Global Research

Judge Françoise Tulkens is the chair of the Monsanto Tribunal, which opened in The Hague this weekend. Interviewed by journalist Rémi Barroux in Le Monde, Tulkens explains the legal context of the Tribunal and its potential consequences. English translation: GMWatch

The chair of the Monsanto Tribunal, Judge Françoise Tulkens, who heard witnesses in The Hague on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 October, hopes to contribute to the development of international law by the inclusion of new issues, in particular ecocide.

Tulkens was a judge for fourteen years at the European Court of Human Rights – she was even the Vice President – and was appointed in September 2012 to the Human Rights Advisory Panel of the United Nations in Kosovo.

What is the purpose of this Monsanto Tribunal that you have agreed to chair?

Françoise Tulkens: We will hear witnesses for two days, familiarise ourselves with the many items in the file, including scientific studies, and we five judges will deliberate amongst ourselves in order to issue an “advisory opinion”. Six questions have been put to us regarding rights that are recognized by international law, such as the right to food, the right to a better state of health, and the right to the freedom that is indispensable for scientific research.

These rights are notably enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Other international instruments also exist, such as the UN Principles and Guidelines on Business and Human Rights, as approved by the Council of Human Rights in a resolution of June 2011.

Does this mean that you have the legal tools to condemn Monsanto?

We will not pronounce judgment. We will give an advisory opinion. Specifically, we will check if Monsanto’s activities are in compliance with the laws as they exist in the UN legal instruments that I mentioned. We are therefore not a court that condemns a criminal nor one that judges a fault in civil law.

Monsanto, in an open letter, denounced the tribunal as a “masquerade” with a “pre-determined outcome”. What do you think?

I read this open letter and what it suggests is incorrect. Monsanto will not be condemned in advance, since it will not be condemned at all. This is not the place for that. There will not even be a moral condemnation, because a court does not deal in morality. It is an educational tribunal, which I hope will influence international human rights law and allow openings for victims.

I only regret the absence of Monsanto, even if its absence is both understandable and predictable. It is important to point out that Monsanto was invited several times to participate, and that all facilities were offered to allow it to argue its point of view.

But if Monsanto is not really being tried, what is the scope of this tribunal?

The Monsanto Tribunal is a way for civil society to take the initiative to give a voice to witnesses, to enable the public to understand the impacts of Monsanto’s activities, and to help advance international law by offering new ideas, such as the responsibilities of business regarding human rights, or new concepts. This is a difficult but essential education.

The Russell Tribunal [also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal], made in the context of the Vietnam War in 1966, was also a tribunal of opinion. It is important to refer to this history. Our opinion, which we will try to deliver before 10 December, International Human Rights Day, will be sent to Monsanto and the United Nations. From this legal opinion, other jurisdictions can be involved and other judges will step in. As for us, we have seen, heard, taken note, and deliberated. And without doubt, new questions, such as those concerning ecocide, could be taken into account by international law.

What do you mean by “ecocide”?

This offence still does not exist and in order for that to happen, it first has to be precisely defined. Genocide is a crime against humanity aimed at the partial or total destruction of a group of persons because of their national, ethnic, racial or religious characteristics. Ecocide would be a “genocide” committed against the environment, environmental damage that would alter in a serious and long-lasting way the ecosystems upon which human life depends. The International Criminal Court here in The Hague has just decided, on 15 September, to include concerns about the environment in its field of investigation, so that is evolving.

The issues of access to water and to a healthy diet are old. They are not new issues generated in the minds of angry activists. And these issues, such as the right to a healthy environment, are likely to become increasingly important with climate change. It is our duty to put the legal tools in place to deal with these problems. The Monsanto Tribunal is a step and a tool in this process. 

Europe is dependent on financial and energy resources of Moscow, according to a report by the Washington Center for strategic and international studies.

On October 13 in Washington, a study was published, “The Kremlin’s Playbook: Understanding the Russian Influence in Eastern and Central Europe”, which on the example of five countries – Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Serbia, explains the mechanisms of the workings of the Kremlin with the economies of European states.

The study notes that when the countries of Eastern and Central Europe joined NATO and the EU in 2004, the expectations of European and American politicians were aimed at the “continuation by regional states of positive democratic and economic transformation”. However, analysts believe that more than ten years later, “the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards, while its economic cooperation with Russia has expanded significantly”.

“Over the last 10 years the share of Russia in the global trading system increased by almost four times: from $210 billion in 2003 to $730 billion in 2014, and Russia’s trade relations with the European Union accounted for 44% of the total,” — said the preamble of the report.

According to analysts, the work of Russia in Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Serbia, is aimed at consolidating around itself the sympathetic politicians, dominance on energy markets and providing the most favorable economic partnerships. [How dare you Putin? – FR]

“In some countries, Russian influence has reached such proportions that it jeopardized their pro-Western orientation and Euro-Atlantic stability, as such,” reads the report.

According to the study, Latvia has a high dependence on the Russian economy (higher only in Bulgaria). “Latvia is 100% dependent on the energy sector of the Russian Federation, which, moreover, is the third largest market of the republic, and 11% of Latvian GDP comes from the transport sector, where the main flow of transit is provided by Russia”, — analysts say.

The report states that entrepreneurs are dependent on the Russian economy and the normal functioning of relations with Russia. Measures to prevent Russian influence proposed by the researchers, are analysis of financial flows coming from Russia and improvement of assistance programs to Eastern European governments. [More American/European tax-payer handouts! – FR]

“The United States can no longer be indifferent to these negative processes. All members of NATO and the European Union must collectively recognize that Russia’s influence is not only internal challenge to control, but a threat to national security,” – point US analysts.

The report was prepared by the Center for Strategic and international studies (CSIS) in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. CSIS was created in Washington in 1962 at the initiative of the director of the CIA with the aim of “finding ways to sustain American prominence and prosperity as a force for peace”. Today, CSIS conducts research on policy issues and strategic analysis of political and economic challenges, with a particular focus on issues concerning international relations, trade, technology, finance and energy.

Today, Belgium followed a ‘no’ vote by two of its regional Parliaments on the controversial EU-Canada trade deal CETA, temporarily blocking the first step towards the treaty’s ratification in a meeting of EU trade ministers. A close look at the CETA – and a recent declaration designed by Brussels and Ottawa to reassure critics and gain support for its ratification – shows that concerns over CETA are well-founded.

Behind the PR attempts by the Canadian Government and the European Commission to sell CETA as a progressive agreement, it remains what it always has been: an attack on democracy, workers, and the environment.

As the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada has entered the ratification process, the controversial deal has faced massive waves of protest. A record 3.5 million people across Europe signed a petition against CETA and its twin agreement TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). More than half a million took to the streets in opposition. And European and Canadian trade unions, as well as consumer, environmental and public health groups have called for the rejection of CETA.

The controversy has also reached governments and parliaments. More than 2,000 local and regional governments in 13 EU countries have declared themselves TTIP/CETA free zones, often in cross-party resolutions. National and regional parliaments, too, worry about CETA, for example in Belgium, France, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

Last week, two Belgian Parliaments denied their federal government the authorisation to sign CETA, mentioning a long list of concerns ranging from threats to farmers and banking regulation to public services (see here and here). This is why Belgium could not sign CETA in today’s meeting of EU trade ministers as had been planned. For now, this puts the symbolic CETA signing, which was planned for next week’s EU-Canada summit, in limbo.

Whitewashing CETA, smearing critics

Over the past weeks, to salvage CETA’s ratification process, the European Commission, the Canadian Government as well as some EU governments and MEPs had gone into a massive propaganda mode. They have framed CETA as “a very progressive trade agreement” (European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström) which will “shape globalisation” along the principles of “fair trade” and in the interest of workers (Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier). The deal’s critics have been stigmatised as “trade hooligans” (European Council President Donald Tusk) who are “fuelling concerns and fears, which have no bearing on the actual CETA text” (Conservative MEPs Daniel Caspary and Elmar Brok). Parts of the media have joined the CETA cheerleading, claiming that “much of the criticism, which might be justified for TTIP, does not apply to CETA” (German news site Spiegel Online).

Let us now have a look at both key passages of the joint declaration as well as the actual text of the CETA deal, so that you can see through the big swindle, which the CETA supporters are currently staging to win support for what is actually a major assault on democracy, workers and the environment.

Swindle #1: CETA protects workers’ rights

The European Commission praises CETA’s “strong rules on the protection of labour rights”.

But the actual labour protections in CETA are poor. Chapter 23 on trade and labour is full of good intentions, such as that “a Party shall not… fail to effectively enforce its labour law and standards to encourage trade or investment” (article 23.4.3). But there is no penalty if EU countries, Canada, or companies operating there violate a provision like this. A violation of CETA’s labour rights would only result in a non-binding process of discussions and recommendations.

European and Canadian trade unions have proposed a protocol – to make CETA’s labour rules effectively enforceable. The issue is important for them as they fear that CETA would put labour standards at risk (as employers can more easily shift capital to locations where standards are weak and laxly enforced).

Many CETA rules are actually detrimental to the interests of working people: CETA’s intellectual property provisions will drive up drug prices; the rules on public procurement could lead to legal challenges when public authorities link their buying practices to social criteria such as the minimum wage or compliance with collective agreements; the market access rules in CETA’s services chapter may impair efforts to establish adequate staffing levels in hospitals or nursing homes; CETA’s foreign investor privileges could lead to expensive lawsuits against states when they don’t interfere in long-lasting strikes. The list goes on and on (see Making Sense of CETA for an analysis of CETA’s different chapters).

Finally, CETA is likely to lead to significant job losses. According to a September 2016 study from Tufts University, 200,000 jobs would be lost in the EU and 30,000 in Canada. The researchers also predict a politically dangerous rise in inequality on both sides of the Atlantic as the gains from CETA would overwhelmingly flow to owners of capital. Both forecasts reflect the experience under previous trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA (see the assessmentof the US trade union confederation AFL-CIO).

So, rather than protecting workers as its cheerleaders claim, CETA promotes the wealth and power of a very few at the expense of workers. They get nothing but inconsequential feel-good rhetoric. The additional declaration does nothing to change that.

Swindle #2: CETA is a good deal for the environment

According to the European Commission, CETA contains “strong rules on the protection of… the environment”.

But the actual protections in the CETA text are weak. Like the chapter on labour, chapter 22 on sustainable development and chapter 23 on trade and environment contain sweet-sounding language on “trade supporting sustainable development”, “trade favouring environmental protection” and so on.

But like the labour chapter, CETA’s environmental provisions cannot be enforced through trade sanctions or financial penalties if they are violated. Victims of environmental abuse cannot bring a claim.

Also, CETA does not include provisions that would allow urgently needed environmental and climate policies to overrule, or otherwise be exempt from CETA rules that might endanger them.

There are many rules in CETA which will make it more difficult to fight climate change and protect the environment: CETA’s investor rights could trigger costly lawsuits from polluting companies when governments ban or regulate toxic dirty mines or want to phase-out fossil fuels; CETA’s liberalisations in the agricultural sector and the thin protections for high food production standards would expand an industrial model of farming that is already destroying the planet;  (See Making Sense of CETA for an analysis of the different CETA chapters.)

In short, the pro-environment rhetoric around CETA is pretty empty and meaningless. It is nothing but an attempt to greenwash a deal which poses real threats to the environment and strong action to save the planet from climate disaster.

Swindle #3: CETA’s investor rights do not endanger regulations to protect the environment, health and other public interests

According to the European Commission, CETA’s investment chapter “guarantees the right of EU governments to regulate in the interest of their citizens, while still encouraging foreign investors by protecting their investments”.

The critical point missing in this statement, as Canadian trade expert Scott Sinclair has explained at length, “is that while parties retain the right to regulate, they must do so in conformity with their CETA obligations and commitments”. And CETA’s chapter eight on investment contains the same wide-ranging ‘substantive’ rights for foreign investors as existing international treaties, which have been the legal basis for hundreds of investor lawsuits against states – including against regulations to protect health, the environment, and other public interests.

CETA’s investor rights could make politicians reluctant to enact desirable safeguards if those are opposed by big business. Examples of such regulatory chill include the above mentioned settlement between Germany and Vattenfall and the delayed implementation of anti-smoking rules in Canada and New Zealand, following lawsuit threats and actual claims by big tobacco.

So, rather than safeguarding the right to regulate as its proponents claim, CETA will force governments to pay when they regulate – whether it is to protect the environment, health or other public interests. And this threat alone is a sure-fire way to bully decision-makers, potentially curtailing desirable policymaking (particularly in combination with CETA’s domestic regulation and regulatory cooperation chapters, analysed in Making Sense of CETA).

Swindle #4: CETA protects public services like healthcare and water

In September, European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström assured the Austrian Parliament (and in nearly identical wording also the Belgian one): “What about public services – known here as “Daseinsvorsorge” – like healthcare? This agreement protects them. Unambiguously. Public authorities – local, regional and national – will continue to have full freedom to organise public services as they wish. There is no obligation on anyone to privatise anything. And if services have already been privatised they can be renationalised.”

The actual CETA text, however, is pretty dangerous for public services.

Probably the biggest threat to public services comes from the far-reaching foreign investor rights in CETA’s chapter eight.  This makes regulations in sensitive public service sectors such as education, water, health, social welfare, and pensions prone to all kinds of expensive investor claims.

Around the world, public service regulations have been targets of investor-state claims. When, in response to its 2001-2002 economic crisis, Argentina froze utility rates to secure people’s access to energy and water, it was hit by numerous lawsuits. Estonia is currently defending a €90 million claim over its refusal to increase water rates. (See Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.

So, when Commissioner Malmström claims that “if services have already been privatised they can be renationalised” under CETA, she misses the point. Because governments could end up paying billions in compensation to foreign investors in return. The decision would be taken by a panel of for profit arbitrators (rather than independent judges), would be based on CETA’s extreme investor rights (rather than a country’s constitution, which balances the rights of property holders) and could include compensation for loss of expected future profits (which would not be compensable under most constitutions). Facing such an incalculable risk, governments might not go ahead with their plans to take services back into public hands – even when past privatisations have been failures.

CETA severely limits governments’ ability to create, expand, restore, and regulate public services. This threatens people’s rights to access services like water, health care, and energy, as well as labour conditions in these sectors. Claiming that CETA protects public services without changing the deal’s provisions that work to the contrary is wishful thinking, at best.

Swindle #5: CETA establishes an independent court to settle investor-state disputes

The European Commission claims that CETA establishes an investment court system (transformed into a proper “investment court” by parts of the media), which is “independent” and will settle disputes between investors, Canada, the EU and its member states in an “impartial manner”.

CETA’s chapter 8, section F on the “resolution of investment disputes between investors and states” grants corporations the right to bypass national courts and directly file highly enforceable multi-billion euro compensation claims against states in international tribunals. But the tribunals are not judicially independent. Rather, they have a built-in, pro-investor bias.

Under CETA, investor-state lawsuits would be decided by a tribunal of three for-profit arbitrators with vested interests. Unlike judges, they would not have a fixed salary, but be paid per case US$3,000 per day. In a one-sided system where only the investors can sue, this creates a strong systemic incentive to side with them – because as long as the system pays out for investors, more claims and more money will be coming to the arbitrators.

So, while CETA proponents praise its “independent court”, what the agreement actually does is establish a dispute settlement process which is heavily slanted in favour of foreign investors – and has very little to do with a court.

Swindle #6: CETA will uphold standards to protect people and the environment

According to European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, CETA will “fully uphold Europe’s high standards”. On its website, the Commission even claims that “standards and regulations related to food safety, product safety, consumer protection, health, environment, social or labour standards etc. will remain untouched” (emphasis added).

But several chapters in CETA directly contradict those empty words designed to reassure.

Take electronic waste for instance. In 1998, a proposal from the European Commission backed by the European Parliament included plans to ban hazardous substances in electronic waste. Through a dialogue process bearing all the traits of regulatory cooperation under CETA, US officials and business lobbyists attacked the proposal, referring to its much vaunted negative impacts on transatlantic trade. In 2002, when the waste directive was adopted, the hazardous substances part had been significantly weakened. It took a court case by the Danish government and the European Parliament to finally take one substance which was to be banned in the original proposal (deca-BDE) off the EU market – ten years after it was first proposed. This is the power of regulatory cooperation. (For this and other examples from the EU-US context, see the report Dangerous Regulatory Duet and the analysis of CETA’s regulatory cooperation chapter in Making Sense of CETA.)

Ellen Gould from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pictured how CETA would “exert enormous pressures on governments to never take… important initiatives”. Referring to the 1997 French ban on hazardous asbestos, she writes: “If CETA had been in place, Canada and its asbestos industry would have had many powerful tools to keep the French ban from ever coming into being. The asbestos industry could have threatened a CETA investor-state suit demanding billions in compensation; the ban could have been opposed by companies using asbestos arguing it had not been established in advance of when they got their licenses;… through CETA’s regulatory co-operation provisions, Canada would have been able to attack the ban in closed door meetings even before French citizens were advised it was being considered. And finally, if these efforts had failed, as a CETA party Canada could have demanded delays in implementation of the ban, giving the asbestos lobby more time to fight it.”

So, rather than upholding social, environmental, or health standards, CETA poses a real risk of lowering them. It results in heavy additional burden on regulators and strengthens the role of business lobbyists in the development of regulations, potentially undermining not only the development of much needed regulations, but also our democracies.

A top draw for corporations

The European Commission and the Canadian Government are pitching CETA as “the most forward-looking free trade agreement that Canada or the EU have ever negotiated”. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has called it “our best and most progressive trade agreement”.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

CETA is a long list of what governments and parliaments are not allowed to do. For example, if they want to fight climate change. Or social inequality. Or regulate banks. Or reverse failed privatisations. Or tackle any other of the pressing problems of our times. In fact, CETA will worsen many of these problems. And CETA can force governments to pay when they choose to press ahead with pro-people and environmental policies for which they have been elected by their citizens.

Rather than the “best” trade agreement for the citizens of Canada and the EU, CETA clearly is a top draw for corporations on both sides of the Atlantic. With CETA, they get ample new ammunition to bully governments and local authorities over regulations which could hamper their profits.

By Corporate Europe Observatory. The above article is summarized version. Read the full article HERE

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led a team committed to delegitimizing the politics of the late Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution.

Es mucho el peso que acarrean sobre sus espaldas, en sufrimientos y abusos,  los pueblos aborígenes de toda América y los pueblos de África y de Asia. La pesadilla comenzó cuando una perspectiva de dominar el mundo bajo el ideario del cristianismo se hizo ideología dominante en Europa a comienzos del primer milenio de la nueva era. Este proyecto de dominación que se tomó casi 500 años en hacerse realidad tiene marca fundamental en 1492 porque comienza allí el genocidio y el terror contra los pueblos aborígenes de América, genocidio que aún no termina y que parece envenenar a la civilización occidental. Esta reflexión viene al caso por la reciente celebración del día de gracias, que así se le llama en Canadá a la celebración que junta a los amigos y a las familias alrededor del pavo tradicional el 12 de octubre cada año y que en España se celebra como el Día de la Hispanidad, que ya queda subido de tono llamarle como antes el Día de la Raza.Canadá, a la vez colonizado y colonizador, no es ajeno al genocidio de los pueblos aborígenes ni a la opresión de gentes de otros pueblos en su propio territorio y fuera de él.  En estas últimas décadas el gobierno federal canadiense ha tratado de pedir disculpas y pagar indemnizaciones por muchos de esos maltratos, no parece que esto alcance para deshacer el daño hecho en particular en el caso de la población aborigen, que en Canadá es de más 1,4 millones de personas (es decir el 4,3 por ciento la población del país) siempre de acuerdo a las definiciones de la constitución canadiense de Nativos o miembros de la Primera Nación, Mètis o descendientes mezclados de esta, y Inuit (Esquimales). Existen más de 615 comunidades de la Primera Nación, 53 asentamientos Mètis y 8 comunidades Inuit, que hablan 60 idiomas aborígenes de una familia de 11 lenguas y de más de 50 grupos culturales. El gobierno reconoce a todas las culturas aborígenes y que estos han ocupado ancestralmente las tierras hoy conocidas como Canadá y que lo han hecho de tiempos inmemorables, pero esto no impide que haya cientos de reclamos territoriales sin resolver, o mal resueltos, desde hace mucho tiempo y tampoco impide que a pesar de este reconocimiento legal estos pueblos originarios hayan vivido, incluso durante el auge en los años sesenta del Estado de Bienestar Social canadiense, una realidad muchas veces cruel y que esta realidad se continúe en nuestros días.

Los pueblos aborígenes son quienes más sufren la pobreza, el racismo y la discriminación en Canadá. Es tanto que incluso muchos inmigrantes se muestran racistas frente a los aborígenes. La policía, ambas las federales y las de cada ciudad muestran diferentes grados de racismo y el racismo también existe a nivel del poder judicial.  Los aborígenes en las reservas, que son el 44 por ciento del total, como los que viven en centros urbanos sufren de problemas de salud serios que van desde la diabetes, a la tuberculosis y la cirrosis, y de adicciones  al alcohol y otras drogas que afectan al 70 por ciento de ellos. La violencia familiar es una realidad que enfrentan las mujeres aborígenes adultas y las niñas; el 50 por ciento de esposas o convivientes con hijos sufren violencia familiar y muchos de los afectados son casos serios que terminan en homicidios y en suicidios. Los suicidios se han transformado en epidémicos entre los aborígenes. Los asesinatos a mujeres aborígenes también son epidémicos; entre 1980 y el año 2012 fueron asesinadas y/o desaparecidas 1.181 mujeres aborígenes en este país y se sospecha que en la mayoría de estos casos sufrieron violencia a manos de esposos o convivientes. En términos de educación la población aborigen canadiense también es afectada, sabemos que el 20 por ciento de todos los aborígenes canadienses no completa su educación secundaria. Sabemos también que son más afectados por el desempleo, en parte porque viven en zonas de mayor tasa de desempleo, por lo que sufren índices de más del 20 por ciento de desempleo. Los aborígenes, hombres y mujeres, están sobre representados en cárceles y prisiones de Canadá; hay más de 5000 aborígenes presos y presas, constituyendo el 26 por ciento de todos los presos y presas canadienses. Las mujeres aborígenes representan el 36 por ciento de las presas del país, mientras que los hombres aborígenes representan el 24 por ciento de los presos del país. Hace tres décadas el numero era el 10 por ciento, el incremento se debe según la justicia canadiense al aumento del consumo de alcohol y drogas.  En las reservas aborígenes el 20 por ciento de las casas están sobre pobladas y la mayoría de ellas requieren reparaciones, se necesitan más de 5000 viviendas nuevas para acomodar las necesidades de habitación de la población aborigen en las reservas.

El gobierno federal de Canadá reconoció hace unas semanas atrás los daños y abusos que le causara hace ya 60 años a una comunidad de Sayisi Dene, un grupo  de las Primeras Naciones, y les pidió disculpas oficialmente. Esta comunidad Sayisi Dene vivía desde tiempos ancestrales en su lugar llamado Little Duck Lake al norte de la provincia de Manitoba; en 1956 y por orden del gobierno canadiense los Sayisi Dene fueron sacados de su lugar en donde vivían con suficientes alimentos, agua y familiaridad, y fueron reubicados en la bahía de Churchill lugar para ellos no familiar y donde sufrieron hambre, falta de vivienda y apoyo, racismo, violencia y desolación. La excusa del gobierno de entonces era que los Sayisi Dene eran responsables del declive de la población del reno o caribú, argumento que más tarde se probara totalmente falso. En este traslado, que fue forzoso ya que no se les consultó a ellos en nada antes de tomar la decisión, fue causa de la muerte de un tercio de la población Sayisi Dene.  El gobierno federal de entonces no cumplió las promesas que les hizo a los Sayisi Dene de ayudarlos en forma suficiente para facilitar el traslado impuesto, el apoyo que les dio fue tan mínimo e insuficiente que se repitió el genocidio histórico que ha ilustrado a la colonización. En todos los medios de comunicación canadienses la noticia de la disculpa oficial del gobierno federal de Canadá y su indemnización a los Sayisi Dene por un monto de 33,6 millones de dólares canadienses fue notable, indemnización que los Sayisi Dene pueden utilizar en desarrollo económico de su comunidad, que desde 1973 han regresado a su lugar de origen en Little Duck Lake, ilustra una reacción clásica en este país: algunos canadienses no aborígenes no están de acuerdo en que se le paguen indemnizaciones a los aborígenes, otros lo ven como algo necesario para curar el pasado de opresión de la sociedad blanca sobre los grupos originarios de este país, y los menos están  de acuerdo en la necesidad de tomar responsabilidad por los abusos y crímenes del pasado pero entienden que se requieren cambios más radicales que ayuden a generar una sociedad libre de opresión, racismo, discriminación,  explotación o tendremos que pasar toda la vida disculpándonos de los atropellos que continuamos generando.

En septiembre del 2007, el gobierno de Canadá aceptó su responsabilidad y pidió disculpas, pagó indemnización a los niños y niñas aborígenes por la imposición vergonzosa, el abuso y el crimen que sufrieron en las Escuelas Residenciales Indias (internados) desde 1840 que, aunque administradas por las iglesias Anglicana, Prebisteriana, Baustista, Católica y la Iglesia Unida de Canadá, que fueron contratadas por el gobierno federal de entonces para reeducar a niños y niñas aborígenes sacados de sus comunidades a la fuerza para que atendieran estas escuelas donde se les prohibía el uso de su lengua materna (nativa) y sus costumbres culturales, se los separaba de sus familias y se los sometía a un genocidio cultural y a abuso emocional, y muchas veces físico y sexual, e incluso a asaltos que se transformaron en homicidios. Estos establecimientos llegaron a ser 80 en número para 1931, y por ellos pasaron más de 150.000 niños y niñas. Fueron finalmente clausurados en 1996 pero dejaron generaciones de aborígenes traumatizados y de familias aborígenes destruidas; muchos de estos niños y niñas fueron dañados para el resto de sus vidas.  El Papa Benedicto XVl se disculpó en el 2009 por el daño que su Iglesia Católica  causara a estos menores. En realidad los abusos han sido tan ofensivos y dolorosos que las disculpas y las indemnizaciones son solamente un primer paso en lidiar con ellos, no como muchos canadienses quieren creer una solución final y definitiva.  En realidad se requiere un cambio mucho más fundamental de actitud en occidente. Se trata de respetar a otros seres humanos con diferentes perspectivas,  conductas y creencias que las judeo-cristianas (que occidente favorece); de respetarlos también en su visibilidad cuando eligen vivir con perspectivas diferentes a la judeo-cristiana. La actitud de respeto tiene que incluir además varios ejes, lo que se entiende por cultura, lo que se entiende por estatus socio económico, lo que se entiende por sexualidad, lo que se entiende por género, todos los ejes en que los seres humanos explicitamos diversidad.

El sujeto colonizador ha también cambiado, y se sigue generando atropello y opresión no solamente a los pueblos aborígenes sino que a todos los que sufren explotación  y se les trata  con desprecio.  Desde hace 30 años ha emergido en Canadá un nuevo sujeto colonizador que son las compañías mineras canadienses; estas elevadas a casi santidad y alabadas por los medios de prensa en Canadá como “creadores” de oportunidades y riquezas. Los nuevos conquistadores son simplemente explotadores de recursos mineros en, principalmente, países del Tercer Mundo, muchos con altos índices de pobreza y de poblaciones aborígenes y campesinas dominadas por oligarquías nacionales focalizadas en su propio beneficio y que en nada respetan ni el bienestar de sus compatriotas ni la defensa del patrimonio nacional. Estas oligarquías simplemente favorecen la explotación que llevan a cabo estas corporaciones, las dejan libre de hacer lo que quieran con el lugar explotado y su gente y las eximen de toda responsabilidad por el daño que hacen. Canadá se ha convertido en el más importante centro de corporaciones mineras, el 75 por ciento de todas las compañías mineras del mundo tiene su base en Canadá; se trata de más de 1200 corporaciones que operan en 100 países, de estas 1200 solamente 60 tienen categoría de grandes, la mayoría explotan el mineral del oro, luego el cobre y el níquel. Los valores de estas compañías suman más 130.000 millones de dólares, internacionalmente tienen una propiedad del 90 por ciento de las minas explotadas, los principales países donde operan son México, Chile y Estados Unidos.

Las corporaciones colonizadoras mineras canadienses disfrutan no sólo de un amplio renombre en la sociedad canadiense, que algunos con absurdo patriotismo las entienden como muy valerosas, sino que también cuentan con apoyo tecnológico, excepciones de impuestos y regalías de parte del gobierno federal de Canadá y de los gobiernos provinciales canadiense. La mayoría de los gastos de relaciones públicas, la propaganda que las corporaciones hacen, las hacen a través de agencias estatales como CIDA y CIIEID y de Organizaciones No Gubernamentales, que contribuyen creando programas “sociales” y “educacionales” de corta duración y focalizados a mejorar la imagen de estas corporaciones en el Tercer Mundo donde operan, que de invasoras, depredadoras y usurpadoras pasan a verse como vehículos de progreso y creadoras de trabajo.  A pesar de la efectiva estrategia usada, han existido focos de resistencia al despojo, la explotación y la contaminación que estas empresas generan en varios países. Por ejemplo, en Guatemala en la mina de Marlín, donde hubo implicaciones de homicidios contra activistas dentro de territorios aborígenes, como también en Honduras, en el Valle de Siria, donde se han violado los derechos humanos y hay continuas amenazas de asesinatos contra activistas en defensa de la tierra.  En África los crímenes de las compañías mineras canadiense no ha sido poca cosa, por ejemplo una compañía canadiense que opera en Eritrea ha sido demandada en la corte suprema de la provincia de British Columbia (Canadá) por someter a tres personas a la esclavitud. En otra situación en R.D. del Congo, en la localidad de Kilwa un puerto usado por una compañía minera canadiense, el ejército congoleño en el 2004 fue llamado a contener una pequeña protesta en contra de la minera y esto resultó en una masacre, donde se empleó la ejecución, la tortura, numerosas violaciones y saqueos contra los habitantes de este pueblo, tanto que las Naciones Unidas concluyeron que el 70 por ciento de los habitantes del lugar fueron asesinados, y la compañía tuvo que reconocer haberle brindado apoyo logístico al ejército congoleño (con vehículos y aviones de transporte de su propiedad) para que este realizara la masacre, todo documentado por el CCIJ (Canadian Centre for International Justice).

Incluso en territorio canadiense, se hace evidente el colonialismo de las compañías mineras y de las compañías de la industria del petróleo y del gas, que violan territorios aborígenes y los tratan de comprar para realizar sus proyectos, lo que se ha convertido en una pesadilla para los pueblos aborígenes que enfrentan continuo hostigamiento de corporaciones que cuentan con el apoyo de las autoridades administrativas y políticas del país. Y a pesar de que aborígenes y otros activistas que solidarizan con ellos  han sufrido represión y cárcel, la lucha continúa. En realidad estas comunidades en lucha en Canadá están no sólo protegiendo sus tierras sino la salud del medio ambiente, lo que nos afecta a todos.  En Canadá las corporaciones también actúan de mala fe y gestionan en contra de los mismos trabajadores que hacen posible la explotación y producción de minerales –ver por ejemplo el artículo titulado “Canada´s Mining Industry and Popular Resistance” del Socialist Project  publicado por Global Research que muestra varios videos ilustrando  esta situación.

Los primeros conquistadores en América tenían que pagar tributos, o parte de lo que saqueaban, a la Corona pero los conquistadores de hoy, por ejemplo las mineras canadienses, se lo llevan todo, no sólo no contribuyen nada al estado ni a la sociedad canadiense sino que por el contrario estas las subvencionan, o sea que nos quitan. Han pasado cientos de años en que los agresores y ricos occidentales  se han beneficiados de las conquistas, aunque estas han implicado genocidio, opresión y explotación contra pueblos aborígenes u originarios y contra trabajadores. Pero, en el transcurso de todo este tiempo la mentalidad de los conquistadores convertidos en corporaciones no ha cambiado, su desprecio por la vida y el medio ambiente es el mismo.  Durante un período del siglo 20, los movimientos  sindicales, políticos y revolucionarios pusieron en alerta a los conquistadores del mundo de que no podían siempre imponerse por la fuerza. En el siglo 21, sin embargo, los conquistadores se sienten nuevamente libres de ejercer su oficio y de hacerlo sin que nadie los responsabilice, o los haga pagar, por sus abusos. Se demuestra claramente que el avance civilizatorio no aplica a ellos.

 Mario R. Fernández

Syria’s First Lady, Asma al-Assad delivers her first public interview with foreign media.

We bring to the attention of Global Research readers her interview with Russia’s Channel 24 TV.

It is important that Americans across the land take cognizance of the voice of Syria’s First Lady, acknowledge her humanitarian mandate and commitment outside the realm of mainstream media propaganda. 

While Obama and the US media have persistently described the war in Syria as the result of sectarian conflicts opposing the Allawite minority and the Sunni majority, they fail to acknowledge that the First Lady Asma Al Assad is Sunni.

The war on Syria is the result of US-NATO aggression and support of terrorist organizations.

With the ongoing U.S. presidential election campaign, an increasingly large number of Americans consider that what is required is “Regime Change” in the USA, rather than in Syria. (M.Ch. GR Editor) 

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The Iraqi army started a large operation to liberate Mosul from Islamic State jihadists. But the forces, in total some 40,000, are still several dozen kilometers away from the city limits. They will have to capture several towns and villages and pass many IED obstacles before coming near to the center and house to house fighting. It might take many month to eliminated the last stay-behind ISIS cells in Mosul.

About one million civilians live in Mosul. Many, many more than in east-Aleppo. Many of them were sympathetic with the new overlords when ISIS stormed in two years ago. French, American, Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish artillery are pounding them now. Airstrikes attack even the smallest fighting position. When the city will be conquered it will likely be destroyed. The imminent fight over Mosul might be the reason why John Kerry dialed down his hypocritical howling over east-Aleppo in Syria which is under attack from Syrian and Russian forces.

The attack on Mosul proceeds on three axes. From the north Kurdish Peshmerga under U.S. special force advisors lead the fighting. Iraqi forces attack from the east and south. The way to the west, towards Syria, is open. The intend of the U.S. is to let ISIS fighters, several thousand of them, flee to Deir Ezzor and Raqqa in Syria. They are needed there to further destroy the Syrian state.

We pointed out here that this move will create the “Salafist principality” the U.S. and its allies have striven to install in east-Syria since 2012. The “mistake” of the U.S. bombing of Syrian army positions in Deir Ezzor was in support of that plan. Other commentators finally catch up with that conclusion.

The Turks are openly talking about such an escape plan for ISIS in Mosul. The Turkish news agency Anadolu published this “sensitive” operations plan. Point 4 says:

An escape corridor into Syria will be left for Daesh so they can vacate Mosul

Two points in the Turkish plan will not come true.

• The Iraqi government has ordered that no Turkish troops take part in the Mosul operation and will designate them as enemies should they try.
• The Sunni “Nineveh Guard”, trained by Turkey, paid by the Saudis and led by the former Anbar governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, will also be excluded.

It was the Saudi proxy al-Nujaifi who practically handed Anbar over to ISIS by ordering his troops to flee when ISIS attacked. He and his Saudi and Turkish sponsors want to create an independent Sunni statelet in west Iraq just like the Kurds created their own entity within north Iraq.

The U.S. hopes that the influx of ISIS fighters into Syria will keep the Russians and Iranians trapped in the “quagmire” Obama prescribed and finally destroy the Syrian state. It seems to have mostly given up on other plans. The U.S. military now acknowledges that fighting the Russian air defense in Syria would be a real challenge:

“It’s not like we’ve had any shoot at an F-35,” the official said of the next-generation U.S. fighter jet. “We’re not sure if any of our aircraft can defeat the S-300.”

There is a “no-fly zone” over west-Syria and it is the Russians who control it. All U.S. and Turkish talk about such a zone is moot. The Obama administration has for now also given up on other plans. The recent National Security Council meeting deferred on further decisions:

Consideration of other alternatives, including the shipment of arms to U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in Syria, and an increase in the quantity and quality of weapons supplied to opposition fighters in Aleppo and elsewhere, were deferred until later, officials said. U.S. military action to stop Syrian and Russian bombing of civilians was even further down the list of possibilities.

The only U.S. “hope” for its Syria plans is now the facilitation of another ISIS influx. That and the CIA coordinated actions of its allies. The Saudis Foreign Minister announced that his country will increase weapons flow to its al-Qaeda proxies in Syria. The “rebels” are still receiving TOW anti-tank missiles and other heavy weapons.

Turkish proxy forces, some Syrians, some “Turkmen” from Chechnya and elsewhere, have taken Dabiq from ISIS. The village is said to become a focal point of a future apocalyptic Christian-Muslim battle. A lot of “western” commentators pointed to that as a reason why ISIS would fight for it. But that battle is only predicted for the period after the return of the Mahdi which has not been announced. The current ideological value of Dabiq is therefore low and, like in Jarablus, ISIS cooperated well and moved out before the Turkish proxies moved in.

The Russians had allowed Turkey to enter Syria only within a limit of some 15 kilometers south of the Turkish border. Heavy artillery would have to stay on the Turkish side. The sole original purpose of the Turkish invasion was to prevent a Kurdish corridor from the eastern Kurdish areas in Syria to Afrin in the west. Such a corridor would have limited ISIS access to Turkey.

The Kurdish corridor has been prevented and ISIS access to Turkish controlled areas and Turkey itself is as open as ever. The Turkish military sees this as sufficient for its aims:

Taking control of Dabiq had eliminated the threat to Turkey from rockets fired by the jihadists, the Turkish Armed Forces said in a written statement.

The Turkish military wants to halt the operation. But Erdogan and his proxies forces want to go further south and west to attack the Syrian army encirclement of east-Aleppo:

President Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Sunday Dabiq’s liberation was a “strategic and symbolic victory” against Islamic State.He told Reuters it was important strategically that the Turkey-backed forces continue their advance toward the Islamic State stronghold of al-Bab.

To move to al-Bab Turkish artillery, with its units relying on conscripts, would have to move south of the Turkish-Syrian border. Any attack on them by the Syrian or Russian forces would thus become legal. Kurdish guerilla would be a constant threat. This explains the new split between the Turkish military and political forces. It will be interesting to watch how that dispute develops.

For Thursday the Russian command announced a unilateral temporary ceasefire in east-Aleppo to let the Jihadis move out. British and other special forces, said to be embedded with al-Qaeda, will be happy for the chance to leave.

In Iraq some Shia militia are moving towards Tal Afar to cut of the ISIS path to the west. Russia promised to take political and military measures should it detect an ISIS move. In east-Syria the Russian and Syrian air-forces, Hizbullah and more Shia militia from Iraq are now preparing surprises for the expected ISIS influx from Mosul. How much can they risk when the U.S. provides further air-support for the ISIS move?

The cutting off of Internet access for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is one more ugly episode in a US presidential election campaign that has plumbed the depths of political degradation.

Effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over four years, Assange now is faced with a further limitation on his contact with the outside world.

On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry of Ecuador confirmed WikiLeaks’ charge that Ecuador itself had ordered the severing of Assange’s Internet connection under pressure from the US government. In a statement, the ministry said that WikiLeaks had “published a wealth of documents impacting on the US election campaign,” adding that the government of Ecuador “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” and “does not interfere in external electoral processes.” On that grounds, the statement claimed, the Ecuadorian government decided to “restrict access” to the communications network at its London embassy.

This statement from the bourgeois government of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is a study in hypocrisy and cowardice. By abetting the US government’s suppression of WikiLeaks, Quito has intervened in the US elections on the side of the ruling establishment and against the rights of the American people. If Correa expects that his professed sensitivity toward the “principle of non-intervention” will be reciprocated, he should recall the fate of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled in a coup orchestrated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009.

WikiLeaks cited reports that Secretary of State John Kerry had demanded that the government of Ecuador carry out the action “on the sidelines of the negotiations” surrounding the abortive Colombian peace accord last month in Bogota. The US government intervened to prevent any further exposures that could damage the campaign of Clinton, who has emerged as the clear favorite of the US military and intelligence complex as well as the Wall Street banks.

Whether the State Department was the only entity placing pressure on Ecuador on behalf of the Clinton campaign, or whether Wall Street also intervened directly, is unclear. The timing of the Internet cutoff, in the immediate aftermath of the release of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches, may be more than coincidental.

In the spring of 2014, the government of Ecuador agreed to transfer more than half of its gold reserves to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for three years, in an attempt to raise cash to cover a growing deficit brought on by the collapse in oil prices. It reportedly sent 466,000 ounces of gold to Goldman Sachs, worth about $580 million at the time, in return for “high security” financial instruments and an anticipated profit on its investment. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe that such a relationship would give Goldman Sachs considerable leverage in relation to the Ecuadorian government.

In any case, it is evident that the US ruling establishment is growing increasingly desperate to stanch the flow of previously secret emails and documents that are exposing the real character not only of Clinton, but of capitalist politics as a whole. While WikiLeaks has released over 17,000 emails from the account of Clinton campaign manager and top establishment Democrat John Podesta, it is believed that there are more than 33,000 still to come.

The transcripts of Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other top banks and employers’ groups, for which she was paid on average $200,000 per appearance, are the most incriminating. They expose the workings of the oligarchy that rules America and the thinking and actions of a politician prepared to do anything to advance the interests of this ruling stratum, while simultaneously accruing ever greater riches and power for herself.

While on the campaign trail, Clinton has postured as a “progressive,” determined to hold Wall Street’s feet to the fire. But in her speeches to Goldman Sachs, she made clear her unconditional defense of the banks and financial houses. Under conditions of popular outrage against the bankers and their role in dragging millions into crisis in the financial meltdown of 2008, Clinton gave speeches praising the Wall Street financiers and insisting that they were best equipped to regulate themselves. She apologized to them for supporting the toothless Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, saying that it had to be enacted for “political reasons.”

In front of her Wall Street audiences, Clinton made clear she had no inhibitions about ordering mass slaughter abroad. While telling her public audiences that she supports a “no-fly zone” in Syria as a humanitarian measure to save lives, she confidentially acknowledged to her Goldman Sachs audience that such an action is “going to kill a lot of Syrians” and become “an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.” In the same speech she declared her willingness to bomb Iran.

The emails have laid bare the nexus of corrupt connections between the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, her various campaigns and her network of financial and corporate donors, which together constitute a quasi-criminal influence-peddling enterprise that could best be described as “Clinton, Inc.”

The revelations contained in the WikiLeaks material have been ignored or downplayed by the corporate media, which instead has focused unrelentingly on the charges of sexual misconduct leveled against Clinton’s Republican rival, Donald Trump.

The Clinton camp itself has sought to deflect any questions regarding what the candidate said in her speeches or the corrupt operations of her campaign by claiming, with no evidence whatsoever, that the material released by WikiLeaks had been hacked by the Russian government and therefore cannot be trusted.

This line of argumentation serves not only to divert attention from the WikiLeaks material, but also to further the Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyite claims of Kremlin intervention on behalf of Trump and advance a propaganda campaign aimed at preparing popular opinion for a direct military confrontation with Russia.

There is an air of desperation in the attempt to quash the WikiLeaks material. CNN news anchor Chris Cuomo, an open supporter of Clinton, went so far as to lie to his audience, claiming it was illegal for them to access the emails and insisting they could obtain any information on them only through the filter of the corporate media.

Well before the release of documents related to the Democratic Party, the determination of ruling circles to suppress WikiLeaks had found repeated and violent expression. State Department officials have come forward with a report that in 2010, in the midst of WikiLeaks’ mass release of State Department cables exposing US imperialist operations around the world, Clinton, then secretary of state, asked subordinates, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” She recently said she could not remember the remark, but if she made it, it was a joke.

During the same period, however, Clinton supporter and longtime Democratic campaign operative Bob Beckel declared in a television interview in relation to Assange: “A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States… there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

To this point, the American ruling class has limited itself to judicial frame-ups and character assassination, counting on the help of its servants within both the media and the pseudo-left, large sections of which have either joined the witch-hunt against Assange or downplayed his victimization.

The principal vehicle for this campaign of persecution had been fabricated allegations of sexual misconduct pursued by Swedish authorities acting in league with the US and British governments. Earlier this year, the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued findings that Assange had been “deprived of his liberty in an arbitrary manner,” meaning the body had reached the conclusion that the Swedish case constituted a politically motivated frame-up.

In the midst of the current attempt to silence Assange, an even more bizarre and filthy frame-up has been concocted, attempting to smear the WikiLeaks founder with charges of taking Russian money as well as pedophilia.

At the center of these allegations is a little known online dating service, Toddandclare.com, which first attempted to lure Assange into a supposed deal to film an ad for the site, for which he supposedly would be paid $1 million, to be provided by the Russian government. When WikiLeaks rejected this preposterous provocation, the same site claimed that Assange had been charged with inappropriate contact through the site with an eight-year-old Canadian child visiting the Bahamas. This accusation was then invoked in an attempt to pressure the UN to drop its demand for an end to the persecution of Assange.

Even a cursory investigation makes clear that these allegations constitute a grotesque fabrication. Bahamian police have stated that there are no charges or any case whatsoever against Assange. The dating service has no business address, working phone number or corporate presence anywhere in the US, having all the earmarks of a dummy company created by US intelligence for the purpose of hounding Assange.

The use of such tactics is a measure of how terrified the US ruling class has become in the face of growing mass hostility to both major political parties and their two abhorrent candidates. Their fear is that the relentless exposure of the inner workings of a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich is robbing the existing political setup of what little legitimacy it had left within the population, and creating the conditions for a political radicalization within the working class and social upheavals, whoever is elected on November 8.

When the United States announced that it would be abandoning “peace talks” with Russia regarding the ongoing conflict in Syria, many had already dismissed them as disingenuous.

The Washington Post in an article titled, “U.S. abandons efforts to work with Russia on Syria,” would claim:

U.S.-Russia relations fell to a new post-Cold War low Monday as the Obama administration abandoned efforts to cooperate with Russia on ending the Syrian civil war and forming a common front against terrorists there, and Moscow suspended a landmark nuclear agreement.

The Washington Post would also admit however, in regards to Russian allegations that the US categorically failed to separate militants it has been backing in the 5 year long conflict and universally-designated foreign terrorist organisations, that:

Russia’s version of the sequence of events mandated by the deal is “explicitly not true,” a senior administration official said. “Separation was not step one,” but was supposed to occur after seven days without major violence. The Russians, the official said, have “constantly tried to move the goal posts.” 

This admission made by US policymakers, politicians and the Western media all but admits that the US has never prioritised confronting terrorism in Syria and has been using the presence of terrorist organisations merely as a pretext for more direct Western military intervention. In fact, by acknowledging that Western-backed militant groups are indistinguishable and inseparable from designated terrorist organisations including Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, Jabhat Al-Nusra, the US is all but admitting it is intentionally arming and equipping the terrorists themselves.

This explains the apparently inexhaustible resources terrorist organisations like Al-Nusra possess and why they have risen to prominence above so-called “moderate rebels” the US and its allies have repeatedly claimed they were funding hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the conflict.

It appears that the answer to the question as to how Al-Nusra could rise to prominence in Syria despite “moderates” receiving hundreds of billions in aid from the US and its allies is that there were never any moderates to begin with, and that the US and its allies were arming and funding terrorist organisations, including Al-Nusra, since the conflict began.

It also appears to be no coincidence that this scenario now openly unfolding in Syria fulfils warnings published by Western journalists as early as 2007 (Seymour Hersh, The Redirection) in which it was revealed that the US was already at that time providing material support to extremist organisations“sympathetic to Al Qaeda” toward the end goal of overthrowing the governments of both Iran and Syria.

While the US now claims Russia has sabotaged US efforts to bring an end to hostilities in Syria, Washington is also illogically attempting to argue that the failure of its feigned “peace talks” has also somehow prevented the US from targeting terrorists organisations in Syria, the alleged pretext of America’s presence in Syria to begin with.

Despite strained relations with Russia, the US is still cooperating with Moscow regarding the use of Syrian airspace to avoid unintentional confrontations. While the cessation of hostilities may have collapsed, is there really any excuse as to why separating designated terrorist organisations from militant groups the US and its allies are providing billions in weapons and equipment to is still not an absolute and urgent priority?

The answer is, no — there is no excuse. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, it is simply an excuse for the US to continue funnelling men and materiel into Syria Washington knows with absolute certainty will end up in the ranks of Al Qaeda, whom the US admittedly intended to use as early as 2007 to overthrow the Syrian government with.

What Washington Really Wants in Syria 

Beginning in 2001, the United States has systematically destroyed the nations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, while either directly or indirectly laying waste to the nations of Sudan and Somalia. The nation of Iran was also subjected to multiple attempted provocations and US-driven subversion since 2001.

While the United States has created narratives for the public to serve as apparently “unique” and independent justifications for each and every one of these conflicts, often predicated on averting a “humanitarian disaster” or pursuing “terrorists” and even preventing “weapons of mass destruction” from being used against the West and its allies, America’s serial blitzkrieg across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are part of a singular, admitted agenda.

US Army General Wesley Clark, in a 2007 Flora TV talk titled, “A Time to Lead,” would reveal this singular agenda by relating a conversation he had as far back as 1991 with then US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, by stating (our emphasis):

I said Mr. Secretary you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm. And he said, well yeah, he said but but not really, he said because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and we didn’t. And this was just after the Shia uprising in March of 91′ which we had provoked and then we kept our troops on the side lines and didn’t intervene. And he said, but one thing we did learn, he said, we learned that we can use our military in the region in the Middle East and the Soviets wont stop us. He said, and we have got about five or ten years to clean up those all Soviet client regimes; Syria, Iran, Iraq, – before the next great super power comes on to challenge us. 

And indeed, even from 1991 onward, the goal of US intervention across the planet has been to establish deeply-entrenched global hegemony before another rising world power could balance American geopolitical domination.

Fast forward to today, with the US on the brink of war with Russia in Syria, and with China in the South China Sea, the United States has run out of time and finds the leading edge of its hegemonic ambitions chaffing against a reemerging Russia and a rising China.

So while Washington has concocted an array of excuses as to why it is involved in Syria’s conflict, running the full gambit from  fearing “weapons of mass destruction” to fighting terrorists to addressing humanitarian concerns, the reality of America’s involvement in Syria boils down to the pursuit of the latest and most desperate leg of its rush to dominance before emerging world powers reintroduced balance and limits to Western hegemony.

It is therefore incumbent upon the world to reject Washington’s various excuses for intervening in Syria, expose the truth driving its involvement in (and responsibility for) the conflict, confront Washington regarding its state sponsorship of terrorist organisations it itself has designated as such and bring the Syrian conflict as well as America’s latest “growth spurt” to an abrupt end.

Global peace and stability depends on bringing this decades-long global power-grab to an end, in an atmosphere of conflict and confrontation many fear may even lead to a direct confrontation between nuclear-armed states.

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

This edition of The Global Research News Hour was originally broadcast in December 2013:

I voted against CAFTA, never supported NAFTA, and will not support NAFTA-style trade agreements in the future. NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed and we must now amend the agreement to fix them. While NAFTA gave broad rights to investors, it paid only lip service to the rights of labor and the importance of environmental protection.[1]  Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama, February 28, 2008

To boost American exports, support American jobs, and level the playing field in the growing markets of Asia, we intend to complete negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership.  And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union – because trade that is free and fair across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.[2]  President Barack Obama, February 12, 2013

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Webster’s dictionary defines the term ‘Trojan Horse’ as follows:

“…someone or something intended to defeat or subvert from within usually by deceptive means.”[3]

The term has been applied by critics to any number of so-called free trade deals that Canada, the United States and other countries around the world are embracing.

In Canada, the Harper government recently extolled the virtues of opening up new markets for Canadian goods, services and investment in the European Union and Asia as critical to the nation’s prosperity. Hence, determined efforts to secure free trade deals with these regions through the Canadian – European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) respectively are hailed by the government and pundits alike as centrepieces of the Harper government’s agenda going into 2014.

Interesting that the details of these agreements are largely hidden from public scrutiny.

The TPP in particular, as noted by Global Research author Kevin Zeese, has been drafted with an unprecedented degree of secrecy.

The campaign ‘FLUSHTHETPP.org‘ claims that the gift horse that is increased trade and investment, conceals a corporate assault on food safety, the environment, worker rights, access to health care, and basically every facet of our lives as free citizens.

A recent release of the Intellectual Property Rights Chapter from Wikileaks confirmed the fears of trade liberalization critics that the reach of patents, copyrights, and trade secrets will be extended at the expense of consumer rights and safeguards.[4]

To quote Wikileaks editor in Chief Julian Assange:

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”[5]

The TPP secured third place among Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2012-2013. The Sonoma State University media research program describes the TPP as “an enforceable transfer of sovereignty from nations and their people to foreign corporations.”

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a congressional fellow with Physicians for a National Health Program and a pediatrician based in Baltimore, Maryland. She has written extensively on the topic of the TPP, and has championed efforts to stop it in its tracks. Dr. Flowers joins the Global Research News Hour in the fist half of the programme to describe the onerous aspects of this deal, update us on the recent twelve nation talks in Singapore, America’s ‘Fast-Track’ legislation, and the realistic prospects of grassroots people to bring an end to this deal.

CETA, likewise is cloaked in secrecy. Critics like Stuart Trew of the Council of Canadians argue the deal extends drug patents and makes community economic development initiatives such as ‘buy local’ policies subject to legal challenges under new procurement rules. Trew will fill out the second half of the programme with a comprehensive look at what we know about the CETA, and how that deal can be stopped.

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The Global Research News Hour, hosted by Michael Welch, airs on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg Fridays at 1pm CDT. The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 5-6pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US, and is available for download on the Global Research website.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

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

Notes

1) Ohio Conference on Fair Trade, February 28, 2008, http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/OCFT_-PresPrimaryTradeQuestionnaire_Obama_022008.pdf
2) Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, Tuesday, February 12, 2013; Washington, DC; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/president-barack-obamas-state-union-address
3) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trojan%20horse
4) Peter Sayer, Nov.14, 2013, “Leaked treaty draft shows US at loggerheads with Pacific states on copyright”; http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/internet/3489259/leaked-treaty-draft-shows-us-at-loggerheads-with-pacific-states-on-copyright/#ixzz2niYnuQil
5) ibid
6)http://www.projectcensored.org/3-trans-pacific-partnership-threatens-regime-corporate-global-governance/

Washington’s Global Economic Wars

By Prof. James Petras, October 19 2016

During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies. US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. More recently Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals as well as against weaker countries.  The US no longer confines its aggressive impulses to peripheral economic countries in the Middle East, Latin America and Southern Asia:  It has declared trade wars against world powers in Asia, Eastern and Central Europe and the Gulf states.

On the Edge of Nuclear World War? Clinton Propaganda Distracts from Criminality and Imminent Attack on Russia

By Larry Chin, October 19 2016

As nuclear war with Russia over Syria is being planned in earnest and craved by New World Order fanatics including the Clintons, the Obama administration and the Bushes, a “civil war” is being waged ahead of the US presidential election. The future of the entire planet is at stake.

Does Hillary Clinton Have The Temperament To Have Her “Finger On The Nuclear Button”?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, October 18 2016

Until I viewed the video in the URL below, I had concluded from my time spent with Republicans that the Republican Party was more corrupt than the Democratic Party.  But after watching this 16 minute video report, which seems too much to be faked, the Democratic political establishment—not necessarily the Americans who vote Democrat—seem to be corrupt beyond the meaning of the word.  Make up your own mind.

Digital Information Warfare: WikiLeaks, Assange and the US Presidential Elections

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 19 2016

In all disproportion to size and physical heft, WikiLeaks has managed to throw bombs of digital worth into various political processes with marked effect.  While its critics and detractors deny and attempt to dispel its influence, the authorities are still concerned.  So concerned, in fact, that they have attempted, over the years, to curb the reach and access to the website, and its chief publisher, Julian Assange.

Generating Hate against Russia: The Absurd New Anti-Russian Propaganda From The New York Times

By Robert Parry, October 18 2016

The New York Times is so determined to generate hate against Russia that it has lost all journalistic perspective, even portraying Russia’s military decoys – like those used in World War II. If the dangers weren’t so great – a possible nuclear war that could exterminate life on the planet – The New York Times over-the-top denunciation of all things Russian would be almost funny, like the recent front-page story finding something uniquely sinister about Russia using inflatable decoys of military weapons to confuse adversaries.

Para hacer frente a la guerra financiera de Estados Unidos, es urgente que los BRICS fortalezcan sus vínculos de cooperación en los ámbitos de la economía y las finanzas. El nuevo banco de desarrollo de los BRICS debe aumentar su volumen de créditos, lo mismo el Acuerdo Contingente de Reservas. Adicionalmente, los BRICS deben poner en marcha lo más pronto posible su propia agencia de calificación. Para intensificar su cohesión económica, la implementación de un área de libre comercio echaría abajo las barreras arancelarias y, con ello, incrementaría sustancialmente los intercambios comerciales entre ellos. En definitiva, si no se toman cuanto antes las medidas pertinentes, los BRICS corren el riesgo de naufragar durante el próximo huracán financiero.

El 15 y 16 de octubre se llevó a cabo en el estado de Goa (India) la octava cumbre de los BRICS, acrónimo de Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudáfrica. Hay que reconocer que el encuentro se desarrolló en medio de una situación profundamente crítica para la economía mundial. Sin embargo, los BRICS pusieron de manifiesto, una vez más, su extraordinaria capacidad para transformar un mal momento en una oportunidad para profundizar los vínculos entre ellos desde una perspectiva estratégica.

Después de que las economías de los BRICS gozaran de una ‘época dorada’, en los últimos años sus tasas de crecimiento han sufrido una drástica desaceleración. Frente a esta difícil coyuntura, hoy más que nunca los BRICS necesitan echar mano de las instituciones financieras que presentaron ante el mundo hace un par de años en Fortaleza (Brasil) durante su sexta cumbre.

En abril pasado, su nuevo banco de desarrollo realizó sus primeros préstamos por más de 800 millones de dólares y para 2017 se calcula que los créditos otorgados podrían alcanzar los 2,500 millones de dólares. Asimismo, esta entidad financiera llevó a cabo en julio de este año una histórica emisión de ‘bonos verdes’ (‘green bonds’) en yuanes por un monto equivalente a 450 millones de dólares. Estos títulos financieros, a la vez que incrementan la influencia de la moneda china a escala mundial, sirven para el financiamiento de grandes proyectos de inversión.

Por su parte, el Acuerdo Contingente de Reservas (CRA, por sus siglas en inglés), dotado de 100,000 millones de dólares, ya está listo para otorgar sus primeras líneas de crédito con el objetivo de estabilizar las balanzas de pagos de los BRICS, según anunció el ministro de Finanzas de la India, Arun Jaitley. Toda vez que la Reserva Federal (FED) de Estados Unidos amaga permanentemente con subir la tasa de interés de los fondos federales (‘federal funds rate’) y, con ello, detonar una nueva turbulencia financiera mundial, urge que los BRICS incrementen cuanto antes los recursos monetarios de su fondo de estabilización pues, de lo contrario, corren el riesgo de padecer serios estragos por las apuestas especulativas de los grandes bancos de inversiones.

De forma simultánea, los BRICS necesitan abrir nuevos frentes de batalla que desafíen de modo abierto la hegemonía de Estados Unidos y el dólar en el sistema financiero mundial, no solamente a través de los intercambios comerciales en monedas locales sino, por ejemplo, a través de la acumulación de reservas en yuanes entre sus bancos centrales, más todavía luego de que ‘la moneda del pueblo’ (‘renminbi’, en chino) ingresó oficialmente el pasado 1º de octubre en los Derechos Especiales de Giro (‘Special Drawing Rights’), la canasta de divisas de élite creada por el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) a finales de la década de los 60.

Por añadidura, los BRICS tienen la capacidad de articular una gran alianza financiera con poderosos eslabonamientos geopolíticos entre América Latina, Asia, África y el Medio Oriente. Los bancos regionales de desarrollo, que están conformados en su mayoría por los países periféricos, bien pueden servir a este objetivo: el Banco Asiático de Inversiones en Infraestructura (AIIB, por sus siglas en inglés), el banco del ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) e incluso el Banco del Sur que, finalmente, arrancará antes de que termine este año.

Asimismo, se ha vuelto una imperiosa exigencia para los BRICS la puesta en marcha de una agencia de calificación propia que rompa con el predominio aplastante que Estados Unidos mantiene a través de Fitch, Moody’s y Standard & Poor’s. Estas tres agencias de calificación, más que realizar evaluaciones que se guíen por criterios de tipo técnico, actúan fundamentalmente bajo impulsos de carácter político; esto es, como auténticas máquinas de guerra: degradan las notas de los bonos de deuda soberana y, con ello, elevan dramáticamente los costos de financiamiento de países como Grecia, Rusia o Venezuela.

La cohesión económica es otro de los grandes retos, si bien es indudable que se ha venido intensificando de forma sustantiva durante los años recientes: entre 2001 y 2015, el comercio entre los BRICS como proporción de sus intercambios totales se duplicó del 6 al 12%. China es, por mucho, la economía que está más integrada con los demás BRICS. En contraste, los vínculos entre países como la India y Sudáfrica son marginales. Lo mismo sucede entre Brasil y Rusia. Por eso es muy pertinente la próxima implementación de un área de libre comercio entre los BRICS. Sin embargo, además de echar abajo las barreras arancelarias entre ellos, los BRICS necesitan promover la construcción de cadenas de valor de forma conjunta; esto es, integrar sus aparatos productivos para incentivar la industrialización de las economías menos aventajadas.

En conclusión, son muchos los desafíos en el horizonte para estas cinco potencias emergentes. Estoy convencido de que, en lo sucesivo, el éxito de los BRICS dependerá de la capacidad que tengan para reinventarse, de su creatividad para articular nuevas dimensiones de cooperación con vistas a cumplir metas de más largo alcance. Frente a la nueva guerra financiera que prepara Estados Unidos, es momento de que los BRICS vuelvan a la carga…

 Ariel Noyola Rodríguez

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez : Economista egresado de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Fuente: Russia Today.

WikiLeaks on Sunday called attention to remarks made by CNN anchor Chris Cuomo in which he appeared to warn viewers that it was “illegal” for those outside of the media to look at emails from Hillary Clinton‘s campaign chairman.

“Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us,” Cuomo told viewers.

The broadcast aired on Wednesday, but began circulating more widely after being highlighted by WikiLeaks Sunday.

WikiLeaks has made more than 12,000 emails obtained from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta available on its website over the last week. Members of the public can easily browse the stash of documents using a search function provided by the site.

CNN tries to convince us it’s “illegal” to read the #wikileaks emails so we have to rely on their fair and balanced coverage #PodestaEmails9 pic.twitter.com/tYDLFTi1qG

— 400-lb Hacker Owens (@NubianAwakening) October 16, 2016

This article was originally published on September 26, 2016.

The ratification of the CETA agreement is imminent, with far-reaching economic and social implications. France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls is currently in Canada for meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

CETA is the object of protests in both Canada and the EU. It was also the object of a legal procedure in Germany. 

The logic of the agreement must be understood. It constitutes the first step towards the integration of  NAFTA and the EU. This integration would create an North Atlantic political entity broadly coinciding with NATO.

NAFTA-EU integration would modify the political architecture of the European Union. 

EU-NAFTA integration is a part of Washington’s neoliberal agenda.

Towards the formation of a North Atlantic Trade and Investment Area (NATIA), a trading block broadly coinciding (geographically) with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? .

The geopolitical implications are far-reaching with Washington overshadowing Brussels. 

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THE RATIFICATION OF THIS AGREEMENT BE BLOCKED 

Michel Chossudovsky, October 13, 2016

*      *      *

In less than a month from now, an important and far-reaching “trade agreement” between Canada and the European Union is slated to be signed and ratified by the House of Commons in Ottawa and the European Parliament. 

The Canada and European Union (EU) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is described by the media as “a high quality agreement that reinforces Canada’s fundamental relationship with the European Union.”

But there more than meets the eye.

The CETA agreement –presented to public opinion as an innocuous “bilateral” EU-Canada trade deal– constitutes a TTIP in disguise.

It includes the entire neoliberal policy gamut: commodity trade,  trade in services, investment, intellectual property, financial services provisions, all of which are contained in the US sponsored TTIP agreement. It is a de facto “carbon copy” of the controversial  Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States, which has been temporarily “blocked” by both the European Parliament and the US Congress.

Global Trade is part of an Imperial Agenda

In turn the TTIP, CETA, TISA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are the building blocks of a global “imperial” trading structure. The NAFTA-Asia Pacific  Trading Block hinges upon the adoption of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

“Regulatory convergence” is the talking point of global trade negotiations. It has nothing to do with free trade. Quite the opposite: it requires conformity and similarity in the formulation of national rules and provisions, on behalf of powerful multinational conglomerates: regulatory convergence implies “removal of impediments” to trade and investment coupled with homogenous and “friendly” provisions (e.g. austerity measures, curtailment of social programs, the toning down of labor laws, corporate friendly environmental clauses and consumer protection laws, “national treatment” for foreign investors, no subsidies to farmers, etc.)

CETA and the TTIP

While the  devastating economic and social consequences of the Transatlantic US-EU trade deals (TTIP and TISA) including the loss of national sovereignty of EU member states have been the object of persistent public protest, the CETA agreement (which has similar neoliberal underpinnings) is going ahead largely unopposed, without debate, minimal protest, no firm opposition at the political level.

The [EU] ministers themselves are expected now to convene an extraordinary meeting on October 18, allowing the [CETA] deal to be signed during the visit of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Brussels on October 27. It could enter force next year.

But as CETA came closer to approval, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Program (TTIP), a free-trade agreement with the US, suffered a new blow ahead of the meeting when Austrian Economy Minister Reinhold Mitterlehner urged his EU counterparts to end the talks.

…. “TTIP has become a metaphor for the exuberant dealings of big corporations. That has a negative connotation. We hope for a good deal, but it has to be approached differently,” he added.

Mitterlehner echoed comments by French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl last month that he would request a halt to TTIP negotiations after German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel declared that talks were “de facto dead.”

Fekl said the United States had demanded too much and not compromised enough.

“A crazy machine is moving here, the negotiations are a failure, nobody believes that they will come to a successful conclusion,” he told the German business daily Handelsblatt.

TTIP would create the world’s biggest free trade area with a market of 850 million consumers stretching from Hawaii to Helsinki.

But the deal, under negotiation since 2013, has become a hot potato as key elections approach in the United States, France and Germany. Washington and Brussels are officially committed to sealing the free trade deal before President Barack Obama leaves office in January.

There are deep-seated fears in Europe that the deal would undercut the 28-nation bloc’s standards in key areas such as public health and welfare.

(Deutsche Welle,  September 23, 2016)

The US-EU TTIP is viewed by the protest movement as a mechanism of  appropriation of Europe’s economic landscape by corporate America.

Has the Atlantic TTIP Trade Deal Negotiated behind Closed Doors been Blocked?

In this regard, it would appear that EU politicians are playing a deceptive double game: “Urged to end the talks”, they have reluctantly put the TTIP “on hold” in response to public pressure and the protest movement, while pushing ahead the CETA back-door deal with Canada, The adoption of CETA would in practice validate the eventual de facto implementation of the US sponsored TTIP (or its formal adoption at a later stage and/or under a different label, see below).

What analysts and politicians fail to acknowledge is that Canada is heavily integrated (politically and economically) into the US. The US-Canada corporate and financial establishment is also integrated. A trade agreement by a NAFTA member state, namely Canada with the European Union (EU) would inevitably lead to de facto integration of the EU into the trading structures of NAFTA which are controlled by Washington and Wall Street.

This US-Canada integration does not solely pertain to trade and investment under NAFTA, it also encompasses foreign policy, military affairs, law enforcement and Homeland Security, intelligence, oil and gas pipelines, road transportation, immigration and national borders, strategic waterways and maritime rights, etc.

CETA is Washington’s Backdoor Mechanism

The TTIP would be imposed de facto rather than de jure “via Canada”.

At the outset, instead of launching a single process of trade negotiations between NAFTA and the EU  which would have been the object of widespread opposition, Canada and Mexico were called upon by Washington to launch parallel “bilateral” trade deals with the EU, which would eventually create conditions for the integration of NAFTA and the EU, constituting thereby the core of the US empire’s Atlantic Trading block.

Trade and militarization go hand in hand. The proposed Atlantic Trading Block would also coincide with the structures of NATO and the Atlantic alliance (which in practice are also controlled by the US).

CETA is a “copy and paste”: it was formulated during the Harper government, starting in 2009 in close consultation with Washington and Brussels. The Harper government was entrusted by Washington “to expedite resolution of the agreement [CETA] talks to avoid losing the European’s focus to the TTIP, and to prevent delay due to increasing debate surrounding contentious elements.” 

While the US, Canada and  Mexico are member states of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Washington’s ultimate endgame is to create an integrated  North American Union: i.e. the United States and Provinces of North America.  The latter is in many regards already functional.

The CETA agreement is a back-door initiative which was developed in close coordination with the TTIP. It’s adoption would trigger the de facto (rather than de jure) adoption of the broader TTIP agreement, leading to the eventual integration of the trading structures of the “North American Union” and the European Union. It would create a fait accompli which would contribute to furthering the TTIP negotiations most probably under a different label.

It is a corporate take-over, in both the EU and North America: it will serve to destroy and undermine the economy at the local level, destroy the family farm, precipitate small and medium sized enterprises into bankruptcy, undermine social programs, etc.

It is important that people in the US, Canada and the European Union, across the land firmly oppose the signing and ratification of The Canada and European Union (EU) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). 

In Canada, Hon Paul Hellyer, former defense minister and deputy prime minister during the Pierre Trudeau government is taking the lead in the campaign against the signing of the CETA agreement by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“We could become the first country to go fascist through free elections.” — William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Generally, we avoid using the word “fascism” in polite company, and until recently, a person pointing out parallels between Nazi Germany and the current United States would invite elevated eyelids along with the outworn charge of sounding like a “conspiracy theorist“. The current electoral cycle seems to be changing that, so I will trust that now is the right time to convey some ideas I’ve been marinating regarding fascism in my US Homeland. The ruling plutocrats are clearly ferrying the ship of State along that current, so if fascism is destined to be a part of our lives, perhaps we should quit pretending we can’t see the ugly elephant in the room and somehow respond to it.

In discussing fascism as it exists in the United States, an accurate definition is in order. If we can see past lurid images of swastikas, jackboots, and death camps, we might realize that some elements of fascism, such as presumed racial superiority, have existed in the US since its inception and are more pervasive than we have so far acknowledged.

While the historical racism responsible for the US slave trade, the ongoing genocide of American aborigines, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazism all reflect symptoms included in the fascist impulse, I am using the term “fascism” in its post-World War 2 context, which involves the rise of the Corporation as amoral tyrant.

While Benito Mussolini is often credited with defining fascism as the merger of corporate and state power, there is no evidence I can find that he actually said it. In the 1932 edition of Enciclopedia Italiana Mussolini did write that “Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual,” which may be the heart of the matter, for it raises the ethical question: Are we, as human beings, subordinate to any “State”? It seems to me our traditional American value favoring individualism argues against it.

When he was leaving office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the influence of powerful corporations in his 1961 farewell speech, during which he warned of what he called the “military-industrial complex” although he didn’t call it fascism:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

a fascis (image by Shawn Hamilton)

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

The Oxford Unabridged English Dictionary defines fascism as “a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of the opposition, the retention of private ownership of the means of production under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism and racism, glorification of war.”

The root of the word is the Latin “fascis”, meaning a bundle or packet.

The symbol’s history is murky.

It was perhaps first used by Etruscans–and later by ancient Romans–to symbolize power and authority. In a fascis, individual sticks combine into a stronger unit, an idea similar to “E Pluribus, Unum”, a US national motto, which means “Out of Many, One”. In that context we may understand why fasces appear on each side of the rostrum in the US House of Representatives:

The Italian word “fascismo” stems from the same root and refers to “a political group, an organization, a club”. In 1919 Mussolini instituted the Fascisti at Milan, intending to suppress “radical” groups” by which he meant socialists. Interestingly, Mussolini’s father had been a socialist–he named his son after Benito Juarez, the leftist Mexican president. Benito Mussolini even wrote for socialist journals while he lived in Switzerland, but he apparently was kicked out of the party for supporting involvement in WWI, and he soon transmogrified into a committed Fascisti.

Hatred of “Communists” or “Socialists” appears to be a primary religious tenet of modern fascism although other groups can be included and interchanged in the category of despised others as we saw in Nazi Germany–homosexuals, dark-skinned people, immigrants, pacifists, radicals, Slavs, Jews, and gypsies as well as conscientious journalists, academics, and citizens of any background who opposed (or threatened) the absolute power of the State. People could qualify on one or several points, each making them targets of the Order.

The Nazis called themselves Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a billing that exploited the popular socialist ideology to gain initial public acceptance rather than offering a sincere socialist platform. The Nazis were just one of many variations of the fascist mentality, with its racist assumptions, that has manifested throughout history.

German-American Bund Summer Camp, Long Island New York, 1938 (image by Holocaust History Museum)

In 1933 when Hitler became chancellor, Deputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess granted Heinz Spanknobel, who had entered the United States as a Christian minister, approval to create an American Nazi organization called the “Friends of New Germany”. By 1936 this group had become known as the “German-American Bund”, a US group devoted to advocating for Nazi Germany and Hitler.

The German-American Bund, which conducted a summer youth camp on Long Island, New York for its members, reached its zenith in 1939 with about 25 thousand members. Nearly 22 thousand of them gathered at Madison Square Garden, ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of George Washington, who Bund leaders considered “America’s first fascist”. Several thousand Bund members were also members of Hitler’s paramilitary “Sturmabteilung” (SA), the so-called “Brownshirts”. At the start of World War 2, many Bund members were placed in internment camps, and some were deported at the end of the war, but many remained in the US.

German-American Bund parade; New York City; East 86th St.; Oct. 30, 1939 (image by Wikimedia)

When Hitler assumed power in 1933, the Fuhrer hired a prominent New York City public relations firm, Carl Byoir & Associates, to improve his US image. The firm’s clients included the American Tobacco Company, Proctor and Gamble, General Motors, and many others. One of the firm’s associates was Edward Bernays–Sigmund Freud’s son-in-law who public relations (PR) flaks today generally consider the “father” of PR and spin.

Most people have never heard of him or his books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), yet Life magazine named Bernays one of the most influential people of the 20^th century. As a relative of the famous German psychoanalyst, Bernays had developed insight into the dynamics of the “Unconscious” and subliminal motivation, and he quickly and deftly exploited that knowledge to fleece the Americans by persuading them to buy junk they didn’t need, to adopt habits like smoking (and later a campaign persuading them to stop), and, politically, by coaxing them to accept policies harmful to their own interests.

He called it “engineering consent” and deemed it crucial to democracy (it was certainly important to the Third Reich). Some just call it “propaganda”, and it was pitched as the way to control populations when direct force is “ill-advised”. American advertising, largely based on Bernays’ persuasive techniques, embodies racist and elitist assumptions along with a paternalistic, yet unsympathetic, view that people are too dumb to manage their own affairs and must be guided. Using similar techniques whether selling the public hamburgers or wars, this self-appointed class of ubermensch presumed to “guide” the People using devious and deceptive means derived from the new “science” of Psychology, relieving them of money and liberties in the process.

Bernays had engineered a political propaganda campaign in the early 1950s on behalf of the United Fruit Company to destroy the popular president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, by traducing the reformer as a godless Communist and paving the way for US supported coups d’e’tat. The term “banana republic” originated in reference to United Fruit’s control of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries where the company extracted profits. The company’s brutal policies and inhumane treatment of workers resulted in cheaper bananas for US consumers and poverty for the country’s peasants. Arbentz, for trying to lessen the disparity between the extremely wealthy elite and the poor in Guatemala– on whose backs the elite’s wealth was founded– was deposed in a 1954 CIA-arranged coup. This episode revealed to many that multinational corporations, with greed and treachery in their hearts and military power behind them, can make life hell for anyone opposing the Order.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, in his 2008 New York Times book review of Peter Chapman’s Bananas, How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, describes the company as “more powerful than many nation states … a law unto itself.” He said:

United Fruit defined the modern multinational corporation at its most effective — and, as it turned out, its most pernicious. At home, it cultivated clubby ties with those in power and helped pioneer the modern arts of public relations and marketing. After a midcentury makeover by the ‘father of public relations,’ Edward Bernays, the company started pushing a cartoon character named Senorita Chiquita Banana [based on Carmen Miranda]. Abroad, it coddled dictators while using a mix of paternalism and violence to control its workers.

As for repressive regimes, Chapman writes in Bananas, United Fruit was their best friend–, with coups d’e’tat among its specialties. Kurtz-Phelan noted that “United Fruit had possibly launched more exercises in ‘regime change’ on the banana’s behalf than had ever been carried out in the name of oil,” and he pointed out that the company’s successor, Chiquita Brands International, has admitted to paying nearly $2 million to right-wing death squads in Colombia.” Edward Bernays’ persuasive techniques were key to manufacturing the consent necessary to make the US public ignore reports of atrocities and support government policy conducive to profit-making.

German Propaganda: Joseph Goebbels 

Joseph Goebbels (image by Holocaust History Museum)

Germany’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, admired Bernays and followed his work despite Bernays being s Jew; the techniques were too useful to ignore. It was from Bernays that Goebbels learned the propaganda techniques he used to market fascist ideology to the German public.

An undercurrent of US fascism had come to the astute attention of Major General Smedley Butler, a decorated United States marine who in 1935 wrote a book called War is a Racket . He testified before a congressional committee that a group of powerful industrialists, who had tried to recruit him, were planning to form a fascist veterans’ group that intended to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt and overthrow the government in a coup. While news media at the time belittled Butler and called the affair a hoax, the congressional committee determined that Butler’s allegations were credible although no-one was prosecuted. A similar scenario played out successfully nearly thirty years later when President John Kennedy was ambushed and killed under highly suspicious circumstances. There were many reasons for his assassination, but his threatening to dismantle the CIA, home base for so many Nazis, may have been a primary reason.

President John Kennedy and Allen Dulles ca. 1962 (image by Holocaust History Museum)

A key figure in the Kennedy assassination and cover-up was Allen Welsh Dulles (1893–1969). An icon of US Intelligence, Dulles mingled with Nazi elites, embraced fascism, lived in neutral Switzerland during the war, and knew for far too long what was happening to Jews and other unfortunates in Germany while doing nothing to stop it. After the war Dulles worked tirelessly to cut deals for his Nazi connections, especially those on trial for war crimes at Nuremburg, and he actively facilitated the transfer of Nazi technology (and ideology) to the United States after World War 2. By most definitions, Dulles was a traitor. Instead, he is remembered as an elder statesman and diplomat.

Reinhardt Gehlen (image by Holocaust History Museum)

In 1947 Congress instituted the National Security Act, which allowed the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dulles established the CIA essentially changing the name of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and subsuming into the former OSS operation the entire Nazi spy apparatus of Reinhardt Gehlen, Germany’s General of Foreign Armies East. Through Gehlen, Dulles inherited an expansive, ready-made spy network already poised against the Soviet Union, ushering in the National Security State we don’t understand or love today.

The modern CIA then, is a direct outgrowth of Nazi intelligence–modeled after Gehlen’s Nazi spy network, and staffed with many Nazi agents. Consider that Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission to “investigate” (or squelch) the inquiry into the death of President John Kennedy in 1963. This may have been what accused Oswald killer, Jack Ruby, meant when he said “Nazis” were involved in the assassination. Allen Dulles, however, didn’t have any problem with Gehlen’s past. “He’s on our side,” Dulles once said chuckling, “and that’s all that matters.”

In October 2015, Democracy Now host Amy Goodman interviewed David Talbot, whose book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, sheds much needed light on the secretive Allen Dulles. Goodman had asked Talbot about Nazis:

DAVID TALBOT: “The Nazis, well, they have a very tight relationship, many Nazi businessmen, with the Dulles brothers. And when Allen Dulles was in Switzerland, supposedly working for our side, the OSS, during the war, he was actually using that to meet with a lot of Nazis and to cut separate deals with them. He did indeed finally cut a separate peace deal with the Nazi forces in Italy against FDR’s wishes. FDR had a policy of unconditional surrender. Don’t–AMY GOODMAN: “This was Operation Paperclip?”

DAVID TALBOT: “This was Operation Sunrise, was this deal that he made. And then he set up these rat-lines, so-called, where Nazis, leading Nazi war criminals, escaped after the war through the Alps in Switzerland, down into Italy and then overseas to Latin America and even in the United States. One of the key Nazis he saved was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s former chief of intelligence, who he installed, Dulles, as head of West German intelligence after the war, a man who should have stood trial at Nuremberg.”

Considering that the CIA was getting its information about Russia from the very Nazis who the Russians had defeated during the war–US intelligence assessments of Russia are likely to have been highly biased and perilously skewed in that post-war period of rising tensions during the Cold War. The US had been naively accepting Nazis’ characterizations of the Russians as demons–the Russians, our former allies who should have been thanked rather than blamed. They won WW2 after all, at huge cost. Was it really wise to form opinions of Russia and its leaders from “intelligence” delivered by its former enemy?

I suggest this absurd arrangement helps explain much of the incomprehensible and fascistic postwar US policy, official and clandestine, that we’ve glimpsed with horror over the last 65 years–the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s; covert mind control experimentation (MK-ULTRA); the 1960s political assassinations of both Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Black Panthers Hampton and Clark; the mechanized slaughter of the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese called it the “American War”); the overthrow and murder of democratically elected foreign leaders such as Diem and Allende in the 1970s; the rise of the Corporation as tyrant, and the false flag operations we’ve heard of and those we haven’t. These events had in common the goal of reducing liberty and increasing control in order to institute the “New World Order” that George H.W. Bush arrogantly bragged would succeed in a speech he delivered on September 11th 1991.

Richard Nixon and Prescott Bush (Bush’s lackey Nixon got himself a hat like his boss!) (image by Holocaust History Museum) 

Be this Guy! (image by Holocaust History Museum)

The United States’ decades long irrational hatred and fear of “Communism” and “Communists” can largely be explained as a predictable side-effect of the large-scale importation of Russia-hating, unrepentant Nazis after the war–hundreds of them and their families through Operation Paperclip, which Dulles ran. An influx of these Nazis into positions of high rank and influence in the US national security state, as intentional as it was illegal, allowed known Nazi sympathizers–like Prescott Bush, patriarch of two US presidents–to join forces with the financial architects of Nazism. It explains much regarding pathological postwar US policy and numerous inexplicable events, including assassinations, coups, false flag attacks, and illegal wars.

In a subsequent segment, I will offer more information regarding some famous Nazis and Nazi admirers including Hitler’s second-in-command, Martin Bormann, car maker Henry Ford, aviator Charles Lindbergh, animator Walt Disney, Prescott Bush, and NASA director Wehner Von Braun among others.

It was presumably intended as an Israeli history lesson to the world. A video posted to social media by Israel’s foreign ministry shows an everyday Jewish couple, Jacob and Rachel, in a home named the “Land of Israel”. A series of knocks on the door brings 3,000 years of interruptions to their happiness. First it’s the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, Hellenists, Arabs, Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottomans – all straight out of Monty Python central casting.

As nuclear war with Russia over Syria is being planned in earnest and craved by New World Order fanatics including the Clintons, the Obama administration and the Bushes, a “civil war” is being waged ahead of the US presidential election. The future of the entire planet is at stake.

The efforts to control the narrative, and the eventual outcome, are desperate and unprecedented, as has been the resistance to the imperial propaganda effort.

A Hillary Clinton presidency is being pushed down the collective throats of humanity with massive psy-op, a global “wag the dog”. The end game of the elites—nuclear war with Russia, the long-awaited conquest of the Eurasian subcontinent, and a criminal succession must not be derailed. A Trump victory and a popular revolt pose threats to this end game, and must be thwarted at all costs.

Aligned against the New World Order is an unprecedented anti-establishment resistance, represented by Trump and his movement, exemplified by Wikileaks, DC Leaks, Anonymous, the alternative media, and the urgent warnings of whistleblowers and seasoned observers who know the Clintons, and individuals such as Cindy Sheehan and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who warn that a Hillary Clinton presidency poses and immediate threat of world war.

Tensions are reaching the breaking point. Within the US, there is intense volatility on all fronts, and divisions at every level.

The Clintons’ dirty propaganda tidal wave

The Clinton/Bush/New World Order forces and their worldwide corporate media apparatus have concocted a propaganda construct of massive proportions—an alternative reality made up of smoke and mirrors, false narratives.

The entire mainstream media, from the international and national to the local levels, is functioning as nothing more than a propaganda bull horn for Clinton, a weapon of around-the-clock mouth-foaming character assassination against Trump, and an all-out propaganda attack against Russia. In lockstep, the Washington criminal establishment led by the Clinton and Bush factions, and the corporate media that they own, pummel the war drums around the clock, demanding collective obedience and surrender.

Trump is the immediate target, but Russia is the larger and more important one.  Russia must be set up as the justifiable target for war. Russia is being systematically blamed for Donald Trump and “interference” with the election, for a total infiltration of America. Russia is blamed for Wikileaks and all counter-Clinton resistance.

It does not get more Orwellian than this, or more dangerous. Reality has been turned upside down. Trump is portrayed as a fascist madman. The headline of a recent editorial penned by former Clinton official Robert Reich, typical of what is found across the mainstream media today, screams: “Failing to vote for Clinton puts our future in jeopardy”. This nonsense spews forth, when in fact Hillary Clinton is the neocon, the war criminal, the fanatic who is demanding for nuclear war with Russia. In fact, Hillary Clinton puts all of humankind in jeopardy immediately. In fact, there will be no future at all when nuclear war breaks out. 

The degree and depth of the collusion, the bald-faced nature of the deception, has never been more evident. The sheer number of Clinton/Bush surrogates, mouthpieces and gatekeepers, astounding. Hollywood and the entertainment world, controlled by the same forces and CIA assets as the news media, are also is out in force. The Trump-bashing, the “Trump as pervert” allegations, the pro-Clinton cover-up and fantasy spinning is around the clock, from snarky pro-Clinton Saturday Night Live skits to the glib talk show hosts and entertainment “reporters”.  An upcoming episode of the TV series Law and Order, to be shown before the election, is being specially produced to depict a Trump-like sexual predator who is running for office.

The Clintons destroyed Bernie Sanders and stole the Democratic Party nomination using a variety of criminal means.  What Sanders suffered is nothing compared to what is being dealt to Trump.  The combined forces of the Clintons and Bushes—virtually the entire New World Order and its networks—are aiming their weapons at Trump. The dissent and resistance that he represents is to be smashed and silenced. They will stop at nothing.

Destroying Trump

Days before the second presidential debate, it seemed that Donald Trump’s campaign had been neutralized by the Hillary Clinton sleaze machine.

Following a first debate in which the Clintons blatantly and criminally cheated, the Clintons went directly to what they do best: more dirty tricks. The “bombshell” designed to end Trump was a mysteriously recorded audio clip from 2005 in which Donald Trump was caught using “lewd locker room” language about women. The actual source of the leak is not known. Suspects could include any number of Clinton-connected CIA assets within NBC and/or Republican operatives (connected to Paul Ryan or the Bushes) working with the Clintons to remove Trump from the presidential race.

NBC executive producer Rob Silverstein claims that he was not the leak, while acknowledging that he knew about the tape. What is known is that Washington Post asset David Fahrenthold, a fervent anti-Trump pro-Clinton attack dog who was responsible for creating the furor over alleged improprieties within Trump’s charities, somehow obtained the clip from the leaker.  The Washington Post, like much of the corporate media, is an Establishment propaganda organ, rife with CIA assets, dominated by Clinton and Bush plants, and devoid of “journalism”.

Trump’s private conversation (likely illegally taped) was with Billy Bush, host of NBC’s Access Hollywood and host of Miss Universe pageants. Billy Bush is the nephew of George H.W. “Poppy” Bush. He is the cousin of Jeb Bush, son of Jonathan Bush, who is the brother of “Poppy”, and a manager of some of the Bush family’s many banking interests, including the CIA-connected Riggs Bank, which specialized in money laundering.

It is not known if Billy Bush was directly and knowingly involved in setting the trap on Trump, or if he has any played any direct political role from his convenient position within NBC. The tape’s release was no surprise. Bush not only remembered the recording but bragged about it to NBC colleagues during the Rio Olympic Games in August 2016. Given the enduring connection between the Clintons and Bushes, and their shared hatred of Trump, a Bush presence in the middle of an anti-Trump operation does not appear to be a coincidence. Billy Bush is in the process of leaving NBC (after being “suspended” for having laughed along with Trump), and is negotiating a lucrative severance package. The rest of the Bush family, however, is no doubt chortling with glee over Trump’s demise, and proud of Billy for playing the fall guy. Here was one manifestation of the Bush “throat cut” warning to Trump. There will be more to come.

So desperate is the New World Order for a Hillary Clinton White House that the Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, are willing to risk their own political seats to get rid of Trump. Some fifty Republicans immediately withdrew support for Trump.

The furor over this original Trump tape has been followed by an onslaught of other Trump-as-pervert-sexual predator accusations that the media and its legions of operatives have dutifully and aggressively trumpeted and repeated.

The accusations are transparently deceptive, the accusers likely paid off by Clinton operatives. They are baseless, unwitnessed, out of nowhere claims from decades ago, some by individuals who have already been proven to be liars. Although the Trump campaign has responded to each smear with legal action, the corporate media has continued to apply overwhelming pressure, endless air time, endless ink, and an endless parade of accusers.

As exposed in the Wikileaks dump of emails to John Podesta, longtime Clinton operative Bill Ivey wrote that “we’ve all been content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry”.

Distract a dumbed-down and brainwashed American populace, occupy them with salacious tabloid garbage, imprison them sex gossip from which they never emerge. Make sure they stay dumb and don’t look up facts or read book. Make sure the warnings about Clinton are not heard.

Facts are rendered meaningless, while fakery, illusion and propaganda rule. The magnitude and scope of the deception is unprecedented.

With just one month until the election, the nightmare is just beginning, not only for Trump but for all who oppose the New World Order. This writer predicts that in the coming weeks, the Clinton sleaze machine will dredge up new and more outlandish material to scandalize Trump. And worse.

The resistance strengthens

Inside the confines of the Clinton/Bush propaganda bubble, it would seem that things are in order. The election is over already. Donald Trump is a sexual predator. Hillary Clinton’s lead is “insurmountable”. Hillary is the “overwhelming” champion of debates (that she did not win), the “overwhelming” leader in polls (that are rigged and compiled deceptively by pro-Clinton media and services that purposely oversample pro-Clinton voters). The election will be stolen, regardless, but thanks to manufactured reality, Trump is gone, resistance is squashed. It’s over.

But in reality, the deception has not worked. In many ways, it has backfired.

The smear campaign did not work. Trump is not only fighting back with even more pointed attacks but he has more popular support than ever.  He is in full attack mode.

In reality, Trump leads Hillary. According to a Rasmussen poll (that is, unlike the Hillary-rigged polls of CNN, NBC, etc. fairly sampled and more accurate)  Trump led Clinton even after the release of the Trump tape. According to a more recent Daybreak poll taken at the time of this writing, Trump’s lead is growing.

Wikileaks has unleashed bombshells about Hillary Clinton on a daily basis, with more to come.

Daily releases have exposed Hillary Clinton from all angles as a criminal.  Any one of the revelations should have the power destroy her politically, indict her as a criminal, send her to prison, and remove her from public life.

Hillary Clinton has now been caught funding the Islamic State. This evidence proves that she, her State Department, the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, the Obama administration literally created ISIS terrorism, in collusion with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to destabilize the Middle East and topple Syria, towards the nuclear war with Russia that she wants to wage. It is pure treason. Hillary Clinton is a terrorist. The abuse of power at the State Department, Benghazi, the emails, the Clinton Foundation, election fraud, the —all of it is treason. And add to that the host of criminal lies about Hillary’s health and documents exposing illegal Machiavellian operations of Clinton operatives.

Trump is attracting support, his events are attended in the thousands. While Clinton’s support is smoke and mirrors and illusion: thinly-attended, staged, rigged, and even faked for the cameras. The Clinton campaign even struggles to employ campaign workers.

There is a good reason why Wikileaks, DC Leaks, Anonymous and other sources of genuine investigative journalism and truth have almost exclusively focused their efforts to stop Hillary Clinton and not Trump.  It is because Clinton and the criminal establishment she represents is the genuine threat to humanity.

Even Cindy Sheehan and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein have declared that Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump, and warn that Hillary Clinton could start a nuclear war.

The Trump smears may also be backfiring on the Clintons. It has opened the door for Trump to address expose Bill Clinton’s known history as a sexual predator and a rapist, and Hillary ‘s history of intimidation against Bill’s victims.  Four of Bill Clinton’s rape victims came to Trump’s defense. Many more victims of the Clintons are coming forward. The “Bill Clinton is a rapist” counter-movement is not going away.

Hillary herself is a sexual predator, and a deviant, according to many. There is plenty of rich material exposing Hillary’s personal history, such as the accounts of former Clinton insiders, Secret Service agents, and rape victims such as former CIA asset Cathy O’Brien, who claims to have been raped by Hillary as a young girl.

(The O’Brien story holds the potential for utterly destroying Hillary Clinton, but has not been mentioned by the Trump forces, nor has it made it into any corporate media reporting. It has not even been prominent in the alternative media. This writer believes that the O’Brien story is too dangerous to be wielded in a mass public fashion, because it not only exposes the Clintons, but also the Bushes, CIA criminal covert operations, and Iran-Contra.)

The New World Order is desperate to force their trickery but they have not been able to shut down the Internet, where the resistance thrives. The Internet is at present too open, too fast, too democratic, too “dangerous”, and offer too many avenues to the truth. This is why the government and its corporate fronts are engaged in efforts to eventually shut down the Web. Google and YouTube, for example, are currently engaging in outright censorship of political content but have not fully shut down all dissent.

While much of America remains dumbed down and brainwashed, more people are waking up. This scenario is unacceptable to the elites.

Surviving the smear, winning the debate

Trump won the second presidential debate, in spite of the fact that the Clintons rigged it, in spite of the clear and aggressive attacks by “moderators” Anderson Cooper of Clinton-controlled CNN (and a CIA intern) and ABC’s Martha Raddatz (White House correspondent in the George W. Bush administration).

They attempted to make the event a referendum on Trump’s behavior. They constantly interrupted Trump, but let Hillary filibuster. They refused to let Trump finish sentences. Cooper went after Trump, accusing him of being a sexual predator. “Do you deny that you groped women?” (laying the groundwork for the accusations of rape that would follow after the debate).

Raddatz inserted herself into the argument for Syrian regime change, demanding Trump to address (what she believes is) the need for an “armed humanitarian occupation of Syria. She argued with Trump, and squealed in anger at his statements.

Their assistance to Hillary was so blatant that Trump said, “it’s one on three”.

Hillary robotically went about her talking point presentation. She badgered Trump on “character”, pronouncing herself “good”, and took every opportunity to launch unfounded attack Russia and Putin. She blamed Russia for the Syrian crisis, terrorism and cyberattacks, blamed Russia as the force behind Wikileaks and Trump. While stating that as president, she would not deploy “ground forces” in Syria, but promised to send Special Forces, and covert operations (therefore contradicting herself cleverly), and promised a no-fly zone (at act of war).

But Trump owned the most memorable moments of the night (“You’d be in jail”) and unnerved Clinton by promising to appoint a special prosecutor to go after her.

Trump:

• Exposed Bill Clinton as a rapist
• Went after Hillary’s emails
• Went after Benghazi
• Addressed Clinton and Obama as the creators of ISIS and a “disastrous” Middle East full of terrorism (but did not mention the CIA, or Anglo-American management of Al-Qaeda, Al Nusra, ISIS)
• Addressed how Clinton wants open borders that allow jihadists to move about freely and enter the United States (but again, no mention of CIA agenda that purposely allows its assets to be moved around strategically)
• Mentioned Wikileaks but did not go into specifics
• Slammed Clinton for 30 years of ineffectiveness (but did not mention her specific crimes)
• Successfully deflected attacks on his tax returns by pointing out that Hillary and her Wall Street friends including Warren Buffett and George Soros also evade taxes
• Mentioned Bill Clinton colluding with Loretta Lynch to shut down the investigation into Hillary
• Correctly stated that Hillary has “ lot of hate” but did not go into detail, failed to mention Clinton’s known history of mental instability and poor character

Trump’s most important exchange was about Russia, in which he openly disagreed with the anti-Russia stance of his running mate Mike Pence.

“It would nice to be friendly with Russia so we can fight ISIS together. Russia is killing ISIS, Syria is killing ISIS, Iran is killing ISIS.”

He also clarified that he “doesn’t know Putin”, has no business dealings with Russia. “The reason you keep blaming Russia is to attack me”.

Trump trounced Clinton, took the lead over Clinton after the debate, but Clinton’s media machine pronounced her the overwhelming winner via numerous fake polls and fake focus groups.

The criminal past

The Clintons’ criminal history also offers a treasure trove of damning material. The “elephant in the living room” is this legacy. Their criminal activities in Arkansas, their Iran-Contra/CIA drugs collaboration with the Bushes, their enduring relationships with the neocons and the CIA, the long string of political murders stretching back to the 1980s, their many financial swindles, the White House scandals of the 1990s, the war crimes.  The partnership of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton is notorious and blood-soaked.

There are countless individuals who know in specific detail what the Clintons are about. There are the former Clinton operatives and insiders, the staffers, the bodyguards and the Secret Service agents who were there to witness their crimes. Many, who remain among the living, have spoken out and continue to speak out. There are the political colleagues who were betrayed, the insiders and whistleblowers who have been marginalized. Many of these individuals have spoken out and written books, and their stories are readily available.

The question is how far Trump and his operatives dare go into this history, if they dare let Cathy O’Brien speak out, and if the truth galvanizes a resistance among the knowing—a revolution that not even a massive criminal apparatus can control.

October Surprise: World War III?

While the popular anti-New World Order/anti-Clinton movement aligned with Trump continues surge in the reality not reflected by the corporate media fantasy world, all hopes could be rendered a moot, if the criminal forces have their way.

The greater danger comes from those in power right now, who, unlike either presidential candidate, hold the power to create immediate chaos and calamity.

A  full blown nuclear war with Russia would change everything. It would result in the literal destruction of the planet. Fanatics are on the march.  The resistance knows it.

A false flag event on the magnitude greater than even 9/11 may be in the works.

The Obama administration has declared that it will retaliate against a fake non-existence cyberattack by Russia, against a fake non-existent Russian infiltration of the US presidential election. A massive financial crisis, coinciding with a world war, is also a possibility, given the collapse of Deutsche Bank, a major criminal (CIA-connected) bank and lynchpin of the world financial system, and the inability of the New World Order to maintain control of its “vassals”, as evidenced by Brexit.

The more successful the anti-Clinton efforts of Trump, Wikileaks and resistance movements, the more likely the empire resorts to violence and humanity-ending calamity.

The Obama administration might choose to start the war before the election, to cancel the election.

Or with a Trump win, start the war before Obama leaves office, preventing Trump from taking office. Or with a Hillary win, start the war in a more “orderly” sequence, when the “queen” takes the throne.

A genuine nightmare scenario is upon us. It is no longer “unthinkable”, it is happening.

Those who refuse to passively accept the possible end of the world must act now, with what little time is left.

Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners program covering the fate of refugees in the detention facility on Nauru, known euphemistically as a “processing centre” costing $35.3 million a year to the Australian tax payer.

The Four Corners program was, in turn, informed by a significant Amnesty International report, aptly titled Island of Despair, which was released on Monday night.[1]  That report examined the rather ghoulish extent the Australian government, with its Nauru satraps, has been going about the business of “processing” boat arrivals.

In the sobering words of the report, Australia’s government had furthered “a policy to deter people arriving by boat” calculated to inflict “intolerable cruelty and the destruction of the physical and mental integrity of hundreds of children, men and children,” an approach “chosen as a tool of government policy.”

As the author and research director for Amnesty, Anna Neistat, noted, attendance by refugee children in local schools was poor for one obvious, abysmal point: “No matter how horrible the detention was – and the conditions in detention were – quite a few families and children themselves told me that now they’re in the community, they feel less safe because they’re subjected to attacks by the local population.”[2]

Material had also been supplied by the contractor, Broadspectrum, formerly of Transfield fame, to an Australian Senate select committee citing 67 allegations of child abuse in Nauru, 12 of which found their way to the Nauru police.  The police, true to form, have dragged their feet on the issue.

Australia’s morally impervious Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, remains rigidly opposed to any suggestion that Nauru has become an exemplar of torture for refugees, a continuum that stretches from the camp itself to the community that despises them.  “I reject the claim totally,” claimed the prime minister in fully rehearsed Newspeak.  “It is absolutely false.  The Australian government’s commitment is compassionate and it’s strong.”[3]

Turnbull, along with his counterparts in Parliament, has taken a vaccine against refugee processing on Australian shores.  The vaccine operates across the board, against incriminating reports, against ghastly revelations, and, generally, against any alternative that is not purposely cruel.  The point is not to save lives but make the lives of the living unbearable.

The Republic of Nauru, bought and complicit in the entire venture, decided to attack the entire premise of the investigative report, using its propaganda arm (the “media and public information” unit) to argue that the children had been “coached” and interviewed in a “stage-managed” way.

What the statement from the same unit insisted upon was the conclusiveness of appearances, the triumph of embalmed truths.  What you saw was what you, without doubt, got.  “[V]iewers could clearly see that the refugees were well dressed, well-groomed and healthy.”  Where, went the suggestion, was the squalor, the degradation, the hostility?

A closer look at the spectacle that is Nauru’s processing facility suggests a few illusions which the propaganda preachers have been at pains to engender. The pedantic will draw upon the point that those in the facility are not technically detained, being allowed, like protected animals in an enclosed safari park, to wander around – within reason.

Nauru authorities have insisted that the children are not held in any case, being allowed to live with families in appropriately safe accommodation, close to shops and decent amenities, including a new school and the “new $27 million state-of-the-art medical facility to which refugees have unrestricted and free access”. The environment is near idyllic, free of violence, or at any rate less violent than Australia.

With insistent smugness, the statement goes on to sociologically dump on Australian conditions, a reverse psychological approach that deems Terra Australis the place of nightmares: “There are fights in Australian schools on a daily basis and there is crime in Australia.  The Australian news shows acts of crime each night that are far more violent than anything Nauru has experienced.”

Having raised the Nauru wilderness to the status of a welcoming refugee utopia, the unit statement goes on to aim at the Four Corners program, which it claims “should be campaigning for no refugees to be allowed into such a violent society as Australia.”

With cruel perversion, an indigent, pseudo-colonial entity like Nauru becomes more appropriate than the funder of this grandiosely macabre vision, the Australian government.  The journalists of Four Corners had refused to play along, instead falsely portraying “Nauru as an unsafe nation, which it is not.”

Nauru had, effectively, been taking up a heavy, dark man’s burden, while in the mind of its officials, a scurrilous ABC had been promoting “biased political propaganda and lies” disseminating a report that was, “From start to finish… denigrating, racist, false and pure political activism.”

While this turn of the comic absurd will make some in Canberra squeamish, disturbing the odd conscience, the points on this clownishly brutal episode are clear: the torture facility that is Nauru is here to stay, a defiant reminder that humanitarianism towards the stateless and the fleeing is a fiction advanced by those who trumpet it as they deny it.   

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

Notes

The US media and political establishment have been consumed over the past two days with denunciations of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s allegations that the presidential election is “rigged” in favor of his rival, Hillary Clinton.

There is an increasingly racist and fascistic character to Trump’s charges, which combine attacks on the media for pushing allegations of sexual abuse with sweeping claims of vote-rigging, particularly in minority neighborhoods. Trump is urging his supporters to turn out en masse to “monitor” the polls, creating the possibility of violence on Election Day.

As always, Trump’s statements are a mixture of half-truths and lies. While there is no doubt that the media establishment has lined up behind Clinton, Trump is using the “rigged election” claim to lay the basis for declaring the election to have been stolen. He is preparing to use the “stolen election” as the rallying cry for the development of an extra-parliamentary, far-right movement after November 8.

This does not, however, lend the slightest credibility to the self-righteous and hypocritical response of the Democratic Party and the political establishment in general. Their indignation over any suggestion that something could be amiss with the pristinely democratic American electoral system is absurd.

Trump’s charges resonate well beyond the relative minority of his supporters who respond to racist agitation because his claims correspond to the bitter experience of broad masses of people with what passes for American democracy. This is, after all, a country that had a stolen election. The US Supreme Court shut down a vote recount in Florida and awarded the 2000 election to George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore.

This was followed by the 2004 election, when George W. Bush was reelected based on disputed voting in Ohio and widespread charges of voter suppression.

The question, however, goes far beyond vote-rigging. Even by the standards of other major capitalist countries, the electoral system in the United States is among the least democratic. The two-party system is institutionalized, enforcing a political monopoly of two right-wing parties entirely beholden to the financial aristocracy—this in a vast and diverse country of 320 million people!

State ballot access and election laws impose prohibitive requirements, including the collection of tens of thousands of signatures, making it virtually impossible for “third party” and independent candidates to mount an effective campaign.

This political duopoly is reinforced by the unrestricted role of corporate money in US elections, corrupting the entire process to a degree, and with a brazenness, unmatched by any other major industrialized country. It is estimated that campaign spending by presidential and congressional candidates this year will hit a new record of more than $7.3 billion. For all practical purposes, to win high office in America one must either have billionaire backers or be a multi-millionaire oneself.

The corporate-owned media does its anti-democratic part, depriving coverage to alternative parties. In this election, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, who are respectively polling 7 percent and 3 percent nationally, are excluded from the televised presidential debates, not to mention Jerry White, the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party.

The result is a political system that is increasingly unviable because it is unable to address any of the concerns of the vast majority of the population. The fact that barely half of the electorate bothers to vote is a devastating commentary on the US electoral system.

The bitter experience of the Obama administration, brought to power on a wave of popular hatred for Bush and revulsion over his wars and attacks on working class living standards, has further convinced tens of millions of people that neither their needs and concerns, nor their votes, have any impact on the policies pursued by the government. The candidate of “hope” and “change,” mistakenly believed to be an agent of progressive change because of his ethnicity, continued and deepened the policies of war and corporate plunder of his predecessor.

In the current election, the internal rot resulting from decades of economic decay and political reaction, presided over by both parties, has erupted onto the surface, placing a question mark over the survival of the two-party system. One measure of the system’s bankruptcy is the fact that an election cycle in which millions of people cast votes for a candidate who claimed, falsely, to be a socialist and opponent of Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, now presents the people with the “choice” between a billionaire quasi-fascist and a corrupt stooge of Wall Street and the military/intelligence establishment.

The transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, released by WikiLeaks, show the real relationship that exists between the politicians and Wall Street. They are the paid servants of the financial oligarchs who run the country.

The fundamental and gigantic fraud that dominates the election is the total disconnect between the populist claims of both candidates and the reality of the programs they intend to implement. The real agenda, regardless of which one wins in November, is war, austerity and repression.

Is the election rigged? Of course it is—to produce an outcome acceptable to the ruling class. The entire political system is rigged and fundamentally undemocratic because capitalism is a system of class exploitation in which real political power is concentrated in the hands of a corporate-financial oligarchy.

This opinion piece was co-signed by 17 members of the European Parliament, from three different political groups.

In reality, the EU-Canada trade deal fosters excessive liberalisation and deregulation: it weakens governments’ rights to regulate in the public interest and the so-called “additional declaration” does not provide legal protection in key areas and does not meet the requirements of our legal traditions.

When the Transatlantic trade negotiations were launched, both European and American leaders failed to understand why they were the target of a wave of scepticism in public opinion. They pledged that this time, it would be different from NAFTA.

The North-American Free Trade Agreement ended up destroying manufacturing jobs, pressuring down wages, weakening standards and consumer protection, and turned Canada, once a small farmers’ nation, into one of the biggest GMO producers.

Now that the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is completed and public, one can assess whether these official claims are grounded or if they were rather part of the political marketing.

According to the EU Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, CETA will “raise standards” and “create jobs”. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Trade Minister, goes further when she says that CETA is a “progressive agreement” because it reflects “progressive values”.

In reality, if these negotiations were really about raising the bar while creating equally distributed wealth, it’s fair to wonder why they were led in such an opaque way. Average parliamentarians, both at national and EU level, were not associated with the discussions, and the Council’s negotiating mandate – setting the guidelines for the Commission’s negotiators – was only made public after the agreement was concluded.

If CETA really was a “progressive agreement”, why would its sponsors be afraid of facing democracy? Whereas national and regional parliaments will have to approve CETA, 90% of the agreement (i.e. “EU-only competences”) will enter into force before their vote. And even if one or several parliaments decide to reject CETA, “provisional application” will keep being effective on these EU-only matters.

Contrary to what is officially advocated, no one is able to prove CETA’s ability to generate prosperity and create jobs. The official Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) forecasts only a 0.03 GDP increase, and other independent studies based on a more realistic UN model anticipate negative economic effects and more than 200,000 EU-wide jobs lost.

Whereas the European Commission says that CETA is primarily a way to help SMEs – 99% of them do not actually export beyond the Atlantic – many actually fear a diversion of their business in the EU due to the competition from big Canadian companies.

The EU-Canada agreement is therefore definitely not about wealth creation. When faced with that contradiction, CETA proponents discovered another line of defence: they argue that their main intention is to create high international trade standards with the help of like-minded partners, such as Canada, against dumping from China.

But here again, the text of the agreement does not objectively reflect that ambition: sanitary standards are not reinforced, because the “precautionary principle” is nowhere mentioned; the EU and Canada did not commit to better protect social rights and labour rights; our climate commitments alongside the COP21 are deeply contradicted by CETA, which is expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Essentially, the EU-Canada trade agreement goes against what Europe, undermined by the rise of inequalities and the decline of public investment and services, really needs. Indeed, CETA fosters liberalisation instead of protection and deregulation instead of re-regulation. It also weakens our legal systems and our states’ ability to pursue public policy objectives. An example: while the EU’s farmers desperately ask for more protections in the EU internal market, CETA opens new duty-free quotas for Canadian beef and pork, representing in total 140,000 tons a year.

Worst of all, when three decades of wild globalisation left the feeling among many citizens that their governments were deprived of any ability to tame it, governments’ public policy decisions will be further challenged by multinational companies, including through legal channels. The new “ICS system” is not fundamentally different from the old “ISDS system”.

Both are unnecessary and dangerous: just as Transcanada sued Obama’s government for putting an end to the Keystone XL project, Canadian companies could legally ask Germany, France or any other European country for compensations if they take measures affecting their “legitimate expectations”.

It is worth noting that the German Association of Judges severely questions the compatibility of that parallel jurisdiction with the EU legal order and urges the Commission, national governments or the Parliament to ask the ECJ for a legal opinion on compatibility with EU law.

Indeed, serious doubts remain regarding the independence and qualification of ICS judges – among other elements, they will be paid on a daily basis – as well as regarding the protection of the states’ right to regulate in public interest.

The European Commission and the member states are well aware of our arguments. The fact that the Commission decided to draft an “interpretative declaration” to further clarify the CETA provisions shows that our claims are well grounded. But that text misses the point.

It is rather a smokescreen that according to experts in international law has neither the legal weight nor the ambition to contradict some of the most problematic aspects of CETA – even the Commission admitted it was rather a communication tool. It cannot counter the services liberalisation mechanism, does not mention the precautionary principle nor climate protection goals etc.

We still believe that CETA is not the kind of agreement Europe needs. While we think CETA is dangerous for our democracy, our economy, our standards and our environment, we also think that there can be good trade regulation, particularly at a multilateral level.

We are strong supporters of multilateral trade agreements contributing to creating tangible benefits for workers and consumers, regulating globalization, integrating the fight against global warming, safeguarding our norms while preserving our democratic models. Any other kind of agreement should be rejected and we will fight to that end.

This op-ed is signed by the following MEPs:

• Marie Arena, S&D (Parti socialiste – Belgium);
• Guillaume Balas, S&D (Parti socialiste – France);
• Hugues Bayet, S&D (Parti socialiste – Belgium);
• Sergio Cofferati, S&D (Italy);
• Fabio De Masi, GUE/NGL (DIE LINKE – Germany);
• Yannick Jadot, Greens/EFA (Europe Ecologie – France)
• Eva Joly, Greens/EFA (Europe Ecologie – France);
• Stelios Kouloglou, GUE/NGL (ΣΥΡΙΖΑ – Greece);
• Curzio Maltese, GUE/NGL (Italy);
• Florent Marcellesi, Greens/EFA (EQUO – Spain);
• Emmanuel Maurel, S&D (Parti socialiste – France);
• Anne-Marie Mineur, GUE/NGL (Socialistische Partij – Netherlands);
• Dimitrios Papadimoulis, GUE/NGL (ΣΥΡΙΖΑ- Greece);
• Georgi Pirinski, S&D (Bulgarska sotsialisticheska partiya- Bulgaria);
• Marc Tarabella, S&D (Parti socialiste – Belgium);
• Ernest Urtasun, Greens/EFA (Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds – Spain);
• Monika Vana, Greens/EFA (Die Grünen – Austria)

Hundreds of foreign mercenaries have arrived to the contact line in Donbass, Chief of the Staff of the People’s Militia of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), Oleg Anaschenko, said, citing reconnaissance units of the republic. Reportedly, the fighters come from such countries as Poland, the Baltic States, Canada and the US.

“According to information received from human intelligence sources in settlements near the line of contact, several hundred mercenaries from the United States, Canada, the Baltic countries and Poland have arrived in the area, armed with small arms and equipment,” the Doni news agency quoted his words.

Anaschenko also noted that the Ukrainian side has created three training camps in the Ukrainian-controlled settlements of Bobrovo and Bobrovskoye, located near Severodonetsk. According to the LPR People’s Militia, Ukrainian soldiers are being trained there in urban combat, as well as in reconnaissance by foreign instructors.

“We have also recorded the presence of training camps in the village of Schastye (on the contact line) where American and Polish instructors teach sharpshooters and sabotage and reconnaissance groups for their further actions on the territory of the LPR,” Anaschenko added.

Anaschenko also said that an arrival of about 150 foreign mercenaries, armed with US-made assault rifles, as well as of off-road vehicles, infantry combat vehicles, armored fighting vehicles has been spotted in the settlement of Polovinkino in Starobelsk. According to Sputnik news agency, LPR intelligence sources reported that foreign mercenaries, armed with NATO-standard light weapons, have also been noticed in Trekhizbenka village in Slavyanoserbsk.

The Chief of the Staff of the LPR People’s Militia stressed that these facts once again confirm that the Ukrainian side is not going to have a peaceful dialogue in order to resolve the situation in Donbass, and rather would use any opportunity to destabilize it, trying to divert attention of Ukrainian people from numerous domestic problems.

In all disproportion to size and physical heft, WikiLeaks has managed to throw bombs of digital worth into various political processes with marked effect.  While its critics and detractors deny and attempt to dispel its influence, the authorities are still concerned.  So concerned, in fact, that they have attempted, over the years, to curb the reach and access to the website, and its chief publisher, Julian Assange.

Within these asymmetrical power relations between the publishing outfit and state actors lies Assange, assiduously engaged in activities that have already proven historical in value. They, in the main, have taken place without molestation from the Ecuadorean authorities who front as hosts for him in the London compound.

Hardly having the warmest set of relations with Washington, Ecuador has generally kept the issues it might have with Assange at arm’s length.  It was not a state of affairs that would last.  Assange has been particularly hot in the current US presidential campaign, with the release of email exchanges connected with the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s own emails and the latest Podesta files.

On Saturday, WikiLeaks released the contents of three speeches made by the Democratic nominee for the White House to Goldman Sachs.  Clinton was handsomely remunerated, a point that should permanently disable any notion about partiality in the context of regulating Wall Street and its more resilient demons.

Ever since the Clinton campaign started springing more leaks than a refugee vessel, its frazzled managers have been attempting to guard the content of those deliveries with fanatical, if misplaced dedication.  Inconsistencies and worries have been flagged, all of these available in email exchanges from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

This week, it became clear that other factors were at play, with Ecuador acknowledging that Assange’s internet access had been restricted.  The Ecuadorean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility found itself having to fend off suggestions that Washington had been breathing heavily down the neck of its officials.  The emphasis was, rather, on untrammelled sovereignty – the country, after all “does not cede to pressures from other countries”.

To that end, “Ecuador, exercising its sovereign right, has temporarily restricted access to part of its communications systems in its UK embassy.”[1]  The stance of not bowing to pressure was less than convincing given the prefacing comments noting how WikiLeaks had “in recent weeks […] published a wealth of documents, impacting the US election campaign.”  Furthermore, the country respected “the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” including “external electoral processes”.

WikiLeaks itself claimed that “multiple US sources” had informed it that US Secretary of State John Kerry “asked Ecuador to stop Assange from publishing Clinton docs during FARC peace negotiations.”[2]

The digital conflict has also thrown up desperate turns.  Podesta, whose political impotence in this has been near total, decided last week to take a rather vulgar approach against Assange. It came soon after his own Twitter account had been hacked to display a pro-Trump message.  “I bet the lobster risotto,” tweaked Podesta to Assange as he can be seen preparing the dish, “is better than the food at the Ecuadorean embassy.”[3]  The snappy response was immediate.  “Yes, we get it,” went WikiLeaks. “The elite eat better than the peasants they abuse.”

The digital war that has unfolded during the course of this presidential election is one for narrative and reality. The effort from the Clinton campaign to foil access, seek vengeance on the whistleblower, and draw Russia into the debate has reached maniacal proportions. Some on the Right of US politics have even gone so far as to grace WikiLeaks with their blessings, among them Rep. Jeff Duncan, who even thanked the divine for publisher’s work in frustrating the meek efforts of mainstream media.[4]

Another limb in the campaign that has unfolded in the last few days features efforts to remind the humble reader, and possessor, of stolen documents connected with WikiLeaks, how the intrusive arm of the law might well interfere.

Chris Cuomo of CNN got busy claiming with faux paternalism how “it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media.  So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” Keeping it mainstream; keeping it tepid; and most importantly, keeping it unreal.

That effort to control access and frame the means which such emails and data can be distributed flies in the face of US jurisprudence.  On several occasions in US legal history, courts have noted that the First Amendment protects both the media and the general public, including instances of distributing illegally obtained material.

In New York Times Co. v Sullivan, 376 U.S., 265-6 (1964), the bench laid heavy emphasis on the “persons who do not themselves have access to publishing facilities” as having equal entitlements to those who did.  In Bartinicki v Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001), privacy gave way to the interest in publishing matters of public importance, notwithstanding that the phone call intercepts in that case were obtained illegally, then distributed.

Even the less legally aware would note the case of New York Times Co. v United States, 403 U.S. 713, which famously disregarded the fact that the documents in question had been stolen by a third party. What mattered was the nature of the stolen documents’ character and consequences of public disclosure.

As the Clinton campaign emphasises the stolen character of the data in a hope of some miraculous rite of purification, WikiLeaks remains committed in refocusing attention on one of the least attractive contenders for the White House in US political history.  Substance does sometimes count more than form, and the messages are there to prove it.

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

Notes

Iraq’s volunteer forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) complained that the warplanes of the US-led coalition are allowing ISIL military convoys flee Mosul in Iraq’s Nineveh province to Syria without being harmed.

“Much surprised the ISIL convoys that have been escaping from Mosul to Syria have not come under attack by the coalition fighter jets,” a Hashd al-Shaabi source said.

He said that the ISIL is now confused in Mosul as the Iraqi security forces have gained a lot of information about the concentration centers of the terrorist group in Mosul.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi announced early on Monday that the country’s armed forces and popular troops had started large-scale operation to take back the ISIL’s self-proclaimed capital, Mosul.

Prime Minister Al-Abadi appeared on the state TV an hour after midnight to declare that his country’s army, security and mobilized volunteer troops have started the long-awaited offensive to take back the country’s second-largest city.

“The hour has come and the moment of great victory is near,” Al-Abadi said early on Monday in a speech on state TV, flanked by the armed forces’ top commanders.

Al-Abadi vowed that the military troops will take maximum caution to save civilian lives and avoid collateral damage in the city that is believed to still be home to over a million people.

The premier asked the civilian population to raise white flags over their buildings and contact the government troops for any kind of helpful information that they might have about ISIL militants.

“We urge you, the heroic people of Mosul, to cooperate with our security forces to rescue you,” the Prime Minister added.

Mosul in Nineveh province that is ISIL’s last stronghold in Iraq was occupied by the terrorist cult on June 10, 2014 and its liberation marks an era of demise for ISIL in Iraq.

Mosul was the first city taken by the terrorist group and it was there that ISIL Leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared his so-called caliphate on June 29, 2014.

ISIL could stretch control over 40 percent of Iraq after it took Mosul over two years ago, but now holds only 10 percent of the country after losing battles in such major cities as Beiji, Tikrit, Fallujah and Ramadi in the last one year.

Mosul is of paramount importance both to Iraq and the ISIL as it is in an oil-rich region close to the borders with Syria and Turkey, while it has been a regional trade hub for the last several centuries. In addition to smuggling crude stolen from the oil wells of Nineveh, ISIL also levied forceful taxes for various reasons from the over 1-million-strong population that is still believed to be living in the city. Loss of Mosul will inflict a major blow to the terrorist cult as it will lose a major source of its revenues.

Iraqi army troops and volunteer forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) had been deployed 15 kilometers from Mosul two days ago.

“The reconnaissance operation in Mosul ended; we are waiting for the operations to kick off,” Hashd al-Shaabi announced in a statement on Saturday.

Iraq’s military forces have been bringing in a large number of troops, weapons, ammunition, armored vehicles, personnel carriers, tanks and other types of military equipment in preparation for the operation for the last several weeks, but many military and state officials and popular forces’ commanders were slamming the US for pressurizing Baghdad to delay the operation for the last several months, a view that was even supported by US presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In his second televised debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump asked why the US has been hindering the operation for such a long time to give ISIL commanders and top brass to escape to Syria.

ISIL has also been preparing for the operation for the last several weeks. The terrorist group has reportedly used thousands of prisoners to dig a complicated network of tunnels and trenches around the city and filled the wide trench dug around the city with oil to put it on fire as it expects the city to go under siege by Iraq’s joint military troops. The terrorist group has opened multiple fronts to confront the government troops.

Meantime, many ISIL top commanders, including Al-Baghdadi himself and his deputies, as well as their family members have left the city for Raqqa, the terrorist cult’s second self-proclaimed capital.

Al-Baghdadi and his top aides left the city last week, while local sources in Nineveh disclosed on Sunday that the families of the ISIL terrorists that had left Mosul just arrived in the town of Merkedeh in Syria’s Hasaka province.

“The ISIL commanders, including al-Baghdadi, are escaping Mosul to Syria,” Iraqi Kurdistan Democrat Party’s media director Saeed Mamouziti said last week.

He said that al-Baghdadi has also ordered his followers to completely destroy Mosul if they are defeated in the war against Iraq’s joint military forces.

Later Mamouziti said that the ISIL militants were fleeing the city since the long-awaited large-scale operation to free Mosul was expected to be launched in the following days.

Meantime, local sources revealed that “ISIL commanders’ families, including over 25 foreign families, escorted by military convoys reached the town of Merkedeh” on Sunday.

Earlier on Sunday, local sources in Nineveh province disclosed that the ISIL has brought to a halt all activities of its security offices in the city of Mosul.

“The ISIL has recently issued a circular in Mosul city according to which all its offices will halt operation until further notice,” a local source said.

The source noted that the ISIL has already evacuated its security offices in several districts of Mosul in recent days, while many ISIL members seem confused to see the rush in their commanders’ actions.

The US has also been pressuring Baghdad to keep the Hashd Al-Shaabi away from the operation, but they are now deployed to the battlefield after Prime Minister al-Abadi, the commander-in-chief of Iraq’s armed forces, personally approved their participation in the Mosul operation last week.

The Iraqi media had earlier reported that the Mosul operations would start from several directions, the most important of which are al-Qayyara axis located 60 kilometers to the South of Mosul and Sahl Nineveh some 20 kilometers to the East of the city.

Until I viewed the video in the URL below, I had concluded from my time spent with Republicans that the Republican Party was more corrupt than the Democratic Party.  But after watching this 16 minute video report, which seems too much to be faked, the Democratic political establishment—not necessarily the Americans who vote Democrat—seem to be corrupt beyond the meaning of the word.  Make up your own mind.

Published on Oct 17, 2016

“In this explosive new video from Project Veritas Action a Democratic dirty tricks operative unwittingly provides a dark money trail to the DNC and Clinton campaign. The video documents violence at Trump rallies that is traced to the Clinton campaign and the DNC through a process called birddogging.”

This second video report purports to be based on reports by the NBC TV crew that filmed Hillary’s September 7 interview by Matt Lauer.

Lauer departed from the pre-agreed script, and the result was a meltdown by Hillary following the interview.

This 8 minute report confirms Secret Service agent Gary Byrne’s account of Hillary’s explosive, uncontrollable temper in his book Crisis of Character.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/06/28/ex-secret_service_agent_people_need_to_know_the_real_hillary_clinton_and_how_dangerous_she_is.html

If these reports are true, at this time of heightened tensions between Washington and the two other major nuclear powers, it would be extremely dangerous to have in the White House a person susceptible to uncontrollable rage, especially a person who would be staffed with neoconservative warmongers.

A vote for Hillary could be a vote for nuclear war and the end of life on earth.

A recommendable New York Times piece looks at the mostly hidden way the U.S. is now waging wars. The example is Somalia, where the U.S. has been at war with the people of that country for over 25 years. But, as the authors note, the same modus operandi applies elsewhere.

The Obama administration has intensified a clandestine war in Somalia over the past year, using Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies in an escalating campaign against Islamist militants in the anarchic Horn of Africa nation.

Would that “anarchic” nation Somalia still be “anarchic” if the U.S. would end its endless fighting there? That is very unlikely. Without outer interference Somalia would have been peaceful again many years ago. But the war continues, run not with regular U.S. forces, but with mercenaries, proxies, drones and a few U.S. Special Forces.

Somalia is an example of the “failed states” the U.S. now creates wherever it goes. A “failed state” then justifies further involvement. The “model” applies around the world:

The Somalia campaign is a blueprint for warfare that President Obama has embraced and will pass along to his successor. It is a model the United States now employs across the Middle East and North Africa — from Syria to Libya — despite the president’s stated aversion to American “boots on the ground” in the world’s war zones. This year alone, the United States has carried out airstrikes in seven countries and conducted Special Operations missions in many more.

Such wars are mostly “off the book”. Congressional oversight does not happen for them as the impact within the U.S. is too small. The media are practically excluded. The money comes out of secret CIA and special forces accounts or is shaken out of some friendly U.S. client state like Saudi Arabia. No one will find out what methods of force or “interrogation” are used and as those prisoners vanish in some local warlord’s dungeon, no one is likely to ever find out:

About 200 to 300 American Special Operations troops work with soldiers from Somalia and other African nations like Kenya and Uganda to carry out more than a half-dozen raids per month, according to senior American military officials. The operations are a combination of ground raids and drone strikes.

The Navy’s classified SEAL Team 6 has been heavily involved in many of these operations.

Once ground operations are complete, American troops working with Somali forces often interrogate prisoners at temporary screening facilities, including one in Puntland, a state in northern Somalia, before the detainees are transferred to more permanent Somali-run prisons, American military officials said.

Force is applied willy-nilly. It doesn’t matter much who gets hit or why. Lack of local knowledge, language and politics are the norm. No one ever gets punished for getting things wrong:

[A]n airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were American allies against the Shabab.Outraged Somali officials said the Americans had been duped by clan rivals and fed bad intelligence, laying bare the complexities of waging a shadow war in Somalia.

The responsibilities that legally come with warfare are handed off to private parties. The use of mercenaries prevents accountability:

At an old Russian fighter jet base in Baledogle, about 70 miles from the Somali capital, Mogadishu, American Marines and private contractors are working to build up a Somali military unit designed to combat the Shabab throughout the country.Soldiers for the military unit, called Danab, which means lightning in Somali, are recruited by employees of Bancroft Global Development, a Washington-based company that for years has worked with the State Department to train African Union troops and embed with them on military operations inside Somalia.

Michael Stock, the company’s founder, said the Danab recruits received initial training at a facility in Mogadishu before they were sent to Baledogle, where they go through months of training by the Marines. Bancroft advisers then accompany the Somali fighters on missions.

What the piece misses are the media measures – or propaganda – which accompanies all such U.S. campaigns. That is not unwittingly as the NYT is always an integral part of such campaigns. The usual justification is “terrorism” or the “moral” need to eliminate a “brutal regime”. The piece accordingly list a few alleged terrorism incidents with origin in Somalia to justify the massive, decades long uprooting of a whole country.

The scheme visible in Somalia is the same one that is applied in Libya, in Syria and in the Ukraine. The U.S. hires some group willing to wage war for a decent pay, lots of weapons and a chance to – may be – reach a lot of power for itself. It sends some mercenary company to “train” those forces, PR agencies get hired to provide the necessary media background, U.S. military forces are silently involved but only from far away via drones, or in mini special force formation that train and direct the local proxies.

The CIA is usually in the lead with the U.S. military providing firepower as needed. The State Department handles the diplomatic hurdles, pampers the proxies and so called allies and, together with the Treasury, generously applies devastating sanctions to bend the people to its will.

The methods are not dissimilar to those used during the last century mainly in south America. But the wars are now more open with more brute force applied.

The big question for the rest of the world is how such mostly hidden wars can be countered. They are very difficult to win by force on the ground. The U.S. will not change course because a few of its mercenaries get eliminated. The obvious answer is to increase the price the U.S. directly has to pay. The hurt must be painful enough to raise above the public negligence level that usually applies. Terrorism within the U.S. can and has been used. But I expect new, more subtle methods to be a part of the future answer. The cyber realm is ideal for asymmetric forces. A few knowledgeable fighters are sufficient. To counter them is difficult. The U.S. is probable the most sensitive target for cyber mayhem while the nations the U.S. attacks are mostly insensitive to such attacks.

No matter of what new ways of war the U.S. applies. Those attacked will always find ways to hit back.

The New York Times is so determined to generate hate against Russia that it has lost all journalistic perspective, even portraying Russia’s military decoys – like those used in World War II.

If the dangers weren’t so great – a possible nuclear war that could exterminate life on the planet – The New York Times over-the-top denunciation of all things Russian would be almost funny, like the recent front-page story finding something uniquely sinister about Russia using inflatable decoys of military weapons to confuse adversaries.

The Oct. 13 article, entitled “Decoys in Service of an Inflated Russian Might,” was described as part of a series called “DARK ARTS … How Russia projects power covertly,” suggesting that the nefarious Russians aren’t to be trusted in anything even in the case of “one of Russia’s lesser-known military threats: a growing arsenal of inflatable tanks, jets and missile launchers.”

The bizarre article by Andrew E. Kramer, one of the most prolific producers of this anti-Russian propaganda, then states: “As Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has muscled its way back onto the geopolitical stage, the Kremlin has employed a range of stealthy tactics. … One of the newer entries to that list is an updating of the Russian military’s longtime interest in operations of deceit and disguise, a repertoire of lethal tricks known as maskirovka, or masking. It is a psychological warfare doctrine that is becoming an increasingly critical element in the country’s geopolitical ambitions.”

What is particularly curious about Kramer’s article is that it takes actions that are typical of all militaries, going back centuries, and presents them as some special kind of evil attributable to the Russians, such as Special Forces units not dressing in official uniforms and instead blending in with the surroundings while creating deniability for political leaders.

American and European Special Forces, for instance, have been deployed on the ground in Libya and Syria without official confirmation, at least initially. Sometimes, their presence is acknowledged only after exposure because of casualties, such as the death of three French soldiers near Benghazi, Libya, in July.

Indeed, one could argue that the United States has excelled at this practice of stealthily entering other countries, usually in violation of international law, to carry out lethal operations, such as drone assassinations and Special Forces’ strikes. However, rather than condemning U.S. officials for their sneakiness, the Times and other mainstream Western publications often extol the secrecy of these acts and sometimes even agree to delay publication of information about the covert attacks so as not to jeopardize the lives of American soldiers.

The U.S. Propaganda Network

The U.S. government also has built extensive propaganda operations around the world that pump out all sorts of half-truths and disinformation to put U.S. adversaries on the defensive, with the American financial hand kept hidden so the public is more likely to trust the claims of supposedly independent voices.

For “Newsweek,” Putin is the “West’s public enemy number one.”

Much of that disinformation is then promoted by the Times, which famously assisted in one major set of lies by publishing a false 2002 front-page story about Iraq reconstituting its nuclear weapons program as a key justification for the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Yet, the Russians are called out for activities far less egregious than what the U.S. government – aided and abetted by the Times – has done.

You could even view the Times’ article citing inflatable weapons as proof of Moscow’s perfidy as itself an example of another U.S. psychological operation along the lines of the Times’ article accusing Iraq of obtaining aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges, when the tubes were actually unsuited for that purpose. In this new case, however, the Times is heating up a war fever against Russia rather than Iraq.

Yet, as in 2002, this current psy-op is not primarily aimed at a foreign adversary as much as it is targeting the American people. The primary difference is that in 2002, the Times was helping instigate war against a relatively small and defenseless nation in Iraq. Now, the Times is whipping up an hysteria against nuclear-armed Russia with the prospect that this manufactured outrage could induce politicians into further steps that could lead to nuclear conflagration.

As German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote in a recent opinion piece, the current tensions between Washington and Moscow are “more dangerous” than during the Cold War.

“It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War,” Steinmeier wrote. “The current times are different and more dangerous” because there were clear “red lines” during the Cold War where the rival nuclear powers knew not to tread.

Though Steinmeier, as a part of the NATO alliance, puts most of the blame on Moscow, the reality is that Washington has been the prime instigator of the recent tensions, including pressing NATO up to Russia’s borders, supporting an anti-Russian putsch in neighboring Ukraine, and helping to arm rebel groups fighting in Syria alongside Al Qaeda’s affiliate and threatening Russia’s allied Syrian government.

‘Regime Change’ in Moscow?

Further feeding Russia’s fears, prominent Americans, including at least one financed by the U.S. government, have called for a “regime change” project in Moscow. Yet all Americans hear about is the unproven allegation that Russia was responsible for hacking into Democratic Party emails and exposing information that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has tried to keep secret, such as the content of her speeches to Wall Street investment banks and other special interests.

Vice President Joe Biden has announced Washington will retaliate with some information-warfare strike against Moscow. But the reality is that the U.S. government, working hand-in-glove with the Times and other mainstream American publications, has been waging such an information war against Russia for at least the past several years, including promotion of dubious charges such as the so-called Magnitsky case which was largely debunked by a courageous documentary that has been virtually blacklisted in the supposedly “free” West.

The Times also has embraced the U.S. government’s version of pretty much every dubious claim lodged against Moscow, systematically excluding evidence that points in a different direction. For instance, regarding the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, the Times ignored a published Dutch (i.e. NATO) intelligence report stating that the only powerful anti-aircraft missiles in the area capable of hitting MH-17 were under the control of the Ukrainian military.

While it may be understandable that the Times opts to embrace claims by a Ukrainian-dominated investigation that the Russians were responsible – despite that inquiry’s evidentiary and logical shortcomings – it is not journalistically proper to ignore official evidence, such as the Dutch intelligence report, because it doesn’t go in the preferred direction. If the Times were not acting as a propaganda vehicle, it would at least have cited the Dutch intelligence report as one piece of the puzzle.

The Times’ relentless service as the chief conveyor belt for anti-Russian propaganda has drawn at least some objections from readers, although they are rarely acknowledged by the Times.

For instance, Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tried to lodge a protest with the Times’ editors about the “inflatable weapons” story.

In the email, a copy of which he forwarded to me, Postol wrote: “This article is a very good example of the misleading foreign policy reporting that has unfortunately become a hallmark of the New York Times. 

“The complete lack of sophistication of this article, coupled with the implication that the use of such decoys is somehow an indication of a Russian cultural bias towards deception is exactly the kind of misleading reporting that cannot possibly be explained as a competent attempt to inform Times readers about real and serious national security issues that we are today facing with Russia.”

Postol attached to his email a series of photographs showing decoys that were used by the Allies during the Battle of Britain and the D-Day invasion. He noted, “There is a vast popular literature about this kind of deception in warfare that is available to even the most unsophisticated nonexperts. It is simply unimaginable to me that such an article could be published in the Times, yet alone on the front page, if the oversight mechanisms at the Times were properly functioning.”

Postol, however, assumes that the editorial system of the Times wishes to provide genuine balance and context to such stories, when the pattern has clearly shown that – as with Iraq in 2002-2003 – the Times’ editors see their role as preparing the American people for war.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He currently writes for Consortiumnews, where this article first appeared.  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 West is feverishly seeking someone to blame for the catastrophic situation in the Middle East. Following on from John Kerry, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has announced his intention to request that the International Criminal Court investigate Russian «war crimes» in Syria. Hillary Clinton, a contender for the post of US president, is also known for her attempts to put Russia in the dock. During the second presidential TV debate with Donald Trump on 9 October, she stated she supported efforts to probe «war crimes committed by the Syrians and the Russians and try to hold them accountable.

So do we need to clarify, once again, who is to blame? Let’s try.

America’s ‘Greater Middle East’ strategy, which involves violently redrawing the political map of a vast region, has destroyed the states of Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen, and has led to an unprecedented surge in terrorism, a tremendous loss of human life, and a large influx of refugees to Europe.

But America does not want to take the blame for what it has done.

Ahead of the change of administration in America, US legislators have been trying to make Saudi Arabia primarily responsible for the spread of terrorism. On 28 September, the US Senate and the House of Representatives passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which entitles the relatives of US citizens killed in the 9/11 attacks to file lawsuits against Saudi Arabia and receive compensation.

Five days later, on 3 October, an article appeared in the Arab language newspaper Rai Al-Youm (published in London), written by its editor-in-chief Abdel Bari Atwan, that sheds light on which way the Arab world is leaning on the issue of who’s to blame.

A few words about the article’s author. Abdel Bari Atwan is the most prominent of today’s Arab journalists. The son of a refugee from Gaza, he was involved in the struggles of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) for a long time and was close to Yasser Arafat until they parted ways in 1993, when he disagreed with the hasty conclusion of peace with Israel. In the 1990s, he opposed UN sanctions against Iraq; not in defence of Saddam Hussein, however, but in defence of the rights and interests of the Iraqi people. In recent years, Atwan has written a great deal on the importance of establishing friendly relations between Sunni Arab states and Shi’ite Iran.

In his article, entitled «US law firms sharpening their knives for Saudi Arabia», Abdel Bari Atwan suggests how the Saudi authorities can oppose American blackmail. Here are his recommendations to Riyadh.

– Stop the senseless and bloody war in Yemen.

– Wind down its support of jihadist organisations in Syria.

– Take steps to normalise relations with Iran and Iraq.

– Seriously address the creation of an Arab lobby in the US (a pressing issue, since the Israel lobby in America is multilayered, works closely with the media and funds major research centres, while the Saudi lobbying effort is limited to banal bribery).

– Withdraw most of Saudi Arabia’s assets and investments from the US as soon as possible.

– Suspend all negotiations with Washington on an oil price agreement.

– Adopt measures allowing oil from the Persian gulf to be quoted in currencies other than US dollars (i.e. euro, yuan and roubles).

– File countersuits against the US through Muslim human rights organisations for war crimes committed in the Middle East between 2003 and the present day.

Abdel Bari Atwan says it is unlikely that the Saudi authorities will listen to him, but it seems as if the initiative has already struck a chord in other Arab countries. A group of Iraqi parliamentarians headed by Najeh al-Mizan has put forward a bill allowing Iraqi citizens to demand compensation from the US government for war crimes committed during the years of occupation (2003-2011) not just by the regular American army, but also contract soldiers from private military companies and ‘death squads’ set up using CIA money.

The outcome of America’s ‘presence’ in Iraq (or rather ‘the American genocide’) is truly horrifying. Even according to official (underestimated) data from the John Hopkins Institute, Americans and their accomplices killed 250,000 people (civilians) in Iraq during the occupation. According to Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, this figure (direct losses) is as much as 450,000 people. Added to the victims of US sanctions in the 1990s, the number of deaths is close to one million. Most of these were children. Nobody can accuse US academic Juan Cole of incompetence or lobbying – he is a world-renowned expert on the modern Middle East and South Asia, a specialist in the history of Iran and Arab countries, and the author of 14 academic monographs.

But that is only the direct losses. There is also the destruction of Iraq’s state institutions and its law enforcement, health and education systems as a result of the American occupation, and the disintegration of relations between ethnicities and faiths.

The repercussions of the ‘Iraqi holocaust’ carried out by the Americans will be felt for many years to come. Here are some figures from the Australian scientist Dr. Gideon Polya. During the years of the crisis, there were 7.7 million refugees in Iraq. Of these, 5 million were internally displaced persons and 2.7 million fled the country. These included the cream of Iraqi society: doctors, teachers, engineers, university professors and businessmen. During the first few years of the occupation, 2,200 doctors and nursers were killed in Iraq. As a consequence of America’s use of bombs with low-enriched uranium, the number of cancer patients in the country increased from 40 per 100,000 people (1990) to 1,500 per 100,000 people (2005). And as a result of the actions of the occupation forces and sectarian fighting, there are currently three million widows and five million orphans in the country. 1.5 million Iraqi children are undernourished.

The world has not forgotten about the war crimes committed by America in the Middle East. Sooner or later, the US will have to answer for these crimes, no matter what Hillary Clinton says.

(image) Professor Anthony Hall

The University of Lethbridge, Alberta has suspended Professor Anthony James Hall for allegedly promoting anti-Semitism and denying the Holocaust.

Professor Hall has taught liberal education and globalization studies as a distinguished scholar for some 26 years.

We are now joined by Dr. Hall himself to get his take on this.

Al-Nusra terrorists carry out public executions of local residents, trying to leave the eastern districts of Aleppo. The Russian General Staff is going to introduce a humanitarian pause in Aleppo on August 20.

The situation in Aleppo remains tense, as terrorists of the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (previously known as the Al-Nusra Front) group have intensified shelling of residential areas, the Russian General Staff said on October 17.

“The situation in Aleppo remains extremely difficult. The militants of the Nusra Front terrorist group, understanding that they are doomed, have intensified shelling of residential areas in western Aleppo,” chief of the Russian General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate, Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoy, told journalists in Moscow on Monday.

Rudskoy also added that terrorists carry out public executions of residents, who try to leave the eastern districts of Aleppo. He noted that the West ignores reports of civilian casualties in Syria and refuses to react to crimes of terrorists.

“These facts are ignored by the Western countries. They do not want to either record militants’ crimes, neither react to them,” Rudskoy said.

The Lieutenant General pointed out that shelling of civilian infrastructure by terrorists in Aleppo has killed more than 130 children since the beginning of September.

“Shelling of social objects such as schools, mosques, markets in western Aleppo by militants has become systematic. Thus, seven schoolchildren were killed in mortar shelling in the Sulaymaniyah district, while more than 130 children were killed by militants since the beginning of September,” he stressed.

Rudskoy said that Russia calls on “the terrorists’ leadership to demine routes of approach to the humanitarian corridors and give residents opportunity to leave eastern Aleppo.” He added that although airstrikes against supply routes and weapon convoys of terrorists are carried out by the Russian Aerospace Forces in Aleppo outskirts, the Russian side is ready to stop its airstrikes during a humanitarian pause, which would be introduced around the city from 08:00 am to 16:00 pm local time on August 20.

“Russian combat planes and Syrian government forces will not carry strikes during this period,” Rudskoy stressed.

He noted that two secure corridors could be used by terrorists in order to move from eastern Aleppo to Idlib.

The chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian General Staff also stressed the Russian side is ready to stop airstrikes in Aleppo at any time on request of humanitarian organizations and groups.

“Russia is willing to discuss any initiatives or proposals on resolving the crisis in Aleppo,” Rudskoy stressed.

War between US and Russia Could Be Sooner than Later. “The Danger of a Nuclear War”

By Joachim Hagopian, October 18 2016

Barely noticed in a virtual media blackout in the West are at least a half dozen high alert, significant international developments that all strongly indicate the extreme danger of a nuclear war breaking out at any time against Russia and its Eastern alliance.

Whether to Go to War Against Russia Is Top Issue in U.S. Presidential Race

By Eric Zuesse, October 18 2016

The United States government has already declared that in regards to what it alleges to be a Russian cyberattack against the U.S. Democratic Party, the U.S. reserves the right to go to war against Russia. NATO has accordingly changed its policy so as to assert that a cyberattack (in this case actually cyber-espionage, such as the U.S. government itself perpetrates against even its own allies such as Angela Merkel by tapping her phone) constitutes an act of war by the alleged cyberattacker, and so requires all NATO member nations to join any cyberattacked NATO nation in war against its alleged (cyber)attacker, if the cyberattacked member declares war against its alleged cyberattacker.

Canada Goes To War. Trudeau Postures For The UN

By Jim Miles, October 17 2016

Stephen Lewis, former socialist NDP leader from Canada’s province of Ontario was asked about PM Justin Trudeau’s letter to the UN asking for a special General Assembly meeting, as reported by the CBC yesterday: The Canadian Mission to the United Nations has submitted a rare request asking the president of the General Assembly for a meeting of all 193 member states to “explore concerted action to apply pressure on the parties of the violence [in Syria],” now in its sixth year. He commented that “war crimes are being committed by Russia” but hopefully that “Russia may at some point be forced to reconsider,” its position.

Washington and London Call for Yemen “Ceasefire” amid Escalation Of U.S. Bombings… Dangerous Crossroads in Syria and Iraq

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 18 2016

A new proposal for the cessation of hostilities in Yemen was announced on October 16 amid an escalation in United States bombing operations against the most impoverished nation in the Middle East. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and United Nations envoy to Yemen, Ould Cheikh Ahmed of Mauritania, issued the call during a break from discussions in London centered on the current situation in Syria.

The Real Humanitarian Crisis Is Not Aleppo. The Crisis is Washington Loosing its ISIS Mercenaries

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, October 18 2016

Why do we hear only of the “humanitarian crisis in Aleppo” and not of the humanitarian crisis everywhere else in Syria where the evil that rules in Washington has unleashed its ISIL mercenaries to slaughter the Syrian people?  Why do we not hear about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where the US and its Saudi Arabian vassal are slaughtering Yemeni women and children?  Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Libya where Washington destroyed a country leaving chaos in its place?  Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, ongoing now for 13 years, or the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan now 15 years old? The answer is that the crisis in Aleppo is the crisis of Washington losing its ISIL mercenaries to the Syrian army and Russian air force.

Toxic Mind Control Contaminates The Public Sphere

By Mark Taliano, October 17 2016

We are living in a society where dangerous political ignorance prevails, and truth is subordinated. “Forbidden truths” are concealed beneath the protective cover of a growing array of taboos. The taboos protect the criminal warmongers and the oligarch class, as they corrode peace, equality, freedom, and prosperity.

Right now the US mainstream media is obsessing over Donald’s alleged womanizing and female groping soap opera as the Clinton’s/MSM’s pruriently entertaining smokescreen, neatly designed to cover up Hillary/Bill’s serial raping and her criminal lead role as enabler/strong armed intimidator of past victims.

Meanwhile, barely noticed in a virtual media blackout in the West are at least a half dozen high alert, significant international developments this last weekend that all strongly indicate the extreme danger of a nuclear war breaking out at any time against Russia and its Eastern alliance. Again, do not pay attention to the US deceivers behind their Oz-like curtain and their frenzied pushing of Western propaganda machine levers as sleight of hand distraction to willfully withhold the fact that many unreported major world events are simultaneously occurring now that foretell the start of World War III potentially just days away.

The current threat level to every human life on this planet even surpasses the October Cuban Missile Crisis of 54 years ago as the earth today is in more peril by manmade destruction than any previous time in human history. Yet the neocon madness of Obama, Hillary and their MSM minions do not want Americans to know this dire truth that the US is rapidly moving to very likely execute a series of false flags that could ignite a global war between US-NATO and the Eastern powers: Russia, China and Iran.

And based on alarming rapid fire events, it could even begin prior to the scheduled November 8th presidential election just three weeks away. Make no mistake – that perfect storm of destabilizing developments triggering WWIII, the global economy crash and possible martial law timed with the US presidential election that many independent journalists like myself have been writing about for months is unfolding right this very moment.

Here are just a few of these disturbing breaking news events and anomalies that are currently unfolding over this last weekend that are conspicuously missing in action from all MSM headlines:

FAA issues no fly zone over parts of Montana

Per the FAA on Saturday a no fly zone went into effect for most of the day from 3PM to midnight over selected parts of the state of Montana.

The FAA claimed that US military rockets were being launched in connection with “space operations” yet the only missiles in Montana are nuclear armed warhead missiles. According to NewsPrepper.com, the missile silos in Montana are armed with Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRV’s) and each MIRV contains a 100 kiloton nuclear warhead. Within a half hour after launch, each single rocket is capable of destroying eight cities anywhere on earth.

The real question is what was the government actually up to on Saturday with nuclear missiles in Montana?

Source: Nuclear Archive

Buildup of US military planes and ships on Diego Garcia Island

Last Friday isn this remote US military outpost on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean (see image below), a US military private contractor who cycles through every nine days working on the island for ongoing maintenance of military hardware reported an enormous, unprecedented buildup of US Air Force bombers – both B-1’s and B-2’s. Some were painted flat black. On a related note, this past week the US Air Force was caught dressing up its warplanes disguised as Russian aircraft that would likely be used in false flag operations to blame Russia for aggression it didn’t commit. The civilian contractor on Diego Garcia stated that far more activity was witnessed than any time prior in the 9 years he’s been on the job there. He reports that under the tightest security the government has blocked off access roads and that so many warplanes have been assembled on the island that aircraft are now being parked on blocked off roads.

A count of over a dozen refueling tankers were sighted and flights were taking off on the average of every 15 minutes. He also observes the tent city that sprang up includes temporary barracks and hangars for both US Air Force and Navy personnel. His ex-Air Force coworker speculated that the ultra-tight security and sudden influx of so much activity is characteristic of top secret nuclear weapons movement. Speaking of which, the eyewitness also noticed that 6-8 US Navy vessels were offshore and the island docks were busily unloading countless pallets of bombs. Obviously sneaky Obama is up to something very big against his targeted cold war enemies potentially including nuclear powered Russia and China.

DEFCON Level 3 warning

Even the Sunday edition of the British rag the Daily Star ran the headline “US nuclear attack warning ‘upgraded to level 3’ as Russian threat goes ‘beyond Cold War.’” Though midway through the article the Star quietly backtracks from its sensational headline claiming the US government has not officially released any public notice that the US is currently on DEFCON level 3, it references its “breaking news” headline based on the “conspiracy theory” website defconwarningsystem.com.

In any event, only three previous times in US history has Washington issued a DEFCON level 3 warning as its official nuclear war alert index, the last time being on 9/11. This particular level on the Chiefs of Staff developed “defense readiness condition” entails a nuclear attack readiness that the US Air Force is prepared to mobilize a nuclear strike within a 15 minute period. Level 3 also calls for the federal plan to take immediate effect that will maintain continuity of government services in response to imminent threat of any national emergency or crisis. Though true to form, the most secretive US president in history – Barack Obama and his neocons – are choosing to not publicly disclose this level 3 grave danger facing the American people, admitting the US is on the brink of nuclear war against Russia. For many years now the powers-that-shouldn’t-be have been secretly preparing for this nuclear showdown moment.

The five-level alert system ranges from level 5 at no threat at all to level 1 which is all-out nuclear war within the hour. Despite Washington’s official non-disclosure, a reasonable chance exists that we could be headed toward level 2, signifying an urgent readiness to deploy an armed attack within six hours in what would most likely amount to a nuclear exchange with one or more adversaries (Russia and China), resulting in mutually assured destruction (MAD) that’s long been an integral part of US national security policy and strategic military doctrine. During the first cold war MAD prevented either side from pushing the nuke button due to the principle of deterrence motivating both parties to not dare engage in such insanely suicidal behavior. However, the puppet masters and their neocon lunatics presently calling the shots are operating from a deluded sense of false security believing that when safely cloistered in their luxurious underground bunkers, they’re capable of surviving a nuclear holocaust at the earth’s surface.

Last Friday Obama met with foreign policy advisors on the Syrian crisis

Obama met last Friday with his top security advisors to assess and weigh all his military and non-military options in Syria and beyond. Clearly with all the unprecedented activity noted just since this meeting, the chronically weak leader who’s been our commander-in-chief the last eight years is racing against election time heavily influenced by his hawkish, “preemptive strike” neocons to rewrite his legacy. Putin. Keep in mind Barack Hussein Obama’s been the Manchurian puppet president who’s dutifully followed his globalist masters’ marching orders to destroy America to the T. So the big question remains is he planning to defy Russian warnings and attack Assad forces like he sneakily did on September 17th and thereby initiate war directly against Russia? By what has been happening over the weekend, it appears he just might.

CIA coordinating cyberattacks on Russia

No doubt also high on Obama’s meeting agenda last Friday is the covert cyber operation against Russia. As part of US retaliation for Putin allegedly hacking into DNC and Clinton emails while trying to change the election outcome in favor of Trump, all unsubstantiated deep state lies, MSM presstitute NBC News just reported that the CIA is coordinating the launching of cyberattacks against Russia. All the major powers engage in hacking and cyber warfare, so really there’s nothing much new here other than efforts to derail Russian intelligence apparatus and economic infrastructure is at its height right now.

This tit for tat game Empire’s playing now is serious risky business. Repercussions may have a boomerang effect manifesting as either a false flag or real cyber security breaches that could wreak havoc with US military and economic infrastructure. One morning we may wake up and not be able to withdraw cash from our local ATM or even pump gas. Or if asymmetrical warfare escalates to EMP attack, we may find ourselves without electricity for months, which within the first year is estimated to result in the death of 90% of the American population. The stakes are only growing higher yet our despots in charge appear to be throwing all caution to the wind. But then if their eugenics plan calls for 90% of us to be dead, it readily explains their reckless, homicidal behavior given both the means and motive.

US at war now in Yemen and signs of escalating violence and conflict at other global hotspots

This week’s aggression in Yemen by US Navy destroyers firing cruise missiles on Yemen soil can easily be construed as yet another clear, premeditated act of war against both Yemen as well as its fellow Shiite ally Iran.

Again without confirming any evidence of truth behind its claim, a highly deceitful US insists that Houthi rebels fired a missile twice during this past week at a Navy destroyer. Hence five missiles were launched by the destroyers at alleged Houthi radar stations.

It’s no accident or random event that the Ukraine conflict is also heating up now. This week a helicopter with NATO military instructors onboard was shot down by Donetsk freedom fighters. With freshly supplied new heavy weapons and even American snipers, the US puppet government in Kiev launched another offensive into the Donetsk People’s Republic with heavy mortar shelling. The US is stepping up its hostilities globally on all hotspot fronts in its apparent launch of this century’s world war.

As yet another further sign of the West’s plan to wage global war against Eastern powers, a Sunday FARS News Agency article is reporting that based on recent WikiLeaks released emails sent to Hillary, Israel has entertained designs in its warming of relations with the House of Saud to use a Saudi airbase from which Israeli air force jets can be deployed for purposes of attacking Iran. The article also mentioned in a related matter that The New York Times in 2010 disclosed that Saudi Arabia was prepared to give its air force stand down orders so that Israeli warplanes could safely pass through Saudi airspace to enable Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear and military facilities.

Multi-modal Information war propaganda

At the same time that NBC discloses the CIA hack-attack plan, messenger boy Biden makes his NBC appearance to further deliver the message to both America and Putin on Meet the Press. These so called countermeasures against fabricated Putin aggression are being carried out in a multitude of ways, just one being through recklessly blunt, sabre rattling threats recently uttered by members of both the State and Defense Departments.

Of course another old oft-used Empire standby is to engage in economic terrorism through such Empire vassal appendages as the UN and EU. The UK represented by warmongering Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and his sniveling US counterpart Kerry just met in London to discuss the latest round of ante upping economic sanctions against both Syria and Russia for their alleged “misconduct in Aleppo.” Again they’re hypocritically hiding behind their worn out phony humanitarian excuses when in fact it’s Putin and Assad who are doing the world the favor of wiping out their US supported terrorists. In perhaps the most provocative development leading to the West’s war against Russia, as the #1 US lackey last week the UK has given its fighter jet pilots in the Royal Air Force the greenlight to fire upon Russian aircraft in Syria.

Meanwhile the criminal cabal in Washington says nothing when those same terrorists they’re backing are shelling and killing civilians daily in western Aleppo. Last Thursday five children were killed in a bombed out school. Nor do they squawk when their terrorists are repeatedly using chemical weapons on Syrian people. Just two months ago in Aleppo five civilians were asphyxiated to death. Remember Obama’s self-righteous faked redline in August 2013 after his terrorists killed all those children in Ghouta? Or when every day Saudi jets are committing horrific war crimes of the century on the innocent civilians of Yemen 10,000 victims later. Instead of acknowledging humanitarian responsibility to protect the innocent in the poorest nation in the Middle East, the US Empire has now directly entered that war with recent missile attacks killing more Yemenis. Empire’s egregious criminality cannot be ignored.

Vice President Biden on NBC’s Meet the Press: Obama is threatening Putin with nuclear war

But the latest smugly delivered message to Putin of the ominous nuclear Armageddon comes out of the mouth of his VP Joe Biden on Sunday’s Meet the Press interview. The last question asked was what is Obama doing about Putin tampering with the US election outcome? A clear US lie without any supporting evidence thus far. Though Biden danced around the issue with a nebulous innuendo reply that career politicians are notorious for, he alluded that Obama is sending Putin an implicit threat. According to highly astute historian and geopolitical writer Eric Zuesse’s deciphered interpretation, that threat is the nuclear war that Putin and the Russians are now taking very seriously.

Hillary has repeatedly made war against both Russia and Iran her top priority imperative.  On the other hand, Trump has made it clear that he would work with Putin as a partner to eradicate the scourge of the terrorists worldwide. And without the terrorists, no more war on terror, no more terrorism, no more reason for making draconian laws in the name of national security that kill what’s left of our mortally wounded Constitution, and as an ally of Putin who dislikes globalism as much as terrorism, no more reason for one world government tyranny. Bearing this in mind, it’s very easy to see why Obama and Hillary are so gung ho and determined to risk all our lives for their NWO cause.

Saturday’s 20 nation meeting over Syria ends without agreement

Syrian talks in Lausanne, Switzerland involving 20 nations ended with zero agreement reached (other than be open to meeting at an undisclosed hypothetical future time). US et al versus Russia et al are deadlocked completely at odds with each other as US Empire is unwilling to pursue diplomatic channels with Russia to prevent the larger war. The US led coalition airstrike on Syrian soldiers last month proved that much in reality. At this point Russia does not trust the West and for good reason.

Russia’s preparedness for nuclear war

In response to the cold war approaching the boiling point in recent weeks, and in total contrast to America, Russia has been busy preparing its citizens for potential nuclear war. Moscow ordered all Russian citizens, diplomats and students traveling, working or studying abroad to immediately return home. Members of Russia’s diplomatic corps were threatened with reprimands and career demotions should they refuse to comply with the Kremlin directive. Additionally 40 million Russian citizens, that’s near one-third of the nation’s total population, just completed an unprecedented massive nuclear war defense drill. Also unlike the US, Moscow has built underground facilities for housing its 12 million residents under the capital city for safe refuge. Again unlike America, Russia is taking the extreme threat of nuclear war with the West very seriously. Even MSM fixture ABC News ran a story how Russians have been preparing for a nuclear winter outcome. In stark contrast, outside of Putin bashing and the election sideshow, neither Washington nor its propaganda whores in the press have alerted Americans that they are currently in grave danger. In fact it’s been an MSM news blackout while Russian media has told its citizens that nuclear war is “imminent.” Meanwhile as another sign that Putin means business, in response to NATO’s nuclear missiles activated in Romania and Poland, Putin has ordered at the ready his nuclear capable missiles in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between NATO members Poland and Lithuania.

“The Russians are Coming” Propaganda Ploy: Alleged “Russian Invasion” of US by way of Alaska

Britain’s tabloid the Daily Star (quoted by The Inquisitr) has run an October 16th headline “The Russians Are Coming”, Says Ex-Navy Leader: World War 3 Will Start with Alaska Invasion.”

Inquisitr Headlines (October 15, 2016)

No doubt, the anonymous source to the “Russians Are Coming” story published by the Daily Star is but part of the Clinton-Obama propaganda blitzkrieg falsely blaming Putin for everything gone wrong in this world as yet more propaganda used to justify a US war against Russia. That said, according to the Inquisitr article, the unnamed “high-ranking former US Navy official” warned that an unprotected part of America’s largest state Alaska with its closest point separating America from Russia just 50 miles, has been Putin’s planned designated target where Russian submarines will secure an invasion of our 50th state and proceed southward to the continental US. The former naval officer stated:

Our feeling in the Navy was that Obama had turned Alaska into a defenseless area that will serve as a forward base of operations when World War III begins.

The tabloid propaganda article quoting an unidentified former naval officer as the leaked source also claimed that Russian soldiers disguised in Alaska as “highway road crews” have been literally laying the groundwork for the invasion and will be used to secure bridges and disrupt communications during the invasion. The article goes on to report that other unnamed sources have independently also laid claim that Russians have been moving into the local area and living in abandoned motels and military bases.

Conclusion

The bottom line is the West and their terrorist allies are losing the war in Syria. The battle for Aleppo is being won as the Syrian Arab Army is making headway in the eastern part of Syria’s second largest city. Not only is the legitimate president of Syria – Bashar al-Assad – going to remain in power, but the US wet dream of a no fly zone under US control is not in the cards either. Putin has checkmated the neocon traitors by deploying his advanced S-400 and S-300 anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense systems vowing to shoot down any unidentified airplanes in the skies over Syria. The trained Syrians will be the ones pulling the trigger.

The US is realizing its longtime investment in terrorists and terrorism is being lost as Raqqa will be the final ISIS stronghold to be vanquished once Aleppo is liberated. Another second largest city in a neighboring country, Mosul will also be next, won back by Iraqi forces. The terrorists and their Western and Gulf State backers are going down in defeat. Knowing that US Empire’s run as the unipolar hegemonic kingpin of the world is rapidly fading, DC crazies are now acting out aggressively with wild abandon. Hopefully they’re not so deranged to push the button.

The most fitting metaphor for the current geopolitics chessboard drama being played out in Syria is the neighborhood bully who for years always has had his way browbeating and terrorizing his smaller neighbors into submission.

But one day the bully finally meets his match – a worthy challenger willing to stand up and fight the bully once and for all. Always having bragged about his strength and power over everyone else through his frequent show of force, which he has brutally and repeatedly demonstrated, ultimately the bully is now having second thoughts, having to face reality that his stealth and strength cannot match his false bravado.

The bully realizes that he can’t actually beat his worthy challenger who has been able to outsmart and outfox him. Since the bully knows that the jig is up, he is fast running out of options. Unable to face the public humiliation of being exposed as the weaker, finally dethroned opponent, the bully is becoming increasingly agitated, mentally unstable and desperate.

Before whimpering away in defeat, the bully decides to throw one final but huge tantrum as his last defining moment as the king of the hill, exercising all his power and intimidation, he threatens to kill everyone in the neighborhood. This is what’s going on right now, the world bully – the United States Empire – is finally receiving his comeuppance. But the only problem is the mentally deranged bully possesses WMD’s that can in fact destroy the entire global village.  Since he knows his days as top dog are over and he feels he has nothing left to lose since he’s going down anyway, will the bully follow through on his threat to bring down the entire planet with him? That’s the big question.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at: http://empireexposed.blogspot.co

Original Bashir interview that contradicts Washington’s account of killing bin Laden

A website in the UK, themindrenewed.com, that downloaded the video from the link in my original report of the Pakistani TV interview with Mohammad Bashir has posted the interview with the original English subtitles. You can view it here:

..

This interview of an eyewitness to the entire event is powerful evidence that the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden and his burial at sea is a hoax and a lie. Pakistani Samaa TV confirms that Bashir is who he says he is and that he lives next to the alleged bin Laden compound. Samaa TV also confirms that neighbors knew the residents of the “compound.” There has never been any mention of the Bashir interview in the presstitute media.

http://themindrenewed.com/interviews/2013/334-int-32 ^[2]

Published on Oct 16, 2013

Mohammad Bashir, Abbottabad resident and neighbour to the alleged “compound” of Osama bin Laden, gives his eyewitness account of what he saw happen on 2 May 2011 (local time), when – according to the official story – US Navy SEALs assassinated Osama bin Laden. In this interview, soon after the event, with a Pakistan national TV station (Samaa.tv), Bashir gives an account which fundamentally contradicts the official story.



For a transcript of the interview, please see: http://paulcraigroberts.org/2013/09/16/pakistani-national-tv-reveals-that-obamas-claim-to-have-killed-osama-bin-laden-is-an-american-hoax-paul-craig-roberts/



For a detailed interview with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary to the US Treasury for Economic Policy, who obtained the translation, please see: www.themindrenewed.com ^[3]

This video is being made public for the purposes of education. It provides documentary evidence with respect to the transcript and interview mentioned above; it is thus posted here in the spirit of Fair Use.

Massimo Mazzucco’s 9/11 Documentary

The extraordinary 5-hour film by Massimo Mazzucco exposing the 9/11 official explanation is now available (see below). Information and documentation continue to pile up that 21st century history is largely an orchestrated disinformation event.

Review of “September 11 – The New Pearl Harbor.”  A documentary by Massimo Mazzucco.

by David Ray Griffin

There have been several good films and videos about 9/11. But the new film by award-winning film-maker Massimo Mazzucco is in a class by itself.

For those of us who have been working on 9/11 for a long time, this is the film we have been waiting for.

Whereas there are excellent films treating the falsity of particular parts of the official account, such as the Twin Towers or WTC 7, Mazzucco has given us a comprehensive documentary treatment of 9/11, dealing with virtually all of the issues.

There have, of course, been films that treated the fictional official story as true. And there are films that use fictional stories to portray people’s struggles after starting to suspect the official story to be false.

But there is no fiction in Mazzucco’s film – except in the sense that it clearly and relentlessly exposes every part of the official account as fictional.

Because of his intent at completeness, Mazzucco has given us a 5-hour film. It is so fascinating and fast-paced that many will want to watch it in one sitting. But this is not necessary, as the film, which fills 3 DVDs, consists of 7 parts, each of which is divided into many short chapters.

These 7 parts treat Air Defence, The Hijackers, The Airplanes, The Pentagon, Flight 93, The Twin Towers, and Building 7. In each part, after presenting facts that contradict the official story, Mazzucco deals with the claims of the debunkers (meaning those who try to debunk the evidence provided by the 9/11 research community).

The Introduction, reflecting the film’s title, deals with 12 uncanny parallels between Pearl Harbor and September 11.

The film can educate people who know nothing about 9/11 (beyond the official story), those with a moderate amount of knowledge about the various problems with the official story, and even by experts. (I myself learned many things.)

Mazzucco points out that his film covers 12 years of public debate about 9/11. People who have been promoting 9/11 truth for many of these years will see that their labors have been well-rewarded: There is now a high-quality, carefully-documented film that dramatically shows the official story about 9/11 to be a fabrication through and through.

This is truly the film we have been waiting for.

Availability: The film is freely available to the world at:

1. The film-maker’s own website, complete with detailed index:
http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=167 ^[4]

2. On YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1GCeuSr3Mk (Preview)  ^[5]

A new proposal for the cessation of hostilities in Yemen was announced on October 16 amid an escalation in United States bombing operations against the most impoverished nation in the Middle East.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and United Nations envoy to Yemen, Ould Cheikh Ahmed of Mauritania, issued the call during a break from discussions in London centered on the current situation in Syria.

Kerry told the international press that

“We are not calling for this in a vacuum. There have been communications to both the Houthi through various intermediaries as well as to [Yemeni] President [Mansour] Hadi, respectful of his position, but this is the time to implement a cease-fire unconditionally and to move to the negotiating table. We cannot emphasize enough today the urgency of ending the violence in Yemen, of providing for an opportunity for a political settlement, which is the only way it will be ultimately resolved.” (Al Manar, Oct. 17)

In response to the failure of Washington’s policy in Yemen where in the aftermath of the withdrawal of diplomatic personnel and Special Forces in March 2015, the Saudi Arabian and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) coalition launched an aerial campaign and ground conflict which lead to the deaths of approximately 10,000 people, the injuring of tens of thousands more and the displacement of several million. President Barack Obama’s administration has sold $110 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia in addition to authorizing the use of U.S. manufactured warplanes, bombs, intelligence coordination and refueling technology which created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world today.

The Saudi-GCC Coalition claims that it is assisting the “legitimate” government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi which was ousted by an alliance of Yemeni forces including the Ansurallah (Houthis) working in conjunction with military units still loyal to the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Ansurallah is said to be assisted politically by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Opening a broader phase of the war, a U.S. Navy Destroyer admitted to firing tomahawk missiles aimed at disabling radar sites controlled by the Ansurallah on October 12. These actions and subsequent hostile military operations are heightening tensions throughout the entire region. Ansurallah leaders have denied firing missiles at US Navy Destroyers contradicting the Pentagon claims.

The Guardian newspaper in London reported on the Pentagon attacks warning of a potentially deeper quagmire on the part of the U.S. Although this is by no means the first attacks by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against people deemed as terrorists in Yemen, the character of the recent strikes will inevitably prompt widespread resentment against the Obama administration turning U.S. war machinery and its allies into compelling military targets.

Spencer Ackerman of New York wrote in the Guardian saying “While the U.S. has conducted lethal attacks in Yemen against al-Qaida forces throughout Obama’s presidency, killing civilians as well as U.S. nationals, Wednesday’s (Oct. 12) reprisal strikes were Washington’s first against the Houthis. They raised the prospect of deeper U.S. involvement in what many in the region and Washington see as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Houthi missiles have also struck deeper into Saudi Arabia and on Monday were reported to have struck the Taif airbase near Mecca.” (Oct. 12)

Washington and London Seeking to Delay a Total Collapse of Syrian Policy 

This announcement by the governments of Obama and Theresa Mays in Britain as it relates to Yemen comes amid the intensification of the conflict in Syria. The Obama administration and its allies are still committed to the overthrow of the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

Pentagon forces bombed a Syrian military base in the east of the country on September 17 killing over 60 soldiers and wounding many others. Although the Obama administration expressed regret at the attacks saying it was actually targeting Islamic State fighters operating in the area, this explanation was rejected by the Syrian and Russian governments.

Moscow is supporting the government in Damascus having been engaged in carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State fighters since the latter months of 2015. Despite Russian involvement and the diplomatic discussions between Kerry and his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the last several months, relations are continuing to deteriorate.

Samantha Powers, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, walked out of a Security Council meeting convened at the request of Russian envoy Vitaly Churkin to discuss the bombing of Syrian troops in Deir al-Zour. Since September the diplomatic efforts to end the war in Syria through the development of a comprehensive political agreement remains at a standstill.

With respect to the U.S. strikes, the New York Times reported

“The attack went on for about 20 minutes, with the planes destroying the vehicles and gunning down dozens of people in the open desert, the official said. Shortly after this, an urgent call came into the American military command center in Qatar, the outpost in the Persian Gulf that coordinates the aerial campaign in Syria and Iraq. The call was from a Russian official who said that the American planes were bombing Syrian troops and that the strike should immediately be called off. The Centcom official said the attack was halted within minutes, but not until dozens had been killed.” (Sept. 17)

An escalating conflict in Yemen which would require intensified offshore and aerial bombardments by Washington can only complicate matters further in the Middle East. With the national elections for president and numerous congressional seats at stake, the administration is obviously concerned about its image as the source of instability and displacement throughout the region.

Consequently, almost no information on the events in Syria and Yemen are placed in any significant manner before the people in the U.S. The outcome of the November 8 poll seems irrelevant as it relates to foreign policy in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are strategic waterways connecting the Arabian Peninsula with the Horn of Africa. Both geo-political areas are being subjected to growing militarization at the aegis of Washington.

Compounding tensions in the region is the beginning of military efforts to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul which began on October 17. Mosul is the second largest city in Iraq and a protracted battle to reclaim the city by the Iraqi army could result in monumental casualties and displacement.

The Associated Press reported on the situation saying

“though some troops were less than 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Mosul’s edges, it was unclear how long it would take to reach the city itself, where more than 1 million people still live. Aid groups have warned of a mass exodus of civilians that could overwhelm refugee camps.”

This same report goes on to note that

“Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul fell to IS in the summer of 2014 as the militants swept over much of the country’s north and central areas. Weeks later the head of the extremist group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the formation of a self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque.”

The situation in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia are a direct result of imperialist interventions by Washington, NATO and its surrogates in the region. These military campaigns have created the most dreadful refugee, migrant and humanitarian crises since the conclusion of the Second World War.

As has been widely reported, in 2013 Hillary Clinton was paid $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs. 

One was delivered on June 4, 2013 at the 2013 IBD CEO Annual Conference at The Inn at Palmetto Bluff in South Carolina, a second one took place on October 24, 2013 at the Goldman Sachs Asset Management AIMS Alternative Investment Symposium, and the last one was delivered on October 29, 2013 at the Goldman Sachs builders and innovators summit.

The speech transcripts, in their entirety, were revealed for the first time in an email from Tony Carrk, research director at Hillary for America, in an email dated January 23, 2016, and disclosed to the public for the first time ever during today’s latest Wikileak of Podesta emails.

In the email Carrk says:

The 3 (I misspoke about 5 earlier) speeches to Goldman are attached with
some parts highlighted. Below are some of the more noteworthy quotes.

The highlights Carrk refers to are the following:

In the first excerpt Hillary Clinton (rightfully) mocks Dodd Frank as nothing but a political contrivance which was created solely for political reasons as “there was also a need to do something because for political reasons.” To wit: “*Clinton Said, With Dodd-Frank, There Was “A Need To Do Something Because For Political Reasons” Because Members Of Congress “Can’t Sit Idly By And Do Nothing.”

“And with political people, again, I would say the same thing, you know, there was a lot of complaining about Dodd-Frank, but there was also a need to do something because for political reasons, if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it’s all the fault of Wall Street, you can’t sit idly by and do nothing, but what you do is really important.” [GS2, 10/24/13]

* * *

In the second highlighted excerpt, Tim O’Neill, Global Co-Head of the Investment Management Division, thanks Hillary for her “continued involvement in the issues (inaudible) to be courageous in some respects to associated with Wall Street and this environment” and then thanks her “very much.”

*Tim O’Neill Told Clinton “We Really Did Appreciate It” When She Had Been “Courageous In Some Respects To Associated With Wall Street And This Environment.” 

“MR. O’NEILL: By the way, we really did appreciate when you were the senator from New York and your continued involvement in the issues (inaudible) to be courageous in some respects to associated with Wall Street and this environment. Thank you very much. SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I don’t feel particularly courageous. I mean, if we’re going to be an effective, efficient economy, we need to have all part of that engine running well, and that includes Wall Street and Main Street. And there’s a big disconnect and a lot of confusion right now. So I’m not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers, but I am interested in trying to figure out how we come together to chart a better way forward and one that will restore confidence in, you know, small and medium-size businesses and consumers and begin to chip away at the unemployment rate. So it’s something that I, you know, if you’re a realist, you know that people have different roles to play in politics, economics, and this is an important role, but I do think that there has to be an understanding of how what happens here on Wall Street has such broad consequences not just for the domestic but the global economy, so more thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don’t kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here.” [GS2, 10/24/13]

* * *

In a third noted excerpt, Clinton pitches the idea that the best regulation of Wall Street is self-regulation because “the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”

*Speaking About Financial Regulations, Clinton Said “The People That Know The Industry Better Than Anybody Are The People Who Work In The Industry.” 

“There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” [GS2, 10/24/13]

* * *

In a fourth excerpt, Hillary admits she had “great relations and worked so close together” with Wall Street and has “a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it.”

*Clinton Said “I Represented All Of You For Eight Years. I Had Great Relations And Worked So Close Together After 9/11 To Rebuild Downtown.” 

*“I represented all of you for eight years. I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown, and a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it, but I do — I think that when we talk about the regulators and the politicians, the economic consequences of bad decisions back in ’08, you know, were devastating, and they had repercussions throughout the world.” [GS2, 10/24/13]

The fifth and final highlighted excerpt blames banks’ unwillingness to “do what they need to do” due to fear of regulations, the same regulations which in the same speech she said should be left to Wall Street.

*Clinton Said “Banks Are Not Doing What They Need To Do Because They’re Scared Of Regulations, They’re Scared Of The Other Shoe Dropping.”

*“I mean, right now, there are so many places in our country where the banks are not doing what they need to do because they’re scared of regulations, they’re scared of the other shoe dropping, they’re just plain scared, so credit is not flowing the way it needs to to restart economic growth. So people are, you know, a little — they’re still uncertain, and they’re uncertain both because they don’t know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they’re also uncertain because of changes in a global economy that we’re only beginning to take hold of.” [GS2, 10/24/13]

* * *

Addtionally, as flagged by Reuters earlier, in the June 4 Goldman Sachs speech, Hillary warned Beijing it would “ring China with missile defense” unless it did more to rein in North Korea’s missile program.

Because they could not only do damage to our treaty allies, namely Japan and South Korea, but they could actually reach Hawaii and the west coast theoretically, and we’re going to ring China with missile defense. We’re going to put more of our fleet in the area.

Clinton told Goldman that the message to China had been, “You either control them, or we’re going to have to defend against them.”  According to Reuters, the State Department on Friday declined to comment on “alleged leaked documents.” When asked whether such a message had been delivered to China, an official said it was not department policy to comment publicly on diplomatic discussions. Although Clinton’s reported comments raised a stir in Asia, Reuters adds.

Clinton said she also told her Chinese counterparts that the United States had as much a claim to the Pacific as China, given that U.S. forces had liberated it in World War Two.

China had “a right to assert themselves,” but the United States needed to “push back to create a balance” to prevent China taking a chokehold on sea lanes and countries bordering the South China Sea, she said.

* * *

Clinton gives yet another confirmation that Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are funding the “Jihadis” in Syria, aka the Islamic State:

If you look at what’s happening in Syria, it’s clearly a multiply leveled proxy battle. We’ve got Iran with their agents in Hezbollah, and they’re being taken on by indigenous rebels but increasingly a collection of Jihadists who are funded by the Saudis, funded by the Emiratis, funded by Qatar, and you have the Turks that were very active in the beginning, but then began to be concerned by some of the development inside Syria, particularly among the northern and northeastern Kurdish population in Syria.

Here are some interesting thoughts on Syria from June 2013, in which she herself admitted that a no fly zone in Syria would “kill a lot of Syrians.”

So let’s just take a step back and look at the situation that we currently have in Syria. When — before the uprising started in Syria it was clear that you had a minority government running with the Alawites in lead with mostly the other minority groups — Christians, the Druze, some significant Sunni business leaders. But it was clearly a minority that sat on top of a majority. And the uprisings when they began were fairly mild in terms of what they were asking for, and Assad very well could have in my view bought them off with some cosmetic changes that would not have resulted in what we have seen over the now two years and the hundred thousand deaths and the destabilization that is going on in Lebanon, in Jordan, even in Turkey, and the threat throwing to Israel and the kind of pitched battle in Iran well supported by Russia, Saudi, Jordanians and others trying to equip the majority Sunni fighters.

I think that we have tried very hard over the last two years to use the diplomatic tools that were available to us and to try to convince, first of all, the Russians that they were helping to create a situation that could not help but become more chaotic, because the longer Assad was able to hold out and then to move offensively against the rebels, the more likely it was that the rebels would turn into what Assad has called them, terrorists, and well equipped and bringing in Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The Russian’s view of this is very different. I mean, who conceives Syria as the same way he sees Chechnya? You know, you have to support toughness and absolute merciless reactions in order to drive the opposition down to be strangled, and you can’t give an inch to them and you have to be willing to do what Assad basically has been willing to do.

That has been their position. It pretty much remains their position, and it is a position that has led to the restocking of sophisticated weapon systems all through this. The Russians’ view is that if we provide enough weapons to Assad and if Assad is able to maintain control over most of the country, including the coastal areas where our naval base is, that’s fine with us. Because you will have internal fighting still with the Kurds and with the Sunnis on the spectrum of extremism. But if we can keep our base and we can keep Assad in the titular position of running the country, that reflects well on us because we will demonstrate that we are back in the Middle East. Maybe in a ruthless way, but a way that from their perspective, the Russian perspective, Arabs will understand.

So the problem for the US and the Europeans has been from the very beginning: What is it you — who is it you are going to try to arm? And you probably read in the papers my view was we should try to find some of the groups that were there that we thought we could build relationships with and develop some covert connections that might then at least give us some insight into what is going on inside Syria.

But the other side of the argument was a very — it was a very good one, which is we don’t know what will happen. We can’t see down the road. We just need to stay out of it. The problem now is that you’ve got Iran in heavily. You’ve got probably at least 50,000 fighters inside working to support, protect and sustain Assad. And like any war, at least the wars that I have followed, the hard guys who are the best fighters move to the forefront.

* * *

So we now have what everybody warned we would have, and I am very concerned about the spillover effects. And there is still an argument that goes on inside the administration and inside our friends  at NATO and the Europeans. How do intervene — my view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene. We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know,  everybody can’t help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we’re doing and I want credit for it, and all the rest of it.

So we’re not as good as we used to be, but we still — we can still deliver, and we should have in my view been trying to do that so we would have better insight. But the idea that we would have like a no fly zone — Syria, of course, did have when it started the fourth biggest Army in the world. It had very sophisticated air defense systems. They’re getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian imports.

To have a no fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk — you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.

Some thoughts on Putin:

Look, I would love it if we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia. I worked very hard on that when I was Secretary, and we made some progress with Medvedev, who was president inname but was obviously beholden to Putin, but Putin kind of let him go and we helped them get into the WTO for several years, and they were helpful to us in shipping equipment, even lethal equipment, in and out of out of Afghanistan.

So we were making progress, and I think Putin has a different view. Certainly he’s asserted himself in a way now that is going to take some management on our side, but obviously we would very much like to have a positive relationship with Russia and we would like to see Putin be less defensive toward a relationship with the United States so that we could work together on some issues.

We’ve tried very hard to work with Putin on shared issues like missile defense. They have rejected that out of hand. So I think it’s what diplomacy is about. You just keep going back and keep trying. And the President will see Putin during the G20 in Saint Petersburg, and we’ll see what progress we can make.

Here is Hillary opining on Wikileaks and Edward Snowden:

(Laughter.)

MR. BLANKFEIN: And I didn’t hear the crisp denials, but I didn’t hear any confirmation of it. How would you — would you be looking forward to giving that explanation? How do you go — what do you do now?

SECRETARY CLINTON: So, all right. This is all off the record, right? You’re not telling your spouses if they’re not here.

MR. BLANKFEIN: Right.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Okay. I was Secretary of State when WikiLeaks happened. You remember that whole debacle. So out come hundreds of thousands of documents. And I have to go on an apology tour. And I had a jacket made like a rock star tour. The Clinton Apology Tour. I had to go and apologize to anybody who was in any way characterized in any of the cables in any way that might be considered less than flattering. And it was painful. Leaders who shall remain nameless, who were characterized as vain, egotistical, power hungry —

MR. BLANKFEIN: Proved it.

SECRETARY CLINTON: — corrupt. And we knew they were. This was not fiction. And I had to go and say, you know, our ambassadors, they get carried away, they want to all be literary people. They go off on tangents. What can I say. I had grown men cry. I mean, literally. I am a friend of America, and you say these things about me.

MR. BLANKFEIN: That’s an Italian accent.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Have a sense of humor.

MR. BLANKFEIN: And so you said, Silvio.
(Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: So, fast forward. Here we are. You know, look, I have said, and I will continue to say, we do need to have a conversation with and take a hard look at the right balance that we could strike between, you know, privacy and security because there’s no doubt, and I’ve seen this and understand it, there’s no doubt that much of what we’ve done since 9/11 has kept us safer. That’s just a fact. It’s also kept our friends and our partners and our allies safer, as well. The sharing of intelligence requires the gathering of intelligence and the analysis of intelligence.

* * *

MR. BLANKFEIN: Maybe embedded you’ve already given part the answer, but how serious, how bad was it what Snowden and Assange did? What are the — I mean, Assange — if this were a destroyer and innovator conference, we might have had Assange here.

SECRETARY CLINTON: I wouldn’t be here.

MR. BLANKFEIN: But how much did that hurt us? Aside from the embarrassment, clearly some avenues now, some things we relied on that, have been closed off for us. I know it was very important to try to get some legislation that would have made it legal to get some more of this metadata that’s been very helpful without having the carriers face liability. That’s probably been put on the back burner. What are the consequences long term for this in terms of our own safety and the safety of the Republic.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, separate the two. The WikiLeaks problem put at risk certain individuals. We had to — we had to form a kind of investigative team that looked at all the names and all the documents, which was quite a challenge, to make sure that identities that were either revealed or described in enough detail that they could be determined would not put people who were at risk. I mean, without going into detail, you know, maybe they’re — let’s just hypothetically say there was somebody serving in a military in a certain country who was worried about some of the activities of the military that he served because he thought they were doing business with rogue states or terrorist networks, and so he would seek out an American diplomat to begin a conversation. And the American diplomat would report back about the concerns that were being expressed about what was happening in this country. And then it’s — you know, it’s exposed to the world. So we had to identify, and we moved a number of people to safe — to safety out of where they were in order for them to be not vulnerable.

So on the WikiLeaks, there was the embarrassment factor, there were the potential vulnerability factors that individuals faced. The WikiLeaks issue was, you know, unfortunate. Private Manning should have never had access to a lot of what he did have access to. So, in effect, it was a problem. But it didn’t expose the guts of how we collect and analyze data.

* * *

So, you know, if Snowden has given them a blueprint to how we operate, why is that in any way a positive. We should have the debate. We should have the conversation. We should make the changes
where they’re necessary. But we shouldn’t put our systems and our people at risk. So I think that WikiLeaks was a big bump in the road, but I think the Snowden material could be potentially much more threatening to us.

* * *

We are currently readying the transcripts for further informative details about what Hillary tells the world’s most improtant commercial bank in private.

Here are the full speeches with links:

Speech #1 (link)

* * *

Speech #2 (link)

* * *

Speech #3 (link)

In this explosive new video from Project Veritas Action, a Democratic dirty tricks operative unwittingly provides a dark money trail to the DNC and Clinton campaign. The video documents violence at Trump rallies that is traced to the Clinton campaign and the DNC through a process called birddogging.

A shady coordinated communications chain between the DNC, Clinton Campaign, Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC (Priorities) and other organizations are revealed.

A key Clinton operative is on camera saying,

“It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfxxxcker.”

 

Canada does not need new pipelines, in spite of repeated misleading claims by the oil industry.

That’s the conclusion of a new Oil Change International (OCI) analysis showing that Canada has ample pipeline Capacity to export all existing and under construction oil production to market from western Canada. The analysis suggests that industry has manipulated its forecasts in order to perpetuate an ongoing myth of pipeline constraints in order to advocate for unnecessary new pipeline construction.

The analysis is accompanied by an explainer video and website.

The briefing shows that neither the proposed Kinder Morgan nor Energy East pipelines would be required unless Canada intends to abandon its commitments to cut climate pollution by allowing new and additional expansion of the tar sands well into the next decade.

In its annual Crude Oil Forecast, Markets and Transportation report, oil industry lobby group the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has wrongly forecast that Canada would run out of capacity to export oil in the following year in each of their yearly forecasts since 2012. Their latest press release in June stated once again that “new major oil pipelines are urgently needed.”

However, OCI’s analysis based on the latest oil industry data suggests that there is actually almost 500kb/d of untapped export capacity currently available – even before additional planned expansions in the system are considered.

“Canada’s oil industry has cried wolf far too many times,” said Adam Scott of Oil Change International. “New pipelines won’t help an industry struggling with low global oil prices and won’t boost our economy.”

New pipelines won’t raise prices significantly, because the price differential that once forced Canadian producers to sell their oil at a discount is gone. The lifting of the longstanding U.S. crude export ban, the completion of new routes from the Cushing terminal to the Gulf of Mexico and the drop in global oil prices means that new pipelines will not significantly improve prices producers receive.

Tar sands expansion can’t continue in a world facing an urgent climate crisis. New pipeline capacity from projects like Kinder Morgan and Energy East would only be required if a significant number of new tar sands projects were given a green light in the future. Such a scenario would mean disaster for the climate.

Canada has now signed and ratified the Paris Agreement, which commits it to work to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels while aiming to limit the increase to 1.5°C. Building new, long-lived, high-carbon tar sands pipelines and extraction projects is not compatible with that goal. In the meantime, there is already enough pipeline capacity to export Canada’s oil.

View Oil Change International’s new briefing here:

http://priceofoil.org/2016/10/18/brief-canada-not-running-out-of-pipeline-capacity

Learn more about CAPP’s bad math and see the video at CAPPmath.ca

Oil Change International is a research, communication, and advocacy organization focused on exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the coming transition towards clean energy. The production and consumption of oil, gas, and coal are major sources of global warming, human rights abuses, war, national security concerns, corporate globalization, and increased inequality. For more information on Oil Change International, see www.priceofoil.org

Over 1,000 people have reportedly died as a result of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti just six-and-a-half years after a devastating earthquake which killed hundreds of thousands.

In addition to the deaths, injuries and physical destruction there is concern that an outbreak of cholera could erupt as did in the post-earthquake situation of 2010.

Today’s relief efforts surrounding the destruction in the country should be viewed within the same context as the military history of European and United States interventions.  Haiti was born during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries through a war of national liberation mainly in opposition to France but also included battles fought against Spain and Britain.

On October 15 the director of the U.S. Southern Command Admiral Kurt Tidd indicated that the Pentagon’s role in the relief operations in Haiti would conclude in a few days. He said the main task involved delivering hundreds of thousands of pounds of rice and medical supplies.

“What you’re beginning to see is a transition as the civil authorities, [non-governmental organizations] and other entities get in, get on the ground … and deliver life-saving goods,” Tidd said.  “We’re kind of at that natural point where the demand signal on us is going down as their picking up the load.” (Navy Times, Oct. 15)

This same military official said the Pentagon jets which had been in Haiti for ten days would begin pulling out while the airlift duties would shift to the 11 helicopters on the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima — a mix of CH-53 Sea Stallions, MH-60S Knighthawks and MV-22 Ospreys. (Navy Times)

Yet for over a century the U.S. has made several military invasions and occupations of Haiti. From 1915-1934, Washington’s military forces suppressed a revolt against successive administrations which treated the country as a colony.

In more recent times, in 1994, the administration of President Bill Clinton sent thousands of Marines into the country ostensibly to reinstall the elected leader of Haiti who was overthrown with the assistance of this same government under the previous regime of George Bush, Sr. Conditions set down during the 1994 intervention plagued Haiti for another decade when George Bush, Jr. in 2004, on the bicentennial anniversary of Haiti, deployed thousands of additional troops to topple the Aristide government forcing him into exile for several years.

The Pentagon along with military forces from Canada and France paved the way for the United Nations Mission to Haiti which maintains a presence inside the country. These military forces which have occupied Haiti for more than two decades have not been able to ensure that adequate relief reaches the majority of the impoverished population.

What Happens to the Money?

In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti the U.S. government and other entities pledged to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction. According to most accounts these funds which were raised did not benefit the people in need of assistance and only a small number of homes were built to address the crisis of displacement and homelessness.

A recent article published by the Huffington Post entitled “Should You Trust The American Red Cross With Your Donation For Haiti?”, questioned the role of such agencies which are making appeals for assistance to Haiti. This organization due to its reputation associated with providing relief, operates fundraising networks where billions are channeled every year.

Adam Hamze wrote on October 14 that “The Red Cross, the world’s 16th-largest charity with a yearly budget of more than $3.1 billion, has a complicated history in Haiti. The group raised $500 million in donations after the 2010 earthquake, promising to provide shelter, rebuild infrastructure and meet basic needs. But a 2015 investigation by ProPublica and NPR found that the Red Cross fell short of its promises. The charity had only built six permanent homes in the entire country, the media organizations found, and its efforts were plagued by internal disorganization, lack of experience in Haiti, use of donations for its own expenses, and tensions with residents and government officials.”

Although the Red Cross said that 91 percent of the funds collected went directly for charitable purposes, the ProPublica and NPR investigation claimed that it was only 60 percent with the remaining 40 percent going for administrative costs for the agency. Haitians who are involved in providing assistance on the ground inside the country emphasized that aid promised by the Red Cross was never delivered.

Institute for Justice and Democracy staff Attorney Nicole Phillips, who is based in the capital of Port-au-Prince, disputed the Red Cross responses to the allegations made by the investigators saying “The reputation of the Red Cross in Haiti is very negative. Some good work was done by the Red Cross, but I think the overwhelming experience from Haitians with the Red Cross has been disappointment and frustration.” (Huffington Post, Oct. 14)

Phillips encouraged individuals and organizations seeking to provide assistance to donate directly to organizations that are based in the country. Stressing this point Phillips noted “Haitians know how to help other Haitians better than we do, and their efforts are extremely impressive. By giving money directly to the Haitian network, you’re cutting out a huge sum of cost that otherwise would have to pay for the middleman, for plane tickets, accommodations, et cetera  — it’s going directly to Haitians.”

The famous Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat urged people to send donations to organizations that have been working in the country for years, mentioning Paradis des Indiens, The Three Little Flowers Center, and the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation. Public relations manager for Camp-Pericare, Isha Rosemond, a Haitian-run group that collaborates with other aid agencies, said that philanthropic organizations must cooperate with people on the ground to make sure the relief is delivered and is provided to those who are in need.

Haitian Migration Crisis Escalates

Haitians are fleeing once again out of the country to seek refuge and work in other nations including the U.S. In the wake of the hurricane, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said that the administration of President Barack Obama would suspend deportation flights to Haiti. This statement came in the aftermath of an announcement in late September that an acceleration of deportations of Haitians would resume.

There was a halting of deportations after the 2010 earthquake. Nonetheless in 2011, these expulsions began again ostensibly at a slower rate.

However, this policy of temporary suspension is shrouded in ambiguity because Johnson also said that the flight would resume very soon. At the same time the issue has gained almost no attention in the U.S. corporate and governmental media which is consumed with the mudslinging that is characterizing the 2016 presidential elections.

On the Mexican border with U.S. at Tijuana and other border towns, there are a number of Haitians who are stranded awaiting hearings with immigration officials. Many of the Haitians have traveled from Brazil where they found employment surrounding the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

With the political coup against Worker’s Party President Dilma Rousseff and the overall economic downturn in Brazil, Haitians are rapidly moving across South and Central America in search of refuge and employment. These problems will only be addressed through a mass outcry from immigration advocates along with civil and human rights organizations.

The U.S. has always maintained a racist immigration policy which benefits those nationals who can best benefit the political priorities of the ruling class. These and other issues will require the attention of activists leading into the next administration in the U.S.

Why do we hear only of the “humanitarian crisis in Aleppo” and not of the humanitarian crisis everywhere else in Syria where the evil that rules in Washington has unleashed its ISIL mercenaries to slaughter the Syrian people?  Why do we not hear about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where the US and its Saudi Arabian vassal are slaughtering Yemeni women and children?  Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Libya where Washington destroyed a country leaving chaos in its place?  Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, ongoing now for 13 years, or the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan now 15 years old?

The answer is that the crisis in Aleppo is the crisis of Washington losing its ISIL mercenaries to the Syrian army and Russian air force.  The jihadists sent by Obama and the killer Hillary (“We came, we saw, he died”) to destroy Syria are being themselves destroyed.  The Obama regime and the Western presstitutes are trying to save the jihadists by covering them in the blanket of “humanitarian crisis.”

Such hypocrisy is standard fare for Washington.  If the Obama regime gave a hoot about “humanitarian crisis,” the Obama regime would not have orchestrated humanitarian crisis in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen.

We are in the middle of a presidential campaign in the US and no one has asked why the US is determined to overthrow a democratically elected Syrian government that is supported by the Syrian people.

No one has asked why the White House Fool is empowered to remove the president of Syria by siccing US-supplied jihadists, which the presstitutes misrepresent as “moderate rebels,” on the Syrian people.

Washington, of course, has no acceptable answer to the question, and that is why the question is not asked.

The answer to the question is that Washington’s strategy for destabilizing Iran and then the Muslim provinces of the Russian Federation, former Soviet central Asia, and the Muslim province of China is to replace stable governments with the chaos of jihadism.  Iraq, Libya, and Syria had stable secular societies in which the government’s strong hand was used to prevent sectarian strife between Muslim sects. By overthrowing these secular governments and the current effort to overthrow Assad, Washington released the chaos of terrorism.

There was no terrorism in the Middle East until Washington brought it there with invasions, bombings, and torture.

Jihadists such as those that Washington used to overthrow Gaddafi appeared in Syria when the British Parliament and the Russian government blocked Obama’s planned invasion of Syria. As Washington was prevented from directly attacking Syria, Washington used mercenaries.  The prostitutes that pretend to be an American media obliged Washington with the propaganda that the jihadist terrorists are Syrian democrats rebelling against “the Assad dictatorship.”  This transparant and blatant lie has been repeated so many times that it now is confused with truth.

Syria has no connection whatsoever to Washington’s original justification for introducing violence into the Middle East.  The original justification was 9/11 which was used to invade Afghanistan on the fabrication that the Taliban was shielding Osama bin Laden, the “mastermind,” who at the time was dying of renal failure in a Pakistani hospital.  Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset who was used against the Soviets in Afghanistan.  He was not the perpetrator of 9/11.  And most certainly, neither were the Taliban.

But the Western presstitutes covered up for the Bush regime’s lie, and the public was deceived with the phrase that we must “defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.”

Of course, Muslims were not going to attack us at home. If Muslims are a threat, why does the US government keep bringing so many of them here as refugees from Washington’s wars against Muslims?

9/11 was the neoconservatives “new Pearl Harbor” that they wrote they needed in order to launch their wars in the Middle East. George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury said that the topic of Bush’s first cabinet meeting was the invasion of Iraq.  This was prior to 9/11.  In other words, Washington’s wars in the Middle East were planned prior to 9/11.

The neoconservatives are zionists. By reducing the Middle East to chaos they achieve both of their goals.  They remove organized opposition to Israeli expansion, and they create jihadism that can be used to destabilize countries such as Russia, Iran, and China that are in the way of their exercise of unilateral power, which, they believe, the Soviet collapse bequeathed to the “indispensable nation,” the USA.

Osama bin Laden, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, was dying, not directing a terror war against the US from a cave in Afghanistan. The Taliban were focused on establishing their rule in Afghanistan, not on attacking the West. After blowing up weddings, funerals, and childrens’ soccer games, Washington moved on to Iraq.  There was no sign of Iraqi beligerance toward the US. UN weapons inspectors said that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but Washington did not hear.  The whores who comprise the American media helped the Bush regime create the image of a nuclear mushroom cloud going up over America if the US did not invade Iraq.

Iraq had no nuclear weapons and everyone knew it, but facts were irrelevant.  There was an agenda at work, an undeclared agenda.  To advance its agenda that the government did not dare reveal, the government used fear.  “We have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”

So Iraq, a stable, progressive country was reduced to ruins.

Libya was next. Gaddafi would not join Washington’s Africa Command.  Moreover, China was developing the oil fields in eastern Libya.  Washington was already troubled by Russia’s presence in the Mediterranean and did not want China there also.  So Gaddafi had to go.

Next Assad was set up with faked evidence that he had used chemical weapons against the rebellion that Washington had started.  No one believed the transparant Washington lie, not even the British Parliament.  Unable to find support to cover an invasion, Killary the Psychopath sent the jihadists Washington used to destroy Libya to overthrow Assad.

The Russians, who until this point had been so naive and gullible as to trust Washington, finally figured out that the instability that Washington was brewing was directed at them.  The Russian government decided that Syria was their red line and, at the request of the Syrian government, intervened against the Washington-supported jihadists.

Washington is outraged and is now threatening to commit yet another criminal violation of the Nuremberg Standard with blatant aggression against Syria. Such an ill-advised step would bring Washington into military conflict with Russia and by implication with China.  Before Europeans enable Washington to initiate such a dangerous conflict, they had best consider the warning from Sergey Karaganov, a member of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy and Defense council:  “Russia will never again fight on its own territory. If NATO initiates an encroachment against a nuclear power like ourselves, NATO will be punished.”

That the government of the United States is criminally insane should frighten every person on earth.  Killary-Hillary is commited to conflict with Russia.  Regardless,  Obama, the presstitutes, and the Democratic and Republican establishments are doing everything in their power to put into the Oval Office the person who will maximize conflict with Russia.

The life of the planet is in the hands of the criminally insane. This is the real humanitarian crisis.

www.paulcraigroberts.org

Notes: 

Lt. General Michael Flynn, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency stated in an interview that the creation of ISIS was “a willful Washington decision.”  See, for example:

https://www.rt.com/usa/312050-dia-flynn-islamic-state/   Also:  http://russia-insider.com/en/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad/ri7364

The DIA warned that ISIS would result in a Salafist principality over parts of Iraq and Syria.  http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf   The warning went unheeded as the neoconservative Obama regime saw ISIS as a strategic asset to be used against Syria.

“[Shimon Peres] thought about history where Netanyahu thinks about the next election.” — Itamar Rabinovic, New York Times, Sep 30, 2016

“We learned from the British,” explained the late Shimon Peres in The Guardian in 2011, “what democracy means, and how it behaves in times of danger, war and terror.  We thank Britain for introducing freedom and respect of human rights both in normal and demanding circumstances.”[1]

This student of history was the pitch perfect representation of the Israeli narrative, one born in brutality, maturing in it, and then, in time, considering the option of peace through necessity. The realisation that the Jewish state would have to make concessions from its imperial loft was not a point he wished to make. Circumstances dictated it.

All of this was part of the role of making history, to count in its annals, to matter in the books.  Each Israeli leader has been obsessed by that theme: to achieve something supposedly unprecedented, the next stage, a form of outdoing the impossible, namely, Ben-Gurion’s own effort in establishing the state of Israel.

Prior to Israel’s birth as a nation state, Peres was confronted by the dilemma of what entity would become. A vision of it came, fittingly enough, from Ben-Gurion, who in 1946 was chairman of the Jewish Agency.  Leon Trotsky, explained Ben-Gurion to Peres, was no statesman, “Because of his concept of no-peace-no-war.”

Ben-Gurion went on to elaborate.  Such a concept was a “Jewish invention,” and not something Lenin succumbed to when he agreed with the brutally stripping 1917 Brest-Litovsk treaty with Imperial Germany.  Lenin, despite being “Trotsky’s inferior in terms of intellect” was the supreme statesman, deciding on peace and paying “the heavy price that peace required.”[2]

For decades, Peres was the man of war.  He joined the predecessor of the Israeli Defence Forces in 1947, the Haganah, and in 1948, became head of naval services.  With Israel still in swaddling clothes, Peres was dispatched to Washington to procure arms, a line of supply which has never dwindled.  He kept company with Ben-Gurion on his 1956 trip to Sevres, France, where Israel plotted with French and British ministers to make war on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt after the Suez Canal had been seized.

Political figures in the Middle East tend to be highly evolved chameleons, adeptly changing colours in far more skilled fashion than clumsy tigers hiding spots they can never remove.  This adjustment saw Peres morph from dedicated war maker and military builder to agent of reconciliation, though few were fooled by this change of heart. Those with sufficiently long memories recall the firm backer of Israeli settlements in the West Bank in the 1970s.

Politics offers a flexible medium to play in, and in the theatre of the Middle East, grand manoeuvrability is possible.  On this stage, Peres ducked and weaved, living up to the assessment made by another man of transformed credo, Yitzhak Rabin, who claimed Peres was “a tireless schemer” and “indefatigable underminer”.

With the victory of Labour in June 1992, the first in fifteen years, Israel was still functioning with the perspective of war as the essential, if not only weapon, for its survival.  Rabin preferred a different tack: To use peace as a weapon, a task which he sought assistance from his long term foe.

It was projected in two phases, one featuring an interim arrangement granting the Palestinians control over most of Gaza and local governance in the West Bank.   These would be affirmed in the second phase to secure a permanent arrangement after the 1996 elections.  Jordan and Syria would also feature as regional partners.

On the surface, it seemed that progress was being made. But the agreement with Yasser Arafat and the subsequent creation of the Palestinian Authority enabled a different form of control to be asserted. While the PA, lacking accountability and transparency, bullied and ruled, Israel was still able to exert control over the subjects it was meant to be gradually releasing from historical captivity.

With the assassination of Rabin in November 1995, Peres became prime minister, gifted a legacy he squandered at the election of May 29, 1996.  Where Rabin had been certain, Peres dithered, leaving the ground fresh for a seizure by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Oslo process withered, as did the image of Peres the peacemaker, with a dubious campaign in Lebanon, and the killing of a Hamas operative in January 1996 that sparked retaliatory Palestinian suicide attacks.

To the last, Peres would speak of the need for yielding.  “Israel,” he claimed at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv two years ago, “will be giving up its future if it sees the status quo as its desire.”[3]  That status quo has been all the rage under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Peres, at 93, was one of the last significant figures to the tortured history of a country deemed both remarkable and tyrannous in equal measure, a stunning yet brutal social experiment in the Middle East.  As with his colleagues, and Ben-Gurion, Peres helped build a country that has seen a state neither of peace nor war, but a kingdom precariously perched on the precipice.

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

The United States government has already declared that in regards to what it alleges to be a Russian cyberattack against the U.S. Democratic Party, the U.S. reserves the right to go to war against Russia. NATO has accordingly changed its policy so as to assert that a cyberattack (in this case actually cyber-espionage, such as the U.S. government itself perpetrates against even its own allies such as Angela Merkel by tapping her phone) constitutes an act of war by the alleged cyberattacker, and so requires all NATO member nations to join any cyberattacked NATO nation in war against its alleged (cyber)attacker, if the cyberattacked member declares war against its alleged cyberattacker.

Excuses are being sought for a war against Russia; and expanding the definition of “invasion,” to include mere espionage, is one such excuse. But it’s not the only one that the Obama Administration has cooked up.

U.S. Senator Mike Lee has asserted that President Barack Obama must obtain a declaration of war against Syria — which is allied with and defended by Russia — before invading Syria. Syria has, for the past few years, already been invaded by tens of thousands of foreign jihadists (financed mainly by the royal Sauds and Qataris, and armed mainly with U.S. weaponry) who are trying to overthrow and replace the Syrian government so that pipelines can be built through Syria into Europe to transport Saudi oil and Qatari gas into the EU, the world’s biggest energy-market, which now is dominated by Russia’s oil and gas. Since Syria is already being defended by Russia (those royals’ major competitor in the oil and gas markets), America’s invasion of Syria would necessarily place U.S. and Russia into an air-war against each other (for the benefit of those royal Arabs — who finance jihadist groups, as even Hillary Clinton acknowledges): Syria would thus become a battleground in a broader war against Russia.

So: declaring war against Syria would be a second excuse for World War III, and one which would especially serve the desires not only of U.S. ‘defense’ firms but of the U.S. aristocracy’s royal Arabic allies, who buy much of those ‘defense’ firms’ exports (weaponry), and also U.S. oilfield services firms such as pipelines by Halliburton. (It’s good business for them, no one else. Taxpayers and war-victims pay, but those corporations — and royal families — would profit.)

The U.S. government also declares that Russia ‘conquered’ Crimea in 2014 and that Russia must restore it to Ukraine. The U.S. government wants Ukraine to be accepted into NATO, so that all NATO nations will be at war against Russia if Russia doesn’t return Crimea to Ukraine, of which Crimea had only briefly (1954-2014) been a part, until Crimeans voted on 16 March 2014 to rejoin Russia. This Crimean issue is already the basis for America’s economic sanctions against Russia, and thus Russia’s continuing refusal to coerce Crimeans to accept again being part of Ukraine would be yet a third excuse for WW III.

The U.S. Presidential Contest

Hillary Clinton says “As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.” She alleges that when information was unauthorizedly made public from Democratic National Committee computers, the cyberattacker was Russia. She can be counted as a strong proponent of that excuse for WW3. She’s with Barack Obama and the other neocons on that.

She has furthermore said that the U.S. should shoot down any Russian and Syrian bombers in Syria — the phrase for that proposed U.S. policy is to “establish a no-fly zone” there. She makes clear: “I am advocating the no-fly zone.” It would be war against not only Syria, but Russia. (After all: a no-fly zone in which the U.S. is shooting down the government’s planes and Russia’s planes, would be war by the U.S. against both Syria and Russia, but that’s what she wants to do.) She can thus be counted as a strong proponent of those two excuses for WW3.

On the matter of Crimea, she has said that “Putin invaded and annexed Crimea,” and “In the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in early 2014, some have argued that NATO expansion either caused or exacerbated Russia’s aggression. I disagree with that argument.” She believes that the expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders is good, not horrific and terrifying (as it is to Russians — just like USSR’s conquering of Mexico would have been terrifying to Americans if USSR did that during the Cold War). Furthermore, because Ukraine is the main transit-route for Russian gas-pipelines into Europe, the coup that in 2014 overthrew the neutralist democratically elected President of Ukraine and replaced him by leaders who seek NATO membership for Ukraine and who have the power to cut off those pipelines, was strongly supported by both Obama and Clinton. She can thus be counted as a strong proponent of all three excuses for WW3.

U.S. President Obama has made unequivocally clear that he regards Russia as being by far the world’s most “aggressive” nation; and Clinton, too, commonly uses the term “aggression” as describing Russia (such as she did by her denial that “NATO expansion either caused or exacerbated Russia’s aggression”). To her, Russia’s opposing real aggression by the U.S. (in this case, America’s 2014 coup that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted), constitutes ‘Russia’s aggression’, somehow. Furthermore, as regards whether Crimea’s rejoining Russia was ‘illegal’ as she says: does she also deny the right of self-determination of peoples regarding the residents of Catalonia though the Spanish government accepts it there, and also by the residents of Scotland though the British government accepts it there? Or is she simply determined to have as many excuses to invade Russia as she can have? She has never condemned the independence movements in Scotland or Catalonia.

The United States is clearly on a path toward war with Russia. Donald Trump opposes all aspects of that policy.

That’s the main difference between the two U.S. Presidential candidates. Trump makes ridiculous statements about the ‘need’ to increase ‘defense’ spending during this period of soaring federal debt, but he has consistently condemned the moves toward war against Russia and said that America’s real enemy is jihadists, and that Russia is on our side in this war — the real war — not an enemy of America such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama claim. Both candidates (Trump and Clinton) are war-hawks, but Hillary wants to go to war against both jihadists and Russia, whereas Trump wants to go to war only against jihadists. Trump’s charge that Hillary would be a catastrophic President is borne out not only by her past record in public office, but by her present positions on these issues.

America’s Presidential campaign is dominated by Trump’s crassly vulgar obsession with sex, and by debates about whether his hiding his tax-returns is worse than Hillary’s hiding her paid speeches to corporate lobbyists, and her hiding her emails while she was Secretary of State. Regardless of whom America’s next President will be (either Clinton or Trump), it’s not going to be a good President, and anyone who thinks that these are the two best-qualified people to be contesting for the U.S. Presidency is either ignorant or else grossly misinformed — or else in sheer reality-denial. But all of those other issues are dwarfed by the top issue of this election: shall we have World War III? And that one issue is by far more important than all of the other ‘issues’ in this campaign, because it’s nothing less than an existential issue, regarding all of the world, and all of the future, which threatens the entire world within just the next few years, or even months, or maybe just weeks.

Americans are being offered, by this nation’s aristocracy, a choice between a marginally competent and deeply evil psychopath Hillary Clinton, versus an incompetent but far less evil psychopath Donald Trump, and the nation’s press are reporting instead a choice between two candidates of whom one (the actually evil Clinton) is presented as being far preferable to the other (the actually incompetent Trump), and possibly as being someone who might improve this nation if not the world. Virtually none of America’s Establishment is willing to report the truth: that the nation’s rotting will get worse under either person as President, but that only under Trump might this nation (and the world) stand a reasonable likelihood of surviving at all (i.e., nuclear war with Russia being averted).

Things won’t get better, but they definitely could get a hell of a lot worse — and this is the issue, the real one, in the present election: WW3, yes or no on that.

Hillary Clinton argues that she, with her neoconservative backing (consisting of the same people who cheer-led the invasion of Russia-friendly Iraq, and who shared her joy in doing the same to Russia-friendly Libya — “We came, we saw, he died, ha ha!”), is the better person to have her finger on the nuclear button with Russia. This U.S. Presidential election will be decided upon the WW3-issue, unless the American electorate are incredibly stupid (or else terribly deceived): Is she correct to allege that she and not Trump should have control over the nuclear button against Russia? She’s even more of a neoconservative than Obama is, and this is why she has the endorsement of neoconservatives in this election. And that is the issue.

The real question isn’t whether America and the world will be improved by the next U.S. President; it’s whether America and the world will be destroyed by the next U.S. President. All else is mere distraction, by comparison. And the U.S. public now are extremely distracted — unfortunately, even by the candidates themselves. The pathetic Presidential candidates that the U.S. aristocracy has provided to Americans, for the public’s votes in the final round, don’t focus on this reality.

Anyone who thinks that the majority of billionaires can’t possibly believe in a ‘winnable’ nuclear war and can’t possibly be wanting WW3 should read this. That was published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street’s international-affairs think tank. They mean business. And that’s the source of neoconservatism — the top U.S.-based international corporations, mainly in ‘defense’ and oil and Wall Street. (Clinton’s career is based upon precisely those three segments, whereas Trump’s is based instead upon real estate and entertainment, neither of which segments is neoconservative.)

It doesn’t come from nowhere; it comes from the people who buy and sell politicians.

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.

A Guardian piece last month described: ‘How September 11 revealed the real Hillary Clinton.’

While even supporters recognise that Clinton’s campaign has been notably cold, passionless and bereft of conviction, ‘The Clinton who emerges from the WNYC [New York Public Radio] tapes is passionate, raw and unrestrained.’

The Guardian quotes sources who reveal how Clinton ‘showed herself to be a fighter’, demonstrating a ‘personal care’ that ‘made a profound impression’. She was ‘kind and gentle’, the ‘most vivid memory’ being of ‘the senator’s eyes’. Her behaviour was ‘the mark of somebody who is sincere, who you want on your side’. All in all, ‘she came across as an effective and empathetic leader’. Tragically, the public has seen little of this:

‘I regret that sometimes she doesn’t come across well in front of a crowd as people don’t know her as so many of us do.’

This presidentialising of Clinton is a key, structural function of ‘left-liberal’ media like the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the BBC. Establishment candidates like Bill Clinton, Obama, and now Hillary Clinton are presented as awesomely benevolent, brave and wise. Even George W. Bush – derided as a buffoon both before and after he held office – was depicted as a calmly authoritative humanitarian. An ITN news report talked of Bush ‘losing patience’ with the president of crisis-hit Haiti. (ITN, 10:15 News, February 28, 2004) This was Bush as benign father figure, fierce in his determination to help the poor.

Propaganda of this kind exploits the human tendency to revere authority and celebrity. If leaders have an aura of benevolence, when their turn comes to ‘intervene’ with great violence in far-flung countries, few will be willing to question their good intentions.

In our time, this benevolence is often said to be indicated by a leader’s alleged passion for gender and sexual rights. Why ‘alleged’? Machiavelli explained:

‘It is not essential… that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most essential that he should seem to have them…’ (Nicolò Machiavelli, ‘The Prince,’ 1513, Dover publications, 1992, p.46, our emphasis)

Gender and sexual rights are favoured because they can be presented as almost apolitical: a state-corporate executive can believe in gay marriage and bomb Iraq to smithereens; she can smash whole countries with bombing, invasion and ethnic cleansing, and support equality for women.

Writing on Clinton in June, senior Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee commented:

‘This is a time to celebrate. At last, a woman leads a major US party to fight for the presidency.’

Moreover:

‘Clinton is not some token woman who has inched into place by offending no one. All her life she has fought the feminist cause…’

Clinton, indeed, is ‘a feminist with a long track record of standing up for the right causes’.

In September, Laurie Penny, contributing editor to the New Statesman, backed Clinton ‘because she is a woman and a feminist, even if her feminism is unlike my own’. For Penny, Clinton is not just ‘a proud feminist woman’, she is a representative of something called ‘centrist soft-liberal feminism’; a claim to which we will return.

Toynbee argued that: ‘Rarely has any candidate so deserved their place.’ Penny agreed:

‘The presidency of the United States does not belong by right to anyone… If it did, though, it would belong to Hillary Clinton.’

Toynbee asked readers to carefully inspect their minds for traces of hidden gender bias:

‘If you are naturally left of centre, especially if you are a woman, yet you find you instinctively dislike her, ask yourself why.’

Penny did the same:

‘If you would truly prefer a Trump presidency to this… then you may want to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself, truly, if you might not be a little bit sexist.’

Toynbee emphasised Clinton’s credentials:

‘if she wins, what an added bonus that, as the first woman to enter the White House, she will also step through the door as by far the most qualified and experienced arrival there for generations… this first woman would also be the safest pair of hands in decades’.

So did Penny, noting that Clinton has ‘a career whose length and breadth would make her the most qualified presidential candidate in history’.

The Causes For Celebration

These, then, are the four causes for celebration: Clinton is 1) a woman, 2) a ‘feminist’ with 3) ‘a long track record of standing up for the right causes’, and 4) she would be ‘the safest pair of hands in decades’.

And yet Toynbee is dismayed by a curious lack of enthusiasm:

‘But among too many who should know better, her success has been greeted with a jaundiced yawn – or outright contempt… Why so fierce, so unreasonable, so vitriolic?’

Why indeed? Some explanations were proposed:

‘she’s not as radical as Sanders; she is not a natural rabble-rouser at rallies; she is the wife of a past president; she’s called “robotic” in her careful choice of words; and as a flesh-presser she warms the cockles of few hearts. After Barack Obama’s effortless charm and sublime speech-making, she is bound to seem leaden-footed in comparison.’

Really, one could hardly find a better example of a senior journalist viewing the world through a Guardian lens that filters out almost everything that matters.

Of course it is true that Clinton’s success would encourage women facing prejudice and inequality around the world; notably, white, mega-rich, American women belonging to great political dynasties. But what of the claims that she is a ‘feminist’ who has ‘a long track record of standing up for the right causes’ and would be ‘the safest pair of hands in decades’.

The ultimate test of the last claim is the developing ‘climate emergency’, by far the most serious and immediate threat of our time, which could literally end human life on this planet in the next few decades. Naomi Klein commented:

‘Hillary Clinton’s campaign… has received a lot of money from the employees and registered lobbyists of fossil-fuel companies. There’s the much-cited $4.5 million that Greenpeace calculated, which includes bundling by lobbyists.’

And:

‘Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years, Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron have all contributed to the foundation.’

Last year, IB Times reported:

‘At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire.

‘The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation – supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself – Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. Having opposed the deal as a bad one for labor rights back when she was a presidential candidate in 2008, she now promoted it, calling it “strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States.”‘

Bill Moyers added some detail:

‘Between 2009 and 2014, Clinton’s list of top 20 donors starts out with Citigroup and includes JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, whose chief Lloyd Blankfein has invested in Clinton’s son-in-law’s boutique hedge fund… They’re also among the deep-pocket outfits that paid for speeches and appearances by Hillary or Bill Clinton to the tune of more than $125 million since they left the White House in 2001.’

Klein strongly emphasised the point that matters on Clinton:

‘[T]aking on powerful corporations goes against her entire worldview, against everything she’s built, and everything she stands for‘. (Our emphasis)

This is very, very bad news; in fact, it is a disaster that will affect every single person on this planet – you, us, your children, our children. Why? Klein concluded:

‘If the next president wastes any more time with these schemes, the climate clock will run out, plain and simple. If we’re to have any hope of avoiding catastrophe, action needs to be unprecedented in its speed and scope.’

The next US president will be Clinton or Trump (a self-declared climate change denier), which suggests that we indeed, now, do not have any hope of avoiding catastrophe.

The Candidate Of The Military-Industrial Complex

What about the problem of Perpetual War, the endless US-UK ‘interventions’ that have created millions of corpses and refugees around the planet? David Sirota wrote:

‘Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation.’

Jeffrey Sachs added:

‘There’s no doubt that Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street. Even more dangerous, though, is that she is the candidate of the military-industrial complex.’

Moreover:

‘Hillary was… a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, which has cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and done more to create ISIS and Middle East instability than any other single decision of modern foreign policy.’

Immediately prior to the 1999 war on Serbia, while travelling in Africa, Hillary called husband Bill: ‘I urged him to bomb,’ she told a journalist.

Investigative reporter Gareth Porter has written of the ‘active effort’ made ‘by the US military to mitigate Obama administration regime change policies’. In 2011, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘had been strongly opposed to the effort to depose the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya led by then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’.

Clinton, then, was more hawkish even than the US military. Writing in the Sunday Times, James Rubin, former Chief Spokesman for the US State Department, commented of Libya:

‘Former defence secretary Bob Gates has written that it was secretary Clinton’s “considerable clout” that tipped the balance in favour of action.’ (Rubin, ‘Why Hillary Clinton would make a better president than Obama,’ Sunday Times, April 12, 2015)

Sachs added:

‘Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillary’s relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must “get out of the way,” backed by secret CIA operations.

‘Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security.’

In her memoir, ‘Hard Choices’, Clinton revealed how she had also played a key role in supporting the coup in Honduras. A former sergeant in the Honduran military recently told the Guardian that, months before her death, he saw environmental activist Berta Cáceres on a hitlist distributed to U.S-trained special forces. The soldier said: ‘I’m 100 percent certain that Berta Cáceres was killed by the army.’

In 2014, Cáceres said:

‘We warned that this would be very dangerous. The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud. The same Hillary Clinton, in her book “Hard Choices,” practically said what was going to happen in Honduras.’

Clinton commented on Israel’s 2014, ‘Operation Protective Edge’ war on Gaza, in which 2,220 Palestinians were killed, of whom 1,492 were civilians (551 children and 299 women):

‘I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets. Israel has a right to defend itself.’

Did Israel do enough to try and avoid killing civilians? Clinton replied that mistakes were made, ‘but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas’. Shamelessly apologising for the massacre, Clinton added: ‘it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets’.

Clinton blamed criticism of Israel’s vicious policies on anti-semitism:

‘we do see this enormous international reaction against Israel, and Israel’s right to defend itself, and the way Israel has to defend itself. This reaction is uncalled for and unfair… You can’t ever discount anti-Semitism, especially with what’s going on in Europe today.’

Raised In Power Above Another

Remarkably, Toynbee omitted all of the above in locating the source of the ‘jaundiced’ and ‘vitriolic’ reaction to Clinton in the fact that ‘she is not a natural rabble-rouser’ and can’t compete with ‘Obama’s effortless charm and sublime speech-making’. This is the great lie of the world as seen through the Guardian lens.

Consider the third of the claims: that ‘All her life’ Clinton ‘has fought the feminist cause’, according to Toynbee, and is ‘a proud feminist woman’, according to Penny.

So what is feminism? The dictionary definition is straight forward enough: ‘the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes’. Wikipedia summarises the goal:

‘to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. Feminists typically advocate or support the rights and equality of women.’

Hannah McAtamney added an important observation on Huffington Post:

‘Feminism is not the belief that one gender should be raised in power above another. The very definition of feminism shows a complete opposition to this belief.’

This is key: feminism is indeed in ‘complete opposition’ to the idea that one gender should be raised in power above another. And yet it could hardly be clearer from Clinton’s ruthless service to elite power, notably the military industrial complex, and from her leading role in the destruction of whole countries like Libya, Honduras and Syria, that she does just that. Clinton has certainly acted to ensure that the interests of elite Western men and women are ‘raised in power above’ men and women in these target countries.

A high-level state executive who manages a system that destroys and damages millions of lives in systematically subordinating both men and women to state-corporate power cannot be described as a representative of ‘centrist soft-liberal feminism’, if the words have any meaning.

We strongly support authentic feminism as an obviously just response to the inequality, exploitation, prejudice and violence facing women the world over. The deepest support for equality of the sexes is found in the practice of ‘equalising self and others’ propounded by many ancient spiritual traditions, notably Mahayana Buddhism. This ‘equalising’ begins when we accept that no person’s happiness or suffering can be considered more or less important than anyone else’s. It is obviously irrational and unfair to suggest that ‘my’ happiness matters more than ‘your’ happiness. When we reflect repeatedly on this equality of importance, we can actually come to feel a sense of outrage at the idea that ‘I’ should benefit at ‘your’ expense. ‘I’ can actually come to take ‘your’ side against ‘my’ own egotism.

From this perspective, it is absurd to suggest that a woman’s suffering matters less than a man’s. Similarly, it is absurd to suggest that the suffering of a Libyan or Honduran man or woman matters less than that of a male or female member of the American 1%.

The idea that Clinton is a ‘feminist’, that her presidency would represent a victory for feminism, is a fraud. In reality, it would involve the exploitation of that vital cause by violent, greed-based power.

At one point in her New Statesman article, Laurie Penny appeared to be overcome with emotion:

‘…Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton! The very personification of steely-eyed, iron-jawed, soft-neoliberal feminism, a woman with short hair and pants…’

But in the strange way of so much corporate ‘leftism’, Penny also passionately insisted that she was opposed to the establishment grandee she was presidentialising:

‘Hillary Clinton is the sort of enemy I’ve been dreaming of over ten years of political work… I look forward to fighting her on her commitment to climate protection, on workers’ rights, on welfare, on foreign policy. Bring that shit on.’

Really? Why wait? Just three weeks after a committee of British MPs exposed one of the great war crimes of modern times – the cataclysmic orgy of death and destruction known in Washington as ‘Hillary’s war’ – Penny made no mention at all of one single, telling word: ‘Libya‘.

Canadian autoworkers have long been pace setters in the Canadian labour movement and as soon as its most recent agreement with General Motors was ratified, Unifor (the successor in 2013 after the merger of CAW and CEP) laid claim to that agreement’s ‘historic’ status. It has now also been ratified by the Chrysler workers, but at the Ford assembly plant in Oakville – now the largest auto facility in the country – it’s pretty hard to find any enthusiasm for the outcome of this latest bargaining round. If this agreement is indeed historic, it may be so in a sense quite different than the leadership’s bravado declaration intended.

Background: The Cancer of Two-Tier Wages

When the financial crisis of 2007-9 brought GM and Chrysler to their knees, it was hardly surprising that the pressure would intensify on workers. This came not only from the economics of the crisis and threats from the companies, but also from the U.S. and Canadian governments. As they intervened to save the companies with public monies, they notably added further pressures on the union and its members by explicitly demanding autoworkers ‘do their share’ to lower corporate costs. (Ford, the third of the auto triumvirate, had enough of a cash hoard to avoid seeking state help, but was no less anxious to exploit the crisis in bargaining with its unions).

Such working class concessions did not of course start with this latest crisis. In the auto sector, the American union (United Automobile Workers – UAW) had, since the end of the 1970s, repeatedly rationalized wage restraint or concessions as ‘trade-offs’ for jobs. That the job security never really materialized rarely led to that logic being challenged; rather, it only resulted in hunkering down to ever more desperate cycles of concessions to save the remaining jobs which, by virtue of decent-paying jobs disappearing throughout the economy, now seemed even more valuable. In contrast, the Canadian section of the union had over most of that same period strongly opposed that illusory trade off – to the point of breaking their institutional links with its American parent in the mid-80s to establish the CAW.

But stubbornness itself was always an incomplete response to the attacks on working people. By the early years of the new millennium the CAW too was slipping toward greater accommodation to corporate power. The marked rise in the Canadian dollar – an outcome of both the Tar Sands exports and an economy not doing as badly as the U.S. during the crisis – compounded the pressures on autoworkers. For years the Canadian dollar had bounced around $0.80 (US); as the Canadian dollar approached and even occasionally exceeded parity with the U.S. dollar, the competitive advantages of being paid in lower Canadian funds faded.

Going into the latest bargaining round, Canadian autoworkers had seen both their base rates frozen and their cost-of living suspended since 2008. The result was that in inflation-adjusted terms, their hourly pay in the fall of 2016 was about 16% below what it was in the summer of 2008. Nor was that the only concession. The auto companies, smelling blood, also demanded a radical change in the compensation of new hires, calling for them to be paid substantially less and their defined pension benefits to be converted to benefits dependent on contribution and returns on investments.

The push for a two-tier wage structure – workers doing the exact same work getting different rates of pay over and above a short initial adjustment period – first significantly erupted in the U.S. in the early 80s. It cropped up in the airline industry, which was struggling with the impact of deregulation, and quickly flowed into aerospace. With corporations demanding concessions and the workforce stubbornly resisting, an ‘innovative’ solution emerged: apply the concessions to workers not yet in the industry and therefore not voting on the contracts.

The head of the Canadian section of the UAW, Bob White, called two-tier wages a ‘cancer’ that had to be stopped ‘before it spread into Canada’ [Bob White, Hard Bargains, p.367]. When, in 1984, McDonnell-Douglas achieved a two-tier structure in the U.S. and tried to bring it across the border, the Canadians, backed by a strike threat, did successfully block this import. The union did however accept a lower hiring rate of 85%, though this was limited to an 18 month grow-in. The hiring rate structure remained unchanged over the following decades, but during the crisis of 2008-9, it was revived as the easy way to shift the burden of concessions (or at least a significant part of them) to another generation.

In 2008 the starting rate was lowered to 70% and the grow-in increased to three years. In the Ford ratification brochure highlighting the new agreement, the President of the CAW at the time insisted that this remained consistent with the principles of “solidarity between generations, linking today’s union members with both retirees and the generation that comes after us. Equal pay for equal work. And a refusal to subsidize, out of our own pockets, a crisis that is not remotely our fault.” But a door had been opened and the corporations, taking advantage of the fear occasioned by the crisis, pushed on relentlessly to gain acceptance for re-opening the contract in 2009 and increasing the grow-in to 6 years.

In 2012, the roof caved in on the new-hire structure. The 2012 agreement brought an unambiguously qualitative change in the practice of equal pay for doing the same work. The grow-in was extended to ten years and new hires started at 60% of the base year with the movement through the grid frozen for three years. After the 10th year, new hires got to where the base was when they hired in. As for catching up to any increases the ‘traditional’ workers got over that interim period, this would occur in incremental annual steps after that 10th year. Furthermore, new hires would also be discriminated against in their retirement years; rather than defined benefit pensions they would have a ’hybrid’ plan that combined elements of both defined and contributory pensions plans.

Changing Course?

Soon after the signing of that definitive four-year agreement of 2012, the crisis in auto sales abruptly ended. Profits, especially at GM and Ford, rose and stayed exceptionally high. As the 2016 bargaining round approached, the lower Canadian health care costs and the fall of the Canadian dollar to the $0.75 (US) range left the Canadians with a significant cost advantage relative to the USA. As the Windsor Star noted, in U.S. dollars, the all-in labour costs at the Detroit Three Canadian plants were “about $50 an hour compared to $54 in the U.S.” For new hires this was “about $30 an hour compared to $42 for new hires at U.S. plants.” [Windsor Star, June 28, 2015].

This changed context seemed to suggest that a reversal of the past concessions would surely come, and interviewed on the eve of his election as the first president of Unifor, Jerry Dias indicated as much. Dias “predicted that a major ‘pushback’ and more labour unrest is coming” and added – ironically in terms of his later defense of the union’s new-hire structure – that “young people will lead that charge because I see them being very militant. … They won’t accept the norm anymore.” [Toronto Star, August 30, 2013].

As the UAW went into negotiations in the summer of 2015, that readiness to correct the concessions of the recent past was reconfirmed: “This isn’t 2008 anymore,” Dias declared. “The auto companies are doing incredibly well and it’s time workers shared in the success. Heaven knows we shared during the troubled times.” [Windsor Star, above]. Dias went on to express his expectations of the U.S. bargaining round:

I am pulling for [UAW president] Dennis [Williams] because his members deserve a share in the success of their companies. … There’s no question in my mind Dennis is determined to make incredible inroads in the two-tier wage system. He understands clearly the incredible inequity that exists. He also understands that his tier-one members haven’t had a pay increase in eight years, which is unacceptable.

And yet for some reason that advice and the hopes behind it didn’t apply to Canada. Far from challenging and reversing the concessions made, the union consolidated them. Though wages did rise by 4% over the four-year agreement (the UAW got a marginally better 6% raise and significant profit-sharing sums), the continued suspension of the cost-of-living allowance meant that after adjustment for inflation, real wages would continue to fall. By the agreement’s end in 2020, the loss will approach 20%. Since pensioners also lost their cost-of-living, they too will continue to see their incomes erode.

It might have been thought that such restraint was the most the companies would expect given the strong revival of the companies, the earlier sacrifices of the workers, and the favorable costs in Canada. Surely, this was the moment to ease the new-hire penalty? But having finally gotten the new hire rate, the companies weren’t about to willingly modify it. And as a bulletin to the Ford and Chrysler workers following GM’s ratification made clear, the union leadership wasn’t up to challenging the corporations on this score. Unifor meekly let the companies define what was possible, offering only this rather lame ‘explanation’:

“Unifor negotiators also pursued with all three companies the idea of shortening the current 10-year grow-in period. In the eyes of U.S.-based CEOs, the ten-year grow-in timetable was crucial for attracting new investment and new product north of the border. On this point the companies were unanimous and aggressive in rejecting changes to the progression length.” [Special Information Bulletin for Unifor Leadership at Fiat-Chrysler and Ford, September, 2016].

The agreement included some tinkering in the new-hire system – improvements in the grid were no longer frozen for three years – but the core structure remained unchanged. This did not even match the very modest change in the U.S. from a 10-year grow-in to an 8-year grow in – which itself only occurred after the Chrysler workers in the U.S. rejected their tentative agreement.

Union information sheets claimed the changes made in the new hire rate would give new hires ‘thousands of dollars’ but that only brought to mind a robber taking your money and car, returning a fiver for a coffee and bus fare, then waiting for you to express your gratitude for his generosity. The point is that even after the adjustment in the new-hire rate, a new hire under the new agreement would lose some $200,000 relative to the pre-2008 hiring-in structure (i.e. 85% with an 18 month grow-in) and about $90,000 relative to the 2009 concession of moving to 70% over 6 years.

Here again, it might have seemed that with wage increases below the rate of inflation, no improvements in pensions, and the basic acceptance of the two-tier structure for new hires, the Company had little basis for adding more takeaways to the new hires. Wrong again. When companies see weakness it only invites them to demand more. In this case, the defined benefit portion of the ‘hybrid’ pension was ended; new hires would henceforth only have a contributory pension benefit plan. This permanent two-tier system in retirement would mean that the pensions of new hires would be lower than ‘traditional’ workers; the pension amounts would be more uncertain with the risks shifted from the companies to the workers; and in contrast to other union members, the new hires would have to pay 4%-5% of their wages out of pocket for this inferior plan.

Selling the Agreement

Unifor’s leadership has dismissed criticism of the agreement worked out at GM and now ratified at Fiat-Chrysler (FCA) as the easy pontifications of outsiders with ‘no skin in the game’. This is an old expedient for avoiding debate, but in this case it also dismisses the extent of dissatisfaction within the union.

The 65% ratification at GM was the lowest in history (since the 1984 negotiations which led to the formation of the CAW, ratifications have averaged 84%). At GM’s St. Catharine’s engine plant, there have been discussions about recalling the local bargaining committee. At CAMI – the ‘little sister’ at GM that stands outside the Master agreement but is very much affected by it – the local leadership took the unprecedented step of distributing an angry leaflet opposing the agreement. Most significant, as noted earlier the leadership in the Ford Oakville plant, very much backed by its members is intending to reject the pattern.

By defending and so aggressively overselling the achievements of this contract, the union leadership came to depend on the same contradictory arguments that it once decried when used by the UAW. Those arguments, the CAW emphasized at the time, had ensnared the union into making the case for the companies rather than defending its members. So Unifor bulletins now deny that the new-hire structure is effectively a two-tier structure even though almost everyone clearly understands it to be so. Or the union argues that two-tiers are not really that bad since its ‘better than not having a job’.

National and local leaders praise pattern bargaining as equalizing conditions across the Detroit Three – “If I’m working on the line, I’m going to make the same money regardless of which one of the Detroit Three (it is)” [Detroit News, October 6, 2015] – but they remarkably set aside inequalities among two people doing the same work in one plant. In attacking the Oakville workers for not accepting the pattern as an unchallengeable given, they too readily forget that the solidarity behind pattern bargaining was introduced to make progress, not prevent workers from fighting their employers. They forget as well that the very formation of the CAW was rooted in the Canadian section of the UAW refusing to follow the American pattern it had for so long automatically accepted.

In justifying the phasing out of defined benefit plans, Unifor does raise the legitimate question of whether private companies can in fact guarantee defined benefit plans in the future. This does need deeper discussion along with the alternative of a radically transformed universal pension plan that parallels universal health care. But to simply give up on such plans in bargaining betrays those still trying to hang on to their plans. Moreover, it tends to lower popular expectations of what is possible for senior citizens in a rich society, and correspondingly reduces pressure on governments to actually move toward such pensions. Giving up defined benefit plans without a struggle is hardly the way to place on the agenda the larger, difficult question of the future of decent pensions for all.

The Trap of Bargaining Investment

Underlying all this is the strategic trap Unifor fell into by effectively making investment the primary and, as the Oakville local rightly noted, the only issue in bargaining. It is one thing to join with other workers in a political struggle to address investment and jobs. But making it into the principle demand moves bargaining to a terrain in which the corporations call the shots and the union is left to more or less ask “What can workers do for you to ‘buy’ new investment?.”

This point cannot be underestimated. Once on this track, why should any company ever make an announcement about planned investments before first holding it back and asserting its conditionality on more restraint/concessions from workers and subsidies from governments? Investments that would have been made anyways now become corporate bargaining chips – and worst of all, this is not temporary. It will never end. In 2020, corporate profits will again be brushed aside. If Canadian labour costs are in fact lower, this will again be said to be irrelevant; if workers have issues to correct – tough. The blackmail, once given into, works its magic indefinitely.

And that too is not the end of the problem. Even when corporations ‘give in’ and make promises, they sometimes honestly can’t meet them for reasons beyond their control, given that the economy as a whole is unplanned and future markets and competition are so uncertain (though the concessions made by workers are of course firmly tied down). Other times, corporations, in the pursuit of their own goals, simply ignore those promises because they can – there is no mechanism to enforce them. And sometimes the fine print in the promises is itself rather iffy. The most recent investment announcements at GM and Chrysler are certainly welcome, but aside from the possibility that some of this may have been coming anyways, unconfirmed reports suggest that GM’s promises in Oshawa and St. Catharines involve Canada getting ‘overflow’ investment, not ‘primary’ investments. If the market is there, the investments will come; and if it isn’t, cutbacks will first occur in Canada.

The experience in dealing with such promises is littered with false promises that the press and the union itself steadfastly ignores. When the UAW began to trade restraint for jobs in the late 70s, its U.S. Detroit Three membership stood at approximately 750,000. Today, after all those ‘trade-offs’ for jobs, U.S. membership stands at under 120,000 – a loss of well over 600,000 jobs or close to 85% of that earlier number. In Canada, the collapse was not quite as bad but still stunning: from about 70,000 to a current 23,000 – a loss of about 2/3 of the jobs.

Desperate to defend its virtual total emphasis on bargaining investment commitments (and perhaps also to isolate the Oakville local), Unifor has pointed to the Oakville plant as an example, arguing that the very major investments it got in 2013 were the result of the new-hire structure negotiated in 2012. But this is dishonest at worst, misleading at best. As the president of the Oakville local has pointed out, the commitment for these investments was actually made in 2009, before the 60%, 10-year phase-in came into place. The 2009 highlights brochure, produced by the national union, confirms this: it proudly proclaims that Ford has made a commitment to the “allocation of new-generation products to Oakville based on a new global vehicle platform during the business plan period.”

The point is that bargaining over jobs ends up giving workers neither decent standards for their work nor job security. It diverts attention from the broader, complex question of what needs to be done now that private corporations clearly aren’t up to improving working people’s lives and making them more secure. And it tends to demoralize workers and weaken unions so that they’re no longer a force capable of addressing those larger issues and leading progressive change.

Conclusion: Making History?

It would be unfair to blame the weaknesses in this current agreement solely on the present leadership of Unifor. The die was cast earlier under former leaderships. Moreover, the crisis in labour is clearly much deeper than recent trends in auto. When the turn to a new aggressiveness against working classes became the norm across capitalist countries, the responses of the trade union movement were remarkably limited.

One response assumed that nothing had fundamentally changed, that what was going on was temporary, that it would correct itself as the business cycle turned or as new politicians came into office with new policies. And so the best thing to do was to muddle through. Another was to find a technical solution in growth through union mergers, thinking that as with corporate mergers, ‘size’ would be their salvation. A third acknowledged the significance of the changes going on but was overwhelmed by them. These changes were seen as inevitable, leaving little to do but to accommodate to them – make concessions to hang on to what you had and make deals with the corporations you formerly distrusted and the politicians you formerly despised. Either way, unions faded as a vehicle for expressing and leading popular discontent What these so-called alternatives all had in common was their refusal to learn the lessons of the past and grasp that only mobilization and organizing, not muddling through, size, nor deals dressed in militant rhetoric could save the labour movement.

The criticism of Unifor’s current direction lies in its response to the deep economic crisis in auto being over; the auto companies now rolling in money; Canada currently sitting in an advantageous competitive position; and a new generation of workers looking to see what unions were really about. The time seemed ripe to lead a reversal in the labour movement’s trajectory – but this was not even tried. That failure defines what was in fact ‘historic’ about the 2016 agreement: it was not the highly overblown claims of the union’s achievements, but the confirmation of the end of the union’s leadership legacy within the labour and social movements.

The story may, however, not be over. The Ford workers in Oakville continue to press to reject the agreement reached at GM and Chrysler and to do so primarily around the basic principle of solidarity with a new generation of autoworkers. Whether or not they can sustain such a fight remains to be seen; challenging not just one of the largest global companies but one’s own union is an intimidating prospect. But if these workers and their local leaders do have the confidence to take on this battle to the end of establishing a new pattern for the next round of negotiations, supporting them will be a test for the entire rank and file of Unifor and for the labour movement as a whole. And it may very well give a different meaning to the ‘historic’ nature of the 2016 bargaining round. •

Sam Gindin, now retired, was an Assistant to two Presidents of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) (now Unifor).

Wow, the world gets crazier every moment!  Stephen Lewis, former socialist NDP leader from Canada’s province of Ontario was asked about PM Justin Trudeau’s letter to the UN asking for a special General Assembly meeting, as reported by the CBC yesterday:

The Canadian Mission to the United Nations has submitted a rare request asking the president of the General Assembly for a meeting of all 193 member states to “explore concerted action to apply pressure on the parties of the violence [in Syria],” now in its sixth year.

ON CBC this morning (Friday, October 14, 2016) Lewis was briefly interviewed by the CBC and clearly and distinctly chose the U.S. /NATO / western imperialist /mainstream media (MSM)  position on Syria.  He called Canada’s moves “artful and important.”  His reasons were shallow and demonstrated clearly that his socialist ideals – at least as an international socialist – are not very near and dear to his heart.

He commented that “war crimes are being committed by Russia” but hopefully that “Russia may at some point be forced to reconsider,” its position.   When questioned further on this he said he did not think that Russia – more specifically Putin, our now necessary evil ‘other’ personified as one man – would change its actions.  Why?  Because “Putin doesn’t care”, he wants to show that “Russia is back” and that is a “terrifying proposal.”

Double standards abound

Apparently the letter was co-sponsored by 68 other countries.  All of them for sure sycophantic allies of the U.S. empire….but perhaps underneath something unintended may occur.

Lewis said the meeting of the UN would “allow the world to express its outrage” at Russia’s war crimes, at the “destruction of children…the murder of children.”  Most interesting here is that while Russia is being singled out with this narrative, the history of the U.S. empire over the past several decades appears to be getting a clear pass.

Does anyone remember the war in Iraq, an illegal war (all initiators of wars are war criminals) that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (many children obviously, as most populations consist of about fifty per cent children)?  And before that, an estimated 500 thousand children died as a result of U.S. sanctions against the Hussein regime.  When questioned about this, then U.S. Secretary of State said the deaths were worth it for  U.S. interests.  War crimes?  Absolutely.

And what about Libya and the war crimes committed there, with the destruction of civilian infrastructure and attacks against the government that went well beyond the UN sanctioned no-fly zone.  More war crimes, more severe unintended consequences – although it did play into U.S. plans to  eliminate Syria.

Back to Afghanistan where the U.S. “war on terror” simmers on.   War crimes and crimes against humanity were committed there by U.S. forces and its “coalition” forces, including Canada.   Afghanistan as you should well know, is now a mess of factional fighting with the Taliban controlling about a third of the country.

Before all those, Serbia was bombed illegally by NATO (which the U.S. leads and in which Canada played a major role), attacking civilian structures such as bridges, industrial plants, public buildings, businesses, and as an aside, the Chinese embassy.  This was supposedly a “right to protect” operation, proved to be a preconceived excuse in order to weaken the Serb Republic and further contain a soon to be resurgent Russia.  An estimated 500 civilians were killed – sorry, no child count there.  But definitely a war crime.

And I probably shouldn’t mention Israel as I will instantly be labelled anti-Semitic, but the war crimes against civilians there – both in the West Bank and Gaza – have been ongoing for decades.  The notable case here at least as seen from the MSM perspective, have been the Israeli attacks against the open air prison of Gaza (population now at 2 million).   Hundreds of children have been slaughtered there using many “made in the U.S.A.” weapons, including chemical warfare (modified tear gas, phosphorous bombs), serving as well as a testing/proving ground for Israeli manufactured materials in support of their militarized economy.  More U.S. supported war crimes.

The U.S. has committed war crimes of an overt or covert nature in 50 countries since WW II, disposing of non-compliant governments with violence against citizens of those sovereign states.

Careful what you wish for

Perhaps, just perhaps, the unintended consequences of the UN meeting might be the bringing to light the war crimes of the U.S., against children, against civilians, against sovereign governments.  I don’t expect that as the U.S. controls the MSM for the western world.  But to focus a call on Russian war crimes is the height of arrogance and hubris from a nation (Canada) that has supported U.S. war crimes and committed some of its own.

Yes, indeed, let’s have a special General Assembly meeting on war crimes, but let’s do it for the whole world and not just the sycophantic interests of an increasingly belligerent member of the U.S. imperial coalition.

The world does need to express its outrage – at war crimes committed by the U.S., about U.S. support for Saudi war crimes in Yemen, about U.S. support for Saudi support of the various salafist jihadi groups around the world.

Russia is back

Well, yes and no.  Russia endured three major invasions from Western Europe (Napoleon, Wilhelm, Hitler), more invasions after WW I from western nations, and suffered under the “shock doctrine” of U.S. neoliberalism.  The latter came about as the result of U.S. influence on the drunkard Yeltsin and created a country in decline ruled by oligarchs who stole much of the wealth of the country (Khodorkovsky, Magnitsky among them).   Currently, the U.S. has a first strike nuclear policy with missile bases in Poland and Romania within minutes of the Russian heartland.

Not exactly a great history of western accommodation.  And now NATO has expanded towards Russia’s borders, yet accuse Russia of aggression (??)  – logic not being a strength of the MSM or the politicians of the west.  The U.S. initiated the coup in Ukraine, just ask Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, partner of Robert Kagan, known neocon warmonger.

The MSM across the west, in collusion with the political elites, are doing their best to create an evil Putin leading an evil Russia trying to regain its empire.  That they have succeeded in this image is a testament to the power of the MSM, the ignorance of the people of the west (most particularly in Canada and the U.S.), and the arrogance, hubris, and wilful ignorance of the elite class.

Russia is back (and Canada postures)

– and is scaring the bejesus out of the U.S. and its allies.  It has obviously revived its military power, and in many cases is considered to be well ahead of the U.S.   It’s economy, in spite of the best intentions of U.S. sanctions, is doing reasonably well as its home grown industries are being forced to develop more, and its agricultural sector has benefited from counter sanctions against EU products.   Western action against China have created a Sino-Russian alliance stronger than it ever was during the Sino-Soviet era.

The latter has serious implications for the U.S. desire to be the global hegemon with full spectrum dominance over – everyone and everything.  And for that, it is good that Russia is back.

For Canada and Trudeau to attempt to corral the western MSM message into the UN is simply political posturing.  Whether it comes from wilful ignorance and arrogance,  simple ignorance, simple stupidity, or a pretty boy posturing as the good guy Canadian mediator is difficult to discern.  But it is definitely posturing – it is the U.S. that has created the mess in the MIddle east, it is the U.S./NATO that has created the belligerence towards Russia, it is the U.S. military /industrial /political /financial complex that has created a world of fear and terror in order to attempt its global hegemony.  Finally someone is capable of standing up to that – which unfortunately, given the U.S. propensity for nuclear sword threats, may result in the U.S. having created the perfect storm to induce world war last.

America knows the leverage corporations have on Washington, but the latest WikiLeaks files on Podesta show how big the influence truly is.

WikiLeaks just released the 9th set of intercepted emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign boss John Podesta. The current batch contains clues that suggest corporate control mechanisms that lead straight to President Obama.

According to the below statement from the WikiLeaks Twitter account, a state party has intentionally cut off access to the Internet for Julian Assange, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks. This happened after the ninth consecutive day of releases of emails from the hacked account of John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign committee. It also comes on the heels of a potentially serious campaign finance problem for the Hillary for America committee, the primary fundraising vehicle for Clinton, according to an email released by WikiLeaks just yesterday. This would be the second time in less than six months that the Clinton campaign’s finances have come under scrutiny.

In April and May of this year, Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign charged the Clinton campaign with serious violations of campaign finance law, including “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” and exploiting “the rules in ways that let her high-dollar donors like Alice Walton of Wal-Mart fame and the actor George Clooney and his super-rich Hollywood friends skirt legal limits on campaign contributions.”

The prior allegations play into the hands of the Trump camp which has consistently portrayed Hillary Clinton as someone who doesn’t care about fellow Americans but only herself and getting rich. The release of an email yesterday by WikiLeaks, together with others over the prior eight days, are making those charges harder to refute.

Robby Mook is Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager. According to numerous leaked emails, over many months in 2014 Mook was consulting and coordinating elaborate professional services for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Unfortunately, there were three major problems with this. Hillary Clinton had not told the Federal Election Commission that she was running a campaign; she wasn’t reporting contributions and expenditures; and Robby Mook, during this time, was being paid by Common Good PAC at the rate of approximately $10,000 per month. Common Good PAC is a Virginia Political Action Committee set up by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a long time Clinton loyalist. (The PAC had already been the target of negative publicity for offering private dinners with Governor McAuliffe and his wife in exchange for $100,000 donations, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.)

The deterrent for Hillary Clinton to set up the normal exploratory campaign vehicle was that throughout 2014 and into the spring of 2015, both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton were making millions of dollars giving paid speeches to global banks, corporations and corporate trade associations according to her financial disclosure report. Each of the Clintons received personal fees of typically more than $200,000 per speech. In an email dated November 18, 2014, long-time adviser to Clinton, Huma Abedin, wrote to other members of the Clinton camp: “We ended up locking in ALL her remaining paid speaking offers a few weeks ago. She reviewed them all with you at meeting so you know everything.” Those paid speeches for Clinton stretched into March of 2015, preventing her from declaring her candidacy without the need to dodge embarrassing questions on pay-to-play.

An October 7, 2014 speech that Hillary Clinton delivered on behalf of Deutsche Bank in exchange for a fee of $260,000 was particularly dicey. Just three months prior to this speech, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had conducted a hearing into how Deutsche Bank had engaged in a scheme with hedge funds to cheat the Internal Revenue Service out of billions of dollars in taxes. Just six months later, a unit of Deutsche Bank entered a guilty plea with the U.S. Justice Department for wire fraud and engaging in a price-fixing conspiracy.

Read complete article on Wall Street on Parade

Since previous military report, the Syrian army, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, Liwa al-Quds Lebanese Hezbollah have achieved more gains in Aleppo city. They took control of the agriculture school, located south of Tall Asfar, and reached the ”Youth Housing” north of the Hanano Housing. Now, the army and Liwa al-Quds focused on military operations in the areas of the Ba’edin and Jandoul roundabouts.  By Oct. 17, the government forces seized the Intharat Heights near the Ba’edin roundabout and secured the areas near the neighborhoods of Ayn at-Tal and Haydariyah.

A separate attempt to push to Jabal Badro has not resulted in any notable success.

The army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) also launched an operation, advancing in the areas west of the Aleppo International Airport. Sheikh Lutfi is the goal. On Oct. 17, clashes intensified in Salah Addeen and the army took control of large parts of the 1070 Apartent Project.

On Oct. 16, the Syrian Army’s Tiger Forces and the NDF liberated from Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), Ahrar al-Sham and its allies the strategic city of Ma’ardas in the northern part of Hama province. This was the biggest success of the pro-government forces since the start of massive counter-offensive in the province. The militant-controlled city of Souran will become the next target of the army and the NDF. Both Souran and Ma’ardas are strategically located along the highway between the cities of Homs and Aleppo.

The army also set a full-control of the villages of Qudsiyah and al-Hamah, located near Damascus after militants had withdrew from the areas under the deal with the government.

On Oct. 17, the army and the NDF continued operation in Western Ghouta, aiming the strategic town of Khan Shih. The government forces were developing the advance from the recently liberated town of Deir Khabiyah. The militants’ defenses are on the verge of collapse in the region.

Late on Oct. 15, the ISIS terrorist group withdrew from the area of Azaz in the northern part of Aleppo province. The ISIS forces were set to deploy in Al-Bab in order to prepare to defend this strategic city in Aleppo province. Next day Turkish-backed militant groups, supported by the Turkish Armed Forces, took control of the cities of Dabiq and Sawran and the nearby areas, including Sawran, Tilalayn, Salihiyah, Hawr al-Nahr and Sunbul.

On Oct. 15, the Russian Northern Fleet officially announced that a group of warships, led by heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser, had started a cruise to the areas of the northeastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The group includes “the Pyotr Velikiy heavy nuclear missile cruiser, anti-submarine warships the Vice Admiral Kulakov and the Severomorsk, as well as supply vessels.”

The Kuznetsov is expected to join up with a nuclear submarine, as well as Tu-160 long-range strategic bombers, for anti-piracy and anti-terror exercises before arriving in Eastern Mediterranean where it will join the Russian forces fighting terrorists in Syria.

The joint forces of the US-led coalition, the Iraqi government, the pro-government Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) and the Kurdish Peshmerga launched the long-awaited military operation to liberate the last ISIS major stronghold in Iraq – Mosul. Since Saturday, Mosul and the nearby areas have been the target of massive shelling and bombing campaigns by the US artillery and the US-led coalition’s air power.

The joint anti-ISIS forces are aiming to secure the Mosul countryside before storming the ISIS stronghold itself. On Oct. 16, the Iraqi Army’s 9th Division and the PMU liberated the city of Bashiqa from ISIS. The Peshmerga joined the operation northeast of Mosul. The Kurdish fighters will block ISIS escape routers and receive and screen refugees but not enter the city.

The Obama administration focused on attempts to retake Mosul after the widely promoted idea of liberation of Raqqa in Syria failed due to the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish tensions in northern Syria. There are also reports that the US military staff has opposed that operation because it will weaken anti-Assad forces.

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73% of Republicans – and according to one poll, 41% of all voters – believe the election could be stolen by Clinton and her lackeys in the media.

Democrats urgently warn that there’s a real threat that Russia could hack our election to steal it for Trump.

While these sound like opposites that are so different that they cannot be reconciled, there’s a bigger picture: our voting systems are so insecure that elections can be stolen.

The alternative media has been warning for years that America’s voting systems are so poorly-designed that it would be child’s play to steal an election.

(Indeed, Democratic president Carter and Republican Supreme Court Justice O’Connor said that the 2000 presidential election was stolen.  And some experts – including the 100th President of the American Statistical Association, professor Fritz Scheuren – say that the Democratic race was stolen from Sanders.)

As security expert Bruce Schneier writes in the Washington Post:

While computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.

We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.

Longer term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails, and no Internet voting. I know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned way, but the security risks are simply too great.

Unless we shore up our voting systems and ditch the electronic voting systems with no paper trail, American democracy won’t be worth the paper it’s written on  …

We are living in a society where dangerous political ignorance prevails, and truth is subordinated.

“Forbidden truths” are concealed beneath the protective cover of a growing array of taboos.  The taboos protect the criminal warmongers and the oligarch class, as they corrode peace, equality, freedom, and prosperity.

Despite the preponderance of strong evidence that the 9/11 catastrophe was a false flag, those who question the ever-changing official narratives are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”. Open discussions are replaced by ad hominem attacks, or straw man arguments that are thought to neutralize dissent and make the truth go away. The repetition of these logical fallacies, especially the “conspiracy theory” label, then serves to conceal the truth within the walls of the taboo.  The CIA is well-versed in these psychological operations, and the masses willingly and gullibly take the bait every time. Writer Paul Craig Roberts cleverly reverses the psy op and wonders if those who refuse to hear the truth are “CIA stooges”.

The 9/11 taboo continues to provide cover for criminal invasions masquerading as “counter-terrorism”, and the “Global War On Terror”.  It continues to shield the public from the known and well-documented truth that the West is expanding the reach of terrorism globally by using mercenary terrorists as proxies to destroy and occupy non-belligerent countries such as Syria.

Everything that mainstream media (MSM) vomits about Syria is false, yet the public rarely thinks critically about the messaging, despite the on-going deceptions and genocides of all the post-9/11 invasions.

False flags are the spark that begin previously-planned invasions, and they always have been.  Invasions take time to plan and prepare.  The illegal invasion of Afghanistan, for example, launched almost immediately after the 9/11 carnage, was not a spur of the moment decision.  Prof Michel Chossudovsky explains in “September 11, 2001: The War Crimes Committed ‘In the Name of 9/11’| Initiating a Legal Procedure against the Perpetrators of 9/11”:

“Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. Confirmed by press reports, the war on Afghanistan was already in an advanced state of readiness prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.”

Instead of relegating open discussions about false flags to the sidelines, shows such as “False Flag Weekly News”, featuring Profs Kevin Barrett and Anthony Hall, should be front and center.  But the taboo prevents this from happening, as elements within our deluded society emerge to suppress the show and its commentators. Hall’s recent suspension without pay from his tenured position as Professor at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, seems emblematic of this suppression.

Those in the Academy who seek to further the cause for peace and international justice, as evidenced by Hall’s books, The American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl With One Spoon, Part One (McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series) and Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series) are seemingly targeted, even as schools such as the Munk School of Global Affairs  — the namesake of which  elicits connotations of predatory economic practices, and predatory forms of globalization – capture positive mainstream attention.

Consequently, political ignorance prevails, terrorism grows, predatory economic models grow, free speech and thought are squelched, and repressive police state legislation flourishes globally.

All of this protects and enriches the criminal warmongers and the oligarch classes, to the detriment of peace, justice, and stability.  Those who seek the truth and open discussion about transformative events are seeking peace, not war, and yet (ironically), they are the ones who are condemned, not the criminal warmongers. Taboo topics also serve to maintain the political status quo at the highest levels.  Geopolitically, most areas are off-limits, so political campaigning is increasingly nonsensical, even absurd.  Third party candidates such as Jill Stein are almost “disappeared”, and the focus is seemingly on the allegations of personal deeds or misdeeds of the lead players: currently Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Evidence-based political analysis is shelved — commentators who might be critical of Apartheid Israel must first survive labels such as “Anti-Semite” or “Holocaust Denier”, each as effective in its own way as the “Conspiracy Theory” label, so important topics are excluded even before the debates and the campaigns begin.

And there is nothing new about this.  Howard Zinn, in A People’s History Of The United States quotes Henry Adams, a nineteenth century commentator who wrote to his friend about the presidential election:

“We are plunged in politics funnier than words can express.  Very great issues are involved  … But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests.  By common consent they agree to let these alone.  We are afraid to discuss them.  Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.”

The choice is ours.  We can continue on this path that leads us from one catastrophe to another, including permanent and increasingly dangerous warfare, or we can break some taboos and reject the status quo.  The latter choice is more life-enriching.

Debunking the Western Media’s Coverage of the War on Syria

By Daniel Espinosa Winder, October 16 2016

There were indeed anti-Assad protests, sometimes clashing with pro-Assad protests, but they were in many cases infiltrated or even promoted by elements with very different goals, mainly not Syrian in origin, and used for violence against civilians and peaceful protestors, policemen and soldiers.

Hybrid Warfare and US Geostrategy

By Michael Welch and Andrew Korybko, October 16 2016

Once the US has identified its target, it begins searching for the structural vulnerabilities that it will exploit in the coming Hybrid War. Contextually, these aren’t physical objects to be sabotaged such as power plants and roads … but socio-political characteristics that are meant to be manipulated in order to attractively emphasize a certain demographic’s “separateness” from the existing national fabric and thus ‘legitimize’ their forthcoming foreign-managed revolt against the authorities.

President Obama Threatens President Putin With Nuclear War

By Eric Zuesse, October 16 2016

“It’ll be at a time of our choosing,” says U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, on NBC’’s “Meet the Press,” aired on Sunday, October 16th. Interviewer Chuck Todd had asked him, “Why would he [Obama] send a message out to Putin?” Biden (image right) pursed his lips, paused, and said, with a grim look on his face, “We sent him the message.” Of course that didn’t answer Todd’s question, which was “Why?” Biden and Todd both remained silent for another tense moment. Then, Biden picked up again: “We have the capacity to do it, and, uh,” and Todd interrupted him there with “He’ll know it?”

Stop Greenwashing Capitalism, Start Holding Corporations to Account

By Rosemary Mason, October 17 2016

In the 1970s, the agrochemicals industry was able to evade effective regulation in the UK. Robert van den Bosch, wrote in 1978 in The Pesticide Conspiracy: “If one considers how dangerous these chemicals are, one would suppose that it would be government policy to minimize their use by every possible means. However, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution notes, ‘there is… no such policy in the UK, nor does the possible need for it appear to have been considered, notwithstanding the great increases in the use of these chemicals.’”

Demonising Wind Energy in Australia: The South Australian Blackout

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 17 2016

From the time when energy became a state ambition and the central, almost paranoid platform of security, its messiness became apparent.  Energy reserves needed to be controlled; corrupt regimes with access to such resources needed to be placated, or, if not, overthrown and replaced by compliant puppet governments.  The world of energy is one governed by invasion, acquisitive brutality and resistance.

About Bob Dylan – Nobel Laureate: “A Lightning Rod for Contentious Debate and Polarized Views”

By Adeyinka Makinde, October 17 2016

Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature? Not to those who feel that an award for literature cannot be based on writing popular music songs and publishing a book on prose poetry. While Dylan’s influence on rock music cannot be denied, he nonetheless serves as a lightning rod for contentious debate and polarized views.

In an ominous sign for press freedom, documentary filmmaker and journalist Deia Schlosberg was arrested and charged with felonies carrying a whopping maximum sentence of up to 45 years in prison—simply for reporting on the ongoing Indigenous protests against fossil fuel infrastructure.

Schlosberg was arrested in Walhalla, North Dakota on Tuesday for filming activists shutting down a tar sands pipeline, part of a nationwide solidarity action organized on behalf of those battling the Dakota Access Pipeline.

“The actions of the North Dakota Police force are not just a violation of the climate, but a violation of the constitution.”
—Josh Fox, Gasland filmmaker

The filmmaker was held without access to a lawyer for 48 hours, her colleague Josh Fox wrote in the Nation, and her footage was confiscated by the police.

Schlosberg was then charged Friday with three felonies, the Huffington Post reported: “conspiracy to theft of property, conspiracy to theft of services and conspiracy to tampering with or damaging a public service. Together, the charges carry 45 years in maximum prison sentences.”

“They have in my view violated the First Amendment,” Fox told the Huffington Post, referring to the state’s Pembina County Sheriff’s Department. “It’s fucking scary, it knocks the wind of your sails, it throws you for a loop. They threw the book at Deia for being a journalist.”

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden observed that Schlosberg faces more years in prison than he does for leaking secret documents about the NSA’s mass surveillance program in 2013:

“Deia isn’t alone,” observed Fox in an op-ed in the Nation. “The arrest of journalists, filmmakers, and others witnessing and reporting on citizen protests against fossil-fuel infrastructure amid climate change is part of a worrisome and growing pattern.”

Indeed, the news of Schlosberg’s arrest followed Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman announcement earlier this week that she will return to North Dakota to combat charges she faces as a result of reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline protest last month.

“Goodman, whose camera crew filmed a private security team attacking peaceful Native American protesters with dogs and pepper spray, faces charges of criminal trespassing—which many have said amounts to an assault on press freedom,” as Common Dreams reported.

It also emerged late Saturday that a North Dakota state prosecutor has dropped the trespassing charge and is seeking instead to charge Goodman with participating in a “riot,” Democracy Now reported.

“I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting,” said Goodman. “I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters.”

A warrant for Goodman’s arrest was issued September 8.

Meanwhile, actor Shailene Woodley was arrested Monday while live-streaming a prayer action at a Dakota Access construction site. “She was singled out, the police told her, because she was well-known and had 40,000 people watching live on her Facebook page,” Fox wrote. “Other filmmakers shooting protest actions along the pipeline have also been arrested.”

“Journalism is not a crime; it is a responsibility,” Fox said in a press statement about this pattern of arrests. “The actions of the North Dakota Police force are not just a violation of the climate, but a violation of the constitution.”

Supporters have created a petition calling on the authorities in North Dakota to drop charges against Schlosberg, Goodman, and other journalists arrested for doing their work and reporting on the protests against Dakota Access.

Neil Young, Mark Ruffalo, Daryl Hannah, and other celebrities have also signed an open letter to President Barack Obama and North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple, calling on the leaders to intervene and for Schlosberg’s charges to be dropped. The charges were “unfair, unjust, and illegal,” the letter said, according to Reuters.

“This is not only about reporting on the climate-change movement,” Fox argued in the Nation.

 “Journalists have also been arrested reporting on Black Lives Matter, the movement for Native rights, and many other important movements the corporate media fails to cover. The First Amendment and the Constitution are at stake in this case. If we lose it, we lose America too.”

Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature? Not to those who feel that an award for literature cannot be based on writing popular music songs and publishing a book on prose poetry. While Dylan’s influence on rock music cannot be denied, he nonetheless serves as a lightning rod for contentious debate and polarized views.

For many, Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman, is a living legend and quite simply a genius. He is an American icon; one in a long line of unique characters hailing from a culture where the capacity for self-invention is seemingly limitless.  In this case, Dylan, the descendant of eastern European Jews raised in a small town in the American Midwest became an important figure in an age of tumultuous social change during which there was a marked evolution in the forms of popular musical expression.

One revolutionary aspect of Bob Dylan’s early career was his part in nullifying ‘Tin Pan Alley’-style lyrics as the only viable vehicle for expressing popular music. This ‘Shakespeare in the alley’ changed the way rock musicians could write songs. Think of the imagery he conjures in songs like “All Along the Watchtower”, “Jokerman” and “Blind Willie McTell”. His influence on fellow musicians was profound. Think of the Byrds and the Beatles for starters.

And don’t forget that sounding like a screeching, electrocuted poor kitty cat didn’t stop that controversial aspect of his package from being influential. Fans of Jimi Hendrix should give Dylan a lot of credit for inspiring him to sing. Hendrix, the story goes, was self-conscious about his voice and only really took to singing because he felt that he stood a chance if the whinny-voiced Dylan could become successful in the business.

But Dylan has always been a polarizing figure right from the time he plugged his guitar into an electric socket. The folk purists never forgave him. Also unforgivable to many of the ideological Left was his support for political Zionism clearly enunciated in the song ‘Neighborhood Bully’. Dylan, they claim had praised Meir Kehane and never retracted this even though the two major bodies that Kehane founded, the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach Party, were both extremist organisations which were later proscribed.

And of course, unforgivable to many is the perception of Dylan as a sell-out to the values to which he had professed as he was propelled to fame and fortune. They argue that he imitated the folk hero activist mantle of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger but only used the protest movement as a pathway to personal enrichment and a means of opening the door to membership of the social elite. In this way, Dylan, it is argued, is no better than those purveyors of the 1960s ‘counter culture’ who had by the 1980s reinvented themselves as agents and functionaries within the capitalist system.

The popular view of Dylan as a rebel has worn thin with the passage of time. Songs of social protest gave way to ruminations of a personal and religious form. It is fair to say that Dylan did not have to bear the turmoil of threats to his life and livelihood as did the musician purveyors of Tropicalismo who had to flee from the clutches of the Brazilian military junta of the 1960s and 1970s, or the Nigerian Fela Kuti who suffered beatings and imprisonment at the hands of successive military governments or Bob Marley who survived an assassination attempt by gunmen with a political motive.

If the question were asked as to what tangible change a political musician such as Jackson Browne achieved from his protests on behalf of the environment and against the United States backed authoritarian governments of Latin America, the response might be that Dylan did not even bother trying.

Dylan’s award of the Nobel Prize is not its first controversial award. The committee’s award to Barack Obama that of its Peace Prize was criticised since the incoming president had not presided over any successful peace initiative. The award of that prize to the former Irgun terror chief Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, who as a young Egyptian officer had been willing to cooperate with the advancing Wehrmacht if they could secure his country’s independence, while based on an unexpected peace treaty in a troubled region, was in time criticized by those who believe that only a comprehensive peace settlement and not separate treaties will bring true and lasting peace to that area of the world.

There has always been the suspicion of a political basis in regards to Nobel awards.

Does the committee favour those who work within the English language above others? Are developing countries given a fair appraisal? There are suspicions of a rotation system among the continents. For instance, when Japan was about to receive its first award for literature, it was felt that Yukio Mishima, the most prominent Japanese writer of his time was the favourite. But Mishima later ruled himself out of contention when he discovered that his early mentor Yasunari Kawabata was in the reckoning and wanted consideration. Kawabata won. Mishima had written a note of recommendation to the Nobel committee in Kawabata’s favour and died having correctly prophesized that when Japan’s ‘turn’ came again, it would be his rival Kenzaburo Oe who would be the more likely to succeed.

The award to Bob Dylan is baffling. While it is true that Dylan has, as the committee cited, created “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” song lyrics are not poems and many poets may tend to eschew the use of instruments as part of their range of expression. He has only written one book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Meanwhile, those writers who have been genuinely innovative and experimental in form and content have been ignored.

Perhaps the members of the Nobel Prize giving board are just sentimental old hippies.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England

From the time when energy became a state ambition and the central, almost paranoid platform of security, its messiness became apparent.  Energy reserves needed to be controlled; corrupt regimes with access to such resources needed to be placated, or, if not, overthrown and replaced by compliant puppet governments.  The world of energy is one governed by invasion, acquisitive brutality and resistance.

Even within countries less susceptible to regime change via energy exploitation, the tendency to politicise the issues surrounding access and acquisition remain.  Cleaner, more sustainable options are deemed unpatriotic, draining traditional industries and jobs.  The sense that the climate change phenomenon is an exaggerated bogey of politics persists.

At stages the argument has been panicked.  The violent storms in South Australia last month, so-called “act of God” events which inflicted an energy blackout through the state, did not draw sympathy from the federal government, which persists in its autistic policies on the environment.  The opposite was the case.

According to Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the blackout was exacerbated by poor energy policies, notably of the environmentally inclined sort.  The finger, he argued, could be pointed to renewal energy targets at the state level deemed “extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic.”  It did not take long for the suggestion to be made that the Greens, and those sympathetic to green policies, be hauled out and given a public dressing down.

Various political figures were also lending their voices to the vitriolic mix, adding good lashings of distortion. After all, South Australia is something of a golden boy in the renewable revolution in a country often hostile to it.  The figure of 41 percent of the state’s energy generated from renewables, much of it drawn from wind, was condemned as a feature of irresponsibility rather than praised as a matter of foresight.

Permanent school boy Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce might well be a fanatic when it comes to repelling the introduction of biosecurity threats into Australia (remember the Depp affair), but tends to be softheaded on the greening of the economy.

Earlier this month, Joyce suggested that the mid-latitude cyclone, which generated several tornados, should not be saddled with the dramatic devastation.  He had found the indisputable culprit.  “It wasn’t a hurricane.  It was a severe thunderstorm.  They’ve had severe thunderstorms before.”  Wind energy, in short was “obviously not working” given the dramatic consequence.

Having made the erroneous deduction that South Australia, having had similar events before, should have been more resilient in the face of the usual, he condemned recent spikes in energy prices in the state, and the “appalling management” on the ground.[1]

Similar views could also be heard from the muddled Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, who remains a customary conquistador indifferent to the renewable industry, and South Australian senator Nick Xenophon, wind energy’s permanent critic.

The searing spotlight had moved to demonising wind and the uneven nature of renewable targets across the states.  “Federal and State renewable energy targets being different,” he explained to Radio National, “does create a problem, because it skews investment in an inefficient way”.  The theme here: money, investment, rather than environmental conscientiousness.

Frydenberg went on to tell the 7.30 Report that, “questions are raised by the virtue of the increasing amount of renewables”, a point he twinned with an admission that “South Australia lost its power due to the most extreme weather event there in half a century”.[2]

Wind energy, as Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel explained, had become something of a handy scapegoat. Not that his views mattered.  “If you had a natural gas generator there, and the voltage was collapsing, and the frequency was collapsing, that natural gas generator would have taken itself off the grid just as rapidly as the wind farms had taken themselves off” (ABC News, Oct 6).

In the populist bilge, the exceptional nature of the weather event, advanced by the energy experts, was ignored.  The views of engineers, gathered from such sources as ElectraNet, which installed temporary transmission towers in the state’s mid-north, were discounted.

A regulatory report released this month by the National Energy Market Operator examining the outage came to the sensible conclusion that weather’s destruction of infrastructure, not environmental mismanagement, was the catalyst.  The authors of the report acknowledged a sudden loss of wind energy, but preferred to focus on the effects of the storm.  The result of the damage to transmission lines increased pressure on the main interconnector with Victoria, resulting in a tripping of the system after an inevitable overload.

Admitting that at the political level would be sensible, but in the ruthless and often misinformed world of energy politics, it would be unexpected.  The point is made more acute in a country where climate change denialism, along with a continued insistence on fossil fuels, prevails with stubborn determination.  In all this, the de-greening of Turnbull’s faux credentials in this entire process is perhaps the most striking feature of the debate.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-06/appalling-management-to-blame-for-prolonged-black-out-in-sa/7908032
[2] https://newmatilda.com/2016/10/09/black-friday-brain-fades-black-outs-and-josh-frydenbergs-awkward-day-in-canberra/

All participants of the international ministerial meeting on the Syrian settlement in the Swiss city of Lausanne have apparently confirmed their commitment to preserve Syria’s integrity.

However, Gregory Copley, editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs and President of the parent organization, the International Strategic Studies Association, warned that the stance currently adopted by the US on Syria may in fact yield some rather risky and unpleasant outcomes.

During an interview with Sputnik Radio, he said that the US insistence that ‘Assad must go’ and stubbornly continuing to support proxy rebel forces looks like a “recipe for disaster.”

“I believe that the Obama administration will be reckless about this and will basically push for a risky outcome. We could see how regardless of the good intentions stated the US is about to do something risky, I believe, in Syria,” Copley said.

He also predicted that if Hillary Clinton gets elected as the next US president, she’s likely to pursue the “risky confrontation with Russia”, in no small part due to her commitment to the anti-Russian policies espoused by the US financial elites.

Also, he ventured a guess that any new agreement reached on the Syrian conflict between the parties involved is unlikely to be a long-lasting arrangement due to the US agenda.

“I think that the US will be forced to get along with things that should sound moderate and supportive of consensus… But the reality is that the United States is now looking for active ways to increase its military engagement in Syria and has just done a number of things which have been extremely provocative,” Copley remarked.

At the same time, he added, if the Syrian army continues to make steady progress in Aleppo and stabilize the situation in the city then it might in fact help “remove some of the apparent legitimacy of Washington’s claims that it must intervene.”

“The US labeled any of its strikes against Syrian government or Russian positions as accidents and labeled anything that Syrian or Russian forces do which might have a civilian impact as being war crimes – this isn’t really a path to achieve any meaningful settlement. However, if the situation stabilizes because the government takes control over east Aleppo, then I think it might remove some of the opportunity for Washington to push ahead with a military solution,” Copley surmised.

To hear US corporate media tell it, the US was dragged into a brand new war on Wednesday.

US destroyers in the Gulf of Aden launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels, a Shia insurgent group currently withstanding a massive bombing campaign from a Saudi-led coalition in a year-and-half conflict between largely Shia rebels and the Saudi-backed Sunni government in Yemen. The Pentagon insisted that cruise missiles had been fired onto the USS Mason on Sunday and Wednesday from Houthi-controlled territory, and called the airstrikes a “limited self-defense” response.

Needless to say, US media followed the Pentagon’s lead. The fact that the United States has been literally fueling Saudi warplanes for 18 months while selling weapons and providing intelligence support to the Gulf monarchy—acts which even the US State Department believes could expose the US to war crimes prosecution—was either downplayed or ignored. Nor did media recall the US’s long history of drone warfare in Yemen, where the military and CIA have been carrying out long-range assassinations since 2002, killing more than 500 people, including at least 65 civilians.

So far, most print media reporting has at least bothered to briefly put the attack and counterattack in broader context, noting the US role in the brutal bombing campaign that has left over 4,000 dead, including over 140 bombed at a funeral in Sana’a last week—even as the stories’ framing downplayed the US’s history in the conflict. The New York Times (10/12/16), for example, said in the second paragraph of its report on the airstrikes (emphasis added):

The strikes against the Houthi rebels marked the first time the United States has become involved militarily in the civil war between the Houthis, an indigenous Shiite group with loose connections to Iran, and the Yemeni government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations.

But the Times story went on to acknowledge, somewhat contradictorily, that the US had been “quietly providing military support to a Saudi Arabia-led bombing campaign against the rebels since last year.” The story noted that the US had been

providing intelligence and Air Force tankers to refuel the coalition’s jets and bombers. The American military has refueled more than 5,700 aircraft involved in the bombing campaign…. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed since the bombing began, according to the United Nations’ top human rights official.

TV news reports, on the other hand, kept the spin and left out the context. They mostly failed to mention that the US has been assisting the Saudi assault on the Houthi rebels for a year and a half, and framed the incident as a US warship being attacked while simply minding its own business in international waters.

CBS’s David Martin, fresh off his 14-minute Pentagon commercial last month, didn’t mention the Saudi bombing campaign or explain the US’s role in the war for his segment for CBS This Morning (10/13/16). In fact, Martin never uttered the word “Saudi” or named any of the other countries involved in Yemen, only noting that the rebels are “trying to overthrow the government.” The average viewer would come away thinking the US Navy ship just happened to be in the neighborhood when it was randomly fired upon.

ABC’s Martha Raddatz (Good Morning America,10/13/16) likewise didn’t inform the viewer that the US has been a party to the civil war for 18 months. She also never used the word “Saudi” or referred to the brutal bombing campaign; she barely even alluded to there being a conflict at all.

CNN’s Barbara Starr (CNN, 10/13/16) joined the club, omitting the US and Saudi roles in the conflict entirely. She went one step further and repeatedly speculated about “direct” Iranian involvement in the Mason attack and what that would entail, despite there being zero evidence and no suggestion from the Pentagon of Iranian participation. Starr even conflated Al Qaeda and Iran, despite their being on opposite sides of the conflict:

The Yemeni missiles were fairly old but had been outfitted with highly lethal warheads, the kind Al Qaeda and Iran know how to make.

The implication was that Al Qaeda might have somehow provided Houthi rebels with missiles, but this, of course, is absurd: The Houthis and Al Qaeda are sectarian enemies and have been fighting each other throughout the civil war. Never mind; Starr needed to raise the stakes and throw out as many boogeymen as she could.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (10/13/16) delivered the worst of the batch. Not only did she too omit the Saudi bombing campaign and the US’s role in it (again, leaving the viewer to believe the attack was a total non sequitur), she spun the issue in tedious partisan terms, recalling Trump’s statement he would attack Iranian warships that threatened the US:

You might remember Republican candidate Donald Trump said in an off-handed remark during the campaign that if Iranian ships got too close to American ships and if Iranian sailors made rude gestures towards our American sailors under President Trump, we’d blow those Iranian ships out of the water. Well, Iranian ships and American ships are now in the same waters, off the coast of Yemen in the middle of war, with Tomahawk missiles and cruise missiles already flying. Steady on.

Why are American ships in those waters? Why are Tomahawk missiles “flying”? The conflict is never explained; it’s only brought up so that Maddow can warn that the GOP nominee could make things worse. Of course, it isn’t Trump who backed the Saudis in an air campaign that’s left thousands dead, but Obama—and it’s Hillary Clinton who as secretary of State enthusiastically pushed to sell warplanes to Riyadh (The Intercept, 2/22/16). But such facts would messy up the election-season narrative.

Maddow, like the other reports, used the loaded modifier “Iran-backed” to describe the Houthis (even though experts and Pentagon officials think Iran’s support is overblown). This is a stark asymmetry, considering that none of the reports referred to the Yemeni government as “US-backed” or “Saudi-backed.” She also said that the Navy blamed the attacks on the Houthis, when the Pentagon only claims the missiles came from rebel territory, and could very well be from other allied groups (New York Times, 10/13/16).

Not only is the US’s backing of Saudi Arabia omitted from all these reports, the word “Saudi” isn’t uttered in any of them. The viewer is given the impression that the war, aside from Iranian meddling, is an entirely internal affair—when it actually involves over 15 different countries, mostly Sunni monarchies propping up the Yemeni government—and that the rebels just randomly decided to pick a fight with the largest military in the history of the world.

The Houthis, for their part, vehemently deny having carried out the attack on the Mason, and there is no publicly available evidence it was them or allied forces. It should be noted, however, that Houthi forces took credit for sinking a United Arab Emirates supply ship two weeks earlier.

As is often the case with war, the issue of “first blood”—or who started the fighting—gets muddied. Governments naturally want global audiences and their own citizens to view their actions as defensive—a necessary response to aggression, not aggression itself. US corporate media are aiding this official spin in their reporting on the US bombing of Yemen.