. They want the America your promised them – of friendly relations with other nations, including Russia, of non-interference in foreign lands, of a reduction of the more than 1,000 US military bases around the globe – and they want you to bring back outsourced jobs to their Homeland. They want a strong America, as in a solid economy, not one based on wars and destruction.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Vassal visiting time, and the next slot in the US imperium tourism schedule was one of America’s more cosy allies, Australia. The US Vice President Mike Pence popped in to keep an eye on matters just to make sure that all was in order. 

There had been that issue of the notable phone call, when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had been verbally slapped by The Donald over the “dumb” refugee resettlement deal made with the previous Obama administration.

Not to fear. Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop came across as caddies willing to do their best for Pence (a US vice president deserves two such officials for this sort of visit). Chuckling, everything seemed to be going accordingly.

That said, Pence did not hide his irritation at a few matters on the meeting agenda, including the refugee agreement made by the Obama administration with Turnbull.

“President Trump has made it clear that we’ll honour the agreement, but it doesn’t mean we admire the agreement.”

As watchers of the refugee news items know, Australia responds to asylum seekers and refugees like an insecure spouse feeling that his assets might be pinched.

The result is usually a practiced irrationalism, in this instance involving the transfer of up to 1,250 refugees in offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island to the United States, in exchange for refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Pence did, however, promise Australia a range of treats, one of them being direct benefits arising from President Trump’s new tax plan. In true Trump fashion, Pence met with various corporate groups, Westfield, Macquarie Group, Lendlease, and Austral, to promise pie-in-the-sky benefits amounting to $1.5 trillion. (Another figure, another speculation.) 

The shower of meaningless rhetoric was heavy.

“The truth is that a stronger American economy also means a stronger economy for all our trading partners, including Australia.”[1] The tax reform on the table “will make the strongest economy in the world stronger still, and it will benefit the American people, American workers, and it will benefit the economy of Australia.”

Such words ring hollow given that the Australian-US Free Trade Agreement has done much to benefit US economic interests disproportionately to Australia’s. Despite projections of an economic nirvana by policy wonks in Canberra, the deal has actually deprived and distorted Australian gains.

The economic promises were merely one feature of the utopian cake being dished up by Pence.

Australia remains a convenient base to watch over matters in the Pacific, be it through military or intelligence operations. That very fact makes Australia both accessory and target in any future conflict in the region. 

Never deemed a military occupation, let alone having the vestiges of a military base, Australian officials have opened their doors to the Lean Green Killing Machine on a rotational basis, a policy that began in 2011. Whether this is part of Obama’s pivot, or Trump’s strategic grope, it all amounts to the same thing: this continental military operation is open for business.

Pence’s visit coincides with another rotational round for the US marines in Darwin, located in the tropical north of the continent. The group, comprising 1,250 personnel, have been particularly busy on the public relations blower.

The soldiers have been instructed to make small talk with the local press, and fraternising is to be encouraged – within limits. Like anthropologists, they are to observe the local population and note their “customs,” though experience tells us that these observations tend to go destructively awry. 

Even Facebook hosts a Marine Rotational Force Darwin page to provide decent filtered comments about the US role in shielding Australia from foreign wickedness. Residents await the arrival of the heroes; weather, boring, tedious, endlessly warm weather, is noted. Welcome to the Australian autumn!

What, then, of the wickedness these Green Mighty Men are defending Australia against? It might take the form of Kim Jong-un’s vain boast of long range weapons, which goes to show that projecting fear is far better than knowing facts.

Such pop fantasies of nuclear cataclysm doesn’t deter the Lowy Institute’s direct of International Security, Euan Graham, from suggesting that North Korea would probably be able to construct a ballistic missile that would be able to reach the Australian mainland “within the life of the Trump administration.”[2]

Even a threat at shooting blanks by the man child in a boiler suit concerns the Australian ministries in Canberra. As long as they come from “rogues”, that is all that matters. Even more stinging was the North Korean leader’s rather accurate statement that Australia had been “blindly and zealously toeing the US line”.

The Marines in Darwin have been duly briefed, and the officers are insisting that they are ready should Pyongyang misbehave.

“Any time a Marine force is forward deployed, we’re always on standby for anything. We stand ready to fight and win the night, always,” claimed Lt. Col. Brian Middleton, commanding officer of the 3^rd Battalion of the 4^th Marines.  How utterly reassuring that must be.

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

Notes

Syria: Missile Strikes, The Terrorists Have Large Quantities of Chemical Weapons

By Stephen Karganovic, April 23, 2017

Thanks to this probably inadvertent Western coalition hit on the terrorist chemical weapons depot, the key controversial issue left from the first explosion attributed to the Syrian air force was finally settled. Indeed, it turns out the terrorists do have quantities of chemical weapons at their disposal. Their established disregard for human life and rules of civilized conduct in general – not just in warfare – actually makes them prime candidates to be the authors of the politically motivated false flag April 4 outrage.

Breaking: French Presidential Election: Macron and Le Pen in Run-Off?

By Stephen Lendman, April 23, 2017

Expect continuity no matter who succeeds Francois Hollande. Longtime French foreign policy analyst Alain Gresh believes France under any leader has “limited impact…on the management of Middle East foreign policy today” – unlike decades earlier.

Afghanistan: Impunity is Another US Lethal Weapon that Kills Silently

By Masud Wadan, April 24, 2017

The US was expected to step forward and determine their fate as it has called for a stern war on Haqqani network and termed the group a “menace” to the American security. Despite being blacklisted by both the West and UN, the US is counteractively so “relent” to the terror group.

Canada Chooses The Wrong Path. Contempt for Peace, De Facto Support for Terrorism in Syria

By Mark Taliano, April 24, 2017

In contrast to life-enhancing globalization that respects international law and nation-state sovereignty, the current form of globalization is contemptuous of international laws and conventions. Instead of rescinding the illegal sanctions against Syria – which aim to destroy Syria and empower the terrorists — Canada’s Trudeau is making them more onerous. Diplomacy as a solution continues to be ignored, Embassies remain closed, and Canada’s contempt for peace and support for terrorism continues unabated.

Trump, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Julian Assange

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, April 24, 2017

Legal counsel for Assange, Barry Pollack, has attempted to dampen the latest spike of interest in WikiLeaks a touch by suggesting that there has been “no communication with the Department of Justice and they have not indicated to me that they have brought any charges against Mr. Assange.”

In another step toward world-wide trade war, the International Monetary Fund over the weekend became the second major global economic organisation to back away from a commitment to “resist all forms of protectionism.”

In the wake of the decision at last month’s meeting of the G20 finance ministers to drop the phrase from its communiqué, the IMF adopted the same course at its spring meeting in Washington. In both cases, the “free trade” commitment was removed as a result of pressure from the Trump administration, in line with the White House’s “America First” agenda.

The statement issued by the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) said it sought to “promote a level playing field in international trade,” dropping the previous wording.

The current chair of the committee, Agustin Carstens, the governor of the Bank of Mexico, sought to cover over the significance of the decision by suggesting that the previous wording had been removed because “the use of the word protectionism is very ambiguous.”

In reality, the omission of any disavowal of protectionism is an unmistakable expression of mounting trade tensions, fueled above all by the Trump administration.

These conflicts could not be completely suppressed at the meeting. In his statement to the IMFC, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said

Germany “commits to keep the global economy open, resist protectionism and keep global economic and financial cooperation on track.”

This statement stood in stark contrast to the remarks of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He said the US would

“promote an expansion of trade with those partners committed to market-based competition, while more rigorously defending ourselves against unfair trade practices.”

He directed his comment in particular against the two major countries, China and Germany, that have the largest trade surpluses with the US. Washington insists that the Chinese economy is not market-based, while members of the Trump administration have asserted that Germany enjoys unfair advantages because the value of the euro is lower than where its former currency, the deutschmark, would have been.

While not directly naming Germany, which recorded a record trade surplus last year, Mnuchin said that

“countries with large external surpluses and sound public finances have a particular responsibility for contributing to a more robust global economy.”

The decision of the IMF to bow to US pressure came just days after the Trump administration announced a major initiative aimed at imposing sweeping restrictions on steel imports, which, if carried through, will have far-reaching implications for the global market in this basic commodity.

Under a little-used law dating from 1962, Trump signed an executive order to launch an investigation into the impact of steel imports on US national security. Describing the decision as a “historic day for America,” he declared that steel was “critical to both our economy and military,” and that this was not “an area where we can afford to become dependent on foreign countries.”

The invocation of “national security” has clear connections to the militarist drive of the administration. But the use of this legislation is also part of a broader strategy on protectionism laid out by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the head of Trump’s National Trade Council, in a submission to Congress earlier this year.

It is based on using previous US legislation to circumvent international trade laws enforced by the World Trade Organization, enabling the United States to impose protectionist measures with impunity. Significantly, in their paper, Ross and Navarro invoked the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, widely credited with being responsible for the trade conflicts of the 1930s that contributed to the outbreak of World War II.

Commenting on the latest Trump move to the Financial Times, Chad Brown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and a former economic adviser to President Obama, said that citing “national security” to justify restrictions on steel imports amounted to carrying out the “nuclear option” on trade.

“This is one more piece of evidence in the worrisome trend that Trump seems to be turning over every rock and investigating each tool available under US law to stop trade,” he said.

In recent years, the US has launched 152 anti-steel dumping cases and has another 25 in the pipeline. But the latest move represents a major escalation. According to Commerce Secretary Ross, the present system is too “porous” and allows only for narrow complaints against particular countries, which can be easily skirted.

The new measures are intended to bring about a “more comprehensive solution with a very wide range of steel products and a very wide range of countries,” which could “conceivably result in a recommendation to take action on all steel imports.”

This would cause chaos in international markets, as steel exporters sought to shift their output to other markets, leading to accusations of dumping, the imposition of tariffs and other restrictions—in short, a full-scale trade war.

There are two essential driving forces behind the actions of the American government:

First, the ongoing economic decline of the US, which it now seeks to overcome by political and military means—a process that has accelerated in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent decline in world economic growth and contraction of world markets.

Second, the striving by the Trump administration to deflect rising social tensions caused by low wages and growing economic hardship, and channel them along reactionary economic nationalist lines. In this, Trump has the full support of the trade union bureaucracy, with key union leaders standing beside him as he signed his executive order on steel. It is also backed by the economic nationalists of the Democratic Party, whose most prominent representative is the self-styled “socialist” Bernie Sanders.

The inherent, objective logic of these processes is economic and military war, to which the capitalist politicians can offer no progressive alternative, as the impotence displayed by the IMF in the face of what it recognises as a great danger once again underscored. This is because the growth of economic nationalism and protectionism is rooted in the very foundations of the socio-economic system based on private profit and the division of the world into rival nation-states.

One hundred years ago, the world was embroiled in the carnage of World War I. It was not the “war to end all wars,” but only the start of a more than three-decade-long struggle to decide which of the imperialist powers would achieve global dominance. Eventually, after tens of millions of deaths and untold horrors, including the Holocaust and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, the US emerged as the preeminent global power.

Now the world is being brought face to face with the even more explosive consequences of America’s economic decline.

But this year also marks the centenary of the greatest event of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution, and the successful conquest of political power by the working class, led by the Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party on the basis of the program of world socialist revolution. That must be the perspective that animates the international working class in the struggles it now directly confronts.

The attempt by Western countries to derail Russia’s fact-finding initiative in Syria to examine the site of the chemical incident in Idlib province exposes their aim to topple the Syrian government, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“I believe that it’s a very serious situation, because now it’s obvious that false information about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government is being used to move away from implementing Resolution 2254, which stipulates a political settlement with the participation of all the Syrian parties, and aims to switch to the long-cherished idea of regime change,” Lavrov said, speaking at a press conference with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Astana.

UNSC Resolution 2254 calls for an inclusive government in Syria and a peace process that would involve a new constitution and free and fair elections.

According to the minister, the decision displayed “complete incompetence” on the part of his Western colleagues, who, in fact, are “prohibiting the OPCW from sending their experts to the site of the incident, as well as to the airfield from where aircraft loaded with chemical weapons allegedly flew out.”

“Yesterday [April 20], our proposal that experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] visit the sites of the suspected chemical attack in Syria was blocked by Western delegations without any explanations,” Lavrov said.

In the meantime, the UK and France claim their experts have received samples from the site of the incident, Lavrov added.

“London, Paris, and the OPCW have given no answers to our questions as to where they took these samples, who took them, or when they were delivered,” Lavrov stated.

“I think we are very close to this organization [OPCW] being discredited,” Lavrov added.

On Thursday, the OPCW’s executive council overwhelmingly rejected a proposal from Russia and Iran for a new investigation into the Idlib chemical incident.

The proposal had been amended to agree to Western demands that the investigation into the alleged attack be carried out by the existing OPCW fact-finding mission, but was defeated nonetheless.

The draft proposal seen by AFP called on the OPCW

“to establish whether chemical weapons were used in Khan Sheikhoun and how they were delivered to the site of the reported incident.”

Both OPCW fact-checking missions tasked with looking into the Idlib incident are being headed by UK citizens, which Lavrov called “a very strange coincidence” that “runs contrary to the principles of an international organization.”

Earlier in April, an incident in the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun reportedly killed as many as 100 people and injured several hundred. The US has squarely laid the blame on Damascus, claiming that it hid chemical weapons stockpiles from the OPCW after pledging to hand them over in 2013.

Moscow, however, said a thorough investigation, including an on-site inspection in rebel-held territory, should be carried out before jumping to any conclusions. Russia has cautioned that the incident may have been a false flag operation meant to provoke a US attack against Syrian government forces.

“I’m glad that the Justice Department has found a way to go after Assange. He’s gotten a free ride for too long.” –Rep. Peter King (R-New York), Apr 20, 2017

There had been some doubts from initial enthusiasts about WikiLeaks once information from leaks released on its site started puncturing holes in an already worn Democratic campaign in 2016. Accusations of being an agent of Russian interests were being fired by various officials across the Clinton spectrum, though many Republicans, seeing the Clinton ship holed, preferred reticence, and even praise. 

No better example is the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, recently in the front line of exempting WikiLeaks from free speech immunities.

“Julian Assange,” Pompeo opined emphatically, “has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in an Embassy in London. He’s not a US citizen.” 

The Pompeo of now, his patriotic skin rebadged and dry cleaned from the campaign, claims it “time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”.

During the presidential campaign, Pompeo was rather thrilled to also avail himself of the trove of documents obtained from hacks of the Democratic National Committee. Tweets followed on the “proof” that the DNC had a strategy of fixing the candidate selection process. 

But wearing the fake news hat in a new administration has seen Pompeo retreat from such statements, issuing not so much a clarification as a blanket denial that he ever considered WikiLeaks a credible source.[1] The world of post-truths is an expansive one to hide in.

As for the President himself, WikiLeaks was an exciting boon, a sabre to be rattled and directed at his opponents with searing campaign effect.

“WikiLeaks catches Crooked in the act – again,” tweeted Donald Trump last October.[2]

 He also declared his love for the organisation and its exploits, noting in January how Julian Assange had essentially exposed the adolescent standard of cyber security fronted by the Democrats.

“Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’ – why was DNC so careless?”[3]

All of this places the latest moves behind the Department of Justice investigation of WikiLeaks and Assange in sharp, if contradictory context. Having assumed the mantle of president, Trump is remaining traditional to old concepts of imperial power. Staying mum about operations against North Korea, for instance, is one such example. His restraint regarding that matter on Twitter was not so much superhuman as abnormally deafening.  The open information trove drawn upon with such relish is now proving to be a hazard, a liability to be distanced from.

On Thursday, CNN reported that the investigation against Assange, having gone a touch cold during the latter part of the Obama administration since being started in 2010, had been reignited. The obvious point about the reluctance on the part of President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, was that throwing the prosecutor’s book at Assange would also entail targeting more conventional outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Assange himself has made the point that WikiLeaks simply advances the agenda of such outlets, supplementing their missions with material in the conventional tradition of leaks, albeit with greater panache.[4] What matters is the material disclosed “irrespective of whether sources came by that truth legally or have the right to release to the media.”

This point was certainly alluded to in Chelsea Manning’s trial. Of the 22 counts leveled at Manning for disclosing classified material to WikiLeaks, that of “aiding the enemy” was not accepted by the military judge presiding, Colonel Denise Lind.[5]  To have done so would have drawn in the news establishment, including mainstream outlets, rendering the fourth estate a confirmed enemy.

Legal counsel for Assange, Barry Pollack, has attempted to dampen the latest spike of interest in WikiLeaks a touch by suggesting that there has been “no communication with the Department of Justice and they have not indicated to me that they have brought any charges against Mr. Assange.”

But Pollack is also clear that much of this is to do with the fact that the DOJ has simply refused to engage in any discussions with the organisation, let alone its legal representatives, about where Assange stands at this point of time. It lacks, as yet, a tweeting fiend to give that game away.

Trump’s current Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has been clearer. At a Thursday press conference, Sessions seemed to suggest that the administration had every desire to cast a lasso around the information activist, and those in the “leaking” trade.

“We are going to step up our effort and already stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter that’s gone beyond anything I’m aware of.”

For Sessions, the security environment has become one of anarchic, dysfunctional gloom, riddled with breaches.  Notwithstanding the profiting of the Trump campaign from that every same environment,

“We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious.”

Serious maybe, but only for the person in power at the time.

A final remark by Trump is apt here, if for no other reason than indicating, rather appropriately, the role of the WikiLeaks information machine. The defence may well choose to cite it should Assange ever be surrendered, or rendered and tried by US authorities:

“The dishonest media likes saying I am in Agreement with Julian Assange – wrong.  I simply state what he states, it is for the people”.[6]

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

Notes

The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch condemned the U.N.’s election of Saudi Arabia, “the world’s most misogynistic regime,” to a 2018-2022 term on its Commission on the Status of Women, the U.N. agency “exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.”

“Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. “It’s absurd.”

“Every Saudi woman,” said Neuer, “must have a male guardian who makes all critical decisions on her behalf, controlling a woman’s life from her birth until death. Saudi Arabia also bans women from driving cars.”

“I wish I could find the words to express how I feel right know. I’m ‘saudi’ and this feels like betrayal,” tweeted a self-described Saudi woman pursuing a doctorate in international human rights law in Australia.

Yet the fundamentalist monarchy is now one of 45 countries that, according to the U.N., will play an instrumental role in “promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives throughout the world, and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women.”

Saudi Arabia was elected by a secret ballot last week of the U.N.’s 54-nation Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Usually ECOSOC rubber-stamps nominations arranged behind closed doors by regional groups, however this time the U.S. forced an election, to China’s chagrin.

Saudi Arabia was also recently re-elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council where it enjoys the right to vote on, influence and oversee numerous mechanisms, resolutions and initiatives affecting the rights of women worldwide, including:

• Elimination of discrimination against women
• Equal participation [of women] in political and public affairs
• Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice
• Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences
• Accelerating efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women
• The right to a nationality: women’s equal nationality rights in law and in practice
• Addressing the impact of multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and violence in the context of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance on the full enjoyment of all human rights by women and girls
• Annual full day debate on women’s rights
• Annual half-day panel on the integration of a gender perspective

The latest ECOSOC vote is reported in a U.N. press release:

Commission on the Status of Women: The Council elected by secret ballot 13 members to four-year terms, beginning at the first meeting of the Commission’s sixty-third session in 2018 and expiring at the close of the sixty-sixth session in 2022:  Algeria, Comoros, Congo, Ghana and Kenya (African States); Iraq, Japan, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan (Asia-Pacific States); and Ecuador, Haiti and Nicaragua (Latin American and Caribbean States).

The only good news: thanks to the U.S. calling a vote — breaking with the Obama Administration policy which in 2014 allowed Iran to be elected by acclamation — Saudi Arabia was not elected by acclamation, but instead received the least votes of any other country: 47 out of 54 votes cast, even though there was no competition given that there was an equal amount of competitors for available seats.

Here were the results of the elections, with all 54 ECOSOC members voting:

African States
Algeria: 54
Comoros: 53
Congo: 53
Ghana: 53
Kenya: 53

Asian & Pacific States
Iraq: 54
Japan: 53
Republic of Korea: 54
Saudi Arabia: 47
Turkmenistan: 53

Latin American States
Ecuador: 54
Haiti: 54
Nicaragua: 52

*

It was a secret ballot, but the math tells us that at least 15 of the following democratic member states of the U.N. Economic and Social Council voted to elect Saudi Arabia to the U.N.’s women’s rights commission:

• Andorra
• Argentina
• Australia
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Chile
• Colombia
• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• France
• Germany
• India
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• Norway
• Republic of Korea
• South Africa
• Spain
• Sweden
• UK
• USA

Former Rothschild & Cie Banque investment banker; Hollande’s economy, industry and digital affairs minister Emmanuel Macron is strongly favored to become France’s next president.

A self-styled centrist, an elitist establishment favorite, he ran as an En Marche! (forward) candidate, the party he formed in April 2016 – favoring continuity, not responsible change.

His pledge to address high unemployment and social injustice, improve relations between French youths and police, stress education, promote gender equality socially and politically, among other domestic issues he discussed are promises made to be ignored if elected.

Internationally, he said

“Europe is at the heart of our project. Our responsibility…is to be able to rebuild the European dream” – unattainable for ordinary people under Brussels control, French sovereignty abandoned.

An Opinionway poll published last week showed him defeating Le Pen with a 63% majority – strengthened by his Sunday victory.

Preliminary results had him winning 23.75% of the vote to Le Pen’s 21.5%, a disappointing result for her despite moving on to May 7’s runoff.

A previous article discussed her far-right platform, including France leaving the EU and NATO – opposed by Macron.

As a Hollande Socialist Party minister, he supported its neoliberal and belligerent agenda, policies similar to how America, Britain, Germany and most other European countries are governed.

His anti-establishment-sounding pledge “to serve the public interest” resembled Trump’s rhetoric and other US politicians – a platform to get elected, then abandoned if successful.

Earlier he said France needs a more “balanced” policy toward Syria, including talks with Assad. In April, he proposed military intervention to oust him.

He’s pro-business, pro-banking monied interests, pro-Israel, anti-BDS, and hostile to Palestinian interests.

In June 2015, he and his then-German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel (currently Foreign Affairs Minister and Vice Chancellor) published a platform, advocating continued European integration.

For the first time since Charles de Gaulle established France’s Fifth Republic in 1958, no major center-right or center-left candidates qualified for runoff voting.

Macron’s likely May 7 triumph will assure French political continuity – dirty business as usual again winning, ordinary people losing, along with a lost chance for France to regain its 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. 

We live in a paradoxical world. Much debate on the radical left revolves around multitudes of discontented groups – sometimes lumped together as the 99%, sometimes rebranded as precariat – struggling against an abstract empire and its 1% rulers. Capitalism and class – once serving as a compass to navigate left politics through the apparently chaotic sees of everyday life – have turned into subjects of theoretical debate with little to no connection to political praxis.

Vacated by the left, a new right adopted the language of class to appeal to those who were steamrolled and marginalized by economic globalization. Many of the policies advanced by the new right could have been taken out of social democratic programs of old but are now loaded with claims to racial and national superiority. Some on the left, and pretty much everybody in the political centre, takes the new right ideology at face value and concludes that working class politics, even if originally meant as harbinger of universal human liberation, invariably lead to nationalism and racism. Such reasoning ignores that much of the discontent on which the new right thrives is produced by neoliberal globalization, the very project that appropriates left aspirations of human liberation in the pursuit of profit.

It also ignores the fact that most of the support for the new right does not come from people with low incomes and little educational attainment but from the middle-brackets of Western societies. People at the low-end rather opt out of casting their votes. The franchise for which socialists fought so hard at various points in history is increasingly abandoned by the have-nots whose ancestors still thought the sheer number of their votes might counterbalance the power of concentrated capital.

Dormant: Class Politics from Below

That class politics is dead, or at least dormant, doesn’t mean there are no political and social conflicts. In fact, there are a lot and most of them are fought out in the shadow of social democracy. The demands put forward by political upstarts like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, who grew out of the post-class politics of occupied public spaces, would have been considered as social democratic mainstream back in the 1970s. The same is true for Jean-Luc Mélenchon‘s presidential campaign in France or Jeremy Corbyn‘s efforts to put social democratic content back into the British Labour Party. And it is also true for a whole number of left-wing parties all over Western Europe. Some, like the Swedish Left Party, have roots in Soviet Communism, the Dutch Socialist Party comes out of the Maoist movement, and Ireland’s Sinn Fein out of the struggle for national independence. Back in the 1970s, all of these organizations were more or less critical of social democracy but began filling the vacuum left when social democratic parties, spearheaded by New Labour’s Tony Blair, began deserting the political space they had occupied throughout the post-WWII-era. To the Blairites and others in the political centre, a continued commitment to social reforms and the welfare state, not to speak of further reaching goals of socialist transformation, is not only a step toward the convergence with the populism coming from the new right. It is also seen as an expression of nostalgia unable to come to terms with the new realities of global capitalism.

This nostalgia charge contains a kernel of truth but misses the point. Widespread nostalgia has nothing to do with anyone’s inability to understand the harsh realities of global capitalism. It has anything to do with growing numbers of people resenting these realities and looking for alternatives. Ironically enough, social democratic parties abandoned their commitment to social reform and welfare state expansion at some time during the 1990s when the neoliberal promise of a rising tide that would eventually lift all boats began to ring hollow. With more and more people finding out that they were at the losing end of neoliberal globalization the welfare state regained popularity, which – under conditions of near full employment up until the 1970s – had been challenged by women, ethnic minorities and youth who resented their exclusion from welfare state provisions as much as the bureaucratic ways such provisions were delivered.

Yet, with the collective bargaining power of unions receding in the face of automation, relocations and the reorganization of firms and labour processes, inequality and insecurity began to rise. Under these conditions welfare states, despite cuts and even stricter bureaucratic control, became more important to increasing numbers of people who could have done without many of the welfare state’s provisions in the good old days of high employment and rising real wages. Memories of those days, even if they appear rosier in hindsight than they were experienced at the time, seem to be an inspiration for current struggles against further welfare state retrenchment. They can also contribute to the imagination of a better future.

Forward and Backward Looking Memories

In fact, ‘forward-looking memories’ did play key roles in the making of socialist movements in the past. The moral economy shaped by pre-capitalist agriculture and artisan production turned into a guide to struggle against the factory regime under which the first generations of wageworkers had to toil. Later, the traditions of craftsmanship inspired workers fighting against the degradation of work under the guise of scientific management and developed visions of workers’ councils and self-management out of these traditions. There is no reason that memories of more generous welfare states couldn’t inspire visions of a future beyond ever tighter budget constraints and bureaucratic control under which welfare states suffer at the present time. Unlike the memories of pre-capitalist times and craftsmanship, which motivated workers to build movements focused very much on the point of production, memories of the heyday of welfare state expansion open the focus to the much wider world of social reproduction. This could be a starting point of amalgamating movements organizing around specific issues – such as minimum wages, public healthcare, housing or education – into a more unified movement, which, in Marx’s and Engels’ words in the German Ideology, “abolishes the present state of things.”

Such a vision for the future doesn’t automatically develop out of memories of a better past. It needs to be actively created. This requires political interventions that allow people to see their past in a way that opens prospects for a better future. Without such prospects, ‘backward-looking memories’ can lead to a demoralizing and demobilizing yearning to restore an irredeemable past. The frustrated recognition of the impossibility to restore the past may then open the door to right-wing praise of the glorious past of the chosen people. Falling for such praise inevitably leads to frustration as this ideological cover stands in stark contrast to the politics that new right formations pursue. Rather than offering alternatives to an unloved present, these formations aim at the further radicalization of neoliberalism. Avoiding a vicious cycle of right wing policies thriving on backward-looking memories, further radicalization of neoliberalism and frustration fueled by the outcomes of such radicalization requires not only the opening of future prospects for a better world. It also requires an understanding why better conditions that existed in the past ceased to exist. In this particular case, this means an understanding of social democracy and the welfare state project it pursued, whether in office or in opposition, in the post-WWII-era.

Limits to Social Democracy

Blueprints for an organized capitalism in which the spoils of rising productivity would be shared between labour and capital were floating around socialist circles for quite some time. They only came to fruition during the Cold War. The overarching goal of containing Soviet Communism prompted capitalists’ willingness to strike a deal with social democracy. On the basis of unprecedented and, after the experiences of the Great Depression, unexpected prosperity such a deal could be reached without cutting into company profits. Social democratic theoreticians attributed the prosperity to the virtues of Keynesian demand management that stabilized the accumulation process and therefore reduced the risk of large-scale investments. This Keynesian story is true but incomplete. It misses the role played by the unequal exchange between cheap resource imports from and relatively more expensive industrial exports to the South. And it misses the role played by unpaid household labour and the super-exploitation of groups of workers, often immigrants, who were excluded from the deal between capital and organized labour. The convergence of struggles of these excluded groups, militancy of unionized workers and anti-imperialist movements in the South represented a formidable threat to profit rates from the late-1960s onwards. In the mid-1970s this threat coincided with a crisis of overproduction, on its part induced by a long boom of investment in production capacity and the rise of new industrial economies in Asia.

At that point, capitalists decided to turn from welfare state compromise to neoliberal class struggle from above. This included a global restructuring of production and distribution processes that ultimately destroyed the social basis for the various but largely unconnected movements that had challenged capitalist rule in previous years. During the Keynesian era, capitalists had more or less grudgingly accepted social reform as a means to contain the real or just assumed threat of communism. When that acceptance turned into a threat to profits and capitalist rule in its own right, they built a global economy in which the quest for social reform pushes capitalism to the verge of revolution. At this time, social movements – remnants of old workers’ movements and the new social movements of the 1970s but also movements dating back to the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s and more recent anti-austerity movements – are far from posing a revolutionary threat. At best, they slow the continuation of neoliberal restructuring down and articulate alternatives to the new right. Experiences made in these struggles might contribute to the remaking of working class politics that could effectively challenge capitalist power in the future.

Ingo Schmidt teaches Labour Studies at Athabasca University and is one of the organizers of the annual World Peace Forum teach-ins in Vancouver. His latest books include The Three Worlds of Social Democracy and Reading ‘Capital’ Today (with Carlo Fanelli).

Any reasonable observer of the United States ruling class discourse during April 2017 realizes that the imperialist war drive is still a dominant theme.

Disabled people in Ontario are much more likely to experience poverty than non-disabled people. Many have to live on sub-poverty payments under the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) or the even more wretched income provided by Ontario Works (OW). Those that are in this situation are confronted by an ongoing process of surveillance, invasion of their privacy and moral policing. Those disabled people who are working, because of systemic discrimination, are less likely to be receiving living wages and are far more likely to be precariously employed. As anti poverty organizers, we fully understand the anger and desperation that such a situation generates.

On this basis, it is easy to see how, at first glance, there are aspects of a Basic Income (BI) approach that could be found attractive by disabled people. The promise of a somewhat higher payment, provided without the kind of intrusive element that presently exists, would seem to represent a step forward. However, we think it’s important to ask why the Liberal Government would suddenly support a new approach that would mean considerably increased costs. Why would a Government that has driven down the adequacy of benefit rates and cut programs for disabled people want to reverse course so dramatically?

BI can look very alluring but we are convinced that, in reality, it will mean a degrading of the already inadequate ‘social safety net’ that will make things dramatically worse for disabled people. The Ontario Government’s adviser on BI, Hugh Segal, has proposed a pilot project under which a small sampling of people on OW would have their income raised to $1,320 month. A group on ODSP would be paid $500 more than they are at present. In both cases, the money would be provided without much of the scrutiny and intrusion people presently have to put up with. There is no doubt that the small number of people who became part of such a project would be better off for as long as it lasted. However, it is unlikely that the Ontario Government will run the test at income levels as high as their advisor suggests. Moreover, while a small minority of people are being tested in this way, over a period of several years, far greater numbers will be living as in deep poverty as before on OW and ODSP. There is also no reason to assume that any Province wide system of BI that was eventually adopted would provide the same income as under the pilot project.

Why Basic Income?

It seems curious that the Liberals are ready to offer the promise of long term improvement by way of Basic Income while they flagrantly ignore the glaring problems with the existing system of social assistance and other poverty causing factors that they could deal with immediately. Raising social assistance rates and the minimum wage, building more affordable housing, ensuring that homeless people at least had basic shelter, developing free or low costs pharmacare and dental programs, expanding disability related benefits for all low income people and eliminating the long waiting lists for things like attendant care and supportive housing are all things that they could act upon now to make a real difference in peoples’ lives. If they won’t do things, why should we believe that they want to redistribute wealth and alleviate poverty but way of a system of BI.

The Ontario Liberals have established a long and very ugly record of imposing an agenda of imposing austerity and attacking public services. We might ask ourselves if there is a danger of BI being implemented in such a way as to deepen, rather than reverse, that agenda. During the years of they have been in power, the Liberals have driven down the adequacy of social assistance and, apart from the money this has saved them, this has created a situation where people are more desperate and ready to accept even the lowest paying and most exploitative jobs.

By making ODSP ever harder to get onto and, by allowing the rates to fall lower against inflation, they have ensured that disabled people are frequently forced to be part of this scramble for the worst jobs on offer. Indeed the reference to setting up a pilot project that was contained the last Provincial Budget actually stressed that there was a hope that Basic Income could “strengthen the attachment to the labour force.” The real danger with a BI system, as it might actually be designed by an austerity driven government, is that it could be a basis for making things even worse.

The right wing U.S. political scientist, Charles Murray, advances a version of BI that calls for a wretchedly inadequate payment of $10,000 a year to be provided but, Murray stresses, it is essential that this payment replace all the other elements of social provision. At a time of mounting austerity, with public services at acute risk of privatization, this is exactly the way in which BI could further a regressive agenda. Even a payment that is somewhat higher than under the present social assistance rates would still be a step backwards for disabled people and poor people in general if it was used to justify and increase the attack on public services and other benefits.

Things like the Special Diet, medical transportation and the child care benefit might be targeted. What good would a slightly higher payment be if, as part of the new arrangement, people now faced exorbitant costs for things like hearing aids, wheelchairs, prosthetics, medical supplies and respiratory devices? If BI opened the door to such regressive measures, it would lead, not to reduced levels of poverty, but to a very much worse situation.

The kind of Basic Income we might expect the Ontario Liberals to design would turn the social safety net into a tightrope. The network of present systems is undoubtedly inadequate but a system of universal payment would be even more vulnerable to austerity and the impact of allowing it to fall against inflation or of reducing the level of the benefit would be enormous.

For all the talk of a ‘no strings attached’ system of income provision, governments that are looking at BI or designing pilot projects are very focused on issues of how the system might serve to prod people into low paying jobs. Linked to this, are the old notions of molding poor people into becoming ‘productive’ conforming workers and consumers. This is why coded language around the reconstruction of people can be found in BI literature. For example, the Manitoba Liberal Party supports the implementation of a guaranteed income on the grounds that it would help in “the building of self-reliant, taxpaying citizens.” Similarly, Ontario’s report on BI argues that behavioural changes and increased independence are important goals. The old moral assumptions have not really disappeared.

Basic Income and Disability

There are different ways that a BI could be implemented. The Ontario Report suggests that disabled people get $500 extra in recognition that the “costs of living with a disability” are higher than those faced by non disabled people. However, this isn’t true in the same way across the board. The expenses of someone having to pay the daily cost of a service dog, someone who needs special dietary items, someone who must pay for attendant care, someone who has to pay for ASL interpretation or someone who has to replace a $40,000 wheelchair are all very different. If BI were used as a pretext to eliminate other systems of support, there are a whole range of needs that different disabled people have that would be placed out of range for them.

Importantly, who gets the disabled top up will revolve around how the Government defines disability. Lots of those who are disabled will not be accepted as such. The definition of disability is very limited in terms of accessing ODSP and it’s likely that the vast majority of disabled people will not qualify for the additional payment under a BI system. Governments are presently working to narrow the concept of ‘disability’ and the introduction of a new income support system would likely offer an opportunity to take that further.

Imagining the Future

Right now, we are being told that we are at a crossroads and there are two possible futures. One in which things remain the same with inadequate social assistance rates and rampant poverty or one in which everyone gets a BI payment at 75% of the poverty line in Ontario, making it supposedly easier to escape from poverty altogether. The second, BI future will require study, public consultations and several years to put into place but we are told it’s the best possible outcome. [Ed.: see LeftStreamed No. 346 for a debate on Basic Income.]

One of the main arguments for BI is that social assistance is deeply flawed: the rates are too low and it is punitive and degrading. However, it isn’t necessary to pin hopes on BI to fix these things. The Government could raise social assistance rates to decent levels but it has made the deliberate choice to perpetuate the suffering of the poorest people in Ontario. The Government could eliminate the policies and structures that make social assistance so punitive. It could make the system fair and respectful and expand benefits to all disabled people but it chooses not to.

A lot of people who promote BI have very good intentions. This isn’t the case, however, for Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals and other governments that are investigating BI. They intend more cuts and to increase pressure on people to scramble for the worst jobs. Rather than pin our hopes on the flawed concept of BI, so easily implemented in ways that further a regressive agenda and harm disabled people, we suggest fighting for adequate income, living wages, improved, expanded and accessible public services and income support systems that are adequate and free of surveillance and moral policing. This won’t be won by trusting governments to do the right thing but through strong collective struggle.

AJ Withers and John Clarke are anti-poverty activists with Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

For the last five years, everyone has been talking about Aleppo. I can’t even count how many interviews we’ve conducted, or how many TV news segments I’ve watched and articles read – about the battles and sieges in this crucial theatre which has come to symbolise the long war on Syria.

With all of this in mind, nothing can really prepare you for the sheer scale of the devastation visible throughout Syria’s second largest city.

Fortunately for us, the journey from Damascus to Aleppo is a lot safer than it was just a few months ago. Back in December 2016 before the liberation of Aleppo, travelers were forced to circle around the city heading northwest before turning south down the infamous Castello Road, down a perilous stretch of highway known as “Sniper Alley,” and even less affectionately as the ‘terrorists rat line’ running from Turkey into northern Syria. For a while, that was the only way in, as Al Nusra Front and its affiliates took control of nearly every major artery heading into the city. Terrorists still control many of the main roads between Hama and Aleppo and some other roads between Aleppo and the coastal region of Latakia. This means that what would normally be a comfortable three to four hour drive from Damascus, is now an eight hour journey, which at times might take you as close as 10 km from ISIS-held territory while weaving  your way into Aleppo from the city’s eastern countryside.

While visiting the northern city of Aleppo, you quickly come realise that the war is still far from over. What the US and the UK still refer to as “moderate rebels” are still occupying parts of the West Aleppo countryside and are firing Grad Missiles and mortars into neighborhoods located on the outskirts of the city.

From our rooftop in the morning, you could see smoke bellowing up in the distance on the outskirts of Aleppo’s city centre (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE)

Syrian and Russian airforce jets were buzzing over our heads while we were doing a walkthrough of the devastation in East Aleppo. I couldn’t determine whether or not that strike was a terrorist mortar or a retaliatory airstrike by Syrian or Russian forces. It was one of many we could hear and see during our visit.

After a long drive we eventually arrived downtown that evening in West Aleppo. There, I had the great pleasure of finally meeting with French activist and humanitarian, Pierre Le Corf.  I had interviewed him previously for the Sunday Wire radio program to talk about his experiences and his work  running his own charity called We Are Superheroes, as well as his work with war-stricken families in the city. During the height of the fighting in 2016, he was supplying families living on the front line with essential supplies including first aid kits, as well as toys for children. Following the liberation of East Aleppo in December 2016, Pierre has continued delivering assistance to families, and by virtue of listening to them and being there for them, he’s also delivering some much-needed counseling for them. He is literally a one man band, operating in one of the most dangerous conflicts ever. His efforts have been nothing short of heroic.

Even though the immediate terror threat of shelling from the east has subsided, Le Corf made a point of reminding us that the threat of terrorism is still omnipresent in Aleppo. Sitting in a cafe in the bustling Azaziya district, he showed us where terrorist mortar strikes and ‘Hell Canon’ gas canister missile attacks had killed civilians on the side walk, only metres away from where we were sitting.

“I wish you could’ve been here 5 months ago, to see what it was like. One moment you’d be sitting here, drinking coffee and talking with people, and the next second people are dying on the pavement right over there. I can still see it, very clear in my mind. But unfortunately, it happened so often that an hour after the attack, people would just carry on with their daily business. It’s really incredible.”

Danger, Clear and Present

Le Corf explained that although the bombardment of civilians has tailed-off in central Aleppo, other terrorist attacks are still ongoing in the city, including suicide bombs, and daily rocket attacks in other parts of the city.

“Still today, all the entrances to the city are bombed nearly everyday – rockets, gas canisters, mortars.”

Not surprisingly, this daily reality of terror reigning down on the civilian population has been completely blacked-out of all coverage from both Western and Gulf state media outlets – the same countries who continue to support what politicians and pundits still disingenuously refer to as “rebel opposition groups.”

“The people here have suffered a lot. Still, people keep dying from the rockets and bombs – it’s very difficult for the families (in Aleppo) because they still cannot yet escape from the war. They’ve been facing it from the start, and they keep facing it here. When you see kids dying, whether it’s 4 months ago, or just now, it’s the same. It’s exactly the same as before 4 months ago,” said Le Corf.

“Just inside the city centre, maybe they can forget a little bit about the war, but the people are still concerned.”

“The people are more tired. It’s like the war will never finish for them.”

The last tree standing following severe damage near the front lines in Shaar, in East Aleppo (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE)

Norwegian journalist Tommy Soltvedt talking to 21WIRE’s Vanessa Beeley amidst the rubble in Shaar, in East Aleppo (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE)

Despite the insistence by most western journalists and military industrial PR men like US Senator John McCain – that somehow The Battle of Aleppo was born out of ‘peaceful opposition’ protests in 2012. Everyone we spoke to -residents, Syrian Army personnel and media professionals all told us the same story: back in the summer of 2012  the city of Aleppo was literally invaded on multiple fronts by militant extremists and mercenaries, operating under various banners, starting with the western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), the al-Tawhid Brigade, who were soon followed by home-grown Arar al Sham, and the Saudi Arabia and Qatari-sponsored Al Nusra Front (al Qaeda in Syria), ISIS, the Levant Front and others.

It wasn’t long before terrorist brigades were embedded throughout east Aleppo and surrounding areas, and throughout the outskirts of the greater Aleppo city limits. Terrorists occupied government buildings, schools, and hospitals, and even the historic 12th century Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo which was tuned into a military command centre by Al Nusra.

From 2013, Al Nusra and ISIS occupied the Eye and Pediatric Hospital in Shaar, East Aleppo, which was quickly converted into a Sharia Court house and an underground prison. The site was run by the ‘Hayaa al-Sharia’ authority, known by extremists the Hayaa.

When I looked at all the ISIS literature all over the ground, and all over the walls, I imagined the suffering of the people in this city, and then I remembered watching CNN’s very own CFR mouthpiece, Fareed Zakaria, only last month, with one of his many ‘Syrian opposition’ guests, a woman who looked into the camera and claimed that Al Nusra and ISIS were never in Aleppo as she waxed on about ‘the revolution.’ Of course, Zakaria had no clue, which seems to be par for the course at the Pentagon’s premier propaganda mill.

A cursory tour of the ruined Eye Hospital turned up endless ISIS and Al Nusra paraphernalia (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE)

Destroyed vehicles parked outside the Eye hospital (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE)

Ghost City

The damage we saw in East Aleppo is practically indescribable, outside of comparisons to Stalingrad. For the most part, half the city resembles a dystopic ghost town, although signs of life are beginning to return to many of the devastated areas.

After walking through the neighborhood of Shaar, it’s easy to see where the frontline fighting had spilled into every single side street and neighborhood. Makeshift barricades were erected by occupying militants on almost every street entrance.

A blocked off alley way in Shaar, piled high with debris (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE).

East Aleppo barricade (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE)

According to our guide and a number of other residents we spoke to, the vast majority of the damage was inflicted by fighting on the ground – street by street, block by block – and not from the air. This is an important point because western media coverage attributed nearly all of the damage to air strikes by the Syrian Air Force, and from late 2015 by Russian jets. This was the script put forward by western media outlets throughout the conflict – which became the basis of the pretext for ‘rebel’ pleas for western intervention, and endless calls in the west for a ‘No Fly Zone,’ or ‘Safe Zones,’ calls which continue to this day.

In actuality, extensive damage in the heavy fighting areas around Aleppo was the result of artillery, tank ordinances and heavy gun fire from both sides, and from terrorist gas canister ‘Hell Canons’, rockets and bombing. Unlike the terrorist barrages which were fired randomly into civilian areas, Syrian air strikes were targeted, as were later Russian strikes. This fact is fairly self evident after touring the battle zone.

Layramoun district was home to the infamous Brigade 16 of the Free Syrian Army (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE)

Barrel Bombs vs Hell Cannons

In addition to the military front, information warfare is arguably an even bigger and more complex battle ground in this protracted conflict.

Egged-on by the mainstream media, the US and British political establishment figures quickly adopted the ‘Barrel Bomb’ talking point as the idiopathic rallying cry for the removal of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. This elaborate media mythology construct claims that the Syrian Army have been busy dropping barrel bombs from helicopters, intentionally targeting civilians, and especially schools and hospitals, or so the story went. This was repeated ad nauseam by caustic US hawks like Senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that very few people had actually seen the barrel bombs in action. Based on the frequency of western barrel bomb reports, you’d think that these would have been filmed and analysed, but instead these reports remain mostly anecdotal. What’s most interesting here, and yet completely ignored by western mainstream media sources, is that the damage inflicted from terrorist Hell Cannon strikes appears to be identical to bromidic tales of the barrel bomb. Both are said to have been used often and indiscriminately, with both featuring a crude metal casing, packed with powerful explosives and shrapnel, designed to inflict maximum damage. Unlike the illusive barrel bombs, footage of the ‘rebel’ Hell Cannon in action is easy to find. Rebel-terrorists not only fired into government-held West Aleppo but also in contested and ‘rebel-held’ areas throughout the Battle of Aleppo. Knowing this, a responsible journalist might ask the pertinent question: how many of Aleppo’s alleged ‘barrel bomb’ attacks attributed to the ‘regime’ were actually Hell Cannon strikes made by the ‘rebel opposition’?

After 2012, gas canister Hell Cannons became the weapon of choice for terrorists, as they shelled residential areas all over Aleppo in a long-running campaign of terror. In total, upwards of 15,000 Aleppo residents have died since 2012 from terrorist ordinances, bombs and gas canister missiles. All of these victims have been documented by name, with details of their injuries, along with their family details collated by the Aleppo Medical Association. Contrast this with the fantastic claims by the US and British-funded ‘search and rescue NGO’ called the White Helmets, who claim in their official literature to have saved some 80,000 lives from the regime’s “barrel bomb” and air attacks since they were founded in late 2013. Unlike the Aleppo medical authorities, the White Helmets have not as yet  provided any actual details of these 80,000 persons, or their injuries. While the incredible claims of the White Helmets continue to garner praise and Oscar awards, the western media seem blind to the 15,000 residents left dead from terrorists strikes, including thousands of dead children. This is a good example of the intricate campaign of disinformation which has been waged against Syria by the west, and continues to this day.

McCain’s Army: Brigade 16

After surveying the Eastern districts, we drove through Kurdish-controlled Sheikh Maqsood area in the city’s northern sector, before heading into the Layramoun district which used to be the textile manufacturing hub of Aleppo. Layramoun became the main base of operations for Brigade 16, who are also credited for inventing the Hell Cannon gas canister bomb delivery system.

It is in Layramoun that the infamous ‘Brigade 16’ set-up a Hell Cannon assembly line in one of the occupied textile factory buildings.

As it happened, Senator John McCain travelled to northern Syria in May 2013 where he met with leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other ‘rebel’ operatives, some of which were later identified as persons with known links to terrorist groups and criminal gangs. One of these was a member of the infamous Brigade 16, commonly known as the “16th Infantry Division” (Arabic: الفرقة 16 مشاة‎‎) of the FSA, known to be responsible for a number of criminal enterprises including robbery, kidnapping, extortion, and the mass looting of factories around Aleppo.

Walking into the factory, you can still see the Brigade 16 emblem prominently displayed on the post to the lefthand side of the building’s entrance.

Brigade 16 commandeered factory in textile district to produce gas canister bombs (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE) 

Driving into the the city from the east, we passed the Jibrin Refugee Centre where thousands of Aleppo displaced residents are still housed, along with newly arrived survivors of last week’s car bomb attack at Rashideen outside of Aleppo, where at least 126 people were killed. The buses were transporting residents who were being evacuated from the towns of Foua and Kefraya, both under terrorist siege for the last two years. The violent event was a stark reminder of just how vicious this war continues to be, and that the ones who suffer the most are not governments, but the poorest of the people. 

(Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE) 

Also along the eastern entry highway, coming off the road which connects Aleppo to Raqqa, we also passed the Sheikh Najjar Industrial District. What you see is difficult to comprehend. Every single factory and industrial estate we passed was decimated. This is one of the most profound and yet completely under-reported aspects of the war which also gets no airtime whatsoever by ‘experts’ in the western circles.

Undoubtedly, Aleppo was one of the top manufacturing powerhouses of the Middle East, and the economic heart of Syria. Since 2012, that heart has been torn from the country by a systematic and targeted effort administered by multiple terrorist factions.

What’s more important to note, is how all of the estimated 1,500 that were trashed or converted to terrorist military facilities, had their contents completely looted by armed groups – piece by piece, machine by machine, before being taken north into Turkey.

The obvious object of this exercise, aside from the fencing value of the stolen goods, was to remove Syria’s ability to supply its own markets with products and make it dependent on imports from neighboring countries, including Turkey.

Independent Parliamentarian Fares Shehabi MP from Aleppo (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE)

The next day we met with Aleppo MP and Chairman of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry, Fares Shehabi. He explained the scale of the disaster left in the wake of the dismantling of Aleppo’s manufacturing sector by western and gulf state-backed terrorist groups, including looting carried out by Brigade 16.

“Brigade 16 of the Free Syrian Army used to occupy the industrial zone. They robbed 1000 factories – completely, they even took the copper from inside the walls. They began this in June 2012 and it was liberated 4 years later. They took everything to Turkey.”

After the liberation of Aleppo’s terrorist-held areas, Shehabi led a delegation to liberated areas in order to survey the damage.

“When we entered the day after liberation, I went with 200 industrialists and they saw their factories in rubble, looted completely. We saw the slogans, we saw a torture prison for pro-government people, we saw the ammunition factories, mortar factories. The guys who used to run this were Brigade 16 – they were the same ones hitting us with the gas canister (missiles), or Hell Cannons,” said Shehabi.

“Myself, I had three factories – a pharmaceutical factory, an olive oil factory, and a clothing factory. The clothing factory is still… for five years now – under Al Nusra control. The olive oil factory, ISIS took it and turned it into a command center for two years. When we finally took it back, I turned it into a school for poor children. The pharmaceutical factory is in a hot zone, still.”

“ISIS even issued an official letter from their court to order the confiscation of my factory.”

‘Official’ ISIS decree to confiscate factory under new Sharia legal domain (Photo: Fares Shehabi)

Ransacked and looted: one of thousands of factories taken over or destroyed by terrorists groups in Aleppo (Photo: Fares Shehabi)

Still, Shehabi is amazed at how western media professionals and politicians are still referring to terrorist factions as the ‘rebel opposition,’ or ‘moderate rebels.’ He then proceeded to show us his collection of photos of numerous radical militant leaders posing with various US officials. One after another, Shehabi delivered a damning indictment of western political leaders and their seemingly open affiliations with radical salafi terrorist commanders.

“Brigade 16 invented the Hell Canon (photo), and Brigade 16 were with John McCain as we can see in the picture. Look, this is (Colonel) Riyad al-Asad – the founder of the FSA, the most ‘moderate’ of them all, sitting here with the Taliban of Syria. Even the Taliban have a branch in Syria.”

“This is the Aleppo (FSA) commander with Robert Ford, and this is the same guy with ISIS.”

Despite the fact that all of these images have been freely available online, these associations still do not register with US media, carefully whitewashed under layers of carefully crafted anti-Syrian propaganda.

Shehabi also knocked back the western misconception about claims of how many actual civilian residents were in East Aleppo during the war, as opposed to imported foreign terrorist mercenaries.

“Remember when they (the western media) used to say, ‘we have 250,000 people living here in East Aleppo and there are no foreigners, they are all from East Aleppo.’ When they (the terrorists) conquered East Aleppo, there used to be 2 million in East Aleppo. This number dropped to 113K, because immediately after the occupation of East Aleppo 1 million people left. They came to this area and we still have half a million of those people living here (in West Aleppo).  The other half million went to the Alawite areas, the coastal areas (Latakia and Tartous). They did not say, ‘oh, these are Alawites, or these are Shi’ites.’ They went there immediately, and they are still living there. So the actual number in East Aleppo dropped to about 113,000.”

“During the evacuation that took place in Dec 2016 in the green buses, 20,000 was the total number of people who left East Aleppo to Idlib, from those who left – 15,000 were not from Aleppo – they were a combination of people from Idlib, and many foreigners – Uzbekistan, Chechens, Saudis. Only 5,000 thousand went with them (to Idlib?), the rest are still here (in West Aleppo). Everyone is now involved – this conflict is now internationalized,” said Shehabi.

As the dust begins settling on Aleppo, it’s now widely understood by Syrians that Turkey has played the pivotal role since the conflict began in 2011 by facilitating terrorist forward operating bases inside of Turkey, as well the destruction of the Syrian economy. After Syria’s manufacturing sector had been gutted and taken north into Turkey, it’s safe to say there is no love lost between Syrians and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

On this, Shehabi remarked,

“We call him ‘The Thief of Aleppo’, Erdogan. For the past 6 years he wanted to establish a parliamentary system in Syria. He said the presidential system in Syria is no good and that we need a parliamentary system in Syria. Why? So that the Muslim Brotherhood can reach power. Ok, so you want us the change to a parliamentary system – while you want a presidential dictatorship in Turkey?”

Culture Targeted

Aside from manufacturing and merchant sectors, another area which has disappeared is tourism, estimated to have comprised roughly 14% of Syria’s economy before the war. The country boasts an unrivaled collection of historical sites which predate both Christian and Islamic civilizations. Syria’s Christian and Islamic sites are some of the most highly regarded in the world.

Veteran tour guide Mohammad Al Khousi explained to us how the conflict has affected him personally, as well as his industry, and how this aspect of the crisis cuts much deeper than the issue of tourism.

“As a guide, I was sometimes in Aleppo three days per week, so Aleppo was like a second home for me. Before the war, I was last in Aleppo in 2009. I was back in 2013 briefly, but when I finally returned to Aleppo in 2016 – it was the saddest day of my life. Honestly, I was crying. When I left Aleppo before, I had great memories. They destroyed my business, as well as all of the other guides I know. They (the terrorists) destroyed shops, and all their incomes. They burned the Old Souks, they burned the gold market, they burned the soap market, they burned the textile markets. Look how many people lost their businesses; as a guide, a shopkeeper, all the drivers, the travel agencies – some of them died, some of them handicapped, some lost their parents, or lost their kids. It’s really very sad, it’s a tragedy.”

“I did an interview on Danish TV, it was a 3 hour recorded interview, and I couldn’t hold it anymore, I started crying. I wasn’t crying because I lost my home, I was crying for Palmyra and Aleppo,” said Al Khousi.

Like so many others we spoke to, Al Khousi believes that Syria’s historic sites have been targeted intentionally, and strategically.

“It started in Lebanon, continued to Iraq, continued to Palestine, then to Syria, and also Yemen. Yemen is the source of civilization to Saudi and to the Arab peninsula. Why? It seems that someone wants to destroy our culture – our civilization.”

After heavy fighting, the Old Citadel remains in tact (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE)

A view looking down from the steps of Aleppo’s 13th century Old Citadel, at what is left of the site where the Ritz Carlton Hotel once stood (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE)

Before the war, the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Aleppo was arguably one of the most impressive boutique hotels in the world with a position and view which was second to none. The stately home turned hotel was part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In May 2014, terrorist fighters tunneled under the hotel, before detonating explosives which completely destroyed the building.

Dr Bouthaina Shaaban (Photo: Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE)

The bombed-out property took on a whole new meaning after a later conversation we had with Dr Bouthaina Shaaban, Syria’s chief political and media adviser to the President, who recalled a harrowing tale of her last encounter with the Turkish leader Erdogan right before the war began in 2011:

“I remember… just before the war on Syria started, when President Erdogan came to Aleppo to visit President Assad, and we were having dinner in what was in the Carlton Hotel but now it’s totally demolished, and it was overlooking the castle (Old Citadel). The view was truly amazing. I was sitting next to Erdogan and he was looking at the castle and said to President Assad, ‘Is there any other place in the world, where you can sit in such a modern place and sit and look at such an so old historic place.’ I remember that, and I remember his tone, but I never imagined he would be so resentful and that he would like to destroy a place he doesn’t have – something he can’t have and can’t claim.”

Any remaining doubt that the takedown of Aleppo, and Syria, was planned well in advance – was long gone by the end of this visit.

Patrick Henningsen is a global affairs analyst and founder of the independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire as well as a regular guest commentator for the UK Column News, RT International, host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR).

In yet another Wall Street giveaway, President Donald Trump on Friday afternoon took executive action to chip away at Dodd-Frank financial regulations and roll back rules aimed at reducing corporate tax avoidance.

Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs for watchdog group Public Citizen, described the orders signed Friday at the Treasury Department as “nothing more than special favors for the same Wall Street banks that crashed our economy in 2008 and put millions of Americans out of work.”

According to ABC News, Trump signed “two presidential memoranda on the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which former President [Barack] Obama signed in response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis.” They order two six-month reviews of what the Los Angeles Times called “pillars” of Dodd-Frank: the Orderly Liquidation Authority and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

The first was established

“to create a process for winding down a large, failing financial company in a way that protects taxpayers from large bailouts such as the ones paid out in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis,” as the Washington Postexplains. The second “called on federal regulators to identify which financial institutions were large enough to merit enhanced regulation, as their collapse could destabilize the economy as a whole,” according to the Post.

“Republican Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson conceived the Financial Stability Oversight Council as a forum for catching financial risks that fall through the cracks between the various regulatory agencies,” said Public Citizen financial policy advocate Bartlett Naylor on Friday. “The biggest bailout in the financial crash went to insurance firm AIG, which fell through one such crack. An executive order that questions this oversight can signal to firms intent on high-risk financial ventures that playtime is back.”

Trump previously signed an order directing a roll-back of Dodd-Frank overall.

Trump also signed an executive order directing Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to review “all significant 2016 tax regulations to determine if they impose an undue financial burden on taxpayers, are needlessly complex, create unnecessary requirements, or exceed what’s allowed under law.”

Mnuchin told journalists on Friday that rules enacted by Obama’s Treasury Department, meant to reduce corporate tax avoidance specifically through the process of tax inversions, would be among those targeted under Trump’s order.

Trump decried such tactics on the 2016 campaign trail, saying companies that employed inversions “have no loyalty to this country.”

“That’s why it’s so shocking to see him order this review, which could lead to a rollback of rules that would have sharply decreased incentives—and limited the ability of companies—to game the system by using inversions to permanently avoid a U.S. tax bill,” said Susan Harley, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

Chye-Ching Huang of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities added:

“During his campaign, President Trump…said that inverting companies ‘have no loyalty to this country…And we have to do something.’ If the new executive order ultimately leads to rolling back the Obama administration’s anti-inversion regulations, President Trump will effectively be cutting taxes for profitable multinational tax avoiders and also creating a bigger incentive and opportunity for the inversions that he has so strongly criticized.”

In its report on Friday’s signings, Vox said the set of actions was

“a clear flashing light that the notion of a Trump-era GOP as an economically populist ‘workers’ party’ is dead, and business interests rule the roost.”

And a dangerous one, at that. Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, told the New York Times:

“From our perspective, it is a direction that is dramatically backwards on financial stability.”

Following the ceremony, Trump announced there would be a “big announcement” on tax reform coming next week. He told the Associated Press he’d be unveiling a tax plan with a “massive” tax cut—”bigger I believe than any tax cut ever”—for businesses and individuals alike.

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

We are fighting in Korea so we won’t have to fight in Wichita, or in Chicago, or in New Orleans, or in San Francisco Bay. –President Harry S Truman, 1952

Why has this tiny nation of 24 million people invested so much of its limited resources in acquiring nuclear weapons? North Korea is universally condemned as a bizarre and failed state, its nuclear posture denounced as irrational.

Yet North Korea’s stance cannot be separated out from its turbulent history during the 20^th Century, especially its four decade long occupation by Japan, the forced division of the Korean peninsula after World War II, and, of course, the subsequent utterly devastating war with the United States from 1950-1953 that ended in an armistice in which a technical state of war still exists.

Korea is an ancient nation and culture, achieving national unity in 608 CE, and despite its near envelopment by gigantic China it has retained its own unique language and traditions throughout its recorded history. National independence came to an end in 1910 after five years of war when Japan, taking advantage of Chinese weakness, invaded and occupied Korea using impressed labor for the industries Japan created for the benefit of its own economy. As always the case for colonization the Japanese easily found collaborators among the Korean elite Koreans to manage their first colony.

Naturally a nationalist resistance movement emerged rapidly and, given the history of the early 20^th Century, it was not long before communists began to play a significant role in Korea’s effort to regain its independence. The primary form of resistance came in the form of “peoples’ committees” which became deeply rooted throughout the entire peninsula, pointedly in the south as well. It was from these deeply political and nationalistic village and city committees that guerrilla groups engaged the Japanese throughout WWII. The parallels with similar organizations in Vietnam against the Japanese, and later against the French and Americans, are obvious. Another analogous similarity is that Franklin Roosevelt also wanted a Great Power trusteeship for Korea, as for Vietnam. Needless to say both Britain and France objected to this plan.

Photo by Stefan Krasowski | CC BY 2.0

When Russia entered the war against Japanese in August of 1945 the end of Japanese rule was at hand regardless of the atomic bomb. As events turned out Japan surrendered on 15 August when Soviet troops had occupied much of the northern peninsula. It should be noted that American forces played no role in the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. However, because the Soviets, as allies of the U.S., wished to remain on friendly terms they agreed to the division of Korea between Soviet and American forces. The young Dean Rusk, later to become Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, arbitrarily drew a line of division across the 38^th Parallel because, as he said, that would leave the capital city, Seoul, in the American zone.

Written reports at the time criticized Washington for “allowing” the Red Army into Korea but the fact was it was the other way around. The Soviets could easily have occupied the entirety of Korea but chose not to do so, instead opting for a negotiated settlement with the U.S. over the future of Korea. Theoretically the peninsula would be reunited after some agreement between the two victors at some future date.

However, the U.S. immediately began to favor those Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese in the exploitation of their own country and its people, largely the landed elites, and Washington began to arm the provisional government it set up to root out the peoples’ committees. For their part the Soviets supported the communist nationalist leader, Kim Il-Sung who had led the guerrilla army against Japan at great cost in lives.

In 1947 the United Nations authorized elections in Korea, but the election monitors were all American allies so the Soviets and communist Koreans refused to participate. By then the Cold War was in full swing, the critical alliance between Washington and Moscow that had defeated Nazi Germany had already been sundered. As would later also occur in Vietnam in 1956, the U.S. oversaw elections only in the south of Korea and only those candidates approved by Washington. Syngman Rhee became South Korea’s first president protected by the new American armed and trained Army of the Republic of Korea. This ROK was commanded by officers who had served the Japanese occupation including one who had been decorated by Emperor Hirohito himself and who had tried to track down and kill Kim Il Sung for the Japanese.

With Korea thus seemingly divided permanently both Russian and American troops withdrew in 1948 though they left “advisers” behind. On both sides of the new artificial border pressures mounted for a forcible reunification. The fact remained that much of rural southern Korea was still loyal to the peoples committees. This did not necessarily mean that they were committed communists but they were virulent nationalists who recognized the role that Kim’s forces had played against the Japanese. Rhee’s forces then began to systematically root out Kim’s supporters. Meanwhile the American advisers had constantly to keep Rhee’s forces from crossing the border to invade the north.

In 1948 guerrilla war broke out against the Rhee regime on the southern island of Cheju, the population of which ultimately rose in wholesale revolt. The suppression of the rebellion was guided by many American agents soon to become part of the Central Intelligence Agency and by military advisers. Eventually the entire population was removed to the coast and kept in guarded compounds and between 20,000 and 30,000 villagers died. Simultaneously elements of the ROK army refused to participate in this war against their own people and this mutiny was brutally suppressed by those ROK soldiers who would obey such orders. Over one thousand of the mutineers escaped to join Kim’s guerrillas in the mountains.

Though Washington claimed that these rebellions were fomented by the communists no evidence surfaced that the Soviets provided anything other than moral support. Most of the rebels captured or killed had Japanese or American weapons.

In North Korea the political system had evolved in response to decades of foreign occupation and war. Though it was always assumed to be a Soviet satellite, North Korea more nearly bears comparison to Tito’s Yugoslavia. The North Koreans were always able to balance the tensions between the Soviets and the Chinese to their own advantage. During the period when the Comintern exercised most influence over national communist parties not a single Korean communist served in any capacity and the number of Soviet advisers in the north was never high.

Nineteen forty-nine marked a watershed year. The Chinese Communist Revolution, the Soviet Atomic Bomb, the massive reorganization of the National Security State in the U.S. all occurred that year. In 1950 Washington issued its famous National Security Paper-68 (NSC-68) which outlined the agenda for a global anti-communist campaign, requiring the tripling of the American defense budget. Congress balked at this all-encompassing blueprint when in the deathless words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson “Thank God! Korea came along.” Only months before Acheson had made a speech in which he pointedly omitted Korea from America’s “Defense perimeter.”

The Korean War seemed to vindicate everything written and said about the” international communist conspiracy. In popular myth on June 25, 1950 the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders. In fact the entire 38^th Parallel had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949. On numerous occasions Syngman Rhee had to be restrained by American advisers from invading the north. The Korean civil war was all but inevitable. Given postwar American plans for access globally to resources, markets and cheaper labor power any form of national liberation, communist or liberal democratic, was to be opposed. Acheson and his second, Dean Rusk, told President Truman that “we must draw the line here!” Truman decided to request authorization for American intervention from the United Nations and bypassed Congress thereby leading to widespread opposition and, later, a return to Republican rule under Dwight Eisenhower..

Among the remaining mysteries of the UN decision to undertake the American led military effort to reject North Korea from the south was the USSR’s failure to make use of its veto in the Security Council. The Soviet ambassador was ostensibly boycotting the meetings in protest of the UN’s refusal to seat the Chinese communists as China’s official delegation. According to Bruce Cumings though, evidence exists that Stalin ordered the Soviet ambassador to abstain. Why? The UN resolution authorizing war could have been prevented. At that moment the Sino-Soviet split was already in evidence and Stalin may have wished to weaken China, something which actually happened as a result of that nation’s subsequent entry into the war. Or he may have wished that cloaking the UN mission under the U.S. flag would have revealed the UN to be largely under the control of the United States, which indeed it was. What is known is that Stalin refused to allow Soviet combat troops and reduced shipments of arms to Kim’s forces. Later, however Soviet pilots would engage Americans in the air. The Chinese were quick to condemn the UN action as “American imperialism” and warned of dire consequences if China itself were threatened.

The war went badly at first for the U.S. despite numerical advantages in forces. Rout after rout followed with the ROK in full retreat. Meanwhile tens of thousands of southern guerrillas who had originated in peoples’ committees fought the Americans and the ROK. At one point the North Koreans were in control of Seoul and seemed about to drive American forces into the sea. At that point the commander- in-chief of all UN forces, General Douglas MacArthur,  announced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.

Truman was loathe to introduce nukes and instead authorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950 with few losses by the Marine Corps vaunted 1^st Division. This threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38^th Parallel, the mandate imposed by the UN resolution. But the State Department claimed that the border was not recognized under international law and therefore the UN mandate had no real legal bearing. It was this that MacArthur claimed gave him the right to take the war into the north. Though the North Koreans had suffered a resounding defeat in the south, they withdrew into northern mountain redoubts forcing the American forces that followed them into bloody and costly combat, led Americans into a trap.

The Chinese had said from the beginning that any approach of foreign troops toward their border would result in “dire consequences.” Fearing an invasion of Manchuria to crush the nascent communist revolution the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou En-Lai declared that China

“will not supinely tolerate seeing their neighbors invaded by the imperialists.”

MacArthur sneered at this warning.

“… They have no airforce…if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be a great slaughter…we are the best.”

He then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border.

It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Korea’s relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was

“about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.”

It was he who later said that the US “ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.” Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said

“We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.”

Lemay was by no means exaggerating.

On November 27, 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops suddenly crossed the border into North Korea completely overwhelming US forces. Acheson said this was the “worst defeat of American forces since Bull Run.” One famous incident was the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where 50,000 US marines were surrounded. As they escaped their enclosure they  said they were “advancing to the rear” but in fact all American forces were being routed.

Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was under “active consideration.” MacArthur demanded the bombs… As he put it in his memoirs:

I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria…and spread behind us – from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.

Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.

He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.

It is well known that MacArthur was fired for insubordination for publically announcing his desire to use nukes. Actually, Truman himself put the nukes at ready and threatened to use them if China launched air raids against American forces. But he did not want to put them under MacArthur’s command because he feared MacArthur would conduct a preemptive strike against China anyway.

By June 1951, one year after the beginning of the war, the communists had pushed UN forces back across the 38th parallel. Chinese ground forces might have been able to push the entire UN force off the peninsula entirely but that would not have negated US naval and air forces, and would have probably resulted in nuclear strikes against the Chinese mainland and that brought the real risk of Soviet entry and all out nuclear exchanges. So from this point on the war became one of attrition, much like the trench warfare of World War I. casualties continued to be high on both sides for the duration of the war which lasted until 1953 when an armistice without reunification was signed.

Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951 the U.S. initiated “Operation Strangle” which officialls estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million. We do not know how many Chinese died – either solders or civilians killed in cross border bombings.

The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true. At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the Geneva Convention. Washington accused the communists of introducing germ warfare.

Napalm was used extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living “a troglodyte existence.”In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang’s harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that

“Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.”

Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.

At Nuremberg after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were executed for their crimes.

So after a horrific war Korea returned to the status quo ante bellum in terms of political boundaries but it was completely devastated, especially the north.

I submit that it is the collective memory of all of what I’ve described that animates North Korea’s policies toward the US today which has nuclear weapons on constant alert and stations almost 30,000 forces at the ready. Remember, a state of war still exists and has since 1953.

While South Korea received heavy American investment in the industries fleeing the United States in search of cheaper labor and new markets it was nevertheless ruled until quite recently by military dictatorships scarcely different than those of the north. For its part the north constructed its economy along five-year plans and collectivized its agriculture. While it never enjoyed the sort of consumer society that now characterizes some of South Korea, its GDP grew substantially until the collapse of communism globally brought about the withdrawal of all foreign aid to north Korea.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as some American policymakers took note of the north’s growing weakness  Secretary  of Defense Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz talked openly of using force finally to settle the question of Korean reunification and the claimed threat to international peace posed by North Korea.

In 1993 the Clinton Administration discovered that North Korea was constructing a nuclear processing plant and also developing medium range missiles. The Pentagon desired to destroy these facilities but that would mean wholesale war so the administration fostered an agreement whereby North Korea would stand down in return for the provision of oil and other economic aid. When in 2001, after the events of 9-11, the Bush II neo-conservatives militarized policy and declared North Korea to be an element of the “axis of evil.” All bets were now off. In that context North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, reasoning that nuclear weapons were the only way possible to prevent a full scale attack by the US in the future. Given a stark choice between another war with the US and all that would entail this decision seems hardly surprising. Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect, after all the history I’ve described, that the North Korean regime would simply submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.

(Acknowledgement to Bruce Cumings and I.F. Stone)

As Venezuela gears up to face a massive protest from U.S.-funded, right-wing opposition groups, embattled President Nicolás Maduro has called for the expansion of armed civilian militias as the threat of more violence on the streets of Caracas continues to grow.

The militias, created by deceased former president Hugo Chávez to resist “imperialist aggression,” currently consist of about 100,000 members. Maduro’s proposed expansion of the civilian force would increase its size to 500,000. Maduro’s announcement was accompanied by a rousing speech in which he called upon Venezuelans to decide if they are “with the homeland” or against it, adding that “now is not the time to hesitate.”

The United Nations quickly condemned Maduro’s plan, arguing that it would only exacerbate tensions in the country. But the UN – along with other human rights organizations such as the Organization of American States – have refused to speak out against the violence perpetrated by the foreign-funded opposition.

The president’s plan to expand the civilian militias comes amid weeks of violent opposition-led protests in the nation’s capital that have seen the deaths of several protestors, with the planned “mother of all protests” set to take place this Wednesday. The ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela has also planned a counter-protest for the same day, meaning that clashes between the two groups are almost certain to occur.

The violence of the recent protests has captured international attention, as years of subtle and subversive foreign intervention against oil-rich Venezuela’s leftist government continues to take its toll. Former U.S. President Barack Obama alone dedicated $5 million to “support political competition-building efforts” in Venezuela. The U.S. is estimated to have spent between $50 to $60 million since Chávez’s election to bolster the country’s right-wing opposition. It should come as no surprise, then, that evidence has emerged showing right-wing politicians and their affiliates paying protesters in cash to violently escalate what would otherwise have been a largely peaceful opposition rally.

For instance, in one publicly released video, one of the protestors asserted that he was paid $420 to attack the Supreme Court building in Caracas with Molotov cocktails during an April 8 rally. Given that Venezuela’s economy is in tatters and many basic necessities are in short supply due to sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, offers of such large sums of money are likely hard to resist for many opposition members.

Venezuela’s opposition has repeatedly asserted that Maduro is transforming his presidency into a dictatorship while also blaming him for Venezuela’s economic problems, food shortages and rising crime. However, Maduro and his supporters continue to assert that opposition leaders, bolstered by foreign governments and corporations, are fomenting violence and waging an economic war intended to destabilize his regime in order to return political power to the right wing, which ruled the country prior to Chávez’s rise to power.

There has been considerable evidence to support Maduro’s claims, though much of it has not been widely reported by the international media. For instance, businesses associated with the opposition have been caught hoarding food and medicine to create the appearance of scarcity and shortages, a tactic long used by the U.S. against leftist Latin American regimes.

In addition, the Venezuelan opposition is openly funded by the United States and Venezuelan oligarchs who have expressed clear interest in regime change in Venezuela for years. While Maduro’s latest call for increased civilian involvement in protecting his government comes at a key time for the embattled president, it may not be enough to ward off the long-standing efforts to remove the socialists from power in Venezuela.

The current form of “globalization” is predatory, criminal, and anti-democratic.

It is led by largely unelected dark state agencies within the U.S establishment. Both President Trump, and Prime Minister Trudeau have largely disavowed their pre-election promises.

In contrast to life-enhancing globalization that respects international law and nation-state sovereignty, the current form of globalization is contemptuous of international laws and conventions. Instead of rescinding the illegal sanctions against Syria – which aim to destroy Syria and empower the terrorists — Canada’s Trudeau is making them more onerous. Diplomacy as a solution continues to be ignored, Embassies remain closed, and Canada’s contempt for peace and support for terrorism continues unabated.

Ken Stone from the Hamilton Coalition to Stop The War offered the following assessment:

The Hamilton Coalition Against The War condemns Prime Minister Trudeau’s astonishing about-face on Syria. Less than 48 hours after publicly calling for an impartial international investigation into the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, Syria, Trudeau suddenly turned 180 degrees and endorsed the illegal and warlike US attack on Sharyat Airbase. This flip-flop was not only the wrong move according to international law but it could lead to a widening of the war to inflame the whole region or even the whole world.

On top of all that, Canada’s Minister for Global Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, widened Canada’s unilateral economic sanctions against Syria to include 27 top-level Syrian government officials. This too was a belligerent, illegal, and unhelpful move.

Trudeau’s flip-flop is only Canada’s latest foreign policy error on Syria. It’s time that Canada changed gears on Syria and worked for a political solution to the crisis there rather than prolonging the war by belonging to the US-led military coalition in Syria and Iraq. Canada should quit that coalition and bring all of our troops and support aircraft home! Canada should resign as the leader of the Economic Sanctions Subcommittee of the so-called Friends of Syria Group of Countries (FSG). In that capacity, Canada, under Harper, helped in Ottawa, in June 2013, to bring in a broad regime of illegal, international economic sanctions against Syria which turned hundreds of thousands of ordinary Syrians into refugees, even though these sanctions did NOT have the approval of the UN Security Council. Trudeau should drop all these economic sanctions immediately! The Canadian government could assist the UN diplomatic effort to restore peace in Syria by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Damascus. Finally, we Canadians could stop being drawn into all the wars of the US Empire if Canada dropped out of NATO! We urge all Canadians to go onto social media and to raise these ideas to MP’s and in all possible forums to bring an end to war in Syria as quickly as possible.

Canada’s progressive branding belies its international criminality.

U.S–led NATO (including Canada) is guilty of the supreme crime of aggressive war against the non-belligerent, sovereign state of Syria.

If Canada was sincere in its “fight against terrorism”, it would be fighting alongside Syria and its allies to defeat the terrorists infesting Syria.  It would open Embassies and lines of communication with Syria, it would rescind all illegal sanctions, and it would reject NATO’s warmongering diktats.

The other day, I asked a longtime Democratic Party insider who is working on the Russia-gate investigation which country interfered more in U.S. politics, Russia or Israel. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Israel, of course.”

Which underscores my concern about the hysteria raging across Official Washington about “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential campaign: There is no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of Israel-gate.

The problem is that if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking to the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)

So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both appeared before AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton promising to take the U.S.-Israeli relationship “to the next level” – whatever that meant – and Trump vowing not to “pander” and then pandering like crazy.

Congress is no different. It has given Israel’s controversial Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a record-tying three invitations to address joint sessions of Congress (matching the number of times British Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared). We then witnessed the Republicans and Democrats competing to see how often their members could bounce up and down and who could cheer Netanyahu the loudest, even when the Israeli prime minister was instructing the Congress to follow his position on Iran rather than President Obama’s.

Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize political influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby’s largesse and who doesn’t. On the rare occasion when members of Congress step out of line – and take a stand that offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a well-funded opponent in their next race, a tactic that dates back decades.

Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy (both Republicans from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby’s wrath when they opened channels of communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the cause of seeking peace. Findley was targeted and defeated in 1982; Percy in 1984.

Findley recounted his experience in a 1985 book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, in which Findley called the lobby “the 700-pound gorilla in Washington.” The book was harshly criticized in a New York Times review by Adam Clymer, who called it “an angry, one-sided book that seems often to be little more than a stringing together of stray incidents.”

Enforced Silence

Since then, there have been fewer and fewer members of Congress or other American politicians who have dared to speak out, judging that – when it comes to the Israeli lobby – discretion is the better part of valor. Today, many U.S. pols grovel before the Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval kings courting the blessings of the Pope at the Vatican.

During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed with suspicion, traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within rocket-range of Gaza while steering clear of showing much empathy for the Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2014.

In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tried to exploit the tense Obama-Netanyahu relationship by stopping in Israel to win a tacit endorsement from Netanyahu. The 2016 campaign was no exception with both Clinton and Trump stressing their love of Israel in their appearances before AIPAC.

Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and American supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have exploited that reality.

One of Israel’s most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has poured millions of dollars in “dark money” into political candidates and groups that support Israel’s interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a nuclear bomb inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump favorite having donated a record $5 million to Trump’s inaugural celebration.

Of course, many Israel-connected political donations are much smaller but no less influential. A quarter century ago, I was told how an aide to a Democratic foreign policy chairman, who faced a surprisingly tough race after redistricting, turned to the head of AIPAC for help and, almost overnight, donations were pouring in from all over the country. The chairman was most thankful.

The October Surprise Mystery

Israel’s involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin played a key role in helping Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages before Election Day.

Begin despised Carter for the Camp David Accords that forced Israel to give back the Sinai to Egypt. Begin also believed that Carter was too sympathetic to the Palestinians and – if he won a second term – would conspire with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to impose a two-state solution on Israel.

President Jimmy Carter signing the Camp David peace agreement with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin.

Begin’s contempt for Carter was not even a secret. In a 1991 book, The Last Option, senior Israeli intelligence and foreign policy official David Kimche explained Begin’s motive for dreading Carter’s reelection. Kimche said Israeli officials had gotten wind of “collusion” between Carter and Sadat “to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Kimche continued,

“This plan prepared behind Israel’s back and without her knowledge must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”

But Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in 1980 when, Kimche wrote,

“he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”

In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe also noted that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.

“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel’s back.”

So, in order to buy time for Israel to “change the facts on the ground” by moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection had to be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.

Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and intelligence operatives who described how Reagan’s campaign, mostly through future CIA Director William Casey and past CIA Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in 1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for keeping the hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as President.)

Discrediting History

Though the evidence of the so-called October Surprise deal is far stronger than the current case for believing that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media have refused to accept it, deeming it a “conspiracy theory.”

President Ronald Reagan, delivering his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, as the 52 U.S. hostages in Iran are simultaneously released.

One of the reasons for the hostility directed against the 1980 case was the link to Israel, which did not want its hand in manipulating the election of a U.S. president to become an accepted part of American history. So, for instance, the Israeli government went to great lengths to discredit Ben-Menashe after he began to speak with reporters and to give testimony to the U.S. Congress.

When I was a Newsweek correspondent and first interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990, the Israeli government initially insisted that he was an impostor, that he had no connection to Israeli intelligence.

However, when I obtained documentary evidence of Ben-Menashe’s work for a military intelligence unit, the Israelis admitted that they had lied but then insisted that he was just a low-level translator, a claim that was further contradicted by other documents showing that he had traveled widely around the world on missions to obtain weapons for the Israel-to-Iran arms pipeline.

Nevertheless, the Israeli government along with sympathetic American reporters and members of the U.S. Congress managed to shut down any serious investigation into the 1980 operation, which was, in effect, the prequel to Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal of 1984-86. Thus, U.S. history was miswritten. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative; Secrecy & Privilege; and Trick or Treason.]

Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the photo from his U.S. Naval Intelligence ID.

Looking back over the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, it is clear that Israel exercised significant influence over U.S. presidents since its founding in 1948, but the rise of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in the 1970s – led by former Jewish terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – marked a time when Israel shed any inhibitions about interfering directly in U.S. politics.

Much as Begin and Shamir engaged in terror attacks on British officials and Palestinian civilians during Israel’s founding era, the Likudniks who held power in 1980 believed that the Zionist cause trumped normal restraints on their actions. In other words, the ends justified the means.

In the 1980s, Israel also mounted spying operations aimed at the U.S. government, including those of intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard, who fed highly sensitive documents to Israel and – after being caught and spending almost three decades in prison – was paroled and welcomed as a hero inside Israel.

A History of Interference

But it is true that foreign interference in U.S. politics is as old as the American Republic. In the 1790s, French agents – working with the Jeffersonians – tried to rally Americans behind France’s cause in its conflict with Great Britain. In part to frustrate the French operation, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In the Twentieth Century, Great Britain undertook covert influence operations to ensure U.S. support in its conflicts with Germany, while German agents unsuccessfully sought the opposite.

So, the attempts by erstwhile allies and sometimes adversaries to move U.S. foreign policy in one direction or another is nothing new, and the U.S. government engages in similar operations in countries all over the world, both overtly and covertly.

Wanted Poster of the Palestine Police Force offering rewards for the capture of Stern Gang terrorists: 1. Jaacov Levstein (Eliav), 2. Yitzhak Yezernitzky (Shamir), 3. Natan Friedman-Yelin

It was the CIA’s job for decades to use propaganda and dirty tricks to ensure that pro-U.S. politicians were elected or put in power in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, pretty much everywhere the U.S. government perceived some interest. After the U.S. intelligence scandals of the 1970s, however, some of that responsibility was passed to other organizations, such as the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

NED, USAID and various “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) finance activists, journalists and other operatives to undermine political leaders who are deemed to be obstacles to U.S. foreign policy desires.

In particular, NED has been at the center of efforts to flip elections to U.S.-backed candidates, such as in Nicaragua in 1990, or to sponsor “color revolutions,” which typically organize around some color as the symbol for mass demonstrations. Ukraine – on Russia’s border – has been the target of two such operations, the Orange Revolution in 2004, which helped install anti-Russian President Viktor Yushchenko, and the Maidan ouster of elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

NED president Carl Gershman, a neoconservative who has run NED since its founding in 1983, openly declared that Ukraine was “the biggest prize” in September 2013 — just months before the Maidan protests — as well as calling it an important step toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, Gershman called directly for regime change in Russia.

The Neoconservatives

Another key issue related to Israeli influence inside the United States is the role of the neocons, a political movement that emerged in the 1970s as a number of hawkish Democrats migrated to the Republican Party as a home for more aggressive policies to protect Israel and take on the Soviet Union and Arab states.

In some European circles, the neocons are described as “Israel’s American agents,” which may somewhat overstate the direct linkage between Israel and the neocons although a central tenet of neocon thinking is that there must be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The neocons say U.S. politicians must stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel even if that means the Americans sidling up to the Israelis rather than any movement the other way.

Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan. (Photo credit: Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl)

Since the mid-1990s, American neocons have worked closely with Benjamin Netanyahu. Several prominent neocons (including former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert Loewenberg) advised Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign and urged a new strategy for “securing the realm.” Essentially, the idea was to replace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab states with “regime change” for governments that were viewed as troublesome to Israel, including Iraq and Syria.

By 1998, the Project for the New American Century (led by neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan) was pressuring President Bill Clinton to invade Iraq, a plan that was finally put in motion in 2003 under President George W. Bush.

But the follow-on plans to go after Syria and Iran were delayed because the Iraq War turned into a bloody mess, killing some 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Bush could not turn to phase two until near the end of his presidency and then was frustrated by a U.S. intelligence estimate concluding that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb (which was to be the pretext for a bombing campaign).

Bush also could pursue “regime change” in Syria only as a proxy effort of subversion, rather than a full-scale U.S. invasion. President Barack Obama escalated the Syrian proxy war in 2011 with the support of Israel and its strange-bedfellow allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States, which hated Syria’s government because it was allied with Shiite-ruled Iran — and Sunnis and Shiites have been enemies since the Seventh Century. Israel insists that the U.S. take the Sunni side, even if that puts the U.S. in bed with Al Qaeda.

But Obama dragged his heels on a larger U.S. military intervention in Syria and angered Netanyahu further by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program rather than bomb-bomb-bombing Iran.

Showing the Love

Obama’s perceived half-hearted commitment to Israeli interests explained Romney’s campaign 2012 trip to seek Netanyahu’s blessings. Even after winning a second term, Obama sought to appease Netanyahu by undertaking a three-day trip to Israel in 2013 to show his love.

Still, in 2015, when Obama pressed ahead with the Iran nuclear agreement, Netanyahu went over the President’s head directly to Congress where he was warmly received, although the Israeli prime minister ultimately failed to sink the Iran deal.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In Campaign 2016, both Clinton and Trump wore their love for Israel on their sleeves, Clinton promising to take the relationship to “the next level” (a phrase that young couples often use when deciding to go from heavy petting to intercourse). Trump reminded AIPAC that he had a Jewish grandchild and vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Both also bristled with hatred toward Iran, repeating the popular falsehood that “Iran is the principal source of terrorism” when it is Saudi Arabia and other Sunni sheikdoms that have been the financial and military supporters of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the terror groups most threatening to Europe and the United States.

By contrast to Israel’s long history of playing games with U.S. politics, the Russian government stands accused of trying to undermine the U.S. political process recently by hacking into emails of the Democratic National Committee — revealing the DNC’s improper opposition to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — disclosing the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street and pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton Foundation — and sharing that information with the American people via WikiLeaks.

Although WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails from the Russians, the U.S. intelligence community says it has high confidence in its conclusions about Russian meddling and the mainstream U.S. media treats the allegations as flat-fact.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making opening remarks at a joint White House press conference with President Donald Trump on Feb. 15, 2017. (Screenshot from White House video)

The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government of raising doubts in the minds of Americans about their political system by having RT, the Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party candidates (who were excluded from the two-party Republican-Democratic debates) and by having RT report on protests such as Occupy Wall Street and issues such as “fracking.”

The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only remaining question is whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign colluded in this Russian operation. For that purpose, a number of people associated with the Trump campaign are to be hauled before Congress and made to testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishment-approved outlets are working with major technology companies on how to marginalize independent news sources and to purge “Russian propaganda” (often conflated with “fake news”) from the Internet.

It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people from the insidious Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about the U.S. political process. But God forbid if anyone were to suggest an investigation of Israel-gate.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

The level of student loan debt in the United States has risen to $1.5 trillion, and defaults are at more than 40% of debtors and rising. Student loan debt has grown to overwhelm all other categories of non-housing consumer debt in this nation.

Underneath this crisis are rising tuition costs, a predatory student loan industry and an absence of consumer protections for students. Student debt is the only debt that can’t be removed through bankruptcy.

Governor Cuomo recently signed a new law that is supposed to help with the cost of higher education, and Senator Sanders introduced similar legislation at the federal level, but these are not real solutions to the crisis.

Alan Collinge, the founder of Student Loan Justice, says that these efforts will not relieve current students of debt, nor will they protect future students from acquiring debt. He anticipates that this crisis will explode within the next 12 to 18 months. Nothing short of a student debt jubilee will work. We discussed this issue in depth on Clearing The FOG.

At present, these massive debts are crippling the lives of more than 40 million people. They are trapped in debt until death because in 2005 Congress, led by Joe Biden, a senator at the time, changed the bankruptcy laws so the debt would continue even after bankruptcy. In fact, student debt collectors can garnish wages, seize social security and take assets from estates to repay the debt. More than $1 billion has already been taken from Social Security to pay student debt.

Collinge writes about the human and economic impacts:

The human cost of this phenomenon cannot be understated. Families and individuals are being financially destabilized and wrecked. Family formation, home and other purchases are being delayed or cancelled, people are actually fleeing the country and even committing suicide as a result of this predatory debt.

Student loan debt was created by the rapidly rising costs of college and predatory lenders. As schools have lost public sources of funding over the past 50 years, they’ve turned to other methods of acquiring funds such as high tuition, room and board prices and assorted fees. This has been fed by rising amounts of money that students are permitted to borrow. Student loan officers are incentivised to encourage students to borrow large amounts without informing them of the disastrous risks they are taking.

Finance predators have been given a lot of power to collect student debts. In Texas, people who defaulted on student loans have had swat teams break down their doors and have been arrested for not paying. For-profit colleges have a history of targeting people living in desperately poor neighborhoods with student loans, even though they know the students will be unlikely to pay them back or even to graduate with a degree.

The result is that at present 27 million people are unable to pay back their loans and are in default or in arrears in some way. That is nearly 10 percent of the country unable to pay back their student loan debt and unable to declare bankruptcy. And, if a parent or grandparent co-signs the loan, they are in the same situation – with a loan that will follow them to the grave.

How student loan debt become the only kind of debt that cannot be relieved in bankruptcy.

Over the past forty years, student loans have become increasingly unprotected and predatory. If you follow former vice president Joe Biden’s senate career, you can map virtually every step of the process. Initially, legislators made it more difficult for students to be relieved of the debt in increments by requiring delays before a graduate could declare bankruptcy and stripping protections from particular types of student loans. By 2005, student ,loan debtors found themselves without any rights. Biden was the Democrat with a middle-class image who provided cover and political weight to these efforts on behalf of his largest contributor, MBNA, and the finance industry generally.

The Obama administration made the crisis worse. They moved student debt into the Department of Education so that now the government is profiting from it immensely. While Obama promised to reverse the Biden law that eliminated bankruptcy protection from student debt, his administration did nothing. DOE’s program is now run by people brought in from the loan industry and they fight to make sure protection of debtors does not occur because they make more money from defaults.

Despite its impact on tens of millions of people and the anchor it creates on the economy, the DOE makes sure that the various loan forgiveness programs put in place over the last decade, such as debt forgiveness for working for non-profits and income-related provisions, fail. Hundreds of thousands have already failed in these programs. The Obama administration became an enemy of those suffering from student debt.

During the presidential campaign candidate Donald Trump criticized the federal government from profiting from student debt. Trump said in his campaign speeches, “That’s probably one of the only things the government shouldn’t make money off — I think it’s terrible that one of the only profit centers we have is student loans.” He was right, the average student loan debt is $34,000. Interest alone on this amount is about $90 billion per year.  Unfortunately, President Trump has been silent on the issue and has done nothing despite the growing crisis. The DOE is making $50 billion in annual profits from student loan debt.

The other big profiteers are colleges and universities. As Collinge writes:

Not only have administrative salaries and capital improvements exploded at college campuses across the nation, their cash reserves (separate from their endowments) have ballooned over the past decade. Since the financial crisis of ‘08, the colleges have managed to build up reserves — aka slush funds — that could possibly be greater than the combined value of all college endowments.

What is the student debt movement to do? Of course the Biden bankruptcy protections should be repealed but that is not enough. We need a complete student loan debt forgiveness program. These debts are ill gotten gains and should be forgiven. If the government refuses to forgive these debts, people must rise up together and refuse to pay any student loan debt.

The people have the power to end this injustice and must mobilize to do so. A student loan debt jubilee, whether mandated by law or put in place by the people, will bring economic freedom to tens of millions, end their debt servitude and allow them to participate in the economy. It will be a significant economic stimulus, but more importantly it will end an injustice.

Visit StudentLoanJustice.org and join one of the fifty state chapters. It is critical that we are ready when the crisis implodes to demand nothing less than a student debt jubilee.

In the face of strong public opposition the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a working paper offering governments suggestions on how to move toward a cashless society. In its recent report The Macroeconomics of De-Cashing, the IMF proposed to abolish cash and recommended to adopt measures in order to restrict its use.

The paper defines ‘De-cashing’ as “the gradual phasing out of currency from circulation and its replacement with convertible deposits.” Defined as replacing paper currency with convertible deposits, de-cashing would affect all key macroeconomic sectors.

In order to achieve its goal the paper proposes certain steps that include

“abolishing large denomination bills, imposing ceilings on cash transactions, introducing declaration requirements on the carriage of cash in and out of the country, reporting requirements for cash payments exceeding a specified amount, and even taxing cash transactions.”

In an interview with Sputnik Germany, former head of the Federal Association of German Industry (BDI) Hans-Olaf Henkel said that this “could lead to terrible consequences.“

“The European Central Bank (ECB) does not want that depositors to keep their money under the pillow. If any bank in Europe goes bankrupt, then depositors have a guaranteed right that the state will return them the amount of up to 100,000 euros. But not more,” the economist told Sputnik Germany.

One of the main reasons behind this proposal is the desire of financial institutions to force people to keep their money in banks. As explained in our exclusive report on the global War on Cash: Target India,

“These are classic strategies to avoid a Bank Run. A Bank Run occurs when a large number of customers withdraw cash from deposit accounts with a financial institution at the same time because they believe that the financial institution is, or might become, insolvent. As a Bank Run progresses, it generates its own momentum: as more people withdraw cash, the likelihood of default increases, triggering further withdrawals. This can destabilize the bank to the point where it runs out of cash and thus faces sudden bankruptcy. To combat a Bank Run, a bank may limit how much cash each customer may withdraw or suspend withdrawals altogether.

When Indian banks were flooded with cash deposits, one frequent question that was being raised was how much of these extra deposits would be permanent? Would bank customers withdraw the money after the situation went back to normal, or would they decide not to keep so much cash in hand, and rather keep it in the bank? The answer would determine whether the surge in bank liquidity would continue and, therefore, mean lower interest rates on bank deposits for longer. A vague atmosphere of conflicting policies that is being maintained by the Indian government and the Reserve Bank of India discourages this practice and ensures that the deposits stay with the banks.

Whether the customers go for a Bank Run or not the extra cash deposits gathered by demonetization is sticky and the stark reality is that the entire demonetization exercise to bailout the banks may have just managed to sustain the crisis for another 6-8 months. The state of public sector banks has only worsened since.

What is taking place today is the greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands in the history of this world. Contrary to a myth long popular in the West and now espoused by the East it’s been the poor of the world that finance the rich not the other way round. At the end it was the decades of hard earned public money that was sucked to bail out the ailing Indian banking system that in turn would bailout and stabilize the bankrupt Western-European economies and corporations.”

There is a war on cash being waged globally and the objective of this war is to push nations into becoming a Cashless Surveillance Society easily managed by the East India Companies in their new avatar as global Multinational Corporations.

The false flag Syrian chemical attack and the subsequent “frightening” (that turned out to be rather harmless) missile attack against the Shayrat air base in the Homs Governorate launched by the US Navy could remind an impartial analyst a chess game on Trump’s part that was thought over in advance. It’s clear that Trump aims at trampling Syria’s sovereignty in bid to show that Bashar al-Assad is no more than a pawn on the Syrian chess table.

Any outright hostile steps that the White House takes against Damascus are designed to serve as an indication of the absence of any need to seek a reason or a permission from Bashar al-Assad for the US to take any steps on the Syrian soil. The international community is also being purposefully disregarded by the Trump administration as if an attack against the sovereign Syrian state doesn’t constitute a violation of international law. We are being shown that Washington will be taking into consideration nothing but its own plans and interests while deploying its military forces in the region, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it will continue pretending that it was going to fight pursue the declared fight against the terrorists of ISIS. Hence, American bases that are being built in Syria as if the soil that they occupy is up for the tacking of anybody reckless enough to claim it, thus emphasizing once again that the West couldn’t care less about Assad’s opinion on that matter.

In recent years, Russia acquired two military bases in Syria – the Khmeimim air base and the naval Tartus base. The United States has had no foothold in Syria to speak of. In this regard, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the US Armed Forces have been particularly active in pursuing the goals that were considered unimportant before Trump came to power. It is quite obvious America’s bases that are being erected to the east of the Euphrates are built with long-term goals in mind, so they are there to stay, no matter what turn the so-called War on Terror will take.

United States Secretary of Defense, James Mattis has already presented to Donald Trump the plan of military seizure of Syrian lands last February that was to be achieved by building a network of military facilities under the pretext of having an urgent need to fight the so-called Islamic State simultaneously in Iraq and Syria. According to this official, there’s no victory to achieve against ISIS without US military installations being installed no more that 35 miles from major Syrian cities that are being occupied by radical militants.

In this regard, in addition to enhancing the engineering and logistic capabilities of the recently acquired Syrian bases of Rmeilan and Kobani, construction works were urgently launched at the former Syrian armed forces base of Al-Tabqa in the Raqqa Governorate, with American engineers working at that base around the clock. In particular, a lot of work has been invested in reconstructing and expanding the runway so that the base will be able to host tactical aviation and air transport units. It is expected that the Al-Tabqa base will soon be playing a pivotal part of US plans.

It is noteworthy that the three above mentioned bases were constructed in the de facto regions of “Syrian Kurdistan”. Thus, the Trump administration tries to show that Damascus can forget about returning the Kurdish areas under its control. A somewhat similar scenario has already been used in Iraq, where “Iraqi Kurdistan” since 2003, in fact, was transformed into a sort of an autonomous region, with Baghdad having no real authority in those lands.

It won’t be an exaggeration to state that he northeastern part of Syria is of exceptional value to Washington these days, not so much as a way of promoting Kurdish forces, but because of the need to keep an eye on Russia, Iran, and also Turkey. Ankara has repeatedly shown its intent of cooperating with Russia in various areas, thus blackmailing certain NATO countries with the possible closure of Incirlik air base.

In addition, Washington’s tries to prevent any steps that Turkey could take against Syrian Kurds east of the Euphrates, thus using the Kurdish factor to push Ankara against the wall. After all, according to the business logics Trump Professes there’s no friends for Washington to be made anywhere, since Washington’s interests are the basis of this new American policy.

So both regional and global players, including Turkey, should carefully monitor Trump’s chess game in Syria, in order not to get deceived by his “pacifying” smile, in a bid to avoid losing before the game even starts.

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

The results seem to be just what the polls have predicted from the start: Emmanuel Macron versus Marine Le Pen.  As if the whole campaign brought us right around to the point of departure.

I would add that a significant result of this campaign is the substitution of a new left represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the totally discredited French Socialist Party, which has betrayed all the hopes of its followers by totally adopting the neoliberal economic policies dictated by the Europe Union. This is a renewed and much more vigorous and original left.

The leaders of the failed Socialist Party are rushing to find a place in Macron’s ill-defined movement, “En Marche!”

So now we are faced with the choice between a fake left – Macron – and a fake “extreme right”: Marine Le Pen.

The plain truth is that Marine Le Pen, of a younger generation than her notorious father Jean-Marie, is simply not the same politically.  She has enthusiastically adopted as her main political advisor and number two in the National Front which she inherited, Florian Philippot, who comes from the patriotic socialist left represented by France’s best statesman of the past generation, Jean-Pierre Chevènement.

This difference seems impossible to explain to people who are stuck in the categories of a past that is not longer pertinent.  Emmanuel Macron is an agent of the globalizing elite, from NATO to Goldman Sachs.

As President, he will confirm French subservience to European Union rules which are destroying the French economy as well as to NATO’s policy of war in the Middle East and hostility to Russia.  Marine Le Pen prefers a policy of peace.  I am waiting to learn from my critics how she is the “fascist” whom we must all oppose.

LATEST (21.47PM PARIS)

Macron and Le Pen projected to contest French election run-off

Voting took place amid heightened security in the first election under France’s state of emergency.

No matter who becomes France’s next president, dirty business as usual will likely triumph – like in all US elections, other Western ones and most others elsewhere. Rare exceptions prove the rule.

Last November, choice for Americans was between death by hanging or firing squad. French voters face the same dilemma.

On election eve, over one-fourth of the electorate was undecided, more concerned about jobs and the economy (pocketbook issues) than terrorism.

Many believe presidential aspirants are largely the same each time elections are held, no matter what they say campaigning.

Large numbers may vote with their feet and stay home, or go places other than to polling stations.

Hyperbole about Sunday’s election being one of the most consequential in recent times was way overblown. Calling the outcome unpredictable is right. Polls show it’s too close to call. 

Anyone of four aspirants could win – Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron likely to be finalists in the May 7 runoff. Yet a surprise April 23 outcome is possible.

One voter said “France is divided in four. Whatever the result, three-fourths of the people will not be happy.”

Political/opinion research firm director Edouard Lecerf believes “(t)he mistrust of politicians is stronger than it has ever been.”

Given how deplorably ordinary people are treated no matter who holds top political posts, it’s clear voting is a waste of time accomplishing nothing – privileged interests served exclusively at the expense of most others.

Neocon/CIA-connected Washington Post editors support dirty business as usual in all elections – in America and abroad, saying:

“The mere possibility that…far-rightist Marine Le Pen and far-leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon…will be the country’s choice in the second round ought to be heart-stopping for anyone who hopes the West’s core liberal values (sic) will survive the wave of popular discontent that already has driven Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, as well as the election of Donald Trump.”

WaPo supports Macron, Francois Hollande’s deplorable economy, industry and digital affairs minister, an establishment favorite, a wealthy globalist supporting dirty business as usual.

What’s good for business is bad for the masses, so you know what he favors, hardline anti-democratic rule – WaPo’s favorite, calling him France’s “best choice” for president.

Its editors blasted Le Pen and Melenchon, saying they’re “anti-American and soft on Russia’s Vladimir Putin…likely to destroy the European Union…”

It’s in crisis, a sinking ship, self-destructing – troubled Greece the future of other EU states, notably Italy, Portugal and Spain, maybe France and others to follow.

Expect continuity no matter who succeeds Francois Hollande. Longtime French foreign policy analyst Alain Gresh believes France under any leader has “limited impact…on the management of Middle East foreign policy today” – unlike decades earlier.

He calls Le Pen slightly more pro-Israel” than other candidates. She’s concerned about radical Islamic militants and politicians, not Jews, so it’s unclear “how things would unfold” if she’s elected.

Her views are similar but not identical to Francois Fillon on Islamism. Melenchon calls for resolving Middle East conflicts diplomatically. He supports Palestinian rights.

Le Pen is conciliatory toward Assad, calling him a protector of secular rights, including Syria’s Christian minority.

Whoever’s elected would have to focus on “big economic interests,” Gresh stressed – linking France with America, other European countries and Arab Gulf ones.

He’s unsure who’ll emerge as May 7 runoff aspirants. At the end of the day, things could change but stay largely the same – the way most elections turn out.

Em agosto de 2016, o jornalista e economista norte-americano Paul Craig Roberts, secretário-adjunto do Tesouro para a Política Econômica dos Estados Unidos na administração do presidente Ronald Reagan em 1981, escreveu em Serás um Pateta nas Mãos da CIA?:

“A expressão ‘teoria da conspiração’ foi inventada e posta a circular no discurso público pela CIA, em 1964, a fim de desacreditar os muitos cépticos que contestavam a conclusão da Comissão Warren de que o presidente John F. Kennedy fora assassinado por um pistoleiro solitário chamado Lee Harvey Oswald, o qual por sua vez foi assassinado enquanto sob a custódia da polícia antes que pudesse ser interrogado. A CIA utilizou seus amigos nos media para lançar uma campanha a fim de tornar suspeições do relatório da Comissão Warren alvo de ridículo e hostilidade. Esta campanha foi “uma das iniciativas de propaganda de maior êxito de todos os tempos”.

“Atualizado nos Estados Unidos, o rótulo de conspiracionista vale hoje também a todos aqueles que questionam a insustentável versão oficial envolvendo os atentatos terroristas de 11 de setembro de 2001.

No Brasil, a estratégia de se rotular ameaças ao poder estabelecido se dá contra defensores de políticas sociais, rotulados agressivamente de doutrinadores” ou “ideólogos”. E milhões de cidadãos desavisados embarcam nesta mediocridade que tem polarizado cada vez mais a historicamente rachada sociedade brasileira, enquanto políticos oportunistas aplicam suas ideologias corruptas e anti-sociais indiscriminadamente.

A Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (Abin) foi criada em 1999 pelo então presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso, é uma reedição do Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI) criado pela ditadura militar brasileira sob supervisão da CIA em 1964, para vigiar e controlar a sociedade brasileira, especialmente movimentos sociais e trabalhadores grevistas.  E esta prática tem crescido assustadoramente nos últimos anos, mesmo nos do PT no governo federal.

Dentro do contexto atual de vigilância doméstica, de caça às bruxas contra setores progressistas brasileiros, e da forte influência da própria CIA à Polícia federal, à própria Abin já que esta é uma extensão de seu antecessor, o SNI, e aos assuntos políticos, econômicos e sociais do Brasil, tudo leva a crer que essa onda de ataques sistemáticos a ideias progressistas trata-se de mais uma produção dos laboratórios da Abin, bem ao estilo norte-americano que exporta seus métodos de controle social, como exemplifica a Escola das Américas.

As lista de evidências da fragilidade, ou da estupidez de se rotular os defensores de políticas sociais de “ideólogos” é tão vasta, que fica difícil optar por apenas algumas delas. Pois o mais recente exemplo vem do político com capacidade marqueteira de poucos atualmente, o prefeito paulistano João Dória que, apoiando-se na despolitização por que seu setor reacionário tanto preza para dominar e gozar dos privilégios do poder sobre uma massa alienada, tem retirado os poucos direitos sociais na maior cidade da América latina, sem que a sociedade se de conta, distraída com aquele que se intitula “gestor” e não político.

Chama a atenção que os mesmos que achincalham programas como o Bolsa Família de Lula (que Aécio Neves afirmou, na campanha presidencial de 2014, manter, na verdade criada por Fernando Henrique Cardoso com o nome de Bola Escola), regozijam-se com o assistencialismo de Dória, que tem doado o salário a instituições de caridade; pois o mais contraditório é que, ao mesmo tempo que faz isso, o “gestor alegadamente “sem ideologias” corta indiscriminadamente verbas da saúde, educação e privatiza até parques municipais. Mas é claro: o “apartidário” de turno, que reza perfeitamente a cartilha de seus padrinhos do PSDB e arranca suspiros dos eleitores de São Paulo, é paulistano e oriundo das classes dominantes, não um nordestino da roça.

Enfim, o último exemplo do quanto a sociedade brasileira em geral tem se prestado a fazer o papel de pateta da Abin, que representa os interesses das oligarquias nacionais, é que em nome da “neutralidade” Dória pretende disseminar nas escolas da cidade de São Paulo livros de economia do Instituto Mises Brasil, que promovam os princípios de livre mercado.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) foi um dos fundadores da Escola Austríaca de Economia, e defendeu o combate à intervenção estatal. “Aprender economia é essencial na vida das pessoas”, disse recentemente o prefeito paulistano, ao mesmo tempo que condenou aquilo que chama de “doutrinação” nas escolas. Pois… a que nível chegou o “debate” tupiniquim:  os materiais de Mises não contêm uma linha ideológica, bem clara?

O que se está fazendo é, como nos piores anos da Guerra Fria, criminalizar visões progressistas  e até a política ao negá-la (com fins ditatoriais, de aniquilação do pouco que há de Estado de direito) sob auto-rótulo de “gestor” ou coisa que o valha.

Na era da Internet, é grave que milhões de indivíduos caiam tão facilmente neste engodo; a sociedade é, cada vez mais, responsável pelas informações que consome, e pelo destino do país. Cada vez menos, pode ser considerada “vítima” da imposição da ignorância pelos donos do poder.<

Porém os agressivos fundamentalistas da ideologia que prega políticas elitistas, travestidos de “apolíticos” sem criatividade que nunca renovam suas artimanhas de dominação, de exploração e da roubalheira indiscriminada, tem obtido sucesso, inversamente proporcional ao nível desta paupérrima “engenharia intelectual” de “combate à ideologia”, em promover a alienação de indivíduos que, por comodidade, por medo ou por uma combinação de ambos, preferem se manter despolitizados, sem posição clara e indiferentes, seguindo a corrente predominante que não é nem nunca foi pautada pelos interesses da maioria da sociedade, senão do 1% dominante (ao qual o enodo Dória pertence).

Por que Jair Bolsonaro pode defender que cada cidadão tenha uma pistola em casa, sendo considerado livre de ideologias, ao passo que quem defende o desarmamento deve ser tachado de “ideólogo”? Por que um professor pode (e com Dória deve) ensinar as leis do livre mercado (neoliberalismo), enquanto um professor que questiona este sistema deve ser criminalizado e responder na Justiça pelo crime”? Por que Dória pode cortar um orçamento já pequeno da Prefeitura para a cultura, na ordem de 0,8% do total da gestão anterior (quando a UNESCO recomenda um mínimo de 1%), agora sofrendo corte de 45% que praticamente zera os recursos para programas e projetos culturais, enquanto quem se opõe a isso defendendo fortes investimentos em educação e cultura, é considerado “doutrinador”? Por que novamente ele, Bolsonaro pode alegar que negro quilombola e índio “não serve nem para procriar”, enquanto um professor que defende justiça social e igualdade de direitos deve ser ameaçado e até chegar a apanhar de pais de alunos, além de ser fortemente discriminado pelo terrorista Estado brasileiro?

Por que este autor merece ser, aos gritos, ameaçado de agressão física por, “comunista comedor de criancinhas”, defender os direitos dos refugiados haitianos, agredidos e assassinados no Sul branco do País, enquanto os mesmos que ameaçam este autor são considerados a nata intelectual e moral brasileira, “livres de ideologias? Quando a sociedade brasileira vai despertar para o que anda ocorrendo?

Até onde vai este papel de pateta nas mãos das oligarquias nacionais que grande parte da sociedade brasileira tem se prestado a fazer? Outro exemplo claro de que não há nada de apartidário nem de democrático neste pobre conteúdo reacionário, que só engana os mais ignorantes, é o próprio caráter profundamente agressivo que cerceia a discussão de ideias e a liberdade de expressão que permeia todos os setores da sociedade, muitas vezes valendo-se de agressões físicas pelos mais banais motivos.

Nunca, após 1964, a democracia brasileira correu tanto risco nas mãos de subprodutos de um Estado autoritário, como João Dória, Jair Bolsonaro, e outros elementos deste tipo, de péssimo gosto moral e intelectual.

Edu Montesanti

O narcisista e fanfarrão Trump deve proporcionar, a curto prazo, o tão esperado espetáculo da queda-livre do corrupto Império, o mais belicista da história. Presidente abertamente fascista é subproduto da democracia fajuta, a melhor que o dinheiro pode comprar nos Estados Policialescos da América que ainda encantam algumas vítimas da grande mídia de idiotização em massa.

A queda definitiva do agonizante Império de turno é apenas uma questão de tempo. Uma leitura do livro Ascensão e Queda das Grandes Potências, do historiador britânico Paul Kennedy, deixa esta ideia bem clara ao leitor, sem nenhuma dúvida. E segundo as impressões deste articulista: o tombo será mais feio que o dos outros impérios ao longo da história. A grosso e resumido modo: quanto maior o tamanho do coqueiro, maior o tombo do coco.

Para Kennedy, um império acaba se vendo forçado a aumentar gastos militares para manter seu poderio, sacrificando assim a economia do país. E para manter esse poder, inevitavelmente deve se expandir, o que implica mais aumentos em gastos militares em detrimento de gastos em outras áreas, e assim sucessivamente para manter a expansão e o domínio até sua economia se esgotar e, fatalmente, declinar diante de outras potências emergentes.

Pois o narcisista e fanfarrão Donald Trump, talvez como nenhum outro poderia fazer em seu lugar, deve proporcionar o tão esperado espetáculo da queda-livre do establishment corrupto, mais belicista e letal Império da história.

Para além do tamanho e da imagem equivocada que a América “livre” e “poderosa” faz de si, à diferença por exemplo do final da II Guerra Mundial quando o Império britânico ruiu de vez, e o norte-americano emergiu como tal, o mundo estava destroçado pelo maior conflito da história: moral, política e economicamente.

Hoje o mundo está cada vez mais multipolar com nações que, além de fortalecer e ultrapassar o combalido Tio Sam em diversos quesitos importantes – inclusive militarmente -, muitos desses países enxergados pelo esquizofrênico Império norte-americano como inimigos, ameaças, concorrentes, estão também se unindo – desejando abertamente aliança com Washington, que se recusa a isso em nome do retorno a um mundo unipolar, e com o desejo, isto sim, de muita guerra.

Em relação às últimas eleições presidenciais dos Estados Policialescos Unidos da América, qualquer candidato seria um personagem a ser contado dentro de uns anos como um dos (i)responsáveis pelo declínio definitivo do Império que, na realidade, vive (há muito) profunda crise política, alimentar, laboral, econômica mais ampla, no campo das liberdades civis e direitos humanos em geral.

Pouco se noticiou, mas os EPUA foram condenados pela ONU no ano passado pelo tráfico de crianças, sob conivência estatal [leia: Tráfico de crianças nos Estados Unidos sob conivência estatal (http://port.pravda.ru/busines/03-02-2016/40316-trafico_criancas-0/)], e por manter campos de concentração também para pequeninos imigrantes, o lixo descartável no paraíso do capital que, nos EPUA têm estado privados até de advogados devendo responder perante a “Justiça” norte-americana sozinhos, enquanto aguardam a deportação da sociedade aberta e livre pintada pelos grandes meios de imbecilização das massas [leia: EUA nega advogado a milhares de crianças deportadas de campos de concentração (http://port.pravda.ru/mundo/10-04-2016/40754-eua_nega-0/)].

Muito pouco se diz, mas Barack Obama foi o presidente que mais deportou imigrantes na história dos EPUA. Sua afilhada nas últimas eleições, a psicopata Hillary Clinton, até pela psicopatia por que sofre além da própria linha política era fria e calculista: como o inquilino anterior da Casa Branca, o Nobel da Paz que palrava com a habilidade de poucos em direitos humanos, Killary falava em direitos femininos mas carregava dentro de si ódio racial e religioso, porém bem mais velado que Trump. George W. Bush (filho) foi quem iniciou uma grande cerca na fronteira com o México: a mesma mídia comercial que demoniza Trump hoje, não lembra disso.

O potencial para o mal desta personalidade e práticas maleficamente veladas é evidentemente muito maior, enquanto Trump é a mesma face da mesma moeda imperialista, preconceituosa, fascista, porém fanfarrão e, talvez, vítima do próprio narcisismo do qual padece.

Killary tinha total apoio do terrorista establishment travestido de democracia, do lobby sionista, do monopólio da desinformação, da indústria armamentista e petrolífera. Mas, enfim, Trump é uma tragicômica consequência da “democracia” norte-americana, subproduto do próprio establishment dos Estados Policialescos Unidos, e de seu showrnalismo(título do livro do brilhante jornalista José Arbex Júnior). Os mesmos que hoje protestam contra aquele que venceu nas urnas através do sistema norte-americano de eleições indiretas em que os Colégios Eleitorais de cada estado decidem – parece que apenas agora uns estão de dando conta de que o rei anda nu há muito tempo, mas não quiseram enxergar

Com Killary, a queda do Império – pela frieza e calculismo da senhora da guerra, por sua habilidade ímpar de manipular e de jogar – a grande e espetacular queda do Império estaria fadada, muito provavelmente, a médio prazo (talvez para além de seus quatro anos, ou se reeleita para o final de seus oito anos na Casa Branca, ou ainda um pouco mais além).

Por outro lado, e desde a campanha presidencial isso parece muito claro, com Trump que diz e faz, abertamente, o que seus antecessores fizeram de maneira mais silenciosa, dissimulada, o declínio definitivo da hegemonia dos EPUA com sua ditadura de mercado através do neoliberalismo e do dólar, além de poderio militar mais letal da historia da humanidade (único a lançar bombas atômicas em todos os tempos), está bastante apressado.

Reconheça-se: Trump faz afirmações e toma atitudes exageradamente abertas e politicamente incorretas, embora não sejam nenhuma novidade nos porões do poder e entre a própria sociedade norte-americana que, de aberta, não tem absolutamente nada (outro mito facilmente dissolúvel).

Contextualizando a frase do historiador britânico de excelente memória, Eric Hobsbawm em Era dos Extremos, “se para o poeta o Thomas Stearns Eliot ‘é assim que o mundo acaba: não com uma explosão, mas com uma lamúria'”, os Estados Policialescos Unidos da América, certamente, encontrará um fim com os dois.

Sobretudo dentro de casa, o coveiro Trump trata de produzir importantes aprofundamentos no buraco norte-americano desde o início de seu “governo democrático”, diante do silêncio conivente e até sob alegres aplausos de parte de uma opinião pública desonesta e excessivamente hipócrita, que se crê a polícia do mundo.

Vão todos ser enterrados na vergonha da história, e é altamente aconselhável que os nada criativos setores reacionários oxigenem-se, apressem-se na elaboração das desculpas, e encontrem também os culpados no que são precários mestres em fazer: a “ditadura” do Maduro, cujo governo rompeu com a ditadura do FMI e com o Consenso de Washington, erradicou o analfabetismo, a pobreza extrema, a fome e a desnutrição infantil além de liderar a integração da América Latina, antigo “quintal” dos EPUA, como nunca antes aconteceu na história? O “napoleônico” Putin, cujo grande crime é defender a soberania e os interesses do povo russo, quem alavancou a economia nacional levando a Rússia a figurar novamente entra as grandes potências mundiais? O “enlouquecido” Jinping, cuja economia nacional logo superará à dos EPUA, e seu exército é o maior do mundo?

Edu Montesanti

Missões de Paz da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) no Haiti estão envolvidas em abusos sexuais contra crianças de até 12 anos de idade, em troca de lanches ou alguns poucos dólares segundo investigação da agência de notícias Associated Press (AP).

A investigação detalhou como, de 2004 a 2007, ao menos 134 membros das “forças de paz” do Sri Lanka na ilha caribenha foram chegaram a explorar até nove crianças por dia, algumas relatando ter feito sexo diversas vezes por dia com os “militares da paz” cingaleses. A AP também descobriu que cerca de 150 denúncias de abuso e exploração sexual por soldados da ONU e de outro pessoal foram relatados apenas no Haiti entre 2004 e 2016, dos quase 2 mil casos mundiais.

No caso dos cingaleses, enviados de volta ao país insular asiático 144 após emissão de um relatório interno da ONU sobre o escândalo, até agora nenhum deles respondeu perante a Justiça pelos abusos.

“Eu nem sequer tinha seios”, disse uma menina conhecida como V01 – Vítima Número 1. Ela afirmou aos investigadores da ONU que dos 12 aos 15 anos de idade, teve relações sexuais com quase 50 pacificadores, incluindo um ” comandante” que lhe havia dado 75 centavos de dólar. Às vezes, ela dormia em caminhões da ONU estacionados na base militar.

V03 identificou 11 tropas cingalesas através de fotografias, uma das quais ela disse que era um cabo com uma cicatriz de bala entre a axila e cintura. V04 relatou que tinha 14 anos quando teve relações sexuais com os soldados todos os dias em troca de dinheiro, biscoitos ou suco.

A vítima denominada Número 8, um menino, disse que havia praticado sexo oral e que tinha sido ainda sodomizado por mais de 20 “soldados da paz” do Sri Lanka. Frequentemente, os militares tinham o cuidado de retirar a identificação para levá-la aos caminhões. Outro menino disse aos investigadores que, por três anos, fez sexo com mais de 100 “soldados de paz”, em uma média de quatro vezes por dia.

A investigação da Associated Press sobre as missões da ONU no decorrer dos últimos 12 anos encontrou quase 2 mil denúncias de abuso e exploração sexual por parte das forças de paz e outros funcionários em todo o mundo – sinalizando que a crise é muito maior do que se tinha conhecimento. Mais de 300 das inúmeras denúncias envolveram crianças de acordo com a AP, mas apenas uma ínfima parte dos criminosos acabou condenada.

A ONU não tem poder legal sobre as forças de paz, deixando que a punição esteja a cargo dos países que contribuem com as tropas. Através de entrevistas com vítimas, ex-funcionários da ONU, investigadores e com governos de 23 países, constatando que nada tem sido feito para investigar os casos. Com raras exceções, poucas nações responderam às repetidas solicitações de julgamento, enquanto os nomes dos culpados são mantidos em sigilo, tornando impossível determinar a responsabilidade de cada um deles.

As Missões de Paz da ONU chegaram ao Haiti em 2004, após um golpe apoiado pelos Estados Unidos contra o então presidente Jean-Bertrand Aristide. O Haiti é o país mais pobre das Américas e um dos mais pobres do hemisfério ocidental, onde se vive com uma média menos de 2 dólares por dia.

Quais Vidas Valem Mais?

Este repórter noticiou, em março do ano passado, que Ban Ki-moon, então secretário-geral da ONU, havia relatado naquele mesmo mês 99 abusos sexuais em 2015 por suas tropas: 69 deles em países onde operam essas mesmas “missões de paz”, e 30 em outros envolvimentos da Organização (leia Denunciados 99 Abusos Sexuais por Tropas da ONU, e Abusos Sexuais por Tropas da ONU sob Omissão Conivente de Washington).

Ocupações militares, ardentemente defendidas por governos imperialistas e sub-imperialistas, deveriam ser substituídas por ajudas humanitárias ao estilo, por exemplo, venezuelano e cubano no próprio Haiti: petróleo a preços preferencias através da Petrocaribe, auxílio médico e educacional entre outras medidas voltadas à assistência social.

Enquanto pouco se escuta falar desses casos na grande mídia internacional, muito menos se tem notícia de indignação por parte dos principais tomadores de decisão internacionais, perguntemo-nos a nós mesmos: que deveríamos esperar se as vítimas fossem europeias ou norte-americanas, de “soldados da paz” venezuelanos, bolivianos e árabes islamitas?

Pois onde estão agora as desmoralizadas grandes potências ocidentais, auto-proclamadas guardiãs mundiais dos direitos humanos, especialistas em “intervenções humanitárias” à base da força? Certamente, muito ocupadas com invasões e bombardeios em busca de interesses econômicos e estratégicos contra nações ricas em petróleo e recursos naturais, que defendem a soberania nacional vítimas de falsas acusações de violações aos mesmos direitos humanos pelos quais, neste horrendo caso haitiano, essas potências se calam. Ainda há quem acredite na sinceridade delas?

Edu Montesanti

O porta-aviões norte-americano Carl Vinson e sua frota chegarão ao Mar do Japão nos próximos dias, afirmou o vice-presidente dos Estados Unidos Mike Pence nesta sexta-feira (21), em entrevista coletiva com o primeiro-ministro da Austrália Malcolm Turnbull, realizado na capital australiana de Sidnei.

“Prevemos que estejam posicionados no Mar de Japão dentro de alguns dias, antes do fim do mês”, anunciou Pence em seu giro por países aliados aos Estados Unidos na região diante da escalada das tensões com a Coreia do Norte desde que Pyongyang apresentou, sábado passado (15), o novo míssil de longo alcance, que segundo o governo norte-coreano é capaz de atingir o território norte-americano.

O líder norte-coreano Kim Jong-il havia dito um dia antes da exibição que o Exército de seu país “devastará impiedosamente” os EUA, se Washington decidir atacar. E no domingo (16), a Coreia do Norte realizou mais um teste de mísseis, aumentando as já altamente tensas relações com os EUA e com a aliada histórica dos norte-americanos na península coreana, exatamente a Coreia do Sul.

Na entrevista coletiva na capital australiana, Pence, que já havia visitado Coreia do Sul e Japão com o intuito de tranquilizá-los diante dos programas de mísseis da Coreia do Norte, desafiou novamente Pyongyang ao garantir que os norte-coreanos cometeriam um grande “erro” ao “ignorar que os Estados Unidos possuem recursos, pessoal e presença necessários naquela região do mundo para assegurar nossos interesses, a segurança desses interesses, e a dos nossos aliados”.

Diante das incertezas e do medo que aumentam em todo o mundo pelas tensões na península coreana, esta frase do vice-presidente norte-americano sintetiza perfeitamente a principal raiz dos problemas mundiais não apenas hoje, mas em relação à própria história dos Estados Unidos e do imperialismo global: esperar que qualquer governo no mundo entenda e aceite presença militar estrangeira ao redor de suas fronteiras em nome dos interesses econômicos e estratégicos dessa força externa, é surreal e não se pode esperar nada mais que um mundo envolto em permanente estado de tensão, e em infinitas guerras.

A causa dos grandes conflitos envolvendo os Estados Unidos hoje não apenas nessa região, mas em todas as partes do mundo é exatamente essa prática descaradamente imperialista através da qual Washington outorga-se o direito exclusivo de valer-se da força militar para impor seus interesses e valores, desrespeitando soberanias nacionais e negando o direito à autodeterminação dos povos, ambos garantidos pelas leis internacionais.

Edu Montesanti

What goes around, comes around. Fast on the heels of the April 4 false flag gas attack in Syria[1] at Khan Sheikhoun, which was pinned on the Syrian government in a brazen, evidence-free media operation followed by an illegal missile strike, all skeptical objections were vehemently ridiculed and swept aside by Western propaganda agencies as groundless conspiracy theories.

Following systematic deconstructions in the alternative media, the official account would have come crashing down even without the welcome assistance of Dr. Theodore Postol’s meticulously written refutation.[2] But several days later, while the controversy over the first alleged chemical exposure was still unsettled, as a result of a US bombing raid on rebel targets in the Deirez-Zor area, south of the town of Tabqah, the resulting huge and lethal explosion of chemical materials in terrorist facilities caused the death of several hundred innocent Syrian civilians, including dozens of so far unmourned “beautiful babies.”[3]

Thanks to this probably inadvertent Western coalition hit on the terrorist chemical weapons depot, the key controversial issue left from the first explosion attributed to the Syrian air force was finally settled. Indeed, it turns out the terrorists do have quantities of chemical weapons at their disposal. Their established disregard for human life and rules of civilized conduct in general – not just in warfare – actually makes them prime candidates to be the authors of the politically motivated false flag April 4 outrage.[4]

The vicious suicide bombing the other day, on terrorist-occupied territory, of a column of civilian refugees trying to reach the safety of Syrian government lines, should have further clarified the dilemma (if ever there was one) of who are the “bad” and the “good” guys in this conflict.

In that terror attack, in fact, in addition to numerous adult refugees, at last count about eighty “beautiful babies” were also snuffed out,[5] a Syrian allegation (documented at least as compellingly, if not more, as the preceding one) that was promptly denied by the “usual suspects”.[6] This outrage not merely did not invite the slightest expression of empathy from the ranks of the First Family but it provoked, rather, a torrent of media disinformation designed to obscure the location and circumstances of the lethal attack and to deflect any thought of attributing responsibility for this crime to the obvious, terrorist suspects, as Moon of Alabama amply documented.[7]

“It was the Mother of all Hypocrisy,” according to no less an authority than Robert Fisk, an outstanding reporter but known for his extreme reluctance to step outside the prescribed bounds of carefully balanced and politically correct discourse.[8] Just as in his uncommonly outspoken and indignant comments Fisk points out, not a single missile was launched to avenge the gruesome murders of these “beautiful babies,” presumably because they were perceived to be aligned with the wrong side in the conflict.

That is the context in which within two days of the uninvestigated chemical gassing incident the United States may have crossed the Rubicon in the Syrian war (subsequent “one off” claims notwithstanding) by undertaking a belligerent and aggressive act of the first magnitude: the bombing, unauthorized and uninvited, of the air force facility of a sovereign nation supposedly to avenge the murder of its “beautiful babies.” The specific circumstances of this gross and lethal violation of international norms (resulting, incidentally, in the death caused by stray missiles of a Syrian mother and her four babies, apparently judged by Western governments and media to be of minor significance because it occurred on Syrian government territory[9]) were quite ably dissected by Alexander Mercouris and require no reiteration here.[10]

Cutting it to the chase, two questions arise.

Why was Syria turned into a slaughterhouse to begin with, where an estimated 400,000 babies and adults have needlessly lost their lives? What does the abrupt intensification of unprovoked belligerence under an Administration elected on a peace platform that apparently never was intended to be implemented portend in terms of international relations?

The first question is easy to answer, and it has been dealt with many times over, but in order to understand the moral darkness of these times the answer always bears repetition in all its stark, shocking, and cynical simplicity. It is a war for the control and marketing of vital resources, in accordance with the principle postulated in the infamous Kissinger Memorandum that whoever controls energy and food is ultimately master of mankind. (“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”[11]) Kissinger’s philosophy of global control is but a slight elaboration of the maxim of an earlier fellow German-speaker, Anton Zischka, in his classical “War for Petroleum”[12]: “A drop of petroleum is worth a drop of human blood.” Kissinger and Zischka served competing hegemons, but their amoral mindsets were perfectly aligned.

Plans for what is going on in Syria today go as far back as 1984, as recently disclosed intelligence documents demonstrate.[13] As Tyler Durden points out these long before laid plans “prophetically foreshadow the current crisis” and mayhem.[14] It has nothing to do with barrel bombs or “dictators killing their own people” and everything with installing a compliant Syrian government in order to lay oil and gas pipelines under globalist control in order to bring Western-controlled energents to European markets and thus outflank Russia in the field of energy competition.

That is the logic behind the foreign engineered “regime change” assault in progress since 2011 and all its subsequent variants and modifications, including “Syria balkanization” proposals,[15] various “splinter and control strategies,”[16] and “safe zone” initiatives.[17] Rescuing babies or avenging their callous deaths is not part of that picture.

So far, it has cost 400,000 lives and, down to the last drop of human blood, in the calculus of Madeleine Albright’s eager disciples it was undoubtedly “worth it”.

As for the second question, the answer should give pause to all who would avoid the unnecessary Armageddon that Paul Craig Roberts warns of,[18] and who are rightly shaken by former Ambassador Charles Freeman’s surgically incisive diagnosis that the U.S. government is the “foreign relations equivalent of a sociopath – a country indifferent to the rules, the consequences for others of its ignoring them, and the reliability of its word.”[19]

Philip Giraldi has also spelled it out plain and clear:

“What has become completely clear, as a result of the U.S. strike and its aftermath, is that any general reset with Russia has now become unimaginable, meaning among other things that a peace settlement for Syria is for now unattainable. It also has meant that the rebels against al-Assad’s regime will be empowered, possibly deliberately staging more chemical ‘incidents’ and blaming the Damascus government to shift international opinion farther in their direction. ISIS, which was reeling prior to the attack and reprisal, has been given a reprieve by the same United States government that pledged to eradicate it. And Donald Trump has reneged on his two campaign pledges to avoid deeper involvement in Middle Eastern wars and mend fences with Moscow.”[20]

One can sign off on every word of Giraldi’s take on the matter, but correct as it is, it is but half the picture. The critical and ominous issue is, what is the take of the other nuclear-armed superpower with a genuinely vital, to be exact – existential, national interest in this and a number of other current, potentially conflict-engendering theaters? That superpower is Russia. Only a fool bent on self-destruction would disregard Russia’s view on these matters.

Here is the view of Russia’s influential, superbly informed geopolitical expert and analyst Andrei Akulov, in whose otherwise sparse blurb we merely find that he is “Colonel, retired, Moscow-based expert on international security issues”.[21] Those proficient at deciphering code words will find this modest introduction sufficient and informative, especially in conjunction with Akulov’s voluminous and serious disquisitions on the topics of his expertise.

Ominously, Akulov sees the April 7 retaliatory raid on Syria not as a “one off” event but

“as a new phase in the ongoing war preparations (…) Alleged chemical attacks and other things are obviously used as a pretext to justify large-scale military presence in the entire region.The war in Syria has not been provoked by the recent events. It began long before Donald Trump took office. The incumbent president has not done anything new. He just decided to continue what his predecessor started. In general, the US administration is taking over where George W. Bush, Jr, left off. The president, who called for keeping away from foreign conflicts during the election campaign, has shifted his stance from ‘America First’ to ‘America Omnipresent’.”[22]

The clear implication is that Russia – in whose name Akulov presumes to speak – does not take those pretensions to omnipresence either lightly or benignly. His exposition presents a very reasonable case why that is so and many would agree that it raises some sensible concerns:

“The United States has already entered Syria. Its military is there right now. The US Air Force has recently expanded an air base in northern Syria. The base is near Kobani, which is about 90 miles north of Raqqa, the last urban stronghold for the Islamic State (IS).

“It’s not Syria only. After initially reinforcing the residual forces remaining in-country, America’s military presence (Operation Inherent Resolve) was restored in Iraq in the summer of 2014, commencing a campaign, dominated by air and special operations, allegedly targeting the Islamic State (IS) group. In 2016, US military established the Kobani airfield in Syria and also set up an airfield at Qayarrah West in northern Iraq. The Kobani airstrip has been modified to support C-17s, the largest cargo aircraft which need hardened runway to support their weight, and other planes. In March alone, the airfield was used for at least 50 landings by C-17s and more than 100 landings by C-130 military cargo planes.

“The United States is accessing another airstrip near the newly retaken Tabqa Dam, north of Raqqa that was taken by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on March 26. The capture of Tabqa airfield about 110 kilometers north of Raqqa would be used in the same way as Qayyarah Airfield West in Iraq is being used for operations to retake Mosul. When finished, Tabka airfield will enable the US to deploy twice as many warplanes and helicopters in Syria as the Russians currently maintain. It is already dubbed «Incirlik 2» or «Qayyarah-2».

“The new base is designed to accommodate the 2,500 US military personnel housed at Incirlik, Turkey. The administration is on the way to pull US air force units out of Turkey, to the five new and expanded air bases in Syria. In 2003, Ankara refused to let the US and its allies use its airspace when the invasion of Iraq started. The decision on airspace was reversed later but the Turkish parliament voted against the use of military bases on Turkish soil. As a result, the US operations in Iraq were significantly hindered. Now the US will not depend on Turkey anymore if Syria’s airspace is open for American flights. This is part of broader plans …

“Escalation is considered elsewhere. Another 2,500 paratroopers have been placed at a staging base in Kuwait. The military leaders have petitioned Congress and the White House for more troops, and the White House is considering loosening the rules of engagement in Afghanistan and Somalia. Add to this the reported plans to escalate US military involvement in Yemen.”[23]

Faced with such a strategic panorama, in Russia it is considered entirely reasonable to ask:

What is going on here? Where is this headed?

Are we taking all reasonable measures to ensure our country’s and our children’s safety in the face of these rampaging Rambos?

Indeed, evidence is mounting of a growing consensus, not just in the Kremlin but throughout Russia, that “Trumpomania” is over and that having to pick the more dangerous of two apparently unstable leaders – Kim Jong-Un or Donald Trump – Russians in droves are voting for the American candidate.

Russia’s most influential television commentator Dmitry Kiselyov declared on Sunday, upon the departure of Secretary Rex Tillerson from Moscow, that

“the world is a hair’s breadth from nuclear war. War can break out as a result of confrontation between two personalities: Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un. Both are dangerous, but who is more dangerous? Trump is.”

Many will find the reasons for Kiselyov’s analysis, shall we say, interesting. According to him,

“Trump was ‘more impulsive and unpredictable’than the North Korean and both men share some of the same negative traits: ‘Limited international experience, unpredictability, and a readiness to go to war.’”[24]

No compliments there for the chief American “partner.” As for the Kremlin’s perspective, Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov was most ambiguous and diplomatic about it. Kiselyov’s views weren’t necessarily always interchangeable with the official position, however “his position is close, but not every time.”

Interpret as one will Peskov’s cryptic words, it does not seem to be very distant from the stance of a growing body of the Russian public:

“A survey by state pollster VTsIOM showed on Monday that the percentage of Russians who hold a negative view of Trump has jumped to 39 from seven percent in a month, and that feelings of distrust and disappointment towards him have grown too (…) “The U.S. missile strike on Syria was a ‘cold shower’ for many Russians,” said Valery Fedorov, the pollster’s general director.”[25]

And to add just one more nuance of complexity to this increasingly eschatological brew, it so happens that, according to the Ku’ran, Syria is situated in the very heart of the end of history. According to Islamic scriptures, when history comes to an end the False Messiah (The Antichrist) will be challenged by Jesus Christ, who will descend from heaven, and the place of their final encounter will be – Damascus. The Last Judgment, we are told by Islamic teaching, will also occur there.

I wanted to check the authenticity of these portents and I asked my good friend Sheikh Imran Hossein, the foremost authority on Islamic eschatology, to enlighten me. This is his response:

“Dear Stefan,

Greetings of peace and love!

There are 3 main actors in the world in the End-time and they are:

The advent of the False Messiah (al-Masih al-Dajjal)

The advent of the Prince (Imam al-Mahdi)

The return of the True Messiah (al-Masih ‘Isa ibn Maryam)

Islamic eschatology locates all three in Damascus in Syria at the same time – hence the End-time importance of Syria.

Also, Islamic eschatology locates the Great War commencing in the region of Syria north of Damascus.

With love,

Imran”

In view of these cheerful End-time prognoses, President Trump would perform a great public service if he took some eschatology lessons with Sheikh Imran before ordering his next missile strike, in Syria or anywhere else.

Notes

[1]http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/04/11/putin-syria-chemical-attack-was-false-flag-more-provocations-are-coming/

[2]https://www.rt.com/usa/384520-postol-report-sarin-syria/

[3]http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-13/syria-claims-us-led-coalition-strike-isis-chemical-weapons-depot-has-killed-hundreds

[4]http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/04/18/russia-chops-the-the-wests-syrian-gas-attack-story-into-little-pieces/

[5]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-civil-war-bomb-attack-children-dead-civilians-swap-bashar-al-assad-a7686241.html

[6]http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/1.783270

[7]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46881.htm

[8]http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-suicide-attack-refugee-buses-trump-only-cares-sunni-children-a7687066.html

[9]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4392816/Syrian-media-claims-four-children-killed-strikes.html

[10]http://theduran.com/us-white-paper-khan-sheikhoun-attack/

[11]http://investmentwatchblog.com/kissinger-control-oil-and-you-control-nations-control-food-and-you-control-the-people-us-strategy-deliberately-destroyed-family-farming-in-the-us-and-abroad-and-led-to-95-of-all-grain-reserves/

[12]Anton Zischka: Ölkrieg, GoldmannVerlag, Leipzig 1939

[13]http://www.activistpost.com/2017/03/1983-cia-document-reveals-plan-to-destroy-syria.html

[14]http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-10/1983-cia-document-reveals-plan-destroy-syria-foreshadows-current-crisis?utm

[15]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46798.htm

[16]http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-war-strategy-destroy-partition-occupy-and-control/5583026

[17]http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-led-coalition-already-using-idlib-chemical-attack-as-pretext-for-war-in-syria/5583610

[18]http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/04/12/is-that-armageddon-over-the-horizon/

[19]http://watson.brown.edu/files/watson/imce/people/fellows/freeman/ReimaginingGreatPowerRelations.pdf

[20]http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/how-the-u-s-government-spins-the-story/

[21]http://www.strategic-culture.org/authors/andrei-akulov.html

[22]http://www.strategic-culture.org/pview/2017/04/15/trump-middle-east-policy-shifting-america-first-to-america-omnipresent.html

[23] Ibid.

[24]http://uk.businessinsider.com/trumpomania-dead-as-kremlin-tv-says-trump-is-more-dangerous-than-kim-jong-un-2017-4?r=US&IR=T

[25] Ibid.

The Main Issue in the French Presidential Election: National Sovereignty and the Future of France

By Diana Johnstone, April 21, 2017

The 2017 French Presidential election marks a profound change in European political alignments. There is an ongoing shift from the traditional left-right rivalry to opposition between globalization, in the form of the European Union (EU), and national sovereignty.

France’s Election at Gunpoint

By Alex Lantier, April 23, 2017

The first round of the elections in France is being held against the backdrop of an attempt by the state and the media to use the violent incident on the Champs Elysées, involving a gunman who is alleged to have been acting on behalf of ISIS, to create an atmosphere of political hysteria.

France Votes, Amidst a State of Emergency

By Stephen Lendman, April 23, 2017

A state of emergency exists, declared by outgoing President Hollande in November 2015 after the Paris Charlie Hebdo/kosher market false flag attacks.

Big Stakes in the French Presidential Election: Global Governance Versus the People By Diana Johnstone, April 02, 2017

Turkey has narrowly voted to approve a set of reforms that will place more power in the hands of President Tayip Recep Erdoğan, giving him the ability to appoint judges, abolish the office of prime minister and curtail the role of parliament. Tahir Abbas explains how the febrile atmosphere of the past two years – and in particular popular fear of terrorism – has enabled Erdoğan to win the vote.

It was arguably the most important of all the referendums held in Turkey since 2002 and the rise of the AKP. For the last 15 years or so, one man, Tayip Recep Erdoğan, at the helm of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), has taken Turkey out of the dark of the early 2000s – a banking crisis, rampant inflation and a politico-ideological vacuum. Erdoğan thrust Turkey into the light of the 21st century, re-imagining the nation through globalisation, majoritarian nationalism (read as populism in the West) and moderate Islamism.

During this period, Turkey transformed its fortunes – it joined the G20, and became a significant player in the Middle and Near East. Once dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’ as the Europeans prepared for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it is now ‘old Europe’ that faces the possibility of breakup post-Brexit.

The Yes vote was a narrow win for Erdoğan: Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir voted ‘No’. Uncharacteristically, eighty per cent of British Turks also voted No. Turks voted Yes on 18 constitutional amendments, many of which will grant wide-ranging powers to the president. They include the ability to appoint members of the senior judiciary, do away with the office of the Prime Minister and directly appoint and fire ministers who will no longer be able to issue a vote of no confidence in the president. The number of parliamentarians will increase by 50 to 600. The voting age will be reduced to 18. For the Yes campaigners, these reforms were necessary to improve a system of government that is seen as generally ineffective and slow to react to events. The need to iron out unworkable aspects of the old constitution, established by the military junta after the 1980 coup, was seen as key.

The referendum campaign had an important international dimension. Erdoğan sent ministers to Germany and the Netherlands despite knowing that according to EU rules, parties are not allowed to campaign outside of Turkish territories. The negative response that the ministers received in the Netherlands was directly related to the Dutch general election, which was polarised along pro- versus anti-Islamophobia lines relating to domestic economic and social issues. Erdoğan exploited this opportunity to maximum effect, knowing that Turks inside Turkey would be galvanised by the idea of a strong leader standing up to external resistance. Both Dutch and Turkish sides took advantage of the opportunity to secure votes for their own campaigns. In both countries, a great deal of work is going to be required to repair long-standing diplomatic relations.

Support abroad … Pro-Erdoğan demonstrators gather in Cologne, Germany, July 2016. Photo: Andreas Trojak via a CC-BY 2.0 licence

The No campaigners argued that the reforms will put too much power in hand of one individual – Erdoğan himself – who has been sliding towards greater authoritarianism since 2011. In particular, they argued that this authoritarianism is invasive – Islamist in character, design and impact – and that it is a throwback to the strongman politics that has brought much of the Middle East to its knees. It is where leaders, unable to govern their own people fairly and justly, look to the West for solutions to problems created by incompetence and self-interest (while the West has been complicit in installing and then propping up these so-called leaders in the first place). The No supporters argued that if the president got the powers he wanted, it would lead to greater isolation in the region and from the EU, as well as further strife for those Turks – especially in politics, academia and journalism – who feel their voices are being policed and silenced.

It was a fraught campaign, with inconsistent messages from the pollsters – although they mostly got it right, despite the difficulty of anticipating the power of social media to sway opinions and actions. Though Erdoğan will no doubt be overjoyed, the nation was deeply divided between the Yes and No camps, reflecting a polarised society. These divisions were exacerbated after the failed coup of July 2016.

Since that night, Turkey has been in a state of emergency. For a great many people, this state of emergency is real and urgent – but it also plays on existing fears, a sense of alarm and genuine issues of insecurity that have blighted Turkey internally and externally over the last two years or so. Internally, all the various peace processes have collapsed, namely the Alevi and the Kurdish openings. What was once a harmonious relationship between the AKP and the Gulen movement, which benefited both sides, has become an acrimonious, violent and wholly one-sided divorce. Erdoğan now characterises the enemy as a combination of FETO (the term used to describe the Gulen movement as a terrorist organisation) the PKK as emblematic of pro-Kurdish sentiment per se, and the suicide death squad known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. One Iraqi who speaks Kurdish, Arabic, Farsi and English was thrown in jail and then put on trial for 18 months. The charge: being a member of FETO, PKK and IS – all because he assisted the Western news media as a local fixer in south-east Turkey.

Turkish politics today is about power, but also authority – and in a climate where strongman politics is able to gain the upper hand by evoking notions of security, strength and stability. A frightened population welcomes this rhetoric with open ears, seeing in the current president all that is right about Turkey now and in the future. There are, however, also concerns about the role of religion – which is odd given that the country is nominally 99.9% Muslim. There is a particular fear that Islamism, while it does not aim for a caliphate, is encroaching on the daily lives of all Turks, whether they want it to or not. To No Voters, the delicate balance between a secularist and religious outlook that has kept Turkey as the bridge between East and West is potentially at risk.

It could be argued that Erdoğan had the best of intentions, certainly at the outset. But his personality has taken over. All the founding fathers of the AKP have been cast aside. He is alone and isolated, but surrounded by sycophants enthralled by his personality cult. During his leadership – while considerable economic and social improvements were made from 2002-2010 – the rise of Islamic State in 2014 was inconceivable, although not improbable. Now political, economic and cultural issues carry the most force. The arguments on both sides have weight, but the concerns were less with the general situation but the issue of Erdoğan himself – hence the vehemence of the division between the Yes and No camps.

The outcome of this referendum was too close to call. A No vote could have meant that Turkey fundamentally changed political direction, as it would have emboldened individuals and groups at the fringes as well as across the spectrum of No voters. Now the Yes supporters’ argument that strengthening the status quo will deliver a more robust, stable and secure society will be put the fullest of tests. Erdoğan’s win will silence his detractors within the AKP, but the urban elites in wider society will continue to ask tough questions. As Turkey awakes to a new dawn, the rest of the world will be watching to see what happens next: a brave new world, or more of the same.

Professor Tahir Abbas FRSA is Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, and author of Contemporary Turkey in Conflict: Ethnicity, Islam and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, December 2016).

The 5th Assault Corps drew the media attention in early 2017 following the fall of Palmyra to ISIS, which showed the need for more well-trained and equipped infantry to deal with crisis situations even more evident. The Syrian military announced the formation of the 5th Assault Corps in November 2016 as an elite force consisting solely of volunteers and backed up by Russia and Iran.

Currently, the corps is over 10,000 troops strong. The leadership of the corps is headquartered in Latakia with military bases scattered about Hama and Palmyra. The top commanders of the force remain unknown. It is believed that it is led by a group of Syrian commanders, aided by large presence of Russian advisors.

Since the establishment of the 5th Corps, the force was participated in several offensive operations the first and most important of which was the Palmyra operation. Troops of the 5th Corps were able to repel ISIS attacks against the key T4 Military Airbase in spite of the force’s relative lack of combat experience at that time.

After successfully defending the airbase against incessant ISIS attacks for several weeks, 5th Corps troops began rapid advance toward Palmyra, using new tactics and with intense Russian air support.  On March 4, the 5th Corps and allied forces recaptured the ancient city with very few casualties in contrast to ISIS death toll of over 300 fighters. The 5th Corps would not stop in Palmyra, as the force would take on a number of operations to expand the buffer zone around Palmyra, including the capture of the Palmyra Silos and a number of hills and oil fields north and south of the city.

The 5th Corps was the first force to support the Syrian Army and the NDF during the latest jihadist offensive on Hama. On the 21st of March, fighters from the corps along with the NDF and Tiger Forces were able to absorb the attack and launch a successful counterattack recapturing over the territories rebels had taken in their offensive.

Many reports suggest that the 5th Corps will be the backbone of the anticipated offensive in east Homs that is aimed at lifting the siege of Deir Ezzor. In fact, many tribal fighters and Deir Ezzor locals have already begun to volunteer for the corps even as Russia continues to bolster the capabilities financially and militarily. The operation that may be launched in late 2017 will seek to retake the 150km-long highway between Palmyra and Deir Ezzor, in what would be one of the largest operations since the beginning of the Syrian war.

The 5th Corps includes several volunteer groups in its forces including Assad Shield, Mahardeh Forces, and Martyrdom or Victory Groups. However, the most important are the following:

ISIS Hunters: A special operations group formed by volunteers who lost relatives and loved ones to ISIS terrorism. Most of its fighters are native to Homs countryside and Palmyra. This group is distinguished by the fact that it was fully armed and trained by Russia. It has already carried out a large score of raids and operations on ISIS positions all around Palmyra; those operations are believed to be the reason the city was recaptured in a very short time.

Tribal Forces: A group of volunteers from the tribes of Deir Ezzor, Raqqa, and Hasakah. This was the force that stormed Palmyra during the last phase of the offensive. It is believed that this group will be the spearhead force of the anticipated Deir Ezzor offensive.

Ba’ath Brigades: A military group formed from members of the ruling Ba’ath Party. The group boasts no fewer than 2,000 fighters and is mainly tasked with defensive operations in the Palmyra desert to ensure the city will not fall again.

As for the weapons operated by the 5th Corps, most were supplied by Russian Army. T-72B3 tanks with Kontakt 5 reactive armor system & thermal sight are perhaps the most advanced weapon systems used by 5th Corps fighters. The Corps are also abundantly equipped with T-62m tanks with improved armor protection which allowed them to survive at least 5 ATGM hits, including by TOW missiles, in Palmyra and north Hama, with none of the crewmembers becoming casualties. In addition to the T-62 ranks, the force is well-equipped with BMP-1s, BMP-2s, GAZ Vodnik wheeled APCs armed with 14.5mm machineguns that are also used as a field ambulance in addition to many UAZ Patriot light utility vehicles armed with 12.7mm machineguns and 30mm automatic grenade launchers.

Russia continues to supply more equipment and ammo on a routine basis as the group increases in size and responsibilities. The 5th Corps so far is a successful experiment in that it managed to accomplish all assigned missions and is a precursor to merging all militias that support the Syrian Army into an official part of the Syrian Armed Forces in the future. Some experts believe that the creation of the 5th Corps is the first part of the Russian-led attempt to improve the Syrian security system and to create a united command structure that will be able to manage, control and absorb various militias supporting the government. In turn, pro-government groups should also be interested in further formalization of their relations with the government and integration into the Syrian military and security services. Therefore, their members will be able to take a rightful place in the post-war Syria.

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As a result of the air strike of the international coalition led by the United States 5 civilians were killed in the city of Al Tabqah. The strike was aimed at supporting the offensive of the Kurds.

At the moment, Kurdish militia units have advanced deeply into the city of Al Tabqah and significantly squeezed the ISIS fighters. It is reported that the Kurds have already captured a local radio station. The militiamen also repulsed the terrorists’ attack on the previously liberated airport near the city.

The attack on Al Tabqah is now in full swing. Kurds have every chance to win and it remains a mystery why the United States carried out the useless air strike.

Sophie Mangal is a co-editor at Inside Syria Media Center.

The first round of the elections in France is being held against the backdrop of an attempt by the state and the media to use the violent incident on the Champs Elysées, involving a gunman who is alleged to have been acting on behalf of ISIS, to create an atmosphere of political hysteria.

With over 50,000 soldiers and policemen set to deploy to polling stations tomorrow, the elections are to be held at gunpoint.

As facts emerge about the background of the alleged gunman, it is virtually impossible not to conclude that this shooting was a provocation involving elements of the security forces, over half of whom plan to vote for Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front (FN).

Karim Cheurfi, a French citizen and career criminal, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2003 for shooting and nearly killing two policemen, but later released on appeal, was last arrested in February after demanding weapons and stating he wanted to kill policemen. He was released supposedly because the “level of danger” he posed was not at the priority level. Though he was an Islamic State (IS) sympathizer who was being followed by French domestic intelligence at least since March, his case was treated as a common law, not terrorist, case.

Despite France’s strict gun control laws, Cheurfi was somehow able to amass an arsenal, including an automatic rifle, a shotgun and several knives, which he had with him during the attack.

The day before the shooting, right-wing media such as Le Figaro demanded that Islamic terrorism be “at the center of the end of the election campaign.” The newspaper wrote:

“It is a critical issue, but one that has been too little dealt with.”

The shooting was the signal for a coordinated political offensive. As security forces put much of downtown Paris on lockdown, the right-wing candidates speaking in Thursday night’s presidential debate demanded stepped-up law-and-order policies and even a shutting down of the election campaign.

Conservative candidate François Fillon demanded the eradication of “Islamist totalitarianism” and called for the “suspension” of the campaign. Le Pen denounced the “incredible laxity of the courts” and demanded the expulsion of all foreigners with intelligence files. Fillon, Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the candidate of the On the March movement, backed by France’s Socialist Party (PS) government, all canceled their campaign events yesterday.

In a remarkable incident at the debate that points to the political atmosphere emerging in France, police confronted New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) candidate Philippe Poutou, who had appealed for police to be unarmed. They called him a “faggot” and said they would keep their weapons.

This attempt to shut down the campaign and fill the airwaves with anti-Muslim propaganda is driven by a deep political crisis. The PS faces a historic collapse, after having been discredited by its austerity measures and its state of emergency, which suspends basic democratic rights. It is terrified of rising antiwar sentiment in the aftermath of the unprovoked US strikes against Syria on April 7, which benefited Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Unsubmissive France movement. Macron, Le Pen, Fillon and Mélenchon are now in a virtual tie, and over one-third of voters are still undecided.

The ruling elite is well aware of explosive class tensions in France and across Europe. Two-thirds of the French people say class struggle is a daily reality of life. At the same time, voters say their main concerns are not terrorism, but social issues such as jobs, wages and social conditions.

The programs of the main candidates—which include calls for mass job cuts, tens of billions of euros in austerity measures, military spending increases and a return of the draft—make clear that the ruling class totally opposes these demands. There are also fears that financial markets could react to a surprise election result with a crash, wiping out trillions of dollars in paper wealth.

With the election outcome still in the balance, the French financial aristocracy aims to fill the airwaves with law-and-order, anti-Muslim propaganda in the final hours of the campaign.

It relies critically on the cowardice of what passes for the “left” in France, which has accepted official claims that the Champs-Elysées attack is merely the outcome of a series of police errors, though each error is so grotesque as to defy belief. Mélenchon himself reacted by declaring on Twitter his “personal solidarity” with Le Pen, Fillon and Macron.

A precursor of today’s situation in France is Italy’s “Years of Lead” in the 1970s and 1980s, when the state responded to popular radicalization and massive class struggles by letting far-right terrorists tied to Italian intelligence mount attacks they blamed on left-wing groups. These attacks included the murder of three Carabinieri police in the Peteano car bombing of 1972 and the 1980 bombing of the Central Station in Bologna.

Several far-right terrorists involved in this “strategy of tension” were caught. Judge Felice Casson explained to the BBC that they aimed to

“create tension in the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies.”

One convicted terrorist, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, told the Observer:

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security.”

As it seeks to slash workers’ living standards and rearm itself for war, the financial aristocracy is well aware that it faces deep popular opposition. It will stop at nothing in an attempt to preserve its rule.

In the midst of complaining about the Islamist threat to Israel and the world, Bibi Netanyahu conveniently forgets that his own country enjoys a tacit alliance with ISIS in Syria. It is an alliance of convenience to be sure and one that’s not boasted about by either party. But is not terribly different from one than Israel enjoys with its other Muslim allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

Bogie Yaalon served as defence minister in the current government till he had a falling out with Netanyahu. Now Yaalon plans to form his own party and run against his former boss. Unfortunately for him, he’s not polling well and doesn’t appear to be much of a political threat.

So Yaalon enjoys the position of having little to lose. He can speak more candidly than the average politician. In this context, he spoke at length on security matters at a public event in Afula. There is always much that I disagree with whenever I read Yaalon’s views. For example, while warning about the danger of favoring too heavily one side over the other, he essentially justifies Israel’s interventionist approach, which largely has favored Assad’s opponents. Nor do I like his choice of political allies–from Pam Geller to Meir Kahane’s grandson.

But he did reveal how closely tied Israel is to ISIS in Syria. I’ve documented, along with other journalists, Israeli collaboration with al-Nusra, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. But no Israeli till now has admitted it has forged an alliance with ISIS as well. Below Yaalon implicitly confirms this below:

…Within Syria there are many factions: the regime, Iran, the Russians, and even al-Qaeda and ISIS. In such circumstances, one must develop a responsible, carefully-balanced policy by which you protect your own interests on the one hand, and on the other hand you don’t intervene. Because if Israel does intervene on behalf of one side, it will serve the interests of the other; which is why we’ve established red lines. Anyone who violates our sovereignty will immediately feel the full weight of our power. On most occasions, firing comes from regions under the control of the regime. But once the firing came from ISIS positions–and it immediately apologized.

The attack he refers to was never reported in Israeli media. Either the information was placed under gag order or under military censorship. It was suppressed most certainly because both the firing by an Israeli Islamist ally on Israeli territory and ISIS’ apology would embarrass both Israel and the Islamists.

Keep in mind, this is the same ISIS which beheaded a Jewish-American who’d lived in Israel: Steven Sotloff. The same ISIS which raped Yazidi women and threw gay men off buildings. The same ISIS which has rampaged through the Middle East sowing havoc and rivers of blood wherever it goes. The same ISIS which Netanyahu routinely excoriates as being the root of all evil in the world.

It’s common knowledge that Israeli foreign policy going back to the days of Ben Gurion has been exceedingly opportunistic and amoral. So I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised at this new development. But still it does momentarily take one’s breath away to contemplate just how sleazy Israel’s motives can be.

To the elation of the western corporate media, Neocons like John McCain and Democons like Hillary Clinton – who had only just called for Trump to attack Syria 24 hours before he obliged – the US President unilaterally ordered the US Army, on April 6, to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Syrian military airfield in Ash Sha’irat near Homs. And managed to appease the entire ‘establishment’ he promised to oppose during his presidential campaign — that so vehemently attacked him for everything he did during his short time in the White House, previous to the attack.

Just to put their ‘elation’ into perspective: Of the top 100 newspapers in the US, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watch group based in New York City, reports that 47 ran editorials on the attack; 39 clearly in favour of it, seven ambiguous (although some may argue that they too were in favour), and only one opposing it. Journalist Brian Williams, who was caught lying about going to Iraq with a Navy Seal team in a helicopter that was hit by a rocket propelled grenade, described the images of the cruise missile launch as “beautiful pictures” live on MSNBC. What he didn’t mention was that the missiles in those “beautiful pictures” killed seven Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers and 7 (or 9) civilians according to reports.

The attack was justified by the US saying (without conducting an investigation or presenting any evidence) that President Assad had used chemical weapons on Syrians in Idlib. This is precisely what the Russian government and others protested in the emergency UN Security Council meeting, called after the attack. Asking, why the US would not wait for the United Nations or other agencies to complete their investigations to find out what had really happened before acting?

Especially after the Russian Ministry of Defence released information about a Syrian army airstrike in Idlib on a rebel warehouse allegedly housing chemical weapons which, according to them, released the chemicals resulting in the deaths that were being used to vilify President Assad. And after what had happened in East Ghouta in 2013 when the US almost went to war with Syria, accusing President Assad of having used chemical weapons (similar to now), which was later proven to be false by many different agencies and individuals — including Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Seymour Hersh, Former UN Weapons Inspector Richard Lloyd, the UN and its former Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte (which was blacked out of the mainstream media).

Ray McGovern, who was head of the Soviet Foreign Policy branch of the CIA, reminded everyone in an interview with journalist Lee Stranahan right after the recent alleged chemical attack, that back in 2014, the UN Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had confirmed the destruction of all declared chemical weapons held by the Syrian government on board of a US maritime vessel, under UN supervision, following the East Ghouta incident. Moreover, in January 2016, the OPCW had again certified that the Syrian government was free of all chemical weapons.

Despite the mainstream media’s failure to report on all of these and more, what it most criminally failed to do is point out the illegality of the US strike on Syria, perhaps unsurprisingly, as has been the case starting with the (illegal under international law but ‘humanitarian’) NATO-US bombing of Yugoslavia in 1995.

Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emeritus at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, wrote in Consortium News,

“Regardless of who is responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun chemical deaths…Trump’s response violated both US and international law”.

This is because the US War Powers Resolution act only authorises the President to introduce US Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities in three situations, according to the professor:

“First, after Congress has declared war, which has not happened in this case; second, in ‘a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces,’ which has not occurred; third, when there is ‘specific statutory authorisation,’ which there is not”. Making it illegal under US laws.

Meanwhile, the UN Charter prohibits the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”, except for in two cases. One, when done in self-defence after an armed attack (the US was not attacked). Two, after getting approval of the UN Security Council (which was not even sought). Making it illegal under international law as well.

The US administration had to, of course, be fully aware of this. And of the fact that Russia already had some armaments and military personnel placed in Syria to fight ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and the 50 other shades of extremists running rampant in the country, alongside the SAA, which the US attacked — despite risks of sparking a greater conflagration — although, reportedly, only after informing the Russians about it.

And what was the Russian response? To immediately suspend its flight safety memorandum over Syria with the US. Which, according to veteran journalist and correspondent-at-large of Asia Times, Pepe Escobar, meant that Russia, “if it chooses”, could “intercept any Pentagon flying object” from then on. Additionally sending its frigate — Admiral Grigorovich — into the Eastern Mediterranean, towards the location of the US destroyer that launched the cruise missiles into Syria.

Its Prime Minister, clearly unhappy with where things were headed, said that the attack put the US “on the verge of a military clash” with Russia. Meaning that if nothing else, what the attack did manage to do was “push the doomsday clock closer to midnight”, shattering hopes of de-escalating tensions following Trump being voted into the White House (as his campaign rhetoric had indicated towards a possible reconciliation with the Russian and Syrian governments). 

The key point about the current situation, however, was stressed on by President Putin. That trust between the two nations, because of the attack, was at its lowest since the end of the Cold War. And what that does is increase chances of ‘accidental collisions/conflicts’ or worse, which can quickly get out of hand, unleashing a chain of events that both sides may not live to regret.

And that is why cooler heads need to prevail and fast. That dialogue between the two nuclear armed powers have resumed since the attack is a positive step towards the de-escalation of tensions. However, the international community must point out that the habit of unilateral aggression, illegal under international law, adopted by the US and its allies ever since the end of the Cold War, is both unacceptable and unhelpful when it comes to solving crises around the world.

And as the Russians have vehemently been saying for a while now, will only be tolerated by countries on the receiving end for so long, before they start to take things into their own hands. At which point, you will have nuclear armed powers pointing their nukes at each other with hands on triggers, wondering whether they will and when, be forced to do the unthinkable — start a nuclear war/Armageddon.

It is now two and a half minutes to midnight. The closest the world has ever been, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to a probable “global catastrophe”.

Eresh Omar Jamal is a member of the Editorial team at The Daily Star.

I confess I really had hopes for some conscience from Trump about America’s wars, but I was wrong — fooled again! — as I had been by the early Reagan, and less so by Bush 43. Reagan found his mantra with the “evil empire” rhetoric against Russia, which almost kicked off a nuclear war in 1983 — and Bush found his ‘us against the world’ crusade at 9/11, in which of course we’re still mired.

It seems that Trump really has no ‘there’ there, far less a conscience, as he’s taken off the handcuffs on our war machine and turned it over to his glorified Generals — and he’s being praised for it by our ‘liberal’ media who continue to play at war so recklessly.

What a tortured bind we’re in. There are intelligent people in Washington/New York, but they’ve lost their minds as they’ve been stampeded into a Syrian-Russian groupthink, a consensus without asking — ‘Who benefits from this latest gas attack?’ Certainly neither Assad nor Putin. The only benefits go to the terrorists who initiated the action to stave off their military defeat. It was a desperate gamble, but it worked because the Western media immediately got behind it with crude propagandizing about murdered babies, etc. No real investigation or time for a UN chemical unit to establish what happened, much less find a motive.

Why would Assad do something so stupid when he’s clearly winning the civil war? No, I believe America has decided somewhere, in the crises of the Trump administration, that we will get into this war at any cost, under any circumstances — to, once again, change the secular regime in Syria, which has been, from the Bush era on, one of the top goals — next to Iran — of the neoconservatives. At the very least, we will cut out a chunk of northeastern Syria and call it a State.

Abetted by the Clintonites, they’ve done a wonderful job throwing America into chaos with probes into Russia’s alleged hacking of our election and Trump being their proxy candidate (now clearly disproved by his bombing attack) — and sadly, worst of all in some ways, admitting no memory of the same false flag incident in 2013, for which again Assad was blamed (see Seymour Hersh’s fascinating deconstruction of this US propaganda, ‘London Review of Books’ December 19, 2013, “Whose sarin?”). No memory, no history, no rules — or rather ‘American rules.’

No, this isn’t an accident or a one-off affair. This is the State deliberately misinforming the public through its corporate media and leads us to believe, as Mike Whitney points out in his brilliant analyses, “Will Washington Risk WW3” and “Syria: Where the Rubber Meets the Road,” that something far more sinister waits in the background. Mike Whitney, Robert Parry, and former intelligence officer Phil Giraldi all comment below. It’s well worth 30 minutes of your time to read.

Lastly, I enclose Bruce Cumings’s “Nation” analysis of North Korea, as he again reminds us of the purposes of studying history. Can we wake up before it’s too late?

I for one feel like the John Wayne veteran (of war) character in “Fort Apache,” riding with the arrogant Custer-like General (Henry Fonda) to his doom. My country, my country, my heart aches for thee.

Mike Whitney, “Will Washington Risk WW3 to Block and Emerging EU-Russia Superstate,” Counterpunch, http://bit.ly/2oJ9Tpn

Mike Whitney, “Where the Rubber Meets the Road,” Counterpunch, http://bit.ly/2p574zT

Phil Giraldi, “A World in Turmoil, Thank You Mr. Trump!” Information Clearing House, http://bit.ly/2oSCGrW

Robert Parry, “Did Al Qaeda Fool the White House Again?” Consortiumnews, http://bit.ly/2nN88c0

Robert Parry, “Neocons Have Trump on His Knees,” Consortiumnews, http://bit.ly/2oZ5GyN

Robert Parry, “Trump’s Wag the Dog Moment,” Consortiumnews, http://bit.ly/2okwZTE

Robert Parry, “Mainstream Media as Arbiters of Truth,” Consortiumnews, http://bit.ly/2oSDo8A

Mike Whitney, “Blood in the Water: the Trump Revolution Ends in a Whimper,” Counterpunch, http://bit.ly/2oSDEo4

Bruce Cumings, “This is What’s Really Behind North Korea’s Nuclear Provocations,” The Nation, http://bit.ly/2nUEroH

John Pilger‘s documentary film, The Coming War on China, has attracted huge interest in China, understandably. The original film has been ‘pirated’ and one version includes Chinese sub-titles.

With the world now approaching the edge of possible nuclear war – with threats to North Korea, and China – John Pilger and Dartmouth Films UK have decided to release the Chinese sub-titled version (also English sub-titled) to Chinese viewers, to be downloaded free of charge.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman outraged many readers when he wrote an opinion piece on 12 April calling on President Trump to “back off fighting territorial ISIS in Syria”. The reason he gave for that recommendation was not that US wars in the Middle East are inevitably self-defeating and endless, but that it would reduce the “pressure on Assad, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah”.

That suggestion that the US sell out its interest in counter-terrorism in the Middle East to gain some advantage in power competition with its adversaries was rightly attacked as cynical.

But, in fact, the national security bureaucracies of the US – which many have come to call the “Deep State” – have been selling out their interests in counter-terrorism in order to pursue various adventures in the region ever since George W Bush declared a “Global War on Terrorism” in late 2001.

The whole war on terrorism has been, in effect, a bait-and-switch operation from the beginning. The idea that US military operations were somehow going to make America safer after the 9/11 attacks was the bait. What has actually happened ever since then, however, is that senior officials at the Pentagon and the CIA have been sacrificing the interest of American people in weakening al-Qaeda in order to pursue their own institutional interests.

‘The only game in town’

It all began, of course, with the invasion of Iraq. Counter-terrorism specialists in the US government knew perfectly well that US regime change in Iraq through military force would give a powerful boost to Osama bin Laden‘s organisation and to anti-American terrorism generally. Rand Beers, then senior director for counter-terrorism on the National Security Council staff, told his predecessor Richard Clarke in late 2002,

“Do you know how much it will strengthen al-Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq?”

After it quickly became clear that the US war in Iraq was already motivating young men across the Middle East to wage jihad against the US in Iraq, the chief architect of the occupation of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, came up with the patently false rationalisation that Iraq would be a “flytrap” for jihadists.

But in January 2005, after a year of research, the CIA issued a major intelligence assessment warning that the war was breeding more al-Qaeda extremist militants from all over the Middle East and even giving them combat experience that they would eventually be able to use back home. In a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence community warned that the number of people identifying themselves as jihadists was growing and was becoming more widespread geographically and even the predicted growing terrorist threats from “self-radicalized cells” both in the US and abroad.

The war managers continued to claim that their wars were making Americans safer. CIA director Michael Hayden not only sought to sell the flypaper argument on Iraq, but also bragged to the Washington Post in 2008 that the CIA was making great progress against al-Qaeda, based mainly on its burgeoning drone war in Pakistan.

But Hayden and the CIA had a huge bureaucratic interest in that war. He had lobbied Bush in 2007 to loosen restraints on drone strikes in Pakistan and let the CIA launch lethal attacks on the mere suspicion that a group of males were al-Qaeda.

It soon became clear that it wasn’t really weakening the al-Qaeda in the northwest Pakistan at all. Even drone operators themselves began privately criticising the drone attacks for making many more young Pakistanis hate the United States and support al-Qaeda. The only thing Leon Panetta, Hayden’s successor as CIA director, could say in defence of the programme was that it was “the only game in town”.

Covert wars

Barack Obama wanted out of a big war in Iraq. But CENTCOM Commander Gen David Petraeus and Joint Staff director Gen Stanley A McChyrstal talked Obama into approving a whole new series of covert wars using CIA drone strikes and special operations commando raids against al-Qaeda and other jihadist organisations in a dozen countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. At the top of their list of covert wars was Yemen, where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had just been formed.

Since 2009, the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA have launched 16 cruise missile strikes and 183 drone strikes in Yemen. Unfortunately, they lacked the intelligence necessary for such a campaign. As many as one-third of the strikes killed innocent civilians and local notables – including the cruise missile strike in December 2009 which killed 41 civilians and attack on a wedding party in December 2013.

Virtually every independent observer agrees that those killings have fed Yemeni hatred of the US and contributed to AQAP’s lustre as the leading anti-US organisation in the country.

The CIA again claimed they were doing a splendid job of hitting AQAP, but in fact the Yemeni offshoot of al-Qaeda continued to be the primary terrorism threat while the covert war continued. Three times between late 2009 and 2012, it mounted efforts to bring down airliners and nearly succeeded in two of the three.

Since 2001, senior Pentagon and CIA officials have sacrificed American interests in weakening al-Qaeda to pursue their own interests

Sharpened contradictions

In late 2011 and early 2012, the contradiction between the US pretension to counter-terrorism in its Middle East policy and the interests sharpened even further. That’s when the Obama administration adopted a new anti-Iran hard line in the region to reassure the Saudis that we were still committed to the security alliance. That hard line policy had nothing to do with a nuclear deal with Iran, which came more than a year later.

At first, it took form of covert logistical assistance to the Sunni allies to arm Sunni anti-Assad forces in Syria. But in 2014, the Obama administration began providing anti-tank missiles to selected anti-Assad armed groups. And when the Nusra Front wanted the groups the CIA had supported in Idlib to coordinate with the jihadist offensive to seize control of Idlib province, the Obama administration did not object.

The Obama national security team was willing to take advantage of the considerable military power of the Nusra Front-led jihadist alliance. But it was all done with a wink and a nod to maintain the fiction that it was still committed to defeating al-Qaeda everywhere.

When the Saudis came to Washington in March 2015 with a plan to wage a major war in Yemen against the Houthis and their new ally, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, the deep state was ready to give Saudi a green light. A predictable consequence of that decision has been to fuel the rise of AQAP, which had already emerged as the primary threat of terrorist attack on the US, to an unprecedented position of power.

The biggest winner

As documented by the International Crisis Group, AQAP has been the biggest winner in the war, taking advantage of state collapse, an open alliance with the Saudi-supported government and a major infusion of arms – much of its provided indirectly by the Saudis.

Endowed with a political strategy of playing up AQAP’s role as champion of Sunni sectarian interests against those Yemenis whom they wrongly call Shia, AQAP controlled a large swath of territory across southern Yemen, with the port of Mukalla as their headquarters. And even though the Saudi coalition recaptured the territory, they maintain a strong political presence there.

AQAP will certainly emerge from the disastrous war in Yemen as the strongest political force in the south, with a de-facto safe haven in which to plot terrorist attacks against the US. And they can thank the war bureaucracies in the US who helped them achieve that powerful position.

But the reason for the betrayal of US counter-terrorism interests is not that the senior officials in charge of these war bureaucracies want to promote al-Qaeda. It is because they had to sacrifice the priority of countering al-Qaeda to maintain the alliances, the facilities and the operations on which their continued power and resources depend.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

A state of emergency exists, declared by outgoing President Hollande in November 2015 after the Paris Charlie Hebdo/kosher market false flag attacks.

At the time, Hollande called what happened “an act of war,” suspending constitutional rule, followed by lawmakers enacting France’s version of America’s Patriot Act.

He and parliamentarians exploited the incidents to crack down hard on civil liberties, human rights, and other democratic principles.

Fear-mongering propaganda persists, convincing people to believe sacrificing fundamental freedoms protects their security.

On election day, France resembles an armed camp, following the violent Champs Elysees incident by an alleged ISIS sympathizer, creating unwarranted hysteria.

Over 50,000 soldiers and police are deployed at polling stations and elsewhere in Paris and other cities.

The election is too close to call – four leading candidates vying to be two finalists, facing off against each other in May 7 runoff voting:

• Prime Minister Francois Fillon; 

• former economy, industry and digital affairs minister Emmanuel Macron;

• Left Party’s Jean-Luc Melenchon; and 

• National Front leader Marine Le Pen.

On June 11 and 18, National Assembly elections will be held. On April 24 – 26, the Constitutional Council will verify first round presidential results, the same procedure following the May 7 runoff.

France’s new president is expected to be inaugurated on May 14, possibly sooner. Fillon and Macron represent dirty business as usual.

Melenchon’s campaign featured anti-capitalist rhetoric. His popularity surged in its closing days. He favors taxing the rich, renegotiating international trade deals and France’s EU role, ending nuclear power, treating refugees humanely, and more greatly empowering parliament.

He rejects succumbing to fear and panic, saying

“(o)ur duty as citizens is to stay away from the polemics our enemies are dreaming of, and, on the opposite, to stay together.”

In March, Le Pen announced her “144 presidential commitments,” including:

Banking and monetary system

• Scrap the 1973 law that secures independence of the Bank of France
• Restore a national currency to face “unfair competition”
• Allow the Bank of France to directly fund the Treasury
• Restore “monetary, legislative, territorial and economic sovereignty”
• Cut interest rates on loans and banking overdrafts for companies and households
• Scrap EU regulation that freezes or bans the withdrawal of deposits (life insurance and savings) in case of a financial crisis or bank run

Europe

• Organize a referendum on France’s European Union membership
• Pull out of the Schengen accord that guarantees freedom of movement
• Recreate a 6,000-strong border-control police unit
• Ban posted workers from EU countries to work in France
• Replace EU’s agricultural pact with a French agricultural deal

Trade

• Promote “smart protectionism”
• Ban foreign companies with optimization tax-scheme from having access to public markets
• Support French companies in face of “unfair international competition”
• Ban imports of all type of goods that don’t respect French norms
• Create a “patriotic economy” by rescinding EU laws that ban national preference for public orders
• Ban foreign investors from strategic and “important” French industries
• Create a sovereign fund to protect French companies from “vulture” funds and takeovers
• “Refuse trade agreements” such as CETA,TAFTA, accords with Australia and New Zealand

Industry

• Cut regulated natural gas and electricity prices by 5 percent “immediately”
• Maintain state control on EDF, start a major multibillion euros re-fit plan of the country’s nuclear plants, keep Fessenheim nuclear plant open
• Ban shale-gas exploration “until environment, security and health conditions are satisfactory”
• Set a moratorium on windmills for power generation
• Ban genetically modified organisms
• Plan to re-industrialize the country with state backing
• Keep innovation in France by banning a company that received state subsidies or tax cuts from being acquired by a foreign investor
• Support small and mid size companies by alleviating administrative rules, taxes and labor regulations

Taxes

• Create an additional tax on foreign workers “to promote priority to French nationals”
• Maintain the ISF wealth tax
• Lower income taxes for the three lowest income brackets
• Create a tax on companies doing business in France but evading the tax system on profits

Immigration, Foreigners, National Identity

• Cut legal immigration to 10,000 a year
• Ban “automatic naturalization” for spouses
• Automatic deportation of any foreign criminal offender
• Scratch the right of birthplace
• Make citizenship a “privilege” and insure a “national priority” for French citizens in the constitution
• Put French flags on all public buildings
• “Defend the French language” by restricting the use of foreign languages in schools and by reserving half the teaching time in primary schools to French language
• Make uniforms mandatory in schools

Security

• Pull out of NATO military command
• Increase defense spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2022
• Hire 15,000 police and security forces
• Build a new aircraft carrier (to be named Richelieu)
• Plan to disarm “5,000 gang leaders” in French suburbs
• Rebuild a local intelligence service
• Scratch state family subsidies if underage child is found guilty of repeated offenses
• Creation of a sentence of life without parole
• Creation of 40,000 new prison cells

Terrorism

• Ban all radical Islam groups
• Close all extremists mosques

Labor Laws and Retirement

• National plan for equal pay for women
• Lower retirement age to 60 with 40 years of contributions for a full pension
• Scrap the latest labor regulation (Loi El Khomri)
• Maintain 35-hour workweek
• Increase public workers’ wages

Liberties

• National data protection plan: personal data storage and servers must be in France
• Ban surrogacy and restrict medically supported procreation to people with sterility problems
• Scrap the 2014 law allowing same-sex marriage and replace it with civil union (without retroactivity)
• Put the state on the supervisory board of the television and radio regulator

Electoral System

• Change the voting system to proportional for every election (legislative, senatorial, presidential)
• Cut the number of lawmakers at the National Assembly to 300 from 577 and Senate to 200 from 348
• Cut local administration and shrink the levels of local types of governments by half
• Make citizen-initiated referendums easier to organize

Le Pen will likely advance to second round voting, a long shot at best to become France’s next president.

How would she govern if elected? Politicians nearly always say one thing and do another.

Trump straightaway reneged on key campaign pledges – especially on interventionism, NATO, replacing Obamacare with something better, letting Goldman Sachs run economic policy, putting generals in charge of geopolitical policies, and promising to represent ordinary Americans.

If elected, will Le Pen go the same way? Will she continue dirty business as usual, abandon notions of pulling out of the EU and NATO, and forget about restoring French sovereignty?

Will she continue establishment policies overall? Like America, France’s deep state intends doing whatever it takes to retain its power and privilege.

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. 

Russia has lent weight to Iran joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an emerging economic and security alliance which is being touted as the counterweight to the West’s institutions. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Iran is now ready to be a full-fledged SCO member and that negotiations will be taken up in summer to bring the Islamic Republic to the fold.

Tehran currently has an observer status in the organization which is led by China and Russia. Iran expected the SCO to give a serious reading to its bid at the bloc’s summit in the Uzbek capital Tashkent in June.

But the body did not, prompting Tehran to take a back seat on its attempt. Reports from the summit at the time said SCO members had failed to initiate the accession process for Iran which expected to make it into the group after the lifting of Western sanctions.

SCO members played for time on Iran’s membership, citing the sanctions but the country’s nuclear agreement in July 2016 removed that hurdle. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said there were no obstacles left for Iran to join the organization.

“We believe that after Iran’s nuclear problem was solved and United Nations sanctions lifted, there have been no obstacles left (for Iran’s membership in the SCO),” Putin said in a speech at the SCO summit in Tashkent.

Heads of the state of the SCO members pose for a photo group at their Tashkent summit in June 2016.

On Friday, Lavrov told journalists at the end of a meeting of the group’s foreign ministers that Iran

“has settled the problem of the UN Security Council sanctions and hence fully meets the SCO membership criteria.”

“We hope that during their June summit in Astana, the heads of our states will be able to discuss the possibility of launching the procedure for admitting Iran into the organization as a full member,” he added.

India and Pakistan joined the SCO in July 2015, giving the group added prominence and appeal. Lavrov said the SCO is about to account for 43 percent of the world’s population and 24 percent of the global GDP.

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are other full members of the SCO. Afghanistan, Mongolia and Belarus are also observer members.

Heads of state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) countries, observers and dialog partners pose for a group photo at their summit in Ufa, Russia on 10 July 2015.

In recent years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted at joining the bloc, expressing his frustration with the European Union for refusing to accept his country in the alliance.

Erdogan was reported to have said during a visit to Russia in 2013 that “if we get into the SCO, we will say goodbye to the European Union.”

“The SCO is better – much more powerful… If the SCO wants us, all of us will become members of this organization,” he said, according to the Newsweek magazine.

Quem não se lembra do espetáculo tragicômico, bem peculiar por parte da Câmara dos Deputados quando da aprovação do impedimento da então presidenta Dilma Rousseff há um ano, que chamou a atenção do mundo negativamente?

Pois como pouca desgraça é sempre uma grande bobagem quando o país que menos lê no mundo e um dos mais discriminadores do planeta está em cena, o tempo passou e tanto a plateia, à direita e à esquerda, quanto o picadeiro político aperfeiçoam a díspar capacidade de se superar quando o assunto é despolitização, ódio, violência, desmando e muito oportunismo.

“Passado é passado”, referindo-se à ditadura militar palrou do alto do pedestal ele, Luiz Inácio quando gozava dos privilégios do poder que julgou perpétuos, valendo-se de cordiais abraços até em personagens como o senhor engenheiro, doutor Paulo Maluf e José Sarney, entre as mais pitorescas figuras da oligarquia tupiniquim sem nenhum constrangimento.

“Aí se vai um brasileiro merecedor de três dias de luto oficial”, declarou publicamente Luiz Inácio no velório do “doutor” Roberto Marinho, contra cujas Organizações Globo hoje esperneia ferrenhamente, seguido por suas multidões.

À época da filosofada oportunista do então presidente em relação aos militares, mandatário que dizia ainda, categoricamente, nunca ter sido de esquerda, discutia-se a importância de a Comissão da Verdade não apenas recontar os 21 anos de história do regime militar, como também seguir exemplos de outras nações e recomendações de diversos organismos internacionais como a OEA, a fim de julgar os criminosos militares já que crimes de lesa-humanidade não prescrevem.

Mas uma vez no poder, bajulado pela velha oligarquia, que importância tinha se a máxima de Nicolás Avellaneda era recordada por meia dúzia de “esquerdistas radicais” no Brasil? “Povo que esquece seu passado, está condenado a vivê-lo novamente”. Se não se requer ser cientista social para ter consciência da profunda verdade contida na frase do jurista argentino de saudosa memória, não é que o castigo dos “moderados” veio a cavalo?

Ainda no picadeiro político, saindo da torrente à la Rio Tietê à “esquerda”, o excesso de desmando e ódio bem peculiar à direita está personalizado em Sérgio Moro e sua Lava-Jato que o que menos faz é promover justiça, mas sim arrancar mais uma série de assombro internacional pelo caráter politiqueiro e, consequentemente, autoritário para poder alcançar seus objetivos.

Na plateia à esquerda e à direita, o show de comédia trágica abunda diariamente, e só aumenta com o passar do tempo.

No primeiro caso, por 13 anos patrulhou a crítica nervosamente apresentando ataques esquizofrênico-democráticos cada vez que – especialmente quando Luiz Inácio gozava de ampla popularidade – a sociedade era criticada pela despolitização e inércia – um alerta pelo que certamente viria, o que se fez questão de ignorar já que o poder pelo poder era o limite -, bem como alianças e práticas políticas do PT que incluíam injeção de milhões de dólares na grande mídia como nenhum governo jamais fizera anteriormente, is banqueiros lucraram também de maneira inédita em uma economia artificial, crescentemente financeirizada que cada vez menos produzia, diante da evasão de divisas igualmente recorde que nem Fernando Henrique Cardoso fora capaz de presentear ao capital estrangeiro.

Pois hoje este mesmo setor não apenas aplaude alegremente estas mesmas críticas à sociedade brasileira, como hipocritamente as toma a iniciativa de fazer. Critica duramente – com toda a razão – personagens como Henrique Meirelles, apenas “se esquecendo” de que este ser fez parte do governo “de esquerda” do mesmo PT que abraçou o hoje demonizado Michel Temer – pois no poder, os petistas demonizavam os “esquerdistas radicais” que demonizavam Temer aliado de Dilma: pouca hipocrisia? Eis uma pequena parte do patético espetáculo tupiniquim.

Já o setor à direita da plateia, velho espetáculo à parte, hoje no auge da histeria justiceira: sua “nata intelectual” esbanja, entre termos e a própria construção da língua portuguesa ridículos enquanto se julgam seres de elevado valor cultural, o tradicional festival de ódio, discriminação e intolerância.

Sem noção nenhuma do ridículo a que se presta, tal setor anda agora rotulando até a Rede Globo de comunista (!) por minissérie televisiva crítica aos anos de regime militar; a cara-de-pau e o show de despolitização e ignorância – marcas registradas mesmo entre sua considerada “elite intelectual” – dão-se da apologia á violência contra toda e qualquer diferença de ideias (a derrubada da ex-presidenta Dilma não se deu, no discurso desta ala, em defesa da liberdade de pensamento político e de expressão garantidos pela Constituição, e própria da democracia?) à cínica crítica do que historicamente seus palhaços no picadeiro sempre praticaram, e hoje no poder seguem praticando com o maior descaramento.

Condenam a ex-presidente Dilma por corrupção (até hoje não comprovada) enquanto fazem vistas grossas a todas as evidências de que Michel Temer é corrupto, tendo recebido milhões em propinas.

Não esboçam a mesma indignação quando se aponta que o Mensalão começou com o PSDB em Minas Gerais, nem diante do fato mais que evidente que o Congresso que derrubou ilegalmente a ex-presidente Dilma, sim, é comprovadamente corrupto.

Esbanjam moralismo seletivo ao não reprovar a compra da reeleição de Fernando Henrique Cardoso junto ao Congresso, a crise de 1999 promovida por este assim como privataria que se desfez a preço de banana de nossas riquezas naturais, enriqueceu seu bolso, além dos desmandos, o fracasso administrativo e os escândalos de corrupção envolvendo José Serra, Geraldo Alckmin e Aécio Neves.

Batem no PT mais que em Judas em Sábado de Aleluia pelo que qualificam de excessivos gastos, incluindo o Bolsa Família enquanto não apenas “se esquecem” que o próprio Aécio Neves, candidato reacionário à presidência em 2014, havia afirmado que o manteria se vencesse as eleições.

Se se relembra que o Bolsa Família do PT, que consome ínfima parte do PIB nacional, é criação de Fernando Henrique, aperfeiçoada e com o nome modificado (Bolsa Escola), não se demonstra a mesma indignação pela “irresponsabilidade” dos “gastos contra vagabundos”, especialmente “vagabundos nordestinos”.

Tampouco se incomodam ao se deparar com o fato de que o Brasil com Temer, que tanto afirmaram que superaria as crises econômica e política através de um precário programa denominado Ponte para o Futuro, segundo o novo presidente de “salvação nacional” que readquiriria a confiança dos investidores, e executaria uma limpeza ética no segundo caso.

Ambas as cries deterioram-se dia a dia, o país gasta com juros da dívida oito vezes mais que com assistência social, com saúde e com educação pública (o que não era diferente nos anos neoliberais de Lula e Dilma, e nem seus partidários à época incomodavam-se embora hoje se mostrem profundamente indignados com este assalto ás contas públicas).

Enfim, que esperar de um setor que se simpatiza com figuras como Jair Bolsonaro, e que caiu teimosamente no engodo Eduardo Cunha – sem demonstrar nenhum arrependimento hoje, desaproveitando-se até da infalível ajuda da análise retrospectiva?

A Lava-Jato é uma operação evidentemente política, mas embora se esteja tentando, o que não é nenhuma novidade no Brasil, criminalizar setores à esquerda, é um grande equívoco de uns, e descarado oportunismo de outros embarcar a cúpula petista nesta luta direita-esquerda.

Luiz Inácio é, sim, vítima de discriminação por ser nordestino e originário da roça. Assim como Dilma, por ser mulher em uma sociedade altamente machista. Ambos têm ainda hoje sofrido perseguição sistemática da grande mídia, da “Justiça” e da própria sociedade brasileira, altamente elitista em todos os segmentos (a grande desgraça brasileira é que se conseguiu transformar até pobres em seres reacionários).

Mas setores “à esquerda” têm descoberto a pólvora e se dado conta de que o Brasil possui uma economia neoliberal, que o saneamento básico e a moradia do país são uma tragédia, além de uma sociedade sem educação minimamente satisfatória, altamente despolitizada e uma mídia inescrupulosa, completamente desregulada: Temer é apenas o estágio mais avançado das políticas oligárquicas, herdadas de seus antepassados todos. Porém, em grande medida tudo isso, outrora combatido (i.e., quando Luiz Inácio e Dilma estavam no poder) é tratado como grande novidade.

O que está em questão envolvendo o PT é a velha briga de cachorro grande pelo poder, neste sistema de Partido Único cuja máscara democrática já caiu há muito tempo e apenas os mais ingênuos e irregeneráveis insistem em não enxergam.

A cúpula do Partido dos Trabalhadores não se regenerou pós-farra nos porões do poder, e algumas evidências disso são a aliança a nível municipal, estadual e nacional que tem feito, desde que Dilma caiu, com o próprio PMDB que a derrubou.

E a evidência de que, de volta ao poder nacional em 2018 não se diferenciará do regime oligárquico e neoliberal que o marcou por 13 anos, é que nas entrevistas que Lula e Dilma concedem não tem nada mais a oferecer como solução ao país que a retomada do poder. Não há autocrítica e, por isso mesmo, não há projetos que não sejam vencer as eleições.

Eis a cara de uma “esquerda” brasileira historicamente apática, mesquinha, politiqueira, inerte, dessituada e como consequência disso tudo, sem a menor capacidade de reação. Completamente rendida a uma direita do pior nível, intelectual e moral.

Que ninguém se engane: seja Lula preso ou presidente da República novamente, tudo seguirá como sempre esteve no Brasil. O que menos se está fazendo é justiça, o que as siglas integrantes da ditadura de Partido Único no Brasil, e seus respectivos canalhas de turno desejam, é apenas deleitar-se dos privilégios do poder.

Quanto ao PT, particularmente, tem sido vítima de todos os seus venenos, um a um: de não ter se aliado à sociedade em todos os anos que esteve no poder – perdendo a oportunidade de fazê-lo especialmente em junho de 2013 -, da repressão e cooptação dos movimentos sociais, da despreocupação com educação e politização da sociedade, da criminalização da esquerda autêntica.

A grande ironia deste cenário circense é que, hoje assim como foi durante o golpe parlamentar do ano passado, o partido depende desesperadamente de cada um desses pontos para retornar ao poder.

O Brasil requer, está mais que claro, alternativas já que o PT não mudou o péssimo caráter uma vez de volta ao poder, sem sombra de dúvidas, viraria as costas aos mesmos que se apoiou para lá chegar como outrora fez e aos seus próprios “discursos” e “indignações” de esquerda.

Existe a alternativa que a sociedade – em grande medida de maneira nada sincera e até sem nenhuma consciência – anda dizendo que deseja, reforma no sistema político, na condução da economia no sentido de haver equidade com responsabilidade, na mídia e no sistema judiciário.

Porém, essa alternativa – a ser buscada com lupa, é verdade – passa longe dos grandes partidos que compõem a ditadura de Partido Único travestida de democracia, com suas siglas, que entre si, nada mais são que a outra face de uma mesma moeda adepta da politicagem mais baixa, e da roubalheira indiscriminada.

Edu Montesanti

As eleições presidenciais francesas de 2017 não são uma brincadeira. Elas estão a erigir-se como um confronto altamente significativo entre duas conceções profundamente opostas da vida política. Por um lado, a governança, que significa a gestão conjunta da sociedade por uma elite cooptada, com base no modelo das corporações empresariais. Por outro lado, o sistema tradicional chamado “democracia”, ou seja, a escolha pelo povo de líderes, através de eleições livres e justas.

Historicamente, os acontecimentos políticos em França tendem a marcar épocas e a clarificar dicotomias, a começar pela distinção em declínio entre a “esquerda” e “direita”. Estas eleições podem ter também essas características.

O que é a “governança”?

É cada vez mais claro que a elite do poder transatlântico há muito decidiu que a democracia representativa tradicional não é a forma de governo apropriada para um mundo globalizado baseado na livre circulação de capitais. Em vez disso, o modelo preferido é a “governança”, uma palavra retirada do mundo dos negócios, que se refere à gestão bem-sucedida de grandes corporações, unidas num único propósito e visando a máxima eficiência. Essa origem é evidente em aspetos da governança política: uma unanimidade obrigatória sobre “valores”, imposta pelos meios de comunicação corporativos; O uso de comités especializados para fornecer sugestões sobre questões delicadas, o papel desempenhado pela “sociedade civil”; o uso da psicologia e das comunicações para moldar a opinião pública; o isolamento das vozes críticas que questionam o sistema e levantam problemas; a cooptação das lideranças.

Estas características descrevem cada vez mais a vida política no Ocidente. Nos Estados Unidos, a transição da democracia para a governança foi gerida pelo sistema bipartidário, limitando a escolha dos eleitores a dois candidatos, selecionados e controlados pelos principais interesses corporativos do país, com base no seu compromisso de prosseguir a agenda da governança. Tudo isto estava a correr sobre esferas até que Hillary Clinton, a candidata indiscutível de toda a elite, ter sido derrotada de forma chocante por um intruso inesperado, Donald Trump. A reação negativa, sem precedentes, em todo o Ocidente mostra quão pouco a elite da governança global está pronta para ceder poder a um estranho. A situação nos Estados Unidos permanece incerta, mas a revolta refletiu o ressentimento popular crescente, embora mal definido, contra os governadores globalizadores, especialmente devido à desigualdade económica e ao declínio dos padrões de vida de grande parte da população.

Hillary Clinton optou por usar a palavra “governança” para descrever os seus objetivos, em parceria com a Goldman Sachs e outros representantes da “sociedade civil”. Mas nem mesmo ela era um produto puro do sistema de globalização como o é, nas eleições francesas, o candidato Emmanuel Macron. (Imagem à direita)

Governança Personificada

A primeira forma de identificar o papel atribuído a Macron é simplesmente passar os olhos pela média: as intermináveis capas de revistas, peças sopradas, entrevistas chocantes – e nunca uma palavra de crítica, (enquanto os seus principais rivais são sistematicamente denegridos). Em janeiro, a revista Política Externa apresentou Macron aos seus leitores como sendo “O Inglês-Falante, O Alemão-Afetuoso, o político francês que a Europa estava à espera”.

A trajetória da sua carreira deixa a claro por que a média mainstream ocidental o está a apelidar por o Messias.

Nascido em Amiens há apenas 39 anos, Emmanuel Macron passou grande parte de sua vida na escola. Como a maioria dos líderes franceses, foi educado em algumas das melhores, mas não nas melhores, escolas de elite da França (para os conhecedores, ele falhou a entrada à ENS, mas fez Sciences Po e ENA). Os meios de comunicação dos EUA parecem impressionados pelo fato de ele ter estudado filosofia ao longo do seu percurso, o que não lá grande cartão-de-visita, em França.

Em 2004, passou no exame de admissão para ingresso na Inspeção Geral de Finanças, um dos corpos de especialistas que mais se distinguem ao serviço do Estado francês, desde os tempos de Napoleão. Os inspetores do IGF têm segurança no emprego para a vida e exercem funções de consultoria económica junto do governo ou até de entidades privadas. No IGF, ele chamou a atenção do alto funcionário Jean-Pierre Jouyet, particularmente bem relacionado, que o recomendou a Jacques Attali, o mais espetacular dos gurus intelectuais que, nos últimos 35 anos, tem regalado os governos franceses com suas visões futuristas (Jerusalém Como capital de um futuro governo mundial, por exemplo). Em 2007, Attali cooptou Macron na sua super-elite “Comissão para a Libertação do Crescimento”, autorizada a orientar a Presidência. E uma estrela nasceu – uma estrela do mundo dos negócios.

A Comissão Attali preparou uma lista de 316 propostas explicitamente concebidas para “instalar uma nova governação ao serviço do crescimento”. Neste contexto, o “crescimento” significa, naturalmente, o crescimento dos lucros, através de medidas que reduzem o custo do trabalho, derrubam as barreiras à circulação de capitais, em suma, a desregulamentação. Os 40 membros da elite que planejavam o futuro da França incluíam os chefes do Deutsche Bank e da empresa suíça Nestlé. E assim, foram eles que forneceram ao jovem Macron um valioso livro de endereços e de contatos úteis.

Em 2008, por recomendação de Attali, Macron foi levado para o Rothschild Bank, ocupando uma elevada posição. Ao negociar uma compra da Nestlé no valor de nove mil milhões de dólares, Macron tornou-se milionário, graças ao montante elevado da sua comissão.

A que é que ele deveu a sua ascensão meteórica, ascensão que há dois séculos teria sido um excelente tema para um romance de Balzac? Ele foi “impressionante”, lembra Attali. Ele deu-se bem com todos e “não antagonizou ninguém”.

Alain Minc, outra estrela especialista em tudo, disse: Macron é esperto, mas acima de tudo, é um bom banqueiro porque é “encantador” – uma qualidade necessária para “a profissão de puta”).

Macron é famoso por palavras de profunda sabedoria como:

“O que a França precisa é de mais jovens a quererem ser milionários”.

Ou:

“Quem se importa com os programas? O que conta é a visão. ”

Assim, Macron lançou a sua carreira com base no seu charme e “visão” – certamente ele tem uma visão clara de qual é o caminho para o topo.

Formação da Elite da Governança

Este caminho está cheio de contactos. A elite da governança opera por cooptação. Reconhecem-se, “cheiram-se uns aos outros”, eles são de uma única mente.

Naturalmente, um destes dias, as polícias irão ativamente condenar estas conversas da “governança” dizendo que não passam de teoria da conspiração. Mas não há conspiração, porque não é necessário que o seja. As pessoas que pensam de modo igual agem em conjunto. Ninguém tem que lhes dizer o que fazer.

E as pessoas que condenam cada dica sobre a “conspiração” parecem acreditar que as pessoas que possuem um poder imenso, especialmente o poder financeiro, não se dão ao trabalho de o usar. Em vez disso, sentam-se e dizem: “Deixem o povo decidir”. Como George Soros, por exemplo.

Na verdade, as pessoas com poder não apenas o usam, mas estão convencidas de que devem usá-lo, para o bem da Humanidade, para o bem do mundo. É por isso que David Rockefeller fundou a Comissão Trilateral há quarenta anos, para descobrir como lidar com “demasiada democracia”.

Hoje em dia, os ideólogos mantêm as massas divertidas com argumentos e discussões a respeito de si mesmas, a que grupo identitário pertence, qual o género que podem assumir, quem é injusto com quem, quem é que elas devem “odiar” pelo crime de “odiar”.

Enquanto isso, a elite encontra-se entre si e decide o que é melhor.

Graças a Jouyet, em 2007 Macron foi cooptado para pertencer a um clube chamado Les Gracques (na senda dos irmãos romanos Gracchus), dedicado aos “valores”, com base no reconhecimento de que o Estado-providência keynesiano não se enquadra na globalização e no desenvolvimento da União Europeia.

Em 2011, Macron foi cooptado para o Club de la Rotonde, que se comprometeu a aconselhar o Presidente Hollande a acordar a França com um “choque de competitividade” – favorecendo o investimento, reduzindo as despesas públicas e os custos de mão-de-obra.

Em 2012, Macron foi recebido na Fundação Franco-Americana, conhecida por selecionar os “jovens líderes” do futuro.

Em 2014, Macron chegou ao grande momento. Em 31 de maio e 1 de junho desse ano participou da reunião anual de Bilderberg, realizada em Copenhaga. Este encontro super-secreto de designers de “governança” foi formado em 1954 pelo príncipe Bernhard da Holanda. Não são permitidos jornalistas na reunião de Bilderberg, mas os principais barões da imprensa estão lá para concordar com o consenso que deve ser difundido e inculcado na mente das massas.

E política? Programa? O que é isso?

Com todas essas credenciais, Macron passou de conselheiro econômico de François Hollande para ministro da Economia, Finanças e Indústria Digital, sob a presidência do primeiro-ministro Manuel Valls, onde promoveu vigorosamente a agenda de Attali sob pretexto de promover o “crescimento”. Entre outras coisas, ele reverteu a posição de seu antecessor ao aprovar a venda da joia da coroa da indústria francesa, o setor de energia da Alstom responsável pela indústria de energia nuclear da França, à General Electric.

Como ministro, Macron foi responsável pelas medidas mais impopulares de toda a impopular presidência de Hollande. A sua chamada “Lei Macron”, caracterizada por uma desregulamentação maciça, conformou-se às diretivas da União Europeia, mas não conseguiu obter a maioria no parlamento e teve de ser aprovada recorrendo ao artigo 49.3 da Constituição, que permite ao Primeiro-Ministro aprovar uma medida sem a aprovação parlamentar.

A sua realização seguinte foi mais velada. Projetou a “reforma” (desmantelamento parcial) do direito de trabalho francês, apresentada ao público como a Lei El Khomri, em homenagem ao jovem ministro do trabalho, marroquino Myriam El Khomri. A Sra. El Khomri não tinha praticamente nada a ver com a lei de seu nome, exceto colocar um rosto bonito e um nome de “diversidade étnica” numa legislação extremamente impopular que enviou trabalhadores a protestar nas ruas durante semanas, dividiu o Partido Socialista e obrigou o Primeiro-ministro Valls a recorrer novamente ao Artigo 49.3 para poder aprovar a lei.

Aqui a história torna-se quase cómica. A divisão e a colisão criada por Macron no governo Hollande / Valls praticamente destruíram o Partido Socialista francês, deixando-o dividido e desmoralizado. Isso abriu caminho para Macron emergir como o campeão heroico de “o futuro”, “nem a esquerda nem a direita”, “a França dos vencedores”, no seu novo partido, En Marche (que pode significar “está funcionando”).

No momento, Macron está no topo das sondagens, ombro a ombro com o corredor da frente, Marine Le Pen, para a primeira volta eleitoral de 23 de abril, e portanto, é o favorito para desafiá-la na decisiva segunda volta de 7 de maio. Ser “charmoso” assegurou a Macron uma carreira bem-sucedida como banqueiro, e os subservientes meios de comunicação social estão a fazer o possível para lhe assegurar a Presidência, principalmente com base em seu charme juvenil.

A média e as pessoas

Como nunca antes, a imprensa e as televisões de onde a maioria das pessoas obtém as notícias tornaram-se, não só unânimes nas suas escolhas e sem escrúpulos nos seus métodos, mas também tirânicos na sua condenação de fontes de notícia independentes reputando-as de “fake” e “false”. Eles devem ser designados por Média de Gestão da Mente. A objetividade é uma coisa do passado.

Há onze candidatos oficiais na corrida para a Presidência da República Francesa. A Média de Gestão da Mente, pródiga em centrar a atenção em Macron, trata os seus rivais mais diretos como delinquentes, atiram alguns ossos aos perdedores, e ignoram os restantes. Apoiado pela Média de Gestão da Mente, Macron é o candidato da governação autoritária a correr contra todos os outros, contra a própria democracia francesa.

Este é o primeiro de dois artigos sobre a eleição presidencial francesa.

Diana Johnstone

Artigo original: http://www.globalresearch.ca/big-stakes-in-the-french-presidential-election-global-governance-versus-the-people/5582937

Tradução : Júlio Gomes (Docente na Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, atualmente reformado.) 

Diana Johnstone é co-autora de From Mad to Madness (Clarity Press), um livro de memórias do planeamento dos objectivos nucleares no Pentágono pelo Dr. Paul H. Johnstone, seu falecido pai. 

“‘War is peace’, ‘Freedom is slavery’, ‘Ignorance is strength’ and ‘Lying is the truth'” -“Nineteen Eighty-Four”, George Orwell

The statements of some Western politicians about the Idlib chemical attack on April  4, suggest once again that the so-called modern world is suffering a severe and chronic crisis of political will.

The lack of a clear and independent position on the issue (and also on most of global problems) by the governments of Western powers constitutes a serious obstacle in the fight against such threats as terrorism, organized crime, the struggle against hunger, global warming, the proliferation of nuclear weapons etc.

This raises serious doubts as to whether these politicians are competent and whether the opportunity to make the world safer under their leadership is real.

UN experts have not yet published any objective conclusions as to who might be involved in the use of chemical weapons in the city of Khan Sheikhun. The result of the samples’ analysis isn’t released. It was not even determined what war gas and kind of weapons (munitions) were used.

The investigation initiated by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in Syria has just started and the experts have so far refused to comment on what had happened without having at least preliminary information on the issue.

But how is all of this related to the attitude of Western politicians and diplomats, when the world community wants a speedy reaction to what had happened?

The main thing for them is to do their best to earn political capital, without waiting for the results of the investigation and without making well-considered decisions. When the world community forgets to think about the tragedy, the situation in the world can dramatically change.

One of the main conditions of political success is a storm of hysteria in the mainstream media and an attempt to adopt a rough-and-ready UN resolution.

While using such tough retaliation measures as Trump’s pinpoint strikes and organizing a splendid little war any weak politician can turn the world on its head, rekindle glory, become once again the history-maker, divert people’s attention from Obamacare and other problems within their  own country.

Hundreds of Syrian children were brutally thrown to the wolves and murdered.

Are diplomats from different countries really getting to the bottom of the truth? An analysis of the statements about the chemical attack in Syria makes it possible to give answers that are close to reality to these questions.

The events that took place within a week after the air strike attack on Khan Sheikhun divided the world community into two camps. Some seek to establish the truth, while the latter require immediate action, not caring about the truth.

A list of supporters of Orwell’s strategy:

1. The National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces one of the first claimed that at least 80 people were killed, and 200 injured as a result of the attack. The armed opposition accused the Syrian Army of the action.

2. U.S. President Donald Trump put the responsibility for the alleged chemical attack on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Some Trump’ specialists from Quemado Institute state Khan Sheikhun’s false flag might also be designed to overthrow Trump, by proving Trump is an impulsive and dangerous leader who is unfit for office.

3. The Turkish Foreign Ministry called on all the parties whose influence on the Syrian government is high, to “immediately stop the barbaric attacks, which grossly violate the truce and are directed against civilians.”

M. Çavuşoğlu

4. British Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson, went much further. Prior  the investigation, Johnson stressed that he had personally seen the evidence of using chemical weapons by the Syrian Army.

B. Johnson

5. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun coincided with other Syrian government’s actions.

C. Freeland

6. France’s Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, also blamed Damascus for the incident in Idlib.

J-M Ayrault

7. Qatar is confident that the Syrian authorities are only responsible for the attack in Syria’s Idlib. This was stated by Qatar’s Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.

A. al-Thani

8. Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel refrained from accusing the Syrian authorities, but expressed fears that in the fight against terrorism, calling for restraint in the attacks directed against Syrian President Bashar.

S. Gabriel

…This list can be easily continued.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst the truth.”

1. Staffan de Mistura called on the OPCW to launch an investigation on the chemical attack, and demanded to determine those guilty for the attack in Syria’s Idlib. De Mistura also proposed to organize a meeting of the UN Security Council.

S. de Mistura

2. Even warhawk Frederica Mogherini has condemned Trump’s actions. The head of EU diplomacy, Federica Mogherini, said those who are responsible for using chemical weapons in the Syrian Idlib, should be punished.

F. Mogherini

3. Shock, but NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, called for bringing the perpetrators to justice, refraining from accusations against Bashar Assad.

J. Stoltenberg

4. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, called for an objective and fair investigation.

H. Chunying

…Is it easy to continue this list?

Apparently, it does not make sense whether the second camp can establish the truth or not. The will of most of the Western leaders and diplomats is poisoned by political, financial and personal interests.

For the Syrian people, who are the victims of the US led war, the missile strikes from the US destroyers constitutes a crime against humanity.

 The process of re-establishing relations with the opposition in Geneva and Astana is again under the threat.

The situation in the Middle is the result of a process of “controlled chaos”. The strategic goals have been achieved, who needs to know the truth about the murdered Syrian children?

Sophie Mangal is a co-editor at Inside Syria Media Center.

The details of the Israeli Air Force attack on the position of the Syrian Arab army (SAA) in the in Quneitra Governorate have been disclosed.

As it turned out, Israeli aviation attacked Syrian government troops with unmanned aerial vehicles. The soldiers of SAA’s 90th Infantry Brigade were under fire.

The Israeli Air Force planes struck a missile attack at the positions of the Syrian army in the Khan Arnabeh district of Quneitra Governorate. It was also reported earlier the blow was carried out to the east of the village of Ein Ayshaa.

Two missiles were fired at 06.45 p.m. when government forces were repulsing  Al-Qaeda’s attacks in the vicinity of the city of Quneitra.

The remnants of an Israeli missile that hit SAA Golan regiment’s tank.

The incident led to heavy losses of equipment and material in the Syrian Arab Army.

There are reports that Al-Qaeda terrorists infiltrated Quneitra from the Golan Heights occupied by Israel with the aim to strengthen the front in Madinat al-Ba’ath.

Al-Qaeda terrorists infiltrated

Apparently, Israel had prepared and launched a missile strike in order to provide artillery support to Al-Qaeda terrorists. The Israeli drones recorded in the province of Quneitra make it possible to conclude that Al-Qaeda is provided with reconnaissance information from the battlefields with Israel help too.

Sophie Mangal is a co-editor at Inside Syria Media Center.

The April 6th U.S. missile attack on the Shayrat Military Airbase, ostensibly done in response to an alleged chemical attack on a village in Idlib province, Syria, is a blatant act of aggression. At least 14 people were killed in the missile strikes, including five soldiers on the base and nine civilians in neighbourhoods surrounding the facility.

Shayrat is one of the largest and most active Syrian Air Force bases, dedicated primarily to fighting ISIS in central Syria and providing aid to besieged civilians in Deir Ezzor.

This unilateral action, taken without any UN Security Council mandate, is an egregious violation of international law which cannot be justified. Indeed, Washington has failed to provide any evidence proving that the Syrian government and its allies were actually guilty of this chemical attack, and before any independent investigation could be undertaken by UN monitoring bodies to determine responsibility for the Sarin gas attack.

The U.S. missile strike significantly escalates the ‘proxy’ war on Syria, precisely at a time when negotiators from both the government and some of the ‘rebel’ sides are in Geneva attempting to achieve a political solution to end the six-year long conflict. More than that, it increases the possibility of a direct military confrontation between the leading nuclear weapons powers – the U.S. and the Russian Federation – which could ignite a much wider regional conflict, not to mention a global thermonuclear war.

This wanton act of war – and the accompanying justifications given by the Trump Administration – confirm without a shadow of doubt that Washington’s true objective in Syria is not to fight terrorism but rather to impose ‘regime change’ on its people, despite its hollow claims to the contrary.

Canada’s role in this deepening Syrian crisis is no less deplorable. While stating that Canada will not take part in any further military attacks on Syria, the Trudeau government has lent its political support to this illegal and dangerous US bombing.

The Canadian Peace Congress unreservedly condemns this aggression, and demands such attacks cease immediately, and that the over 1,000 U.S. ground troops, already in Syria without any sanction or approval from Damascus, be withdrawn. We further demand that the Canadian government reverse its policy, withdraw its support for this brazen and extremely serious violation of international law, and call instead for a lasting political solution to the conflict in Syria. Canada should remove itself from the US-led coalition in Syria & Iraq, end its punishing economic sanctions against Syria, and to re-establish diplomatic relations with Damascus!

Canada must also declare its recognition and respect for Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, end all military flights over Syria (which are to refuel allied warplanes and to identify new targets), and stop selling weapons to countries who are funding and arming the terrorists in Syria. Not least, this should include cancelling the $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

We also appeal to all peace organizations and activists, labour, anti-imperialist and international solidarity groups, and peace-loving people across Canada to see through the barrage of imperialist propaganda, and its crass use of the now-discredited “Responsibility-to-Protect” (R2P) doctrine intended to disorient and neutralize organized resistance, and to come together in unity and action against imperialist aggression in Syria.

Hands off Syria!

Canada Out of NATO!

Executive Committee
Canadian Peace Congress
April 8, 2017

Last month, Secretary of State Tillerson said “(l)et me be very clear. The policy of strategic patience has ended. We are exploring a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures. All options are on the table.”

“(I)f (North Korea) elevate(s) the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action, then, (the option of war is) on the table. (A) comprehensive set of capabilities” is being developed.

Last week in Seoul, South Korea, Vice President Pence repeated Tillerson’s warning, adding Pyongyang “would do well not to test (Trump’s) resolve.”

Any DPRK use of nuclear weapons would be met with “an overwhelming and effective response,” he blustered. Trump said US

“patience…in this region has run out and we want to see change.”

“We want to see North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear weapons, and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable.”

“(E)ither China will deal with this problem or the United States and our allies will?”

Things are fast coming to a head on the Korean peninsula. The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group is expected to arrive in the Sea of Japan next week.

On April 25, the DPRK will commemorate the founding of the Korean People’s Army. Will it conduct a sixth nuclear test on this date? If so, how will Washington and China respond?

On April 18, a Beijing-linked Global Times commentary said China “will cooperate with Washington and stick to its own principles” – aiming to restrain “Pyongyang’s development of nuclear and ballistic missiles.”

“However, cooperative efforts by China and the US will under no circumstance evolve into any kind of military action against North Korea.” 

“Beijing will never support or cooperate with Washington when it comes to implementing solutions that involve using military force against Pyongyang. Nor will Beijing support increasing measures from Washington that involve the direct overthrow of the Pyongyang regime.”

If Trump attacks North Korea,

“the Chinese people will not allow their government to remain passive when the armies of the US and South Korea start a war and try to take down the Pyongyang regime.”

38 North provides “analysis of events in and around the DPRK.” It’s a Johns Hopkins University Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies US-Korea Institute program – managed by former State Department official Joel Wit and USKI assistant director Jenny Town.  

On April 21, it said

“(c)ommercial satellite imagery of the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site from April 19 indicates probable trailers near the North Portal, the tunnel that North Korea appears to have been preparing for a nuclear test.” 

“While no recent dumping is observed, there are at least five mining carts along the tracks leading to the spoil pile and one probable small equipment trailer adjacent to the support building. A net canopy remains in place, presumably concealing equipment…”

It’s unclear if site activity is a “tactical pause” ahead of another nuclear test. Satellite imagery “indicate(s) that the Punggye-ri nuclear test site appears able to conduct a sixth nuclear test at any time once the order is received from Pyongyang.”

Key is what happens if it occurs. Attacking North Korea would be madness, risking possible nuclear war no one can win.

On April 19, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said

“(t)he situation (on the Korean peninsula) is fraught with unpredictable tensions, and we are concerned about that.”

“We stand for continuing political and diplomatic efforts aimed at solving the North Korea issue, particularly using international formats that have already proved to be effective.” Sanctions do not, “an unsuccessful approach,” said Peskov.

On Friday, an amended Security Council statement “strongly condemn(ed)” Pyongyang’s April 15 missile test. It expressed “utmost concern (over its) highly destabilizing behavior and flagrant and provocative defiance of the Security Council.”

It stressed “the importance of maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in North-East Asia at large.”

It express a commitment by Security Council members to “a peaceful, diplomatic and political solution to the situation.”

It urged efforts “to facilitate a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialogue.”

The original US draft omitted mention of “dialogue” in the text. Russia insisted it be included. 

Its amended version was adopted. Whether it’s enough to prevent conflict on the Korean peninsula remains to be seen. Tensions remain high.

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.

It had arrived again, the day that newspapers, TV and magazines had been hyping. April 22, Earth Day, or, as it was known in 1990, “The Dawn of the Environmental Decade.” But despite the sunny skies and big promises to “clean up the planet,” I was uneasy.

Should I have been more content? Maybe. After all, the news that we faced a crisis of global, potentially catastrophic proportions was finally reaching the masses. I had been urging people to take individual and collective action since the first Earth Day twenty years before. Yet most of the “save the planet” messages, and even an emerging eco-consciousness, felt unsettling rather than reassuring.

On the previous Friday, for instance, CBS’s Dan Rather had reported that we were making headway in reducing smog over many US cities. Really? In most urban areas residents faced smog levels up to 150 days a year. Rather’s report and others seemed misleading. The idea that environmental protection laws passed after the original Earth Day had produced real gains provided a false sense of security.

Newspapers congratulated themselves for using recycled paper. But there was no sign of reducing the amount of mindless pap promoting a “consumer society” that perpetuates waste and pollution. And of course, major corporations touted their newfound commitment to environmental protection while conveniently omitting their toxic crimes.

Time Warner sponsored The Earth Day Special and promised to do its part. But what about Time magazine? asked my son. He knew that its 30 million glossy copies were produced on non-recyclable paper every week.

Too cynical? It was Earth Day, after all. Time to forgive and recycle, right? But I just couldn’t buy into the “we can do it” mood. Something simply wouldn’t leave my mind. Reality. Things were getting worse, not better. The hype no longer convinced me that “we will do it,” at least until we understood was was really wrong.

Celebrating Earth Day was educational and fun. But I wasn’t impressed, and either was the planet.

Maybe the problem was too much information. For several months I had been part of a local environmental task force. We’d looked into what Burlington, Vermont could do to create more “ecological security.” That phrase, used to name a conference I’d organized to bring together the peace and environmental movements, was an attempt to refocus locally at the end of the Cold War. Our insecurity, it suggested, stemmed from diverse threats to the natural world. The Task Force was expected to create a factual record and come up with bold yet feasible remedies.

We managed to develop a respectable list of first steps, among them proposals for a local ban on the use or sale of all products producing CFCs, the creation of citywide bike lanes, buying development rights to the delicate Intervale area, establishing a collection and storage facility for hazardous wastes, and a community panel to oversee biotechnology operations at the university. Like lists of “simple things you can do” being distributed at the time, such changes were clearly necessary. Still, on reviewing their work, some Task Force members felt defeated.

Had we succeeded only in developing another laundry list, while failing to identify the underlying problems? Wouldn’t other actions by the government and private interests negate the improvements we suggested? No funds for recycling had been included in the new Public Works budget. And despite a stated commitment to explore alternative transportation, the city administration still proposed new roads and the expansion of others. Some even thought it advisable to build a road over the edge of a recently closed landfill. Without limits on development and changes in energy production, even not-so-simple things would have a negligible effect.

Despite the best intentions, the Ecological Security Task Force had fallen into a trap described by Barry Commoner in his book, Making Peace with the Planet. Environmental degradation was built into the design of the modern means of production, he argued, and therefore traditional “control” approaches to environmental protection are bound to be inadequate. Trapping or even destroying pollutants merely postpones or shifts the problem. The only way to eliminate a pollutant is to stop producing it. Once produced, it’s too late.

Ecological Security Logo

What this suggests is the need for a radical set of changes in lifestyle and production practices. Not to minimize the “every person can make a difference” viewpoint, big institutions do have the biggest impacts. At the local level, government, the university, the hospital complex and the commercial sector would all have to take major steps to reduce waste, stop using or producing non-recyclable or toxic materials, and re-use as often as possible. Voluntary action alone wouldn’t cut it.

You’d have to be living in an oil drum not to see the problem. Air pollution, the Greenhouse Effect, ozone depletion, hazardous waste, acid rain, vanishing wildlife, garbage islands, and more. Plus the dangerous drift of society. Natural products replaced by synthetic petrochemical creations; natural agricultural fertilizers by chemical alternatives; trains, trolleys and buses by private, inefficient and polluting cars; reusable goods by throwaways. Shops, vehicles, factories and farms had become seedbeds of pollution.

And this was before we understood the phrase “climate change” or began to experience “extreme weather.”

Although its charge stopped at the city line, the Ecological Security Task Force recognized that the problems did not. They could only be addressed through regional and broader cooperation. Looking only at the bottom line, corporations had produced much of the mess. But the public was being asked to handle the clean up. In general, environmental laws passed since the first Earth Day had not dealt effectively with what industry produced.

When General Electric proudly proclaimed that it would review the environmental impacts of its products and spend $200 million on protection, it was important to keep in mind its rarely mentioned 47 contaminated toxic waste sites, past radiation experiments, toxic releases and status as one of the world’s major nuclear contractors.

The challenges are enormous. But what can make a difference is an active, even angry citizenry. And this was another reason for my Earth Day blues. Despite all the study and talk, I could not see the groundswell of popular outrage that was needed for a successful movement. Sure, recycling was catching on and the state was “environmentally conscious.” But being conscious isn’t enough. There must be real demands, ones that force all levels of government to use their purchasing and regulatory powers to eliminate polluting technologies and products, and also rapidly develop alternatives. In particular, the planet and its inhabitants cannot afford the squandering of resources, both material and human, that more than $1 trillion a year in world military spending represents.

We also need alliances that force businesses and governments to prevent pollution at the source. And it won’t get easier as we go along. Steps like halting the production of toxic chemicals or the use of nuclear energy won’t be embraced with nearly the enthusiasm of a general “save the planet” campaign. Every time people press for an ecological goal, the response is bound to be a competing economic need. After postponing action for so long, the clean up won’t be cheap.

So yes, I am skeptical. It’s easy to tell ourselves that “minor” sacrifices will be enough, or that corporations will factor in the environmental impacts as they assess the balance sheets. But these artificial entities are designed to make money, not to protect anything. Under the current capitalist system, they are machines that use the air, water and land without calculating the long-term costs. Meanwhile, most people in the developed world have not truly acknowledged that their lifestyle is built on environmental waste and degradation. As Paul Erhlich put it, there aren’t too many people, just too many rich people.

Will we wake up in time? Are we finally getting serious? These days I wouldn’t bet on it. But I look forward to being wrong.

Speaking on a visit to Israel on Friday, US Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis charged that the Syrian government has violated an agreement brokered by Moscow in 2013 by holding onto chemical weapons.

“The bottom line is there can be no doubt in the international community’s mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its agreement and its statement that it had removed them all,” Mattis said during a press conference standing alongside his Israeli counterpart, the extreme right-wing Zionist Avigdor Lieberman.

Mattis refused to provide any estimate of what quantity of chemical weapons he believes are in Syrian hands, claiming that it would compromise intelligence sources. He charged, however, that Damascus was in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and warned that it would be “ill-advised to use any again. We’ve made that very clear with our first strike.”

The US defense secretary’s accusations come just two weeks after American warships rained 59 cruise missiles on the Syria’s Shayrat air base, killing 15 people, the majority of them civilians.

The April 7 strike was launched in supposed retaliation for a chemical weapons incident in the village of Khan Sheikhun in Syria’s Idlib province that reportedly killed scores of people. Within hours of the first reports of the incident—relayed to the West by Western-funded “media activists” linked to the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate that controls the area—Washington and its allies pinned the blame on government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Since then, the US and its allies have provided no substantive evidence that the Syrian government launched the attack, which served no rational motive, given the militarily inconsequential nature of the target and the inevitability that it would serve as a pretext for Western retaliation.

Since then, the US has systematically blocked demands by Syria and its two principal allies, Russia and Iran, for an objective investigation of the alleged chemical attack by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Friday condemned the US and its allies for blocking a resolution on the OPCW executive council to send a fact-finding mission “to establish whether chemical weapons were used in Khan Sheikhoun and how they were delivered to the site of the reported incident.”

Syria’s President Assad also denounced the US and its allies for blocking any impartial investigation of the Idlib chemical incident.

“We formally sent a letter to the United Nations, we asked them in that letter to send a delegation in order to investigate what happened in Khan Shaykhun,” the Syrian told the Russian news agency Sputnik. “However, until this moment they didn’t send any group since the West and the United States blocked any delegation from coming because if they come, they will find out that their narrative about what happened in Khan Shaykhun… was a false flag and a lie.”

It is apparent that the US and the other Western powers backing regime change in Syria fear what such a mission would uncover. One US authority on missile attacks, the MIT physicist and national security consultant Theodore Postol, has issued a report that establishes, based on evidence provided by Washington, that the chemical weapon was not delivered by a missile fired from the air, but rather set off by an improvised explosive device on the ground, meaning it was almost certainly the work of those who control the area, the “rebel” forces tied to Al Qaeda.

Like the allegations over this staged chemical weapons attack, Mattis’ charge that Syria has kept its chemical weapons is totally unsubstantiated and designed to provide the pretext for further US military aggression.

The chemical disarmament of Syria was carried out under a deal brokered by Moscow in 2013 when the Obama administration backed down from a threat to launch airstrikes against Syria over another alleged chemical weapons incident in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. That incident was also exposed as a deliberate provocation staged by Turkish intelligence in league with Islamist “rebels” for the express purpose of provoking a US attack. The US participated directly in the destruction of Syria’s chemical stockpiles, and the OCPW certified that all of the country’s chemical weapons had been destroyed in January 2016.

Mattis’ allegations against Syria came just a day after President Donald Trump charged Iran with failing to live up to the “spirit of the agreement” negotiated between Tehran and the major powers over Iran’s nuclear power. On Tuesday, the US State Department certified that Iran was in full compliance with the agreement, but indicated that the administration was conducting full review of its sanctions regime to determine whether its waiver of sanctions under the terms of the deal remained “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson followed up on Wednesday with a bellicose denunciation of Iran and the clear indication that Washington was prepared abrogate the deal and escalate military confrontation.

Mattis’ Middle East tour has essentially consisted of a consultation with an axis of regional enemies of Iran, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Friday praised what he termed

“a great change in the direction of American strategy” which he said had been “made clear by Mattis’ clear and forthright words … and very forthright deeds against the use of chemical weapons by Iran’s proxy, Syria.”

He said Israel welcomed the “strategic change of American leadership and American policy.” The Netanyahu government viewed the Obama administration as insufficiently supportive, even as it raised the annual military aid from Washington to some $3.8 billion.

The main bone of contention was the Iran nuclear deal, which the Israeli government, the region’s sole nuclear power, bitterly opposed. Now, with the Trump administration’s escalating campaign of worldwide militarism and its bellicose denunciations of Tehran, the Israeli government is clearly hoping that it can scuttle the nuclear agreement and ratchet up military provocations against Iran, seen by both Tel Aviv and Washington as the principal rival for regional hegemony.

In the same statement charging Syria with keeping chemical weapons, Mattis also said that the Syrian army had “dispersed their aircraft in recent days.” US intelligence officials have reported that Damascus has redeployed its warplanes to Russia’s Hmeimim airbase near Latakia on the Syrian coast in order to intermingle them with Russian planes. Another US strike against them would inevitably mean hitting Russian personnel, raising the threat of a military confrontation between the world’s two major nuclear powers.

On April 15^th, Zero Hedge bannered “Doomsday Bunker Sales Soar After Trump’s Military Strikes“, but this growth in the market for nuclear-proof bunkers is hardly new; it started during the Obama Administration, in Obama’s second term, specifically after the Russia-friendly government of Ukraine, next-door to Russia, got taken over in 2014 by a rabidly anti-Russian government that’s backed by the U.S. government.

This boom in nuclear-bunker sales is only increasing now, as the new U.S. President, Donald Trump, tries to out-do his predecessor in demonstrating his hostility toward the other nuclear superpower, Russia, and displaying his determination to overthrow the leader of any nation (such as Syria and Iran) that is at all friendly toward Russia.

For earlier examples of feature-articles on this booming market for homes that allegedly would enable buyers to survive the first blast effects, and the most immediate nuclear contaminations, of a Third World War, see here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. 

This surging demand for nuclear bunkers started right after the U.S. government arranged a coup in Ukraine that replaced the existing Moscow-friendly democratically elected President by installing a rabidly anti-Russian Prime Minister and national-security appointees from Ukraine’s two nazi Parties, the Right Sector Party, and the former Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (which the CIA renamed “Svoboda” meaning “Freedom” so as to enable it to be acceptable to the American public). Then, the intensifying U.S. effort to replace the secular pro-Russian Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad by a sectarian jihadist government that would be dependent upon the Saudi-Qatari-UAE-Turkish-U.S. alliance, has only intensified further the demand for these types of «second homes».

Whereas all of the purchasers of these bunkers are being kept secret, the U.S. federal government provides, free-of-charge, to top officials, nuclear bunkers, so as to allow the then-dictatorship (continuation of America’s current dictatorship) to function, in order, supposedly, to serve their country, which they’d already have destroyed (along with destroying the rest of the world) by their determination to conquer Russia. No one knows what the reality would actually be in such a post-WW-III world, except that there would be no functioning electrical grid, nights would be totally dark for anyone whose sole reliance is on the grid, and all rivers and other water-sources would be intensely radioactive from the fallout, so that groundwater soon would also be unusable — and, of course, the air itself would also be toxic; so, lifespans would be enormously shortened, and excruciating, not to say extremely depressing.

No one has published a computer-model of a U.S.-Russia nuclear war, because doing that would be unacceptable to the “military-industrial complex” including the U.S. government, but in 2014 a “limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan” was computer-modeled and projected to produce global ozone-depletion and “the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years”, which “could trigger a global nuclear famine”. But such a war would be only 50 bombs instead of the 10,000+ that would be used in a WW III scenario; and, so, everyone who is paying money in order to survive WW III is simply wasting money.

But, somehow, there are people who either want a Russia-U.S. war, or else whose preparations for it are directed at surviving in such a world, instead of at ending the current grip on political power in the United States, on the part of the people who are working to bring about this type of (end to the) world. At least the owners of the major U.S. armaments-firms, such as Raytheon Corporation, would have an explosive financial boost during the build-up toward that war, but buying bunkers in order to survive it, would seem to be a dubious follow-up to such an investment-plan. On the other hand, it might appeal to some thrill-seekers who don’t even feel the need for a good computer-simulation of a post-WW-III world; maybe they’ve got money to burn and a craving to experience ‘the ultimate thrill’, and don’t want unpleasant knowledge to spoil the thrill.

After President Trump threw out his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and replaced him with the rabidly anti-Russian H.R. McMaster, and then lobbed 59 cruise missiles against the Syrian government (which is protected by the Russian government), the cacophony of press that had been calling for President Trump to be impeached and replaced by his rabidly anti-Russian Vice President Mike Pence, considerably quieted down; and, so, the Obama-Trump market for nuclear bunkers seems now to be established on very sound foundations, for the foreseeable immediate future. And, if anyone in the U.S. federal government has been planning to prepare the U.S. for a post-WW-III world, that has not been publicly announced, and no news media have even been inquiring about it — so, nothing can yet be said about it.

The general message, thus far, is that, after World War III, everyone will be on his or her own, but that the dictators will (supposedly) be in a far better position than will anyone outside that ruling group. However, if the survivors end up merely envying the dead, it will be no laughing matter, regardless of how silly those nuclear bunkers are. It would be nothing funny at all.

On April 17^th, Scott Humor, the Research Director at the geostrategic site “The Saker,” headlined “Trump has lost control over the Pentagon“, and he listed (and linked-to) the following signs that Trump is following through with his promise to allow the Pentagon to control U.S. international relations:

March 14^th, the US National Nuclear Security Administration field tested the modernized B61-12  gravity nuclear bomb in Nevada.

April 7, Liberty Passion, loaded with US military vehicles, moored at Aqaba Main Port, Jordan

On April 7^th the Pentagon US bombed Syria’s main command center in fight against terrorists

April 10, United States Deploying Forces At Syrian-Jordanian Border

April 11, The US Air Force might start forcing pilots to stay in the service against their will, according to the chief of the military unit’s Air Mobility Command.

April 12, President Donald Trump has signed the US approval for Montenegro to join NATO

April 13, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announced the alliance’s increased deployment in Eastern Europe

On April 13^th, the Pentagon bombed Afghanistan. The US military has bombed Afghanistan with its GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB)

April 13, the US-led coalition bombed the IS munitions and chemical weapons depot in Deir ez-Zor killing hundreds of people

April 14, The Arleigh Burke-class, guided-missile destroyer USS Stethem (DDG 63) has been deployed to the South China Sea

April 14, the US sent F-35 jets to Europe

April 14, Washington failed to attend the latest international conference hosted by Moscow, where 11 nations discussed ways of bringing peace to Afghanistan. The US branded it a «unilateral Russian attempt to assert influence in the region».

April14, the US has positioned two destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles close enough to the North Korean nuclear test site to act preemptively

On April 16^th, the US army makes largest deployment of troops to Somalia since the 90s.

Mr. Humor drew attention to an article that had been published in “The Daily Beast” a year ago, on 8 April 2016, “CALL OF DUTY: The Secret Movement to Draft General James Mattis for President. Gen. James Mattis doesn’t necessarily want to be president—but that’s not stopping a group of billionaire donors from hatching a plan to get him there”. Though none of the alleged “billionaires” were named there, one prominent voice backing Mattis for the Presidency, in that article, was Bill Kristol, the Rupert Murdoch agent who co-founded the Project for a New American Century, which was the first influential group pushing the “regime-change in Iraq” idea during the late 1990s, and which also advocated for the foreign policies that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, have since been pursuing, each in his own way. It seems that whomever those “billionaires” were, they’ve now gotten their wish, with a figurehead Donald Trump as President, and James Mattis actually running foreign policy. Humor also noted that Mattis wants to boost the budget of the Pentagon by far more than the 9% that Trump has proposed. Perhaps Trump knew that even to get a 9% Pentagon increase passed this year would be almost impossible to achieve. First, the unleashed Pentagon needs to place the military into an ‘emergency’ situation, so as to persuade the public to clamor for a major invasion. That ‘emergency’ might be the immediate goal, toward which the March-April timeline of events that Humor documented is aiming.

As regards the military comparisons of the personnel and equipment on both sides of a U.S.-Russia war, the key consideration would actually be not the 7,000 nuclear warheads that Russia has versus the 6,800 nuclear warheads that the U.S. has, but the chief motivation on each of the respective sides: conquest on the part of the U.S. aristocracy, defense on the part of the Russian aristocracy. (Obviously, the U.S. having continued its NATO military alliance after the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991, indicates America’s aggressive intent against Russia. That became a hyper-aggressive intent when NATO absorbed Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies. NATO even brought in some parts of the former USSR itself, when in 2004, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, entered NATO, and in 2014 U.S. President Obama tried to get Ukraine into NATO, and these five countries hadn’t even been Warsaw Pacters, but had instead been parts of the USSR itself. It was as if Russia had grabbed not only America’s allies, but some states in the U.S. itself. This constituted extreme aggression, and shows the U.S. aristocracy’s obsessive intent for global empire — to include Russia.)

Any limited war between the two powers would become a nuclear war once the side that’s losing this limited war becomes faced with the choice of either surrendering that limited territory (now likely Syria) or else going nuclear. On Russia’s side, allowing such military conquest of an ally would be unacceptable; the war would then expand with the U.S. and its allies invading Russian territory for Russia’s continuing refusal to accept the U.S.-Saudi and other allies’ grabbing of Syria (on ‘humanitarian grounds’, of course — as if, for example, the Sauds aren’t far more brutal than Assad). After the traditional-forces’ invasion of Russia, Russia’s yielding its sovereignty over its own land has never been part of Russia’s culture: If Russia were to be invaded by allies of the U.S., then launching all of Russia’s nuclear weapons against the U.S. and America’s invasion-allies, would be a reasonably expected result. Here’s how it would develop: On America’s side, which (very unlike Russia) has no record of any foreign invasion against its own mainland (other than the Sauds’ own 9/11 ‘false flag’ attacks), the likely response in the event of Russia’s crushing its invaders would be for the U.S. President to seek to negotiate a face-saving end to that limited war, just as the American President Richard Nixon did regarding America’s invasion and occupation of Vietnam.

However, a reasonable question can be raised as to whether, in such a situation, Russia would accept anything less than America’s total surrender, much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in WW II was determined to accept nothing less than Germany’s total surrender, at the end of that war. If Trump wants to play Hitler, then Putin (acting in accord with Russian tradition) would probably play both FDR and Stalin, even if it meant the end of the world. For Russia to be conquered, especially by such intense evil as those invaders would be representing, would probably be viewed by Russians as being even worse than ending everything, and this would probably be Putin’s view as well. If America did not simply capitulate, Putin would probably nuclear-blitz-attack the U.S. and its allies, rather than give Trump (or Pence) the opportunity to blitz-attack Russia and to sacrifice all of the U.S. side’s invading troops in Russia so as to ‘win’ the overall war and finally conquer Russia. It would be like WW II, except with nuclear weapons — and thus an entirely different type of historical outcome after the war.

Consequently, either the U.S. will cease its designs on Russia, or there will be WW III. Russia’s sovereignty will never be yielded, especially not to the thuggish gang who have come to rule the U.S. (both as “Republicans” and as “Democrats”). The bipartisan neoconservative dream of America’s aristocrats (world-conquest) will never be achieved. Russia will never accept it. If America’s rulers continue to press it, the result will be even worse than when the Nazis tried. It’s just an ugly pipe-dream, but any attempt to make it real would be even uglier. And nobody who buys a ‘nuclear-proof bunker’ will get what he or she thinks is being bought — safety in such a world as that. It won’t exist.

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

Mattis: ‘No doubt‘ Syrian regime has chemical weapons, April 21, 2017

“There can be no doubt in the international community’s mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its agreement and its statement that it had removed them all. There is no longer any doubt,” Mattis told reporters.

Full text of Dick Cheney‘s speech, August 27, 2002

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors …

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”― Edmund Burke

“A good part of what’s happening in the United States and a good part of American policy-making cannot be understood unless you understand that there is a kind of military-industrial complex tail wagging the American policy and economic dog.” – Professor Radhika Desai (from this week’s interview)

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Americans may have been led to believe through their education systems, their religious institutions, mainstream media and popular culture that their government’s foreign policy is guided by the dictates of conscience, humanitarian considerations, and empathy for chemically mauled infants as well as a national vocation to bring “freedom and democracy” to the world.

A more honest and rigorous review of America’s involvement in military conflicts, and its support for Israel, Saudi Arabia and other rogue states around the world reveal the shallowness of this understanding.

The structure of power in the U.S. as with other imperialist powers throughout history demands certain economic arrangements and military formations on the world stage.

American geopolitical imperatives demand, among other things, reliable supplies of energy (oil) to fuel the empire, the projection of military power (bases) abroad, control over major trade and transport corridors, access to strategically important resources like rare earth minerals, control of the currency of international exchange, and dominance of the strategic terrain of the High Seas and outer space.

A lot has changed since the end of World War II. The U.S. labours under a massive nearly 20 trillion dollar national debt. The Soviet Union has collapsed. A resurgent Russia is proving to be a major and defiant player on the international landscape. Now the Russian bear is forging important military and economic partnerships with Iran and China threatening to thwart the advances of a fading superpower under the leadership of its current idiosyncratic commander-in-chief.

This week, on the Global Research News Hour, we examine a number of hotspots and flashpoints around the globe and put them in the context of larger geopolitical forces. In a conversation recorded at the beginning of April, before the reported Syrian chemical weapons attacks, our guests touch on the U.S. naval maneuvres in the South China Sea, the ongoing conflict in Yemen, the current elections in France and prospects for the demise of the European Union. Our guests are Professors Radhika Desai and Mahdi Nazemroaya.

(video credit: Paul S. Graham)

Dr. Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013) among other books. She co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an award-winning author and geopolitical analyst, author of The Globalization of NATO (Clarity Press) and a forthcoming book The War on Libya and the Re-Colonization of Africa. He is a Sociologist and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a contributor at the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), Moscow, and a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, Italy.

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

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On April 19, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), confirmed that “the analysis indicate that the victims were exposed to Sarin or a Sarin-like substance” during the events occured in Idlib, Syria, last April 4th (see full text of the press release issued a the end of this note). The OPCW (see official website) is the monitoring body created by the Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons: in a study celebrating the 10th anniversary of this international agreement, we read that “The Chemical Weapons Convention is a strong treaty, not a weak one. Is is unique when compared to the two others multilateral disarmament and non-proliferation treaties, the 1968 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the 1972 Biological Toxins and Weapons Convention (BTWC)” (see SWP Research Paper, “Freeing the World of Chemical Weapons. The Chemical Weapons Convention at the Ten Year-Mark”, Berlin, 2007, Preface, available online).

The last investigation on use of chemical weapons in Syria has been presented in January 2017 to Security Council by OPCW Fact Finding Mission, regarding an incident of 2 August 2016 (see letter and reports of OPCW Fact Finding Mission available here). It can be read in the conclusions (p. 16) that:

“6.3 Based on the evidence presented by the National Authority of the Syrian Arab Republic, the medical records that were reviewed, the results of the sample analyses, and the prevailing narrative of all of the interviews, the FFM cannot confidently determine whether or not a specific chemical was used as a weapon in the investigated incident. From the results of the analyses of the samples, the FFM is of the opinion that none of the chemicals identified are likely to be the cause of death of the casualties in the reported incident“.

The explosion that took place in Idlib last April 4th has been followed 48 hours later by a missiles strike of United States, with 59 Tomahawk missiles sent to the Syrian aerial base to which, in accordance to United States intelligence report (see full text), the alleged “chemical weapon attack” has been carried out by Syrian airforces. This strike constitutes a clear violation of United Nations Charter, as no military action can be taken without prior approval of UN Security Council. See on this particular point the analysis published by Professor Marko Milanovic (University of Nottingham) entitled: “The Clearly Illegal US Missile Strike in Syria” published by EJIL-Talk.

A well known scientist from MIT (Massachusetts), Theodor Postol has analyzed the intelligence report issued by United States, and has expressed some doubts about its thesis and conclusions on the direct responsibility of Syria (see Postol´analysis published by GlobalResearch in which we read that:

“We again have a situation where the White House has issued an obviously false, misleading and amateurish intelligence report“.

In an Addendum dated April 13th (see full text), the scientist concludes his complementary analyse writing that:

“I therefore conclude that there needs to be a comprehensive investigation of these events that have either misled people in the White House, or worse yet, been perpetrated by people seeking to force decisions that were not justified by the cited intelligence. This is a serious matter and should not be allowed to continue“.

Syrian officials have stated since April 4th 2017 that they have no responsibility in the events that took place in Idlib and that no chemical weapons are used by Syria army since their complete destruction in 2014 (see Syrian representative´s statement at Security Council session, S/PV.7921 of last April 12, pp. 17-20). Early, Israel Defense Minister affirmed been “100% certain” that Syria top authorities were directly involved in the events of April 4th (see note of Haaretz).

While France, United States and United Kingdom have accused Syria to use chemical weapons against rebels group in Idlib (see the official statement made by their representative at the same session of April 12), Russia has asked for an immediate investigation in situ to clarify the exact origin of the chemical substances found in Idlib. On April 5th, three drafts resolution have circulated among the Members of the UN Security Council: see Document 1 (Russia´s draft), Document 2 (E-10 draft) and Document 3 (P-3 draft) reproduced at the end of our note entitled: “Chemical weapons in Syria and UN Security Council: no resolution adopted. Would you like to know why?“.

On the results announced by OPCW concerning Sarin presence in Idlib, Russia top officials have made a few questions related to the physical absence of an investigation team in Idlib: ”

According to Konashenkov, “in the past two weeks, not a single OPCW representative was seen there.” “Where do these samples come from? Who of the OPCW members was able to study them so fast while standard procedures stipulate a complex research which requires time, as we can see in the case of mustard gas use in Aleppo,” Konashenkov said” (see press note of TASS). A proposal of Russia to facilitate to OPCW full access to Idlib has been rejected by OPCW on April 20th. In his statement after the vote that took place at OPCW, Russia said that: “The proposal that we put forward in conjunction with Iran on the immediate start of a full-fledged investigation into the circumstances of the incident with the use of chemical agents in the Syrian province of Idlib on April 4 was not supported by the required number of votes. In particular, the states from the Western group opposed this draft decision. We are all the more disappointed by this since the Russian delegation, mindful of the instructions issued by a number of colleagues from other regional groups, was looking, until the last minute, for an opportunity to reach a compromise“. (see Russia declaration of April 20).

At the end of this note is preproduced an official press release of Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) on this vote that took place last April 20 in The Hague, poorly reported by international media.

The Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons adopted in 1997 has been ratified by 192 States, including Syria (in 2013). The only State that has not ratified this international treaty is Israel (see official list of signatures and ratifications).

OPCW PRESS RELEASE OF APRIL 19th, 2017

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — 19 April 2017 — The Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reconvened today to further address the allegation of chemical weapons use in the Khan Sheikhun area of southern Idlib in the Syrian Arab Republic. OPCW’s Director-General, Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü updated Council members on recent developments regarding the OPCW Technical Secretariat’s activities.

Ambassador Üzümcü underscored that the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) continues its work using procedures and methodologies consistent with its mission and reaffirmed that the FFM has been endorsed by the relevant decisions of the Executive Council and applicable resolutions of the UN Security Council. He reiterated his full confidence in the professionalism and impartiality of colleagues comprising the Fact-Finding Mission teams.

The bio-medical samples collected from three victims during their autopsy were analysed at two OPCW designated laboratories. The results of the analysis indicate that the victims were exposed to Sarin or a Sarin-like substance. Bio-medical samples from seven individuals undergoing treatment at hospitals were also analysed in two other OPCW designated laboratories. Similarly, the results of these analyses indicate exposure to Sarin or a Sarin-like substance.

Director-General Üzümcü stated clearly:

“The results of these analyses from four OPCW designated laboratories indicate exposure to Sarin or a Sarin-like substance. While further details of the laboratory analyses will follow, the analytical results already obtained are incontrovertible.”

In the meantime, the Fact-Finding Mission is continuing with interviews, evidence management and sample acquisition. The Director-General reported that an FFM team is ready to deploy to Khan Sheikhun should the security situation permit. He reminded the Executive Council of the 27 May 2014 attack on an FFM team and the action the Council subsequently took in emphasising the importance of safety and security of OPCW experts deployed to Syria.

The FFM is still anticipated to complete a first report of its findings to be submitted to States Parties of the Chemical Weapons Convention within two weeks and the Director-General will make the report available to the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism. Ambassador Üzümcü repeated his request for the continued support of all States Parties, including through the provision of relevant information, to ensure that the Technical Secretariat is able to pursue its work, and to allow it to fulfil the OPCW mission within a reasonable time frame.

The Executive Council decided to reconvene tomorrow, 20 April, to vote on a draft decision under discussion.

PRESS RELEASE OF RUSSIA MFA OF APRIL 20th, 2017

20 April 2017, 21:40

Comment by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov for TASS on the OPCW Executive Council session

The outcome of today’s vote at a special session of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Executive Council shows that the Western group of countries and some of the states that joined it are not interested in establishing the truth. They failed to demonstrate their willingness to take the only right step in this situation, specifically, to send a team of investigators to the scene of the chemical incident in Khan Sheikhun and to the Al-Shayrat air base, from which the alleged “chemical attack” was supposedly carried out, as they claim. Those countries continue to stick to their line, disregarding any argument, and continue to impose on the international community the same pseudo conclusions that they pushed on the UN Security Council.

They do not need the truth. For them, everything has been settled: Damascus is to blame, according to them, and Moscow, they say, is just obscuring the matter, preventing the OPCW from doing its job.

However, without collecting evidence at the location and establishing the facts, all their accusations against the legitimate government of Syria remain groundless. The West always has its own “pocket” specialists on hand, who are ready to write any report at the first signal and fit pseudo evidence into pre-formulated conclusions. Today, our diplomats in The Hague and the Russian Defence Ministry’s official representative talked about this amply and convincingly.

We are grateful to the countries that supported the joint Russian-Iranian draft solution. We heard many reasonable arguments in statements by representatives of the countries that abstained from voting.

And we strongly condemn the irresponsible stance of those that voted against it. The Western group has once again revealed the essence of its destructive approach.

These countries caused serious damage to the reputation and authority of the OPCW. By disrupting this badly needed process, they have again complicated the search for a way out of the Syrian crisis.

Earth Day 2017: Humans Are The Most Destructive Species On Earth

By Pratap Antony, April 20, 2017

Our planet is not in danger. Humans are in danger. From ourselves. Humankind is on the road to extinguish ourselves. Sooner rather than later. The future for all of us is bleak. The planet will continue as it has for the 99% of the time before man, it will adjust and continue. Perhaps with other life forms, other vegetation, other landscapes.

Life on Earth is Dying. Thousands of Species Cease to Exist. Homo Sapiens is the Cause

By Robert J. Burrowes, April 20, 2017

You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures’.

Earth Day is no longer about Celebration: Uranium Contamination Across America, Holding the Silent Killers Of Environmental Destruction Accountable

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, April 21, 2017

Earth Day is no longer about celebration. We are making Mother Earth sick by using extreme methods to extract fuels from her mountains and from beneath her surface and by massive spills of oil, chemicals and radiation. We must mobilize ourselves to take action now to create clean renewable energy and to restore the damage we have done.

From Earth Day to the Monsanto Tribunal, Capitalism on Trial by Colin Todhunter, April 22, 2017

Earth Day came a few days after the legal opinion offered by the five international judges who presided over the Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague. The judges concluded that Monsanto has engaged in practices that have impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Monsanto’s conduct also has had a negative impact on the right of scientists to freely conduct indispensable research.

Self-Assured Destruction, The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War. Mass Starvation, Ozone Depletion by Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, April 22, 2017

Even a “small” nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each country detonating 50 Hiroshima-size atom bombs—only about 0.03 percent of the global nuclear arsenal’s explosive power—as air bursts in urban areas, could produce so much smoke that temperatures would fall below those of the Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, shortening the growing season around the world and threatening the global food supply.

World Environment Day (WED) occurs on 5 June every year. Promoted by the United Nations, its aim is to encourage global awareness and action for the protection of the environment. Since its inauguration in 1974, WED has helped bring attention to various issues, including global warming, sustainable consumption and wildlife crime.

We also have Earth Day, celebrated annually on 22 April. On this day. various events are held across the globe to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Earth Day dates back to 1970.

Given the threats to the environment, these two symbolic days in the calendar promote laudable aims. For instance, consider that a range of species are endangered due to poaching and habitat destruction. The scaly anteater is probably the most trafficked mammal on earth. Over a million of these have been taken from the wild in the past decade alone. The illegal trade in live apes is also rife, and many other species across the planet are being trafficked.

The vast illegal trade in wildlife products is pushing whole species towards extinction, including elephants, rhinos, big cats, gorillas and sea turtles. Driven by a growing demand for illegally sourced wildlife products, the illicit trade has escalated into a global crisis. Thousands of species are internationally traded and used by people in their daily lives.

Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on UN agencies and various partners to provide a co-ordinated response to wildlife crime and spread the message that there should be zero tolerance for poaching. As part of a wider approach, a strategy is being developed to create greater public awareness of the issue at hand, which will hopefully lead to reduced demand for wildlife products.

Palm oil and environmental destruction

As commendable as these aims are, however, on their own they will not be enough to save species or their habitat. That’s because the interests of powerful actors must be taken into account and the economic system they perpetuate has to be challenged.

For instance, between 2000 and 2009 Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Planned expansion could wipe out the remaining natural habitat of several endangered species.

This is a ludicrous situation considering that Brazil and Indonesia spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it. The two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.

If we want to see how not to manage the world’s wildlife and natural habitats, we need look no further than India, which is the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. India imports over two-­thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.

Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the WTO, import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector (see this) and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.

Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of climate-changing gases (see this analysis). Indonesia emits more greenhouse gases than any country besides China and the US and that’s largely due to the production of palm oil.

The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of industrialised agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the environmental destruction we see today.

Without addressing the impacts and nature of corporate imperialism and a wholly corrupt neoliberal capitalism that privileges corporations and profit ahead of people and conservation, Earth Day or World Environment Day will continue to send out a valuable message but will have minimal impact.

The devastating nature of chemical-intensive industrial farming, its geopolitical role and its massive environmental, social and health costs has been highlighted at length in previous article I’ve written. There is no need to go over this again here. But one of the guilty parties which perpetuates this model of agriculture is of course Monsanto.

The Monsanto Tribunal

Earth Day came a few days after the legal opinion offered by the five international judges who presided over the Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague. The judges concluded that Monsanto has engaged in practices that have impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Monsanto’s conduct also has had a negative impact on the right of scientists to freely conduct indispensable research.

The judges additionally concluded that a gap remains between the commitments and the reality of environmental protection. The Tribunal concluded that if ecocide were formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, the activities of Monsanto could possibly constitute a crime of ecocide too.

The Tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules is currently in place to protect investors’ rights in the framework of the World Trade Organization and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free-trade agreements.

These provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human and environmental rights, not least because key questions of human and environmental rights violations are to be resolved by private tribunals operating entirely outside the United Nations framework and the legal systems of nation states (see ‘Clear and Present Danger to Democracy‘, which highlights the disturbing shift in power as a result of investor trade dispute settlement provisions written into trade and investment agreements).

The Tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.

Capitalism on trial

While the Monsanto Tribunal saw that company being put on trial and being found guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.

Monsanto and other powerful corporations can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture governments and regulatory bodies, to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever global influence, to profit on the back of US militarism (Iraq) and destabilisations (Ukraine), to exert undue influence over science and politics and to rake in enormous profits.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ and its ongoing commitment to a wholly corrupt and rigged model of globalisation is a further recipe for plunder, corruption and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. Whether it involves Monsanto, Cargill or the type of corporate power grab of African agriculture that Bill Gates is helping to spearhead, global capitalism (under the project of ‘globalisation’) will continue to ensure this happens while hiding behind platitudes about ‘free trade’ and ‘development’.

Brazil and Indonesia are subsidising private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Monsanto, Bayer and Cargill.

“The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture with agribusinesses like Monsanto, WalMart, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ITC in its Board made efforts to turn the direction of agricultural research and policy in such a manner as to cater their demands for profit maximisation. Companies like Monsanto during the Vietnam War produced tonnes and tonnes of “Agent Orange” unmindful of its consequences for Vietnamese people as it raked in super profits and that character remains.” Communist Party of India (Marxist)

These powerful corporations increasingly hold sway over a globalised system of food and agriculture from seed to plate. And with major mergers within the agribusiness sector in the pipeline, power will be further monopolised and the situation is likely to worsen. The overall narrative about farming has been shaped to benefit the interests of this handful of wealthy, politically influential corporations whereby commercial interest trumps any notion of the public good.

We require transparency, accountability and a system of decision making that does not take place within the overbearing shadow of commercial influence. However, in capitalism, the state’s primary role is to secure the interests of private capital. The institutions of globalised capitalism – from the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO right down to the compliant bureaucracies of national states or supranational unions – facilitate private wealth accumulation that results in the forms of structural inequalities and violence (unemployment, poverty, population displacement, bad food, poor health, environmental destruction, etc.) that have become ‘accepted’ as necessary (for ‘growth’) and taken for granted within mainstream media and political narratives.

When referring to Western countries, those narratives like to use the euphemism ‘austerity’ for deregulation, privatisation and gross inequalities and hardship, while hiding being the mantra ‘there is no alternative’. When referring to places like India or Africa, they use the euphemism ‘assisting development’ for corporate imperialism, while hiding behind the term ‘investing in’.

In the cynical world of ‘free’ market capitalism, an interlocking directorate of corporate interests have for a long time ensured that state institutions and international bodies are shaped and manipulated to facilitate the interests of private capital.

If the current myths about the necessity for perpetuating the stranglehold of capitalism go unchallenged and real alternatives are not offered or supported, we will see accelerated environmental destruction and human rights violations by powerful private interests and a dangerous march towards increasing militarism and possible nuclear conflict as a moribund capitalism approaches its ultimate crisis.

Criminal Media Messaging, Black Propaganda

By Mark Taliano, April 21, 2017

US-led NATO supports terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. Same story. Corporate cartoon news amounts to war propaganda.

The West supports terrorism. Period.

The terrorists are proxies for the West.

Terrorism also includes illegal sanctions, and illegal bombing, and other genocidal strategies.

Chlorine, Not Sarin, Was Used In The Khan Sheikhun Incident

By Moon of Alabama, April 21, 2017

The OPCW did not conclude that a chemical attack occurred in Khan Sheikhun. It suggested nothing about the incident itself. It only talked about bio-medical samples of several persons – nothing more, nothing less. It also did not give any hint of how much exposure the persons in question received. Was it a minimal traceable amount that had no effect on them or did they die from it? The OPCW does not say.

Syria: Media Cover Up of Crimes Committed by US Backed Al Qaeda “Rebels”

By Whitney Webb, April 20, 2017

The media has worked to flip the narrative to glorify the rebels and frame any atrocities committed by them as having been perpetrated by the Syrian government. The BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN are the most prominent examples.

Fake News and False Flags against Syria: Why the Assad Government Most Likely Did Not Commit the Gas Attacks in Khan Shaykhun

By Gregor Flock, April 21, 2017

Former British Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford likewise states that it is “highly unlikely” (0:10) that either Syria or Russia were behind the gas attacks, also since “we know for a fact that the Jihadis were storing chemical weapons in schools in Eastern Aleppo, because these were seen later by Western journalists” (0:40).