Global Research

The following article brings into light important questions about the accession of India and Pakistan, the two major powers of South Asia, into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The two South Asian powers will change or adjust the geopolitical gravity of the SCO, expanding it outside of Central Asia, and in the process strengthening the Eurasian credentials of the SCO. There are, however,  questions on whether the “Shanghai Spirit” of consensus-based decision-making can continue with the entry of India and Pakistan as full SCO members. Should the founding members of the SCO, like China and Russia, establish formal special statuses and rights for themselves to make sure that the focus of the SCO is not changed or diverted by India and Pakistan, as this article published by the Global Times in China proposes?

 Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 2 July 2016.

The annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was held last week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Prior to it, Li Huilai, China’s assistant foreign minister, said that the SCO would see some progress in its expansion at this year’s summit after India and Pakistan were given the initial green-light to join the bloc at last year’s Ufa summit. This marks the first expansion by the organization 15 years after its establishment, and will create new opportunities for its development.

But in the meantime, the regional organization is still young and the inclusion of new members may bring it some concerns, which SCO member states need to make plans early on and deal with them well so as to maximize the benefits from expansion.

As SCO observers, India and Pakistan had been committed to promoting cooperation with the organization and remarkable achievements have been made in political, economic and cultural arenas. The two countries requested to join the SCO many years ago. Generally, including new members can help the SCO expand its clout. But the inclusion of the two South Asian powers might also lead to some problems.

First of all, the inclusion may have an impact on the SCO’s principle of consultation-based consensus. Right after its establishment, the six founding member states put forward the “Shanghai Spirit” of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for cultural diversity and pursuit of common development.

The principle of consultation-based consensus has been widely recognized and adhered to by the members. In this sense, the inclusion of India and Pakistan may bring into the SCO their long-existing disputes over territorial and religious issues and disturb the organization’s efforts to carry out the principle.

Besides, the inclusion may divert the focus of the SCO. As four out of six founding members of the SCO are in Central Asia, the SCO has always concentrated on the region. But the joining of India and Pakistan may split the focus of the SCO, and hence the four Central Asian members will reduce their dependence on the SCO.

Moreover, giving full memberships to India and Pakistan will affect the SCO mechanism. The working languages of the SCO are now Chinese and Russian, and there has already been massive language workload in current meeting mechanisms. If India and Pakistan are taken in, the organization’s daily work is likely to increase exponentially.

The SCO has played a critical role in regional stability and development and in enhancing cultural and people-to-people exchanges. Remarkable achievements have been made in this regard. Hence an increasing number of countries are becoming interested in the organization.

Before the Tashkent summit, the SCO consisted of six member states, six observers and six dialogue partners. The inclusion of India and Pakistan will undoubtedly enhance the influence of the SCO, and the member states also highly value and support the wills of observers and dialogue partners to step up their cooperation with the organization.

For the possible problems that may arise after India and Pakistan become full members, the SCO cannot just ignore but instead deal with them in a positive and rational manner. For instance, regulations should make clear the obligations and rights of new member states and in particular demand they respect and carry out the principles of the SCO. The SCO founding members should be given some special rights to dispel their concerns caused by the expansion. Requirements can be proposed to the new members in terms of mechanism-building so as to avoid cooperation bottleneck after the expansion.

As long as the problems are properly handled, the SCO can take the opportunity and enter a new stage.

Zhang Wenwei is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

A Chechen national named as the brains behind the Istanbul terror attacks had reportedly fled Russia some 12 years ago to win refugee status in Austria, which helped the terror suspect repeatedly avoid extradition to his home country.

Turkish media cited police sources as saying that Ahmed Chataev, a Russian citizen of Chechen origin who had joined the Daesh terror group in 2015, was the organizer of the triple bombings and gun attacks that killed 44 people and injured over 230 others at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport earlier this week.

No group has claimed responsibility for the assault, but authorities in Ankara say evidence is growing that Daesh was behind the carnage.

A file photo of Ahmed Chataev, a Chechen national suspected of being the mastermind of Istanbul terror arracks

On Thursday, a Turkish official said the three bombers were from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. However, he stopped short of identifying the trio.

A CCTV image of the three of them walking into the airport together has been made public.

Footage taken from CCTV shows suspected bombers at
Ataturk Airport in the Turkish city of Istanbul on June 28, 2016.

According to Deputy Chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee Andrey Przhezdomsky, Chataev was a senior Daesh commander tasked with creating terror cells to be sent to Russia and West Europe, Russia’sKommersant newspaper reported earlier this year.

In January, Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee announced that Daesh terror cells led by Chechen recruiter Chataev were planning terrorist attacks in Russia and Europe.

According to the United Nations Security Council, Chataev has now 130 Daesh terrorists at his disposal in Syria. Thousands of recruits from the republics in Russia’s North Caucasus region have joined the ranks of Daesh in Syria in recent years, usually reaching the Arab state via Turkey.

Chataev had been on a Russian wanted list for terror charges since 2003, but he fled to Europe later that year and won asylum status in Austria.

During the Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2000, he joined the militants that fought against Russia and lost his arm during the war.  However, he has claimed that he lost his arm under severe torture in Russian custody.

Reports say Chataev, known by the nickname ‘One Armed,’ used to send equipment back to the Northern Caucuses for terrorists to use.

He spent time in a Swedish prison in 2008 along with a number of other Chechen nationals after police found Kalashnikov assault rifles, explosives and ammunition in his car.

Two years later, Chataev was detained in Ukraine, with his mobile phone files containing a demolition technique instruction and photos of people killed in a blast.

Moscow filed a request with the Kiev government for Chataev’s extradition, but the European Court for Human Rights ordered Ukraine not to hand him over to Russia.

Carnage at largest Turkish airport

The attackers initially opened fire to create panic outside. Two of them then entered the terminal building and blew themselves up, while the third detonated his explosives at the entrance.

At least 44 people, including 19 foreigners, were killed, and more than 230 others were wounded.

A second Chechen, Osman Vadinov, has also been named as one of the three suicide assailants. Reports say he had entered Turkey from the Syrian city of Raqqah, the main Daesh stronghold in Syria.

Investigators are examining CCTV footage and mobile phone videos to shed more light on the terror attack. They are also carrying out DNA tests on the bombers’ remains.

On Thursday, Turkey detained 22 people in connection with the attack.

(Please read Part I, Part II, Part III,  Part IV, and Part V before this article)

The research has thus far extrapolated on Southeast Asia’s global economic importance and the most relevant points in its recent history, which therefore set the appropriate situational backdrop for grasping ASEAN’s geostrategic significance. The region plays a critical role in facilitating China’s international trade network, and it’s for this reason why the US has sought to destabilize it and bring the waterways under its control. In response, China has endeavored to break through the containment bloc being constructed against it and streamline two mainland corridors as partial geopolitical compensation.

Herein lies the New Cold War tension in ASEAN – the US is alternatively synchronizing both mainland and maritime portions of the Chinese Containment Coalition (CCC) in order to preempt Beijing’s ‘breakout’ from this region-wide geopolitical trap, while at the same time China continues to bravely push through its maritime and mainland agendas. On the waterborne front, the US can only resort to conventional power mechanisms to keep China in check and traditional alliance politicking, whereas the continental aspect of this containment campaign can incorporate more insidious tactics.

The major headway that’s been made so far with the China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor and the ASEAN Silk Road has raised fears in Washington that Beijing has adeptly sidestepped the US’ South China Sea containment trap. In response, the US feels pressured to do whatever it can to seize control of the mainland ‘escape routes’ that China is charting in ASEAN, and if they can’t be geopolitically commandeered (like what appears to be happening in Myanmar at the moment), then the US won’t hesitate to unleash a Hybrid War to stop them.

China’s Geo-Economic Lifeline To Africa

ASEAN’s steady and consistent growth is attributable to a number of reasons, but first and foremost this has to do with its convenient geography that allows it to connect Eastern and Western Eurasian maritime trade. Ships passing back and forth from China, Japan, and South Korea on one hand, and the EU, Arica, the Mideast, and South Asia on the other absolutely must transit through Southeast Asia. A growing exception is emerging to this geo-economic rule, however, in that melting Arctic ice will soon make the Northern Sea Route a much more commercially viable option for EU-East Asian trade, but that won’t at all take away from Southeast Asia’s transit role for South-South economic interaction between China and Africa, the Mideast, and South Asia.

More specifically, though, the Indian Ocean and related Strait of Malacca and South China Sea access routes will progressively become more important for Chinese-African trade than any other as a result of the continental “Silk Roads” directly linking China with the Mideast (through the China-Iran railroad) and South Asia (through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and proposed BCIM corridor), provided of course that they’re successfully constructed. Whether they are or not, it won’t have an impact on China’s links with Africa because of the geographic incongruity of the continent to Eurasian connective infrastructure, ergo the motivation for the maritime portion of the One Belt One Road project.

Xi Jinping and South Africa President Jacob Zuma co-host the Johannesburg Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, December 2015

China’s second Africa policy paper that was revealed in December 2015 emphasizes the priority that Beijing allots to strengthening full-spectrum relations with all of its African counterparts, specifically in regards to the economic sphere. Likewise, a Silk Road conference in Lianyungang in September 2015 confirmed that China needs African markets as destinations for its outbound investment, which in turn is predicted to sustain the country’s growth rates well into the future and tangentially secure social stability. Understood in this manner, it’s of paramount importance to China to guarantee itself free access to its African partners and prevent any geopolitical impediments to bilateral trade.

With the South China Sea gradually coming under heavy American influence and the Strait of Malacca already an American-controlled waterway, the impetus organically developed for China to spearhead a pair of overland ASEAN routes to the Indian Ocean that avoids both of them. The China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor and ASEAN Silk Road are the geo-economic solutions to this dilemma, but they’re also the reason why the US has set its sights on swaying Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand away from China. If any of these governments steadfastly reject the respective outreaches presented to them, then the US will carry through on its tacit Hybrid War threats in order to destroy China’s containment-escaping infrastructure plans.

Stirring Up Trouble In The South China Sea

The Strategic Underpinning:

The whole reason that China has to resort to ‘escape routes’ in Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand is because of the trouble that the US has stirred up in the South China Sea. China’s merchant marine fleet can still navigate the waters as they see fit, but the growing strategic threat to their future freedom of movement is obvious. The Chinese have never been one to take unnecessary chances, especially when national security is at stake, so Beijing made the decision to lessen full dependency on the waterway and streamline two complementary mainland solutions in response.

Nevertheless, for the time being, the China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor is still in its early stages, and the route itself is exceptionally vulnerable to rebel attacks, despite none having happened as of yet. Additionally, the non-resource economic aspect of this corridor has yet to be actualized, leaving a lot of valuable potential still waiting to be tapped. Concerning the other project, the ASEAN Silk Road hasn’t even been constructed yet and will still need a few years before it’s fully built and operational (if not over its entire route, than at least partially through Thailand and up to the Indian Ocean).

This means that China’s dependency on its southern sea is still an important factor that could be exploited by the US until then, with the strategic window of opportunity narrowing by the year as the mainland ‘detour’ projects make progress and gradually come into use. In the event that either or both of the two projects is sabotaged or ‘indefinitely delayed’, then the US would predictably prolong and enhance the strategic vice grip that it’s gaining over one of China’s most vital trade conduits. Should Washington be successful in unleashing full-scale chaos in Central Asia and disrupting the Eurasian Land Bridge to Europe, then China would most certainly remain almost fully dependent on the South China Sea, and thus exceptionally vulnerable to US geopolitical blackmail there.

The Escalation Ladder:

The modern-day history of the South China Sea dispute is convoluted and controversial, but what’s less muddled is that China has had historical claims in the region for centuries that form the basis for its present position. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the matter, it’s important to still document the general escalation progression that’s occurred since the US took the initiative to thaw out the long-frozen conflict. While there were clashes over some of the participants’ overlapping claims in the past, the issue had largely been put on the backburner of regional affairs, with all parties implicitly recognizing that it’s in everyone’s shared interest to maintain the peaceful and stable status quo. That dramatically changed after the US announced its Pivot to Asia at the end of 2011, and in the years since, Washington put tremendous pressure on Vietnam and the Philippines to aggravate the situation.

South China Sea dispute

Hanoi and Manila’s revisionist actions (in the sense of modifying the earlier established status quo) appeared to be a coordinated attempt at goading Beijing into an irrational and emotional response. China’s leadership is well-versed in making calculated moves and it thus wasn’t tricked into doing anything that could put its position in jeopardy. Actually, what it had decided to do was surprisingly take the initiative in asserting its sovereign claims while cautiously avoiding any sort of unnecessary military engagement (no matter how provocative) that could embroil it in a preplanned Pentagon trap. China presciently saw the writing on the wall and realized that if it didn’t take the determined steps that it had in reclaiming its island possessions, then Vietnam and the Philippines would have been in a relatively stronger position to enforce their respective demands, and this could have easily allowed the US to step in and take charge of the waterway.

By standing up for itself in the face of American proxy aggression, China startled American decision makers that had been convinced that it would back down, and this in turn prompted them to harness all available information means at their disposal to discredit Beijing’s moves. Furthermore, while the US had earlier enjoyed ‘escalation domination’ in the South China Sea, it was now China that had seized the initiative and was fortifying its island locations, leading observers to wonder whether this ambiguously had defensive and/or offensive applications. Taken largely off guard, the US realized that the tables had turned and that China had regained its strategic position at Washington and its allies’ expense. In order to compensate for this, the US responded by pushing forward its preplanned strategy of multilateral escalation to evolve the dispute past its regional origins and into a larger Asian-wide one that draws in India and Japan.

The Excuse:

The US’ progressive heightening of the escalation ladder has the disturbing but very real potential to hit a ceiling of inevitable conflict sometime or another in the future, which might very well be what its ultimate plans are anyhow (albeit under conditions in which it has a monopoly of control). Washington’s first-tier Lead From Behind partners are entering the Southeast Asian theater through both maritime and mainland means, and India and Japan’s anti-Chinese involvement there (be it in economic, infrastructure, and/or military manifestations) are raising the barometer of proxy conflict to unparalleled levels. It should be remembered that India and Japan each of their own respective self-interests that they feel they are promoting through their provocative engagements there, and that to be fair, some of the governments (like in Myanmar, Vietnam, and the Philippines) are more than willing to enable them in order to reap the ensuing anti-Chinese advantages. These will be discussed more in the next section, but what’s important to realize is that the preplanned escalation that the US had initiated in the South China Sea has served as a very convenient excuse for all manner of tangential escalations since, every one of which is related to containing China in as multilateral of a fashion as possible.

The Chinese Containment Coalition

To accomplish the gargantuan task of containing China, a large-scale informal coalition of sorts is being assembled under American tutelage. The author comprehensively explored this massive undertaking in the article “Asian NATO-like Project To Be Stopped”, but it’s necessary to review some of its most important tenets in order to familiarize the reader with the neo-containment taking place. The Chinese Containment Coalition (CCC) is the neologism used to describe this de-facto alliance, and it has both maritime and mainland components to it. The most relevant utilization of the CCC of course relates to the South China Sea, and the US has a vested interest in maintaining the stability of each of its participating members in this geo-critical theater. It may, however, tinker with punitive Hybrid War threats to keep some of the members in check and/or create a plausible front for ‘justifying’ a deeper military commitment to each of them, although of course this could unintentionally spiral out of control and lead to unexpected consequences. The Hybrid War possibilities for each of the ASEAN states (both those that could ‘unintentionally’ erupt in the CCC and the ones purposefully planned against specific targets) will be extensively investigated later on in the work, but the focus right now is on the general shape and power relations within the CCC.

Membership Roster:

The CCC is a broadly inclusive strategic bloc whose members have their own motivations for containing China. The following is an enumeration of the states that are involved, as well as an explanation of what they believe to be their self-interested reasons for participating:

US

Washington is most of all motivated by concrete geostrategic considerations, believing that the containment of China is a necessary action in order to indefinitely prolong American hegemony over Eurasia. China is one of the three Great Power multipolar centers pushing back against the US’ dominance over the supercontinent (with the other two being Russia and Iran), and the US wants to acquire geopolitical leverage over it by controlling its vial mainland and maritime economic conduits in Southeast Asia. The US is fearful that a rising China could spearhead a revolutionary system of post-modern international relations based on win-win benefits and genuine partner equality (the very concept behind the One Belt One Road endeavor), and coupled with Beijing’s rising naval capabilities, it believes that China might become powerful enough to weaken Washington’s unipolar stranglehold over the region. If the US’ control over Southeast Asia begins to deteriorate, perhaps concurrent with a parallel process underway in the Mideast, then the US would suffer a major geopolitical blow from which its hegemonic control might never be able to fully recover.

Japan

The island state has always been China’s chief geopolitical and civilizational rival, and the present tensions between the two amount to nothing more than an American-manufactured return to history. Japan aspires for leadership of the entire East and Southeast Asian space, believing that its historical naval superiority and maritime identity entitles it to play a premier role in guiding regional events. To add some substance to its grand ambitions, it’s also the only country aside from the US that has the excess capital and management experience necessary to compete with China in developing this rapidly growing bloc. Furthermore, while Japan’s World War II history of conquest in Southeast Asia was objectively a very dark and brutal time for the region, much of the public and their corresponding leadership have been whipped up into such an anti-Chinese nationalist frenzy as of late that they seem willing to overlook the negative facts during this time period and dwell only on its positive anti-colonialism connotations.

The relevance of this to the present day is that the US has been largely successful in convincing people in Vietnam and the Philippines that China is the latest colonizer to creep into the region, with the subtle intimation being that a ‘reformed, non-imperialist’ Japan can preemptively liberate them from their coming servitude. Tokyo already wants to deepen its hold over the ASEAN’s markets (both commercial and military) as it is, and being literally called in by some of the region’s members to do so and with the full backing of the US is just about the greatest soft power boost that it could have ever hoped for. The constructed narrative at play here is that the Chinese ‘bad guy’ is trying to control the region and its maritime resources, while the ‘anti-Chinese good guy’, Japan, is willing do whatever it takes to counter it, with the ‘trusted’ US keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t relapse into any of its colonialist habits. The irony is that it’s Japan and the US, not China, which are bent on a neo-colonialist power grab in Southeast Asia, but the unipolar-influenced information services in the region have largely mirrored their European counterparts in parroting their patron’s talking points and disseminating a false reality.

India

New Delhi’s strategy in all of this is to constrain the rise of its natural geopolitical rival, and this has seen it take a gradually more vocal stance in addressing the South China Sea crisis. For the most part, India’s leadership has played coy with China in pragmatically interacting with it in large-scale multilateral frameworks such as the AIIB, BRICS, and the SCO, but in being noticeably less constructive when it comes to indirect bilateral relations. To explain, India’s dealings with states and regions of mutual interest to it and China tend to be much more competitive and reek of zero-sum proxy intentions on New Delhi’s part, for example, when addressing ‘freedom of navigation’ in the South China Sea together with Japan or in unilaterally blockading Nepal. There’s an undeclared butclearly observable Cold War going on between both Asian great powers, despite neither of them willing to publicly admit it, and it’s in this context that India has a desire to provoke China in Southeast Asia. Although it has yet to send any naval vessels to the region, the possibility hasn’t been explicitly discounted by New Delhi, and it’s quite probable that it could find some pretext to do so in the future  (be it under ‘freedom of navigation’ auspices or to participate in a multilateral CCC drill there).

Adding to that, India is clearly a rising power in its own right, and the self-confidence that this comes with has encouraged its elite to spread their country’s influence to surrounding regions. The so-called “Cotton Route” that was suggested as an institutional counter-weight to the New Silk Road will likely stretch into Southeast Asia, considering the historical bond between India and the region that was described in the second chapter. India’s political basis for doing so is termed “Act East”, and it’s Modi’s evolved version of his predecessor’s much more passive “Look East” policy. It includes not only ASEAN, but also Japan as well, and the interplay between both of the US’ Lead From Behind proxies in the geographic middle ground of Southeast Asia will be described soon enough. Physical proximity is an obvious enabler in accelerating India’s bilateral relations with ASEAN, and theTrilateral Highway between it, Myanmar, and Thailand (the ‘ASEAN Highway’) is designed to physically integrate the subcontinent’s SAARC with the neighboring ASEAN bloc. Suffice to say, this project’s successful completion would directly infuse Southeast Asia with a steady stream of Indian economic and institutional influence that could pose a sizeable challenge to China, and its particular effect on Myanmar’s anti-Chinese pivot will certainly be elaborated on later in the research.

Vietnam

The mainland ASEAN leader of the CCC has a vehement dislike for China, despite its larger neighbor ironically being its biggest trade partner. In some ways, this actually plays into the anti-Chinese rhetoric and political ambitions of some of Hanoi’s elite, since they were able to spin this successfully enough as a form of ‘Chinese hegemony’ that the rest of the government fell for the nationalistic knee-jerk reaction of agreeing to get on board with the US-led TPP. Anti-Chinese nationalism is at such a high level among the most influential elements of Vietnam’s leadership that the once-proud country has even backtracked on its historical principles by closely allying with its former US tormentor in ‘countering’ its northern neighbor. As was earlier discussed when describing the long history of Chinese-Vietnamese relations, there’s definitely an ingrained distrust of China interwoven into Vietnamese identity due to the country’s millennium-long incorporation into the Empire, but the US plainly exploited this psychological trait by initiating the timed thawing of the South China Sea dispute.

Information warfare specialists were likely consulted well in advance in order to craft the most effective ways in which the Vietnamese audience could be misguided into interpreting unrequested American diplomatic interventionism as ‘Chinese aggression’. The sum effect of this nationalist-appealing information manipulation has been that the anti-Chinese forces in the country decisively won out over the pragmatic ones and that Vietnam ultimately made its choice in aligning with the unipolar-oriented forces that are militarily and economically circling China. By becoming the US’ mainland beachhead in the CCC, Vietnam likely hopes for American acceptance of what will probably soon be a renewed attempt at resurrecting its leading role in the former French lands of Indochina. Hanoi still has sizeable institutional influence over Vientiane (particularly military and economic), although it’s of course been relatively dwindling since the end of the Cold War, while Vietnam has urgently been trying to play catch-up with China in Cambodia ever since its military withdraw in 1989 re-opened the door to Beijing’s influence. Vietnam’s counter-proposal to both of its neighbors’ chummy ties with China is a so-called “development triangle” between them, which will in reality serve as a vehicle for the return of Vietnamese influence to these countries.

The Philippines

The former American colony is much weaker than China by all metrics, and its population is easily riled up by simple fear mongering techniques. In turn, it presents itself as a tantalizing target for the US’ anti-Chinese information operations there, which are ultimately predicated on returning the Pentagon’s presence to the island chain. The American footprint is all over the Philippines owing to the colonial and post-World War II past (essentially a continuation of the former arrangement albeit under the more acceptable-sounding label of ‘independence’), but Washington’s overbearing presence had the predictable aftereffect of engendering strong anti-American emotions that eventually manifested themselves in the 1986 overthrow of proxy leader Ferdinand Marcos and the 1991 order for the US’ full military withdrawal. The military campaign against southern separatists and Muslim terrorists (which have regretfully merged into a semi-unified movement that mostly discredits the former at this point) resulted in the return of US special forces to the country in 2002 on the basis of anti-terrorist cooperation.

The one-and-off insurgency that has been fought since then provided the necessary pretext for embedding the US’ military personnel deeper into the country and making them an integral part of the Philippines’ anti-terrorist ‘tool set’, but it wasn’t sufficient for the full return of forces that the Pentagon initially had in mind. The 2011 Pivot to Asia and subsequent American agitation of the South China Sea dispute served the purpose of stoking nationalist sentiment in the country that was professionally channeled by the US and its affiliated information actors (both formal TV and web ones and informal ones such as NGOs) into a self-serving anti-Chinese direction. The US’ plan was to have the Philippines, once formerly colonized by it, go as far as formally inviting the US military presence back into the country on the grounds of defending its South China Sea claims from an ‘aggressive China’. Even still, domestic political sensitivities to such a move evoke heightened emotion even to this day, ergo why the US had to euphemistically ‘settle’ for an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in April 2015 that gave it the right to periodically “rotate” its forces out of 8 or more Filipino bases but stopped short of outright giving it formal control of the facilities there. For all intents and purposes, this amounts to the exact same thing, but it’s described differentially via the ‘rotating’ loophole so as to assuage patriotic Filipinos that are dead-set against a US military return to their formerly dominated nation.

The present situation in the Philippines is actually somewhat of a paradox – for as nationalistic and proud as most of the population is, many people are apathetic (or even welcoming) to the return of American forces to their country, having been misled to the point of believing that a re-occupation by their former occupier whom they previously ousted is somehow more preferable than a full-spectrum and pragmatic partnership with China. This confounding contradiction only serves to demonstrate the effectiveness of the US’ information warfare operations, and it also speaks volumes about the subservience and outright collaboration of various elements of the Filipino elite. The political individuals that publicly support the US’ military return to the Philippines either naively don’t realize that this is a reiteration of the same imperialist blueprint, or more realistically are well aware of this but have positioned themselves so as to profit quite handsomely from this arrangement. It cannot be underscored enough just how much of a contravention of the Philippines’ national interest it is for the country to ‘re-invite’ the US military back onto its territory, and while private individuals could be somewhat forgiven for having fallen victim to the US’ rabid anti-Chinese nationalist information warfare, their governing elites have no such excuses and are fully complicit in their country’s reoccupation.

Australia

Canberra’s involvement in the CCC is minimal but symbolic, and it proves the extent that Australia is willing to go to behave as the ‘junior America’ in its corner of Southeast Asia. The Australian elite generally harbor political ambitions that don’t correlate to their country-continent’s actual potential, and militarily ruffling China’s feathers in a high-stakes game of chicken is certainly one of them. It’s been revealed that Australia has been carrying out provocative ‘freedom of navigation’ flights over the South China Sea, despite formally having positive relations with China through a recently signed Free Trade Agreement. It’s necessary at this point to draw a distinction between Australia’s economic and military loyalties, as these don’t correspond to one another. The FTA with China hints at a pretense of pragmatism, yet Australia’s military-strategic loyalty to the US is completely counter-productive to any of the broader positive inroads that the economic pact could yield in the future. The clear abrogation of national interest that this entails is symptomatic of the Australia political elites’ prevailing inferiority complex vis-à-vis the US and other Western countries, as Canberra seems intent to score points with its Anglo-Saxon peers and gain their ‘acceptance’ at the tangible expense of endangering ties with itsnumber one economic partner.

This shortsighted policy is inherently untenable and cannot continue to exist indefinitely, however, it’s not likely that China would respond with any punitive economic measures so soon after signing the FTA. Additionally, Australia is betting that China needs its iron resources more than it needs China’s economic patronage for them (although this is a dubious gamble), but given that the arrangement is mutually beneficial for the time being, Beijing isn’t prone to cut it loose anytime soon. Provided that Australia keeps its provocations to a bare minimum and at as low of a scale and intensity as possible, China will probably ignore it aside from possibly issuing a strongly worded statement against it, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to maintain such an unnatural balance when the US will inevitably encourage it to do more in the future. Australia also believes that it present actions of anti-Chinese provocation are endearing it closer to some of its new ASEAN free trade partners, but they too (especially Vietnam and the Philippines) will likely join forces with the US in calling for a more active Australian presence in the South China Sea.

Canberra probably didn’t anticipate this when it initially signed on to the CCC (however low-commitment it may thought it would be), so eventually it’s going to be pressed into making a difficult decision in choosing between its main economic and strategic partners (China and the US, respectively). The caveat, however, is that China’s iron ore-purchasing dependency on Australia will make it reluctant to take any concrete measures against its ‘partner’ even if it ramps up its anti-Chinese activity, and until it finds a third major partner to diversify its imports from besides Brazil, it’s probably going to be inclined to preserve the status quo of economic relations. On the other hand, as the FTA enters into full swing and begins more actively involving sectors outside the mining one, it’s possible that China could establish a few unforeseen strategic footholds in the Australian economy that might come in handy for ‘leveling the playing field’ and deterring any further unnecessary Australian aggression in the South China Sea.

Power Hierarchy:

The CCC operates under a simple power hierarchy that is expressly dominated by the US. It can be conceptualized via the basic model below:

The following model adds detail to the framework and accommodates it for the specificities of the CCC’s South China Sea mission:

It’s pretty easy to understand the power flow in the abovementioned hierarchies. The US, as the militant enforcer of unipolarity, has partially contracted its regional responsibilities to its two trusted Lead From Behind partners, India and Japan. In turn, the three of them (albeit on different levels and to varying degrees) cooperate with Vietnam and the Philippines, the CCC’s most geopolitically relevant proxies in the South China Sea. Bringing up the rear, Indonesia’s potential inclusion in the TPP would provide a serious boost to the CCC’s economic efforts, while Australia’s military presence, although extraordinarily minimal at the moment, could be beefed up to a bit more of an impactful contribution in the future.

The concept is also relevant for explaining the CCC’s activities in mainland ASEAN, with scarcely any membership modifications needed:

The first two tiers and power motivations remain the same in this adaptation, with the only differences being that Myanmar substitutes for the Philippines and Australia is removed from the equation. The reasoning for this is obvious, since the Philippines aren’t a part of mainland Southeast Asia and Australia has no realistic possibility for militarily assisting in any CCC operation in this region. If anything, the UK’s base in Brunei gives it the faint possibility of replacing Australia as the auxiliary military actor in this framework, but even that appears to be unlikely owing mostly to the fact that the mainland portion of any forthcoming containment campaign will result in a lot less of a direct military presence for all actors. As will be argued later on in the research, it’s much more foreseeable that Hybrid Wars will be utilized in place of the type of conventional military containment witnessed in the South China Sea.

Geopolitical Convergences:

The two above-cited conceptual models aptly illustrate the geopolitical convergences between the CCC’s maritime and mainland missions, with Vietnam functioning as the consistent proxy element between them because of its dual identity. Partially speaking, Vietnam is a maritime nation because of its extensive coastline and claims over part of the South China Sea, while it’s also equally a mainland country as well and has the potential to reestablish its sphere of influence over Laos and Cambodia, two of China’s most important ASEAN partners. This makes it doubly important for the US and its Lead From Behind partners to enter into its good graces so as to fully exploit the geopolitical advantage this would provide for them in their shared CCC goal.

There are a few particulars that deserve to be expanded upon in order to understand nuances of the CCC’s overall mission in each of these two sub-theaters:

Maritime

To approach the maritime region first, the common space between Vietnam and the Philippines is the South China Sea and the myriad islands between them, ergo the present focus on provocative ‘freedom of navigation’ bomber flyovers and warship transit. There’s little in terms of strategic asymmetry that the US and its allies can do in ‘countering China’, so for the most part (save for creative military-technical innovations), conventional alliance dynamics predominate this vector of geopolitical competition. Therefore, events here are a lot more predictable because they simply boil down to whether or not there will be a direct military clash between China and the CCC, although the situation does get increasingly tense and dramatic the more that the US provokes China into acting.

Eventually, it seems almost inevitable that one side or the other will lose their cool and make a regretful decision, but even in the event that this happens, it’s very likely to be contained. The exception would occur under the circumstances that the US chooses to escalate an engagement between China and either of the two geopolitical proxies (Vietnam, or more likely, the Philippines) to the point of bringing in the Lead From Behind partners (India, but more foreseeably, Japan) to provide indirect back-up support  and institutionalize the CCC. This scenario is easier to conceptually understand if the reader replaces the Philippines with Ukraine and China with Russia, thus allowing one to perceive of the strategic structural continuities between both Eurasian containment operations. Just as Ukraine’s US-provoked aggression against Donbass created the pretext for NATO to deepen its involvement in the former’s affairs, so too would the Philippine’s possible US-provoked aggression against China in the South China Sea function as a pretext for the CCC (especially its US and Japanese elements) to further embed themselves into the island nation.

Even so, the China vs. CCC dynamic still remains largely linear and conventional, thus making it predictable to a large extent. The same, however, certainly can’t be said for the mainland portion of this rivalry.

Mainland

Matters are infinitely more complicated, and therefore dangerous, in the CCC’s strategy for mainland ASEAN. As seen from the previously mentioned model, Myanmar and Vietnam are the ‘geopolitical bookends’ in this sub-theater, with each respectively falling deeper under their nearby Lead From Behind overseer’s influence. For example, India’s ASEAN Highway stands to position New Delhi as one of Myanmar’s most vital economic partners, while Japan is heavily investing in all sectors of Vietnam’s economy and is one of its most important full-spectrum strategic partners. Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia are critically positioned in between the CCC’s mainland proxies, with Japanese-led investment projects strategically bridging the physical gap between them.

For example, the Asian Development Bank (ADB, commonly understood as an institutional tool of US-Japanese policy) and direct Japanese investment are being used to help fund a bunch of multisided physical integrational projects in the Greater Mekong Subregion (the ADB’s official jargon for mainland Southeast Asia plus southern China). One should keep in mind that the CCC’s funding extends mostly (but not exclusively) to the East-West and Southern Corridors that link both coasts of mainland ASEAN, and that Japan is building the Thai sections of both high-speed rail projects. Tokyo is also a major investor in Myanmar’s Dawei SEZ, so taken together with its railroad ambitions, it’s plain to see that Japan has staked its Greater Mekong Subregion interests in facilitating connective infrastructure projects between both of the region’s coasts.

The picture below demonstrates these and the other associated projects:

The red line running from China to Thailand is the ASEAN Silk Road that was mentioned earlier in the work, which is China’s ‘escape route’ for evading the South China Sea trap that the CCC is setting for it. While the map suggests that this could dually run through Myanmar and Laos, it’s highly unlikely that it will ever be constructed (let alone remain secure) in the largely rebel-held portions of the former. The changing nature of domestic politics in Myanmar, which is rapidly moving along a pro-Western trajectory, also bodes quite negatively for that prospective route’s political feasibility. It’s much more likely then that China’s ASEAN Silk Road (formally described by the ADB as the “North-South Corridor”) will remain completely dependent on Laos for its transit access to Thailand, the infrastructural hub of the Greater Mekong Subregion. In fact, China is actually moving forward with two Thai-destined railroad projects simultaneously, with the relevant “Central Corridor” spoke forming an integral part of Beijing’s present railroad construction plans, and it’s this additional ‘artery’ that’s expected to form the actual basis of the ASEAN Silk Road.

Remembering that it was earlier written that Cambodia is a structurally unreliable ally of China owing to the lack of direct connective infrastructure to its partner, the reader returns to the conclusion that Laos and Thailand are China’s only true geopolitical partners in mainland ASEAN. The situation with Cambodia could theoretically be remedied and the bilateral partnership considerably strengthened well past its already positive and pragmatic nature via the completion of the Cambodian portion of the Central Corridor route through Laos, but that project is far from a priority in the face of the much more strategically urgent North-South Corridor and “Central-North-South Corridor” linking China with Thailand. These projects acquire such strategic importance precisely because Myanmar’s westward pivot is rapidly diminishing the prospects that the China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor will ever expand into an all-out economic one as was originally envisioned, and also because the ASEAN Silk Road could be modified near its tail end to reach a to-be-constructed terminal along Thailand’s Indian Ocean (technically Andaman Sea) coast. Thailand might not even have the proper harbor or port conditions for what China could be planning as its ultimate contingency plan, but that’s not to say that China simply couldn’t build whatever it needs in its desired geographic location, considering the engineering ‘miracles’ it’s pulled off in the South China Sea.

The Indian-Japanese Double Flank

It’s relevant at this juncture to highlight the CCC’s guiding geopolitical concept for ‘countering China’ in the Greater Mekong Subregion (mainland ASEAN), and that’s the ‘Indian-Japanese Double Flank. It’s been thus far described that India’s primary avenue of approach into the region is via the ASEAN Highway through Myanmar (the “Western Corridor” as described by the ADB in the above-cited map), while Japan’s strategy has been to link the region’s two coasts through the East-West and Southern Corridors. What’s pretty much happening here is that India is moving eastward into the region while Japan is moving westward, and their point of ultimate convergence is Thailand, which also just so happens to be China’s primary focus as well.

Just like any traditional flanking strategy, the target is moving in a linear direction while the opponents are striving to simultaneously flank it from both angles. In this actual situation, China is streaming southward while India and Japan are rushing to block it via their respective advances from the west and the east. Geostrategically speaking, the greatest point of friction for all parties lay at or near the planned perpendicular intersections of the unipolar and multipolar projects in Northern and Central Thailand, and in a theoretical sense, that’s where one would be inclined to believe that a clash of interests could occur. The reality is a bit different, though, since it’s technically possible for Thailand to accommodate both geopolitically divergent projects and create an ultimate win-win situation for everyone.

As beneficial as this may be for all of the directly involved parties, US strategists would beg to differ, since it’s their ultimate aim to keep the CCC firmly on its anti-Chinese course and not to have its main supportive members (India and Japan) partially deterred out of a shared strategic interest with Beijing, which in this case is the stability of Thailand.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. He is the post-graduate of the MGIMO University and author of the monograph “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change” (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare.

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:

Hybrid Wars 1. The Law Of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Wars 2. Testing the Theory – Syria & Ukraine

Hybrid Wars 3. Predicting Next Hybrid Wars

Hybrid Wars 4. In the Greater Heartland

Hybrid Wars 5. Breaking the Balkans

With the Chilcot Inquiry due to publish its long-awaited report on 6 July, an early indication of what the findings might be have been aired by BBC Panorama’s “Iraq the Final Judgement”. In the hour-long programme, journalist Jane Corbin returned to the war-ravaged country with the grief stricken parents of British soldiers killed in Iraq and former army officers to try to make some sense of what now seems like a senseless and unnecessary conflict.

Millions of British people, including families who lost loved ones, want to know if they were told the truth about why the nation went to war in Iraq, why it cost countless lives and why the invasion left a country in chaos. Couples like Roger and Maureen Bacon, who accompanied the Panorama team to Basra where their son Matt was killed, are hoping to find some meaning for their terrible loss.

Corbyn, who reported from Basra at the height of the Iraq war, interviewed a number of high profile figures, including former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. Prior to the invasion, Blix was sceptical of the intelligence provided by the British. He warned the then Prime Minister Tony Blair that hundreds of inspections before the war had failed to yield any substantial evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). He shared his doubts about WMD with Blair who brushed them aside. According to Blix, “[The] British authorities would frequently say intelligence shows us this and intelligence shows us that, but simply saying ‘intelligence shows’ is not evidence.”

Tony Blair

Blair’s persistent finger-pointing at the intelligence committee and his refusal to take any personal responsibility for the invasion is questioned by the former UN inspector along with the intelligence officials themselves. As the documentary makes clear, a year before the war British intelligence agents told the government that their knowledge of WMD was “sporadic” and “patchy”; six months later, though, they helped Blair to compile the dossier that made the case for war against Iraq.

Did the prime minister gloss over intelligence weaknesses to make a false case for war, and did he misrepresent the facts? Hans Blix is retired now and no longer feels the need to be careful with his words: “What he said did not represent reality.” When pushed to say if Blair misrepresented the facts, he responded, “Yes.” Claire Short, a former secretary of state for international development in Blair’s government was also interviewed for the programme. “I think he [Tony Blair] had made up his mind to be with [George W] Bush,” she said.

“And we were massaged and deceived to get us there when it was a manipulation of us – that is us, the parliament, the cabinet, British public opinion, American public opinion — by people who were determined to take military action from the beginning.”

Blix and Short have little doubt about the main question addressed by Chilcot: why did Britain go to war and who was responsible for what happened? Other prominent figures like former British Ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer told Corbin that Blair said to Bush, “Whatever you decide to do George, I’m with you.” Meyer, who was at Bush’s ranch when the two leaders met in private to discuss the invasion of Iraq, added that a secret deal had been made with Blair to remove Saddam Hussain. The following day, Blair joined Bush in his plan for regime change and to bypass the UN.

The invasion of Iraq is infamous not only because of the lies and misinformation in the lead up to the war but also for the violence it unleased and the abject failure to plan for the aftermath. Blair, it seems, was cherry-picking the advice he was given from the intelligence community. His entire defence for the failed invasion is based on faulty intelligence but the former prime minister is less forthcoming in admitting that intelligence chiefs had also warned of the heightened risk of terrorism that would follow any military action to topple the Iraqi president.

The manner in which the invasion was carried out, in particular the bypassing of the UN and failure to unite a broad coalition for regime change, meant that plans were not made, because all the players that were supposed to be involved were not involved, claimed Clare Short.

Predictably, regime change led to sectarian war and terrorism. Following the surprise collapse of Saddam’s forces, the initial feeling of gratitude and optimism changed quickly as fear and alarm gripped communities in the ensuing power vacuum. Brigadier Graham Binns, the Commander of Britain’s 7th Armoured Brigade in 2003, described the false sense of security as Bush pronounced “mission accomplished” prematurely. Looting, fuelled by the break-up of law and order, spread across Iraq. State apparatuses collapsed and essential services like water supplies came to a grinding halt. With Britain tied to the US policy of regime change, its troops in Basra bore the brunt of Iraqi resentment and anger; overnight the British became occupiers, not liberators.

The seeds of sectarian conflict and the rise of Daesh were planted during the early phase when occupation forces disbanded the entire Ba’ath structure that had held the country together, including the police, the army and the civil service. They stripped the entire regime completely but did not replace it with anything. According to Emma Sky, who was a British civilian coordinator during the early phase of the invasion, “It ended with hospitals without doctors and schools without teachers.” Britain and the US didn’t just remove the top tier of the Iraqi regime; the whole lot went. “So without any security forces, people were fearful,” Sky recalled. “They started to form gangs, militias were able to flourish, insurgent groups started to rise up.”

Failing to plan for the aftermath of the invasion left a power vacuum that pushed the country into a civil war. Brigadier Binns, who led British troops into Basra, returned to the city after thirteen years for Panorama. “I don’t think we had a coherent plan in the longer term,” he told Corbin. “The coalition hadn’t thought through how we were going to operate in the aftermath of the fighting. We were unprepared both physically and mentally.”

Parents like Roger and Maureen Bacon who lost loved ones in the Iraq war are still struggling to make any sense of it. “I would like to think that he [their son] lost his life in a worthwhile cause but I can’t do that,” said Roger. “We were carried into it [this war] and I can’t emphasise how much I feel this was entirely wrong — this was a complete deception.”

It’s unlikely that the Chilcot Inquiry will provide meaning to an enormous personal loss, but will it at least heal the political and social trauma caused by Tony Blair? To mend Iraq’s wounds in any meaningful way there has to be a sense that justice has been seen to be done for what was a deception of enormous magnitude and consequence. The final judgement of Tony Blair has to be nigh.

Critics dispute official White House report on 473 drone attacks and air strikes outside of war zones between 2009 and 2015

The United States on Friday said it had killed up to 116 civlians in air strikes and drone atacks outside of war zones in six years, a figure disputed by campaigners who say the toll is much higher.

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report provided death estimates for 473 strikes between 2009 and 2015 that were conducted outside principal war zones such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The DNI said anywhere from 64 to 116 civilians were killed in the strikes, and up to 2,581 combatants. Rights groups, however, believe the number of civilians killed are much higher.

Such attacks are typically conducted via drones, though the military has also used manned warplanes and guided missiles.

Though the US military routinely releases information on strikes targeting the Islamic State (IS) group and other organisations, mainly in Iraq and Syria, it is the first time the Obama administration has published a toll from its strikes elsewhere, in countries like Libya, Somalia and Pakistan.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) welcomed the reported, but cast doubt on the figures presented.

“It’s hard to credit the government’s death count, which is lower than all independent assessments,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, in a statement.

The government continues to conceal the identities of people it has killed, the specific definitions it uses to decide who can legitimately be targeted, and its investigations into credibly alleged wrongful killings.

The American public can’t be confident that the government is using lethal force legally and wisely with a disclosure that’s so limited as to be virtually meaningless.

The release comes after rights groups and the media for years demanded a better accounting of such military actions under Obama.

Critics have long said US strikes – especially drone strikes – kill far more civilians than the administration claims, and Friday’s release is unlikely to change that narrative.

Observers also say that without better transparency surrounding strikes, it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of US fatality assessments.

“The public has a right to know who the government is killing – and if the government doesn’t know who it’s killing, the public has a right to know that,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer wrote this week.

The DNI acknowledged the fallibilities of its own numbers.

“Although the US government has access to a wide range of information, the figures released today should be considered in light of the inherent limitations on the ability to determine the precise number of combatant and non-combatant deaths given the non-permissive environments in which these strikes often occur,” the DNI said in a statement.

The White House meanwhile released an executive order that provides additional information on “best practices and procedures” that can be applied to strikes, regardless of where they are conducted.

“The president has underscored that we will continue to develop a sustainable legal and policy architecture to guide our counterterrorism activities going forward,” the White House said.

But the ACLU said the executive order did not go nearly far enough.

“The issuance of the executive order is a positive step, but the transparency it promises is very shallow, and not sufficient to allow a meaningful assessment of the government’s policies,” Jaffer said in a statement.

In addition, it’s important to remember that the next president can revoke this order with a stroke of a pen. While we welcome today’s disclosures, transparency about the drone campaign should not be a matter of executive grace. Both the courts and congress have a role to play in ensuring that the public has the information it needs in order to understand and assess the government’s policies.

Jaysh al-Islam, a group that is trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and establish a caliphate in Syria, has shelled a UN humanitarian convoy in the province of Damascus, the Russian Defense Ministry reported. Moscow urged the UN to designate the group as a terrorist organization, but the US blocked this initiative.

The incident took place in Harasta, a suburb of Damascus, the ministry detailed. The driver of the truck that was distributing humanitarian aid is said to have been badly wounded.

In addition, Jaysh al-Islam fighters shelled the Syrian Arab Army in the villages of Arbil and Jaubar.

Headquartered in Eastern Ghouta, Jaysh al-Islam has been active in Damascus, the Syrian province of Homs and the Lebanese town of Arsal. It is estimated to have up to 25,000 fighters, making it the largest radical group operating close to the capital. The group is believed to have been supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Jaysh al-Islam has coordinated its activities with al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Syria that is not part to the nationwide ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia and the US earlier this year. For its part, the militants claim that they are part of the Syrian opposition. Its delegation has taken part in the Geneva peace talks.Russia, Syria, Iran and Egypt have added the group to the list of terrorist organizations. Moscow has made every effort to convince the UN Security Council to designate Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar ash-Sham as terrorists, but the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Ukraine pulled the plug on this initiative.

“We have called for this and submitted a relevant proposal to the sanctions committee, so that they [the groups] would be added to the list of terrorist organizations, but so far, our Western partners are not ready for this,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said earlier in June.

Russian officials maintain that Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar ash-Sham share the same ideology as Daesh, a brutal group that carved a caliphate out of Iraq and Syria.

File this under Another Unsettling Development: People who want to travel to the United States may soon have their Facebook profiles and other social media accounts “vetted” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) before entering.

A proposed change to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) and to Form I-94W posted to the government’s Federal Register last week suggests adding the following question: “Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier.”

These forms are filled out by all international travelers who wish to travel to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program.

The report states that this would be an “optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information.”

“Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case,” the department further notes.

As Fusion reporter Kashmir Hill wrote, this overly broad request raises many questions for travelers.

“As phrased that could include your Twitter handle, the url for your Facebook page, your OkCupid or Grindr handle, your Instagram account, your Tumblr, your Vine account, your Snapchat, your Reddit account, your Pinterest page, your PornHub account, and any random messaging forums in which you take part,” Hill said. “Where does it end? Must you include an account if it’s private?”

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist with The Center for Democracy & Technology, who firstdrew attention to the change, told the BBC that he hopes that U.S. government “rethinks” the proposal.

“Democracy in general requires having spaces free from government scrutiny and increasingly social life happens online,” Hall said. “We would have a poor society if people were chilled from participating in social activity online so I really hope they rethink this.”

For what it’s worth, the government is accepting comment on this proposal for the next 59 days.

Hacked private emails of the US general formerly in charge of NATO reveal a campaign to pressure the White House into escalating the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, involving several influential players in Washington.

Jeremy Corbyn is right to urge us to see through the media’s attempts to divide us. The media has encouraged those who voted to Remain see Leave voters as, at worst, a venal mob and at best misguided and stupid enough to think a government under the likes of Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage would be an improvement.

Against the wishes of many Labour MPs who hope to find a way to delegitimise the referendum and remain in the EU, Jeremy Corbyn has given a clear commitment to invoke Clause 50.

Anger did indeed motivate some Leave voters. During membership of the EU the division between rich and poor has increased, with the poorest suffering a fall in living standards. A UCL study has shown that the poorest 20% of British workers have indeed been affected adversely by immigration (1), so it was easy for the Leave campaign to focus discontent on this point instead of giving a voice to constructive and positive reasons people had for wanting to leave. Polling showed that support for UKIP actually fell during the referendum campaign (2).

Lord Ashcroft’s recent poll (3) is considered more accurate than most. A larger number of people than usual were interviewed. Asked which of the following they considered to be forces for good, a considerable proportion of leave voters expressed support for multi-culturalism (29%), social liberalism (32%), globalisation (49%), the green movement (38%), feminism (40%) and even immigration (21%).

About half of the voters, whether leave or remain, felt capitalism was a force for ill rather than a force for good (51%:49%).

This, then, could be the reason why the Parliamentary Labour Party is so keen to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn.

The majority of the population, across all the political parties, want nationalisation of key industries and around half think capitalism is a force for ill. Because of the lack of proportional representation, when there is any choice at all in a constituency it is between three neo-liberal parties, all of which represent the moneyed classes and support free market capitalism.

Lord Ashcroft’s poll found the majority of those who voted to remain believe life is better today than it was for their parents’ generation. The majority of those voting to leave remember their lives before membership of the EU and believe life is now worse for their children. So both groups are voting for what they perceive to be a better future for the rising generation.

As far as interest in politics is concerned, both remain and leave voters shared similar levels of interest. However, 77% of those who voted to remain thought “the decision we make in the referendum could have disastrous consequences for us as a country if we get it wrong”, whilst 69% of leave voters thought the decision “might make us a bit better or worse off as a country, but there probably isn’t much in it either way”.

Leave voters have good reason to think that whatever the outcome the status quo is likely to continue, since all major parties support the current system of voracious capitalism.

The media as well as the official Leave campaign aim to minimise the debate to maintain the status quo. As Corbyn has pointed out, they are doing everything they can to divide us, especially pitting young against old. However, there is much in common between the voting choices across the generations.

The turnout for young people was only around 30% (4), meaning only a quarter of young people felt strongly enough to vote to remain in Europe. Therefore, as a proportion of their age group, less young people voted to remain than all other age groups.

So the ‘generation gap’ has to a large extent been manufactured, with the help of the usual suspects, including Change.org, (an American corporation with 100 million users which is now running a petition for London to secede from England) and other US organisations backed by George Soros, such as Avaaz. The day after the referendum I received this from sumofus.org, yet another American ‘organisation for change’ with connections to Soros: “I woke up tired, shocked and a little scared”. People have been stirred up by social media to express themselves in this way and to feel that only the feelings of the Remain supporters are legitimate.

Analysis of the 3.5 million signatories to the much touted petition requesting a 2nd Referendum has shown only 353,000 are from Britain, and many of these may be fake (5).

The following 27 minute video about how Colour Revolutions are manufactured gives vital insight in to ‘mass’ movements for social change: The Revolution Business

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXbA6yZY-8 (6)

Based on theories formulated by CIA asset Gene Sharp, and supported by Soros organisations which stir up vocal groups of mostly young people who are unrepresentative of the population as a whole, demonstrations and petitions are presented by international media as the voice of the people. Opposition from the majority of the population is demonised and foreign military intervention often follows. Weight of Chains (7), about how Yugoslavia was broken up in this way by the US and organisations funded by Soros, is another very watchable film, and the points made are very applicable to many situations and pretty well every country in which the USA has an interest in shaping politics.

In his earlier life, Jeremy Corbyn was against membership of the EU. As leader of a party whose parliamentary representatives voted overwhelmingly to remain, Jeremy Corbyn supported this view. However, he explained that because of major faults in the EU his support for the EU project was only 7 – 7.5%. Not surprising when one of his major commitments is to attempt to renationalise the railways, which is prohibited under EU legislation.

Corbyn, like most of the population, is against rule by corporations. The economic power of the top 200 global corporations is twice that of 80% of all humanity and yet they employ just 18.8 million, 0.3% of the people in the world. Corporate lobbyists now termed “expert committees” meet daily with EU Commission officials to hammer out trade deals such as TTIP (Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership which will enable governments to be sued if they don’t open everything to privatisation, or attempt to protect their environment against corporate interests). The European Parliament, consumer and environmental organisations have no say in this deal (8).

Corbyn is for transparency and accountability. The European Parliament cannot propose any legislation at all. Legislation is formulated by the 5 unelected presidents of the European Commission, which includes ex-Goldman Sachs alumnus Mario Draghi. If our political representatives in the European Parliament make any decisions that conflict with the wishes of the EU Commission, they are simply over-ruled.

Corbyn is against militarism. He has chosen Clive Lewis as Shadow Defence Secretary. Lewis is against renewing Trident, which will cost up to £300bn, most of which will be transferred to the US, and simply guarantees the UK’s destruction in event of war (9&10).

As CIA documents from the US National Archives make clear (11&12) the EU was a CIA initiative, the purpose of which is to make it easy for Washington to exercise political control over Europe. It is much easier for Washington to control the EU than 28 separate countries. Currently, US Special Operations Forces employ ‘military capabilities’ to achieve military and/or economic objectives in 134 countries (13&14). The EU is primed to form a EU army and paramilitary police force to suppress civil unrest and help the US to achieve objectives such as the dangerous game of baiting Russia by placing missiles in the EU countries bordering Russia – which has the added bonus of providing a useful buffer for the US should the US then initiate a war.

The UK is currently committed to switching to the euro. It is impossible to be a financial centre unless a country has its own currency and central bank. If the Brexit referendum is defeated the UK will be forced to accept the euro, enabling US financial dominance (15).

Corbyn knows that within the EU there is no way to stop these events unfolding.

There will be many Labour supporters who voted to remain in the EU whilst sharing Corbyn’s doubts. In addition, there are the 38% of Labour voters who voted to leave, which leaves them feeling unrepresented by only 2% of Labour MPs who share their concerns.

By refusing to give a voice to the majority of leave voters, and presenting the false analysis of young versus old and enlightened versus racist, remain voters are therefore incredulous that such a thing could have happened and many feel justified in ignoring a democratic vote. As Ashcroft’s results show, there is in fact little difference between the values of those who voted. People in both groups voted for a brake on rampant capitalism and a better, fairer, future.

The Establishment is preparing to maintain the status quo by offering either a post-Corbyn neo-liberal Labour Party that indefinitely postpones the signing of Article 50, or a Conservative party led by Boris Johnson, a Europhile until the conversion that increased his chances of becoming prime minister. Boris Johnson can also not be trusted to invoke Article 50. Neither party will represent the 50% of both remain and leave voters who believe capitalism is a force for ill.

At the current time, Jeremy Corbyn is the only chance we have of a prime minister who will represent the wishes of a majority of both leave and remain voters. That is why he is hanging on and that is why it is so important for the media, establishment and his own party to oust him. As Ghandi said, “the truth is still the truth even if you are in a minority of one”. I, for one, would be happy to see all of Corbyn’s detractors resign.

After the victory of the “Brexit” in the June 23 referendum, the world economy entered into an episode of turbulence: billions of US dollars disappeared from the principal markets in hours, with which the risks of a new banking crisis in Europe increased. According to Ariel Noyola Rodriguez , the rapid unraveling of the project of European Unity is highly improbable, even though in various countries there has been a call to leave the European Union, the majority of nations of continental Europe form part of the Eurozone and until now, with the exception of political parties of the extreme right, there are no political forces disposed to abandon the common currency.                            

Although the principal surveys published over several weeks indicated that the British were convinced of their permanence in the European Union, the group in favour of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (the so-called “Brexit”) finally won in the referendum celebrated on June 23 with a margin of nearly four points: 51.9% voted in favour with 48.1% against.

Surprisingly the Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced his resignation moments after; the Pound Sterling registered its worst value since 1985; and the major stock markets collapsed. Both in the Asia-Pacific region as in the European Continent the markets fell between 6 and 10%. In fact, the imminent withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union opened a new picture of great uncertainty at a moment of extreme vulnerability for the world economy.

Financial turbulence on a world scale

At the beginning of June, the World Bank reduced their prevision of growth for 2016 from 2.9 to 2.4%; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for their part noted that economic nationalism can undermine the free movement of commercial exchange and investment among countries; so that the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) is looking closely at the risks of a new “currency war”.

The fact is that international monetary cooperation is facing one of its major challenges and because of this, with the danger that credit markets may shrink from one moment to another, the European Central Bank (ECB) under Mario Draghi, and the Bank of England under Mark Carney joined the fray to make it clear that they would spare no resources to guarantee financial stability.

Over the long day, but above all after the first signs that the “Brexit” had triumphed in the ballots, the ECB intervened violently in the sovereign debt market to avoid an increase in “risk premiums” of the bonds of the peripheral economies: Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. Meanwhile, the Bank of England had already prepared a powerful battery of 250 billion Pounds Sterling to defend their exchange in the face of attacks by speculators.

The Federal Reserve System (FED), under the mandate of Janet Yellen, established a series of “swaps” to provide additional liquidity along with other central banks of the Group of 7 (G-7, made up of Germany, Canada ,the United States, France, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom) in case the volatility of financial markets went out of control.

But the contingency plans of the monetary authorities were not sufficient. World stock markets registered losses of more than 2 trillion US dollars in less than 24 hours. It should be noted in addition that the chaos of the Pound Sterling occasioned a massive flight of capital from the London Stock Market, to immediately take refuge in Wall Street. In the face of the financial turbulence, market investors sought protection in safer financial instruments, basically in the dollar and precious metals that serve as reserves of value, gold and silver, for example.

Nevertheless, the massive purchase of dollars deepened the chaos of prices of the rest of commodities, already very low compared to the pre-2009 years. For example, the international reference prices of petroleum, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and the Brent, that had registered some increase during April and May, fell once again.

The prices of hydrocarbons are now below 50 US dollars per barrel, a situation that sharpens deflation (the fall of prices) and that, combined with tendencies of low growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the fall of benefits of the financial sector, increases exponentially the risks of a new banking crisis in Europe.

The “Brexit” does not necessarily imply the end of European integration

The vote in favour of the “Brexit” manifested the enormous rejection of European integration. The economic policy applied in the United Kingdom had basically followed the same route as the rest of the countries of continental Europe: indiscriminate liberalization of trade in goods and services, deregulation of the financial sector, and a policy on labour that left stagnate the increase of wages and that proposed to suppress social benefits of workers.

It is clear that the dream of a democratic, social and solid Europe is only that, a fantasy. The “Welfare State” that was put together after the Second World War, is practically dismantled today. The quality of a democracy cannot be valued only by the celebration of a referendum and the respect of its results by the Government. Democracy means, above all, the direct participation in the principal decisions of concern in a society, both in the area of economics and in political life.

And it is here that the construction of the European Union has its principal faults: the design of the project of integration has been converted into an affair reserved for the business elites. The big corporations have been the principal beneficiaries of the establishment of a “common market”, they are the ones who insist on the approval, as soon as possible, of the Transatlantic Treaty of Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), promoted by the government of the United States, and it is they who promote the offensive of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

It is without doubt true that Europe urgently needs and institutional re-design. In fact, after the victory of the “Brexit”, in various countries referendums have been proposed to abandon the European Union; nevertheless, one has to take into account that the majority of the countries of continental Europe form part of the Eurozone, but this is not the case of the United Kingdom, that has always resisted the adoption of the common currency.

Up to now the progressive forces of Europe have not proposed to abandon the Euro. We recall for example the case of Greece in 2015: with a leftish Government, the troika (made up of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) rejected all the proposals of the economic programme of Syriza. And although the Greek Government called a referendum to reject the leonine conditions of the third rescue programme, finally fiscal austerity carried the day.

The Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, was always reluctant that Greece should abandon the Eurozone (the so-called “Grexit”), with all that and to date it has been impossible to establish an alternative economic policy and, at the same time, comply with the demands of the troika. To my own judgement, the great drama that Europe lives in this time is that those who propose an exit from the Euro and then from the European Union, are leaders of political parties of the extreme right, those who utilize the xenophobic rhetoric to distract attention from the true causes of the crisis and who, let us say it clearly, have no intention to promote the rebirth of Europe….

The author is an economist graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Twitter: @noyola_ariel.

Translation: Jordan Bishop.

Source: RT español.

While paying homage to Marx for his profound understanding of “the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production,” most contemporary economists argue that, nonetheless, his economic analysis cannot be of much service when it comes to the study of modern banking and big finance, since these are relatively recent, post-Marx developments. I will argue in this essay that, in fact, a careful reading of his work on “fictitious capital” reveals keen insights into a better understanding of the instabilities of today’s financial markets [1].

It is true that his discussions of fictitious capital remained brief and fragmented. Nonetheless, what he wrote (in broad outlines) on the distinction between “money capital and real capital,” between productive and unproductive labor, and between speculative and real investment can be of significant interest in relations to the rise of finance capital and its destabilizing effects on the advanced market economies of our time [2].

The Marxian theory of value, as the product of human labor generated in the process of production, and its twin theory of surplus value—value over and above the cost of production—as the source of profit, interest and rental incomes implies that, to have a viable economy, the monetary sum of these various types of incomes cannot deviate much from the total surplus value created in the process of production. In other words, the overall sum of money incomes and/or profits in an economy is limited, ultimately, by the total amount of real values produced in that economy.

Policy implications of this theory in terms of what really sustains an economy are enormous, as it can readily alert policy makers to the dangers of an impending economic crisis when deviations of monetary magnitudes from real-value magnitudes tend to become too big and, therefore, unsustainable.

This stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream/neoclassical economic theory that, instead of human labor, views ownership and/or management as sources of profits, or economic surplus. Accordingly, there are no systemic limits to the amounts of income/profits made by “smart” capitalist managers and financial “experts”: it all depends on how creative they are, including all sorts of clever “financial innovations” that could create paper or electronic wealth out of thin air, without being limited by any underlying real values.

Not surprisingly, most mainstream economists did not see a problem with the astronomical growth of fictitious capital (relative to industrial capital) in the immediate period preceding the 2008 financial implosion. Indeed, not long before the market crash, these economists were cheerfully predicting that there would be no more major crisis of capitalism because “creative financial innovations” had essentially insured the market against risk, uncertainty and crash.

The Marxian theory of financial instability (and of economic crisis in general) goes beyond simply blaming either the “irrational behavior of economic agents,” as neoliberal economists do, or “insufficient government regulations,” as Keynesian economists do. Instead, it focuses on the built-in dynamics of the capitalist system that fosters both the behavior of the market agents and the policies of governments. It views, for example, the 2008 financial meltdown as the logical outcome of the over-accumulation of the fictitious finance capital, relative to the aggregate amount of surplus value produced by labor in the process of production.

Instead of simply blaming “evil” Republicans or “neoliberal capitalism,” as many left, liberal and Keynesian economists do [3], it focuses on the dynamics of “capital as self-expanding value,” as Marx put it, that not only created the huge financial bubble that imploded in 2008, but also subverted public policy in the face of such an obviously unsustainable bubble. In other words, it views public policy not simply as an administrative or technical matter but, more importantly, as a deeply political affair that is organically intertwined with the class nature of the capitalist state, which has increasingly become dominated by powerful financial interests.

While blaming policies or strategies of deregulation, securitization, and other financial innovations as factors that facilitated the financial bubble is not false, it masks the fact that these factors are essentially instruments or vehicles of the accumulation of fictitious finance capital. No matter how subtle or complex, they are essentially clever tools or strategies of transferring surplus value generated elsewhere by labor, or of creating fictitious capital out of thin air. Marx characterized this subtle transfer of (real/labor) value from productive to unproductive fictitious capital as “an extreme form of the fetishism of commodities” in which the real, but submerged, source of surplus-value is concealed. In discussing how fluctuations in the magnitude of fictitious capital, or financial asset prices, may not necessarily reflect changes in the real economy, Marx wrote:

 To the extent that the depreciation or increase in value of this paper [assets] is independent of the movement of value of the actual capital that it represents, the wealth of the nation is just as great before as after its depreciation or increase in value. . . . Unless this depreciation reflected an actual stoppage of production and of traffic on canals and railways, or a suspension of already initiated [productive] enterprises . . . the nation did not grow one cent poorer by the bursting of this soap bubble of nominal money-capital (emphasis added0 [4].

Marx prefaces his discussion of the relationship between finance capital, which he calls “loanable money-capital,” and industrial or productive capital by posing this question: “to what extent does the accumulation of capital in the form of loanable money-capital coincide with actual accumulation, i.e., the expansion of the reproduction process?” [5].

The answer, he points out, depends on the stage of the development of capitalism. In the earlier stages of capitalist development, that is, before the rise of big banks and the modern credit system, growth of finance capital was regulated or determined by the growth of industrial capital. For, in the absence of monopolistic big banks and modern credit system the dominant form of credit consisted of commercial credit. Under commercial credit system, where one person lent the money to another in the reproduction process (for example, the wholesaler lent to the retailer, or the retailer lent to the consumer), finance capital could not deviate much from the industrial capital: “When we examine this credit detached from banker’s credit it is evident that it grows with an increasing volume of industrial capital itself. Loan capital and industrial capital are identical here” [6].

But at higher stages of capitalist development, where banks scoop up or centralize and control national savings, the growth of finance capital no longer moves in tandem with the growth of industrial capital. Under these conditions, “Profit can be made purely from trading in a variety of financial claims existing only on paper. . . . Indeed, profit can be made by using only borrowed capital to engage in (speculative) trade, not backed up by any tangible asset” [7].

These brief passages reveal that Marx makes a clear distinction between real profit and profit from financial bubbles. While real profit is rooted in, and therefore directly limited, by production of surplus value, profit from inflation of fictitious capital (or asset price inflation) is not—at least, not directly, immediately, or in the short-term. Marx distinguishes between a variety of profits and/or incomes—all dependent, ultimately, on the amount of surplus value created by human labor in the process of production.

The main and the obvious category is profit that results from manufacturing or real production, or profit of “enterprise,” as Marx called it. According to his labor theory of value, profit of “enterprise” is essentially unpaid labor. Starting from production, he expresses the value of total gross national product (GNP) by this simple equation: GNP = C + V + S, where C stands for “constant” capital (or depreciation and inputs, including raw materials), V stands for “variable” capital, which is the equivalent of (production) wages, and S stands for surplus value, which is the basis of (production) profits, or profit of “enterprise.” Interest payments for borrowed (and invested) capital as well as rental payments for the space rented for doing business would be deducted from the profit of enterprise, or surplus value.

Part of the remaining profit of enterprise would normally be set aside for reinvestment and/or expansion—which is called “retained earnings” in today’s business vernacular —and the rest would become dividend income and/or entrepreneurial/managerial income. [In the above equation, Marx calls C “dead” labor, that is, labor ossified or congealed in the machinery or means of production; (V + S) “live” or “living” labor, that is, total labor (hours) performed, or total value created; which is today called net national product, or value added.]

A second category of profits, according to Marx, is “profit upon alienation or expropriation,” which comes from capitalists’ appropriating part of the workers’ income or wage in the form of interest or rent. When workers’ pay (V in the above equation) is below the “subsistence” level, i.e., they are not paid a living wage, they often resort to borrowing to supplement their inadequate earnings. Frequently this leads to indebtedness and, therefore, the appropriation of part of their income by bankers and other money-lenders. This “financial expropriation is based on re-dividing the existing flows of money incomes, and thus amounts to a zero-sum game”: lenders gain what borrowers lose. Marx characterizes this type of financial gain by lenders at the expense of borrowers profit from “secondary exploitation”—as distinct from profit from “primary exploitation,” or profit of “enterprise,” which as mentioned in the previous paragraph, is based on the extraction of surplus value in the process of production.

Both the profit of “enterprise” and profit upon “alienation” are made within the sphere of production; they both come from net national product, or value added (S +V in the above equation). However, there is also another type of profit whose connection to real values is indirect or submerged, and whose scope for expansion is, accordingly, much wider; it is the profit from fictitious capital, that is, profit that is made on paper or computer keyboards in the financial sector through trading or speculation in financial assets. This type of profit, and its accumulation into more fictitious/parasitic capital, is the main source of financial bubbles and bursts.

It follows from this distinction between various types of profits/incomes that exploitation in the process of production (as measured by the ratio of surplus value and necessary value, or approximately profit-wage ratio, which Marx calls the rate of exploitation) and exploitation upon “expropriation,” or “alienation,” go hand in hand: as the former intensifies so does the latter. For example, the rise in the profit-wage ratio in the U.S. over the past several decades has been accompanied by a corresponding rise in indebtedness, or in a larger and larger share of working people’s income/wage being expropriated (in the form of debt servicing) by lenders.

So, the distinction between different types of profits/incomes is not simply an academic exercise, or “a radical but impractical Marxian concept,” as most of the befuddled contemporary economists would opine. More importantly, it finds close relevance to actual economic categories, developments, and trends. Not only does it show, for example, the sources of various types of incomes/profits, that is, how national resources are appropriated or distributed, but also the material foundations and limits to real economic growth, as well as the sources and limits to financial bubbles.

This transparent delineation of various types and sources of profits and/or incomes stands in sharp contrast to today’s mainstream economic theory (or neoclassical economic theory) of income distribution which tends to be more confusing and mystifying than clarifying. According to this theory, which is called “functional distribution of income,” each of the four “factors” to production (labor, capital, management and landlords) receives a share of output or income that is by default “fair and equitable.” The rationale for this “spontaneous, guaranteed and fair distribution of income” is that, the theory maintains, the share of each factor of production, whether it is wage or salary or profit or interest or rent, is automatically determined by market mechanism in a way that it ends up to be exactly equal to that factor’s contribution (at the margin) to the production of output/income! (All this magical performance of making distribution under capitalism “fair and equitable” is accomplished with the help of many unrealistic assumptions and mesmerizing mathematical gymnastics, especially differential calculus/derivatives.)

As noted earlier, most contemporary economists, including many on the left, argue that since Marx lived and wrote in an era prior to the rise of big finance he could not have foreseen the destabilizing influences of financial bubbles on a relatively advanced market economy.

A careful reading of his work on “money capital and real capital” reveals, however, that he did, indeed, discuss scenarios of systematic outflows of finance capital (which he interchangeably called “money hoards,” “surplus-capital,” or “money-capital”) from the sphere of production into the realm of speculation in pursuit of higher returns; thereby paving the way for the rise of financial bubbles and bursts. Not only did Marx envision scenarios of finance capital shunning or abandoning the sphere of production in pursuit of higher returns in the sphere of speculation, his analysis of the dynamics of such scenarios or developments, which could lead to financial bubbles and bursts, is indeed much deeper and richer than those of contemporary economists [8].

According to these economists, both neoliberal and Keynesian, any discrepancy or imbalance between finance capital, which they call it aggregate national savings (S), and real capital, which they call it aggregate national investment (I), would be temporary and, therefore, non-problematic because, they argue, the imbalance between S and I would soon be rectified either automatically by the forces of supply and demand (neoliberals), or by government intervention (Keynesians).

In the neoliberal view, the balance between S and I is guaranteed by market mechanism: an excess of S over I would be only short-lived as this (temporary) oversupply of loanable funds would soon lead to lower rates of interest, which would then encourage businesses/manufacturers to borrow and invest more. This process of borrowing and investing the cheapened S would continue until the excess S is used up and equality between S and I is restored.

In the Keynesian view, however, such a spontaneous or automatic restoration of balance between S and I is not guaranteed, which means that a situation of S>I, or insufficient investment spending, may persist for a long time. Under conditions of relative uncertainty and weak demand, even low interest rates would not induce manufacturers to borrow and invest, or expand. Under such conditions, the government can step in, borrow the “idle” savings and spend them (“in behalf of their wealthy owners,” as Keynes put it), thereby closing the savings–investment (or income–expenditures) gap.

In the Marxian view, by contrast, the discrepancy or the gap between speculative “surplus capital” and productive investment can persist, or even widen, with calamitous consequences in terms of financial bubbles and market instability. Pointing out how in the age of big banks finance capital can grow independent of industrial capital, Marx writes: “The subsequent credit swindle proves that no real obstacle stands in the way of the employment of this surplus-capital,” a scenario that could precipitate asset-price inflation, or financial bubbles [9].

After thus pointing out that the limits or boundaries of the speculative finance capital are much wider than those of the industrial capital, he then cautions that this does not mean that speculative capital can expand indefinitely: “However, an obstacle is indeed immanent in its laws of expansion, i.e., in the limits in which capital can realize itself as capital” [10]. In other words, a giant bubble of fictitious values on a narrow base of real values can expand only to a certain extent; it is bound to burst beyond that extent.

In brief, Marx’s discussion of the systemic and systematic outflow of finance capital from the sphere of production to the sphere of speculation in pursuit of higher returns shows that, contrary to widespread perceptions among contemporary economists, Marx did, indeed, envision scenarios of the emergence of financial inflations and deflations, or bubbles and bursts. The discussion further signifies the superiority of his analysis of the relationship between industrial capital and (parasitic) finance capital over those of neoclassical economists, according to whom any outflow of finance capital from the sphere of production would be temporary and non-problematic, as it would soon be reverted back to the real sector of the economy (either by the invisible hand of the market mechanism a la neoliberalism, or by the state’s visible hand a la Keynesianism) to be invested productively. Therein lies the tragedy of mainstream/neoclassical economists: in their paranoid fear of Marx, they have essentially censored his economic views, thereby depriving themselves of the richest analysis of capitalism. In so doing, they have also succeeded in reducing economics as an academic discipline to what Professor Michael Hudson aptly calls “junk economics,” the official labelling of the discipline as a “science” notwithstanding.

References

[1] This essay draws heavily on Chapter 5 of my book, Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis: Parasitic Finance Capital (Routledge 2015).

[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, New York, International Publishers 1967, chapters 25-33.

[3] See, for example, David Kotz, “The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism,” Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 41, no. 3 (2009), pp. 305-317.

[4] Karl Marx, ibid. p. 468.

[5] Ibid. p. 494.

[6] Ibid. p. 481.

[7] This passage is based on Marx’s discussion of “Speculation and fictitious capital,” as quoted in Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital#cite_note-1>.

[8] Karl Marx, ibid. pp. 476-519.

[9] Ibid. p. 507.

[10] Ibid.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

According to an EU official, the liquidity support program includes up to €150 billion ($166 billion) in government guarantees. The WSJ adds that the commission spokeswoman declined to comment on the amount of guarantees that were authorized, but said that the budget requested by the Italian government had been found to be proportionate. The Italian economy ministry declined to comment.

An amusing sidebar: “only solvent banks would qualify for the liquidity support program, which has been authorized until the end of the year.” The problem is that with €360 billion in NPLs, every bank in Italy is insolvent, which implicitly means that they will all be found to be solvent or otherwise nobody will benefit.

Confirming the severity of the Italian fiasco, is that the decision which was taken on Sunday, had not been previously disclosed until the WSJ reported on it and “appears to be a first indication of governments moving to shore up banks in the wake of market turbulence following the Brexit referendum in the U.K.”

In other words, just as we said before, Brexit was nothing more than a Europe-blessed “crisis” ploy designed to achieve two things: unleash more QE, which the BOE admitted will happen (most likely with the involvement of the ECB), and ii) to facilitate the bailout of insolvent Italian banks. To wit:

Brexit will be just the scapegoat used by Renzi and Italy to circumvent any specific eurozone prohibitions. And if it fails, all Renzi has to do is hint at a referendum of his own. Then watch as Merkel scrambles to allow Italy to do whatever it wants, just to avoid the humiliation of a potential “Italeave.”

And while Angela Merkel apparently shut down the original proposal pitched by Italy, Europe – surely under the guidance of Mario Draghi – has found a way to circumvent her veto power.

“As this decision and other precedents demonstrate there are a number of solutions that can be put in place in full compliance with EU rules to address market turbulence,” the spokeswoman said.

To be sure, Italy’s market has indeed been turbulent: Italian banks have lost more than half of their market capitalization since the beginning of the year, as investors fret about the lenders’ huge exposure to bad loans. That compares to an average decline of less than one third for European lenders. Some Italian banks have seen their shares drop by some 75%.

But what is most stunning is the WSJ’s conclusion of what the plan is supposed to prevent – it is not to halt the stock price collapse, it is to prevent a bank run:

A person familiar with the Italian government plans said the cabinet of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi hoped to use a liquidity backstop to contain investor panic, which could result in a run on deposits and affect banks’ liquidity.

Needless to say, for Italy’s Prime Minister to be contemplating how to avoid “investor panic” and prevent a “run on deposits“, then Italian banks must truly be on the verge of collapse.

Finally, for those curious about timing and how soon until it all unravels, we quote the European Commission spokesman who said that “there is no expectation that the need to use this scheme should arise.”

What this statement really means, and whether a preemptive plan to bailout Italy’s insolvent banks will “boost confidence”, we leave up to readers decide.

Australia’s nuclear industry has a shameful history of ‘radioactive racism’ that dates from the British bomb tests in the 1950s, writes Jim Green. The same attitudes persist today with plans to dump over half a million tonnes of high and intermediate level nuclear waste on Aboriginal land, and open new uranium mines. But now Aboriginal peoples and traditional land owners are fighting back!

From 1998-2004, the Australian federal government tried – but failed – to impose a national nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in South Australia.

Then the government tried to impose a dump on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory, but that also failed.

Muckaty Traditional Owner Kylie Sambo is an objector to what she considers radioactive blackmail: education in return for accepting nuclear waste. ‘As Australians we should be already entitled to that.

Now the government has embarked on its third attempt and once again it is trying to impose a dump on Aboriginal land despite clear opposition from Traditional Owners.

The latest proposal is for a dump in the spectacular Flinders Ranges, 400 km north of Adelaide in South Australia, on the land of the Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners.

The government says that no group will have a right of veto, which is coded racism: it means that the dump may go ahead despite the government’s acknowledgement that “almost all Indigenous community members surveyed are strongly opposed to the site continuing.”

The proposed dump site was nominated by former Liberal Party politician Grant Chapman but he has precious little connection to the land. Conversely, the land has been precious to Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners for millennia.

‘It was like somebody ripped my heart out’

The site is adjacent to the Yappala Indigenous Protected Area (IPA). “The IPA is right on the fence – there’s a waterhole that is shared by both properties”, said Yappala Station resident and Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Regina McKenzie.

The waterhole – a traditional women’s site and healing place – is one of many archeological and culturally significant sites in the area that Traditional Owners have registered with the South Australian government over the past six years. Two Adnyamathanha associations – Viliwarinha Aboriginal Corporation and the Anggumathanha Camp Law Mob – wrote in November 2015 statement:

Adnyamathanha land in the Flinders Ranges has been short-listed for a national nuclear waste dump. The land was nominated by former Liberal Party Senator Grant Chapman. Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners weren’t consulted. Even Traditional Owners who live next to the proposed dump site at Yappala Station weren’t consulted. This is an insult.

The whole area is Adnyamathanha land. It is Arngurla Yarta (spiritual land). The proposed dump site has springs. It also has ancient mound springs. It has countless thousands of Aboriginal artefects. Our ancestors are buried there.

Hookina creek that runs along the nominated site is a significant women’s site. It is a registered heritage site and must be preserved and protected. We are responsible for this area, the land and animals.

We don’t want a nuclear waste dump here on our country and worry that if the waste comes here it will harm our environment and muda (our lore, our creation, our everything). We call on the federal government to withdraw the nomination of the site and to show more respect in future.

Regina McKenzie describes getting the news that the Flinders Ranges site had been chosen from a short-list of six sites across Australia:

We were devastated, it was like somebody had rang us up and told us somebody had passed away. My niece rang me crying … it was like somebody ripped my heart out.

McKenzie said on ABC television:

Almost every waste dump is near an Aboriginal community. It’s like, yeah, they’re only a bunch of blacks, they’re only a bunch of Abos, so we’ll put it there. Don’t you think that’s a little bit confronting for us when it happens to us all the time? Can’t they just leave my people alone?

Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Dr Jillian Marsh said in an April 2016 statement:

The First Nations people of Australia have been bullied and pushed around, forcibly removed from their families and their country, denied access and the right to care for their own land for over 200 years. Our health and wellbeing compares with third world countries, our people crowd the jails. Nobody wants toxic waste in their back yard, this is true the world over. We stand in solidarity with people across this country and across the globe who want sustainable futures for communities, we will not be moved.

The battle over the proposed dump site in the Flinders Ranges will probably be resolved over the next 12 months. If the government fails in its third attempt to impose a dump against the wishes of Aboriginal Traditional Owners, we can only assume on past form that a fourth attempt will ensue.

Dumping on South Australia, 1998-2004

This isn’t the first time that Aboriginal people in South Australia have faced the imposition of a national nuclear waste dump. In 1998, the federal government announced its intention to build a dump near the rocket and missile testing range at Woomera.

The proposed dump generated such controversy in South Australia that the federal government hired a public relations company. Correspondence between the company and the government was released under Freedom of Information laws.

In one exchange, a government official asked the PR company to remove sand-dunes from a photo to be used in a brochure. The explanation provided by the government official was that: “Dunes are a sensitive area with respect to Aboriginal Heritage”. The sand-dunes were removed from the photo, only for the government official to ask if the horizon could be straightened up as well.

Aboriginal groups were coerced into signing ‘Heritage Clearance Agreements’ consenting to test drilling of short-listed sites for the proposed dump. The federal government made it clear that if consent was not granted, drilling would take place anyway.

Aboriginal groups were put in an invidious position. They could attempt to protect specific cultural sites by engaging with the federal government and signing agreements, at the risk of having that engagement being misrepresented as consent for the dump; or they could refuse to engage in the process, thereby having no opportunity to protect cultural sites.

Aboriginal groups did participate in Heritage Clearance Agreements, and as feared that participation was repeatedly misrepresented by the federal government as amounting to Aboriginal consent for the dump.

‘We would not do that for any amount of money’

In 2002, the Federal Government tried to buy-off Aboriginal opposition to the dump. Three Native Title claimant groups – the Kokatha, Kuyani and Barngala – were offeredA$90,000 to surrender their native title rights, but only on the condition that all three groups agreed.

The government’s offer was refused. Dr Roger Thomas, a Kokatha Traditional Owner, said:

The insult of it, it was just so insulting. I told the Commonwealth officers to stop being so disrespectful and rude to us by offering us $90,000 to pay out our country and our culture.

Andrew Starkey, also a Kokatha man, said:

It was just shameful. They were wanting people to sign off their cultural heritage rights for a minuscule amount of money. We would not do that for any amount of money.

In 2003, the federal government used the Lands Acquisition Act 1989 to seize land for the dump. Native Title rights and interests were extinguished with the stroke of a pen. This took place with no forewarning and no consultation with Aboriginal people.

Next – the sham ‘consultation’

Leading the battle against the dump were the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a council of senior Aboriginal women from northern South Australia. Many of the Kungkas personally suffered the impacts of the British nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s.

The government’s approach to ‘consultation’ with Aboriginal people was spelt out in a document leaked in 2002. The document states: “Tactics to reach Indigenous audiences will be informed by extensive consultations currently being undertaken … with Indigenous groups.” In other words, sham ‘consultation’ was used to fine-tune the government’s pro-dump propaganda.

The government’s cynical and disrespectful tactics were the antithesis of Article 29 of theUnited Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that ”no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent”.

This issue of sham ‘consultation’ arises time and time again, most recently with the discussion initiated by a Royal Commission (discussed below) into “building confidence” in the safety of nuclear waste dump proposals. West Mallee Protection (WMP), representing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from Ceduna in western South Australia, responded with this blistering attack:

WMP finds this question superficial and offensive. It is a fact that many people have dedicated their time and energy to investigating and thinking about nuclear waste. It is a fact that even elderly women that made up the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta – a senior Aboriginal women’s council – committed years of their lives to stand up to the proposal for a low-level facility at Woomera.

They didn’t do this because of previously inadequate ‘processes’ to ‘build confidence’ as the question suggests but because:

A) Individuals held a deep commitment to look after country and protect it from a substance known as ‘irati’ poison which stemmed from long held cultural knowledge.

B) Nuclear impacts were experienced and continued to be experienced first hand by members and their families predominately from nuclear testing at Emu Field and Maralinga but also through exploration and mining at Olympic Dam.

C) They epitomized and lived by the worldview that sustaining life for future generations is of upmost importance and that this is at odds with the dangerous and long lasting dangers of all aspects of the nuclear industry.

The insinuation that the general population or target groups such Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta or the communities in the Northern Territory that succeeded them and also fought off a nuclear dump for Muckaty were somehow deficient in their understanding of the implications and may have required “confidence building” is highly offensive.

The politicians finally get their ears out of their pockets

The Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta continued to implore the federal government to “get their ears out of their pockets”, and after six years the government did just that. In the lead-up to the 2004 federal election, with the dump issue biting politically, and following a Federal Court ruling that the government had illegally used urgency provisions in the Lands Acquisition Act, the government decided to cut its losses and abandon the dump plan.

The Kungkas wrote in an open letter:

People said that you can’t win against the Government. Just a few women. We just kept talking and telling them to get their ears out of their pockets and listen. We never said we were going to give up. Government has big money to buy their way out but we never gave up.

Botched clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear test site

The 1998-2004 debate over nuclear waste dumping in South Australia overlapped with a controversy over a botched clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear weapons test site in the same state.

The British government conducted 12 nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the 1950s, most of them at Maralinga. The 1985 Royal Commission found that regard for Aboriginal safety during the weapons tests was characterised by “ignorance, incompetence and cynicism”.

The Australian government’s clean-up of Maralinga in the late 1990s was just as bad. It was done on the cheap and many tonnes of plutonium-contaminated waste remain buried in shallow, unlined pits in totally unsuitable geology.

Nuclear engineer and whistleblower Alan Parkinson said of the clean-up:

What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn’t be adopted on white-fellas land.

Dr Geoff Williams, an officer with the Commonwealth nuclear regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, said in a leaked email that the clean-up was beset by a “host of indiscretions, short-cuts and cover-ups”.

Nuclear physicist Prof. Peter Johnston noted that there were “very large expenditures and significant hazards resulting from the deficient management of the project”.

Prof. Johnston (and others) noted in a conference paper that Traditional Owners were excluded from any meaningful input into decision-making concerning the clean-up. Traditional Owners were represented on a consultative committee but key decisions – such as abandoning vitrification of plutonium-contaminated waste in favour of shallow burial in unlined trenches – were taken without consultation with the consultative committee or any separate discussions with Traditional Owners.

Federal government minister Senator Nick Minchin said in a May 2000 media release that the Maralinga Tjarutja Traditional Owners “have agreed that deep burial of plutonium is a safe way of handling this waste.” But the burial of plutonium-contaminated waste was not deep and the Maralinga Tjarutja Traditional Owners did not agree to waste burial in unlined trenches – in fact they wrote to the Minister explicitly dissociating themselves from the decision.

Barely a decade after the Maralinga clean-up, a survey revealed that 19 of the 85 contaminated waste pits have been subject to erosion or subsidence.

Despite the residual radioactive contamination, the Australian government off-loaded responsibility for the contaminated land onto the Maralinga Tjarutja Traditional Owners. The government portrayed this land transfer as an act of reconciliation. But it wasn’t an act of reconciliation – it was deeply cynical. The real agenda was spelt out in a 1996 government document which said that the clean-up was “aimed at reducing Commonwealth liability arising from residual contamination.”

Radioactive ransom in the Northern Territory

After the Kungkas victory in 2004, successive federal governments spent the best part of a decade attempting to establish a national nuclear waste dump at Muckaty, 110 km north of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. A toxic trade-off of basic services for a radioactive waste dump was part of the story from the start.

The nomination of the Muckaty site was made with the promise of a A$12 million compensation package comprising roads, houses and scholarships. Muckaty Traditional Owner Kylie Sambo (see photo) objected to this radioactive ransom: “I think that is a very, very stupid idea for us to sell our land to get better education and scholarships. As an Australian we should be already entitled to that.”

While a small group of Aboriginal Traditional Owners supported the dump, a large majority were opposed and some initiated legal action in the Federal Court challenging the nomination of the Muckaty site by the federal government and the Northern Land Council (NLC).

The conservative Liberal/National Coalition federal government passed legislation – theCommonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act – overriding the Aboriginal Heritage Act, undermining the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, and allowing the imposition of a nuclear dump with no Aboriginal consultation or consent.

The Australian Labor Party voted against the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act, with Labor parliamentarians describing it as “extreme”, “arrogant”,“draconian”, “sorry”, “sordid”, and “profoundly shameful”. At its 2007 national conference, Labor voted unanimously to repeal the legislation.

Yet after the winning the 2007 election, the Labor government passed legislation – theNational Radioactive Waste Management Act (NRWMA) – which was almost as draconianand still permitted the imposition of a dump with no Aboriginal consultation or consent (to be precise, the nomination of a site was not invalidated by a failure to consult or secure consent).

Radioactive racism in Australia is bipartisan – both the Labor government and the Liberal/National Opposition voted in support of the NRWMA. Shamefully, the NLC supported legislation disempowering the people it is meant to represent.

In February 2008, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd highlighted the life-story of Lorna Fejo – a member of the stolen generation – in the historic National Apology to Aboriginal People in Parliament House. At the same time, the Rudd government was stealing her land for a nuclear dump.

Fejo said:

I’m very, very disappointed and downhearted about that [NRWMA legislation]. I’m really sad. The thing is – when are we going to have a fair go? Australia is supposed to be the land of the fair go. When are we going to have fair go? I’ve been stolen from my mother and now they’re stealing my land off me.

‘Our heart jiggled with joy’

The Federal Court trial finally began in June 2014. After two weeks of evidence, the NLCgave up and agreed to withdraw the nomination of Muckaty. Victory for the Muckaty mob!

The announcement came just days before the NLC and government officials were due to take the stand to face cross-examination. As a result of their surrender, the NLC and the government did not have to face cross-examination in relation to numerous serious accusations (see here, here and here) raised in the first two weeks of the trial – including claims that the NLC rewrote an anthropologists’ report.

Kylie Sambo said:

I believe [the NLC] didn’t want to go through that humiliation of what they really done. But it’s better now that they actually backed off. It’s good for us.

Lorna Fejo said: “I feel ecstatic. I feel free because it was a long struggle to protect my land.”

Marlene Nungarrayi Bennett compared the Muckaty victory to other famous victories for Aboriginal people: “Today will go down in the history books of Indigenous Australia on par with the Wave Hill Walk-off, Mabo and Blue Mud Bay. We have shown the Commonwealth and the NLC that we will stand strong for this country. The NLC tried to divide and conquer us but they did not succeed.”

Dianne Stokes said:

Everyone is feeling very happy that we won; we struggled that long to get it over and done with. … If anyone else around the country wants support to stop a nuclear dump, we will come along and help them to go against the waste. We had so much support when we were struggling, if anyone calls we will go straight there.

Isobel Phillips said:

Looking back now on how we struggled, it was the hardest. Keeping it up was the worst because of the pressure that our land will be destroyed. We first felt sad, heartbroken and betrayed that the government would put the nuclear waste on our country. And our grief is for our elders who have passed away – they helped us but their spirit is here with us today. There is one thing that we have – our culture, lore, and family connection on the land.

We kept going with the fight until we won our land back. Our heart jiggled with joy and smiled when we heard the good news that the government was not going ahead with the nuclear waste dump on our country. We jumped and we danced with excitement – what a blessing. We are so happy, so strong and still smiling with pride.

Australia as the world’s nuclear waste dump

Now Aboriginal people in South Australia face the imposition of a national nuclear waste dump as well as a plan to import 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste and 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate level waste for storage and disposal as a commercial venture.

The plan is being driven by the South Australian government, which last year established a Royal Commission to provide a fig-leaf of independent supporting advice. The Royal Commissioner is a nuclear advocate and the majority of the members of the Expert Advisory Committee are strident nuclear advocates.

Indeed it seems as if the Royal Commissioner sought out the dopiest nuclear advocateshe could find to put on the Expert Advisory Committee: one thinks nuclear power is safer than solar, another thinks that nuclear power doesn’t pose a weapons proliferation risk, and a third was insisting that there was no credible risk of a serious accident at Fukushima even as nuclear meltdown was in full swing.

Announcing the establishment of the Royal Commission in March 2015, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill said:

 We have a specific mandate to consult with Aboriginal communities and there are great sensitivities here. I mean we’ve had the use and abuse of the lands of the Maralinga Tjarutja people by the British when they tested their atomic weapons.

Yet the South Australian government’s handling of the Royal Commission process systematically disenfranchised Aboriginal people. The truncated timeline for providing feedback on draft Terms of Reference disadvantaged people in remote regions, people with little or no access to email and internet, and people for whom English is a second language. There was no translation of the draft Terms of Reference, and a regional communications and engagement strategy was not developed or implemented.

Aboriginal people repeatedly expressed frustration with the Royal Commission process. One example (of many) is the submission of the Anggumathanha Camp Law Mob (who are also fighting against the plan for a national nuclear waste dump on their land):

Why we are not satisfied with the way this Royal Commission has been conducted:

Yaiinidlha Udnyu ngawarla wanggaanggu, wanhanga Yura Ngawarla wanggaanggu? – always in English, where’s the Yura Ngawarla (our first language)?

The issues of engagement are many. To date we have found the process of engagement used by the Royal Commission to be very off putting as it’s been run in a real Udnyu (whitefella) way. Timelines are short, information is hard to access, there is no interpreter service available, and the meetings have been very poorly advertised. …

A closed and secretive approach makes engagement difficult for the average person on the street, and near impossible for Aboriginal people to participate.

The plan to turn South Australia into the world’s nuclear waste dump has been met with near-unanimous opposition from Aboriginal people. The Aboriginal Congress of South Australia, comprising people from many Aboriginal groups across the state, endorsed the following resolution at an August 2015 meeting:

We, as native title representatives of lands and waters of South Australia, stand firmly in opposition to nuclear developments on our country, including all plans to expand uranium mining, and implement nuclear reactors and nuclear waste dumps on our land. … Many of us suffer to this day the devastating effects of the nuclear industry and continue to be subject to it through extensive uranium mining on our lands and country that has been contaminated.

We view any further expansion of industry as an imposition on our country, our people, our environment, our culture and our history. We also view it as a blatant disregard for our rights under various legislative instruments, including the founding principles of this state.

The Royal Commission acknowledged strong Aboriginal opposition to its nuclear waste proposal in its final report – but it treats that opposition not as a red light but as an obstacle to be circumvented.

The racism of the ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’

Australia’s self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ – academic Barry Brook (a member of the Royal Commission’s Expert Advisory Committee), uranium and nuclear industry consultant Ben Heard, and one or two others – have never once voiced concern about attempts to impose nuclear waste dumps on unwilling Aboriginal communities. Their silence suggests they couldn’t care less about the racism of the industry they so stridently support.

Silence from Brook and Heard when the federal government was passing laws allowing the imposition of a national nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory without consulting or securing consent from Traditional Owners.

Echoing comments from the right-wing Liberal Party, Brook and Heard said the Muckaty site in the Northern Territory is in the “middle of nowhere”. From their perspective, perhaps, but for Muckaty Traditional Owners the site is in the middle of their homelands – and claims that it is in the middle of nowhere are deeply offensive.

Heard’s comments about the current proposed dump site on Adnyamathanha land in South Australia have been just as offensive. He claims there are “no known cultural heritage issues on the site”. Try telling that to the Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners who live on Yappala Station, in the Indigenous Protected Area right next to the dump site.

So where did Heard get this idea that there are “no known cultural heritage issues on the site”? Not from visiting the site, or speaking to the Traditional Owners. He’s just parroting the federal government’s racist lies.

Brook and Heard are also offering up the state of South Australia for an international high-level nuclear waste dump as if it was their personal property. No mention of Aboriginal Traditional Owners or their fierce opposition to the proposal.

In the US …

The intersection between nuclear waste dumping and racism isn’t unique to Australia, of course. In the US, for example, a 2010 article in Scientific American noted: “Native tribes across the American West have been and continue to be subjected to significant amounts of radioactive and otherwise hazardous waste as a result of living near nuclear test sites, uranium mines, power plants and toxic waste dumps.”

More bluntly, indigenous activist Winona LaDuke sums up the problem:

The greatest minds in the nuclear establishment have been searching for an answer to the radioactive waste problem for fifty years, and they’ve finally got one: haul it down a dirt road and dump it on an Indian reservation.

The racism associated with nuclear waste dumping in the US is as plain as the nose on James Hansen’s face, but he hasn’t said a word about it. Nor has the Breakthrough Institute or any of the other self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ in the US.

Self-styled Aboriginal leaders

Just as self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ ignore the nuclear industry’s systemic racism, so too do a number of self-styled Aboriginal ‘leaders’.

One such ‘leader’ is Warren Mundine. At various times he has been a member of the federal government’s Indigenous Advisory Council, a National President of the Australian Labor Party, a Director of the Australian Uranium Association and co-convenor of the Association’s ‘Indigenous Dialogue Group’ (which never initiated any dialogue with indigenous people).

Mundine was silent when the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta were struggling to prevent the imposition of a nuclear waste dump on their land from 1998-2004; and when Muckaty Traditional Owners were struggling to prevent the imposition of a nuclear waste dump on their land from 2006-2014.

And he remains silent today as the Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners struggle to prevent the imposition of a nuclear waste dump on their land; and as one after another state government passes legislation weakening Aboriginal land rights and heritage protections at the behest of uranium mining companies.

Mundine says Australia has “a legal framework to negotiate equitably with the traditional owners on whose land many uranium deposits are found.” In fact, only in the Northern Territory do Traditional Owners have any right of veto over mining – and that legislation has a clause specifically exempting the Ranger uranium mine from the Act!

Mundine was awarded an Order of Australia gong in the June 2016 Queen’s Birthday honours, “for distinguished service as a leader in Indigenous affairs and advocate for enhancing economic and social public policy outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people.”

No such recognition for Aboriginal people fighting to protect country and culture – the Maralinga Tjarutja, the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, the Muckaty mob, the Adnyamathanha and many others.

Systemic racism

Bill Shorten, leader of the federal Labor Party, recently said that “systemic racism is still far-too prevalent” in Australia. He should know – the Labor Party has repeatedly driven or supported bipartisan attempts to impose nuclear waste dumps against the wishes of Aboriginal communities.

And both the Labor Party and the Liberal/National Coalition believe that uranium mining is more important than Aboriginal rights. One example concerns the 1982 South Australian Roxby Downs Indenture Act, which sets the legal framework for the operation of BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam uranium mine in SA.

The Act was amended in 2011 but it retains exemptions from the South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act. As things stand, BHP Billiton must partially comply with an old version of the Aboriginal Heritage Act – a version that was never proclaimed.

Traditional Owners were not even consulted about the 2011 amendments. The government’s spokesperson in Parliament said:

BHP were satisfied with the current arrangements and insisted on the continuation of these arrangements, and the government did not consult further than that.

That disgraceful performance illustrates a broader pattern. Aboriginal land rights and heritage protections are feeble at the best of times. But the legal rights and protections are repeatedly stripped away whenever they get in the way of nuclear or mining interests.

Thus the Olympic Dam mine is largely exempt from the South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act. Sub-section 40(6) of the Commonwealth’s Aboriginal Land Rights Actexempts the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory from the Act and thus removed the right of veto that Mirarr Traditional Owners would otherwise have enjoyed.

New South Wales legislation exempts uranium mines from provisions of the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act. The Western Australian government is in the process of gutting the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 at the behest of the mining industry. And on it goes:

• Native Title rights were extinguished with the stroke of a pen to seize land for a radioactive waste dump in South Australia;
• Aboriginal heritage laws and land rights were repeatedly overridden with the push to dump nuclear waste in the Northern Territory;
• and near-unanimous Aboriginal opposition to a nuclear waste dump in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges is being ignored by the federal Liberal / National Coalition government (and the Labor Opposition) and the South Australian Labor government (and the Liberal Opposition).

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that the never-ending nuclear war against Australia’s Aboriginal people amounts to cultural genocide. Indeed it would be a statement of the obvious.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where a version of this article was originally published. Nuclear Monitor, published 20 times a year, has been publishing deeply researched, often critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

Take action:

• The Aboriginal-led Australian Nuclear Free Alliance (ANFA) is asking organisations around the world to endorse a short statement calling on nuclear nations not to dump their nuclear waste in Australia.
• ANFA is seeking donations to hold its annual national meeting.
• Sign the ‘No Dump Alliance‘ statement opposing international high-level nuclear waste dumping in Australia.
• Join the Facebook group: Fight to Stop Nuclear Waste in the Flinders Ranges.

Brexit could trigger a $500 trillion derivatives meltdown, by forcing the EU to allow insolvent member governments and banks to write down debt. Italy is in financial crisis and is already petitioning for that concession. How to avoid collapse of the massive derivatives house of cards? Alternatives are considered.

Sovereign debt – the debt of national governments – has ballooned from $80 trillion to $100 trillion just since 2008. Squeezed governments have been driven to radical austerity measures, privatizing public assets, slashing public services, and downsizing work forces in a futile attempt to balance national budgets. But the debt overhang just continues to grow.

Austerity has been pushed to the limit and hasn’t worked. But default or renegotiating the debt seems to be off the table. Why? According to a June 25^th article by Graham Summers on ZeroHedge:

. . . EVERY move the Central Banks have made post-2009 has been aimed at avoiding debt restructuring or defaults in the bond markets. Why does Greece, a country that represents less than 2% of EU GDP, continue to receive bailouts instead of just defaulting?

Summers’ answer – derivatives:

[G]lobal leverage has exploded to record highs, with the sovereign bond bubble now a staggering $100 trillion in size. To top it off, over $10 trillion of this is sporting negative yields in nominal terms. . . .

Globally, over $500 trillion in derivatives trade [is] based on bond yields.

But Brexit changes everything, says Summers. Until now, the EU has been able to reject debt forgiveness as an alternative, using the threat of financial Armageddon if the debtor country left the EU. But Britain has left, and Armageddon hasn’t hit. Other Eurozone nations can now threaten to do the same if they don’t get debt forgiveness or a restructuring.

The First Domino – Italy

That has evidently started happening, with Italy as the first challenger of EU rules. On June 27^th, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported in the UK Telegraph that the first serious casualty of the Brexit contagion had struck. The Italian government is preparing a €40 billion rescue of its financial system, as Italian bank shares collapse. The government is now studying a direct state recapitalization of Italian banks, to be funded by a special bond issue. They also want a moratorium of the bail-in rules and bondholder write-downs, although those steps are prohibited under EU laws.

According to a June 28^th editorial on ZeroHedge titled “The First Casualty of Brexit”:

The likely outcome is that Italy’s [prime minister] Renzi will be “forced” to take matters into his own hands and enact a unilateral sovereign rescue of the Italian banking system in defiance of the EU, unless he wins concessions soon from Brussels. Those who know him say he will not go down in flames for the sake of European ideological purity.

As a result, Brexit will be just the scapegoat used by Renzi and Italy to circumvent any specific eurozone prohibitions. And if it fails, all Renzi has to do is hint at a referendum of his own. Then watch as Merkel scrambles to allow Italy to do whatever it wants, just to avoid the humiliation of a potential “Italeave.”

Behind the Italian Collapse: Brexit or Bail-ins?

The ZeroHedge editorial questions whether Brexit was actually the cause of the Italian collapse. The banks were already in serious trouble. A good crisis was just needed so that EU rules could be suspended without admitting they were unworkable all along; and Brexit fit the bill. But the real trigger of the collapse seems to have been the bail-in scheme implemented in January 2016. According to ZeroHedge:

The new bail-in reform this year has brought matters to a head, catching EU authorities off guard. It was intended to protect taxpayers by ensuring that creditors suffered major losses first if the bank gets into trouble, but was badly designed and has led to a flight from bank shares. The Bank of Italy has called for a complete overhaul of the bail-in rules.

. . . The banking squeeze has become politically explosive in Italy after thousands of small depositors were wiped out at four regional banks late last year. They were classified as junior bondholders even though most of them were just ordinary savers who did not realize what was being done with their money.

The bail-in scheme was supposed to shift losses from governments to bank creditors and depositors, but it has served instead to scare off depositors and investors, making shaky banks even shakier. On top of that, heightened capital requirements have made it practically impossible for Italian banks to raise capital. According to Lorenzo Cordogno, former director general of the Italian Treasury, the result has been that the ECB is “unwittingly destabilizing the banks in an overzealous attempt to make Europe’s banks safer.”

But EU rules have been flexible in “emergencies.” Before the Eurozone debt crisis of 2011-12, the European Central Bank was forbidden to buy sovereign debt. Then Greece and other southern European countries got into serious trouble, sending bond yields (interest rates) through the roof.  But default or debt restructuring was not considered an option. The ECB finally got on the quantitative easing bandwagon and is now buying government debt along with other financial assets at the rate of €80 billion per month.

According to Evans-Pritchard, Brexit has not yet caused serious trouble in the debt markets, because this new QE policy has allowed the ECB to cap bond yields. Rather than deal with a very awkward Italeave, the EU could cave on its bail-in and bailout rules as well.

Time for a Reset

That may get Italy out of the woods, but the system is clearly broken. A $500 trillion derivatives time bomb poised atop a $100 trillion mountain of debt is not a stable situation. It’s time to push the reset button, but how? Bailouts and bail-ins have been tried and proved wanting. But a debt “jubilee” – simply canceling the debt – would devastate creditors and collapse the massive derivatives bubble.

All else having failed, it may be time to do what should have been done all along: convert “sovereign debt” into “sovereign money.” The “event of default” triggering a derivatives meltdown can be avoided by simply paying the debts with money issued by the government.

A government oppressed by “sovereign” debt is not really sovereign. A sovereign government has the power to issue money and need not go into debt at all. But EU member governments have lost that sovereign power. They are unable to issue their own money or borrow money issued by their own central banks. If they leave the EU, they can get that power back for future expenditures; but their existing debt is in euros, and only the ECB has the power to convert bonds into euros.

In fact that is what it does when it buys government bonds with QE. The problem with QE as currently practiced is that the bonds remain on the central bank’s books, “sterilizing” their effect on the market. The idea is to be able to sell them back into the market should inflation become a problem. But that means the bonds are still counted as debt for purposes of balancing national budgets, forcing continued austerity, cutbacks and privatization. If the bonds were bought back and voided out, national governments would be free to spend again. QE doesn’t need to be unwound by selling bonds into the market. If the money supply grows too large, money can be pulled back with taxes, interest or fees.

The invariable objection to paying off the debt with central bank-issued money is that it would lead to hyperinflation. But would it? Government bonds are already classified as “near money” – so liquid that they are readily exchangeable for cash. Turning them into cash is little different from moving money from your savings account to your checking account. One draws interest and the other doesn’t, but cashing out the savings account doesn’t make you any richer than before. It doesn’t propel you to spend more on goods and services, driving consumer prices up.

If  people and governments were incentivized to spend more, however, that would actually be a good thing. Consumer markets need more demand today. The way to stimulate economies is to get money into the pockets of people who will spend it. Demand (money) stimulates supply (productivity). Before QE can stimulate the real economy, it has to make it into the real economy. If the goal of the EU is to hold itself together and avoid a derivatives meltdown, some QE that actually got into the hands of the people could be just the ticket.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, Founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com. She can be heard biweekly on “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown” on PRN.FM.

The Daily Caller is reporting what would be a pretty good scoop if it turned out to be true: Hillary Clinton is set to meet with the FBI as part of its investigation into her private email server on Saturday. This according to a “source close to the investigation.”

The source suggested that it could take place at Clinton’s home in Washington, D.C.

More from the Daily Caller:

Scheduling the meeting on a holiday weekend will likely help with logistical issues for both the FBI and the Clinton campaign.

Clinton has no campaign events listed on her schedule which means that she will not be tailed by the usual pack of campaign reporters. The FBI has sought to avoid drawing attention to its probe by bringing in witnesses in secret. That strategy has been successful, as reports of the meetings have only come out after they were held.

Past interviews with Clinton probe witnesses have reportedly been conducted by FBI agents, lawyers with the Justice Department’s National Security division and prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Va.

Hillary Clinton looks on during a conversation on immigration at
Los Angeles Mission College Culinary Arts Institute on June 4 in Sylmar, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Those past interviews have included meetings with top Clinton aides such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

The news of the possible interview comes at a time when the Justice Department is taking heat for Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton.

This isn’t the first time it’s been reported that the presumptive Democratic nominee would be meeting with the FBI over the bureau’s investigation into the private email server she used as secretary of state and whether she illegally sent classified information in unclassified, unsecure email.

In March, Al Jazeera America’s David Shuster reported that Clinton would be interviewed by the FBI “in the next few days and weeks.” In May, CBS reported that Clinton would be interviewed “within the coming weeks” and CNN reported it would be “in the coming weeks.”

So it’s been expected for a while now, but this is one of the first reports with a specific date attached to it. We’ll know soon enough what comes of it.

Distinguished author and lawyer Ezil Danto 

A recent article noted that “Congress faults Obama for not being tough with UN over Haiti’s cholera crisis “

Here is my analysis again on the whole futility of the Concannon-Kurzban cholera case that’s really another fundraising boon for the 28 billion per year humanitarian industry, on another Haiti crisis.

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/29/us-congress-haiti-cholera-united-nations-obama-administration)

The article is about a congressional letter sent to Obama where because a “bipartisan group of 158 members of Congress are ‘deeply concerned’ that the US did not treat the UN’s refusal to accept responsibility for the outbreak with enough urgency.” Now, we all know that Obama was selected, as Minister Farrakhan points out, to run white affairs. Most of these politicians in Congress are there running the government for the one percent. Long ago, HLLN stopped appealing to the destroyers, whose function in our society must be redefined, restructured.

But the article reminds me, it’s been awhile since I’ve hit on the white savior industrial complex cashing in on their imported diseases to Haiti. Their feudal pillage masking as humanitarian aid and “defending” and “helping” Haiti victims of imperialism.

Oceans of our blood have poured and watered the soil to nourish civilized co-existence on this planet Earth and continue, this very minute, to soak the earth needlessly, simply because Haitians were the first to counter, in combat, European/U.S. biological fatalism, destroy their myth of white superiority and to do what even Spartacus could not.

For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? To the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, reveling in their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviors of his dreams. –by Ezili Dantò of HLLN

Brian Concannon-Ira Kurzban the ones bringing the cholera case, are, in this case, the control opposition financed by the system of racism/white supremacy.

 The whites will make money, pad their resumes, Haitians die, Paul Farmer continues to distribute ineffective short term, foul cholera vaccines 6-years after the outbreak began, making hundreds of millions for his p-harm aceutical buddies.

The depths of white depravity is unbounded. It’s a religion that has no logic except making profit off Black bodies and resources. And if they control the cholera victims narrative, they can lead it anywhere they wish. Be on TV legitimizing the UN’s crime against humanity in Haiti by asking the UN to apologize. To apologize for killing over 20,000 people and not inoculating and then not quaranteeing their soldiers, but covering up where the source of the disease came from, denying the importance of the source with a Paul Farmer-CDC public relations spiel in the first months of the outbreak.

Controlled opposition offer nuggets of truth but are essentially working for the perpetrators of the crime, controlling the perpetrators’ exposure to condemnation and ultimately to the most just punishment.

The best way to cover up the UN’s crime against humanity is to “sue” the UN for a way lesser crime, like for not having a claims procedure for Haitians to file their cases, instead of calling them the criminals that they are. For, even if the UN had a claims procedure, based on their history and the incontrovertible evidence, it would never rule against itself in favor of their victims. That’s not even reasonable. It’s like expecting the rapist to admit he’s a rapist and make whole his victim.

But the Concannon-Kurzban crew, marginalized this critical Haiti narrative of HLLN by getting all the press about their “cholera case.” Notice, no media picks up on the Haitian narrative. It’s as if we’re invisible. As if we haven’t pointed out the Concannon-Kurzban legal conflicts of interests. Their close alliance and warm involvement with the occupiers of Haiti.

That Paul Farmer, the UN star consultant and contractor for cholera relief and water detoxification is not on the board of the Brian Concannon’s Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) which is purportedly defending the cholera victims.

It’s as if the United States is not complicit in the UN cholera abuse for bringing them to Haiti to carry out their occupation in the first place. That its not the respondiat superior -the employer that also needs to be sued for financing the UN that brought death to Haiti. Because the US is not a name defendant in the Concannon-Kurzban theater, when Obama comes into Court on the side of the UN against the cholera victims, there’s no legal issue about the US involvement and criminal complicity in the cholera abuse case for the judge to consider.

In the final analysis, the Concannon-Kurzban court gesture is an exercise in futility because the military occupation under UN proxy command, imposed by the US, continues unabated with its devastating effects.

In fact, by suing the UN as some humanitarian gone-wrong incident, never mentioning the US occupation or even the UN proxy occupation, the white savior industrial complex indirectly legitimizes the occupation of Haiti and destruction of Haiti sovereignty. It’s the elephant in the Concannon-Kurzban case no one but HLLN sees in the room.

HLLN would have lauded the letter if those Congressspersons had actually faulted Obama and U.S. imperialism in Haiti for bringing the UN to Haiti which then infected Haiti with a gross disease.

But the control opposition at IJDH carved the narrative on the cholera case, so the letter from Congress  to Obama is not “Congress faults Obama for the UN over Haiti’s cholera” no. It’s “Congress faults Obama for not being tough with UN over Haiti’s cholera crisis.” Like their not mingled together as employer/ employee. The control opposition that is funded by the UN/USAID and the NGOs masturbating on Black pain, makes sure, that the root cause of why there’s cholera in Haiti, is not on the table for discussion. That a U.S. Boca Raton resident wasn’t the one to sign for MINUSTAH’s presence, but Haitians?

Èzili Dantò, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, Free Haiti 

The United States, as part of its stated agenda of raising tensions in the South China Sea to encourage cooperation across Southeast Asia with the US in encircling and containing Beijing’s regional and global rise, has included several high-profile naval and aviation incidents. However, there is a legal battle lurking just behind these more spectacular headlines, and once again the United Nations is being brought in and undermined in the process.

The Associated Press in their article, “Beijing to ignore South China Sea ruling,” reported that:

China said on Saturday that it would ignore the decision of an international arbitration panel in a Philippine lawsuit against Beijing’s sweeping territorial claims in the South China Sea.

“To put it simply, the arbitration case actually has gone beyond the jurisdiction” of a UN arbitration panel, said Rear Adm Guan Youfei, director of the foreign affairs office of China’s National Defence Ministry.

The Philippines has filed a case in the United Nations under the UN Convention on Law of the Sea, questioning China’s territorial claim. An arbitration panel is expected to rule on the case soon. The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled last year that it has jurisdiction over the case despite China’s rejection.

While the Associated Press portrays the lawsuit as “Philippine,” it is in reality headed not by the Philippines, but by a US legal team led by Paul S. Reichler of the Boston-based law firm Foley Hoag. Inquirer.net in an article titled, “US lawyer for PH expert in maritime boundary cases,” would reveal that not a single lawyer representing the Philippines is actually Filipino:

The lawyer leading the Philippine team in its fierce legal battle against China belongs to a select group of elite lawyers with extensive experience in representing sovereign states before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (Itlos) in Hamburg, Germany, according to Chambers Global, which ranks law firms and lawyers across the world.

Paul Reichler of the Boston-based law firm Foley Hoag has specialized for more than 25 years in land and maritime boundary disputes, the law firm said on its website.

Reichler works with four other lawyers from the United States and the United Kingdom, in arguing the country’s case before the UN arbitral tribunal in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Foley Hoag represents the most powerful corporate-financier interests on Earth, and is an integral part of expanding their power and influence across the globe. That Foley Hoag is involved in Washington’s goal of encircling and containing one of the greatest threats to Washington and Wall Street’s hegemony not only in Asia, but globally, is no surprise.

Part of America’s agenda in the South  China Sea is to provoke and then portray tensions in the region as being solely between China and its neighbors, with the United States feigning the role as peacekeeper – thus justifying its continued military, political, and economic “primacy” over Asia.

Such an appraisal is hardly conjecture. The corporate-financier funded and directed policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published a paper titled, “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China,” penned by Robert Blackwill – a Bush-era administrator and lobbyist who has directly participated in Washington’s attempts to maintain hegemony over Asia.

Blackwill’s paper states (emphasis added):

Because the American effort to ‘integrate’ China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia—and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally—Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.

Indeed, a US policymaker openly admits that the US perceives itself as possessing  and seeking to maintain “primacy in Asia,” primacy being defined by Merriam-Webster as, “the state of being most important or strongest.”

The United States then, literally an ocean away from Asia, presumes “primacy” over an entire region of the planet, and is openly seeking to deny the very nations within that region “primacy” over their own destiny, peoples, and resources.

It is an open, modern proclamation of imperialism.

It is also the true reality that underlines US foreign policy in the South China Sea and explains why an American and British, not a Philippine legal team has spent years trying to exact a ruling from the UN and other “international” organizations regarding Beijing.

In this context, it is quite clear why Beijing plans to ignore the ruling.

However, China’s ignoring the ruling was already considered by US policymakers and the US law firm “representing” the Philippines.

In a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Q&A: Taking China to Court Over the South China Sea,” Paul Reichler of Foley Hoag would respond to the question of, “what if China simply ignores a judgment that goes against it?” by stating (emphasis added):

In more than 95% of international cases — litigation and arbitration before various international courts and tribunals — the states comply with the judgment, even if they are unhappy with it. There are at least two reasons for this. First is reputation and the influence that comes with it. The second reason is that many states understand it is to their advantage, and the advantage of others, to live in a rules-based system. Now, in the case of China, we see a country that is a great power that wishes to project its influence across the international community. China also advertises itself as the anti-imperialist great power, in contrast to the U.S., Russia and others. Think of the economic advantages that will accrue to the richest and most powerful nation in the region if these disputes are resolved and investment in resource extraction from the South China Sea begins.

Unfortunately for Reichler, Foley Hoag, and the US-dominated “rules-based system” China is expected to comply with, too many examples of this system’s abuse in recent years has preceded the ruling against China. The UN’s role in the invasion, occupation, and destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are perhaps the most extreme examples, with the UN’s complicity (either directly or through inaction) in the destruction of Syria and Ukraine, and sanctions leveled against Iran and others other examples of the UN simply being used to enable Western geopolitical ambitions and justify Western military, socioeconomic, and political aggression across the globe.

The true foundation of Wall Street and Washington’s “international order” is clearly, “might makes right.” For Beijing and its expanding military presence in the South China Sea and its attempts to circumvent “international” arbiters in favor of bilateral talks with nations being pressured by the West to confront Beijing, appears not only to be China’s strategy of choice, but a strategy that is incrementally drawing out Washington’s true agenda in the region and making it increasingly complicated for complicit governments in Asia to continue their cooperation with the West.

Whether or not Washington’s necessity to exert increasing pressure on governments across the region to toe the line in America’s proxy war against Beijing will finally force Asian governments to abandon this risky and costly game remains to be seen. But Beijing is playing a game with home-field advantage – building military capabilities that are backed by logistical networks leading back to the mainland that will match and inevitably exceed US capabilities in the region.

Avoiding a rush to conflict with the United States as Japan mistakenly did in the lead up to World War II will ensure China sustainably creates and expands a deterrence that will first ward off US attempts to maintain or expand primacy across the region before finally rolling US primacy back altogether. For the rest of Asia, it is paramount that they themselves create a regional balance of power predicated on military deterrence coupled with economic cooperation, that excludes attempts by the US to create conflict that will cost the entire region peace, stability, and most importantly, prosperity.

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

A new pro-GMO propaganda campaign has been launched in which, in the words of a Washington Post article, “more then 100 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to end its opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.”

In highly emotive language, the letter, published by a shadowy website called supportprecisionagriculture.org, claims, “Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia.”

The letter calls upon Greenpeace: “to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general”, and upon governments “to reject Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general; and to do everything in their power to oppose Greenpeace’s actions and accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology, especially seeds improved through biotechnology. Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.”

The letter ends with an impassioned rhetorical question:

“How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”

The problem with this picture is that the “emotion and dogma” in this case do not belong to Greenpeace but to those who claim or imply that GM golden rice is ready to deploy and that only anti-GMO activists are holding it back.

That’s because in reality, as Prof Glenn Davis Stone pointed out in a peer-reviewed study co-authored with development expert Dominic Glover, GM golden rice still isn’t ready and there’s no evidence that activists are to blame for the delay.

In 2014 the body responsible for the rollout of golden rice, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), announced that the rice had given disappointing yields in field trials and needed further R&D to produce a crop that farmers would be willing to grow. Stone commented, “The rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done.” Stone’s study showed that the rice is still years away from being ready.

And far from the rice being held up by over-stringent regulations fostered by over-zealous anti-GMO activists, as some pro-GMO campaigners have claimed, Stone pointed out that GM golden rice “has not even been submitted for approval to the regulatory agency, the Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI).”

Indeed, how could it have been submitted to regulators, given that IRRI says it’s not ready for release and that it hasn’t been tested for toxicity, let alone efficacy in combating vitamin A deficiency in the target malnourished populations?

As Greenpeace stated in its response to the campaign:

“Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘golden’ rice are false. ‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research. As admitted by the International Rice Research Institute, it has not been proven to actually address Vitamin A Deficiency. So to be clear, we are talking about something that doesn’t even exist.”

Authority over expertise

The laureates’ letter relies for its impact entirely on the supposed authority of the signatories. Unfortunately, however, none appear to have relevant expertise, as some commentators were quick to point out. Philip Stark, associate dean, division of mathematical and physical sciences and professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, revealedon Twitter his own analysis of the expertise of the signatories: “1 peace prize, 8 economists, 24 physicists, 33 chemists, 41 doctors”. He added that science is “about evidence not authority. What do they know of agriculture? Done relevant research? Science is supposed to be ‘show me’, not ‘trust me’… Nobel prize or not.”

Devon G. Peña, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of Washington Seattle and an expert in indigenous agriculture, posted a comment to the new campaign’s website in which he called the laureates’ letter “shameful”. He noted that the signatories were “mostly white men of privilege with little background in risk science, few with a background in toxicology studies, and certainly none with knowledge of the indigenous agroecological alternatives. All of you should be stripped of your Nobels.”

The lack of expertise among the letter signatories contrasts markedly with that of the man whose work the new propaganda campaign seems to be attempting to discredit. Glenn Davis Stone – who has never opposed GM golden rice – is an expert on crop use and technology change among poor farmers, including rice farmers in the Philippines, the country targeted for the golden rice rollout – if it ever happens. He has been following the evidence on the progress of golden rice for years and has published extensively on the topic.

In other words, unlike the laureates, he knows what he’s talking about.

Who is behind the letter?

The new propaganda campaign is said to have been organized by Sir Richard J. Roberts. Roberts is a Nobel Laureate in physiology or medicine for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns, and chief scientific officer for New England Biolabs. According to their website, New England Biolabs are “a collective of scientists committed to developing innovative products for the life sciences industry… a recognized world leader in the discovery, development and commercialization of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research.”

Given these facts, it is surprising that Roberts claims that he has “no financial interest in GMO research”.

According to the writer and researcher Colin Todhunter, Roberts has been propagandizing for GM food and crops in India. Todhunter says Roberts’ speech included emotional blackmail in the form of a claim that millions of people in the third world would die of starvation unless GM crops were introduced, as well as highly questionable assertions about the safety of the technology.

Conflicts of interest and bias aside, if you think it’s unlikely that Roberts alone would be able to mobilize over a hundred Nobel laureates to launch a campaign that gives patently false information about a GM crop that may never see the light of day in real farmers’ fields, you are not alone.

So who’s really behind the laureates’ letter?

Some odd goings-on at the press conference announcing the letter may give a clue. Tim Schwab of the NGO, Food & Water Watch and a Greenpeace representative tried to attend the press event, held at the National Press Club. However, Schwab reported, “We were barred at the door from entry – by none other than Jay Byrne, whose long relationship with Monsanto needs no elaboration.”

Byrne is a former Monsanto PR man who now heads the PR firm to the biotech industry, v-Fluence.

Schwab commented that it was “a bizarre choice for this campaign to have Byrne play bouncer.” He added, “Byrne said only credentialed press were allowed to attend. Seconds later I saw a representative from CSPI (an NGO) entering the room. Byrne said some NGOs were invited to attend. Really? Why not Greenpeace – the subject of this campaign?”

Schwab tweeted, “Nobel laureate #gmo #goldenrice press event would be a lot more credible if industry guy wasn’t blacklisting NGOs.”

Why now?

The timing of this press event may be significant. Could it be timed to coincide with the run-up to the GMO labelling vote in Senate, with the added ‘bonus’ of burying Stone’s inconvenient golden rice critique?

Whatever the answer to that question, the ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’ campaign is shamelessly exploiting a group of Nobel laureates in a propaganda exercise that is actively misleading the public, the media, and governments.

Update 30 June, 20:00 hrs: GMWatch has been alerted to the fact that the website for the laureates’ letter is supportprecisionagriculture.org, but the .com version, supportprecisionagriculture.com, reroutes to the Genetic Literacy Project, which US Right to Know calls an “agrichemical industry front group… with unknown funding that regularly attacks activists, journalists and scientists who raise concerns about the health and environmental risks of genetically engineered foods and pesticides.” Its executive director is Jon Entine.

Update 1 July 2016: A GMWatch reader has pointed out to us that the second organizer of the laureates’ letter alongside Richard J. Roberts is Phillip A. Sharp, who works at the David H. Koch Institute at MIT.

An article for the website Science Alert about the “107 laureates” publicity stunt describes Sharp only as “the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology”.

What the article fails to mention is that Sharp is a biotech entrepreneur with interests in GMO research. In 1978 he co-founded the biotechnology and pharmaceutical company Biogen and in 2002 he co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which uses RNAi gene silencing genetic engineering technologies to manufacture therapeutics.

To be clear, GMWatch does not oppose the use of genetic technologies in contained use situations, such as medicine, as long as there is informed consent by the patient to the therapy and no risk to non-target populations and the environment. However, Sharp’s interests in biotech companies should be disclosed in any GMO advocacy exercises he engages in, just as they would be if he were to publish a paper on GMO technologies in any reputable scientific journal.

Does Sharp’s interests in medical biotech constitute a conflict of interest when it comes to his advocacy for GM in food and agriculture?

It is true that medical uses of GM are separate from food and ag uses and are regulated by different laws. It is a perfectly cogent position to oppose genetic engineering in food and ag while supporting medical use or remaining neutral to it.

However, from a crude industry perspective, the less public concerns there are around GM technologies, the better. That’s presumably why industry lobby groups like BIO represent food and ag alongside other sectors of the biotech industry, including medicine. And why we should treat lobbying for GM crops by medical biotech entrepreneurs with the same skepticism as if they were involved in the GM crops industry.

Whenever President Vladimir Putin stresses Russia’s “all-embracing and strategic partnership” with China, one can hear the proverbial howls of anger emanating from the neocon/neoliberalcon axis in the Beltway.

As he met Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijng this past Saturday, Putin even allowed himself an understatement;

“To say we have a strategic cooperation is not enough anymore. This is why we have started talking about a comprehensive partnership and strategic collaboration. Comprehensive means that we work virtually on all major avenues; strategic means that we attach enormous inter-government importance to this work.”

Why understatement? Because this really ventures way beyond a stream of business deals.

Deals, of course, matter; in Beijing, China and Russia advanced 58 projects worth $50 billion. These include a $6.2 billion loan from Beijing to build the 770 km-long high-speed railway between Moscow and Kazan and $12 billion in loans to build an LNG plant in the Russian Arctic.

Russian Railways, Russian investment company Sinara Group, China Railway, and Chinese CRRC will also invest in a plant in Russia to build 100 high-speed trains, designed for the Moscow-Kazan high-speed railway. The railway inevitably will be connected to the future, $100 billion, high-speed expansion of the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Beijing.

It goes without saying, this is all part of an essential node of the New Silk Roads. And as if this was not enough, in a further, graphic instance of geoeconomic interpolation, Russia and China’s central banks are setting up a yuan clearing mechanism in Russia.

The inter-connectivity bonanza

Putin and Xi met for the 15th time just after Xi concluded a three-nation Eurasia tour – Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan – where, alongside Foreign Minister Wang Yi, he explicitly laid down the bridge between the New Silk Roads, or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), as they are officially referred to in China, and the development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Not by accident China has now also struck a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan – on the way to weaving a broad “China-Europe strategic partnership” in parallel to the development of the SCO.

This already translates into projects such as the Hungary-Serbia railway; the Pupin Bridge on the Danube River in Belgrade; the expansion and upgrading of a power plant in Kostolac; what Beijing calls the China-Europe freight train service (from eastern China to Duisburg in Germany and also Madrid); the Kamchiq Tunnel in Uzbekistan; and last but not least the massive China-Central Asia natural gas pipeline system.

No wonder Xi keeps stressing the “inter-connectivity” theme over and over gain, as economic corridors are being built at breakneck speed, and the China Railway Express all the way to Europe – although not yet on high-speed rail – is already a go.

So there was plenty to talk about at the 16th SCO Council in Tashkent. Plus, the acceleration of full membership to both India and Pakistan; next year will be Iran’s turn.

What this translates to in practice is the amalgamation of the New Silk Roads/OBOR; the Eurasia Economic Union, EEU (as Putin stressed in the St. Petersburg forum); the SCO; financing mechanisms such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and the overarching Russia-China strategic partnership.

No wonder a certain Sultan Erdogan was watching all this in Ankara with trepidation, and decided to make a move. Erdogan’s attempt at a rapprochement with Russia involves not being hopelessly sidelined in this OBOR/EEU/SCO amalgamation. Turkey cannot afford to be alienated from Russia; the Turkish Stream gas pipeline will be essential to consolidate Ankara’s position as a key energy crossroads towards Europe. At the same time, Ankara must imperatively position itself as a key hub in OBOR.

With India and Pakistan, and later Iran, as full members, the SCO will be able, in the medium term, not only to interface with OBOR on all sides (via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC, and also the Indian investment in the Iranian port of Chabahar); but also to be the key player in brokering a solution to the Afghan drama, something that the Americans and NATO would never be able to accomplish. Russia and China have always insisted that Afghanistan needs an Asian solution.

Lean, clean and green

Almost simultaneously to the Putin-Xi meeting in Beijing, and also not by accident, the AIIB turbo-charged its operations.

The AIIB started doing business only six months ago, with 57 founding member countries and $100 billion in committed capital.

It’s scheduled to invest $1.2 billion in 2016. Once again with trademark understatement, Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said, “the AIIB needs to establish its comparative advantage”, profiting from “lessons of developing countries’ years of development.”

The board approved its first four deals, worth $509 million, with three projects co-financed with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the United Kingdom Department for International Development and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. They refer to a slum renovation in Indonesia and highways in Pakistan and Tajikistan. A power grid upgrade in Bangladesh will be solely AIIB financed.

And this is just the beginning. The head of AIIB may be Chinese, Jin Linqun (he has promised a “lean, clean and green” AIIB), but one of the five vice presidents is British, Daniel Alexander. Beijing holds 30% of the initial capital but has only 26% of voting power. India holds 7.5% and Russia 5.9%, followed by Germany and South Korea. This is a real multipolar project.

Almost simultaneously to the AIIB in action, Russia and China’s foreign ministers signed a declaration supporting the role of international law, stressing sovereign equality of states; non-interference into internal affairs; and peaceful resolution of disputes. Considering the recent historical record, not exactly The Empire of Chaos’s cup of tea.

Commenting on Brexit, Boris Titov, the Kremlin’s small business ombudsman, ventured, “it’s not long until a united Eurasia – about 10 years.” Considering the slowly but surely interpenetration of OBOR, EEU, SCO, AIIB, the NDB and the solid Russia-China partnership inside the G20, that’s more than feasible.

In Beijing, Putin and Xi did discuss their common position in the upcoming G20, only three months away in China; that’s where the real action is, not the G7. Compare it also with NATO’s upcoming warmongering summit in Warsaw; that’s what the West has to “offer” the global South.

In a nutshell; the option to a united Eurasia is chaos. And there’s no question the Empire of Chaos will stop trying to sow chaos. Expect Beijing ordering 1,000 heavy transport aircraft from Russia and Russian ships possibly spotted sooner or later in the South China Sea to add to those perennial howls of anger in the neocon/neoliberalcon galaxy.

Exactly 100 years ago today, General Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Army fighting on the continent during World War I, launched a major offensive in a part of northern France that is known as the Département de la Somme. A département is an administrative district, and this one is named after the Somme, the river that meanders lazily through the area from the east to the coast of the English Channel in the west; during World War I, it thus crossed the line of the Western Front, which ran from the Swiss border in the southeast to the North Sea coast in Belgium to the northwest.

The Somme département corresponds more or less to the ancient province of Picardy, whose capital city is Amiens. Most of the ensuing fighting of what would become known as the “Battle of the Somme” was witnessed by the area to the east of Amiens, between the small town of Albert, which was held by the allies, and the towns of Bapaume and Péronne, which were behind the German lines.

The objective of Haig’s offensive was twofold. An immediate aim was to reduce the hellish pressure exerted on the French who were desperately trying to halt a major German offensive aimed at seizing the historic city of Verdun. But Haig also perceived an opportunity to succeed where British and French offensives had failed in 1915, and to win the war by breaking through the strongly defended German lines. He spoke optimistically of the offensive he planned as the “Great Push Forward” or, short and sweet, the “Big Push.” The British military supremo was convinced that God had chosen him personally to guide his country and its allies to victory; of his offensive, he would later say that he “felt that every step in [his] plan had been taken with the Divine help.”

The Somme region had been a particularly calm sector of the Western Front. The British troops stationed there were newcomers to the war, inexperienced recruits who had arrived in France only shortly before. They were not professional soldiers like the members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), who had already been thrown into battle at the very start of the war, in the summer of 1914; they were volunteers who had joined the forces in 1914 and 1915, and were collectively known as “Kitchener’s Army,” for they had heeded Lord Kitchener’s famous summons to fight for king and country. The great majority of these men were from Britain itself, that is, from England, Scotland, and Wales, as well as Ireland.

On July 1, 1916, the weather was described as “divine,” but that glorious summer day would turn out to be the darkest date in the history of the British army. At exactly 7:30 in the morning, the British guns that had been shelling the German positions suddenly fell silent and the “Tommies,” as British soldiers were known, “went over the top” or “jumped the bags,” as exiting the trenches was called. In the case of the Surrey Regiment, an officer kicked a soccer ball into the direction of the German trenches when the attack began, as if this were the start of a game or sports contest. In the minds of the still mostly unexperienced Tommies, this stunt created the impression that the situation was under control, that all would be well. Moreover, the officers had assured the men that they would hardly face any opposition: for five consecutive days, an unprecedented array of cannonry, totalling approximately 1,600 guns, had continuously shelled the Germans, firing about one and a half million projectiles; not much was therefore supposed to be left of the German positions and their defenders.

And so the men moved forward through the no man’s land as they had been told, the British way: disciplined and dignified, marching slowly, body upright, shoulder to shoulder. However, the British commanders had not foreseen that all too many German defenders, ensconced in solid tunnels and bunkers up to ten meters deep under the ground, would be able to survive the preliminary artillery bombardment. As soon as the guns ceased to fire, the surviving Germans realized that the attack was imminent, so they rushed out of their shelters with their machine guns. They could not believe their eyes when they saw thousands and thousands of British soldiers approaching through no man`s land, slowly, erect, in neat lines. Countless Tommies were thus mowed down in very little time on that fateful morning. The preliminary shelling, no matter how awesome, had been far less effective than expected because the British shells were of inferior quality, and no less than one quarter of all projectiles fired turned out to be “duds” that did not explode. The waves of British attackers were mowed down, one after the other, by the “meat grinders” (Fleischhackmaschinen) or “sewing machines” (Nähmaschinen), as the Germans called their machine guns.

Still, the Tommies kept surging forward. This was the case, even relatively late in the day, for the Newfoundland Regiment, one of the rare British units involved in the battle that were not from Britain itself. (At the time, the great island in the northwest Atlantic was not yet part of Canada, as it is today, but was still a separate British colony.) In the vicinity of the village of Beaumont-Hamel, 684 of the 752 Newfoundlanders involved fell victim to the machine guns of Germans of whom they never even saw one single specimen. But which British general worried about the loss of a few hundred fishermen, miners, and others workers from a distant and insignificant part of the glorious Empire?

On that fateful “first day on the Somme,” the British Army lost more men than ever before in one single day: approximately 60,000 casualties, maybe more, on a total of 110,000 men who participated in the attack. The German losses allegedly amounted to 8,000 men. The thousands of cavalrymen kept in readiness by Haig waited in vain for the signal to move forward, as the hoped-for breach in the German lines never materialized. The Battle of the Somme started catastrophically on July 1, 1916, but it would drag on until November of that same year, revealing itself to be a Moloch that devoured many more victims. The British ended up registering minimal territorial gains, but arguably more important was the fact that Haig’s scheme had provided some much-needed relief for the beleaguered French around Verdun. In any event, as at Verdun, the losses were enormous. The British suffered casualties totalling approximately a half million men, including at last 125,000 killed, while the French registered 200,000 casualties. The German losses allegedly amounted to about a half million men. To all the forces involved in it, the holocaust at the Somme cost more than one million killed, wounded, missing in action, and prisoners of war.

How could tens of thousands of infantrymen so callously be sent to their death on that fateful first day of July? Ever since the 1960s, it has been fashionable to blame General Haig and his colleagues for their incompetence, if not outright stupidity; the British soldiers were presumably skilful and brave enough, but they happened to be a pride of “lions led by donkeys.” However, demonizing Haig and his colleagues, in other words, blaming the massacre on a handful of individuals, does not provide a satisfactory explanation. Indeed, the Great War witnessed too many other similar cases of generals – not only in the British but also in the French, German, and Russian armies – nonchalantly ordering attacks that amounted to a death sentence for tens if not hundreds of thousands of their own men, for example in the Battles of Tannenberg (1914) and the Chemin des Dames (1917). Many of these commanders were skilled professionals, it would be a mistake to dismiss them all as “donkeys.” However, in the armies of all belligerent countries, the officers in general were overwhelmingly “gentlemen,” members of the social elite, and the generals tended to be aristocrats or members of the highest ranks of the upper-middle class (or bourgeoisie) who had internalized the ethos of the aristocracy – as in the case of Haig. It is this class background of the army hierarchs that can help us to make sense of massacres of minions such as the one that occurred on July 1, 1916.

First of all, it ought to be kept in mind that the nobility had been a “warrior class” since the Middle Ages, and continued to perceive war as a “chivalrous” affair, in which gentlemen of high social rank, the modern incarnations of the “knights in shining armour,” were supposed to play a decisive role. Hence a preference for cavalry and bladed weapons like the sword. Haig a cavalryman himself, had internalized this ethos. He was certainly not an ignoramus, and had learned lessons from the experiences of 1914 and 1915, which had demonstrated the effectiveness of modern (and definitely unchivalrous) weapons of the industrial age, above all artillery; this is why he had ordered the aforementioned preliminary shelling of the German positions. Still, he considered this bombardment as a mere prelude to the real thing, namely, a battle in the style of the supposedly “good old days,” perhaps not the Middle Ages, but those of the Napoleonic Wars: masses of foot soldiers, supported by artillery, would hurl themselves against the enemy line and blow a hole in it; the cavalry, the favourite weapon of the nobility, would then make the decisive move, storming through the gap to roll up enemy lines and harvest the glory of victory.

Haig’s approach reflected the traditional military mindset of the aristocracy, not only with his overestimation of the importance of cavalry, but also with his correspondingly low opinion of the enemy’s foot soldiers and their weapons, even modern rifles. Haig had allegedly persuaded himself that “the ability of bullets to stop horses was greatly exaggerated”; maybe that is only a legend, but it does illustrate his unquestioned confidence in the huge potential of warriors on horseback. Even the machine gun was underestimated: how could a weapon, mass-produced by workers in some anonymous factory and manipulated by any proletarian, prevail over an aristocrat riding high on the “noble” animal that was his horse?

As for the ordinary soldiers of the infantry, was it not inevitable, and customary, for them to suffer huge casualties? Had it not always been like that? And that did not present a problem, because there were so many of them – at home, and in overseas colonies stretching from Newfoundland to India. The elite, not only in Britain but also in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere, appeared to believe that plebeian “raw material” needed to be used in copious amounts in order to enable the warlords to produce victory, and that this human material was in any event virtually inexhaustible. Russian soldiers who had survived the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg complained that their commanders had “acted as if they had at their disposal such millions of men ‘that it does not matter how many are thrown to their deaths.’”

In the big scheme of things, as perceived by the military leadership, the loss even of tens of thousands of proletarians in uniform did not amount to a big deal. Two days after the attack, when Haig received a report stating that the losses amounted to 40,000 men – while in reality they were much higher! – he remarked coolly that “this cannot be considered severe, in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked.” The death of thousands of soldiers did not cause him any headaches. “We lament too much over death,” he stoically commented on one occasion, “we should regard it as a change to another room.” And he added:

The nation must be taught to bear losses…[and] to see heavy casualty lists for what may appear to the uninitiated to be insufficient object[s]…Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause.

From the perspective of the upper classes within and without the military, the loss of tens of thousands of plebeians was not only perceived to be inevitable, affordable, and rather unimportant, but even beneficial. Like many if not most other members of Britain’s – and Europe’s – elite, a “symbiosis” of the aristocracy and the upper-middle class, generals like Haig perceived the huge numbers of the “lower orders” not only as the cause of proletarian poverty but also as a menace to their own power, wealth, and privileges; from the perspective of the upper classes, the lower classes were what the French called “les classes dangereuses,” “la vile multitude.” The popular “masses” loomed as stupid, aggressive, and dangerous, and simply too numerous, so that the elite welcomed any way in which the number of plebeians in general could be lowered, be made less massive. The solution seemed to be provided by emigration to distant colonies, and, even more so, by Malthusian “positive checks” on the proliferation of the proletariat; these “positive checks” – “positive” in the sense that they increased mortality – included famine and diseases such as tuberculosis, affecting mostly the lower orders, but also war.

War inevitably involved considerable losses on the part of the plebeian foot soldiers, and this was perceived as a kind of pruning or culling, a quantitative cut that improved the quality. (A few years before the outbreak of war in 1914, Lord Frederick Roberts, a British general who had covered himself in glory, as the saying goes, during the wars in India and South Africa, praised war as a way to get rid of “the great human rottenness that is rife in our industrial cities.”) Viewed in this light, the dark cloud of the losses suffered on July 1, 1916, could be deemed by the military, political and social elite to have a silver lining: the casualties were mostly members of Britain’s polloi, the all too numerous, redundant and dangerous “mass” of poor folks, whose ranks had to be thinned out for the benefit of their “betters.” During World War I, some ordinary soldiers were in fact convinced that massacres such as those of July 1, 1916, reflected a desire on the part of their generals to reduce the ranks of the workers and thus to make the fearsome masses less “massive” and less frightful. During one of the many strikes Paris was to witness in June 1919, a striker, reflecting on the Great War, declared that

This war was wanted by the bourgeoisie, the industrial capitalists, and the leaders of all the countries [involved in the war]. They observed the swelling of the ranks of the proletarian organisations and they feared for their coffers. And so they found a solution: eliminating workers by means of war.

Finally, if the plebeian rank-and-file suffered heavy losses, the generals also managed to wash their hands in innocence by arguing that it was the fault of the plebeians themselves. Whose fault, for example, was it that the preliminary shelling had not eliminated sufficient numbers of German defenders because so many shells turned out to be duds?  Perhaps the “war-profiteering” manufacturers who earned fortunes by producing ammunition, and who sought to increase their gains by using material of lower quality? As far as Haig was concerned, however, there could be no doubt: the culprits were the British factory workers whom he believed to “have too many holidays and too much to drink.” (“A notable argument,” remarks historian Adam Hochschild, “for someone whose family fortune was based on whiskey.”) Haig suggested in a letter to his wife that it would be a good idea to “take and shoot two or three of them” so that “the ‘Drink habit’ would cease.”

The British generals were of course disappointed that the attack had not produced the desired result. But they were most satisfied with the way in which the men had followed orders and conducted themselves in such a dignified manner. “Where today we might see mindless killing,” writes Adam Hochschild, “many of those who presided over the war’s battles saw only nobility and heroism.” And with respect to the bloodbath of July 1, 1916, he quotes the report of a general:

Not a man shirked going through the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine-gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out…He saw the lines which advanced in such admirable order melting away under the fire. Yet not a man wavered, broke the ranks, or attempted to come back. He has never seen, indeed could never have imagined, such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination. The report that he had had from the very few survivors of this marvellous advance bear out what he saw with his own eyes, viz, that hardly a man of ours got to the German front line.

In other words, the military authorities were pleased that the attack, though murderous, had demonstrated that they had managed to inculcate some discipline and class into proletarians who, during the socially turbulent years leading up to the war, punctuated by frequent demonstrations and strikes, had shown themselves to be restless, unruly, recalcitrant, even rebellious. During the attack they had obeyed orders, nicely lined up, like schoolchildren, then advanced slowly and unswervingly through the no man’s land, erect and dignified, just the way their superiors liked to see it. In fact, in order to make this a fine and enjoyable show for the superiors watching from a safe distance, the attack had been scheduled to take place in full daylight.

The satisfaction of the generals with the performance of their subordinates on July 1 was echoed by the media in Britain. A war correspondent over there reported that, “on balance, [it had been] a good day for England and France. It is a day of promise in this war.” The soldiers themselves, however, saw things in a different light. The Somme offensive, Haig’s “Big Push,” was referred to by the men as “the Great Fuck Up,” a term that would eventually also designate the war in general. It was a term with a double edge, reflecting not only the soldiers’ contempt for the generals, but also their perception of being terribly abused by Haig and their other superiors. The soldiers’ hatred and contempt of the generals was also voiced as follows by a famous war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, in the poem The General:

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on the way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

In this context, it is worth citing a comment from the memoirs of the English writer J. B. Priestley, who acquired a “class conscience” as a result of his experiences as a soldier in the Great War, especially because of the way in which the officers treated their subordinates:

The British command specialised in throwing men away for nothing. The tradition of an upper class…killed most of my friends as surely as if those cavalry generals had come out of the chateaux with polo mallets and beaten our brains out. Call this class prejudice, if you like, so long as you remember…that I went into that war without any such prejudice, free of any class feeling.

The Battle of the Somme provided inspiration for a song that would become a huge hit in Britain, Roses of Picardy, written by a lawyer and famous songwriter, Frederick E. Weatherley. The province of Picardy, more or less the territorial equivalent of the Département of the Somme and therefore the theatre of the great battle, is not known for its roses, those flowers functioned as the powerful symbol of the blood that was spilled in that region, much as the poppies did for Flanders’ Fields. Moreover, as Paul Fussell has noted, roses are closely connected to England and are a symbol of loyalty to the British fatherland. In this song, loyalty to the homeland is closely associated with loyalty to the loved one:

Roses are shining in Picardy
In the hush of the silver dew
Roses are flowering in Picardy
But there’s never a rose like you
And the roses will die with the summer time
And our roads may be far apart
But there’s one rose that dies not in Picardy
‘T is the rose that I keep in my heart.

Roses of Picardy is a beautiful song that was very effective in conjuring up the atmosphere in Britain during and after the Battle of the Somme. But the horror and absurdity of the battle in general and the attack of July 1 in particular are conveyed even more strikingly in the poem After the ‘Offensive’ by Theo Van Beek, an artillery officer:

Waves of strong men
That will surge not again,
Scattered and riven
You lie, and you rot;
What have you not given?
And what – have you got?

Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Great Class War 1914-1918, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2016

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On this week’s holiday edition of the Global Research News Hour, we spend the hour listening to Dennis Edney speaking on The Rule of Law and the Politics of Fear. This speech was presented on the evening of June 19, 2015 at the Broadway Disciples United Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in occupied Anishnaabe Territory in the homeland of the Metis nation. Dennis Edney was the lawyer for Omar Khadr. a Canadian who had been held in America’s notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for 10 years before being returned to Canada in 2012.

In this interview we will hear Dennis Edney tell Omar Khadr’s story and put it in the wider context of the then Harper Government’s draconian policies and failure to respect the rule of law.

The speech was followed by a brief question and answer period.

videographer credit: Paul Graham

Dennis Edney is recipient of the 2008 National Pro Bono Award and of the 2009 Human Rights Medal awarded by the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia for work that “has helped to promote and further human rights”.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

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

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

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

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.

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

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

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

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

The first reports of shots came at 2.03am involving a confrontation between Mateen and a security guard at the entrance of the nightclub   “An off-duty cop working as a security guard at the club returned fire, prompting Mateen to retreat further into the hotspot and take hostages, officials said.” (New York Post, June 12, 2016).

According to police statements, there was, however, no “active shooter situation” at 2am in the morning, requiring an immediate police response. Moreover, there was no firm evidence that killings of hostages had taken place.

The Orlando police authorities initiated a process of negotiation with Mateen. When Mateen said that “there would be an imminent loss of life,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina (image right) was prompted “to end a three-hour standoff and ordered the assault that killed Mr. Mateen and freed dozens of people trapped in the club.” (New York Times, June 13, 2016).

Shortly after 5am, the police using an armored vehicle burst through the wall of the building. “A furious gunfight with 11 SWAT team members followed, during which Mateen was killed and a cop was saved from death when a shot struck his Kevlar helmet”. (New York Post ,June 12, 2016).

The Islamic State (ISIS) allegedly claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement released by its Amaq news agency, saying the onslaught “was carried out by an Islamic State fighter,” (Ibid).

What Really Happened?

The official FBI police report acknowledges shootings at 2am, it does not confirm the occurrence of killings of hostages prior to 5am. The killings started when the Police SWAT Teams stormed the Building at 5.13am. (see Timeline Below) 

The Orlando Police Department Timeline summarized in an FBI Tampa Press release not only suggests that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team broke into the building, it also confirms that the first deadly shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am. This assessment was confirmed by Judge Napolitano in a Fox News report:

“Here’s what is news in the summary – nobody died until 05:13 in the morning, when the SWAT team entered. Prior to that no one had been killed. The 53 that were injured, and the 49 that were murdered all met their fates at the time of, and during, the police entry into the building,”

The Police report does however acknowledge that individual SWAT members entered the building before 5am. According to the head of the SWAT team Capt. Mark Canty [image below] “both SWAT and patrol officers pulled “several” people out of the club during the three-hour standoff.”

The Killing of Omar Mateen

Mateen was allegedly involved in an exchange of gunfire with the SWAT team starting at 5.13am, While under attack of the SWAT team, Mateen could not have killed and injured over 100 people in 1-2 minutes; the FBI report confirms that he was killed at 5.15pm. 

According to the Orlando Sentinel:

After most of the hostages got out, Mateen emerged from the first hole [in the wall] around 5:14 a.m.

There was a barrage of shots and Mateen was taken down in that hallway. [at 5.15am]

Possible Killings Perpetrated by the SWAT Team?

Barely mentioned by the mainstream media, police officials have acknowledged that some of the killings could have been perpetrated (“accidentally”) by the SWAT officers:

“The Orlando Chief of Police John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.” (Naples Daily News, June 14, 2016)

Killing them in order to save them? An upside down diabolical concept. Kill with a view to saving lives?

It should however be mentioned that Orlando Police Chief John Mine was not directly in charge of the SWAT operation per se. The latter was under the command of  Capt. Mark Canty.

Police Chief John Mina intimated that 8-9 SWAT officers might have killed people in the nightclub by accident (see quote below).

This important “detail” revealed by the Orland Chief of Police did not make the headlines of the mainstream media. It was reported locally in Florida, (Florida Naples News). It was not picked up by the national news media:

Mina said his decision to enter the club with such violence was tough. “It was a hard decision to make, but it was the right decision,” he said. “Our No. 1 priority is on saving lives, and it was the right decision to make.”

… Orlando officers walked into the nightclub and found lifeless club patrons strewn about a bar and lounge area. More bodies were found in a nearby bathroom.

“Some of the Victims Could have Been Killed by Officers who Were Trying to Save Them”

Saving People by Killing them? “New Normal”? The SWAT police officers were celebrated as HEROES by the mainstream media “for having saved dozens of lives”.

Source London’s Daily Mail

The possibility of SWAT killings at the Pulse nightclub was acknowledged and then casually dismissed by the Washington Post (June 20, 2016):

“The FBI is still working to determine if any of the victims at Pulse were hit by police fire, according to a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation… The SWAT commander at Pulse said Sunday he was not sure if any victims may have been struck by officers’ gunfire, and the chief medical examiner has said he does not know.” (emphasis added)

No further investigation by the Washington Post was required.

Were the Victims shot by Omar Mateen or by the Police SWAT Team?  

The Orlando Police Department Timeline (see below) (quoted by Judge Napolitano) suggests that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team stormed the building, it also confirms that the first deadly shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am.

Within the scope of 1-2 minutes, Mateen is said to have killed 49 people and injured 53. And this happened while the suspect was been fired at by the SWAT team. 

The reports are contradictory: First they say that the SWAT team was being fired upon by the suspect (see quote above) “who had hid in the bathroom”  and then they acknowledge that he was killed when the hostages started pouring out of the building (through a hole in the wall, when they broke down the wall):

“A cop rammed his Bearcat armored vehicle through the club wall. Hostages poured out. So did Mateen, guns blazing. With quick efficiency, officers shot him dead.” (Naples Daily News, June 13, 2016)

What the  above statement suggests is that Mateen was executed at point blank (“with efficiency”) upon exiting the building through a hole in the wall with members of the SWAT team waiting to kill him upon his exit through the hole. If Mateen had known that he was to be executed, he would not have attempted to exit the building through the hole in wall together with hostages. (see image below)

Reports suggest that  there was an extensive exchange of fire between Mateen and the SWAT team: “Omar Mateen, 29, was killed by police when he engaged them in a gun battle.” In the same Naples News report, quoting Chief of Police Mina:

“There’s a hole in the wall about two feet off the ground and three feet wide. We were able to rescue dozens and dozens of people who came out of that wall,” Mina said. “The suspect came out of that hole himself with a handgun and a long gun and engaged in a gun battle with officers where he was ultimately killed.”

Visibly this statement by Chief of Police Mina is convoluted to say the least: it would have been almost impossible for Mateen to have effectively engaged the SWAT officials upon exiting the hole in the wall. (See image). Mateen’s fate was similar to that of the dead (alleged ISIS-Daesh) terror suspects killed rather than arrested by the police in Brussels and Paris terror attacks.

The official story is that Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 on the orders of the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh).

And this allegedly took place –according to the OPD time line– in a lapse of 1-2 minutes before he was shot dead at 5.15am, while leaving the building through a hole in the wall. 

There were eleven SWAT police officers who stormed the building at 5.13am; the suspect was reported dead at 5.15am. According to the Orlando Police Chief, 8 or 9 out of the 11 SWAT officers accidentally shot at the hostages. The statement of Orlando Police Chief Mina does not refer to an error of one or two SWAT officers, the entire SWAT team (8 or 9 out of 11) under the helm of SWAT Commander Capt. Canty “accidentally” fired at the nightclub patrons.

CCTV Camera Footage

Law enforcement officials have acknowledged that the CCTV footage from several cameras inside the Pulse nightclub were available and have been viewed and examined. Sofar the CCTV footage of what happened inside the nightclub including the “friendly fire” of the SWAT team, has not been released.

Did Mateen have the ability of shooting and killing 49 people and injuring 53 in the course of less than 2 minutes while also exiting the building through a hole in the wall at 5.14am and confronting the SWAT team in cross-fire.  Is this corroborated by the CCCTV footage?

The autopsy reports as well as the ballistic reports have not been released.

Ballistics 

It is worth noting that Mateen allegedly used the Sig Sauer MCX .223-caliber rifle with a magazine capacity of  30 rounds. He also had in his possession a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol with a standard magazine capacity of 17 rounds.

1. the semi-automatic parameters of  the two weapons in his possession would not have allowed Omar Mateen to fire more than one hundred shots within a 1-2 minutes without magazine reloading. Note the time line: 5.13am-5.15am. 5.15am: Mateen is recorded dead.

See the video below which indicates the semi-automatic nature of the Sig Sauer MCX.

https://www.fbi.gov/tampa/press-releases/2016/investigative-update-regarding-pulse-nightclub-shooting

The Collapse of Western Democracy

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, July 01 2016

Democracy no longer exists in the West. In the US powerful private interest groups, such as the military-security complex, Wall Street, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness and the extractive industries of energy, timber and mining, have long exercised more control over government than the people. But now even the semblance of democracy has been abandoned.

Pro-GMO Spin Masquerading as Science Courtesy of “Shameful White Men of Privilege”

By Colin Todhunter, July 01 2016

Unlike their predecessors, early 21st century missionaries do not come armed with bibles. They come as members of a scientific priesthood, spouting slick PR and are supported by the likes of Bill Gates, taxpayer ‘aid’ and the global agritech cartel and rely on the leverage of international institutions like the World Bank, IMF and WTO.

Mass Shootings and Massacres in America: The Political, Cultural and Socio-psychological Features of US Society

By Prof. James Petras, July 01 2016

Over the past fifty plus years, over 125 mass shootings/massacres have occurred within the United States but not one perpetrator has been identified as a trained member of an international Islamist terrorist organization.

Why There Will Probably Be a Second Referendum on Brexit

By Eric Zuesse, July 01 2016

Preliminary Brexit (British exit from the European Union) would be a ferocious kidney-blow to the international aristocracy, the people (and their agents) who own controlling blocs of stock in international corporations, and who control politicians in every country (except Russia and perhaps China), and who especially control international organizations such as the executive body of the EU, which is the European Commission (or “EC”).

Corbyn, British Labour and Anti-Semitism

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, July 01 2016

In another attempt to kick the leader of the British Labour down and out, a campaign has been hatched with a now commonplace virulence.  A report into anti-Semitism within Labour party circles authored by Shami Chakrabarti was to be released with little fanfare, filled with the pieties that come at a time when language is a matter of moral policing rather than concerted expression.

A Conspiracy Theory that became a “Conspiracy Fact”: The CIA, Afghanistan’s Poppy Fields and America’s Growing Heroin Epidemic

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, July 01 2016

The heroin epidemic resembles the days when “Crack cocaine” became the major drug that destroyed communities across the United States and other parts of the world including the Caribbean that began in the early 1980’s.

Over 6000 people have been killed in a bombing campaign that has created a humanitarian catastrophe; destroying vital infrastructure and leaving 80% of the population in need of aid. Despite this, the UK has continued to arm the Saudi regime, with over £2.8 billion worth of arms having been licensed since the bombing began last March, including licences for bombs and air-to-surface rocket components and a £1.7 billion licence for combat aircraft.

The claim follows reports from a range of prestigious international organisations including a UN Panel of experts, the European Parliament and humanitarian NGOs, which have accused Saudi forces of serious breaches of IHL. These include:

• A failure to take all precautions in attack as required by IHL
• Attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilians and civilian objects.
• A failure to adhere to the principle of distinction and/or the targeting of civilians and civilian objects and those not directly participating in hostilities.
• The destruction of Cultural Property and/or a failure to adhere to the immunity to be afforded to such property during armed conflict.

Despite this, the UK government has licensed over £2.8 billion worth of arms since the bombing of Yemen began. The weapon categories included for arms exports since the bombing of Yemen began include approximately:

• £1.7 billion worth of ML10 licences (Aircraft, helicopters, drones)
• £1.1 billion worth of ML4 licences (Grenades, bombs, missiles, countermeasures)
• £430,000 worth of ML6 licences (Armoured vehicles, tanks)

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said:

This is a historic decision and we welcome the fact that arms exports to Saudi Arabia will be given the full scrutiny of a legal review, but they should never have been allowed in the first place.

The fact that UK aircraft and bombs are being used against Yemen is a terrible sign of how broken the arms export control system is. For too long government has focused on maximising and promoting arms sales, rather than on the human rights of those they are used against.

Successive governments have pulled out all stops to keep the arms deals flowing. Recent years have seen Tony Blair intervening to stop a corruption investigation into arms exports to Saudi, David Cameron flying out to to Riyadh meet Saudi Royalty, and Prince Charles sword dancing to secure sales for BAE Systems.

The claim, which will now progress to Judicial Review, calls on the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills to suspend all extant licences and stop issuing further arms export licences to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen while he holds a full review into if the exports are compatible with UK and EU legislation.

Andrew continued:

The arms export controls do not work, but how can they when the government is actively promoting arms sales and working hand in glove with regimes like Saudi Arabia?

The Saudi Royal Family’s influence is imprinted all over Whitehall’s approach to arms sales and the Middle East.

If the government cares for the human rights of those in Saudi Arabia, Yemen or the wider region then it must end its support for the Saudi military and its complicity in Saudi state violence.

Rosa Curling from the human rights team at Leigh Day, which is representing CAAT, said:

It is crucial that the courts consider whether the ongoing sales of arms from the UK to Saudi Arabia is unlawful. The overwhelming evidence from those who are, or have been, working on the ground in Yemen is that the Saudi coalition is acting in breach of international law, killing thousands of people and destroying vital infrastructure. To continue to grant licences in such circumstances, is unlawful. We hope the Court will now intervene in this matter and order the government to reconsider without further delay.

To any historian buff, it should be a known fact that Britain’s “special relationship” with Washington has been a tough one, subjected to periods of bruising and disagreement. States caught in a web of imperial domination can only be special to a certain extent.

Despite this, the mythology of a special relationship between London and Washington continues to sound its tunes.  That sense of closeness has been as much a cultural as political one.  Together, Anglo-Saxons would triumph on a global scale in a messianic, racially adorned mission twittering about a liberal democratic order.

While the US Republic was perceived as founded upon a radical revolution, loyalist ties ran deep with the British empire. The strain of Anglo-Saxon bonding persisted.  Joseph Galloway, a figure of prominence at the Continental Congress in 1774, would eventually break with the leaders in favour of the loyalist cause.  Fleeing for Britain after being deemed by the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1778 a traitor, Galloway nursed fantasies of reunion, with Parliament assuming its role as sagacious mother and governor.

The flirtation with re-union persisted even as Britain increased its possessions.  Writing in 1902, British journalist William Steadman considered the links in the unmistakably titled The Americanization of the World.  “The lion’s share of the world is ours, not only in its bulk, but in tit-bits also.”  This smug observation tended to ignore that large German speaking population within the US, the implications of that which would come out in the early part of the First World War.

While President Woodrow Wilson did eventually enter on the side of the Allies in 1917, aspirations to make the world safe for democracy proved troubling to the victorious imperial powers.  An articulated right to self-determination was particularly problematic.  The days of British Empire were numbered.

With the advent of the League of Nations, an organisation which refused to receive domestic American support, the US went into something of a slumber, hoping to avoid unnecessary entanglements through the 1920s and 1930s. (To this day, the myth persists that the US was entirely insular or even isolationist during this period.)

As the Second World War raged, the close relationship of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, did pay dividends. The 1942 Lend-Lease agreement was one such manifestation of this association. But the good will forged in war would not last in peace.

President Harry S. Truman was in little mood to be charitable, demanding British repayments in 1945 and rebuffing advances for new loans for reconstruction.  The debt was subsequently reduced, and Congressional approval forthcoming for a loan amounting to half what was approved.  (Churchill, now in opposition, had procured his begging bowl to convince Congress.[1])

The international order was transformed with the Bretton Woods institutions, much to the chagrin of Britain’s planners. The anti-colonial, open market agenda came across as another rich slap to the protectionist enclaves of empire.

Despite being in ruin, and a former enemy, Germany, at least its western part, became part of a US project of European finance and integration.  Strategists were already banking on a revived German economy, with an industrial capacity superior to that of a crippled Britain.  The European Coal and Steel Community had Washington’s blessing, while a snobbish Britain remained obsessed with its declining empire.

As Columbia University emeritus professor Volker R. Berghahn has observed, Germany may have failed on two occasions to attain primacy on the continent with military force but gained “hegemony in Europe without firing a single shot” after 1945, in no small part due to its relationship with the US.[2]

More rebuffs to Britain would follow from the bullish power across the Atlantic. Britain got a firm scolding from President Dwight D. Eisenhower for its Suez adventure against Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956.  During the next decade, Britain dug in its heels regarding the failed US engagement in Indo-China, refusing to deploy personnel to Washington’s own version of a bloody colonial adventure.

Be it a “special relationship” or an Anglo-American union, such ideas have bound the countries on both sides of the Atlantic, not always to the good. The fact that Britain has been a particularly noisy cheer leader for Washington’s interests during the post-Cold War world, be it in Europe or on the UN Security Council, could hardly have been surprising in its familial sense.

Much of it seemed to be an act of contrition for having gotten it wrong about the re-unification of Germany, which President George H.W. Bush backed; and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s continuous opposition to the European Economic Community.

Subsequent pro-US engagements made less sense politically.  Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, this entailed unwarranted evangelical missions from 2003 into traditional areas of European and Western interference with calamitous outcomes.  The Blairite mission in the Middle East was miserably characterised by obsequious endeavour.  Instead of being a firm critic of US imperial bullying, Britain became a co-sponsoring companion.

With the Brexit vote, President Barack Obama’s reassurances that Britain remains one of the chosen has to be seen in the context of a mythology that produced it. Washington’s interests are as much, if not more tied, to such states as Germany, the European continent’s business motor.  The fantasy of an Anglophone sphere of interests, typified by Boris Johnson’s school of thinking, is bound to persist. The economic realities will lie elsewhere.

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

Notes

[1] https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/17792/Churchill%20%20US%20loan.pdf?sequence=1

[2] https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-u-s-special-relationship-is-with-germany-not-britain

In another attempt to kick the leader of the British Labour down and out, a campaign has been hatched with a now commonplace virulence.  A report into anti-Semitism within Labour party circles authored by Shami Chakrabarti was to be released with little fanfare, filled with the pieties that come at a time when language is a matter of moral policing rather than concerted expression.[1]

The report had been set up to investigate the circumstances behind the suspension of MP Naz Shah and former London mayor Ken Livingstone.  Chakrabarti makes the important point that the Labour Party “is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism.  Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law.”

Suggestions for reforming disciplinary procedures, be it the insertion of legally qualified personnel, attention to guidance and training and a range of recommendations, are also made in the report.

Criticism of foreign powers, including Israel, was legitimate “without resorting (by accident or design) to inflammatory (rather than persuasive) language.”  As a cautionary note, Labour members “should resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine.”

In public debate, notably in countries where one can be punished for the utterance of words, attention is not paid to how they are used, contexts and meanings.  The crime lies in saying the unmentionable. Never, for example, equate the Zionist project to an exterminating one; never suggest that Israel’s policies resemble those of apartheid, or dispossession.  And never, of course, deny the Holocaust in various European countries, because that just might book you a room in a cell. Free speech, however misused, is a mutable possession indeed.

That sets the scene for what happened regarding the latest round of criticisms.  Corbyn’s remarks at the release of the report were hardly shocking in their conceptual distinctions: “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.”[2]

Corbyn was making an obvious, if at times contested point: governments and institutions should not be confused with the broader population, be it intention or acts. Individuals express disagreement with governments that supposedly represent their interests.  Many would wish such governments did not.

Such sharp points of distinction did not trouble Britain’s chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. The Labour Party had done the unpardonable by making comparisons between peoples he should have avoided.  The singular, exceptional chosen ones were above such comparisons.

Former Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks suggested that Corbyn had apparently compared the state of Israel to Islamic State, calling it “demonisation of the highest order, an outrage and unacceptable.”

Corbyn had done nothing the sort.  As he explained in remarks, “The point is that you shouldn’t say to someone that just because they’re Jewish you must have an opinion on Israel, any more that you say to anyone who’s a Muslim you must have an opinion on the vile actions being taken by people misquoting the good name of Islam in what they do.”

Rabbi Sacks was far more interested in the sniff of equivalence, as were such figures as Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Having never mentioned the specific regime in question, the good Rabbi assumed that Corbyn had gone through the list of extreme comparisons and drawn the most reprehensible one out of the hat.

The Islamic State, he explained in his statement, is “a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity. In the current political climate, when hate crimes are rising and political rhetoric is increasingly divisive, this is all the more shocking.”[3]

This is an age old debate about complicity that has raged for centuries – at least since the state became a manifestation of the general will.  To what extent can you attribute a German citizen’s blame for the concentration camps of the Second World War has been an ethicist’s and lawyer’s feast.  Complicity does, and can travel far, but it would be foolish to suggest that all were somehow directly responsible.

Another aspect has also been the Israeli government’s desire to speak for all Jews, an appropriating catch-all evocation that eliminates free will and independent thought and always assumes a “my country right or wrong” approach.  This effectively conflates entities: to question the Israeli government and its policies is to question the high representative of the Jewish people, which becomes, ipso facto, anti-Semitic.

This has been particularly problematic in debates between Jewish communities in the aftermath of the establishment of Israel in 1948, be there those in the United States, or the secular remnants in Europe that miraculously survived the Holocaust.

Such dogmatic thinking has become the means to silence and shout down disagreement about Israeli policies, however severe or savage they might be to Palestinians or neighbouring states. That fact, rather than the barrage on Corbyn, should have been brought to the fore.

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

Notes

Preliminary

Brexit (British exit from the European Union) would be a ferocious kidney-blow to the international aristocracy, the people (and their agents) who own controlling blocs of stock in international corporations, and who control politicians in every country (except Russia and perhaps China), and who especially control international organizations such as the executive body of the EU, which is the European Commission (or “EC”). The EC, the executive power within the EU, is an appointed not elected body; each of its members can be fired, at will, by the President of the EC, who is the real President of the EU, who is himself appointed as a result of deal-making amongst appointees who were selected by deal-making amongst elected politicians from each one of the nations that’s a member-state of the EU. The whole process of control at the EU is incredibly convoluted (for example, it includes, by reference, this monstrosity) and prevents real political accountability to the public, so that a career in “public service” at the EU is, essentially, service to the European aristocracy, not to the public.

The EU is set up as a unification of the various national aristocracies, or ‘member states’, that the EU represents; the EU does not represent the public — not even the voting public — anywhere. The President of the EC has enormous power over Europe: he drafts, and the entire EC rubber-stamps, all laws within the EU dictatorship, which is one of the reasons why there is such strong sentiment amongst the publics within the EU, to replace the EU dictatorship and to put in its stead some democratic system of government, one that’s responsive to the will of the majority of the public, and not only to the will of the major stockholders in international corporations.

British exit from the European Union would therefore constitute a public rejection of this entire system, and a public preference for restoring the given nation’s democracy — it would constitute a public rejection of rule by Europe’s aristocracy.

There is no actual European democracy; there is, instead, a European dictatorship, or else (via exit from the EU), independent national governments, some of which governments might be democracies, and some of which might be dictatorships. The choice is either continued dictatorship, or else, the possibility of establishing (or re-establishing) national democracy. The EU is an international dictatorship, not really a democratic federation (such as it pretends).

The British Situation

UK has no written constitution, and so the UK government “wings it” on matters such as determining when a public vote in a referendum (such as Brexit) is actually final.

The petition to Parliament for there to be a revote about British exit from the EU has already received over four million signatures, and it notes that “Parliament considers all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures for a debate,” which means that even if only one-in-forty of those signatures are valid, and there are no additional signers, Parliament will take up the debate.

At that time, the fact that the referendum on Brexit was only “advisory” and not at all obligatory-to-be-adhered-to by the government, will be put forth in Parliament, again and again, as reason why the 52%-to-48% Brexit vote shouldn’t necessarily be considered to be final. That 52% might have been an accurate snapshot of voters’ opinion on June 23rd, but public opinion constantly changes, and a repeat-vote could easily produce a majority decision to “advise” Parliament against leaving the EU.

Furthermore, the petition’s point might also find majority support amongst Parliamentarians, that “We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum.

” There is no fixed rule on these matters in UK, because there is no written constitution; so, a mere majority-vote on such a matter might even be argued not to make good democratic sense. For example, the U.S. Constitution (widely considered to be “democratic”) requires that at least two-thirds of U.S. Senators must vote to pass a proposed treaty in order for it to become law in that country — America’s Founders recognized that adopting any treaty is vastly more binding a national commitment than is merely adopting a new law, which can easily be abandoned or changed by merely another majority-vote to do so. Since treaty-matters are (by their international nature) inherently more binding than any mere law is, a requirement for some type of “supermajority” or above-50%-standard, does actually make sense, in order to enter into a treaty. (And America’s Constitutional requirement for at least two thirds of the Senate to vote for a proposed treaty in order for the treaty to become law is actually a vital protection of U.S. national sovereignty, and thus of U.S. democracy.)

As to whether a supermajority-requirement in order to exit a treaty makes democratic sense, it doesn’t in this case, because no supermajority was required (as it should have been required) in order to “vote” to join the EU. That supermajority would then be applying ONLY in order to EXIT the EU, not in order to JOIN the EU (which was done without any such supermajority-standard). Consequently, by rights, there should be no re-vote at all: if 50% was required in order to join the EU, then 50% should be required in order to leave it, and that standard was met; it was the 52% vote, and that should be final.

But rights and wrongs do not make policies and laws; power does, and the international corporations possess it, the public unfortunately do not. Consequently, there will probably be a revote, because the owners of international corporations want there to be a revote.

This revote will probably likewise be only “advisory,” and it will probably be required to meet a stiffer standard than a mere majority of the voting electorate to “advise” Parliament to exit the EU, in order for the vote to be “advising” exit.

By that time (the time of the re-vote), the millions of citizens who are eligible to vote and who opposed Brexit but didn’t care as passionately about the matter as did the Brexit people and so didn’t come to the polls on June 23rd, will far more likely be coming to the polls on the re-vote; and the result of that will be a far-shortfall of the 60% or whatever standard Parliament will have set in order for Parliament to be “advised” to exit the EU, and probably there won’t even be as much as a bare majority (50%) of voters favoring Brexit. Those results (probably sub-50% but in any case below the super-majority standard set) would likely end the “Exit the EU” movement, first in UK, and then (by its example, which can conveniently be copied elsewhere) in other EU countries.

And, so, UK will very likely remain in EU; democracy will probably be irrevocably dead in UK, from that time forward; the major stockholders in international corporations will then rigidly control the country. UK’s unwritten constitution will then, without any practical challenge, be whatever the major stockholders in international corporations want it to be. And, as far as other countries in EU are concerned, all of which do have written Constitutions, those Constitutions will become less and less effective over time, as the EU’s international-corporate dictatorship will increasingly take precedence, in the emerging United States of Europe. It will be the Bilderbergers’ dream, the Trilateralists’ dream, the Davos dream: international dictatorship, by the international aristocracy. The words might superficially sound pleasant, but the outcome will be hell. And here that hell is described regarding U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed TPP treaty for Pacific nations, which is similar to his proposed TTIP and TISA treaties for Atlantic nations (including Europe): regulations regarding the environment, workers’ rights, and product-safety, will be whatever international corporations want them to be; democracy, the sovereignty of the public, will end.

Even Obama’s statements advocating action against climate-change are sheer fakery. Scientists can publish to each other the reality regarding climate-change, but the mass-media project a different ‘reality’ (more favorable to the international-corporate aristocracy), to serve an audience not of consumers but of the international corporations (such as oil companies) that advertise to consumers and that provide the advertising income to the ‘news’ media. The attitude of the people in power (the people who control those corporations) is: the world can simply go to hell; I need my profits. Profits used to be a privilege that was earned by an investor’s taking risks; now profits have become an investor’s right that the public guarantees to them, and that takes precedence over the public’s sovereignty — investors are now the new sovereign, replacing the public in that capacity. Governments exist to serve investors, not citizens. Citizens have instead become mere subjects, of the aristocracy. It’s a return to feudalism, but in the era of corporations, a body-politic that Benito Mussolini called — and championed as — “corporationism” (or, alternatively, as “fascism”).

Conclusion

The significance of the first Brexit vote is: it was the first instance in modern times when UK citizens formally expressed their opposition to what the UK’s aristocracy desire. However, the outcome of that vote is likely to be the same (though by different means) as was the outcome of the Greek referendum regarding the international aristocracy’s 2015 ‘bailout’ (their euphemism for purchase) of the Greek government. In that case, the 5 July 2015 Greek referendum vote was, by a 61% majority, to reject the sale of the nation’s government. The wikipedia article on that matter closes by noting: “On Monday, 13 July, the Syriza-led government of Greece accepted a bailout package that contains larger pension cuts and tax increases than the one rejected by Greek voters in the referendum.” And that was the end of that.

The Greek leader, Syriza Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, even stayed in power. By contrast, Britain’s Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron, promptly resigned when the first Brexit vote turned out to reject his position that the UK should stay in the EU. The process of defeating the people’s rebellion is more drawn-out in Britain than it was in Greece; that’s all. Otherwise, it’ll probably be basically the same end-result in UK as it was in Greece. People must accept their fate, as subjects. Western history is going full-circle back to feudalism, but in its modern form: ‘peaceful’ fascism.

The message of that, if all of this comes to pass, will be, from the masters: Welcome to the future; it belongs to me and my children, not to you and your children. We own it, you don’t. Just get out of our way, because we’ll get there, by hook or by crook, no matter what you do.

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.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has been engaging in clashes with militants of Al Nusra, Ahrar Al-Sham and the Turkmen Islamic Party in the northern part of Latakia province. The main clashes are ongoing for areas in Jabal Al-Akrad where militants had launched to advance on the positions of pro-government forces earlier this week.

Near Aleppo city, joint forces of Al Nusra and Nouriddeen Al-Zinki successfully advanced on the SAA positions in the Malaah Farms pushing pro-government forces from the northern part of the farms. SAA units, located there, withdrew to the Handarat Mountains in order to regroup and prepare fresh  operations in the area.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, helped by US Special Forces and supported by the US-led coalition air power, are advancing in the ISIS-controlled city of Manbij in Aleppo province. Kurdish forces have seized the Madfaa traffic circle near western gates of Manbij, the police traffic building at the M4 Highway and the Assadiyat neighborhood. Clashes are also ongoing in the Hawatima neighborhood. ISIS still controls the most of the city, including areas west and south of Tetbekat Prison. Following the ongoing events, the SDF is likely attempts to separate the eastern and western part of the city in order to cut off various ISIS units and defeat them one after one.

On June 29, the US-backed militant group, known as “New Syrian Army”, helped by Western-backed special forces, seized a military airport, the nearby Hamdan village and the village of al-Sukari held by Islamic State militants close to their strategic city of Al-Bukamal near the Syrian-Iraqi border. The NSyA announced the advance on Al-Bukamal, located on the Euphrates River, and engaged in clashes with ISIS militants near the city.

However, this advance ended in total disaster for the US-backed group. ISIS fighters reportedly killed 40 NSyA militants and captured 15 others. 6 vehicle-mounted automatic cannons and 6 trucks loaded with ammunition were also captured by ISIS.  As of June 30th, the NSyA withdrew from the al-Hamadan military airport and the nearby villages.

Now, NSyA-linked media sources argue that the group strategically retreated to the desert and the Al-Bukamal was a raid because the group was not pursuing the goal to capture the city.

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Unlike their predecessors, early 21st century missionaries do not come armed with bibles. They come as members of a scientific priesthood, spouting slick PR and are supported by the likes of Bill Gates, taxpayer ‘aid’ and the global agritech cartel and rely on the leverage of international institutions like the World Bank, IMF and WTO.

More than 100 Nobel laureates have put their names to a letter urging Greenpeace to end its opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block the introduction of genetically engineered Golden Rice, which supporters say could reduce vitamin-A deficiencies that cause blindness and death among children in the Global South.

The letter campaign has been organised by Sir Richard John Roberts, a biochemist and molecular biologist with New England Biolabs, and Phillip Sharp, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns. The letter urges Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods ‘improved’ through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies and abandon their campaign against GMOs in general and Golden Rice in particular.

Roberts says that the signatories are scientists who understand the logic of science and that the attitude of Greenpeace towards GMOs is “anti-science.” He implies Greenpeace engages in scaremongering.

The letter states that scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than, those derived from any other method of production. It argues that there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption, and their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment and a boon to global biodiversity.

Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Society in the UK. Last year. he was in India promoting GM crops and food. While in Mysore, he delivered a talk on ‘A Crime Against Humanity’. He said that when people were hungry, they needed food but rich European countries are opposing introduction of GM crops because they have sufficient food and went on to say that their propaganda against GM crops is affecting hungry people in the developing nations. Roberts added that to help people in need, we need “more science in politics and less politics in science” and also asked why should not the denial of food to people in developing nations by developed nations be considered a crime against humanity.

During a talk in Hyderabad, he said that “millions of people in the third world” would die of starvation unless GM crops were introduced and added that Greenpeace is in the business of scaring people when it comes to GM crops.

Roberts bases his argument on PR spin, not facts

It seems a little strange that Roberts would attack Greenpeace for ‘blocking’ the introduction of Golden Rice when new research from Washington State University indicates that the reason it hasn’t come to market is because, after over two decades of expensive research, it basically does not work, alternative approaches to supplying vitamin A to children are actually working and that the actions of campaigners have had no impact on its failure to reach the commercial market.

For Roberts to acknowledge these three facts would derail his agenda of promoting GMOs based on emotional blackmail and demonising opponents. He engages in PR, not science. His emotive rhetoric is intended to play to a media-led public gallery, not least his desire to haul Greenpeace into court for committing crimes against humanity because it is blocking Golden Rice and denying nutrition to the poor.

Being in possession of a science degree, no matter how eminent you may be in your relevant discipline, does not provide a free pass to spew out ill-informed personal opinion, or pro-industry PR, and to assume such opinions will be automatically respected (see ‘Inside the Church of the pro-GMO Activist’ ).

Professor of Statistics Philip B Stark (UCLA) responded to Robert’s letter on Twitter with a comment aimed at the 107 signatories:

“W all due respect, science is about evidence not authority. What do they know of agriculture? Done relevant research?” He added that the 107 Nobel laureates comprised one peace prize winner, eight economists, 24 physicists, 33 chemists and 41 doctors.

The type of PR Roberts is engaging in relies on the media and public bowing down to a scientific priesthood whose authority should never be questioned. But it should be and it has been. And, in questioning the claims Roberts makes, it soon becomes clear he is not basing his position on facts, but falsehoods and misrepresentations.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society (RS), Roberts should be aware of the Society’s failure to acknowledge and correct the misleading and exaggerated statements that it or its members have used to actively promote GMOs and smear critics since the mid-1990s and, in effect, convey false impressions. Roberts himself appears to be reading from a similar script. See the  open letter to the RS from Steven Druker (author of ‘Altered Genes, Twisted Truth’, which discusses the scientific fraud underpinning the attempt to alter the genetic core of the world’s food supply for the benefit of powerful interests).

While Roberts likes to convey the impression of an overwhelming consensus on the efficacy and safety of GMOs, this is not true – whether among scientists themselves, scientific literature or prominent institutions. For instance, Food & Water Watch has produced this informative, fully-referenced brief on the general lack of consensus within science on GM. Furthermore, readers may also wish to consult this by geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, which addresses the “central dogma” of molecular biology that provides a “simplistic picture” of the precision involved in GM, and this (which cites peer-reviewed sources) on the failures of 20 years of GMOs.

As for GM ‘feeding the world’ or helping to eradicate disease and malnutrition, we should move beyond rhetoric. In 2014, the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) released a fully referenced report that concluded hunger is caused by poverty and inequality. GM crops on the market today are not designed to address hunger. Four GM crops account for almost 100 percent of worldwide GM crop acreage, and all four have been developed for large-scale industrial farming systems and are used as cash crops for export, to produce fuel or for processed food and animal feed. The report also stated that GM crops have not necessarily increased yields and do not increase farmers’ incomes. Moreover, GM crops as a whole have led to an increase in pesticide use.

CBAN is merely one source from many that could be used to make these points. Hunger, poverty and inequality cannot be remedied by a bogus techno quick fix like GMOs. Eric Holt-Giménez  provides useful insight into the social and political factors that create and perpetuate hunger and food insecurity as do Walden Bello and Michel Chossudovsky.

Roberts is not unique among those who find the line between science and pro-GMO propaganda hard to distinguish. From Kevin Folta, Bruce Chassey and CS Prakesh to Anthony Trewavas, Shanthu Shatharam and many others, he is in good company. See ‘Claiming to represent’science’, the global GMO industry is built on fear, fraud and corruption‘ and this excellent piece ‘By their own standard, credentialist pro-GMO activists are ignorant yahoos‘.

There is sufficient evidence to show that GM crops do not increase yield, are outperformed by non-GMO crops, or derive positive traits as a result of conventional breeding (see this), and are usually worse than non-GM crops at tolerating extreme climate conditions. Moreover, the experience with GM crops shows that the application of GM technology is more likely to actually undermine food security and entrench the social, economic and environmental problems created by industrial agriculture and corporate control (see this report by GRAIN).

From labelling GM food to ‘substantial equivalence’, science has been distorted and debased to serve commercial interests (see this and this). The result is that not a single long-term epidemiological study has been conducted with GMOs, while illnesses and diseases continue to spike since the introduction of GMOs in the US.

Despite what Roberts and others who display a similar mindset would have us think, it is not the politics of a bunch of green-oriented elitists that is contributing to world hunger, but the power, influence and ambitions of a very wealthy and politically well-connected cartel of agribusiness concerns that is promoting a highly profitable GM technology, drawing up trade deals, writing legislation to patent and control seeds and is exploiting the situation of the hungry (and do not be misled: there are powerful agritech interests behind Golden Rice). At the same time, it is intent on side-lining approaches to agriculture that can enhance food security in an equitable and sustainable manner (see this, this and this).

There is an attempt to depoliticise and disguise the genuine underlying power structures that are determining the GM agenda and global agriculture per se. Certain scientists serve as apologists for global capitalism, which has pushed nations into an economic quagmire due to ‘structural adjustments’ involving prioritizing debt repayment, conservative macroeconomic management, huge cutbacks in government spending, trade and financial liberalization, privatisation and deregulation, the restructuring of agriculture and export-oriented mono-cropping.

And this as true for certain African countries as it is for The Philippines, where Golden Rice is being offered as a proxy solution for malnutrition and poverty (despite the fact it is not available!).

The reality is the type of rhetoric and misleading, false statements made by certain scientists constitute an attempt to shut down any criticism. It is also designed to side-line legitimate analyses of the root causes of hunger and poverty and genuine solutions for productive, sustainable agriculture that can feed humanity and those who argue for them.

As I finished writing this piece, I read a piece on the GMWatch website about Robert’s letter (which is posted on a pro-GMO campaign site). It says that Devon G. Peña, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of Washington Seattle and an expert in indigenous agriculture, posted a comment to the new campaign’s website in which he called the laureates’ letter “shameful”. He noted that the signatories were:

mostly white men of privilege with little background in risk science, few with a background in toxicology studies, and certainly none with knowledge of the indigenous agroecological alternatives. All of you should be stripped of your Nobels.

 

We are witnessing a remarkable increase in tension between the US/NATO and Russia these years – and it can not only be explained by whatever we choose to think happened in Ukraine and Crimea. We find a totally new effort on both sides to use social and other media to tell how dangerous “they” are to “us”. There is a clear tendency to “fearology” – to instill fear in the citizens on both sides about the capabilities and intentions of the other side.

We find deeply concerned articles about the possibility of war between the two parties – a quarter of a century after the Berlin Wall tumbled.

Why is the new tension rising in Europe between US/NATO and Russia so manifestly dangerous and – with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis worse than during the First Cold War?

On a series of indicators, the political Western world – US/NATO/EU and Christian (Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic with sects) – is becoming weak relative to other players in the global society.

The West has engaged in a series of wars that turned into very costly fiascos – from what followed from Sykes-Picot which turned 100 in May 2016 over Vietnam to the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The West is still the largest economic bloc and the 28 NATO members cover about 70% of the world’s mind-boggling US $ 1700 billion military expenditures. Africa as a continent, BRICS countries – China in particular – are making progress, also in fields where the West has failed; for instance, China has lifted 400 million Chinese out of poverty in a couple of decades. The wealthy West has done nothing of the sort over centuries but produced a grotesquely, perversely unequal income distribution.

Take a look at the graphs linked to this summary page from SIPRI. They will tell you how world military expenditures in constant prices have risen since 1996 even though the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved. In 2015, the US alone stands for 36% of the world’s military expenditures, China for 13% and Russia for4%.

President Obama stated recently that the US military is stronger than the next 8 – here is what he said in his State of the Union Address on January 12th, 2016:

I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker,” Obama said in his last annual State of the Union address Jan. 12, 2016. “Let me tell you something: The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.

In spite of these fact that prove the overwhelming and increasing superiority of today’s NATO, we see a constantly increasing propaganda coming out of NATO circles to the effect that NATO is getting weaker and that Russia a formidable, unreliable power just waiting for the next opportunity to invade some country in the West.

Let’s take a look back in time.

What did the ’military balance’ – or what some called the correlations of forces – look like in the 1960s and 1970s between the then Warsaw Pact – the WTO, Warsaw Treaty Organisation – and NATO? This is important in and of itself because there is a whole school of thought that maintains that military balance is a major tool to prevent war and create stability.

Here is what I have calculated on the basis of SIPRI’s data sheet:

(And here some sources to the discussion of the relative inferiority of the Soviets at the time).

The graphs tell you that the Warsaw Pact military expenditures were as big as 75 – 87% of NATOs during the old Cold War.

In other words while considerably smaller (and with a much lower level of technical sophistication but more emphasis on quantity) the Warsaw Pact was indeed a potentialthreat in terms of capability at the time.

Whether it was a real threat would depend not only on capabilities but on another factor: intentions.

As far as I know, no first-strike, out-of-the-blue plan for an all-out attack on Western Europe by the Soviet/WTO has been found when the archives were opened after the Cold War. Both sides had plans for how to withstand and roll back an attack from the opponent. Both parties used simulations and held exercises with that in mind. If there had been a solid evidence that either party had a concrete plan – with intention and capabilities to back them up – for un-provoked invasion and occupation, the other sides would have made it top news to the world.

Be that as it may, the indisputable truth is that today the West is in a much better situation than in the old Cold War era.

The Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union disappeared completely. Today NATO has 28 members:

10 countries are former Warsaw Pact members – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (joining in 1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Romania, Slovakia (joining in 2204) and Albania (2009).

From non-aligned Yugoslavia has joined Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2009). That is, 12 new members over 10 years, all of some security importance to the Soviet Union at the time. It all means that what Russia has a legitimate reason to see as a potential enemy – namely NATO – has moved very much closer to its border.

And what are the Russian military expenditures as percentage of NATO’s today? Less than one-tenth of what they were during the old Cold War!

According to SIPRI’s latest statistics, Russia’s military expenditures are 8% of NATO’s and 11% of those of the U.S. Look above – down from 75-80% of NATO during the First Cold War to 8% of NATO today!

Now, are military expenditures a good measurement of military strength?

It’s true that national military budgets are not always completely comparable; all countries do not include the same expenditures, some categories are included under various other budgets and it is no easy task to compare across exchange rates and time. Likewise the national purchasing power per currency unit is often not comparable.

But then – simply comparing numbers of weapons or soldiers is much less meaningful and much less ‘objective’. Quantity is one thing, quality quite another.

If you look for only one single indicator applicable across the board, military expenditures in constant prices (Milex) is it.

It is true that you can spend your money in different ways and some people, as we all know, are able to get a lot out of little while others just squander money thoughtlessly.

However someone with only 8 dollars shall be smart beyond the imagination to achieve much more for his money than the one who has 100. In addition, one can ask: How many times stronger must you be to have a fair chance to win a war you start against an opponent?

There is of course the theory advanced by Andrew Mack in World Politics in 1975 – “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict” – in World Politics. And there is a fine discussion here by Ivan Arreguín-Toft. Of course, there are other factors than armies and weapons – such as resolve, cohesion, topography, moral strength, economic strength, sustainability and whether you fight for your motherland or far away from it to gain some resources.

And some would maintain – and correctly so in many historical cases – that nonviolence is stronger, among other things because it is legitimate, considered courageous and draws sympathy from third parties (also because it can’t be used for aggression).

On most if not all these indicators, Russia would be a loser if it tried to invade, occupy and control the whole or parts of Eastern Europe. And it could certainly not count on the sympathy from important international players anywhere if it did. Indeed, only a suicidal or mentally ill leader in Moscow would – for years ahead – start a war against NATO.

So, to put it in a different way: Could anyone please find us a NATO general who’d rather serve in the Russian military with the wages, technology, the budgets and working conditions he would have there if he switched from Bruxelles to Moscow. Name and phone number, please!

One must indeed wonder why the West that has much less to fear militarily than ever since 1945 either pretends to be so fearful or acts with such out-of-proportion irrationality and alarmism.

It’s very rare that you see the ruling elite totally at a loss for words: but they were. Gobsmacked and stunned would be accurate descriptions of the look on the political class’s collective face on the morning of June 24, 2016.

It’s the corporate/state media that effectively calls the shots when it comes to national decision-making in the UK these days, so most people assumed that the Remainers would win the previous day’s vote on whether or not the country should remain in Europe. The pre-voting propaganda was so solidly devoted to the “immigration problem,” that nobody considered the implications of actually exiting from the EU should the Brexiters win the vote. In fact, it just added to the confusion, the results of which are all too apparent now, with pro and anti at each other’s throats. And all of it, engineered.

However, almost a week after the vote, economist Richard Wolff spelled out the reasons for the result during an interview with the Real News Network:

It’s perfectly clear that the mass of people wanted to send a message to the old, established, austerity-committed government of David Cameron, that they don’t want him, they don’t want what he does, they don’t believe in any of this. They believe that the leadership of the European Union, what is crushing Greece, etcetera, is not something they want to be part of. They feel victimised by all of that. And the Brexit vote gave them a chance to say no, we don’t want it. Sure, there were racist elements and anti-immigration elements. That’s part of the British political scene. Of course it’s going to play its role, seeking its objectives as part of this.

The BBC’s propaganda campaign in favour of remaining had been as relentless as their attacks on Jeremy Corbyn since his election as leader of the Labour Party almost a year ago. So it seemed almost logical that, in a bizarre inversion of reality, that he, not Cameron, is the one they, and the rest of the media, would blame for Brexit.

Media watchdog Medialens highlighted one of the meanest media attacks on Corbyn in the days following:

Perhaps the worst example of an anti-Corbyn attack, post-Brexit, was in the Mail on Sunday. A piece by Dan Hodges was illustrated by a Photoshopped image of a malevolent vampiric Corbyn in a coffin with the despicable headline, ‘Labour MUST kill vampire Jezza.’ That this should appear just ten days after Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered is almost beyond belief. – ‘Killing Corbyn‘, Media Lens, 29 June 2016

Reading what passes for news this past seven days, you’d never know that the real cause of the upset was the Tory Party, which, aside from Cameron’s resignation, has barely been mentioned; for the reality is that it was an internal spat in the Tory Party that started the whole Brexit ball rolling.

Instead, the Remain camp feels they’ve been cheated out of victory by their Brexit opponents – wrongly labelled as a bunch of Nazis and xenophobes. This is exactly the way the BBC has been portraying events: images of angry Remainers demonstrating outside Parliament, contrasted with interviews of penitent Brexiters, who have seen the “error of their ways” and wished they’d voted with their ‘internationalist’ brothers and sisters. So no problem taking in the refugees then?

A convenient scapegoat

Initially this was going to be a kind of blow-by-blow diary of the vote and its dramatic outcome, but it’s two stories: one about the UK as a broken capitalist state and its relationship to the EU; the other, much more important story, of the attack on Jeremy Corbyn by his enemies inside and outside the Parliamentary Labour Party in an conspiracy to remove him as leader of the party.

Medialens reports:

Attempts to unseat Corbyn have been supported by Left Foot Forward Ltd, a company set up by Will Straw, which runs the country’s ‘No. 1 left-wing blog’ of the same name. Straw is the son of Jack Straw, who served as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair. . . . Will Straw is ‘among a network of longtime Blairite stalwarts trying to re-found the Labour Party – a project demolished by Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory in the Labour leadership elections in September 2015.

The independent journalist Steve Topple highlights the links between coordinated attacks on Corbyn and a network of Labour figures with direct links to the PR company, Portland Communications…. The PR firm was set up in 2001 by a former adviser to Blair. Its clients include the World Economic Forum, the EU, the UK government, Barclays Bank and large companies, including Morrisons and Nestle. (Ibid)

All this is reminiscent of the dirty tricks the Establishment used against a previous Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in 1976, as Ann Talbot of WSWS reminded us in 2006:

For a large part of his career and throughout his time as prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and again in 1974-76 Wilson was the object of a smear campaign that emanated from the British security services and the CIA. They fed material to the press that appeared to substantiate the view that he was a Soviet agent who had been put in place after the KGB had supposedly murdered Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. In the course of the documentary, the Daily Express defence correspondent Chapman Pincher unapologetically admitted his part in spreading those rumours.

The political class sees Corbyn as a danger, although we are constantly told that socialism is so passé, so 20th-century? So what’s the panic? Why the demonisation of this man, if he is so ineffectual and seemingly from another era, with his scruffy clothes and his vaguely subversive and quaint ideas about not wanting to drop atomic bombs on people? Just what is it that the elite are so afraid of that such venomous dirty tricks should be used against him?

The Great Unwashed

The truth is that Corbyn’s election woke up a sleeping giant – not just those few percent who tipped the balance in favour of Brexit, but the millions of working people who have had enough of austerity while the richest one percent get even richer.

They voted not so much about leaving the EU as in giving the government a black eye in the only way they could (what does this tell us about the current state of of the Labour Party, never mind the Tories?).

In any case, given the nonsense both government and media have been talking about for the past couple of months, how could anyone come to the right conclusion based on so much disinformation and outright lies?

So what should Corbyn do? Or is he just going to turn the other cheek to the vicious attacks being made on him?

Writing on the World Socialist Web Site, on June 29, Julie Hyland clarifies:

The extraordinary scale of the right-wing coup, which had already seen Corbyn lose most of his shadow cabinet in a series of timed resignations, was intended to force the Labour leader to resign. But in a statement put out moments after the result, Corbyn said that he had been elected ‘by 60 percent of Labour members and supporters”’ only last September, and ‘I will not betray them by resigning.’ -‘In right-wing putsch, UK Labour MPs deliver overwhelming anti-Corbyn vote‘ By Julie Hyland, 29 June 2016

The second assault on Corbyn (after the carefully timed shadow cabinet resignations), a vote of no confidence passed by 170 Labour MPs (with 40 in his favour), has no legal basis, but is merely an opinion. The only way to attempt to remove him is to call for an election which, I believe, requires the signatures of 50 Labour MPs. Fine, let them run a new election, they have the numbers. But it’s an election, which according to a YouGov poll, Corbyn will win all over again, and by much the same margin.

As I write, Angela Eagles, one of his former shadow cabinet colleagues, in a traitorous move, has been persuaded to stand against him. But she was roundly trounced in the election that made Corbyn head of the Constituency Labour Party last year, collecting just 16.9 percent of the votes against Corbyn’s 60 percent. In fact, Corbyn was so popular with rank-and-file Labour supporters that he got more votes than all the other contenders combined. Now he has to live up to the faith those voters put in him, but it’s an uphill struggle with the combined weight of the Establishment, the media and his own colleagues in Parliament, out for his blood.

Corbyn has, in my opinion, only one chance of success and that’s if if he steps outside the straightjacket of Parliament and works directly with his supporters. Perhaps ultimately, this might mean splitting the Labour Party in two (and not for the first time) but I doubt Corbyn has got the bottle to do that. It is, after all, an Institution. But as far as I’m concerned, it would be no great loss, in fact I view the Labour Party as an obstacle to real progress.

This is, after all, one of those extremely rare moments in our lives, when things change radically. A dislocation if you like, or revolution even, which is why I wonder whether Corbyn has the bottle or not to take a step into the unknown? 52% did, even if they didn’t know it at the time due to our devious and lying media.

Of course, there’s still no guarantee that a way won’t be found to either neutralize, reverse or rerun the Referendum, now that the awful reality of a Brexitized UK has sunk in. Awful, because that’s the way the elite want it to be and demonizing Corbyn as its cause is an essential part of it.

The issues go to the very heart of a broken economic and political system, not just our place in Europe. The next few weeks are critical.

And if this was not enough to raise the country’s blood pressure, next week we see the publication of the long-awaited (by some at least) Chilcot report on the Blair government’s murderous and illegal assault on Iraq. A report that has been delayed over and over again and is now more than two years past its original publication date.

Will it change anything? It all depends on its content, but which by now will have been well sanitised of anything truly incriminating for our present or past political class. But it adds to the overall sense of unease that permeates the country at this critical juncture in the downward spiral of capitalism.

[A lightly edited version of this was published in the latest issue of Coldtype, available here as a pdf]

Democracy no longer exists in the West. In the US powerful private interest groups, such as the military-security complex, Wall Street, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness and the extractive industries of energy, timber and mining, have long exercised more control over government than the people. But now even the semblance of democracy has been abandoned.

In the US Donald Trump has won the Republican presidential nomination. However, Republican convention delegates are plotting to deny Trump the nomination that the people have voted him. The Republican political establishment is showing an unwillingness to accept democratic outcomes.

The people chose, but their choice is unacceptable to the establishment which intends to substitute its choice for the people’s choice.

Do you remember Dominic Strauss-Kahn? Strauss-Kahn is the Frenchman who was head of the IMF and, according to polls, the likely next president of France. He said something that sounded too favorable toward the Greek people. This concerned powerful banking interests who worried that he might get in the way of their plunder of Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. A hotel maid appeared who accused him of rape. He was arrested and held without bail. After the police and prosecutors had made fools of themselves, he was released with all charges dropped. But the goal was achieved. Strauss-Kahn had to resign as IMF director and kiss goodbye his chance for the presidency of France.

Curious, isn’t it, that a woman has now appeared who claims Trump raped her when she was 13 years old.

Consider the political establishment’s response to the Brexit vote. Members of Parliament are saying that the vote is unacceptable and that Parliament has the right and responsibility to ignore the voice of the people.

The view now established in the West is that the people are not qualified to make political decisions. The position of the opponents of Brexit is clear: it simply is not a matter for the British people whether their sovereignty is given away to an unaccountable commission in Brussels.

Martin Schultz, President of the EU Parliament, puts it clearly: “It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate.”

The Western media have made it clear that they do not accept the people’s decision either. The vote is said to be “racist” and therefore can be disregarded as illegitimate.

Washington has no intention of permitting the British to exit the European Union. Washington did not work for 60 years to put all of Europe in the EU bag that Washington can control only to let democracy undo its achievement.

The Federal Reserve, its Wall Street allies, and its Bank of Japan and European Central Bank vassals will short the UK pound and equities, and the presstitutes will explain the decline in values as “the market’s” pronouncement that the British vote was a mistake. If Britain is actually permitted to leave, the two-year long negotiations will be used to tie the British into the EU so firmly that Britain leaves in name only.

No one with a brain believes that Europeans are happy that Washington and NATO are driving them into conflict with Russia. Yet their protests have no effect on their governments.

Consider the French protests of what the neoliberal French government, masquerading as socialist, calls “labor law reforms.” What the “reform” does is to take away the reforms that the French people achieved over decades of struggle. The French made employment more stable and less uncertain, thereby reducing stress and contributing to the happiness of life. But the corporations want more profit and regard regulations and laws that benefit people as barriers to higher profitability. Neoliberal economists backed the takeback of French labor rights with the false argument that a humane society causes unemployment. The neoliberal economists call it “liberating the employment market” from reforms achieved by the French people.

The French government, of course, represents corporations, not the French people.

The neoliberal economists and politicians have no qualms about sacrificing the quality of French life in order to clear the way for global corporations to make more profits. What is the value in “the global market” when the result is to worsen the fate of peoples?

Consider the Germans. They are being overrun with refugees from Washington’s wars, wars that the stupid German government enabled. The German people are experiencing increases in crime and sexual attacks. They protest, but their government does not hear them. The German government is more concerned about the refugees than it is about the German people.

Consider the Greeks and the Portuguese forced by their governments to accept personal financial ruin in order to boost the profits of foreign banks. These governments represent foreign bankers, not the Greek and Portuguese people.

One wonders how long before all Western peoples conclude that only a French Revolution complete with guillotine can set them free.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

Over the past fifty plus years, over 125 mass shootings/massacres have occurred within the United States but not one perpetrator has been identified as a trained member of an international Islamist terrorist organization.

A review of the massacres will shed considerable light on the political, cultural and socio-psychological features of US society.   The frequent and intensely bloody nature of these mass shootings are a distinctly US phenomenon.  The high proportion of fatalities over wounded survivors is a reflection of the availability of high-power weapons in the US and the poorly coordinated police response – where SWAT teams place ‘force protection’ over saving lives.

Method and Scope

Until very recently, civilian-initiated massacres were an infrequent phenomenon in US society up.  In order to understand the rise of civilian-initiated massacres as an Americanphenomenon, we will first set out approximately 20-year time frames, then list the number of massacres in each time period, examine the number of fatalities and the political and social ethos within each time frame.  It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatalities to wounded survivors in order to gauge the effectiveness of the police/medical response.

We can identify three time frames:  the early period between 1960-1980; the middle period between 1981-1998; the most recent period between 1999-2016.

Political Dynamics of Massacres

There is a clear and consistent increase in the number of massacres and fatalities over the entire half century.  From 1960 to 1980, there was one large massacre resulting in at least 14 fatalities and 32 wounded.

In the subsequent period between 1981-1998 the number of massacres jumped four-fold and the number of fatalities increased four-fold from fourteen to seventy-one.

In the most recent period (1999-2016) thenumber of massacres almost doubled again and the number of fatalities increased two and a half times.

The number of massacres and victims have ‘taken off’ in the last few years    There are grounds to believe that we have moved from massacres as ararity to a transitional period, to a significant upsurge which has become the ‘new norm’ for mass killings.

Myths : State Propaganda and Social Realities

Large, civilian-initiated massacres were rare(The Texas University Tower in 1967) during the two decades (1960-1980) despite this being a time of mass popular protest against the war and racism, cultural revolts, labor unrest and community-based collective action.

During these tumultuous years, the political-cultural climate encouraged mass collective action directed at changing government policy.  Individual political, social and local grievances or psycho-cultural resentments were channeled through well-structured community based organizations.  State propaganda was challenged by a widespread system of robust opposition media, well-publicized critical voices and familiar places of revolt.  Domestic massacres, when they occurred were more often perpetrated by the State – as in the massacres against the Black Panther leadership, or shooting of students at Jackson State and Kent State Universities.

The growth of civilian-initiated massacres as public events began to find prominence between 1980-1998, a time of growing elite dominance over everyday life and the retreat of collective expression.

This ‘middle’ or ‘transitional period’ was characterized by state and media emphasis on individual justifications and resentments, together with the growing cult of private greed– the ‘animal spirits’ of the market – and the promotion of military revivalism, through Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, and George Bush’s destruction of Panama and Iraq.

The previous political culture, which had absorbed grievances and offered outlets for individual aggression, was in retreat.

The elites, led by President Reagan, established the culture of the ‘Lone Ranger’ (or lone wolf), vindicating grievances with his ‘righteous rifle’.  The conflation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution with the worship of the lone vigilante helped to create the contemporary mass killer.

he political culture of resistance was replaced by the pathology of resentment; protests directed at political targets were replaced by violent terror directed at diffuse apolitical publics – the amorphous innocents.

The transition period established several key determinants that led to the subsequent massification of massacres.

First, the political-cultural elites  deliberately and systematically discredited the social context of mass popular protest, ridiculing popular discontent and suppressing dissent while enhancing the image of the power of the individual.  The cult of the ‘individual over the collective’ morphed into a deranged Ayn Randian Atlas with his semi-automatic 9 mm.

Secondly, the transitional political culture renewed and enhanced the role of state violence in resolving conflicts and extended the notion of social violence downward into the mass of society.

Under the guardianship of the political and media elites, the 1980’s and 1990’s did not encourage or permit any effective mass cultural alternative to violence.

The deregulation of the economy and the Clinton regime’s open-ended policy of conquest (or ‘regime changes’) through massive bombing of overseas adversaries led to a massive policing of both foreign (imperial clients) and domestic civil societies, which fed into the pathological tendencies of individuals who set out to vindicate their private grievances.

The first two decades of the 21^st century witnessed a sharp increase in domestic civilian-initiated massacres with an even greater proportion of fatalities.  The cumulative effects of mass murders of previous decades, found expression in a rising spiral of massacres.

The 21^st century is the epoch of multiple serial killings at every geographical region, from global, regional, national and local levels.  The bloody consequences of lawless imperial wars of aggression and pillage (with such psychotic justifications as ‘regime change’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’ especially under the First Clinton Dynastic Regime) are features of everyday life.  Military budgets have skyrocketed at the international and national level and are mirrored by multi-million arms purchases by individuals at the domestic civilian level.

Military metaphysics and quasi-religious public displays of superhuman ‘avengers’ wrapped in the national flag have permeated every cranny of society – from mega-million dollar sporting extravaganzas to school assemblies, business meetings (like the Rotary Clubs) and workplace gatherings.

Millions have entered the war zones; daily police killings of citizens, especially African American and marginalized youth, have become the norm.  Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of immigrants are demonized, assaulted, dragged from their homes or workplaces, incarcerated and deported with barely the shirt of their backs – leaving sundered families and communities.

Most important, the US imperial state has brutalized and, directly or indirectly, massacred millions of Muslim civilians, citizens of once-sovereign nations, throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa and even in the immigrant ghettos, raising lawlessness to a new and more diffuse level.

The pathology of the American state, with its embrace of state-sponsored massacres, has created mass psycho-phobia against Muslim people and is in the process of stirring up the boiling pot of even more brutal civilian massacres.  It must be emphasized that American citizens, overwhelmingly non-Muslim, have committed the vast majority of mass shooting in America.  Even those mass shooting committed by self-described Islamists have involved US-born Muslims or converts who have shown an affinity and commitment to the dominant gun ethos of America.  None have been ‘trained abroad’, none have proved to be ‘soldiers’ of some remote international Islamist movement.   Most have learned their requisite  ‘skills’ at ‘for-profit’ US shooting ranges and all have imbibed the national gun ideology over community and mass collective action.

Only two of the most recent seven large massacres have a remote link to Islam – and these assassins were not directly related to overseas, organized terrorist groups but had been ‘self-radicalized’ in the context of the individualist US gun culture.  Omar Mateen, who massacred scores of unarmed young, mostly Hispanic, people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida clearly had much more in common (spiritually and operationally) with the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik (who shot and killed over seventy youth at a multi-cultural summer camp in 2011) or with Adam Lanzo (who killed 20 small pupils and 6 teachers in Connecticut in 2012), than with any fighting units in Syria or Afghanistan.

Conclusion

The personal-political grievances of mass murderers have everything to do with their cultural and psychological isolation, resentment and deep spiritual commitment to the dominant arms culture of America:  these massacres have become theirself-prescribed psycho-therapy.  The dominant political and police institutions naturally use these for propaganda to advance the imperial agenda, rather than encourage positive collective expressions of grievances to address social issues.

Today there is no collective social expression with highly credible, committed mass activists as there had been during the 1960-70’s, when large-scale civilian initiated massacres were very rare.  The notorious 1967 mass shooting in Austin Texas by a former Marine champion sharpshooter (one shot per kill) was followed by meticulous expert examination of the circumstances and context.  Today, there are no political collective or community responses like that of the Texas tower sniper.  During the 1980-90’s, the elites encouraged and promoted voracious aggressions against rival markets and whole nations, which the financial press pundits have celebrated as expressions of the ‘animal spirits’, the triumph of the ‘fittest’, most individualistic capitalism.  From 2000 to the present, the mass media has saturated its audiences with military solutions to individual grievances.  The psychopathology of the mass murderers is reflected in the state writ-large.

FBI Transcript Shows Nobody Died in Orlando Shooting Until SWAT Teams Entered the Building: Judge Napolitano

By Tim Brown, June 30 2016

“Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.”

The US Problem with Immigration: Railroaded by the Supreme Court

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, June 30 2016

Immigration, blood source of the United States, its motor of development, has been rocked by judicial pronouncements of late. The Obama administration had put much stock in reforming the general approach to immigration in 2014, ostensibly employing a wide reading of executive power against the possible deportation.

Anti-Democratic Democrat Party Platform

By Stephen Lendman, June 30 2016

Republican and Democrat party policies consistently represent privileged Americans at the expense of most everyone else – notably since Bill and Hillary Clinton’s deplorable 1990s co-presidency.

Powerful Interest Groups Have Triumphed Over The Rule Of Law. Bill Clinton Meets up with Attorney General Loretta Lynch

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, June 30 2016

This from a reader: “It was reported this morning that recently the jet that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was on just happened to be on the same ramp as the one carrying  Bill Clinton.

Video: A U.K. Divided, a European Union Contested

By South Front, June 30 2016

On June 23rd Britain voted to leave the European Union by 52% to 48% in a national referendum. The outcome of the Brexit referendum has caused strong reaction at home and worldwide.

The US State Department spokesperson, Mark Toner, “partly, coincidentally” reissued the travel alert for Istanbul the day before the suicide bomb attacks in Istanbul’s Attaturk airport, that so far, have claimed 42 lives and left over 200 wounded.  As Mark Toner waffles through his explanation, one could say he protests too much?

“Three bombers opened fire to create panic outside the airport on Tuesday night, before two of them got inside and blew themselves up. Two hundred and thirty-nine people were wounded, officials said, giving a full account of the bloodshed.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the attackers shot at random to overcome security checks at the international terminal of Ataturk airport. One blew himself up in the departures hall, a second in arrivals, and the third outside.” — Reuters

These attacks followed, almost immediately, the renewed diplomatic ties between Turkey and Israel and Erdogan had also been making conciliatory gestures to clamber back into Russian good books after the Turkish shooting down of the Russian fighter jet on November 24th 2015.

While Erdogan refused to apologise for the incident, he has publicly expressed “regret”.

“Erdoğan said at a dinner to break the Ramadan fast on Monday night that he hoped that relations with Russia would quickly return to normal. Earlier on Monday, the Kremlin said Erdoğan had apologised to Putin over shooting down the jet. Turkish officials said, however, that Erdoğan had written to Putin to “express his regrets” and did not explicitly confirm he had said sorry.” — The Guardian

The United States and Turkey seem to be holding back on deciding which way the propaganda should go, not confirming that it is ISIS gives them the possibility to perhaps take the narrative in the direction of Erdogan’s arch enemy, the Kurds.

John Brennan, CIA director has been quoted as saying that the attack bears the hallmark of “ISIS depravity” but he is being uncharacteristically slow in igniting that particular fuse. Anonymous US sources have stated that US Intelligence does not have enough evidence to indicate ISIS involvement but also say that perhaps Turkey has evidence they are not aware of.  This is a very unfamiliar ambiguousness from both countries which may suggest they are not sure which way to run the storyline.

We should also always connect to other events running in parallel such as the release of the Republican’s Benghazi Report:

“President Obama has said his worst mistake was ‘failing to plan for the day after … intervening in Libya.’ As a result of this ‘lead from behind’ foreign policy, the Libyan people were forced to make the dismal trade of the tyranny of Qadhafi for the terror of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and others. Although the State Department considered Libya a grave risk to American diplomats in 2011 and 2012, our people remained in a largely unprotected, unofficial facility that one diplomatic security agent the committee interviewed characterized as ‘a suicide mission.” — Rep. Susan Brooks

The report has unearthed many pertinent facts implicating Hillary Clinton and Obama in a failure to sufficiently protect their diplomatic corps in Libya.

“To illustrate that point, the report details how there was confusion in U.S. intelligence circles about who ultimately came to the Americans’ rescue. Previous reports concluded it was a “quasi-government militia.” This report says it was a military unit loyal to the country’s former dictator. [Ghadaffi]” — Washington Post

Is this “terror attack” a distracting smokescreen to derail closer analysis of this report and its potentially far-reaching consequences for the Clinton election campaign?

Time will tell and reveal if these intelligence dots can be joined…in the meantime one does have to wonder how much advance warning the US have of all these alleged “terror attacks” and to what extent are they involved in the preparation and planning of these attacks via their multitude of proxies on the ground in Syria and Turkey, primed to execute a variety of murderous missions on command.

What should have been front page news everywhere, somehow got buried amid the official narrative we were given about the Orlando shooting.

Judge Andrew Napolitano told FOX News that an FBI transcript indicated that no one died until 05:13am Sunday morning when the police SWAT teams entered the building.

“Here’s what is news in the summary – nobody died until 05:13 in the morning, when the SWAT team entered. Prior to that no one had been killed. The 53 that were injured, and the 49 that were murdered all met their fates at the time of, and during, the police entry into the building,” Judge Napolitano said.

Consider that the narrative we have been given was that Omar Mateen entered the club around 02:00am on Sunday morning to begin his killing spree, so why was no one actually killed until 05:13am, over three hours later?

Here’s the official transcript.

https://www.fbi.gov/tampa/press-releases/2016/investigative-update-regarding-pulse-nightclub-shooting

So, this makes one question why the 911 call transcripts are being redacted and why the people are not being told the truth across the media about what really took place.

We have been told that 5 to 6 police officers were already in the club for 15 to 20 minutes or more prior to the SWAT teams’ entering.

So, what is the truth here?  Some claim that 05:13am is the time of death, but how is that when that suspect was not even down until 05:15am?  Could it be that some of the people in the club were shot by the SWAT team or by Mateen?  With nearly50 people dead and more wounded, how was Mateen able to get off that many shots?  I’m really curious.

Take a listen to the entrance of the SWAT team into the club.

If that was not enough, police officers have even admitted that they may have killed some of the people. WFAA reports:

Monday, Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.

“I will say this, that’s all part of the investigation,” Mina said. “But I will say when our SWAT officers, about eight or nine officers, opened fire, the backdrop was a concrete wall, and they were being fired upon.”

A law enforcement source close to the investigation who asked not to be named said a crowd of up to 300 people and the complex layout of the dance club may have resulted in some patrons being struck by gunfire from officers. (emphasis added)

GR Editor’s Note

According to Judge Napolitano (Fox News), the Orlando Police Department Timeline not only confirms that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team entered the building, it also confirms that the first shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am.

Within the scope of one minute, assaulted by the SWAT teams, the suspect according to the official narrative killed 49 people and injured 53. And this happened while the suspect was been fired at by the SWAT teams. In this regard, the OPD admits that some people were in fact killed by the SWAT teams as a result of a cross fire allegedly between the suspect and 8 or 9 SWAT officers. This important “detail” did not make the headlines of the MSM, i.e. that some of the victims were killed by SWAT officers.

The Reports are contradictory, first they say that the SWAT team was being fired upon by the suspect (see quote above) “who had hid in the bathroom”  and then they acknowledge that he was killed when the hostages started pouring out of the building:

“A cop rammed his Bearcat armored vehicle through the club wall. Hostages poured out. So did Mateen, guns blazing. With quick efficiency, officers shot him dead.”

Transcript of full  Naples Daily News Article (emphasis added)

ORLANDO — Omar Mateen, the killer who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State, hid in a bathroom at Pulse, a gay nightclub where he had slaughtered scores of people. [the killings took place after 5.13am according to OPD] A wall of cinder block separated him from a team of police officers outside. For three hours early Sunday morning, crisis negotiators tried to end the siege.

Then Mateen — whom police said had acted “cool and calm” during discussions — talked about killing more people [no shots fired according to OPD until 5.14am] Alarmed, police placed an explosive device against the wall and detonated it. The breach failed; the hole wasn’t large enough to allow for a successful rescue.

A cop rammed his Bearcat armored vehicle through the club wall. Hostages poured out. So did Mateen, guns blazing.

With quick efficiency, officers shot him dead. [AT 5.15am according to OPD]

So ended the worst armed massacre in American history: 49 victims were killed and 53 wounded.

Monday, Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.

“I will say this, that’s all part of the investigation,” Mina said. “But I will say when our SWAT officers, about eight or nine officers, opened fire, the backdrop was a concrete wall, and they were being fired upon.”

A law enforcement source close to the investigation who asked not to be named said a crowd of up to 300 people and the complex layout of the dance club may have resulted in some patrons being struck by gunfire from officers. 

Mina said his decision to enter the club with such violence was tough. “It was a hard decision to make, but it was the right decision,” he said. “Our No. 1 priority is on saving lives, and it was the right decision to make.”

Local, federal and state investigators continued to process the scene Monday from a collection of law enforcement mobile command units that lined South Orange in downtown Orlando. Authorities determined Mateen, 29, walked up to the club at 2:02 a.m. armed with an AR-15 rifle and a Glock handgun.

An off-duty police officer working at the club Sunday night was investigating an underage drinker outside when he heard gunshots inside, according to the law enforcement source. The off-duty officer ran inside the club and traded gunfire with Mateen, backed up soon by three other police officers, the source said.

The officers fired at Mateen, who retreated into a bathroom toward the rear of the club.

“Those additional officers made entry while the suspect was shooting,” Mina said. “They forced him to stop shooting and retreat to the bathroom where we believe he had several hostages.”

Mateen called 911 three times from a bathroom he shared with hostages and pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State, a terrorist group also known as ISIL or ISIS.

He called dispatchers twice and hung up before they called him back, the source said.

“He was in one bathroom fortified with hostages,” Mina said. “There were people in the opposing bathroom, about 15 or 20 people. And the details are unknown, they’re part of the investigation.”

Orlando police crisis negotiators were called to the club and spoke with Mateen three times. He remained calm during the talks, but he made clear that his plan was to kill more people, Mina said.

“Based off statements made by the suspect and based on information we received by the suspect and from the hostages and the people inside,” Mina said, “we believe further loss of life was imminent. I made the decision to commence the rescue operation and do the explosive breach.”

A SWAT team failed to topple the exterior wall leading to the bathroom that held 15 to 20 people, so Mina made the call to use the Bearcat.

Officers wore combat-grade body armor and helmets as they rammed the bathroom wall, creating a small hole — about 3 feet wide and 2 feet off the ground — so the captives could escape.

“We were able to rescue dozens and dozens of people who came out of that wall,” Mina said. “The suspect came out of that hole himself with a handgun and a long gun and engaged in a gunbattle with officers where he was ultimately killed.”

Mateen wielded an AR-15 and a semiautomatic handgun he had bought from a Port St. Lucie gun shop a week ago. He fired at officers, striking one of them in his helmet before he was shot several times and died.

Dozens of bullet holes dotted the exterior concrete wall, evidence of the shootout that included dozens of rounds fired by officers.

The last exchange of gunfire Mateen had with Orlando police and Orange County sheriff’s deputies occurred at 5 a.m. and ended a three-hour standoff.

Orlando officers walked into the nightclub and found lifeless club patrons strewn about a bar and lounge area. More bodies were found in a nearby bathroom.

Were the  victims shot by the SWAT teams or by Mateen who was shot at point blank at 5.15am (according to OPD report) while leaving the building together with the hostages? The Orlando Police Chief John Mina acknowledged that SWAT officers had accidentally shot people in the nightclub. 

The official story is that Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53.

And this allegedly took place –according to the OPD time line– in a lapse of 1-2 minutes before he was shot dead at 5.15am, while leaving the building

(M. Ch, GR Editor)

Andrew Peter Napolitano (born June 6, 1950) is the Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News Channel, commenting on legal news and trials, and is a syndicated columnist whose work appears in numerous publications, such as Fox News, The Washington Times, and Reason. Having served as a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, he now teaches constitutional law as a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn Law School. Napolitano has written nine books on constitutional, legal, and political subjects. (Wikipedia)

Last year was the worst year on record for the murder of environmental activists, and more killings took place in Brazil than in any other country in the world.

Activists across the globe are facing increasing violence as they stand up for the planet. An environmental defender was assassinated almost every other day in 2015, according to a new report from Global Witness.

Of those killed, a severely disproportionate number – 40 percent – were Indigenous People. And 50 of the 185 murders worldwide took place in Brazil.

Global Witness found that fights against mining projects, agribusiness expansion and the construction of new hydroelectric plants were the main causes of the killings. Not coincidentally, these are the three priority areas for the supposed development agenda of the Brazilian government.

Brazil is facing an escalation of violence in remote areas, and murderers often face no consequences. Almost all of the murders of environmental defenders in Brazil took place in the Amazon, where criminal activity is common. The lack of governance in the region victimizes the forest and its people.

Only days ago, a Greenpeace Brazil team conducted a flight over the Sawre Maybu Indigenous Land in the heart of the Amazon – home of the Munduruku Indigenous People – and found evidence of illegal logging and mining activities.

Just last week, there were clashes and deaths in three Brazilian states. In the state of Pará, Sergeant João Luiz de Maria Pereira was killed during an operation against illegal deforestation in the Jamanxim National Forest of Novo Progresso.

In Mato Grosso do Sul, a Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous Person was shot dead in a 70 farmer attack on a farm neighbouring the Tey’i Kue Indigenous Land. Six other Indigenous People were hospitalized with gunshot wounds, including a 12-year-old child.

And in Maranhão, the Ka’apor people of the Alto Turiaçú Indigenous Land live under constant threat of attack. To prevent the invasion of their land and forest destruction, they have begun monitoring and patrolling their territory, but this has upset farmers and loggers seeking to exploit it. According to organisations that support the Ka’apor people, farmers and loggers are planning to attack villages. Yet the government agencies responsible for the safety of Indigenous People and their territory are not taking action.

If the Brazilian government doesn’t immediately implement measures to address this growing violence – if it continues weakening the rights of Indigenous and traditional Peoples in the name of economic interests – there is no doubt that there will be more victims.

Environmental defenders are putting their lives at risk to protect their lands, forests and rivers against destructive industries. We must stand in solidarity with them – no matter where we are in the world.

You can start now. Stand with the Munduruku Indigenous People of Brazil, who are fighting to keep their traditional territory in the heart of the Amazon from being devastated by a massive dam.

Márcio Astrini is the public policy coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil.

Another version of this blog was posted by Greenpeace Brazil.

The U.S. military has again failed in one of the training programs it runs in support of fighting the Islamic State. Earlier training missions had failed to create competent and willing forces. Supplies for U.S. supported forces ended on the black markets or directly in the hands of the Islamic State. Is all this really incapability or is there some intent behind this?

Yesterday the U.S. created and supported New Syrian Army, a large gang of Salafists from Deir Ezzur, proudly announced that it was attacking the Islamic State at the Syrian-Iraqi border:

ISIS has gone on alert as US-backed rebels aim to advance toward the border town of Al-Boukamal in a bid to cut the jihadist group’s supply lines between Iraq and Syria.On Tuesday, the New Syrian Army announced the start of its campaign to gain control of Al-Boukamal, which lies across from the Iraqi border town of Al-Qaim deep behind ISIS’s main frontlines in eastern Syria.

Hours after the start of the offensive, the shadowy group active in remote stretches of the eastern Syrian desert seized the defunct Al-Hamdan airbase five-kilometers northwest of Al-Boukamal while fighting also raged overnight southwest of the border town, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The attacked town is 250 desert kilometers away from the only other New Syrian Armyposition at the Tanf border crossing. The forces were dropped by helicopters and had U.S. air support. These New Syrian Army fighters were trained In Jordan and newly equipped by U.S. and British special forces and are said to be led by “foreign airborne fighters”, likely Jordanian specialists.

Three coalition helicopters landed New Syrian Army troops approximately four-kilometers west of Al-Boukamal on Tuesday, according to the SOHR, as coalition airstrikes in the meantime targeted ISIS north of the town.The New Syrian Army also claimed its forces were airdropped, saying their troops “landed behind enemy lines” after which they took the Al-Hamdan airport and nearby village, which are located northwest of Al-Boukamal.

According to a statement issued Wednesday morning by the group, its fighters also seized “the Al-Husaybah area and border crossing [outside the town] as well and the southern southern desert and the whole eastern regions in the vicinity of Abu Kamal.”

The US-backed force further claimed that “sleeper cells of rebel clans in the Al-Boukamal countryside facilitated the advance of our troops.”

Reuters reports that the U.S. supported this attack in a way it usually ascribes to the Russians:

U.S.-led coalition jets fired missiles at the town’s Aisha hospital used by Islamic State ..

We are waiting for Human Rights Watch’s urgent condemnation of this outrageous war-crime …

One assumes that such a large operation is well prepared with thought out fire-plans, good intelligence and extensive logistic support. Fresh, well trained troops with the best available equipment, and with surprise on their side, should have had no real trouble to prevail in such an attack.

But the whole operation failed terribly within just a few hours A total fiasco.

The Islamic State killed five “spies” in Al-Boukamal who were allegedly working for the New Syrian Army. It killed some 40 NSA troops during fighting and wounded some 15. It seized 6 brand new U.S. supplied trucks with miniguns and another 6 trucks with ammunition as well as satellite telephones. The rest of the New Syrian Army retreated to the defunct airbase they had started at and are waiting for exfiltration.

If this was a mission to resupply the Islamic State it indeed had some success. Otherwise it was another very embarrassing failure, not only for the New Syrian Army but of the professional militaries that trained and supported it.

One wonders what the highly paid U.S. military has been doing here. How can such an attack, with all advantages on the side of the U.S. proxies, fail? The British government orders its air force to bomb the Islamic State only when such “success” is need for some (inner-)political event. Is the U.S. way to “fight” similar? Is this intentional failure or sheer incompetence? Does the U.S. really want to fight the Islamic State? Or is this all just obfuscation?

Fully 81 percent of the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) supported Tuesday’s motion of no-confidence in leader Jeremy Corbyn. Just 40 Labour MPs voted against the motion, with 172 in favour. Thirteen did not vote at all and there were four spoilt ballots.

The extraordinary scale of the right-wing coup, which had already seen Corbyn lose most of his shadow cabinet in a series of timed resignations, was intended to force the Labour leader to resign. But in a statement put out moments after the result, Corbyn said that he had been elected “by 60 percent of Labour members and supporters” only last September, and “I will not betray them by resigning.”

The no-confidence motion, he said, has “no constitutional legitimacy.”

Corbyn is correct in that the motion is non-binding and there are no constitutional provisions in Labour’s rulebook for a leader to stand down in the event of such a vote. But his opponents are not merely indifferent, but viciously opposed to party democracy. They aim to overturn the result of last September’s election, which saw Corbyn decisively win the leadership on a ticket of opposing austerity and war.

These events shatter Corbyn’s claim that the party can be “reclaimed” for working people. They make clear that Labour is a right-wing party of the state, deeply hostile to the working class and even to its own membership.

The seismic shock of last Thursday’s referendum vote in favour of Britain quitting its membership of the European Union has provided the trigger for these moves. With the contest for the Conservative Party leadership opening today and a snap general election possible in the autumn, the PLP clique that controls the Labour Party is acting in concert with the highest levels of the state.

Their motivation is not their professed concern that Corbyn could not win a general election, but their fear that he very well might. Under conditions of the gravest crisis for Britain’s ruling elite since the Second World War, the bourgeoisie will not tolerate a potential prime minister professing an anti-austerity, anti-militarist agenda. They want to ensure that Labour—the main political obstacle to socialism in Britain for more than a century—is completely reliable in carrying through the onslaught against the working class now being prepared.

On June 13, 10 days before the EU referendum, the Telegraph’s political correspondent, Ben Riley-Smith, set out precisely the scenario that has now unfolded. “Labour rebels,” he wrote, were preparing to topple Corbyn after the referendum in a 24-hour media “blitz.”

“By fanning the flames with front bench resignations and public criticism, they think the signatures needed to trigger a leadership race can be gathered within a day,” he said.

Within hours of the referendum result, by midday Friday, Dame Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey MP had submitted the no-confidence motion against Corbyn. This was followed early Sunday morning by Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn informing Corbyn that he had no confidence in his leadership, leading to his sacking.

Beginning Monday morning, the wave of resignations by shadow cabinet MPs was underway. Charging that Corbyn had not done enough to ensure a Remain vote in the referendum—despite 64 percent of Labour supporters backing staying in the EU—more than 50 resigned their posts in less than 48 hours. Such was the febrile atmosphere in the PLP that there were wild and false allegations that Corbyn had personally voted to leave the EU.

Late Monday, the Financial Times demanded that the party “now act to remove Jeremy Corbyn.” Regardless of party rules and members’ desires, the PLP must “press ahead” and “spell out to the whole Labour movement the consequence of the false path the party has embarked upon.”

On Tuesday morning, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror led its front page with a call for Corbyn to “step down for the good of the party and the country.”

Corbyn was left to frantically seek replacements for the resigned shadow cabinet ministers, but he could not command sufficient support to fill the vacancies. Two members of his newly reshuffled shadow cabinet, Rachael Maskell and Rob Marris, abstained in the no-confidence motion.

Ian Murray, former shadow Scottish secretary, is among those who quit the front benches. He is Labour’s sole Scottish MP after the party was all but wiped out in last year’s general election. Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale joined the calls for Corbyn to quit, and Lord Foulkes, chairman of the Scottish PLP, said no Scottish politician would be prepared to sit in a Corbyn-led shadow cabinet.

These moves are deeply unpopular. More than 224,000 people have so far signed an online petition defending Corbyn. On Monday night, 10,000 protested in Parliament Square in support of the Labour leader. But right-wing Blairites have lined up to insist that this support—which they deride as consisting of “Trotskyites” and “Stalinists”—is illegitimate.

Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, said that Labour had become a Corbynite “sect” and a “cult,” made up of supporters of hard-left parties. Campbell called on those wanting to oust Corbyn to sign up as Labour supporters in preparation for a leadership challenge. A campaign, #SavingLabour, has been set up to recruit new members on this basis.

Former shadow business secretary Angela Eagle is today expected to announce her challenge to Corbyn’s leadership if he does not resign. Her candidacy, some on the right hope, would rally the majority of the PLP and effectively block Corbyn from even running in a leadership contest, as he does not have the support of the 50 MPs required for placement on the ballot. Corbyn’s supporters say that this is also unconstitutional, because, as serving leader, he automatically has the right to be on the ballot.

So far, Corbyn seems to retain the backing of the major trade unions, which are Labour’s main financial base. Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union, the single largest donor, said that the behaviour of the PLP was “extraordinary” and that “if anyone wants to change the Labour leadership, they must do it openly and democratically through an election, not through resignations and pointless posturing.”

But such statements are lukewarm. And even if these blatantly anti-democratic moves fail and Corbyn is able to run, the PLP has made clear they will not serve under him if he wins again.

Hence the open calls for a split by the right. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett said Corbyn’s supporters should leave Labour and “set up their own party with Momentum,” the “grassroots” organisation set up to support Corbyn after his leadership victory.

Behind such demands, preparations are being made for a “national unity” government. Writing in the Telegraph, John McTernan indicated what is being discussed behind the scenes. The issue of EU membership had split the country and all the parties, he wrote, requiring a “government capable of rising to the challenges the country faces.” The solution was a “grand coalition” along German lines.

The ideal would be to take the “ultra-left rump of the Labour Party” around Corbyn and “demerge them into a separate party.”

The Conservative party could then be split into “pro- and anti-Brexit camps.” This would see “Tory modernisers” join with the majority of Labour MPs in a “progressive party of the radical centre” that could incorporate the remaining Liberal Democrats into an “opposition of national unity.”

After nearly a decade of engineering work on the project, the Panama Canal’s expansion opened for business on June 26.

At the center of that business, a DeSmog investigation has demonstrated, is a fast-track export lane for gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States. The expanded Canal in both depth and width equates to a shortened voyage to Asia and also means the vast majority of liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers — 9-percent before versus 88-percent now — can now fit through it.

Emails and documents obtained under open records law show that LNG exports have, for the past several years, served as a centerpiece for promotion of the Canal’s expansion by the U.S. Gulf of Mexico-based Port of Lake Charles.

And the oil and gas industry, while awaiting the Canal expansion project’s completion, lobbied for and achieved passage of a federal bill that expanded the water depth of a key Gulf-based port set to feed the fracked gas export boom.

Control of the Panama Canal by U.S. big business and Wall Street has, for over a century, served as a focal point of U.S. foreign policy in the Americas.

While no longer in de facto control of the isthmus as it was during the days of the Panama Canal Zone, Jill Biden’s presence as part of an official Presidential Delegation at the expanded Canal’s opening ceremony symbolized the importance of the waterway and de jure role of the U.S. government in pushing for its expansion over the past several years. So too did the attendance of the U.S. military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

And in turn, the reported participation of LNG exports giant Cheniere Energy at the kick-off serves as a portrayal of the importance of the Canal’s expansion to the oil and gas industry. The Panama Canal Authority estimates that 20 million tons of LNG may pass through on an annual basis.

“The volume projected by the Panama Canal Authority represents about 8 percent of global LNG trade and is equivalent to nearly 300 ships a year,” Bloomberg explained.

In a press release announcing the Canal expansion’s opening, LNG shipments receive a prominent mention.

“We are thrilled that we currently have 170 reservations for Neopanamax ships, commitments of two new liner services to the Expanded Canal, and a reservation for the first LNG vessel, which will transit in late July,” Jorge Quijano, CEO of the Panama Canal Authority, stated in the release. “Our customers care that their supply chain is reliable and that they have a diversity of shipping options. And the Canal has always been reliable; today, we offer the world new shipping options and trade routes.”

It has taken a rigorous lobbying and influence peddling effort by the oil and gas industry to make the looming first LNGshipment through the Canal a reality.

Lake Charles LNG MOUs

In January 2015, Port of Lake Charles officials signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Panama Canal Authority officials.

The MOU explicitly mentions the role the Canal could play in opening up the global spigot for LNG exports and a fast-lane to Asia. A sign of the importance of the Canal’s expansion to Asia, the Japan Bank for International Corporation signed a loan agreement with the Panama Canal Authority in December 2008 for $800 million. Japan, in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, has shifted its energy portfolio in the direction of increased reliance on natural gas and LNG imports.

Image Credit: Port of Lake Charles

Officials involved with the effort signed the MOU at the Louisiana-based Port of Lake Charles in an event that featured invitations sent out to executives of the seven Lake Charles-based LNG companies. In the aftermath of signing the MOU, Quijano held a meeting with the LNG company representatives present at the ceremony.

Image Credit: Port of Lake Charles

The Port of Lake Charles houses the approved Sempra LNG facility and the proposed Trunkline LNG and Magnolia LNG facilities.

Matt Young — then the public relations director for the O’Carroll Group public relations firm and current public information officer for the City of Lake Charles — wrote the talking points for the MOU ceremony for Port of Lake Charles officials. At the time and as of April, O’Carroll oversaw the public relations and marketing work for the Magnolia LNG.

Industry Lobbies to Re-engineer Sabine

Beyond the MOU with Lake Charles, the oil and gas industry also used its lobbying prowess to win federal tax dollars that would go toward deepening and re-engineering ports and key coastal waterways in service to industrial interests such as LNGexports. They did so via the Water Resources Reform and Development Act of 2014 (H.R. 3080).

Those lobbying for H.R. 3080 included the likes of LNG trader Koch Industries, LNG industry giant BG Group (now owned by Shell), Sempra Energy (owner of the Lake Charles-based Sempra LNG facility), Independent Petroleum Association of America(IPAA), American Petroleum Institute (API), BP America and ExxonMobil.

BP, Bloomberg has reported, is set to send the first LNG tanker through the Panama Canal in July.

The bill “includes the deepening of the Sabine-Neches Waterway to 48 feet from its current 40 feet. The entire bill is for 34 projects across the country with a price tag of $12 billion,” explained the Beaumont Enterprise. “The Sabine-Neches project, listed first in the bill, would be funded at $748 million and is 75 percent of the project cost.”

Sabine-Neches connects to Cheniere’s Sabine Pass LNG facility, ExxonMobil’s proposed Golden Pass LNG facility and Sempra’s LNG facility. According to the Sabine-Neches Navigation District website, the Waterway is “projected to become the largest LNGexporter in the United States.”

In a PowerPoint presentation from August 2012, the Sabine-Neches Navigation District boasted that it could soon become “Texas’ first Panama Canal ready Port.”

Image Credit: Sabine-Neches Navigation District 

A May 2014 article published by Bloomberg overtly links the bill’s passage with the expansion of both the Panama Canal and the Sabine-Neches Waterway.

“House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on a bill that would authorise deepening several US ports ahead of the expansion of the Panama Canal and the bigger ships that will use it,” reads the article. “The Port Arthur area is home to the southern end of the Keystone XL pipeline. Deepening the port will reduce shipping costs for oil and natural gas processed there by Exxon Mobil, Total and Cheniere Energy.”

BG Group, which lobbied for the port expansion legislation, said in its quarter four 2010 investor call that the opening of the Panama Canal means more trade and business opportunities for the company.

“Stolen Property”

In a July 2015 article published in Platts, a Panama Canal Authority official stated that he expects relatively little LNG export-centric traffic in the Canal through about 2020, as Gulf of Mexico-based terminals await approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

“The first two years of operations [after the 2016 expansion] we expect few transits per year because only one export terminal from the Gulf of Mexico will be operational,” the Canal official told Platts. “As more terminals come online, traffic of LNGcarriers should pick up after 2016…until reaching around three transits per day after 2020.”

Oscar Bazán, the Panama Canal’s executive vice president for planning and development, recently told The Wall Street Journal that by 2020, LNG tankers could be the main cargo sailing through the Canal.

Like the story of the Panama Canal’s expansion and the myriad LNG tankers which soon may pass through it, the Canal’s origins tie back to lobbying and the realization of corporate and Wall Street interests. This was noted in a 1903 editorial penned by The New York Times.

“In order rightly to understand what we are doing we must acknowledge to ourselves that this territory through which we are to build the canal is stolen property, that our partners in the theft are a group of canal promoters and speculators and lobbyists,” opined The Times, proceeding to write that whether the U.S. goes through with the deal or not “the world will get a true measure of the American conscience.”

Given the life-cycle greenhouse gas impacts of fracking and shipping LNG across the planet for climate change in today’s context, it could reasonably be argued that what the U.S. and industry are doing this time around is unconscionable.

This from a reader:

“It was reported this morning that recently the jet that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was on just happened to be on the same ramp as the one carrying  Bill Clinton.

“And somehow each party apparently knew of the presence of the other.

“And they were in close enough proximity that Bill and Loretta met privately in one of the jets.

“The FBI (a department under the AG) is investigating Hillary’s emails as  a criminal violation of the espionage act and the funding of the Clinton Foundation by foreign interests.

“Seems to me that this is more than coincidental and is highly irregular for a prosecuting official to meet privately with a potential defendant—or husband of a potential defendant.

“Wonder who’s jet they met on? Did the AG go to Bill’s jet? Wouldn’t that be particularly unusual? Did Bill go over to the AG’s jet, and if so why would the AG allow it and precipitate such a conflict of interests?”

Here is confirmation that this meeting did occur: 

There was a half hour meeting on the AG’s plane. Watch the news video from ABC 15:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/06/ag-loretta-lynch-half-hour-meeting-bill-clinton-airplane-says-talked-grandchildren-video/ 

http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/loretta-lynch-bill-clinton-meet-privately-in-phoenix

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

The memorandum by 51 State Department officials calling for U.S. military intervention in Syria has been treated in news media coverage as a case of “dissent” from existing Syria policy by individual officials involved in Syria policy.

But the memo has all the earmarks of an initiative that had the blessing of the most senior officials in the department – including Secretary of State John Kerry himself – rather than having been put together by individual officials entirely on their own. And it may mark the beginning of an effort to take advantage of the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

The memo called for a “more militarily assertive US role” in the Syrian conflict in the form of “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed US-led diplomatic process.“  That is precisely the policy option that Secretary of State Kerry has been widely reported to have championed privately for years. As the story in the New York Times, which published the supposedly confidential memo, noted, “[H]igher-level State Department officials are known to share their concerns.”

The submission of the memo through the State Department’s “dissent channel” appears to have been a device to make it appear entirely independent of senior officials in the department. According to the State Department regulation on the “dissent channel,” it is to be used only when dissenting views “cannot be communicated in a full and timely manner through regular operating channels or procedures” or “in a manner which protects the author from any penalty, reprisal, or recrimination.”

But there is no reason to believe that the officials in question had any problem in expressing their views on Obama’s Syria policy over the years. The names of the signatories were not included in the document published by the New York Times, but all 51 officials claimed to have been directly involved in the making or implementation of Syria policy, according to the report. That would certainly encompass the vast majority of those who have worked on Syria over the past five years. It is inconceivable that those officials have not participated in innumerable policy discussions on Syria in which their personal views were freely expressed.

The Kerry Line

The supposed dissenters knew very well, moreover, that Kerry has been advocating essentially the same policy they were articulating for years. Kerry began making the case for sending large-scale, heavy weapons to armed opposition groups and carrying out cruise missile strikes against the Assad regime’s air force in 2013. He continued to advocate that military option in meetings with the President, only to be rebuffed, according to the account by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published in April.

Obama became so irritated by Kerry’s recommendations for cruise missile strikes in Syria that he decreed that only the Secretary of Defense would be permitted to recommend the use of force.

Since mid-2013, Kerry has been the leading figure in a political-bureaucratic coalition favoring a more aggressive military and covert action role in Syria. The coalition also includes the CIA’s National Clandestine Services and civilian leaders in the Pentagon who are loath to see the United States cooperating with Russia and relying on its military power in Syria.

The arguments made by the purported dissenters are in line with some of Kerry’s public talking points. Although he has not call for U.S. attacks on Assad’s forces explicitly, Kerry has strongly hinted that there is little or no hope for progress in the political talks on Syria without some U.S. leverage on Assad. The memo sounds the same theme: “While the regime maintains the advantage,” the authors aver, “an undeterred [Assad] will resist compromises sought by almost all opposition factions and regional actors.”

Kerry frequently reiterates in public statements that the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or Daesh) cannot be defeated as long as long as Assad remains in power. The memo echoes his argument, asserting: “The prospects for rolling back Daesh’s hold on territory are bleak without the Sunni Arabs, who the regime continues to bomb and starve.”

The Nusra Question

The memo presents missile strikes as a way of responding to Assad’s “egregious violations of the ceasefire.” The idea that Assad is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire, which ignores the well-documented fact that many of the groups that Kerry calls the “legitimate opposition” openly sided with al-Nusra Front (Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate) in deliberately and massively breaking the ceasefire, is also part of the Kerry State Department public posture.

The memo never even mentions the problem of al-Nusra Front and the risk that the use of U.S. force to change the military balance between the opposition and the regime would risk an ultimate victory by the jihadists.

One point in the memo sounds very much like an argument intended to be leaked to the media in order to dramatize the case for war against the Assad regime. “None of us see or has seen merit in a large-scale US invasion of Syria or the sudden collapse of existing Syrian institutions,” it says.

Since no one in the administration is advocating a “large-scale US invasion” or the “sudden collapse” of the Syrian state, that sentence was clearly calculated to influence public opinion rather than to convince anyone in the State Department of the need for the use of force.

Kerry made no effort to hide his pleasure with the “Dissent Memo,” telling a reporter on June 20 that the memo was “good” and that he intended to meet with its authors. His spokesman John Kirby said he would not characterize Kerry’s comments as “indicative of a full-throated endorsement of his views” in the memo – an obvious hint that it was consistent with Kerry’s views.

Kirby went on to say that State Department is “discussing other alternatives, other options, mindful … that the current approach is, without question, struggling.” After Kerry’s meeting with 10 members of the group on June 21, Kirby refused to say whether Kerry agreed with the signatories, citing the need “to respect the confidentiality” of the “dissent channel” process.

Clinton Group Backs Memo

The leak of the memo coincided with the advocacy of the same military option by a Washington think tank with ties to Hillary Clinton. On June 16, the very day the New York Times published the story of the leaked memo by State Department officials, the Center for New American Security (CNAS) released a report on a study group on defeating the Islamic State that called for a U.S. policy to “threaten and execute limited strikes against the Assad regime,” to signal to Assad as well Russia and Iran that it is “willing to get more engaged.” The same report called for dispatching “several thousand” U.S. troops to Syria.

The study group was co-chaired by CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, formerly third-ranked Defense Department official, although the report was written by lower-level CNAS staff members. Since leaving the Obama administration in 2009, Flournoy has been critical of its defense policy and is now regarded as the most likely choice for Defense Secretary in a Hillary Clinton administration.

Clinton is clearly sympathetic to the military option in the leaked memo. The timing of the appearance of both documents immediately after Clinton had clinched the nomination suggests that the bureaucratic figures behind the push for a new war in Syria are seeking to take advantage of the Clinton presidential run to build public support for that option.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This article originally appeared at Middle East Eye, http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/syria-dissent-memo-and-us-bureaucratic-pressure-strategy-440534043]

European Union officials adopted a hard line against David Cameron on Tuesday at the final EU summit to be attended by the outgoing British prime minister. The meeting was called in response to last week’s referendum vote for a British exit from the EU. Prior to the summit, European and British officials traded bitter attacks in the European parliament, underscoring the intention of the major EU powers to punish the UK for voting to leave the union.

Cameron has announced he will step down after the ruling Conservative Party’s annual conference in October, leaving it to his successor to invoke Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, triggering negotiations on the terms of Britain’s exit. Once Article 50 is invoked, a country leaving the EU has two years to renegotiate all treaties and other agreements with the EU before they lapse.

No agreement between Cameron and top EU officials on the Brexit crisis emerged from a working dinner, whose attendees included EU Council President Donald Tusk and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. The EU decided to exclude Britain from a second day of talks, though Britain is still technically an EU member state, and Cameron went home empty handed.

Arriving at the EU summit, Cameron asked European officials to be “as constructive as possible” with Britain’s next prime minister. “These countries are our neighbours, our friends, our allies, our partners, and I very much hope we’ll seek the closest possible relationship in terms of trade and cooperation and security, because that is good for us and that is good for them,” Cameron said. “And that’s the spirit in which the discussions I think will be held today.”

On the contrary, leading EU officials, starting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had the previous day issued a series of statements pressing for a rapid and punitive exit of Britain from the EU.

In an official address to the German parliament (Bundestag), Merkel adopted a harsh position vis-a-vis Great Britain. She said German officials were “conscious” that Great Britain “does not yet want to file” for Article 50. However, she continued, Great Britain should “be conscious that there can be no negotiations or preliminary discussions so long as the Article 50 procedures have not been launched.”

Barely concealing the implied threat in her remarks, the chancellor added, “I can only advise our British friends not to fool around as they prepare to take the decisions that must be taken in Great Britain.” Merkel stressed that even though Britain is one of “the closest allies in NATO,” Germany and the EU would negotiate with Britain “on the basis of their own interests.” She said Berlin would “orient its policy around the interests of German citizens and businesses.”

In an especially provocative part of her speech, which was applauded by all the parties present in the German parliament, Merkel said: “We should make sure that the negotiations do not proceed on the basis of cherry-picking. It must make and it will make a noticeable difference whether a country wants or refuses to be a part of the EU family. Anyone who wants to leave this family cannot expect that as all the responsibilities of EU membership are removed, all the rights remain.”

Merkel cited the so-called Lisbon Strategy, formulated in 2000, which called for establishing the EU economically and politically as a world power, to justify pushing for an independent EU foreign and military policy: “We all see that the world faces deep unrest. Also in Europe, we face the consequences of oppression, crises, conflicts, and wars in our immediate neighbourhood. There are foreign and security policy challenges that we Europeans must unfortunately take up …”

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem echoed Merkel’s hard line, making clear that the EU intended Britain’s exit from the EU to damage that country’s international trade. He attacked Nigel Farage, the head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), saying Farage was “living in his own world” if he thought Brexit meant Britain would be able to trade on better terms with the EU. Dijsselbloem chided that Farage “thinks Britain is still a world-spanning empire and can dictate everything, and it’s not going to happen like that.”

Reporting on the working dinner he had had with Cameron and Juncker, EU Council President Tusk confirmed that the EU aimed to inflict serious economic damage on Britain, even at the cost of provoking a global recession, in order to make an example of Britain for voting to leave the bloc. EU officials at the dinner made clear, Tusk said, “that Brexit means substantially lower growth in the UK, with a possible negative spillover all over the world.”

The European parliament voted a resolution calling upon Britain to rapidly invoke Article 50 and begin negotiations, following a chaotic parliamentary session dominated by aggressive statements by Farage and EU Commission President Juncker.

Farage called for a “grown-up and sensible attitude to how we negotiate a different relationship,” but then denounced the European parliamentarians to their face, saying, “Most of you have never done a proper job in your lives.” He launched into an anti-immigrant diatribe against Merkel for allowing Middle Eastern refugees into Europe, and called the euro currency a “failure,” adding, “As a policy to impose poverty in Greece and the rest of the Mediterranean, you have done very well.”

Juncker, for his part, turned on UKIP parliamentarians who applauded a statement calling for respect for the Brexit referendum vote and told them to leave Brussels. He snapped: “That’s the last time you are applauding here… To some extent I am really surprised that you are here. You were fighting for the exit, the British people voted in favour of the exit. Why are you here?”

The EU’s vindictive policy toward Britain and the escalating conflicts between British and EU officials shed light on the deep divisions that have built up throughout the EU, especially since the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity policies imposed in its aftermath. Now, tensions are exploding not only between Britain and Brussels, but throughout the EU.

On Monday, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski blamed “the leadership of the European Union” for “mistakes,” and said that “at least a part of the European leadership should suffer the consequences.” He called the Brexit vote a “defeat,” and demanded that “new politicians and experts… work on new proposals for both Great Britain and Europe.” He announced that Poland might present “radical” proposals at the EU summit, including “a new European treaty” that would give “the main power in the EU to the European Council, not the Commission.”

The right-wing and notoriously anti-Russian governments in Poland and the Baltic countries regard Brexit as a threat that could not only weaken the military buildup against Russia before the upcoming NATO summit in Poland, but also undermine the NATO Alliance as a whole. Arriving in Brussels and asked by reporters about the possibility that Britain in the end might turn around and decide to stay in the EU, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite took a noticeably different line from Merkel, saying, “Welcome, welcome back!”

After meeting US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made clear that the military alliance does not want a change in its relationship with London. “The UK is a strong and committed ally, responsible for almost one-quarter of defence spending among European NATO allies,” he declared, adding, “The Warsaw Summit will be important for the whole of Europe because we will make decisions on deterrence and defence, on projecting stability to our neighborhood, and on how we can enhance and further strengthen cooperation with the EU.”

“Our job is to pass the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party” – Bernie Sanders campaign statement

“[This is] the most ambitious and progressive platform our party has ever seen” – Maya Harris, Clinton policy adviser

The Sanders campaign has more than enough principled reasons to resist conventional political wisdom and carry on its campaign at least into convention floor fights and street demonstrations, not least because Democrats are acting as if they want only to co-opt Sanders supporters and send the Sanders political revolution down the memory hole.

Taken together, the two comments above frame the Democrats’ attempt at a “Mission Accomplished” moment for the party’s platform draft for 2016. Anyone who wants to read the full text and judge it independently is asking for too much participatory democracy. The Democratic National Committee online offers only two platforms, both from 2015. The Democratic National Convention online offers a press release summarizing the 30-page platform draft, but not the document itself. The apparent purpose of this approach is to persuade people that the party has taken Bernie Sanders into the fold and his followers should now fall in love and fall in line with the Democratic Party. And that’s the spin the party got in early coverage from the Washington Post, Associated Press, N.Y. Daily News, CNN (“Clinton campaign hails progressive Democratic platform”), The Hill, and others.

Conventional wisdom has it that party platforms are not to be taken all that seriously, since politicians are notorious for breaking promises, and platforms aren’t binding on candidates anyway. But what about the circumstance where the party platform is made up not only of promises, but of many real and veiled threats? How seriously should we take that? Robert Reich suggests that Hillary Clinton’s lack of a progressive vision for the country enhances the chances of a Donald Trump presidency.

No wonder, then, that the Democratic Party is working to create the image of a progressive party where there is none. DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz thanked the platform committee for “a platform draft that advances our party’s progressive ideals and is worthy of our great country.” Platform Drafting Committee Chair Rep. Elijah Cummings said, “The draft platform we have produced in an open and transparent manner reflects our priorities as Democrats and demonstrates our vision for this nation.” To support these claims, the DNC press release highlights “key progressive policies” in the platform draft, some of which are perennial promises of pie-in-the-sky coming closer to earth. It also leaves out some things that progressives might find important. The following checklist, based on limited available information, is necessarily incomplete in the absence of the 30-page platform draft itself. And in any event, the meaningfulness of any of these platform planks (or omissions) is dependent on the will of a party that has been becoming less and less progressive for thirty years.

Jobs. It’s “the most ambitious jobs plan on record,” and the sky is full of pie. Focus on restoring infrastructure and revitalizing decaying communities seems encouraging, but that’s about as specific as it gets.

Minimum Wage. The committee said a minimum wage of $15 an hour is a nice idea, but rejected the Sanders proposal to actually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. The Clinton members of the committee also rejected indexing any minimum wage to inflation.

Education. For public schools, the platform “reaffirmed Democrats’ commitment to supporting teachers, schools and communities.” Re-thinking federal mandates, not so much. College education for all who qualify, even less. Eliminating (or just mitigating) student debt, not at all.

Death Penalty. “This is the first time in the Democratic Party’s history” that it has called for abolishing the death penalty. A little late, but all the same progress from 1992, when Bill Clinton found it politically expedient to rush back to Arkansas to make sure his state killed a retarded man.

Trade: “Existing deals must be continuously re-examined and enforcement of those existing agreements must be tougher.” Not tough enough now, with TransCanada suing the US under NAFTA for delaying their Keystone XL pipeline? Not a word about that. And not a word about the pending TPP(Trans-Pacific Partnership), opposed by Sanders, sort of opposed by Clinton, but supported by President Obama, so the committee felt politically hog-tied and punted (if you can imagine such contortions). The platform says, “A higher standard [undefined] must be applied to any future trade agreements.” Really?

Earned Income Tax Credit. The DNC calls this “looking out for working people,” and it helps, but not in day-to-day living, only once a year. Expanding it is a feel-good idea with minimal real impact.

Wall Street Reform. The platform promises expanded regulatory controls, like the ones the party refused to adopt when it could in 2009-2010. The platform hints at adopting a “modernized” Glass-Steagall Act, the one the party abolished to make the crash of 2007 possible, if not inevitable. And the party dangles the bait of breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions that threaten economic stability, a break-up the Obama administration made sure didn’t happen. The platform appears to ignore “private equity” threats entirely.

Multi-Millionaire Surtax. The platform is long on rhetoric (“ensuring millionaires can no longer pay a lower [tax] rate than their secretaries”), but short on specifics. Wealth disparity, in any form, is not addressed.

Expanding Social Security. The platform first promises to “fight every effort to cut, privatize, or weaken Social Security,” but neglects to mention restoring cost-of-living increases. The committee adopted an amendment promising to expand Social Security, paying for the expansion by taxing annual incomes above $250,000 (roughly five times the American median household income)

Immigration. The platform draft specifically supports “keeping families together, ending family detention, closing private detention centers, and guaranteeing legal counsel for all unaccompanied minors in immigration proceedings,” as well as “comprehensive immigration reform” without other specifics. The platform is silent on deportation, which has been higher under President Obama than any previous president.

Universal Healthcare. Reiterating its decades-old assertion that “health care is a right,” the platform promotes the Affordable Care Act as a success to build on. The committee, like the president in 2009, explicitly rejected single-payer, Medicare-for-all, despite its manifest popularity and superiority over any other available plan. The Clinton people would have none of it. Universal health care is not even serious pie-in-the-sky.

Honoring Tribal Nations. The committee “unanimously adopted the most comprehensive language ever in the party’s platform recognizing our moral and legal responsibility to honor the sovereignty of and relationship to Indigenous tribes – and acknowledge previous failures to live up to that responsibility.” That’s it, no specifics. No promise to clean up uranium contamination on Navajo land, for example.

Climate Change And Clean Energy. In an apparent rebuke to the president’s “all of the above” energy non-strategy, the committee adopted a joint Sanders-Clinton proposal “to commit to making America run entirely on clean energy by mid-century.” This would actually be a radical proposal, if the party actually meant it. But the committee also flatly rejected any carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gasses and it flatly rejected any freeze on natural gas fracking, leaving the air, underground water, and earthquake-prone areas as vulnerable as ever to the largely unregulated, destructive process. The committee also rejected a ban on fossil fuel drilling on federal land or in federal waters.

Reproductive Rights. According to the DNC, the “platform goes further than previous Democratic platforms on women’s reproductive rights,” which is a measure of how weak previous platforms were. This platform defends Planned Parenthood, opposes the 1973 Helms Amendment (limited US spending abroad on abortion), and opposes the 1976 Hyde Amendment (limiting domestic federal expenditures on abortion).

Criminal Justice Reform. The platform draft “calls for ending the era of mass incarceration, shutting down private prisons, ending racial profiling, reforming the grand jury process, investing in re-entry programs, banning the box to help give people a second chance and prioritizing treatment over incarceration for individuals suffering addiction.” This is tantamount to rejection of Clinton-era “reform,” as well as an implied rebuke to the sitting president, who has done little to end these horrors.

Marijuana. The platform does not come close to supporting legalization, but is for “supporting states that choose to decriminalize marijuana,” without specifying how such support would be expressed (no mention, for example, of removing the stupid federal classification of cannabis as a Schedule I Controlled Substance). The committee adopted an amendment recognizing the racial disparity of the impact of marijuana laws on African Americans (and other minorities), but stopped short of saying what, if anything, to do about that injustice.

That is the last item in the full list of issues the DNC chose to highlight from the platform draft adopted (with Cornel West abstaining) on June 25. Unsurprisingly, the DNC did not offer a comprehensive list of all the platform issues, ignoring Israel, for example, although it was reported elsewhere:

Israel. Israel was very much on the platform committee’s mind, and the committee rejected a proposal that the US should oppose Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation and colonization of the West Bank. The draft platform reflects Clinton’s support for the mirage of a “two state solution” of some sort (not specified). The platform does stake out two new positions for the party: first, that Palestinians “should be free to govern themselves in their own viable state, in peace and in dignity” and second, that Democrats “oppose any effort to delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] Movement.” It’s not clear how Democrats will justify both supporting Israel’s illegal occupation and opposing the entirely legal BDS Movement.

Iraq And Syria. Although untouted by the DNC, the platform also calls for “more inclusive governance” in Iraq and Syria. What, you thought there was a war there or something? Seriously.

And then there’s the highly uncertain, open-ended list of issues possibly important to the American people, but that go apparently unmentioned by the DNC and media coverage. Or maybe they’re there and being ignored:

Assault Weapons. Contrary to what you thought you saw on TV, Democrats have no apparent platform plank dealing with assault weapons, 100-shot clips, background checks, or any other aspect of gun regulation. Not a mumbling word.

Military Budget. $600 billion a year for what? Not worth asking.

Intelligence Budgets. Billions more, much in black budgets, and for what? You’d better not ask.

Terrorism. In the unlikely event that terrorism were actually omitted, that would be a sign of maturity and intellectual integrity, moving away from fear-mongering. It could happen, right?

Terror War in Yemen. Yes, the Saudis are the international war criminals fronting for US, but our hands are bloody. And the profits are good, so why bring it up in a party platform? Have you forgotten how divisive Viet Nam was?

Afghanistan. Not a word about America’s longest war. Long may it wave.

Iran. Saudi Arabia. Turkey. Libya. Etc., etc. Nothing revealed.

Poverty. There are 47 million poor people in America, as Sanders repeatedly points out. They are as invisible in the Democratic platform as they are in everyday life. Why have we become a country where it’s considered a tolerable response to round up homeless people and ship them off to somewhere else, anywhere else but here? The platform is as oblivious to America’s poor as to the world’s poor.

The omissions go on and on – what is the Democratic Party’s policy toward any of the unaddressed issues out there? In favor of war in Ukraine? Itching for Naval confrontation in South China Sea? Wanting to accept England as our 51st state? Who knows? If this is the most progressive party platform the Democrats have ever seen, then the Democrats have never seen a truly progressive platform. Not that that is any reason to stop the shuck and jive.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The situation remains tense in and around Aleppo City. After the liberation of the Mallah Farms, the Syrian Army troops are now deployed in only 1,5 km from the militants’ last supply line to Aleppo City – the Castello road. This poses a significant threat to Al Nusra and its allies in Aleppo. If pro-government forces are able to cut off the Castello road, the militants will be besieged in the northeastern part of the city without any supplies.

Nonetheless, the recent attempts of pro-government forces, supported by Russian fighter jets, to develop momentum have not lead to any gains yet. In turn, militants are consolidating efforts for a large counter-offensive in to recapture the strategic area and defend the strategic supply line.

In East Ghouta, the SAA has secured Beit Naem, Mohammadiya, Jasreen and nearby areas. Last week, pro-government forces managed to liberate Al-Bahariyah, Tal-Bahariyah and Borja-al-Bahariyah. Clashes were observed at Mayda’a.

The SAA’s gains came amid the ongoing between different militant groups – Al Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, Failaq al-Rahman and others – that have erupted after the death of Zahran Alloush

The Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by US-led coalition warplanes, are advancing in the northern and southwestern suburbs of Syria’s Manbiij amid heavy clashes with ISIS militants. SDF units have seized the Hawatima neighborhood in the western part of the city and engaged in clashes in the Hazawani neigborhood. Separately, SDF units seized the Madfaa traffic circle near western gates of the city.

The coalition’s warplanes have been conducting air strikes near and in the city. Some 6 ISIS tactical units and 3 fighting positions were reportedly hit by them.

The ISIS terrorist group has launched an advance towards the Kurdish-controlled town of Ayn Issa in the Raqqa province, capturing Al Habsawi, Mughar and As Suwaidan. Heavy clashes are ongoing there.

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Republican and Democrat party policies consistently represent privileged Americans at the expense of most everyone else – notably since Bill and Hillary Clinton’s deplorable 1990s co-presidency.

Campaigning ahead of the 1992 election, Bill promoted the idea, using the phrase “two for the price of one.” The prospect of repeating the same mistake this November should scare everyone.

Meeting in St. Louis last weekend, Democrats drafted a largely business as usual platform, lofty mumbo jumbo rhetoric pretending otherwise – final approval coming when the full platform committee meets in Orlando, FL on July 8 and 9, ratification at the Philadelphia party convention from July 25 – 28.

Jobs creation is highlighted, fulfillment way short of bipartisan campaign and platform rhetoric, notably since the GW Bush years.

Most good ones went overseas to low-wage countries. They’re gone, others joining them. Largely rotten low-pay/poor-benefit ones remain. Workers need two or more to survive.

Proposals for universal healthcare, a $15 minimum wage indexed to inflation, ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a carbon tax, opposition to the anti-consumer, stealth corporate coup d’etat Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and fracking were rejected.

Nothing was said about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) -like TPP, involving America and EU countries – both trade bills nightmarish for ordinary people.

Nothing about Washington’s imperial project. Nothing about endless wars of aggression. Nothing about renouncing them, endorsing peace as the party’s top priority.

Nothing about rescinding police state laws. Nothing about endorsing governance of, by and for everyone equitably, the general welfare, making America beautiful for everyone, instead of its privileged few alone.

Virtually nothing worth supporting. Weasel words about “advancing our party’s progressive ideals…addressing the needs of all Americans,” supporting public education, “looking out for working people,” taxing the super-rich, “expanding Social Security,” curbing prescription drug costs, promoting clean energy, ending mass incarceration, and “Wall Street reform” rang resoundingly hollow.

Even claiming to support the abolition of the death penalty “as a cruel and unusual form of punishment (for) the first time in (party) history” is duplicitous.

What about millions of imperial war victims, corpses attesting to bipartisan barbarity – capital punishment on an industrial scale, genocide by any standard!

Undemocratic Democrats like their Republican counterparts aren’t looking out for anyone but themselves and privileged interests they support.

In November, voters should either back independent candidates or none at all – renouncing neocon-infested Democrat and Republican parties once and for all.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

In today’s edition of CounterPunch, Andy Smolski lays waste to the feeble and patronizing lesser-evil argument advanced a couple of weeks ago by Noam Chomsky and John Halle, which demanded that the Left vote for the neoliberal war-monger Hillary Clinton as the last bulwark against the fearsome Trump and his rampaging band of post-industrial Visigoths.

Hillary Clinton is a living refutation of the logic of lesser-evilism, since her candidacy as the most rightwing Democratic nominee since Harry “A Bomb” Truman is the inevitable consequence of decades of lesser-evil voting. This toxic political pragmatism engenders a process of natural selection in reverse, where the candidates get more-and-more retrograde because their opponents can always be painted as fractionally more odious. Well, let each pick their own poison in the privacy of the voting booth. Rationalizing, however weakly, a vote for Hillary Clinton isn’t my main problem with the Chomsky/Halle essay.

The most noxious element of the Chomsky/Halle endorsement of Clinton is their paternalistic guilt-tripping that seeks to blame people who choose to vote for Jill Stein, Gloria La Riva, Gary Johnson or no one at all in the extremely unlikely event (one percent according to analytics guru Nate Silver) that Trump prevails in November. If HRC, who now enjoys support from both the Chomsky wing of the Democrats and the Kissinger-Goldman Sachs wing of the GOP, loses it will be the fault of her own record of mendaciousness and villainy, just as Gore was solely responsible for blowing the 2000 election, even though liberals continue to viciously scapegoat Ralph Nader.

It’s an intellectually dishonest position and a morally indefensible one.  According to the specious argument of their Tractatus Illogico-Politicus, Halle and Chomsky would not bear any responsibility for the deaths caused by the candidate (HRC) they support. But Greens, anarchists, socialists and anti-war libertarians who reject the Queen of Chaos would bear responsibility for the carnage caused by the candidate (Trump) they did not support. That’s a textbook case of moral hypocrisy.

Halle has affixed himself to Chomsky like a sea lamprey on a sperm whale. Chomsky should, of course, be cautious about associating with political lampreys such as Halle. Noam, who knows his history, should consider the fate of Henry the First, who “ate a surfeit of lampreys which mortally chilled the old man’s blood and caused a sudden and violent illness against which nature struggled”–struggled futilely, it turned out. Chomsky has a strong constitution, but these days it pays to be prudent.

Who is John Halle, you ask? Halle teaches music theory at an over-rated and over-priced institution for the trust fund children of liberal elites. Halle’s political association with Chomsky is a tale of almost comical self-aggrandizement, on the order of Kenny G sitting in with John Coltrane. It’s probably safe to assume that most of the false notes in their sophistic reasoning were struck by Halle. But that doesn’t absolve Chomsky from affixing his name to an ethically bankrupt argument that is now also being made by Hillary’s new friends: George Will, Henry Kissinger protegé Richard Armitage, Brent Scowcroft and one of the men who brought you the 2008 financial crash, Hank Paulson. A confederacy of lampreys, indeed.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Unification of Europe has brought about radical new divisions within Europe. The most significant split is between the people and their political leaders.

The June 23 British majority vote to leave the European Union has made strikingly evident the division between the new ruling class that flourishes in the globalized world without borders and all the others who are on the receiving end of policies that destroy jobs, cut social benefits, lower wages and reject as obsolete national customs, not least the custom of democratic choice, all to make the world safe for international investment capital.

Actually, the lines are not quite so clear-cut. Political choices never correspond completely to economic interests, and the ideological factor intervenes to blur the class lines. Globalization is not merely a process of economic integration regulated by flows of capital, which is deepening the polarization between rich and poor in the Western countries. It is also a powerful ideology, basing its moral certitudes on simplistic lessons drawn from twentieth century World Wars: the idea that the root cause of wars is a psychological attitude called “racism” which expresses itself in the nationalism of nation-states. This ideology gains semi-religious conviction by reference to the Holocaust, which is considered to have proven the point. Ergo, for the benefit of humanity, national borders must be torn down, national identities must be diluted by unlimited immigration, in order to achieve a worldwide multicultural society in which differences both coexist and cease to matter.

This is a Utopian notion as unsupported by evidence as the Soviet dream of creating a “new man” who voluntarily works unselfishly for the benefit of all. Similarly, it considers human psychology to be perfectible by economic and institutional arrangements. Especially by promoting immigration, the multicultural mix is supposed to result in people all loving each other; there are even national laws to punish alleged expressions of “hatred”. The European Union is seen as the most advanced experiment in this worldwide Utopia of universal love. It is regarded by its intellectual sponsors such as French political guru Jacques Attali as an irreversible advance of civilization. For its fanatic champions, the very thought of dismantling the European Union is equivalent to returning to the stone age.

A chorus of Europists are screaming to high heaven that the world is about to come to an end thanks to lower class Brits too stupid and too racist to appreciate the glorious globalized world that the European elite is preparing for them. One of the fastest on the draw of his pen was the hysterical propagandist Bernard-Henri Levy, whose venom quickly spilled onto the pages of Le Monde and other obsequious journals. BHL trotted out his entire range of insults to decry the LEAVE vote as the victory of demagogy, xenophobia, the extreme right and the extreme left, hatred of immigrants, stupid nationalism, vicious hatred, the unleashed mob, idiot leftists, drunken hooligans, the forces of darkness against civilization, and even the victory of garden dwarfs over Michelangelo.   Many others worked the same theme, with less verbiage.

The main theme of this wailing and gnashing of teeth is the allegation that the LEAVE vote was motivated solely by racism, racism being the only possible reason that people could object to mass unregulated immigration. But there are indeed other reasons.

In reality, for the majority of working class voters, opposition to unlimited immigration can be plainly a matter of economic self-interest. Since the EU’s eastward expansion ended immigration controls with the former communist countries, hundreds of thousands of workers from Poland, Lithuania, and other Eastern European nations have flooded into Britain, adding to the large established immigrant population from the British Commonwealth countries. It is simply a fact that mass immigration brings down wage levels in a country. A Glasgow University study shows statistically that as immigration rises, the level of wages in proportion to profits drops – not to mention the increase in unemployment.

Those who enjoy the pleasure of traveling through Europe without having to stop at borders or change currencies and who relish the luxury level of cultural diversity find it hard to understand the anguish of those who lack advanced degrees, family connections or language skills, and who feel marginalized in their own countries. Yes, some of them probably like garden dwarfs. But you cannot convince millions of people that their only prospect in life must be to sacrifice themselves for the glory of the World Market.

Moreover, whatever their social status, many people in Britain find it unbearable to renounce their traditional parliamentary democracy in order to carry out Directives and Regulations drafted in Brussels without even any public discussion.

The British

The astonishment and indignation of the Europists to see Britons vote to go out is odd considering that most Britons never really felt entirelyin. When I worked as press officer at the European Parliament, I observed that the only national press corps really present and interested was the British press corps, all eagerly on the lookout for the latest absurd rule or regulation which the Brussels bureaucracy was foisting on the Member States.  British media paid attention to the EU because they hated it. Ridiculing it was fun.  The rest of European media were largely ignoring it because it was boring and nobody cared.  Main exception: a few earnest Germans doing their job.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher forced the EU to twist its rules by demanding “my money back”. The United Kingdom stayed out of the Schengen Treaty on free movement of persons. It refused the euro in favor of keeping the pound sterling. More profoundly, the insular English have always had a strong sense of not belonging to “the continent” as well as a particular sensitivity to the notorious “democratic deficit” of the European Union, which leaves law-making to the Brussels bureaucracy.

Considering the insular nature of Britain and its psychological distance from the continent, it is too soon to expect that other EU Member States will soon follow the British example. Indeed, some of the most Euroskeptical populations today were the most Euroenthusiastic in the past, notably France and Italy, and it is awkward to turn around 180 degrees.  For charter Members France, Italy, Benelux and Germany, the break would be much more dramatic. Nevertheless, even in those key Eurozone countries disenchantment with the EU is growing rapidly. Brexit is seen as a warning signal. Thus the Western ruling class will hasten to try to shore up the EU-NATO fortress. The Washington Post quickly called for “strengthening NATO”. This probably means even more strident denunciations of Putin and the “Russian threat”, if such as possible. There is supposedly nothing like an external threat to bring people together.

What Next?

Unfortunately, this referendum did not mark a clean break. Two great difficulties loom. EU rules require a lengthy and complicated process to actually withdraw, a matter of years. And second, there is no viable political force ready to steer Britain through this process. The result is to split the political class still further from the people it should be representing.

The British political landscape is littered with wreckage. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron called the referendum for internal political reasons, failing to realize that if given the chance, the British would vote to jump ship. His name is now mud all over Europe, condemned for the foolish move of letting people vote on the EU. Cameron has announced his resignation, but his government is dragging its feet in initiating the withdrawal process. Some are even demanding that the referendum be either ignored or held over again until people vote as they should – the procedure that followed previous national referendums that turned out badly for the EU. Meanwhile EU leaders are demanding that London hurry up and get out, so they can get to work strengthening the edifice.

Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party that campaigned for leaving the EU is a single issue party with no general program and no aspiration to run the government. Former London mayor Boris Johnson has positioned himself to take over Party leadership by advocating Brexit, but he is not taken seriously by most of his own Conservative party and is also stalling on the exit procedure.

The situation of the Labour Party is critical. Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected party leader by a grass roots uprising expressing a strong popular desire to move the party to the left, comparable to the Bernie movement in Democratic Party primaries, has always been opposed by the Blairites who still dominate the party apparatus and parliamentary representation. In this uncomfortable situation the gentle Corbyn has tried to exercise what is meant to be an inclusive sort of leadership, listening to all sides. This softness already led to the mistake of failing to strongly defend party members falsely accused of “anti-Semitism” by pro-Israel zealots. Now the Blairites are blaming Corbyn for what they consider the Brexit catastrophe. It is all supposed to be the fault of Corbyn for having failed to support REMAIN vigorously enough.

Indeed Corbyn’s support of REMAIN was mild, some say because he actually favored LEAVE, but was bowing to the majority in the upper ranks of his party.   This concession, if it was one, has not prevented the Blairites from demanding that Corbyn resign as party leader. Petitions are circulating both for and against him.

The trouble is that the mainstream caricature of the Brexit voters as narrow-minded racists, if not protofascists, has not been balanced by any articulation of the strong underlying rejection of the EU as a denial of democracy, as the authoritarian rule by a self-satisfied globalizing elite with total contempt for what the people might really want.

There is no political party in Britain that is at all prepared to turn away from the increasingly discredited and disavowed globalization trend in order to lead the way to a truly democratic alternative.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. She can be reached at [email protected]

On June 23rd Britain voted to leave the European Union by 52% to 48% in a national referendum. The outcome of the Brexit referendum has caused strong reaction at home and worldwide. Brexit was supported by the popular majority of Britain and a significant portion of the UK national elite. Even the use of lobbying clout by Cameron’s cabinet did not allow EU supporters to attain victory.

Indeed, leaving the EU would allow the UK to control immigration more efficiently, save billions of pounds in membership fees and advocate its own trade deals while leaving all trade conditions between the UK and the EU relatively unchanged – all while getting rid of restrictive EU regulations, bloated Brussels bureaucracy and run down Eastern and South European economies. In fact, Cameron’s government has simply jilted continental Europe. After all, it was Britain that was an active supporter of many decisions that have had a negative impact on the current situation of refugees in the EU and the economic issues of the Member States.

As to the trade cooperation and conditions, the EU could hardly proceed without British industry, technologies and investments. At the same time Britain acquires the first chance to jump in the US-backed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership freely without intra-European debates. The real question is what strategy the US chooses to apply. This hinges on whether the US makes a bid for the EU, as their primary key partner in Europe or provides equal support to the EU and UK project, which will be figuratively competing with Berlin and Paris.

All involved parties to the ongoing contention are well aware of the past behavior of the Brussels bureaucracy and EU lobbyists. Last weekends events have clearly demonstrated that they are not going to give up without a fight. In the worst-case scenario they are not going to leave British behavior unpunished.

As soon as the results of the referendum were known, Brussels bureaucrats joined by Angela Merkel in Germany and some other EU countries leaders launched a fierce anti-British information campaign. The concerted diplomatic pressure was increased dramatically, in order to prevent the ratification of the referendum results by the Parliament. The effort entails ignoring it, or re-negotiating another deal and putting that to another referendum, thus, repeating the process until voters eventually vote the ‘right’ way. In the case that Britain’s decision to leave the EU is not to be changed, they threaten the UK with numerous fearful scenarios, including dissolution of the state, the separation of Scotland, Northern Ireland and even London, and other far-fetched possibilities that literally verge on madness.

However, EU lobbyists now have moved beyond just the information campaign and diplomatic pressure. They have started to use well-known “color revolutions” technologies, previously field-tested in Eastern Europe and the Arab countries, to attempt to rip the referendum results to shreds.

Media and social networks spread claims that “the majority of the British public didn’t fully understand the significance of the vote and its possible consequences” splitting the society into the thinking less of the results and labeling the citizenry as foolish lemmings. Turmoil and surprisingly rapid civil protest’s actions have started. A significant part of the protesters are from Eastern Europe. Many protesters and commenters appear under the socialist slogans, despite the fact that they simply seek to protect the interests of the European oligarchy that has conducted severe austerity that has crippled the European populations wages and working conditions.

Simultaneously, there are alarming reports of hate crimes and racial abuse in the wake of Britain’s Brexit vote. The situation has the potential to spiral out of control, as a consequence of the failure of the state policy of multiculturalism. Stored up anger, based on a strong cultural differences between indigenous British citizens and newly arrived immigrants is poised to break loose. This appears to be another opportunity for the Neoliberal media establishment to demonize the Leave supporters even more, by accusing them of racism.

Meanwhile the campaign for the second referendum is gaining momentum. The speed in which the public has flocked to sign the parliament petition has been staggering. Created in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s decision to vote to leave the EU it has acquired approximately three million votes in the first 48 hours. Surprisingly there are a huge amount of fakes among them, as claimed by the Petitions Committee of the Parliament. A large portion of these votes may be from people within the EU, and thus, will most likely be disregarded.

However, all these steps have already led to the intended result. British politicians, including strong advocates of the Leave campaign, say there’s no rush in starting the process to exit the EU and David Cameron has exonerated himself from responsibility to implement the referendum’s decision, or moreover, that they do not have to do this and can stop this through a vote in Parliament. There are many options to stop the exit that are discussed behind closed doors in the political sphere, for example, that Scotland and Northern Ireland may have the option to veto the exit.

As a result, the probability of the UK exit from the EU seems insignificant. Perhaps this may be the best way for the economy of the United Europe. But alas, the questions remain “What does it mean for democracy in the UK, the EU, and throughout the world, if the will of the people can be overturned to placate the losing side in such an important plebiscite?” “And where will all of these social technologies, political manipulation, financial and austerity measures lead to in regards to the newly contested European democracy and the interests of the people.

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Immigration, blood source of the United States, its motor of development, has been rocked by judicial pronouncements of late. The Obama administration had put much stock in reforming the general approach to immigration in 2014, ostensibly employing a wide reading of executive power against the possible deportation. It was always going to be haphazard, merely another periodic panacea in a continuing problem.

On November 20, 2014, the President announced that there would be a unilateral suspension of immigration laws applicable to 4 million of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

The reasons were simple enough, and reflect a problem typical of the US imperium. Presidents over the last half century have found themselves providing patch remedies for those at risk of mass deportation.  In 1987, the Reagan administration exempted two hundred thousand Nicaraguans from deportation, and legalising their entitlement to work.[1](There were, of course other political motivations as well.)

Closest to the Obama administration’s mark in terms of precedent remains the 1990 Family Fairness program of President George H.W. Bush, designed to expand the previous administration’s Immigration Reform and Control Act.  The latter’s defect lay in excluding the spouses and children of those placed on the path to legalization.  The policy resulted in relief for 1.5 million family members pending formalisation by Congress.

At stages, xenophobic spikes and concerns of porous borders have marked the discussion about immigration reform in Congress. No better illustration of this exists than Donald Trump’s threat of building an anti-Mexican wall.  Such discussion has resulted in painful constipation, a situation that sees politicians happy to exploit the spectacle of cheap labour without accompanying rights and liberties.

Two dozen or more US states took issue with Obama’s moves back in December 2014, particularly with his remarks that, “What you’re not paying attention to is, I just took an action to change the law.[2]The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the real instrument in this endeavour, subsequently issued a directive purporting to legalise the set number of undocumented immigrants, effectively granting them benefits and rights.

The primary aim was to permit undocumented immigrant parents of US citizen children protection from involuntary removal.  This became known as a deferred action program known as “Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents” (DAPA).

As the legal suit submitted by the states went, “This lawsuit is not about immigration. It is about the rule of law, presidential power, and the structural limits of the US Constitution.”  This, as we shall see, was not necessarily the case at all.  A Texas federal judge subsequently blocked the programs nationwide until necessary legal channels had been exhausted.On June 23, the Supreme Court in United States v Texassplit 4-4 in attempting to resolve the issue, a result that affirmed the lower court’s ruling blocking the deferred action program.[3]  The result, scantily expressed in one page, chilled the process regarding the assessment of millions of undocumented immigrants who are permanently under the threat of deportation.

The administration has attempted to work around the obstacle which effectively leaves a brake on executive action from a lower court.  US Attorney-General Loretta Lynch has few options, but is nonetheless keeping up an optimistic front.  “We will be reviewing the case and seeing what, if anything else, we need to do in court.”[4]

What then, to do? Certainly, the now Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan had argued previously in the Harvard Law Review that presidents should make the bureaucratic policy realm their own.[5]  Since the days of the Clinton administration, the regulatory activity of the executive branch agencies became “an extension of his own policy and political agenda.”

Kagan, rather generously, suggested that Clinton showed that an assertion of personal ownership over such regulatory activity demonstrated “in the process, against conventional wisdom, that enhanced presidential control over administration can serve pro-regulatory objectives.”

The obvious point, and confusion in this entire case, has not been Chapter II powers of the president under the Constitution, but the statutory powers of the DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson. “Put simply,” argues Peter M. Shane, “the question is whether Johnson is reading the statutes properly.”[6]

Shane’s points are solid. In terms of procedure, most of the technical aspects were lover court issues, whether, for instance, Texas had standing to bring the lawsuits in question, and whether Johnson should have abided by a notice-and-comment process before promulgating DAPA.

Assertions of executive reach do works both ways, though Obama has done himself few favours in declaring US v Texas as something more than dry, earth bound administrative law. The constitution is far less relevant than the parties assert.

The threat of an executive falling into imperial tendencies has always been a danger, and Obama’s critics have pounced on that point.  When it happens, it should be curbed.  But the relevant issue is whether Johnson had legal justification to implement the program, rather than Obama per se. That issue has been all but lost in the legal and political melee, much to the detriment of the undocumented immigrants in question.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/09/world/immigration-rules-are-eased-for-nicaraguan-exiles-in-us.html

[2] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/files/ImmigrationStatesFirstAmendedLawsuit12092014.pdf

[3] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-674_jhlo.pdf

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-immigration-idUSKCN0ZE2X5

[5] http://cdn.harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/vol114_kagan.pdf

[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/us-v-texas-wasnt-really-about-presidential-power/489047/

The ‘Brexit’ referendum vote, split 52% to 48% in favour of leaving the European Union, has been exploited by the ‘mainstream’ media to launch yet another assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Impartial’ BBC News, directed by former Murdoch editor James Harding, has been one of the worst culprits.

Consider the wave of resignations of Labour shadow ministers which was heavily promoted in advance on the front page of the BBC News website: ‘ “Half” of Labour top team set to resign…the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg understands’. When the Labour resignations started to roll in, Kuenssberg could be heard virtually gloating over Corbyn’s predicament:

‘A bad day at the office. A very bad day.’ (BBC Weekend News, BBC1, June 26, 2016)

She wrote on the BBC website:

There have been concerns about Jeremy Corbyn’s performance for months and months. But it was his role, or lack of role, in the campaign to keep the UK in the EU, and his sacking of Hilary Benn in the middle of the night, that has given members of the shadow cabinet the final reasons to quit.Corbyn

The laughably biased reference to ‘months and months’ and ‘final reasons to quit’ were intended to portray Labour MPs as exasperated and understandably at the end of their tether. Clearly reaching for some kind of ‘smoking gun’ to finish Corbyn, Kuenssberg added:

documents passed to the BBC suggest Jeremy Corbyn’s office sought to delay and water down the Labour Remain campaign. Sources suggest that they are evidence of “deliberate sabotage”.

But, as Carlyn Harvey wrote on The Canary website, the ‘evidence’ – a sparse selection of leaked emails that the BBC deigned not to show to the public – was bogus:

The emails themselves are not sent from Corbyn’s office and are not published in the BBC article. The broadcaster merely handpicks a few select quotes from them, and allows Kuenssberg to let rip in her analysis of the cache’

Harvey summarised: ‘Is this the level of analysis we should tolerate from the BBC?’

Kuenssberg concluded her attempted hit piece by observing that Corbyn ‘has had persuasive and vehement backing from the party’s members’:

But as the Labour Party reels from Thursday’s result, it is not clear that support will be as solid as it was. MPs report that some of their members are contacting them to say they’ve changed their minds about Mr Corbyn. We’ll see. It’s possible that within days, both of our two main political parties will be looking for a new leader.

These anonymous ‘MPs’ were the same Blairite coup plotters, of course. No balance was included in the original article, no response to the damning allegations, no recognition that these were indeed cynical Blairite plotters seeking any excuse to be rid of Corbyn. Indeed the word ‘Blairite’ does not appear in Kuenssberg’s piece, just as it didn’t in a supposedly impartial Observer analysis. Honest commentators, of course, understand that the word ‘Blairite’ is crucial for anyone trying to make sense of the relentless attacks on Corbyn. Thus, former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook:

Corbyn and his supporters want to revive Labour as a party of social justice… This is nothing more than a class war to pave the way for a return of the Blairites to lead Labour.

The BBC later added balancing comments, after receiving complaints.

The following morning, BBC News misinformed the public that Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, had told Corbyn that he must resign. This was false. BBC News quietly retracted the claim without admitting their error. Indeed, as captured by a Labour activist, BBC News had threesignificantly different headlines in just twenty minutes.

‘Labour’s Watson tells Corbyn to quit’

became:

‘Tom Watson tells Jeremy Corbyn to consider his position’

which became:

‘Tom Watson tells Jeremy Corbyn he faces leadership challenge’

It looked as though the BBC’s desire to be rid of Corbyn had raced ahead of the facts.

A couple of days earlier, in common with other corporate news media, the BBC pushed a manufactured story about Corbyn being heckled at Gay Pride. The staged incident was also given significant coverage on ITN and Sky News, and even front-page treatment in the Guardian. In fact, as Craig Murray observed, the ‘heckler’ turned out to be Tom Mauchline who works for the public relations firm Portland Communications. Mauchline had also previously worked on the Liz Kendall campaign for the Labour leadership. Portland’s ‘strategic counsel’ is the notorious Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former media chief who helped to sell the illegal invasion-occupation of Iraq. None of this was spelled out in the Guardian report by Heather Stewart, the paper’s political editor. Instead, there was a single cryptic line that concealed more than it delivered:

Allies of the Labour leader said the confrontation at Pride had been staged by anti-Corbyn activists who were attempting to undermine the leader’s position.

There was no further explanation or context. When challenged on Twitter, Stewart responded:

Story makes clear it was regarded as staged by Corbyn backers; but if part of plot to destabilise him it’s news.

This was a facile reply. Craig Murray himself then asked her:

1) why does it not make clear that Mauchline is a PR man for Portland Comms? 2) How did you become aware of the story?

As far as we can see, the Guardian‘s political editor simply ignored the awkward questions.

Meanwhile, BBC News ran a live feed on their home page with the headline, ‘Corbyn crisis and Brexit’. Brexit was almost an afterthought; it certainly seemed to be playing second fiddle to the ‘Corbyn crisis’. Anyone seeing this could be forgiven for asking about the BBC News editorial agenda and its setting of priorities. It was as though we were to forget that Prime Minister David Cameron had announced his resignation three days earlier; and that Cameron and the Tory party had led the country into a referendum that had resulted in the FTSE 100 index falling more than 8%, and the pound falling against the dollar by 10%; and that a number of Tories were scrambling to become the new leader, including the warmongering, climate-denying Boris Johnson. But, true to form, BBC News was happy to hammer on about the ‘Corbyn crisis’; this despite the fact that ‘Labour persuaded two-thirds of its supporters to vote remain’.

It was actually surreal to read a post-Brexit BBC article on June 28, ‘Conservative leader: Who might succeed David Cameron?’, reminding readers of Johnson’s ‘unique brand of charisma making him a household name… he is regarded as being an electoral asset’, while Michael Gove was ‘reforming, if controversial’ and ‘is still respected on both the Remain and Leave wings of the party’. No serious criticism of either politician was included, despite their deep responsibility for the Brexit crisis. By contrast, as we saw above, the BBC was only too happy to include damning judgements of Corbyn.

Perhaps the worst example of an anti-Corbyn attack, post-Brexit, was in the Mail on Sunday. A pieceby Dan Hodges was illustrated by a Photoshopped image of a malevolent vampiric Corbyn in a coffin with the despicable headline, ‘Labour MUST kill vampire Jezza’. That this should appear just ten days after Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered is almost beyond belief.

When challenged by readers, Hodges responded with the standard cop-out:

‘Sorry, but I don’t write the headlines.’

It is true that sub-editors write newspaper headlines. But Hodges could still have indicated that he recognised the callousness and irresponsibility of the headline and photo.

One reader fired off this rational follow-up challenge:

‘But are you condoning the headline? Do you agree with it? Or is just no comment from you?’

Hodges did not reply; understandably enough. In March, a tragi-comic announcement was issued: ‘Britain’s best political columnist DAN HODGES joins the Mail on Sunday.’ A lucrative contract for Hodges, to be sure, and one he would be reluctant to jeopardise by criticising his paymasters. ‘It’s hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the cheques’, as the BBC’s Andrew Marr once observed. (Andrew Marr, ‘My Trade – A Short History Of British Journalism’, Macmillan, 2004, p.112)

In a blog piece, Craig Murray rightly noted:

The demonstrable public contempt of the public for the political class has been mirrored these last few days by the demonstrable contempt of the political class for the public. This has been obvious in the response to the Brexit vote, and in the Labour parliamentary party’s move against Corbyn. Both are evidence that the political class feel that they should not be directed by a wider public

This explains why the corporate media have avoided mentioning that Corbyn won last year’s leadership election by a ‘landslide’, winning 60% of the vote, more than all the rest of the candidates combined. Despite noting that Angela Eagle is the likely leadership contender, the media have also ignored a February YouGov poll that found that 60% of Labour members would vote for Corbyn in a new leadership race, with 15% supporting Hilary Benn and just 6% supporting Angela Eagle.

Murray continued:

Everybody knows that the Labour parliamentary party is well to the right of both the membership and the trade unions, and has been itching to get rid of Corbyn from day one. For those who have constantly stabbed him in the back for a year to criticise his effectiveness in fighting their opponents is ridiculous.

Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed points out that:

The latest coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn within the Labour Party is being led by an elitist Blairite network who have always seen his sudden rise to leadership as a threat to their waning control of the party.

Attempts to unseat Corbyn have been supported by Left Foot Forward Ltd, a company set up by Will Straw, which runs the country’s ‘No. 1 left-wing blog’ of the same name. Straw is the son of Jack Straw who served as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair. Ahmed notes that Will Straw is:

among a network of longtime Blairite stalwarts trying to “re-found” the Labour Party – a project demolished by Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory in the Labour leadership elections in September 2015.

The independent journalist Steve Topple highlights the links between coordinated attacks on Corbyn and a network of Labour figures with direct links to the PR company, Portland Communications (mentioned above). The PR firm was set up in 2001 by a former adviser to Blair. Its clients include the World Economic Forum, the EU, the UK government, Barclays Bank and large companies, including Morrisons and Nestle.

Two weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph reported that:

‘Labour rebels hope to topple Jeremy Corbyn in 24-hour blitz after EU referendum’.

The article continued:

By fanning the flames with front bench resignations and public criticism they think the signatures needed to trigger a leadership race can be gathered within a day.

BBC News – in particular, its political editor Laura Kuenssberg – continues to play a disreputable role in fanning these flames. In a BBC News article on Tuesday, Kuenssberg pointed to two more Labour figures who have called on Corbyn to resign as ‘signs that his backing away from Parliament could be starting to fray.’ Extrapolating wildly, she concluded:

‘The wave of enthusiasm he built outside Parliament may be starting to recede.’

This is all part of a bigger picture of how the BBC has put ‘its full weight behind the Corbyn coup’, as Carlyn Harvey notes. Readers may recall that Kuenssberg helped to orchestrate the on-air resignation of a shadow Labour minister earlier this year: another attempt to undermine Corbyn’s leadership.

The ‘Guardian view’ is that the ‘Corbyn experiment is effectively over at Westminster’. This casual dismissal comes from the ‘liberal’ paper which opposed Corbyn from the start, and which makes no mention of the relentless media wrecking campaign against him, including its own ugly role. The ‘Corbyn experiment’ is an experiment in real democracy; something which the Guardian has sought to destroy. A responsible newspaper would relentlessly expose the truth about society; namely, that ‘politics is the shadow cast on society by big business’, as the American philosopher John Dewey said.

Nobody should be surprised at the shameful performance of the corporate media, especially BBC News. Any threat to the ‘natural order’ of power brings the schism between private interests and public interests into sharp focus. The heightened, almost farcical, attacks on Corbyn are thus entirely predictable. Rather than feeling anguished at this state of affairs, we can regard it is a sign of how nervous and vulnerable the establishment is when an awakened public challenges elite power.

Genocidal Corporate Media

By Mark Taliano, June 29 2016

Genocidal corporate media presstitutes follow the all-too-familiar script of blaming the victim for the crimes perpetrated by aggressor nations. NATO terrorists, for example, are invading and occupying Syria, and the Syria government is blamed for the ensuing disasters, but the…

NATO and ‘News’ Media Pump for World War III, Nuclear War

By Eric Zuesse, June 29 2016

INTRODUCTION America’s announcement that Russia has committed ‘aggression’ against America, is an announcement that America is at war against Russia; and here is how America’s ‘news’ media have said that it’s the case — that Russia has aggressed — even…

Political Turmoil in Britain Following Brexit

By Stephen Lendman, June 29 2016

Major disruptions rarely happen, Brexit the latest, a surprise to most observers, reverberations felt in Britain, across Europe, in America and elsewhere. David Cameron is stepping down as UK prime minister, though delaying his departure until October. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour…

Pre-election Violence in South Africa

By Abayomi Azikiwe, June 29 2016

Violence erupted on June 20-21 in City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality after a disagreement over the African National Congress (ANC) selection for a mayoral candidate. In several townships surrounding the capital of Pretoria, crowds attacked public buildings, transport buses and…

The Saudis Have Lost the Oil War

By F. William Engdahl, June 29 2016

Poor Saudi Arabia. They don’t realize it yet but they have lost their oil war. The war in its current phase began in September, 2014, when the dying King Abdullah and his Minister of Petroleum, Ali Al-Naimi, told US Secretary…

United States Bombings of Other Countries. America’s “Bombing List”

By William Blum, June 29 2016

It is a scandal in contemporary international law, don’t forget, that while “wanton destruction of towns, cities and villages” is a war crime of long standing, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. Air…

The Washington Post summarizes the recent apology offered to Russia by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in its article, “Turkish president apologizes for downing of Russian warplane last year.” It reports:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apologized Monday for the downing of a Russian warplane in November and called for Russia and Turkey to mend a bilateral relationship that has become openly hostile over the incident. 

One Russian pilot was killed last year when two Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 warplane over Turkey’s border with Syria in an unexpected clash that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin called a “stab in the back administered by the accomplices of terrorists.”

Additionally, the Washington Post would note:

In a statement, Erdogan’s press secretary said Russia and Turkey “have agreed to take necessary steps without delay to improve bilateral relations,” specifically noting regional crises and the fight against terrorism. 

Indeed, the fight against terrorism does truly require Turkey’s aid. And its aid in this fight, particularly along the Turkish-Syrian border will serve as the true measure of Ankara’s sincerity regarding its apology and regret for Russia’s downed SU-24 warplane.

Turkey Has Enabled this Conflict, It Can Prove It’s Sorry by Ending It  

As revealed by Turkey’s own foreign minister in a Washington Times article titled, “Turkey offers joint ops with U.S. forces in Syria, wants Kurds cut out,” it was admitted that:

Joint operations between Washington and Ankara in Manbji, a well-known waypoint for Islamic State fighters, weapons and equipment coming from Turkey bound for Raqqa,would effectively open “a second front” in the ongoing fight to drive the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from Syria’s borders, [Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu] said.

In other words, Turkey’s own government admits that Islamic State (IS) fighters, weapons and equipment are coming from Turkey, bound for Raqqa, which should make pundits, the press, politicians and the general public alike wonder why then Turkey along with its partners in the Persian Gulf, Europe and North America are fighting the Islamic State in Syria, rather than simply interdicting them within what is essentially NATO territory before they even reach Syria to begin with.

One must also wonder how it is possible for the Islamic State to move enough men and materiel through NATO territory undetected, on a scale so large it can sustain full-scale war in Syria and Iraq and even beyond for years now.

The answers bring with them uncomfortable implications, and also reveal that the solution to ending the conflict in which Russia’s warplane was shot down, and in which several of its soldiers have now died fighting in against IS, lies not within Syria, but along its borders over which the logistical lifelines keeping the terrorist organization alive flow.

Should Turkey sincerely regret the downing of Russia’s SU-24 warplane, it must also sincerely regret the Russian soldiers losing their lives in Syria fighting the Islamic State, who, admittedly, is being rearmed, reinforced and resupplied from Turkey. This regret, articulated in President Erdogan’s recent apology, one must expect, manifests itself with a clear strategy along Turkey’s border to close down logistical hubs, training and recruiting as well as weapon depots serving the Islamic State just over the border with Syria.

Saying Sorry is Easy, Proving You’re Sorry is Not 

It is never enough to merely apologize. One must also commit to ending their offensive behavior, and take steps to reform themselves particularly when such behavior is systemic. It can only be when Ankara’s “regret” is turned into concrete actions to reform its role from facilitator of terror, to obstruction to terror, that Ankara’s apology can be truly accepted.

Until then, the world has every right to believe Anakra merely seeks to avoid the negative consequences of its actions, including sanctions and strained political ties with Moscow, without any commitment toward taking responsibility for what it has done, and what it is still doing regarding Syria and Russia’s struggle against terrorism, terrorism that is clearly being fed by Turkey itself.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

A judge in Panama asked Interpol on Tuesday to help arrest the country’s ex-president Ricardo Martinelli over charges of embezzlement and illegal spying on political rivals, police said.

Judge Jerónimo Mejía asked the international police to launch a “red notice” against the ex-president, meaning a preventive arrest in the United States, where he is reportedly hiding from Panama’s justice, in order to process to his extradition to Panama.

“The national police received the demand and it was immediately sent to the Interpol office” in France, where will be decided whether to accept the request or not, said the head of the force, Omar Pinzon.

“They immediately began procedures according to international police norms.”

Panama’s Supreme Court ordered Martinelli’s arrest in December after the former president, known to be hiding out in Miami, failed to show up to a Panamanian court for a much-anticipated hearing on his case.

He was declared in contempt, and judges called for his detention while investigations into charges of corruption and illegal espionage continued.

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected appeals by Martinelli’s legal team to have the arrest warrant overturned.

The foreign ministry on June 9 said it wanted the United States to extradite him.

Martinelli, a millionaire businessman, is accused of corruption, selling pardons, insider trading, and of tapping at least 150 opponents’ and journalists’ phones and emails during his 2009-2014 presidency.

He fled Panama in January 2015 just before the Supreme Court launched the probe in his suspected corruption and exiled himself in Miami, where we made a request for U.S. political asylum.

Martinelli denies being guilty of wrongdoing and his defense claims the legal process is a form of political persecution.

On June 21st, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) questioned Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, President Obama’s nominee to become the next four star general commanding AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Most of the discussion focused on the ongoing conflict, aka crisis, in Libya, where territory is now controlled by seven different forces: the Council of Deputies and Libyan National Army; the Government of National Accord and Libya Shield Force; the Islamic State; the Shura Councils of Benghazi, Derna and Ajdabiya; the Petroleum Facilities Guard; the Tuareg; and local forces.

In 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then UN Ambassador Susan Rice and then National Security Advisor Samantha Power argued that the U.S. was morally obliged to bomb Libya to stop its leader Muammar Gaddafi from committing genocide and mass atrocities as, they claimed, the U.S. had failed to do in Rwanda. E-mail on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server has since revealed that control of oil and currency issues were the actual motives behind the U.S. and NATO’s bombing war and the ouster of Gaddafi.

Neither oil nor currency issues were discussed at the SASC hearing, where  Lt. Gen. Waldhauser assured South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham that he would expand the so-called War on Terror in Africa and seek the authority to assassinate without presidential approval:

TW: We do. That’s an away game. I know that you’ve mentioned before we are fighting an away game in Africa to contain it on that continent.

Senator Graham concluded that he will gladly support the nomination of Obama’s would-be assassin, aka extrajudicial executioner.

We’re told so far that 36 people including 5 police officers have been killed, with another 60 injured, after three suicide bombers have attacked the international arrivals terminal at Istanbul Ataturk Airport this evening, following an exchange of gunfire with Turkish aviation security.

Police are said to have exchanged gunfire with gunmen before bombs were finally detonated inside the departures terminal, and outside in an adjacent parking structure.

Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport is one of the world’s largest and busiest airports, connecting western and eastern hemispheres, with footfall on par with London’s Heathrow Airport and Charles De Gaulle International in Paris.

IMAGE: ABC News 13

Some early eye witness reports have already been returned, reports Reuters:

“There was a huge explosion, extremely loud. The roof came down. Inside the airport it is terrible, you can’t recognize it, the damage is big,” said Ali Tekin, who was at the arrivals hall waiting for a guest when the attack took place.

A German woman named Duygu, who was at passport control entering Turkey, said she threw herself onto the floor with the sound of the explosion. Several witnesses also reported hearing gunfire shortly before the attacks.

“Everyone started running away. Everywhere was covered with blood and body parts. I saw bullet holes on the doors,” she said outside the airport.”

Reuters then added:

“A witness told Reuters that security officials prevented his taxi and other cars from entering the airport at around 9:50 pm (1850 GMT). Drivers leaving the terminal shouted “Don’t enter! A bomb exploded!” from their windows to incoming traffic, he said.

Television footage showed ambulances rushing to the scene. One witness told CNN Turk that gunfire was heard from the car park at the airport. Taxis were ferrying wounded people from the airport, the witness said.”

Following the attack in Istanbul, Turkish authorities have stated that there has been no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Still, however, the media is moving into overdrive in advancing the “ISIS” narrative.

Over the past year, Turkey has seen a string of violent attacks in major cities, including the capital in Ankara, with the blame being laid on Kurdish PKK militants and also some attributed to ISIS. They are as follows:

2016:

7 June, Istanbul: Car bomb kills seven police officers and four civilians. Claimed by Kurdish militant group TAK

19 March, Istanbul: Suicide bomb kills four people in shopping street. IS blamed.

13 March, Ankara: Car bomb kills 34. Claimed by TAK.

17 February, Ankara: 29 killed in attack on military busses. Claimed by TAK

12 January, Istanbul: 11 Germans killed by Syrian bomber in tourist area

2015:

23 December, Istanbul: Bomb kills cleaner at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport. Claimed by TAK

10 October, Ankara: More than 100 killed at peace rally outside railway station. Claimed by IS

20 July, Suruc, near Syrian border: 34 people killed in bombing in Kurdish town. IS blamed

Source: BBC News

Despite the fact that there has been absolutely no confirmation about who carried out this three-pronged attack, the international media, led by CNN, are already claiming that these attacks ‘do fit the profile of ISIS’.

Sensationalist media merchants at CNN are already promoting a new upgrade from the passésuicide bomber, to the new upgraded terrorist model, complete with a new term, ‘enhamazi’ (Arabic derivative of the Japanese ‘kamikazi’), or “Suicide Fighters” – allegedly, these are terrorists who don’t just blow themselves up, but instead show up with automatic weapons to shoot as many people as possible before detonating their suicide vests and killing more people.

The media claim that this is an ISIS attack based on The Brussels Attacks that was said to have killed 16 people in March of this year at Brussels International airport, which authorities alleged was carried out by the Islamic State militants, although plentiful evidence from the event strongly suggests that aspects of the so-called ‘terror attack’ were staged-managed, at least from a media stand-point, and possibly throughout the ‘attack’ itself.

Will today’s event be viewed as an Attack on NATO member Turkey, and thus be used somehow as a pretext for military aggression by NATO in Syria?

With the geopolitical tension already reaching a fever pitch due to western military activity led by the US along the southern Turkey and northern Syrian border, and with Russian forces present in Syria, today’s event is almost certain to trigger calls for increased military intervention by the US and its allies in what Washington DC claims is primarily a ‘fight against ISIS’, but in reality is being used in order to enact a long-standing US-UK policy of regime change by removing the government of Bashar al Assad in Damascus.

Based on what we are seeing in Istanbul today, it seems as if GLADIO B has in fact resumed.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim confirmed that at least 36 people have been killed and 147 have been wounded in a terror attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport on Tuesday night. A shocking security video reportedly shows the moment when the attack first took place with a bright blast descending into horror. The initial casualty estimates are expected to grow based on imagery coming from the scene which indicate massive casualties.

The Prime Minister also stated that Daesh was responsible for the attacks confirming earlier reports by Turkey’s Dogan News Agency consistent with a earlier statements issued by the PKK and Kurdish dominated minority HDP Party that Kurdish separatists were not responsible for the attack.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the attacks vowing for the country to take a decisive stance against Daesh terrorists. “It is clear that this attack is not aimed at achieving any result but only to create propaganda material against our country using simply the blood and pain of innocent people,” he said in a statement.

The Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim confirmed that at least 3 gunmen opened fire with Kalashnikov automatic rifles before triggering suicide vests as authorities approached. He indicates that security forces shot several suspects at the international terminal’s entry in an effort to neutralize them before the attacks blew themselves up before being killed or apprehended by Turkish police.

The attack location, with both explosions and the initial point of attack taking place in the international terminal indicate that the attackers were not solely targeting Turkish residents.

The attack occurred in the security checkout line as passengers approached the x-ray scanners starting with a wave of heavy gunfire. Hand grenades were also reportedly thrown by the attackers prior to blowing themselves up.

The International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) is encouraging blood donation to aide the victims of the Ataturk airport attack.

Flights in and out of Ataturk Airport have been suspended following the attack according to Turkish airport officials until 8:00am local time. Additionally all US flights to Istanbul have been suspended and a Moscow flight into the airport is now being diverted back to Russia.

The Turkish President reportedly met with the Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim and the head of the Turkish armed forces at the presidential palace following the blast according to local media.

In a show of solidarity, Brussels Airport that was the scene of a horrific terror attack on March 22, 2016 that left 32 dead and over 300 people wounded tweeted that the victims of the Istanbul attack are in their thoughts and prayers.

Another shocking piece of security footage shows one of the suicide bombers at the point of explosion. In the video, police shoot the attacker as passengers are running away. A Turkish police officer approaches the terrorist before quickly running in the opposite direction to avert being caught within the blast radius.

For those who arrived at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport or are in the impacted area who wish to let their friends and family members know they are safe this can be done by Facebook’s The Explosion at Istanbul Ataturk Airport Safety Check site.

Hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) technology has been widely used to maximize oil-and-gas production in the Gulf of Mexico in recent years, and the government allows offshore drillers to dump fracking chemicals mixed with wastewater directly into the Gulf, according to documents released to Truthout and the Center for Biological Diversity under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

From 2010 to October 2014, the Obama administration approved more than 1,500 permit applications for offshore drilling plans that included fracking at hundreds of wells across the Gulf of Mexico, according to the documents. An unknown number of permit applications have yet to be released, so the scope of offshore fracking in the Gulf is likely larger.

During this time regulators issued more than 300 “categorical exclusions” to exempt drilling plans that included fracking from complex environmental reviews. The use of categorical exclusions has been under heavy scrutiny since 2010, when the media learned that BP’s drilling plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig was categorically excluded from review in the months before a deadly explosion on the platform caused the worst oil spill in United States history.

Federal records show that regulators approved several drilling plans involving fracking in the Gulf of Mexico even as the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolded and oil from a broken well spewed into the Gulf for weeks on end.

“The Deepwater Horizon disaster should have been a wake up call that we need to move away from offshore drilling,” said Kristen Monsell, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, in an interview with Truthout. “But now the federal government is rubber-stamping practices like fracking without doing any environmental review or notifying the public, and it’s just another disaster waiting to happen.”

A controlled burn of oil spilled during the Deepwater Horizon disaster sends pillars of smoke into the air in the Gulf of Mexico on June 9, 2010. (Photo: Deepwater Horizon Response)

Hydraulic fracturing involves pumping water, chemicals and sand underground or under the seafloor at high pressure to break up rock and release oil and gas. Offshore fracking techniques are often used in the Gulf to reduce the amount of sand and grit in produced oil and improve its flow path out of the well, according to regulatory documents.

Sometimes, acids such as hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid are also used to dissolve undersea rock formations and increase the flow of raw fossil fuels. Hydrofluoric acid is one of the most dangerous chemicals used in any industrial process and can cause severe burns on human skin and form a poisonous vapor cloud when heated, according to the Environmental Defense Center, which has studied offshore acid treatments.

Regulators point out that offshore fracking and “acidizing” are much smaller in scale than the unconventional onshore fracking techniques that sparked a controversial oil-and-gas boom across the US. However, environmentalists are concerned about the offshore operations’ potential for accidents, and about the fracking chemicals that are routinely dumped overboard along with wastewater and other fluids.

The release of documents to the Center for Biological Diversity and Truthout marks the first time that details on the scope of offshore fracking in the Gulf have been made available to the public. In the past, officials at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), one of two federal agencies that oversee offshore drilling, told Truthout and other investigators that the agency does not specifically keep track of fracking in the Gulf. The Center sued BSEE for failing to respond to FOIA requests, and last year BSEE agreed to compile and release the information.

Is Offshore Fracking Safe?

Environmentalists have been sparring with BSEE and its sister agency, the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM), over offshore fracking since a 2013 Truthout investigation revealed that the technology had been in use off the coast of California. The agencies claim offshore fracking has a good safety record and little impact on the environment, but environmentalists say there is not enough research and data to back that claim up.

The Obama administration set up both agencies in the aftermath of the BP spill to improve oversight of offshore drilling and put an end to cozy relationships between federal regulators and the industry. BSEE was put in charge of enforcing environmental standards, but a recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that the agency has since made “limited progress in enhancing its enforcement capabilities” and failed to develop guidelines for basic functions such has handing out warnings and fines to offshore drillers.

After facing legal challenges from environmental groups, BSEE and BOEM agreed in February to place a temporary moratorium on offshore fracking in Pacific waters while regulators prepared a formal environmental assessment of the practice. The assessment found that offshore fracking does not have a “significant impact,” and the moratorium was lifted last month despite protests by environmentalists, who called the assessment “flawed.”

In March, 30 scientists from across California sent a letter to BSEE and BOEM urging regulators to extend the moratorium, pointing to independent analysis that found “significant data gaps” on fracking in the Pacific. Even the agencies’ own analysis admits that there is a “lack of toxicity data” on chemicals used in the fracking process, but regulators concluded that the chemicals don’t cause much harm because they are diluted by wastewater and the ocean.

Internal agency communications released under FOIA show that regulators have been actively studying offshore fracking since the practice came under scrutiny by activists and the media. For example, a series of emails from 2014 show BSEE and BOEM officials discussing the need to update research on offshore fracking chemicals. They also discuss the Blue Tarpon, a large ship or “stimulation vessel” that pumps fracking and other fluids into oil and gas wells in the Gulf.

“It’s clear from some of the documents that [federal regulators] didn’t even know that [offshore fracking] was happening at all,” Monsell said. “Which is frightening and appalling — that our own government was allowing to the industry to frack at will without doing a environmental review or notifying the public or anything.”

Regulators are now studying fracking chemicals and have dedicated an increasing amount of space to offshore fracking in recent environmental statements required by federal law, indicating that their understanding of the practice is growing. These documents, which clear the way for continued drilling and fracking in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, provide a glimpse of what the government’s oversight of fracking actually looks like.

Fracking Chemicals Dumped Overboard

Every year, fossil fuel companies are allowed to dump into the Gulf of Mexico billions of gallons of the seawater, brine and chemicals that flow back from oil and gas wells. These include fracking chemicals and naturally occurring radioactive substances from deep under the seafloor.

The offshore oil and gas industry dumped 20 billion gallons of this “produced water” into the Gulf in 2014 alone, and nearly half of it was dumped in waters less than 60 meters deep, according federal environmental statements. In 2010, nearly 23 billion gallons went overboard, mostly into shallower waters.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires that these fluids be treated to meet certain criteria before being dumped from offshore platforms. Most of the oil and diesel must be removed from the wastewater, and operators are required to visually inspect the surface of the Gulf and take note if a sheen appears. There are also toxicity limits, and operators must conduct toxicity testing either quarterly or annually, depending on how much wastewater goes overboard.

Chemicals used in the offshore fracking process, which are similar or even identical to those used onshore, can be dumped overboard as long as they are “commingled” with the produced water and not included on a federal list of “priority” pollutants, according to the EPA’s wastewater discharge permit. Operators are not required to report the discharge of fracking chemicals when they are diluted in produced water, so it’s unclear how much is dumped into the Gulf on a regular basis.

It’s also unclear exactly what the chemicals are. Federal regulators refer to a 2001 study that lists chemicals commonly used in offshore fracking and well stimulation, including corrosive acids, biocides, “foamers” and “defoamers,” surfactants and corrosion inhibitors. At least nine of these chemical products contain hazardous substances such as hydrofluoric acid and ammonium chloride. However, the industry has made major advances since 2001, and federal regulators admit that this list needs to be updated. Last year, BOEM launched a $400,000 study to update the list and compile a “descriptive inventory” of all the chemicals used during offshore drilling in the Gulf.

“That’s horrifying, especially considering that commonly used fracking chemicals include some of those that are most the toxic in the entire world with respect to aquatic life,” said Monsell, who added that the EPA’s discharge permit should be updated to at least require operators to report the chemicals they dump overboard, a policy currently in place in the Pacific.

Public affairs officers for BOEM and BSEE in the Gulf region did not respond to requests for comment from Truthout.

BOEM plans to use this study to analyze the risk that offshore fracking chemicals would pose to the environment in the event of a spill, and to evaluate how the chemicals may be impacting water, sediment and wildlife in the Gulf. While this appears to be a step toward more robust regulation, environmentalists say that the agency’s scientific record should have been updated years ago.

“While the federal government shouldn’t be allowing oil companies to frack our oceans at all, it certainly can’t sit idly by without any understanding of the effects of the toxic chemicals being dumped into the ocean,” Monsell said. “And [federal law] specifically requires that environmental analysis occur before decisions are made and before actions are taken, not after.”

Meanwhile, offshore fracking will continue in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere as regulators play catch-up with their chemistry. Monsell and other environmentalists are currently turning their attention to the Arctic waters of Alaska, where they say that a Texas company’s proposal to extend a large “multi-stage frack” under the Cook Inlet is threatening endangered beluga whales.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Britain urgently needs a coalition government to negotiate Brexit and likely Scottish secession.