Global Research

The FBI have finally released the written transcripts from shooter Omar Mateen’s supposed 911 call – and now apparently unredacted.

Meanwhile, another story of survival at Pulse nightclub is called into question.

While the Brexit debate has become a matter of colliding blocs of speculators and crystal ball gazers, a glaring aspect has come to the fore.  Virtually nothing has been said about the role played by human rights, Britain’s role in building it up and inspiration in the European Convention of Human Rights, or the issue about citizenship.

In that sense, Brexit mirrors broader European failures: the excision of the human experience from broader managerial and corporate arguments.  In its stead is a reflection about what the price of camembert cheese might be in a post-Brexit regime, or wine for that matter.  This is middle class snobbery run wild, a fear borne from comfort rather than crisis.

The crude economic arguments speak, in many ways, to European problems, rather than strengths. The broader human issues are neglected before those of the purse and assets, bank balances and trade.  This has made the Remain Campaign vulnerable in its sterility.

To emphasise this very point, currency transfer sites are limiting if not suspending operations.  Transferwise, to make its point, is suspending its service during the course of the Brexit vote.

Not to matter, argues the Leave campaign front man and former London Mayor, Boris Johnson.  Britain, he argues, would be able to “prosper mightily” outside the zone.  He gives no examples how, and avoids the bolstering effect Europe has had for Britain’s economy.  But even more seriously, he avoids the humane aspect of the European regime, and the modifying effects of the convention on British jurisprudence.

His critics, taken aback by his surging success, can only resort to personal invective. Arguments on the human side and the European legacy have been left behind by pomposity.  “The Leave campaign,” argued former conservative leader William Hague, “is really the Donald Trump campaign with better hair.”

Evidence is less important to Johnson than faith. “Our campaign,” he assures voters, “is about belief.  It is about trusting the instincts of the British people, trusting in our democracy, trusting in the institutions that have evolved over a long time.  Our campaign is about accountability.”[1]

In of itself, the argument about accountability and self-reliance is a statement that resounds across Europe.  Never mind that much of it is, as expressed by the Leave campaign, a simple argument to simply do what one damn well pleases, be it paying lower wages or reducing better work conditions in the name of profit.

There are countries (France, the Netherlands) where the EU fares even worse by reputation than it does in Britain, and there, the issue of “accountability” and “self-reliance” also feature. But Johnson’s statements resemble those of autarchic ambition.

The crudest arguments of all have come from parts of the Leave Campaign, haloed by a less than holy crown of terrifying promises should Britain actually retain its current arrangements.  To not leave now, while things are moderately bad, will lead to something infinitely worse.

Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party has been so vehement in this campaign he has become a caricature.  With characteristic indifference to the facts, Farage was happy to be photographed before a poster titled in bold capital letters “Breaking Point”.  Few would argue that the “EU has failed us all”; more would disagree with the idea of using a stream of Syrian refugees to demonstrate the point.

Maps have been produced by the thousands promising a surge of immigrants from countries wishing to be admitted to the EU.  In a spike of xenophobia, and selective thinking, Britain has become the exemplar of fractured Europe.

The good of Europe has been lost in favour of parochialism without oversight.  The issue is not that there is a project worth shaping and saving, but one worth abandoning. “People feel at the moment,” asserts Johnson, “that nothing ever changes in politics.  That is party because so much is governed centrally from Brussels.”

Those of the left who should have been guarding the sacred flame of Europe’s benefits have been conspicuously absent in that regard.  The champagne set have stolen the argument over the working individual who can actually thank the EU for working standards and security.

The absurd premise of pure British indigenousness and exceptionalism demands a good deal of scoffing rebuke. But when it comes out of the mouth of Johnson, it sounds different, striking an idealistically mellow note. He offers a vision without substance, while the Remain campaign have offered what they think is substance without vision.  As Britons go to the polls, the difference will be those undecided ones whose minds will be made up as the mark is made on the ballot paper.

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

Note

Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the “globalization of poverty”: countries are transformed in open territories. 

State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy,  all of which ultimately leads to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire populations (refugee crisis).

This “second stage” goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of  a process of outright destruction of human life.

In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.

Guns and Butter:

Global Financial Warfare: Neoliberalism and the New World Order,

Bonnie Faulkner interviews Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

Global financial war as outlined in professor Chossudovsky’s article, Wall Street Behind Brazil Coup d Etat;

The role played by the IMF and World Bank in the economies of debtor nations,

The Real Plan in Brazil, the imposition of the Washington Consensus;

Loss of national sovereignty, neoliberal institution funding of grassroots movements;

The main corporate actors of the New World Order;

The function of propaganda and the process of global impoverishment and destruction of nation states.

First published in May 2015

Democrats who had been programmed to blindly vote for Hillary Clinton are picking their jaws up off the floor after learning the truth about Hillary’s ties to Monsanto. The ties run so deep that she’s now being dubbed the “Bride of Frankenfood.” (Tweet this story)

Shockingly, Hillary Clinton’s ties to Monsanto are new information to her liberal support base. It drives home the important point that nearly everyone supporting Hillary Clinton has no idea who she really is, as evidenced by this stunning new video from Mark Dice and Luke Rudkowski.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ties to agribusiness giant Monsanto, and her advocacy for the industry’s genetically modified crops, have environmentalists in Iowa calling her ‘Bride of Frankenfood'” reports the Washington Times. “A large faction of women voiced strong support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy until the GMO issue came up, prompting them to switch allegiances to Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, a liberal stalwart challenging her for the Democratic nomination.”

Oh my, how little they really know about the real Hillary Clinton… keep reading to find out more…

Monsanto and Bill Gates are top donors to the Clinton Family Foundation

A quick look at this table of Clinton Family Foundation donors reveals both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Monsanto as two of the heavy-hitting donors to the Clinton Family Foundation.

Bill Gates, of course, pushes vaccines on the world, while Monsanto pushes GMOs. It’s a toxic one-two punch for global depopulation.

Hillary Clinton’s donors also include the drug maker Pfizer, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and many more. It’s a who’s who compilation of the most evil corporations and institutions on planet Earth, and they’ve all given huge money — tens of millions of dollars — to Hillary Clinton.

All the corporations are, of course, buying influence with the Clintons. This obvious fact was wildly attacked by extreme leftist Democratic party operatives like George Stephanopoulos, who turned out to have hidden his own $75,000 in donations to the same Clinton Foundation. He claims he thought he was donating to halt “deforestation.” Hillaryious!

Hillary Clinton hires former Monsanto lobbyist to run her campaign

If you’re still not convinced that Hillary Clinton has strong ties to Monsanto, ask yourself why she just hired a prominent Monsanto lobbyist to run her campaign.

As True Activist reports:

Hillary Clinton recently announced that she will be appointing long-time Monsanto lobbyist Jerry Crawford as adviser to her “Ready for Hillary” super PAC… Over the years, Crawford has been instrumental in fighting against small farmers in court and protecting Monsanto’s seed monopoly.

Crawford is an “equal opportunity payola operative” who hands out political bribes to members of both parties. “Crawford has mostly worked with Democratic politicians in the past, but has also put his support behind Republican candidates as well. Anyone who was willing to support Monsanto’s goals would receive support from Crawford,” says TrueActivist.com.

Hillary Clinton’s law firm used to have Monsanto as a client

Back in the 1990s, during the era when Vince Foster was murdered for what he knew about the Clintons, Hillary Clinton was a partner at the Rose Law Firm. This law firm counted Monsanto as its client:

“Her history of backing GMO dates back to her early days in Arkansas as a lawyer with the Rose Law Firm, which represented Monsanto and other agribusiness leaders,” reports the Washington Times.

Almost none of today’s activist voters are even old enough to remember the Rose Law Firm, the Clintons’ Whitewater scandal, or even the fact that Hillary Clinton ran the media attacks on all the women who tried to go public with claims of being sexually violated by Bill Clinton. (Yes, Hillary ran the “blame the victim” campaign to protect Bill!)

Yet in an age where progressives demand full transparency on all the issues that matter to them most — immigration, gay marriage, gun control and so on — Hillary finds herself squarely on the wrong side of the GMO issue. She’s a puppet for Monsanto and all its toxic practices that destroy life and destroy the environment.

Hillary Clinton pushes toxic pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals

At every opportunity, Hillary Clinton pushes toxic chemicals, pesticides and herbicides that contaminate the food supply, promote human diseases like Alzheimer’s and even threaten destruction of the environment. Hillary Clinton, Bride of Frankenfood, is also a “chemical holocaust” pusher who works hard to make sure every woman and child in America eats food laced with cancer-causing glyphosate.

“In the GMO debate, Mrs. Clinton has consistently sided with the chemical companies,” says the Washington Times. “A new scientific study bolstered environmentalists’ concerns by finding the herbicide Roundup could be linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson’s, infertility and cancers. The study published last month in the scientific journal Entropy also reported evidence that residue of glyphosate, a chief ingredient in the weed killer, has been found in food.”

That food, of course, enriches Monsanto and the other biotech firms, many of which kick back huge donations to Hillary Clinton as long as she keeps pushing poison.

A vote for Hillary, it turns out, is a vote for Monsanto.

Hillary Clinton hands nuclear fuel resource deal to Russia

It’s not just GMOs, either, that haunt the real history of Hillary Clinton. As The Atlantic reported this year, Hillary Clinton was also instrumental in handing the Russian government a near-monopoly over nuclear weapons uranium supplies.

All the while, money was flowing into the Clinton foundation from uranium interests:

In total, people affiliated with Uranium One or its predecessor gave more than $8 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton received $500,000 for a speech in Moscow, paid for by a bank boosting Uranium One stock.

Why does this matter to the Clinton voter support base? Because progressives are rightly anti-nuclear power and anti-nuke weapons. Yet their gender champion Hillary Clinton is out there promoting the proliferation of nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons, all while raking in millions of dollars for her own foundation in exchange for selling her influence to the highest bidder. Suddenly a Clinton presidency doesn’t sound so “progressive,” does it?

Hillary Clinton parrots Monsanto’s talking points as speaker for the Biotechnology Industry Organization

Just to make sure no one is confused about where Hillary Clinton really stands on the issue of GMOs and biotech, she openly parrots Monsanto’s quack science talking points in public.

In 2014, she spoke at the Biotechnology Industry Organization and practiced running Monsanto’s talking points, saying:

I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record … And to continue to try to make the case for those who are skeptical that they may not know what they’re eating already. The question of genetically modified food or hybrids has gone on for many many years. And there is again a big gap between what the facts are and what perceptions are…

During the speech, Clinton basically says that all anti-GMO people are anti-science idiots who don’t know “the facts.” Those “facts,” of course, are all contrived by Monsanto itself and its deep network of financial influence over scientists, universities and even the lamestream media. Hillary Clinton basically concludes that since you don’t know you’ve already been eating GMOs, then it’s safe to keep doing so.

See the video here:

Will anybody stand up and challenge the Bride of Frankenfood?

If you’ve ever wondered why there’s almost no willingness among 100+ million Democrats to challenge Hillary Clinton for the nomination, it’s because Democrats are terrified of Hillary.

For decades, the Clintons were able to control the official narrative and construct a false image of who they really are and what they really believe. But now, thanks to the Independent Media which is now dominating in viewership and is trusted far more than the mainstream media, the Clintons can’t roll out their usual revisionist history and expect it to work.

The simple truth — to the great horror of progressives everywhere — is that Hillary Clinton has long sold out to chemical agriculture and biotech.  And she wants your vote because she’s gonna dethrone the one percent? Seriously? Pathetic. Hillary Clinton is FUNDED by the one percent!

If you think Hillary Clinton opposes the one percent, you must also believe ExxonMobil opposes drilling for oil.

What you can expect from a Clinton / Monsanto presidency

There are so many ties between Clinton and Monsanto that the evil biotech corporation is practically Hillary’s running mate.

Clinton / Monsanto for President, 2016!

And if Clinton becomes president, you can expect the full Monsanto agenda to be aggressively pushed as national policy:

• A nationwide federal ban on GMO labeling.

• Immediate USDA approval of all experimental GMO crops.

• Extreme, politically motivated attacks against all anti-GMO activists, scientists and journalists.

• Huge increases in taxpayer-funded subsidies for farmers who grow GMO crops.

• Aggressive corporate imperialism push to overturn bans on glyphosate and GMOs by other nations.

• Possibly even attempts by the FDA to outlaw non-GMO Project Verified labels in the same way they attacked hormone-free labels for cow’s milk.

Make no mistake: A vote for Hillary is a vote for Monsanto

This article was first published by Global Research in March 2016.

Dr. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England is Goldman Sachs’ Trojan Horse. The lucrative manipulation of financial markets including currency markets is a multibillion undertaking. With inside information on Central Bank monetary policy in both Frankfurt and London, Brexit is a “Silver Platter” for the institutional speculators. 

In the event of a vote in favour of Brexit, The Governor of the Bank of England Dr. Mark Carney reassured the British public: “we will do everything in our power to discharge our responsibility to achieve monetary stability and financial stability…”

Carney intimated that “financial instability” and “poor economic outcomes” are associated with the Brexit process: a rather unsubtle message to investors, brokers as well as speculators. He also warned MPs that Brexit could lead to an exodus of banks and financial institutions from the City of London.

“[There is no] blanket assurance that there would not be issues in the short term with respect to financial stability and that potential reduction in financial stability could be associated – and normally would be associated – with poor economic outcomes, as we have seen in the past”.

Carney was fully aware that an “authoritative statement” pertaining to “financial stability” would have an immediate impact on financial markets. On whose behalf was he acting when he made those statements?

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Mark Carney, of “speculative statements”:

“It is speculative and beneath the dignity of the Bank of England. To be making speculative pro-EU comments.”

The Goldman Sachs Report

In February, Goldman Sachs warned that in the case of Brexit, the pound sterling “could lose 20 per cent of its value”  Mark Carney’s statements at the House of Commons not only point in the same direction, they also provide legitimacy and “credibility” to Goldman’s assessment.

As an institutional speculator, Goldman’s intent is to influence expectations regarding financial markets (backed by authoritative statements from the Bank of England).

Coinciding with Carney’s recent statements, Goldman Sachs released a report on the detrimental economic and financial impacts of Brexit:

“However, given the substantial unpredictability regarding the UK’s post-Brexit trading and regulatory arrangements, quite how damaging Brexit would be in the long term is subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Arguably of more immediate concern is the effect that the uncertainty itself would have on UK growth.

The EU Treaty sets out a two-year timeframe for departure. During this period, the UK government would have to negotiate the terms upon which it could continue to trade with EU countries…

Some of these trade negotiations and many of the regulatory/legal decisions would be relatively straightforward. But many would not. …

During this period, UK-based businesses would face considerable uncertainty: exporting companies would not know the terms on which they would be able to supply export markets abroad once Brexit is complete; importing companies would not know the terms on which they would be able to import; and all companies would be confronted with increased regulatory/legal uncertainty. (Excerpts of report)

Carney dismissed the claims of Goldman in early February. But now he supports them.

Where do Mark Carney’s statements originate, from the Bank of England or from Goldman Sachs, his former employer?

Goldman is known to be the World’s foremost “institutional speculator”. Foreknowledge of statements and decisions by central banks are often used by financial institutions in speculative operations. Inside knowledge and connections are part of this process, they are the “bread and butter” of the “institutional speculator”.

The important question which the British media has not addressed: what is the relationship between Mark Carney and Goldman Sachs.

The Goldman Trojan Horse

Is there a Trojan Horse within the Bank of England with Goldman Sachs sitting on the inside?

While Carney was appointed by Her Majesty, unofficially, he still has “links” to Goldman Sachs.

Is he in conflict of interest?

Next time there’s a financial meltdown, your money could be rescuing Goldman Sachs.

Yes, thanks to a new deal struck by Mark Carney, the former Goldman man now running the Bank of England, the US investment bank could end up enjoying the next round of British taxpayer bailout money. (The Independent, 20 August 2015)

Moreover, several key senior positions within the Bank of England are held by former Goldman officials. Mark Carney was appointed in 2013. The following year (2014), Dr. Ben Broadbent, a Senior Economist for Goldman Sachs was appointed Deputy Governor in charge of Monetary Policy.

Bankers from Goldman are strewn across key policy-making arenas across the world like no other financial institution.

As well as the Governor of the Bank of England, his deputy Ben Broadbent is ex Goldman, as were two previous Monetary Policy Committee members, David Walton and Sushil Wadhwani.

Across the Channel, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi is a Goldman man, while in the US, Goldmanites make up a quarter of the Federal Reserve system’s regional presidents. (Ibid).

This article was first published by GR in January 2016.

A former Goldman official who is not even a British citizen currently runs the Bank of England. How convenient… Goldman Sachs has inside information from within the Bank of England which it can use to speculate in the money markets in anticipation of the Brexit Vote.

A “six sum figure”! You mean the same as the annual bonus for just one single employed trader sitting in front of a screen? Shouldn’t that figure have seven or eight digits not six, to cut any ice?

Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are making large donations to the campaign to keep Britain inside the European Union, sources said, highlighting the concern among some of the world’s biggest banks over the impact of a British exit.

Goldman Sachs has agreed to donate a “substantial six-figure sum” according to one source, while JPMorgan was preparing to make a similar donation, another source familiar with the matter said.

Another U.S. bank, Morgan Stanley, is also likely to make donation but has yet to decide a sum to contribute, a source said. The bank declined to comment. Reuters, January 21, 2016

In the face of growing Euroscepticism among the British electorate and political pressure from within his own party, Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership by the end of 2017.

Or is the report just a banking in-joke to raise a smile during a winter week of plunging global markets, index turmoil, thousands of refugees on the move and a $28 oil price? Might raise a wry smile in the City of London but that’s merchant bankers for you – always ready to crack a joke, and always profitable, whatever the economic or political weather.

However, the obvious implication of this reported derisory offer must be that the bank actually prefers Britain out, not in. And, of course what Goldman wants, Goldman always gets. Which must be a bit worrying for Mr Cameron and the British government who thought they were running the country.

The British people should be clear about just what they will be voting on at the EU referendum this Thursday.

What does it actually mean to stay in the EU?

What does it mean to exit?

“Global financial markets are churning and growing more volatile in expectation of a possible ‘Brexit’—a United Kingdom referendum to vote on leaving the European Union scheduled for June 23, 2016. Brexit has literally become the big financial blockbuster event of summer 2016! But it may very well prove a ‘non-event’—even if the vote on the 23rd is to leave the European Union (EU). 

Syrian Arab Army and Hezbollah units have entered the al-Bahariyah village in Eastern Ghouta, engaging in heavy clashes with militants that had controlled the town. Following series of clashes, the SAA and its allies liberated the village and the nearby Al-Bahariyah Hill and continued advances in the Jisreen Farms.

In the province of Raqqa, ISIS militants have taken control of Khirbat Zaydān and Bir Abu al `Allaj, moving close to the Zakia crossroads. 23 SAA soldiers have been killed and 49 injured during the ISIS counter-attack. Heavy clashes are ongoing.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have seized the village of Arima. Now, the SDF is deployed in about 19km from the Al Bab city in Aleppo province. Meanwhile, the SDF is still not able to reach the center of Manbij.

Sources in the Al Nusra Front terrorist group (Al Qaeda in Syria) says that Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki will turn over a Russia-made T-90 main battle tank to Al Nusra after a sharia ruling. The Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki militant group is the so-called “CIA vetted” group that receives TOW missiles and other equipment from the US. However, this does not prevent it from cooperation with Al Qaeda in Syria. We remember Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki captured a sophisticated Russian-made T-90S main battle tank on June 9 in battles around the Mallah Farms in Northern Aleppo.

Almost since the start of the Syrian war, the Syrian military has suffered a lack of trained personnel. The general staff has tried to compensate this with massive usage of artillery, battle tanks and other kinds of military equipment. However, massive usage of anti-tank weapons by militant groups, opposing to the Syrian government, has leaded to a high loss rate of the SAA’s military equipment.

According to local sources, about a half of these losses is light damaged military equipment abandoned at the battlefield that could be easily evacuated and restored. Even massive delivers of modern weapon systems, including TOS-1 heavy multiple launch thermobaric rocket systems and T90 battle tanks, cannot help if the personnel, often volunteers without a combat experience, cannot use them properly. Additionally, this is one of the reasons why some T-90 and TOS-1 were spotted in Hezbollah and IRGC units operating in Syria instead of the SAA.

The NATO Founding Act was agreed to between the US and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn’t invade his country. When his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the representatives of US President GHW Bush told him that NATO wouldn’t move «one inch to the east» (toward Russia), but as soon as Gorbachev committed himself to end the Cold War, Bush told his agents, regarding what they had all promised to Gorbachev (Bush’s promise which had been conveyed through them), «To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t». 

In other words: Bush’s prior instructions to them were merely his lies to Gorbachev, his lies to say that the US wouldn’t try to conquer Russia (move its forces eastward to Russia’s borders); but, now, since Gorbachev was committed and had already agreed that East Germany was to be reunited with and an extension of West Germany (and the process for doing that had begun), Bush pulled that rug of lies out from under the end of the Cold War – it didn’t really end (though Gorbachev had been deceived to think it had) – and then began the long process after that time, to surround Russia by NATO troops and missiles and then (as Obama with even greater intensity has been aiming to do) ultimately to swallow it up, like it swallowed Ukraine in February 2014, right on Russia’s doorstep.

Yeltsin was mortified that Bush’s successor Bill Clinton was in the process of trashing that promise which Bush’s agents had given to Gorbachev, and that Clinton was allowing into NATO the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (three countries that formally joined NATO two years later, in 1999); so, this NATO Founding Act was the only ‘assurance’ Russia had, to indicate that the US government wasn’t going to place the Russian government into an intolerable position of nuclear war: Russia’s being surrounded by NATO nuclear missiles on and near Russia’s borders. What the NATO Founding Act said was that, for the «foreseeable» future, NATO would engage in no «additional permanent stationing of substantial ground combat forces», a very vague commitment, which didn’t even specify where the commitment would apply – how near to Russia’s borders, etc. – but it’s all that the West would sign to under Bill Clinton, except for another vague commitment: «to strengthen stability by further developing measures to prevent any potentially threatening build-up of conventional forces in agreed regions of Europe, to include Central and Eastern Europe». In any event, it’s all dead now: the US and its NATO partners have boldly violated even those vague terms. America has virtually torn up the document.

On 14 June 2016, the US threw into history’s trash bin the NATO Founding Act, and did it unilaterally, leaving Russia totally out in the cold. This also ends all the nice language in the NATO Founding Act – e.g.: «NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries. They share the goal of overcoming the vestiges of earlier confrontation and competition and of strengthening mutual trust and cooperation».

On 25 February 2016, the US General Philip Breedlove, who was the Supreme Commander of NATO and the one person who possessed the power to order a NATO invasion of Russia, had told the US Congress, that: «Russia has chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term existential threat to the United States and to our European allies and partners». It wasn’t quite a declaration of war against Russia (only the US President could do that), but close.

Leading up to that, the White House had announced on 2 February 2016, a quadrupling of US funding for its European Reassurance Initiative (ERI), which funds NATO’s Operation Atlantic Resolve, which is rushing tens of thousands of troops and advanced American weaponry to and near Russia’s borders. President Obama said that in order to address «Russia’s aggression against Ukraine almost two years ago,… today my Administration announced a four-fold increase in ERI funding for Fiscal Year 2017. An ERI funding level of $3.4 billion will enable the United States to strengthen our robust military posture in Europe and improve our ability to uphold our Article 5 commitments to NATO members». 

He was asserting that in order to supposedly defend Ukraine against «Russia’s aggression» (though Ukraine isn’t a NATO member and so isn’t subject to the the NATO Treaty’s Article V military protection clause), the United States was quadrupling its forces elsewhere on Russia’s borders, so that if Russia invaded a NATO member country on Russia’s borders (which post-Soviet Russia has never done and which would be insane for Russia to do), a blitz US invasion of Russia would be the response, in accord with NATO’s Article V. But since Russia would never do a thing like that, what was Obama’s real motive? Perhaps it was and is to invade Russia regardless. But what could be the pretext for doing that?

On 15 June 2016, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, as if Ukraine already were a NATO member: «We stand firm in our support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Allies do not, and will not recognise the illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea. And we will continue to call on Russia to stop its destabilisation of Ukraine. Russia needs to stop supporting the militants, and withdraw its forces and military equipment from Ukrainian territory».

He was saying that the residents of Crimea shouldn’t have any say in the matter of whether Crimea should be restored to Russia (of which it had been a part until the Soviet dictator transferred it from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 – Stoltenberg was saying that that dictator’s action must never be reversed, no matter if more than 90% of Crimeans want it to be reversed; he was saying that the current Ukrainian government owns them, and they have no say over who rules them).

Obviously, if Ukraine’s application for membership in NATO turns out to be accepted, then at that time, NATO (in other words, the US) will reiterate its demand for Russia to reverse its having accepted the overwhelming desire of the Crimean people to have their Russian nationality restored to them, and if Russia fails to comply with NATO’s (i.e., with the American government’s) demand, then there will be a nuclear war, in order to force the issue.

The US government, or at least its present personnel, are apparently willing to go to nuclear war in order to force the people of Crimea to be ruled by the Ukrainian coup-regime that the US had installed in Ukraine in February 2014 and which was wanting to kill them if it could not conquer them.

Of course, one cannot predict whether the people who control the US government will go all the way in that matter, but right now, this is a nuclear showdown in the making, and apparently the only people who are seriously worried about it are Russians. Now, why would that be? Why would Westerners be so nonchalant about such a matter? Why would they not be furious against the governments that are reigning over them and threatening nuclear war in order to coerce Crimeans to be Ukrainians? Could it be that Westerners don’t realize how dangerous this situation is? Could it be that the Western ‘news’ media haven’t been reporting the situation honestly to them? Could it be that democracy is actually gone from the Western countries? Could it be?

Can socialists take a principled position in relation to the UK’s European Union membership referendum on 23 June, or should we wish ‘a plague on both your houses’? Christina Delistathi puts the case to ‘leave’, Charlie Hore for a ‘remain’ vote, and Rob Owen for a ‘radical abstention’.

Left Exit – Not Just a Vote

The referendum to stay in or leave the EU is ripping the Tories apart, but has also opened up an intense debate on the Left with many people arguing to vote to stay. They fear that the leave vote is mobilising racists, that the end of free movement will make it harder for migrant workers from poorer EU countries to move freely through Europe, and that an exit will signal an assault on our rights currently protected by EU legislation.

Yet both the ‘leave’ and ‘stay’ sides involve racist and nationalist arguments. UKIP’s role in the leave campaign is obvious, but the ‘stay’ side includes Cameron and Theresa May with her despicable plan to cherry pick ‘deserving’ refugees. Unless the radical Left articulates a clear anti-capitalist campaign with demands that unite migrants and non-migrants, there is a real danger that anti-racists will be tied behind Cameron’s chauvinist rhetoric or Corbyn’s calls for a reformed EU – a strategy which was tried by Syriza in Greece and failed so spectacularly.

Many also argue that the free movement of labour among EU states, which has allowed people to build a better life in another country, fosters internationalism. The free movement of labour shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it applies only, and unevenly, to EU citizens. Whichever way the vote goes, the EU remains a fortress of ever-tightening border controls against refugees and migrants fleeing war and poverty. Fortress Europe is responsible for the thousands who drown in the Mediterranean or face razor fences and walls. Internationalism is not strengthened by accepting the right of free movement only for one group of workers. We need to remind ourselves that the only way to beat xenophobia is to defend the rights of all, migrant and non-migrants alike, and to consider the working class, our class, in unity across all borders.

EU Promotes Privatisation

The EU is not a defender of our rights. It’s a bosses’ institution and protects the bosses’ rights. The most recent action to defend the NHS came from junior doctors, whereas the push toward NHS privatisation is aided by EU trade rules that insist companies across Europe can tender for all contracts. The only reliable defence of our rights comes from our struggles. It took just two days of talks before EU leaders accepted Cameron’s demands to limit child benefits and tax credits for migrant workers, plunging them deeper into poverty and opening the door for more benefit cuts for us all.

To suggest then that the EU is what makes things better for working class people, is to accept to sacrifice the rights of one section of the working class – those without an EU passport – in the hope of keeping the rights of the rest. It does not prevent the ruling class from singling out vulnerable groups of migrant workers, undermining our class unity. Migrant and non-migrant workers have repeatedly fought together to secure social rights, welfare benefits and pensions. Think of the cleaners of the living wage campaign, who have fought and won. The only way to safeguard our rights is to ensure that they are available to all.

What Kind of Campaign?

A Left ‘out of the EU’ campaign has to do more than expose the EU as a capitalist and racist institution. The starting point of our campaign should be to use the referendum to strengthen our class, so it cannot end with a vote.

Many argue that a left exit position would have too small a voice to impact on the debate, suggesting that socialist ideas are irrelevant. Yet Corbyn’s victory, which came from campaigning against austerity and for a fairer society, has shown that an audience for a left alternative exists. Last summer, tens of thousands demonstrated in London in solidarity with refugees and many have organised regular trips to Calais. There is a sizable audience for our arguments and this makes it all the more urgent to organise such a campaign. We must give voice to anti-racists and steer the debate to the left. Recently, a number of trade unionists and activists launched a Left exit campaign. This is a very positive step.

We need to confront both faces of racism: islamophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Our campaign must fight for the rights of the largely Muslim Syrian refugees and also have specific demands that safeguard the rights of migrants already here, such as equal access to benefits, welfare, health and education, and working rights. We must prepare a campaign in the unions to fight against austerity and protect everyone’s rights. We must also take on the argument that tighter border controls and fewer migrants will make life better for working class people.

Fears that an exit from the EU may trigger an assault on migrants’ rights are well founded. That’s why it’s important to go on the offensive now. We must combine our ‘no’ vote with a campaign that goes beyond the 23rd June, articulates an alternative to austerity, organises with migrant workers and defends everyone’s rights. We shouldn’t fear having a small voice in this moment – we should rather fear the long term consequences of failing to articulate the interests of the whole of our class from all corners of the globe.

Campaign to Remain

There’s no dispute that the EU is a bosses’ union: racist, neoliberal and pro-austerity. The attacks on Greece, and the ‘Fortress Europe’ walls set up against refugees show the real nature of the institution. But when attacks on refugees and the right to migrate are increasing, does it help to reinforce borders across Europe? Won’t we just be swapping Fortress Europe for Fortress Britain?

There’s no ready-made answer, and we have to think through what the referendum will mean in practice for British politics, and for the working class. And for me that means voting to remain, for three main reasons:

→ Whose referendum? Not ours

British Prime Minister David Cameron conceded the referendum as a sop to the racist right of the Tory party; it’s never been a demand of the left. And it’s happening now because of a defeat for the left – Cameron winning the election last May. UKIP have been central to articulating the demand, but it’s more importantly about the rifts in the Tory party.

Given its origins, inevitably immigration and arguments about numbers have dominated the campaign so far. Cameron’s negotiations with the EU centred on restricting migrant workers’ rights, and the criticism from the Tory right is that he wasn’t harsh enough. However bad Cameron’s attacks, the Tories pushing to leave want to go further.

This is quite different from Scotland – the left and the working class could shape the Scottish referendum because the impetus for independence came from an anti-Tory groundswell. The opposite is true of the EU referendum.

→ Why the left is divided

The EU hasn’t been a focus of the left’s campaigning for decades, largely because successive British governments have been more right-wing and neoliberal than the EU, so it is hardly surprising that many activists don’t see it as the main enemy. But there have also been more fundamental shifts that we should pay attention to.

In the labour movement there has been a sea-change in attitudes, with many who once opposed the EU, now seeing it as a shield against the Tories. That is in part a reaction to decades of defeats, but it is also true that the EU has produced real reforms that the Tories opposed, in particular over workers’ rights and the environment. When Eurosceptics talk about a ‘bonfire of regulations’, those gains are what they have in mind.

There have also been deeper shifts in social attitudes – over issues such as racism, sexism and homophobia – and views on Europe are part of that. Those changes were fought for, and are still contested, as current attacks on refugees and migrants show. But we have not lost all the ground gained, however fierce the right’s attacks. The anti-racist reaction that so many young people have against UKIP and the Eurosceptic right is a healthy one, and we should back it.

→ The changing working class

There are close on three million EU citizens here, with equal rights to housing, work, and health care. It is migration that has mainly fuelled the right’s demand for the referendum, meaning that in Britain the issue of the EU is about migration in a way that isn’t true in other European countries.

Leaving the EU would threaten those rights. Exactly how that would play out isn’t really the issue – the point of leaving the EU, for most of those pushing it, is to make migrants’ lives more precarious. And we only have to look at the USA to see how a society can be dependent on migrant workers, and yet deny them basic rights.

The way forward

Of course there are principled socialists who are arguing for an internationalist exit from the EU. But they are a minority of a minority. The balance of forces is overwhelming with the right, with too many on the left making concessions to the idea that the free movement of labour harms British workers.

Our arguments on the referendum need to centre on defending migrants and refugees, and the right to migrate. And we need to make common cause with those arguing for an exit who also put those at the centre of their politics, and see divisions on the vote as a secondary issue. We will have far more in common with each other than we will with most of those campaigning for either outcome. ‘In or out, workers have to fight’ was a useful slogan in the early 1970s, and it seems to have become apt again.

How you vote should be the end of an argument, not the beginning. But it seems to me that a position grounded in anti-racism and defending workers’ rights leads to one logical conclusion: the road to defending and extending the right to migrate cannot go through restricting existing migration rights, which would be the practical outcome of a vote to leave the EU.

A Plague on Both Houses

2008 exposed the EU’s shaky foundations. Its structures were placed under tremendous pressure by financial tremors emanating from the USA. The attempt to manage the resulting crisis laid bare the debt relationships that underpin the common market and exposed the brutally undemocratic heart of the EU.

Despite its hegemonic role, German capitalism has shown itself both unable and unwilling to resolve the problems underpinning the crisis when the interests of the eurozone conflict with its own immediate interests – particularly ensuring repayments on loans from debtor nations within the EU. The most extreme example was the crushing austerity measures demanded of Greece in exchange for further loans, despite warnings from the other major eurozone economies that it would leave no path to recovery for the Greek economy; an economy previously absorbing billions of dollars’ worth of German exports a year.

British capitalism has consciously placed itself on the fringes of Europe and EU membership has had little bearing on left-wing or working class politics domestically. The referendum has been driven and continues to be shaped by a crisis on the right of British politics. A crisis where both sides are equally committed to deepening austerity and have collectively driven an agenda several steps to the right of anything emanating from Brussels. Their division, notionally over questions of “sovereignty,” is over whether Britain is best placed as a neoliberal outlier within the EU (with greater access to Eurozone markets). Or if the city and British firms could better exploit global markets if freed from the “protectionist” instincts and red tape of Europe. Socialists have no side in this split but it doesn’t mean we can’t exploit divisions to our advantage.

Opportunities for the Left?

We have largely ignored the question of Europe for decades as successive governments, Thatcher, Blair then Cameron have driven forward agendas to the right of mainstream European politics. Slashing of services, growing insecurity and austerity have all been driven by Westminster. For most working class people the only impact of EU membership (bar cheaper holidays) has been an increase in European economic migration and “red tape” regulations on workplace rights. In most communities the only people arguing enthusiastically in opposition to the EU have been closet racists and right-wing Tories.

In an attempt to generate support both camps have pitched narratives unfavourable to the left. The remain camp has focused on economic viability and scare mongering around the financial uncertainty of exit. While the Brexit camp has built upon a dog whistle campaign hostile to the idea of mass migration from Eastern Europe and the idea of “Britishness.” A significant section of the wider left takes opposition to the racism of this postcolonial idea of Britishness as a starting point and combines it with illusions that the EU can be reformed to represent a more progressive anti-nationalist “Europeanism.” This reflects the sense amongst working class communities that a large Brexit would be a vote against the increasingly multicultural life of our cities.

In this context revolutionaries have to put out propaganda exposing and explaining the neoliberal nature of the EU in a dialogue with those voting to remain and attempt to organise the anti-racist sentiment into active solidarity with migrants. Emphasis on the latter is essential if we are to counteract the most likely consequence of the referendum – an increase in anti-migrant legislation and the confidence of those most hostile to multiculturalism.

Don’t Lend our Votes to the Right

Unless a recurrence of the Greek crisis upsets the dynamic of the referendum “left exit” arguments will prove unable to shape the debate beyond the far left and certain unions. If we can’t shape the wider debate then votes to remain are lent in support of Cameron and votes to leave are adding to the numbers in support of a more openly racist, nationalistic conservativism.

The only good outcome on 23 June is a low turnout that demonstrates neither section of the right has gained traction over the question of Europe. The radical left should patiently explain our anti-capitalist critique of the EU and fight where we can win – in solidarity with junior doctors, building the solidarity and combativity of our side

The people of Palestine – both Gaza and the West Bank, arbitrarily split by Israeli separation policies which are illegal in international law – suffer daily abuse, deprivation and oppression. The United Nations, as well as major aid agencies such as Oxfam, provide testimony that Gaza has not been able to recover from the last Israeli assault of 2014. 75,000 people cannot return to their ruined homes and 80% of the population relies on international humanitarian aid just to survive.

Women are in the front line – literally. They are the ones trying to keep their homes and families together among their ruined houses. They are the ones trying to guide and protect their traumatized children living in a war zone. They are the ones suffering, but they are also the ones leading.

Take for example Palestinian journalist Ameera Harouda, who runs towards the sounds of bombs because “I want to be there first because these stories should be told”.

Recognizing the vital role of women in Gaza, the Canadian Boat to Gaza campaign is participating in the Freedom Flotilla Coalition campaign to send an All-Women’s boat to support women in Gaza and to challenge the illegal Israeli blockade. Committed women in public life around the world have volunteered to sail with the Women’s Boat to Gaza.

U.S. playwright Naomi Wallace describes her participation: “The collective venture of the Women’s Boat to Gaza is an act of defiance against the criminal incarceration of and frequent acts of war against an entire population, the majority of whom are children. It is also an intervention to highlight decades of astonishingly creative resistance by Palestinian women against Israel’s illegal occupation.” She adds: “Why will I be on the boat?  I am a playwright.  It’s both my duty and inspiration to engage with and expose systems that diminish us, like occupation, racism and brutality.”

Irish Nobel Prize Laureate Mairead Maquire says “I am sailing on the Women’s Boat to Gaza because I love my Palestinian brothers and sisters and l want to stand with them in all our struggle for Palestinian freedom and rights.” Also on board will be Members of Parliament, other eminent women and activists from over a dozen countries.

These women need our financial support to sail for Gaza. They are donating their time, courage and energy, but need financial donations to buy and equip the boats and provide the other support this campaign needs. http://canadaboatgaza.org/donate/

You, too, can get on board this vitally important initiative and show your commitment to Palestinian women of Gaza and those who would support them by donating to this campaign and helping to spread the word to your friends, family colleagues and other contacts.

Each one of the women sailing on the boats carries with her the support you provide.

Get on board this campaign and help the women of Gaza and the women’s boat to Gaza.

Canadian Boat to Gaza Team

“…only 1 in 10,000 HPV-infected women develop cervical cancer”  (Health Impact News)

“I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all times because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine, technical and scientific feat that it may be, has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers…There is far too much financial interest for these medicines to be withdrawn. (Dr. Bernard Dalbergue a former pharmaceutical industry physician with Gardasil manufacturer Merck, in an interview published in the April 2014 issue of the French magazine Principes de Santé)

No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.  (President Ronald Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when children die or are disabled from vaccine injuries)

“The 271 vaccines in development span a wide array of diseases, and employ exciting new scientific strategies and technologies. These potential vaccines – all in human clinical trials or under review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – include 137 for infectious diseases, 99 for cancer, 15 for allergies and 10 for neurological disorders. (PhRMA, The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America [Big Pharma’s trade association and lobbying group]) 

*     *     *

Recently there was published in the Duluth News Tribune, a commentary article applauding the safety and efficacy of the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccines (Merck’s quadrivalent Gardasil, Glaxo’s bivalent Cervarix and the newest one from Merck, Gardasil 9, which the company hopes will make obsolete the first two).

The article, written by a board-certified pediatrician, failed to fulfill a physician’s ethical and medical-legal duty to fully inform her readers about the negative aspects of the vaccines as well as the positive ones. All vaccines have potentially serious adverse effects, only partly because many of them contain substantial amounts of the neurotoxic, fetotoxic and teratogenic aluminum (especially when it is injected into muscle tissue).

Aluminum is included in many vaccines where it acts as an adjuvant, which makes it highly likely to cause brain problems in immunologically immature infants (and fetuses) because it adversely affects the blood-brain-barrier and is a mitochondrial toxin. Vaccine adjuvants are added to many vaccines to enhance the immune response to whatever antigen is given.

Tragically, such responses can actually cause hyperimmune responses, and can easily create chronic, sometimes incurable autoimmune and other chronic disorders, such as pre-diabetes, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver (= NASH = nonalcoholic steatohepatitis), autism spectrum disorders, asthma, food allergies, a variety of organ-specific autoimmune disorders (such as thyroiditis, vasculitis and autoimmune rheumatic diseases like SLE [lupus], rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and sarcoidosis), chronic fatigue syndrome, metabolic syndrome (= obesity, type 2 diabetes/insulin resistance, hypertension, and dyslipidemia), Gulf War Syndrome, POTS, and others. (See Global Research.)

One can assume that the co-authors hadn’t read the package insert of the newest Gardasil vaccine or the alternative medical literature (that hasn’t been bought by Big Pharma), because there aren’t many physicians who can say that they ever thoroughly read what the Physician’s Desk Reference says about any drug or vaccine before they prescribe it. It is a sad but true reality that most busy, fatigued and often double-booked physicians just don’t have the luxury of time (or energy) to do independent research or reading, especially when some pharmaceutical corporation, drug rep, WebMD, or other questionable source of information has done some for him or her.

Sadly, much of the information coming from Big Pharma (essentially sales pitches and propaganda that they like to call “physician or patient education”), physician-targeted websites, or any of the many professional trade associations (like the AMA, AAP, APA, AAFP, etc) are heartily – and often blindly – pro-drug, pro-vaccine and anti-nutritional therapy.

Because of my deep interest in the subject of iatrogenic diseases (these are disorders caused by prescription drugs, vaccines, medical devices or surgical procedures administered or prescribed by a physician), I have been acutely aware of the many very serious adverse effects that are too-commonly over-looked by busy physicians. And I read the adverse reaction section of the Gardasil package insert. I urge all vaccine-prescribing physicians and prospective Gardasil recipients to do the same.

Having retired from active practice, but still interested in medicine, I have the time and energy, when I am interested, to actually read the PDR and the abbreviated, woefully incomplete medical journal advertising (which no longer includes diagrams of molecular structures [Big Pharma apparently wants to keep us physicians ignorant of the chemistry of their potentially lethal drugs). The information within the PDR is sobering, even infuriating, especially when I consider all the times that I cavalierly prescribed dangerous drugs without being fully informed myself about their dangers.

Thankfully, I practiced medicine during an era when Big Pharma, Big Insurance and the profit motives of Wall Street investors and Big Medicine weren’t in charge of medical education and the way medicine was practiced. Back then physicians recoiled at the thought of giving more than one vaccine inoculation at a single sitting or prescribing more than one drug at a time!

My conscience is clear when it came to vaccines, even though I, just like most of my colleagues, had no idea what dangerous ingredients were in them and how risky was giving multiple shots to tiny infants at one sitting. But no patient of mine ever became autistic from any neurotoxic mercury- or aluminum-containing vaccine that I ordered, because there weren’t very many vaccines to give. No patient of mine ever developed an autoimmune disorder because there was no Big Pharma-promoted over-vaccination agenda back then.

And no young healthy adolescent female patient of mine every developed chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic headaches or chronic vascular instability from aluminum-containing human papilloma virus inoculations. There was no such thing back then, for the medical profession very efficiently and very cheaply prevented cervical cancer by simply doing periodic Pap smears.

Because of the above information, somebody with some expertise in the area has the duty to again warn Duluth-area readers of the Duluth News-Tribune about last week’s unashamedly pro-HPV-vaccine DNT commentary article.

Gardasil ain’t what it is advertised to be, and patients have the right to know what those unwelcome realities are. Following are some excerpts that people need to know, especially if they are contemplating receiving the series of three Gardasil shots.

For background information, please consider clicking on some of the following links where you can find some of the articles that I have written on vaccine dangers:

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/04/aluminum-deceptions-and-academic-misconduct/;

https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/03/duty-to-warn-big-pharmas-nefarious-control-of-health-care-and-the-vaccine-injury-compensation-program/;

http://www.medicalveritas.org/MedicalVeritas/Current_Childhood_Vaccine_Programs.html;

https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/02/duty-to-warn-why-we-need-to-be-more-cautious-about-americas-over-vaccination-program/.

The problem is world-wide, with Japan recently withdrawing its mandate for Gardasil vaccinations and most first world nations re-considering their vaccine agendas. The United States can afford to be more cavalier, because of the fact that vaccine manufacturers and prescribing physicians are immune from medicolegal liability when vaccine injuries or deaths occur. The following articles and excerpts should be instructive.

The FDA needs to be removed from the responsibility of ’assuring the safety, efficacy and security’ of vaccines. It is quite obvious they are not up to the task. They are most certainly not acting in the best interests of the public.

Medical consumers – do not consent to the administration of Gardasil 9 unless you and your medical provider have read and discussed the entire package insert together. The choice is yours, make it an informed one.

For the full text of Dr. Kohl’s article, see DuluthReader.com 

Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his family practice career. He now writes a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. Many of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn and at http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls.

Moments ago the newswires lit up with news that the Clinton Foundation“was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the Nov. election, Bloomberg reports according to three people familiar with the matter.“

.

• CLINTON FOUNDATION SAID TO BE BREACHED BY RUSSIAN HACKERS

As Bloomberg adds, attacks on the foundation’s network as well as those of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign compound concerns about her digital security even as the FBI continues to investigate her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state. The spokesman for the foundation, Brian Cookstra, said he wasn’t aware of any breach; compromise of the foundation’s computers was first identified by govt investigators as recently as last week.

That’s the official version, and one which accurately focuses on the porous security at both the DNC and Clinton Foundation servers.

What really happened is that earlier today, the infamous hacker Guccifer2 – who as we reported previously, revealed himself as the individual who penetrated the DNC server (which was also blamed on Russian hackers) and revealed to the world the DNC’s “attack files” on Donald Trump, among others, including the Clinton mega donors – released another data dump which he titled as the “Dossier on Hillary Clinton from DNC.”

#Guccifer2 Dossier on #HillaryClintonhttps://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/hillary-clinton …

— GUCCIFER 2.0 (@GUCCIFER_2) 10:03 AM – 21 Jun 2016

In the post he says the following:

This’s time to keep my word and here’re the docs I promised you.

It’s not a report in one file, it’s a big folder of docs devoted to Hillary Clinton that I found on the DNC server.

The DNC collected all info about the attacks on Hillary Clinton and prepared the ways of her defense, memos, etc., including the most sensitive issues like email hacks.

As an example here’re some files:

2016er Attacks – HRC Defense Master Doc [updated]

04.29.15 CGEP

2016 Democrats Positions Cheat Sheet 7-7-15

20150426 MEMO- Clinton Cash Unravels

Attacks on Clinton Family Members

Clinton Foundation Donors $25K+

Clinton Foundation Vulnerabilities Master Doc FINAL

Clintons PFD 2015

HRC Defense – Emails

HRC Travel – Private Jets FINAL

MEMO — Clinton Cash Claims (2)

Most notable among these files is the file called “Clinton Foundation Vulnerabilities Master Doc FINAL” which, as the title implies, is an extensive 42-page summary of how the Clinton Foundation views its biggest vulnerabilities based on mentions, references and attacks from the press.

Here are some of the section titles:

• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED DONATIONS FROM INDIVIDUALS TIED TO SAUDI ARABIA WHILE CLINTON SERVED AS SECRETARY OF STATE
• AN EMBATTLED BUSINESSMAN WITH “TIES TO BAHRAIN’S STATE-OWNED ALUMINUM COMPANY” GAVE BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
• A VENEZUELAN MEDIA MOGUL WHO WAS ACTIVE IN VENEZUELAN POLITICS DONATED TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DURING CLINTON’S TENURE AS SECRETARY OF STATE
• GERMAN INVESTOR WHO HAS LOBBIED CHANCELLOR MERKEL’S ADMINISTRATION GAVE BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, SOME OF WHICH WAS DURING MRS. CLINTON’S TENURE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
• THE CEO OF AN AMSTERDAM BASED ENERGY COMPANY DONATED AT LEAST $1 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND LATER ANNOUNCED AT THE 2009 CGI MEETING A $5 BILLION PROJECT TO DEVELOP ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY POWER GENERATION IN INDIA AND CHINA
• INDIAN POLITICIAN AMAR SINGH, WHO HAD DONATED AT LEAST $1 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, MET WITH HILLARY CLINTON IN SEPTEMBER 2008 TO DISCUSS AN INDIA-U.S. CIVIL NUCLEAR AGREEMENT
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED ADDITIONAL DONATIONS FROM INDIAN BUSINESS INTERESTS PRIOR TO HER BECOMING SECRETARY OF STATE
• BILLIONAIRE STEEL EXECUTIVE AND MEMBER OF THE FOREIGN INVESTMENT COUNCIL IN KAZAKHSTAN LAKSHMI MITTAL GAVE $1 MILLION TO $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION BEFORE CLINTON BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE
• SOON AFTER SECRETARY CLINTON LEFT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, THE CLINTON
  FOUNDATION “RECEIVED A LARGE DONATION FROM A CONGLOMERATE RUN BY A
  MEMBER OF CHINA’S NATIONAL PEOPLE’S CONGRESS”
• …AND THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DEFENDED ITS PARTNERSHIPS WITH BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC CORPORATE INTERESTS
• POWERFUL AND CONTROVERSIAL CORPORATE INTERESTS BASED IN THE U.S. ALSO DONATED TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
• AMONG THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DONORS REVEALED IN 2009 WERE SEVERAL FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS WHO HAD GIVEN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
• WHEN HILLARY CLINTON BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE IN 2009, BILL CLINTON AGREED TO STOP ACCEPTING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FROM MOST FOREIGN COUNTRIES
• IN THE PAST, SOME OBSERVERS HAD LINKED FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONATIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND SECRETARY CLINTON’S WORK AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION CAME UNDER INTENSE SCRUTINY IN FEBRUARY 2015 WHEN IT WAS REVEALED THAT THE FOUNDATION HAD ACCEPTED DONATIONS FROM FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS AFTER SECRETARY CLINTON LEFT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TIED FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONORS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION’S ENDOWMENT FUNDRAISING UNDER SECRETARY CLINTON
• CLINTON FOUNDATION ANNOUNCED THAT SHOULD HILLARY CLINTON DECIDE TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT, THE FOUNDATION WOULD FOLLOW APPROPRIATE PROCEDURES FOR ACCEPTING DONATIONS FROM FOREIGN DONATIONS, JUST LIKE IT HAD HAD UNDER SECRETARY CLINTON…
• REPORTS THAT STATE DEPARTMENT LAWYERS DID NOT EXHAUSTIVELY VET BILL CLINTON’S PAID SPEECHES DURING SECRETARY CLINTON’S TENURE RAISED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ROLE CLINTON FOUNDATION DONATIONS MAY HAVE PLAYED IN ORGANIZING THOSE SPEECHES
• SOME CONSERVATIVES USED THE FOREIGN DONATIONS CONTROVERSY TO IMPLY THAT THE CLINTON FOUNDATION IS NOT A CHARITY AND QUESTION THE FOUNDATION’S CHARITABLE WORK
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION HAS ACCEPTED DONATIONS FROM INDIVIDUALS, SOME OF WHOM HAD TIES TO FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, DURING HER TENURE AS SECRETARY OF STATE
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED MONEY FROM A FOUNDATION FORMED BY FORMER UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT MEMBER VICTOR PINCHUK
• WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMNIST MARY O’GRADY CITED A CONTRACT BETWEEN TWO CLINTON DONORS FOR HAITI AID AS EVIDENCE OF A CONFLICT OF INTEREST FOR THE CLINTONS

There is much more in the full document presented below (link).

* * *

One important thing to note: according to an interview that Motherboard conducted with Guccifer2 on Tuesday, the hacker makes it clear he is not Russian. He is, in fact, from Romania, just like the Original Guccifer.

“I’m a hacker, manager, philosopher, women lover,” Guccifer 2.0 told Motherboard on Tuesday in a Twitter chat. “I also like Gucci! I bring the light to people. I’m a freedom fighter! So u can choose what u like!”

The hacker, who claimed to have chosen the name in reference to the notorious hacker who leaked the George W. Bush paintings and claims to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server, denied working for the Russian government, as several experts believe.

“I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia,” he said, adding that he was from Romania, just like the first Guccifer.

When asked to explain how he hacked into the DNC in Romanian, “he seemed to stall us, and said he didn’t want to “waste” his time doing that. The few short sentences he sent in Romanian were filled with mistakes, according to several Romanian native speakers.”

The hacker said he left Russian metadata in the leaked documents as his personal ”watermark.” He also said he got kicked out of the network on June 12, when the DNC “rebooted their system.”

A senior DNC official said in an emailed statement that “our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April, and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians.”

Guccifer 2.0 also said the DNC isn’t the only victim of his hacks, but declined to name any others because “my safety depends on it.”

It appears the Clinton Foundation was one of the other hacks.

Finally, when asked why he targeted the DNC, “Guccifer 2.0 said he simply did it to follow the lead of Marcel Lazar, the original Guccifer, and that he doesn’t “care at all” about Donald Trump. The hacker declined to say whether he knew him personally, “cause I care for Marcel.” “I think we must fight for freedom of minds,” he wrote. “Fight for the world without Illuminati.”

Good luck.

* * *

So while we are going through the full data dump (found here), here is the leaked document revealing the “Clinton Foundation’s Vulnerabilities.”

Neither major party offers a program to reverse the present course of militarism and income inequality 

These are difficult times in the United States and the world requiring a greater degree of preciseness in our analysis and discipline in the style of work that we pursue.

We have the advantage of 36 years of organizational experience where during the course of this period there have been many changes domestically and internationally. Nonetheless, today we are facing similar problems that plagued the founders of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR) in 1980.

First of all I want to discuss the recent massacre at the Pulse Club in Orlando, Florida in the early morning hours of June 12. This was a monumental crime against humanity with the killing of 50 people and the wounding of 53 others.

The crime appeared to be motivated by hate and fear. Some have declared that the alleged perpetrator Omar Mateen was mentally deranged. Others say he had pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (IS) and was outraged by LGBTQ community that frequented the establishment where the shooting took place.

Almost half of the people killed in the attack were of Puerto Rican descent. This compounds the tragedy even further considering that Puerto Rico is a colony of a special type of the U.S. For those who have been following the news about the economic crisis in Puerto Rico, the crisis there bears striking resemblance to what we have been subjected to in Detroit.

Puerto Rico is said to be indebted to the banks and bondholders to the tune of $70 billion. The economic situation on the islands has engendered higher rates of joblessness, austerity and outmigration. More Puerto Ricans now live in the U.S. than reside on the islands. Retired Judge Steven Rhodes who oversaw the massive theft in pensions, healthcare programs, public lands, the regionalization of an entire water system prompting the present calamity in Flint, along with the denial of the fundamental rights of a majority African American city to self-determination and home rule, is now a consultant for the Puerto Rican Commonwealth.

Therefore, we can imagine vividly the type of outcome the Puerto Rican nation will encounter with this type of advice and manipulation from the U.S. government and corporate community. This is the same Rhodes that is now the “transition manager” of the Detroit Public Schools which is slated for dissolution and restructuring once again by the right-wing dominated state government in Lansing.

The Quest for Peace Domestically and Worldwide

One young friend of mine on Facebook who used to live in Detroit said that their reaction to the massacre in Orlando was one of numbness. They said that there are just too many of these incidents in the U.S. Perhaps many people are becoming anesthetized to inter-personal violence and horror. These shooting are by no means a rarity in the U.S. with mass shooting taking place on average daily.

In an article published by PBS in early January it says, “According to the Tracker’s data, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are killed or wounded, there were 372 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2015, killing 475 and wounding 1,870.”

No one could effectively argue that the U.S. is not a country with a violent history. The British colonies and the U.S. government were founded on the forced removal and genocide against the indigenous Native American peoples. African people were brought to the Western Hemisphere for the purpose of enslavement suffering for nearly 250 years in bondage. It would take a civil war between the Confederate states and the Union to end slavery in 1865 ushering in yet another century of legalized segregation and institutional racism.

We also must acknowledge the violent wars of the 19^th century against the Native people who resisted settler intervention and destruction. A war against Mexico from 1846-1848 resulted in the capturing of at least one-third of its territory now designated as the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, California and Nevada.

In 2016, the descendants of these people are labelled as “illegal immigrants” and “minorities”, rationalizing repressive and exploitative policies. Under the present administration of President Barack Obama there have been more deportations than any period in U.S. history.

Corporate media sources often focus on injuries and deaths due to inter-personal violence while far less attention is focused on the direct role of the oppressive state. There have been several high-profile cases over the last four years which have prompted mass demonstrations and rebellions including the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012; the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014; the police choking of Eric Garner in 2014; we must remember Tamir Rice who was playing with a toy gun in a public park in Cleveland and was gunned down by the police; to only mention a few.

In regard to U.S. foreign policy, I have said repeatedly that a nation’s domestic program is reflected in its relations with other areas of the world. This has been starkly illustrated over the last quarter century of “permanent war” and occupation of vast regions of the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

On June 9, when the corporate media was filled with reports announcing that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had “clinched” the Democratic Party nomination for president, President Obama issued an executive order expanding the U.S. role in the war against Afghanistan. This is the same Afghanistan war that has been declared over on numerous occasions yet American troops and resources remain there amid the ongoing fighting.

The Washington Post reported

“The Obama administration has granted American forces in Afghanistan new authorities to assist Afghan troops, a U.S. official said on Thursday. The move signals a return to broader military might against the Taliban and pulls the United States back deeper into the country’s ongoing war. The new measures include authorizing U.S. troops, stationed in Afghanistan on a dual training and counterterrorism mission, to begin accompanying conventional local forces on the battlefield in a way that now occurs only with elite Afghan forces. That, in turn, could mean greater use of U.S. air power to support those American and Afghan forces as they do battle.”

This is also true of Iraq where at least 3,500 Pentagon troops have been deployed over the last year to ostensibly assist in the fight against the Islamic State. In Syria, the U.S. along with at least a dozen other countries is bombing the territory under the guise of combatting terrorism.

In Yemen, the White House is supporting a war against the people though the proxy states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emarites (UAE), among others to purportedly curtail Iranian influence in the least developed country in the Middle East. The Palestinians, pushed to the background of U.S. foreign policy, remain under occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza.

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) destroyed Libya five years ago leaving the continent’s once most prosperous state in ruins and poverty becoming a source of instability for the entire region. Libya is a major source of human trafficking where hundreds of thousands today are seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe exacerbating divisions within the European Union (EU) leaving millions of migrants and their descendants subjected to xenophobia and racism.

In Latin America the government of Brazil was overthrown recently without any response from the U.S. making its role quite suspect in the fifth largest state in the world. Venezuela is under threat after being destabilizing by forces funded and coordinated by Washington.

Cuba is still occupied at Guantanamo Bay by the Pentagon naval base and a concentration camp housing so-called “terrorists” who have never been put on trial. Travel bans and the economic embargo against Havana remains despite the supposed efforts to “normalize” relations with the Caribbean island-nation just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

Another important policy decision from the federal legislature went almost unnoticed as well and that was the recent passage of a defense bill by Congress ignoring a possible veto threat by Obama.

The Associated Press reported on June 14 that

“Defying a White House veto threat, the Senate voted decisively Tuesday to approve a defense policy bill that authorizes $602 billion in military spending, bars shuttering the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and denies the Pentagon’s bid to start a new round of military base closings. The GOP-led Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act passed 85 to 13, with all but seven members of the Democratic caucus backing the legislation. Six Republicans voted against the bill. The legislation mandates for the first time in history that young women sign up for a potential military draft. The requirement has angered social conservatives, who fear the move is another step toward the blurring of gender lines akin to allowing transgender people to use public lavatories and locker rooms.”

The Ongoing Problems of Racism and National Oppression 

Recognition of the violent history of the U.S. takes us into the second segment of tonight’s presentation that is the failure to eradicate racism and national oppression from U.S. society some 151 years since the conclusion of the civil war. Evidence of this reality is all around us as we speak.

We need to look no further than the ongoing 2016 national elections where racism has been allowed to characterize the Republican Party nominations process. House of Representatives speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said just last week that presumptive nominee Donald Trump’s comments about a Mexican American jurist were racist. However, Ryan went on to say in the next breath that he would support Trump anyway. This is quite revealing along with the reticence of the Democratic Party leadership to thoroughly and unequivocally condemn not only the racism of the Republican Party but within its own ranks.

Bill Clinton, when confronted by African American activists in Philadelphia in April responded by saying that critics of his signing of the ominous crime bill during the mid-1990s were defending drug dealers and murderers. Terms such as “super-predators” came out of the mouths of the Clintons during their tenure in office.

Over the last three-and-a-half decades when MCHR was founded, the prison population in the U.S. has increased by at least 500 percent. African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately impacted by police violence and mass incarceration. These policies have been continuous through successive Republican and Democratic administrations.

Moreover, there are other forms of racism which take on a different character that are equally if not more so debilitating and deadly. In the realm of socio-economic equality the U.S. has not made substantial progress within the last 40 years.

A recent annual report issued by the National Urban League entitled “The State of Black America, Locked Out: Jobs, Education, Justice,” documents the continuing disparities between African Americans and whites. This lack of progress over four decades was not altered as a result of two terms of an Obama presidency.

In regard to the NUL study I wrote in early June that

“This report provides much hard data which necessitates a critical look at the lack of progress made during two terms of the Obama administration. African Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008 and 2012 securing his two terms in office. Unemployment rates in the area in which he emerged politically from, the state and federal senates representing Illinois, exposes the futility of an electoral agenda absent of substantive demands based on the concrete conditions facing the working class and poor.”

Illinois has the highest rate of unemployment for African Americans than any other state in the Union. The Chicago area, where many African Americans and Latinos live, is a center for mass poverty and violence. Just last weekend in the Windy City there were 42 different shootings during the course of three days resulting in 7 deaths, one of which was a five-year-old.

In the same articled cited above, I also noted that

“These statistics pose a challenge for mass organizations to continue to put forward a political program for real jobs, decent housing, quality education and economic parity. It would be safe to say that irrespective of who is elected to the White House and Congress for 2017, the oppression and exploitation will not wither away.”

Social Justice and the Economic Crisis

One issue that the Senator Bernie Sanders campaign raised to millions across the U.S. was the growing income gap. Leading up to the 2008-2009 bail out of the banks, insurance companies and automobile firms, this phenomenon took on grotesque characteristics. This has continued into the present period.

Earlier this year it was announced that General Motors reaped $8.7 billion in profits during 2015. GM was founded in Flint, Michigan over 100 years ago. Yet Flint is suffering from contaminated water, a deteriorating infrastructure and mass unemployment.

At a demonstration in the spring calling for the rebuilding of Flint, it was quite striking to look at the space previously known as “Buick City” which was abandoned and razed by the city. Much of the contamination in the Flint River is directly due to the industrial abandonment of this majority African American municipality.

Despite all of this there has been no commitment on the part of GM, the State of Michigan, the U.S. government or others with immense resources to provide the assistance and redevelopment aid needed to reconstruct Flint. This is true not only of Flint but also Detroit, Highland Park, Inkster, Benton Harbor and other cities across Michigan.

These are issues that should be at the forefront of any program of a political party that garners the support of working people and the oppressed. An absence of these demands represents an abdication of the obligations we share as human being seeking to liberate ourselves and humanity from exploitation and repression.

Conclusion

These are just some of the specific questions that we need to grapple with in the next few weeks and months. The Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia will be the scene of demonstrations against the policies of both political parties which quite frankly represent the same class interests.

Even though both parties have different constituencies, the leadership clearly does not represent the social and economic interests of the majority of people in the U.S. whether they are Black, Brown, Red, Arab, Asian, Gay, Straight, disabled or able-bodies, etc. What are we getting for our taxes and votes?

Are we to determine our own destiny through a democratic process or are we to be engulfed into other more violent and disruptive tactics in response to injustice and inequality? We are still human beings and will respond to oppression and exploitation as a liberation force.

These are the challenges we are up against in 2016. Let us move forward to address them in an urgent and creative manner leading us towards the world we want to see and live in.

Note: This address was delivered at the annual meeting of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR) on June 16, 2016. The event took place at the Our Lady of Fatima church in Oak Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Azikiwe’s talk was followed by responses from Kezia Curtis, a MCHR board member and Wayne Curtis, a community activist on the eastside of Detroit. The meeting was facilitated by Atty. Carey McGehee, Chair of the MCHR Board of Directors. 

If you read the presstitute media, Brexit—the referendum tomorrow on the UK’s exit from the EU— is about racism.  According to the story line, angry rightwing racists of violent inclinations want to leave the EU to avoid having to accept more dark-skinned immigrants into England. 

Despite the constant propaganda against exit, polls indicated that more favored leaving the EU than remaining until a member of Parliament, Ms. Jo Cox, was killed by a man that a witness said shouted “Brexit.”  Cox was an opponent of leaving the EU.

The UK government and presstitute media used Cox’s murder to drive home the propaganda that violent racists  were behind Brexit. However, other witnesses gave a different report.  The Guardian, which led with the propaganda line, did report later in its account that “Other witnesses said the attack was launched after the MP became involved in an altercation involving two men near where she held her weekly surgery.”  Of course, we will never know, because Cox’s murder is too valuable of a weapon against Brexit.

There is no doubt that many in the UK are disturbed at the transformation of their country.  One doesn’t have to be a racist to feel that one’s country is being stolen from them by people of alien cultures.  The British have a long history of fighting off invaders, and many believe they are experiencing an invasion, although not an armed one.  An armed one, of course, would not have the government’s and media’s support.

When British people hear pundits pronounce that immigrants contribute more to the UK than they absorb in social payments, what they hear is inconsistent with their experience.  Moreover, many British are tired of having to avoid entire sections of their cities, including London.

It is a propaganda choice to call these concerns racism rather than cultural defense, and the UK political establishment has made that propaganda choice.  Little wonder so many British citizens no longer believe that the British Establishment represents Britain.

But let’s give the propagandists the benefit of the doubt and for sake of argument assume that Brexit is about racism.  What is the opposition to Brexit really about?  Most certainly it is not about helping the refugees from Washington’s wars that the UK government has enabled.  If the British establishment cared so much for the Muslims seeking refuge from America’s invasions, bombs, and drones, the British establishment would not have supported Washington’s attacks on these people.

Opposition to Brexit is based on two powerful interests of Washington.

One is the interests of the New York banks and Wall Street to eliminate the UK as a financial center competitor.  This blatant fact has escaped the notice of the City and the Bank of England.

The British have forgotten that they only have one foot in the EU, because the UK was permitted to keep its own currency.  The UK does not use the euro and, thus, retains the power to finance the British government.  Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, etc., do not have this capability.  They are dependent on private banks for financing.

In order to trick the UK into joining the EU, the British were given special privileges.  However, these privileges cannot last forever.  The EU process is one of political integration.  As I reported years ago, Jean-Claude Trichet, at that time the president of the European Central Bank, said that to complete the political integration of Europe, the fiscal policies of member states would be centralized.  It is impossible to centralize fiscal policies if the UK is an independent financial center with its own central bank and currency.

Wall Street understands that the defeat of Brexit means a shortened lifespan for London as a financial center, as it is impossible to be a financial center unless a country has its own currency and central bank.  As it is impossible for the UK to be a member of the EU and not operate under the European Central Bank, once the Brexit referendum is defeated, the process of gradually forcing the UK into the euro will begin.

The other powerful interest is the interest of Washington to prevent one country’s exit from leading to the exit of other countries.  As CIA documents found in the US National Archives make clear, 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.  Moreover, if the EU unravels, so likely would NATO, which is the necessary cover for Washington’s aggression.

The EU serves Washington and the One Percent.  It serves no one else.  The EU is a murderer of sovereignty and peoples.  The intent is for the British, French, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Spanish, and all the rest to disappear as peoples.  Brexit is the last chance to defeat this hidden agenda, and apparently the British will vote tomorrow without having a clue as to what is at stake and what the vote is about.

The decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to ban the Russian track and field team from competing in the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro is as much about politics as it is about doping and fair play.  Indeed, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) upheld the ruling with caveats that might allow some of the athletes to compete, the public relations damage has already been done.  Russia has been cast as a serial violator of doping rules, and must be a country that is dishonest and cheats routinely; those sneaky Russians just can’t be trusted.  Or so the propaganda subtext implies.

But a closer look at the manner in which the Olympics has been politicized reveals that it is, in fact, the US and its allies, not Russia, who have done the most to use this quadrennial competition of the world’s best athletes for political gain.  And in so doing, it is Washington that bears responsibility for tainting the Olympics.

While the allegations of Russian doping may or may not be true, and the country’s attempts at addressing the issue may or may not ineffectual, the fact remains that it is politics and geopolitics, not banned substances, that now befouls the games.  A quick survey of recent history shows just how serious this politicization has become.

The Olympics as a Weapon

This is not the first time (nor is it likely the last time) that the Olympics have been politicized.  And, considering the recent deep freeze in US-Russia relations thanks to Ukraine, Syria, Edward Snowden, and other key issues, one cannot help but reach the conclusion that the US has used its considerable influence behind the scenes to jab a thumb in the eye of Mr. Putin and the Russian Government.  Moreover, even if this were entirely the actions of the relevant international athletic bodies with no interference from Washington, could anyone seriously blame Moscow for concluding that the ban is politically motivated?

Consider for a moment the recent history of the Olympics, Russia, and the US. In 2014, the western media was replete with columns and television news stories calling for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in Sochi.  Literally dozens of op-eds were written with titles like Send Athletes to the Sochi Olympics, but Boycott the Games,ostensibly in an attempt to put pressure on the Kremlin in the wake of the passage of controversial legislation regarding LGBT rights in Russia.  In fact, the generally aggressive position of the West came through clearly in decisions by leaders such as Barack Obama and David Cameron not to attend the games, despite the invitations.

It should be remembered that the Sochi Olympics, which took place in February 2014, proceeded against the backdrop of intense upheaval in Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, not far from Sochi.  In fact, the coup that forced former President Yanukovich, widely seen as a key ally of the Kremlin, took place roughly 48 hours prior to the closing ceremonies in Sochi.  The general feeling in Moscow, and among many political observers internationally, was that the US-backed coup in Kiev was timed to coincide with the Olympics in the hopes that the Russian Government would fear responding too harshly given the precarious question of public opinion globally.

At the time, many had likened the series of events around Sochi 2014 to the start of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 which coincided with the launching of attacks by Georgia’s government under then President Mikhail Saakashvili against the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Indeed, almost at the very moment that the Russian President Putin was sitting in a stadium in Beijing along with other world leaders, a key US-NATO ally and partner initiated a war of aggression.  However, as one might recall, the western corporate media, with its dutiful adherence to the war party line, endlessly droned about Russian aggression against Georgia.

But within a few months, independent investigations showed that in fact Moscow’s assertion that Saakashvili launched an unprovoked attack on Russian peacekeepers and unarmed civilians had been accurate.  Could it be mere coincidence that at the very moment that the Russian leader was in Beijing a war on Russia’s border and against Russians was launched?  Whether coincidence or not, it was not interpreted that way by Putin and his advisers.  And, of course, they had good reason to be suspect of the timing and motives behind the attack.

Undoubtedly, Russian leaders had in their minds the not too distant memory of the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.  Ostensibly a move designed to punish the Soviet Union for its intervention in Afghanistan, the US Government under then President Carter made the decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics, and attempted to get other countries to do the same.  In hindsight however, the move is remembered as a disastrous blunder by an administration seen as inept in terms of foreign policy while being dominated by Cold War ideologues such as Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In an article aptly titled Jimmy Carter’s Disastrous Olympic Boycott, which purposefully was published on February 9, 2014 (two days after the start of the Sochi Olympics), Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote that:

[Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski also saw an opportunity for Carter to assert himself on matters of foreign policy. But what could the United States hope to do?… the West German ambassador to NATO suggested an Olympic boycott. The White House was intrigued. In a meeting of the National Security Council, Lloyd Cutler, the White House counsel, argued that the United States should boycott the Olympics only if it were combined with other strong action. Vice President Walter Mondale was enthusiastic…As for the president, according to White House notes of the meeting, Carter said the idea sent “cold chills” down his spine…Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott.

Two points brought out by the above excerpt bear closer scrutiny.  First is the fact that Brzezinski – a calculating strategic planner at the uppermost echelons of the political establishment, whose hatred of all things Russia is internationally renowned – saw the Olympics as a means of further undermining Russian/Soviet standing internationally at precisely the moment that the US proxy mujahideen were battling Soviet military in Afghanistan.  In effect, Brzezinski saw an Olympic boycott as war by other means.  The fact that the national security team, led by Brzezinski, was the driving force behind the decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics reinforces the perception that the boycott was less about defending Afghanistan than it was about scoring political points against the Soviet Union.

Secondly, one should pay close attention to the final sentence of the excerpt which really bears repeating: “Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott.”  In other words, the corporate media – significantly freer and more diverse in opinion in 1980 than it is in 2016 – was critical in selling the American public on the idea of a boycott.  Perhaps another way of saying it would be that the media acted as the public relations mouthpiece of the US Government, in much the same way it does now. And without that compliant media making the case for such action, it is unlikely that Americans would feel anything other than anger at being cheated out of an opportunity to watch their country’s best athletes compete against the top competition in the world.

But the politicization of sports vis-à-vis US-Russia relations is not restricted solely to the Olympics.  In fact, as recently as last year the US, UK, and other allies led an effort to discredit Russia’s hosting of the World Cup, the most watched sporting event in the world, with claims of corruption and bribery.  Never mind the fact that it was Mi6 operatives engaged in spying against Russia who created the dossier used to implicate Putin & Co. in the illegal “buying” of the World Cup.  Indeed, this scandal was the death knell for former FIFA boss Sepp Blatter who, because of seemingly friendly ties with Russia, was quickly shown the door after 17 years.

Naturally the media has stepped in with calls to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup on every possible pretext. Witness the following headlines: FIFA should for once do the right thing and strip Russia of World Cup andCould the Litvinenko Murder Verdict See Russia Stripped of the 2018 World Cup? and The growing calls to strip Putin and Russia of the 2018 World Cup.  What was that phrase in the Politico article? “Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott.”  Again, we see today the media playing the role of US policy cheerleader, providing the necessary marketing for a clearly anti-Russian foreign policy move shrouded under the pretext of sports and fairness.

It’s the Propaganda, Stupid

But what’s the point of all this? Who cares if some Russian athletes can’t compete in Rio?  A valid question, to be sure.  To think of these moves by the US and its allies as purely designed to embarrass Russia is to completely misread the intent behind them.  Certainly, bad publicity for Putin is part of the rationale, but it is not the real goal.  Instead, the targets are the citizens of western countries whose ideas, opinions, and attitudes towards Russia will be shaped as much by sports and popular culture as by anything else.

And so, the real objective is to portray Russians as crooked cheaters whose dishonesty and insidious intentions are overshadowed only by their mindless loyalty to their country.   It is to make Americans and Brits and Europeans – already Russophobic in their outlook thanks to decades of Cold War propaganda and the current onslaught of “Putin did it!” politics – view Russian athletes as little more than a bunch of steroid-injecting Ivan Dragos whose deceit is merely a reflection of the treacherous double-dealing of their political leadership.

In short, the move to ban the Russian track and field team is part of a broader project to discredit Russia in the eyes of the public at large.  The issue is not so much about whether there is doping in Russia’s track and field program – doping is widespread in many countries, including the US – but rather about how to undermining and weakening Russia in the court of public opinion on the eve of the Olympics.  Furthermore, the negative attitudes promoted by the media will justify further aggressive policies in Ukraine, Syria, and beyond. And that is precisely the point.

Walter Lipmann, the renowned writer, commentator, and theoretician of public opinion and propaganda defined the term “stereotype” in the modern psychological sense as a “distorted picture or image in a person’s mind, not based on personal experience, but derived culturally.”  And it is just such a distorted picture which the US and its partners are cultivating against Russia, using the Olympics as the pretext.

Moreover, that the distortion is “derived culturally” rather than from personal experience demonstrates that it is the propagandists of the corporate media whose job it is to manufacture and perpetuate such distortions for political reasons who are the arbiters of truth. George Orwell would be proud.

The Italian-American analyst Umberto Pascali explains the presence of Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi at the Saint-Petersburg Economic Forum and the extension of EU sanctions against Russia:

Germany is beginning to work against its own self-interests.

While this process of economic suicide was very clear in Germany, in Italy it is not the same. The level of unemployment is such that every week thousands of companies collapse. There is no possible view of the future unless the sanctions against Russia will be eliminated. Some time ago, the prime minister of Bavaria, formally an ally of Angela Merkel, didn’t care and simply went to talk to Putin.

The longer the sanctions last, the more difficult it will be to put an end to them.

And this is a very important concept: sanctions cannot be automatic. I hope that sanctions will be eliminated formally, legally, de-jure. These sanctions are not just against Russia. The US is forcing Europe to comply and is killing Europe. So, I think there is now a movement of rebellion against this position on sanctions.

We do not want a policy of war and, in fact, we will de-facto restart economic relations cooperation with Russia. If France, Germany, and Italy do what the prime minister of Bavaria did, what Renzi is doing now, and create this push, then we are not going to have a war with Russia no matter what happens with the US elections. It would be very difficult not only to go to war with Russia, but even to go to war with Syria. Europeans didn’t have any problems with Syria before.

Glyphosate herbicide disrupts the development of the uterus of female rats when they are exposed for 7 days after birth, a new study (abstract below) by Argentine researchers shows.

The glyphosate herbicide caused cell proliferation and structural changes in the rats’ uterus. This was in spite of the fact that no signs of chronic or acute toxicity or differences in weight gain were seen in treated pups.

Glyphosate herbicide also disrupted the expression of proteins involved in uterine development.

The authors conclude that exposure to glyphosate herbicide may affect female fertility and/or promote the development of uterine cancer.

They also state that their study is the first to show endocrine-disrupting effects of a glyphosate-based herbicide on the uterus of newborn and prepubertal rats, supporting the possibility that glyphosate-based herbicides might be endocrine disruptors.

Miscarriages in GM soy-growing regions

Doctors and scientists have noted high rates of miscarriage – sometimes called “spontaneous abortion” – in women living in regions of Argentina where GM Roundup Ready soy is grown and sprayed with glyphosate herbicides. The new study may shed light on this phenomenon.

Dose found toxic in new study is claimed safe by US regulators

The dose of herbicide found to disrupt uterine development in the rats was 2 mg per kg of bodyweight per day, based on the US “reference dose” of pure glyphosate that regulators deem safe to consume every day of our lives for a lifetime.

Clearly, this study questions that assumption of safety.

But there is a complication – namely that the exposure route chosen by the researchers was injection under the skin rather than oral administration.

Oral administration is one of the exposure routes favoured by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for toxicology tests conducted on pesticides for regulatory purposes. Exposure routes are supposed to reflect human exposure routes as closely as possible. Studies that use injection are generally dismissed by regulators as “not relevant” to human risk assessment.

However, the authors point out in their study that given the very early stage of development of the rat pups tested – they would still have been feeding from the mothers – injection was the only exposure route that would ensure incorporation of the whole substance into the rats’ bodies. This makes good scientific sense, but almost guarantees that regulators will try to ignore the study.

Oral exposure not the same as injection

Scientists whom we consulted agreed with the authors’ justification for using injection, given the timing of administration. But they added that the distribution of the glyphosate herbicide in the rats’ bodies may be quite different following injection compared to the oral route – and that the toxic effects observed might therefore also be different.

One scientist advised that as only around 30% of glyphosate is taken up in the body through the usual oral route of exposure, the researchers should have injected lower amounts than the US reference dose to reflect this. Indeed, a dose-response experimental design, with additional lower doses, would have been preferable, though this would also have been more expensive. We hope this important study can be followed up along these lines.

For their part, regulators should require studies to be carried out on glyphosate herbicides at realistic doses – but also demand a phase-out of their use until and unless their safety can be established.

Annex

Neonatal exposure to a glyphosate based herbicide alters the development of the rat uterus

Schimpf, Marlise Guerrero, Milesi, Maria M., Ingaramo, Paola I., Luque, Enrique H., Varayoud, Jorgelina

Toxicology (2016)

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tox.2016.06.004

Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) are extensively used to control weeds on both cropland and non-cropland areas. No reports are available regarding the effects of GBHs exposure on uterine development. We evaluated if neonatal exposure to a GBH affects uterine morphology, proliferation and expression of proteins that regulate uterine organogenetic differentiation in rats. Female Wistar pups received saline solution (control, C) or a commercial formulation of glyphosate (GBH, 2 mg/kg) by sc injection every 48 h from postnatal day (PND) 1 to PND7. Rats were sacrificed on PND8 (neonatal period) and PND21 (prepubertal period) to evaluate acute and short-term effects, respectively. The uterine morphology was evaluated in hematoxylin and eosin stained sections.

The epithelial and stromal immunophenotypes were established by assessing the expression of luminal epithelial protein (cytokeratin 8; CK8), basal epithelial proteins (p63 and pan cytokeratin CK1, 5, 10 and 14); and vimentin by immunohistochemistry (IHC). To investigate changes on proteins that regulate uterine organogenetic differentiation we evaluated the expression of estrogen receptor alpha (ERα), progesterone receptor (PR), Hoxa10 and Wnt7a by IHC. The GBH-exposed uteri showed morphological changes, characterized by an increase in the incidence of luminal epithelial hyperplasia (LEH) and an increase in the stromal and myometrial thickness.

The epithelial cells showed a positive immunostaining for CK8, while the stromal cells for vimentin. GBH treatment increased cell proliferation in the luminal and stromal compartment on PND8, without changes on PND21. GBH treatment also altered the expression of proteins involved in uterine organogenetic differentiation. PR and Hoxa10 were deregulated both immediately and two weeks after the exposure. ERα was induced in the stromal compartment on PND8, and was downregulated in the luminal epithelial cells of gyphosate-exposed animals on PND21. GBH treatment also increased the expression of Wnt7a in the stromal and glandular epithelial cells on PND21. Neonatal exposure to GBH disrupts the postnatal uterine development at the neonatal and prepubertal period. All these changes may alter the functional differentiation of the uterus, affecting the female fertility and/or promoting the development of neoplasias.

Foto extraída de  artículo  de prensa sobre la inauguración de la Asamblea General de la OEA en República Dominicana en junio del 2016

Durante la sesión de  inauguración de la Asamblea General de la Organización de Estados Americanos realizada el pasado Lunes 13 de junio del 2016, en Santo Domingo, el Presidente Danilo Medina de República Dominicana sorprendió a algunos en su discurso de bienvenida (ver  texto  del discurso en boletín de la Presidencia de República Dominicana). Leemos en efecto que el Presidente señaló, entro otras cosas, que: “En nombre del pueblo dominicano y en el mío propio, les propongo a todos ustedes que durante este período ordinario de sesiones, se apruebe una resolución de desagravio a la República Dominicana por el rol desempeñado por la OEA durante la Revolución de Abril de 1965” /…/ “Tengo el convencimiento de que este es el mejor momento y el más apropiado lugar para llevar a cabo este acto de justicia, verdad y reconciliación”.
La OEA y las intervenciones en Estados Miembros

Como se recordará, la OEA ha jugado un papel bastante cuestionable en el pasado ante intervenciones en uno de sus Estados Miembros. En este  análisis  de la profesora Sonia Alda Mejías (IUGM), se lee que “la organización no se manifestó ante la intervención norteamericana en Guatemala, en 1954, ni respecto a la invasión de Playa Girón en 1961 y sin embargo respaldó el bloqueo económico y las sanciones diplomáticas a Cuba (de acuerdo al art. 6 del TIAR) y aprobó en 1965 la constitución de las Fuerzas Interamericanas de Paz en República Dominicana de acuerdo a las directrices norteamericanas“. Sobre estas últimas, y el envío de 42.000 efectivos militares norteamericanos a República Dominicana, referimos al lector a este   estudio  en inglés (en particular páginas 41 y subsiguientes) realizado por dos oficiales norteamericanos, Major Jack K. Ringler (USMC) y Henry I. Shaw (Jr): en las conclusiones, ambos autores indican, entre varias lecciones futuras operaciones militares norteamericanas (página 54) que:

“The second lesson is the fact that this was not primarily a military combat action in the traditional sense, but a political-military operation, with certain restrictions being placed upon the military commanders, putting them at a tactical disadvantage. U.S forces had the clearly identifiable mission during the initial days of the crisis of protecting and evacuating U S and foreign nationals. This was to change later as political considerations created by U.S. and OAS policies clouded their mission. Military commanders, both on the scene and those in high positions in Washington, had to be prepared to exercise judgment in both military and political fields. It became apparent that military commanders, in addition to being competent in their own military fields, have to be prepared to take on the trappings of a diplomat“.

En el mes de abril del 2015, con occasion de la puesta a disposición al publico por parte del National Security Archive (NSA) de conversaciones telefónicas del Presidente de Estados Unidos de aquella época, se leyó que: “President Lyndon Johnson regretted sending U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965, telling aides less than a month later, “I don’t want to be an intervenor,” according to new transcripts of White House tapes published today (along with the tapes themselves) for the first time by the National Security Archive at George Washington University” (ver  nota  de NSA del 28/04/2015 con diversas grabaciones de gran interés para las autoridades de República Dominicana).
Una inédita solicitud

Es probablemente la primera vez en la historia que un Jefe de Estado exigió públicamente a la OEA en un discurso de bienvenida reconocer sus errores por avalar intervenciones pasadas  en abierta violación al principio de no intervención en asuntos internos proclamado por… la misma Carta de la OEA de 1948. Tratándose, en este caso, del Estado que hospedó a la reunión anual de tres días de los demás Estados Miembros de la OEA, la solicitud difícilmente pudo ser eludida por estos últimos. Cabe recordar que en agosto del 2015, el actual Secretario General de la OEA, se había manifestado en ese sentido (ver  nota  de prensa). En esta otra  nota  de prensa se lee que para el máximo representante de la OEA:

“Es imprescindible que la OEA cumpla con los postulados fundamentales y asumir posiciones históricas y postular para que hechos del pasado no ocurran nunca más y asumir la verdad, no para reparar el pasado sino como legado de las generaciones venideras. Es por eso que como secretario general deploro los actos de la organización que validaron en 1965 la invasión en la República Dominicana y la intervención en este país“.

La solicitud del Presidente Danilo Medina esta vez se dirigía a los 34 delegados de los Estados Miembros de la OEA, entre los cuales se contabilizaban 27 Ministros (ver  listado detallado  de los jefes de delegaciones presentes en Santo Domingo esta semana).
La propuesta oficial de República Dominicana a la Asamblea General de la OEA

El 14 de junio, una propuesta de resolución fue circulada por la delegación de la Republica Dominicana a los demás delegados presentes en la cita anual de la OEA. Se trataba de un texto muy breve que se leía como sigue:

“RECONOCIENDO que en el proceso histórico de la segunda mitad del siglo XX la República Dominicana fue objeto de acciones llevadas a cabo durante la Revolución de Abril de 1965, y específicamente aquellas que en ese marco ejecutó la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA), que produjeron perturbación y luto y una indignación todavía presente en la población;

ADMITIENDO la responsabilidad histórica de haber dado su respaldo a procedimientos y acciones bélicas en pugna con los principios de No Intervención y de Respesto a la Soberanía establecidos estutariamente en la Carta de la OEA;

RESUELVE

Expresar al pueblo dominicano su pesar por haber respaldado, en 1965, la invasión de su territorio y el atropello de su soberanía, solicitar su comprensión, pedir disculpas por el error histórico cometido y a la vez condolerse por las víctimas ocasionadas, asumiendo el compromiso de trabajar en procura de que acciones semejantes no se repitan en el futuro”.

La versión en inglés de la misma propuesta dominicana de resolución se leía de la siguiente manera:

RECOGNIZING that in the historical process of the second half of the 20th century, the Dominican Republic was the object of actions carried out during the Revolution of April 1965, and specifically of those carried out by the Organization of American States (OAS) in that context, which produced disruptions and mourning and an indignation that is still felt among the population;

ADMITTING its historical responsibility in backing belligerent procedures and actions in contravention of the statutory principles of nonintervention and respect for sovereignty enshrined in the Charter of the OAS,

RESOLVES:

To express to the people of the Dominican Republic its regret at having backed, in 1965, the invasion of its territory and the violation of its sovereignty; to request their understanding; to apologize for the historical error committed; and, at the same time, to express its condolences toward the victims and to assume the commitment of working to ensure that similar actions are not repeated in the future”.

Por parte de la Presidencia de República Dominicana, se indicó en un  comunicado de prensa  sobre esta propuesta que: “La declaración propuesta por la delegación dominicana y de la que se aspira cuente con el firme apoyo de las delegaciones de los 34 países miembros del organismo multilateral, es cónsona con el pedido que hiciera el presidente de la República Dominicana, Danilo Medina, durante el acto inaugural de la reunión plenaria de la OEA en el Teatro Nacional, en presencia del secretario general del organismo, Luis Almagro“.
La respuesta oficial de la Asamblea General de la OEA a República Dominicana.

Pese a las aspiraciones presidenciales, el texto adoptado sufrió sustantivas modificaciones con relación al inicialmente propuesto por sus autores. El 15 de junio, es decir 24 horas después de circular su texto la diplomacia dominicana, la Asamblea General de la OEA aprobó una resolución (ver texto completo al final de esta misma nota en ambos idiomas) en la que hace referencias a los “acontecimientos” de 1965, sin mayor precisión. En su parte resolutiva se indica que la Asamblea General:

“DECLARA:

1. Lamentar la pérdida de vidas humanas y expresar al pueblo dominicano las condolencias de la Organización.

2. Desagraviar al pueblo dominicano por las acciones de abril de 1965 que interrumpieron el proceso de restablecimiento del orden constitucional en la República Dominicana.

3. Reafirmar los principios del derecho internacional, de la Carta de las Naciones Unidas y de la Carta de la OEA.”

Nótese la inversión realizada entre considerandos  / parte resolutiva con respecto a la propuesta inicial de República Dominicana. De igual manera, es de señalar la ausencia de toda referencia a la “invasión” o a la “intervención”, así como al aval dado a esta por la misma OEA en 1965. Como previsible, el texto adoptado por la OEA dista mucho de las palabras pronunciadas por parte del Presidente dominicano en su alocución inaugural (cuyos extractos a continuación reproducimos) y de la propuesta inicial de sus diplomáticos.

Conclusión

A diferencia de lo que dejaron entender algunos titulares recientemente leídos ( como por ejemplo, entre muchos otros, “La OEA emite declaración de desagravio por la invasión de abril de 1965”  – ver nota de Diariolibre – o bien  “OEA aprueba desagravio por invasión de EE.UU. en R. Dominicana” – ver nota de TelesurTV- ), el texto de la resolución adoptada por la Asamblea General de la OEA es bastante omiso. Llama la atención el hecho que analistas, editorialistas y medios de prensa no se hayan interesado mayormente por compararlo  al texto inicial presentado por la diplomacia dominicana. La resolución no reconoce responsabilidad alguna de la OEA por avalar la “intervención” o “invasión” de 1965, términos convenientemente eliminados y sustituidos por “acontecimientos”.

Esta resolución de la OEA puede evidenciar la dificultad para República Dominicana de contar con apoyos certeros a su solicitud, que hubieran podido ser de gran ayuda para lograr un texto mucho más cercano a su iniciativa original. Es también posible que la presentación tardía de su propuesta de resolución haya influido en ello. Este ejercicio diplomático también pone en evidencia el extremo cuido con el que algunas delegaciones en la OEA pusieron a trabajar a sus diplomáticos en aras de lograr revisar una y otra vez el contenido original del texto de República Dominicana. Ello con el objetivo de omitir algunos términos, responder de forma muy diplomática a la solicitud dominicana (sin reconocer responsabilidad alguna de la OEA) y garantizar una adopción por consenso entre las 34 delegaciones presentes durante la Asamblea General. Desde el punto de vista diplomático, la habilidad de la maniobra merece ser señalada; desde el punto de vista mediático, el detalle pasó desapercibido o casi, confirmando la habilidad antes referida.

¿Cuáles fueron las delegaciones más incomodadas por el texto inicial propuesto por República Dominicana (pero no menos influyentes a la hora de revisarlo con los demás 34 delegados)? ¿Cuáles fueron las que segundaron sin mayor objeción  la eliminación de ciertos términos, y las que lo aceptaron con alguna reserva?  No se dejó registro alguno de estas negociaciones, y sería muy oportuno que la diplomacia dominicana los recuperara.

En efecto, es posible que asistamos a un ejercicio muy similar: esta vez con 33 delegaciones oficiales que se harán presentes en el marco de la próxima cumbre de la CELAC (Comunidad  de Estados de América Latina y del Caribe) a realizarse en el 2017 en República Dominicana.

————————————
Documento 1

Extractos del discurso (ver  texto completo ) del Presidente de República Dominicana:

“Para que esta organización pueda jugar este papel tan vital en nuestro futuro, es necesario también que volvamos la vista con actitud reflexiva y autocrítica hacia el pasado de la propia OEA. Por eso, en nombre del pueblo dominicano y en el mío propio, les propongo a todos ustedes que durante este período ordinario de sesiones, se apruebe una resolución de desagravio a la República Dominicana por el rol desempeñado por la OEA durante la Revolución de Abril de 1965.

Como ustedes recordarán, mi país sufrió una invasión que en aquel momento fue legitimada por uno de los mecanismos de la OEA. Esta invasión abortó el proceso democrático que se había iniciado con la elección como Presidente de nuestro admirado lider, el profesor Juan Bosch, impidiendo así el retorno al orden constitucional, legítimamente establecido en el 1963.

Volver a caminar por esta senda constitucional nos costaría a los dominicanos mucho tiempo, mucho esfuerzo y muchos sufrimientos. Esta nefasta violación de la soberanía legítima de los dominicanos, producida en 1965 causó muerte, dolor e indignación en nuestro pueblo. Es una herida aún abierta para muchos y que solo podrá sanar mediante el reconocimiento de lo sucedido por parte de la OEA y la petición de perdón que merece nuestra ciudadanía.

Nuestra Patria y nuestra democracia merecen este acto de dignidad, respeto y es mi obligación, como Jefe de Estado, solicitar a esta asamblea saldar la deuda histórica con el pueblo dominicano

Conocemos bien el contexto histórico en el que se dio la invasión. Eran los años de enfrentamiento entre bloques. Eran los años en los que las relaciones entre EEUU y Cuba eran prácticamente de guerra. Eran los años en los que el conflicto interno de Colombia apenas comenzaba.

Esa es una triste página de la historia que hoy, todos juntos, estamos cerca de pasar porque con diálogo, con paciencia y con la verdad por delante estamos cerrando viejas heridas de nuestro continente.

Eso es, precisamente, lo que queremos los dominicanos. Curar, cerrar ciertas heridas, dar paz al doloroso recuerdo de nuestros mayores, abrir nuevos caminos de esperanza a las nuevas generaciones. Tengo el convencimiento de que este es el mejor momento, el más apropiado lugar para llevar a cabo este acto de justicia, verdad y reconciliación.

Estamos seguros que la Organización de Estados Americanos esta en las mejores condiciones para asumir esa responsabilidad”.

Nicolás Boeglin

Documento 2
TEXTO DE DECLARACIÓN SOBRE REPÚBLICA DOMINICANA

(Acordado por la Comisión General el 15 de junio de 2016 y se eleva para la consideración de la Plenaria)

RECONOCIENDO que los acontecimientos de abril de 1965, que produjeron perturbación y luto, además de indignación, son todavía una fuente de desasosiego para el pueblo dominicano; y

REAFIRMANDO los principios de no intervención y del respeto a la soberanía consagrados en la Carta de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA).

DECLARA:

1. Lamentar la pérdida de vidas humanas y expresar al pueblo dominicano las condolencias de la Organización.

2. Desagraviar al pueblo dominicano por las acciones de abril de 1965 que interrumpieron el proceso de restablecimeinto del orden constitucional en la República Dominicana.

3. Reafirmar los principios del derecho internacional, de la Carta de las Naciones Unidas y de la Carta de la OEA.

Versión en inglés

TEXT OF DECLARATION ON THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

(Agreed by the General Committee on 15, 2016 and submitted to the Plenary)

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY,

RECOGNIZING that the events of April 1965, which caused disruption and grief, as well as indignation, remain a source of consternation for the Dominican people;

REAFFIRMING the principles of non-intervention and respect for sovereignty enshrined in the Charter of the OAS,

DECLARES THAT IT:

1. Laments the loss of human lives and to express the Organization’s condolences to the Dominican people.

2. Expresses regret to the Dominican people for the actions of April 1965, which disrupted the process of restoration of the constitutional order in the Dominican Republic.

3. Reaffirms the principles of international law, the Charter of the United Nations, and the OAS Charter.

Nicolás Boeglin : Profesor de Derecho Internacional Público, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR)

The Corporate Funding of Islamophobia, A Multimillion Dollar Operation in Support of Donald Trump

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 21 2016

Inciting hate towards Muslims has become a multimillion-dollar endeavor, supported by neocon corporate foundations, according to The Guardian quoting a recent report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the University of California at Berkeley’ Center for Race and…

A Clinton Presidency: Humanity’s Worst Nightmare. Hillary’s “Rage for War”

By Stephen Lendman, June 21 2016

Since Soviet Russia’s 1991 dissolution, successive US administrations governed increasingly lawlessly and recklessly – Bill Clinton worse than his predecessors, Bush worse than him, Obama worst of all, at war with multiple invented enemies throughout his tenure – from inaugural…

Migrant Crisis Fueled by Libya War

By Abayomi Azikiwe, June 21 2016

Battle for Sirte and continuing division prompts imperialist rationale for further intervention Fighting for control of the western coastal city of Sirte, Libya has resulted in the fleeing of more people from this embattled North African state which five years…

Immigrants Imprisoned to Boost US Prison-Corporation Profits

By Eric Zuesse, June 21 2016

93% of the people who are locked up in the U.S. in order to meet the minimum legal requirements for the number of people who must be locked up on possible violations of U.S. immigration laws, are locked in for-profit…

If You Value Life, Wake Up! Great Danger: US-NATO Missiles Threatening Russia

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, June 21 2016

Putin: “We Know and they Know that we Know…People do not Understand how Dangerous the Situation Really Is” (quoted  by Global Research) Do you remember how close we came to Armageddon in the early 1960s when Washington put nuclear missiles…

Recently, 51 State Department employees signed a memo urging the president to change his focus in Syria from fighting ISIS to fighting the secular Assad government. They argued that targeting Assad would weaken Assad’s enemy, ISIS. The logic is not immediately apparent.

They also dismissed any danger that a US attack on Russia’s ally in Syria might annoy the Russians, who spent more than six months bombing ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria. Although these 51 represent a very small faction within the Department, the neocon war propaganda immediately latched on to it.

It made front page news in the New York Times. This is likely a preview of a Hillary presidency. More on this important development in today’s Liberty Report:

Who are the White Helmets? This is a question that everyone should be asking themselves.

A hideous murder of a rising star in UK politics, Jo Cox MP, has just sent shock waves across the world. Within hours of her untimely death, a special fund was established in her name to raise money for 3 causes. One of those causes is the Syrian White Helmets.

Are we seeing a cynical and obscene exploitation of Jo Cox’s murder to revive the flagging credibility of a US State Department and UK Foreign Office asset on the ground in Syria, created and sustained as first responders for the US and NATO Al Nusra/Al Qaeda forces?

FOLLOW THE MONEY: The White Helmets are just one component of the new NGO Complex.

If this is the case, and I fear it is, the depravity of our government, the US government, the state led media and associated Syria Campaign support groups have reached a new level of perversion of Humanity. The White Helmets have been demonstrated to be a primarily US and NATO funded organisation embedded in Al Nusra and ISIS held areas exclusively.

This is an alleged “non-governmental” organisation, the definition of an NGO, that thus far has received funding from at least three major NATO governments, including $23 million from the US Government and $29 million (£19.7 million) from the UK Government, $4.5 million (€4 million) from the Dutch Government. In addition, it receives material assistance and training funded and run by a variety of other EU Nations.

A request has been put into the EU Secretary General to provide all correspondence relating to the funding and training of the White Helmets. By law this information must be made transparent and available to the public.

There has been a concerted campaign by a range of investigative journalists to expose the true roots of these Syria Civil Defence operatives, known as the White Helmets.  The most damning statement, however, did not come from us, but from their funders and backers in the US State Department who attempted to explain the US deportation of the prominent White Helmet leader, Raed Saleh, from Dulles airport on the 18th April 2016.

“It was unclear whether Mr. Saleh’s name might have shown up on a database, fed by a variety of intelligence and security agencies and intended to guard against the prospect of terrorism suspects slipping into the country.” ~ New York Times

Mark Toner, State Department spokesperson:

“And any individual – again, I’m broadening my language here for specific reasons, but any individual in any group suspected of ties or relations with extremist groups or that we had believed to be a security threat to the United States, we would act accordingly. But that does not, by extension, mean we condemn or would cut off ties to the group for which that individual works for.”

So we come back to the initial question.  Why is the tragic death of a passionate and ambitious politician being exploited? Why are all political parties in the UK endorsing the Jo Cox fund to provide financial assistance for an organisation the UK Government is already funding and training?

Why are the public once more being used as political pawns to further our government’s imperialist objectives inside Syria and their covert, illegal, proxy intervention of a sovereign nation via both terrorist forces and phony humanitarian first responders?

Phillip Hammond, UK Foreign Secretary meeting White Helmets in southern Turkey

The White Helmets are perhaps being demonstrated to be the most crucial component of the US and NATO shadow state building inside Syria.  Led by the US and UK this group is essential to the propaganda stream that facilitates the continued media and political campaign against the elected Syrian government and permits the US and NATO to justify their regime of crippling economic and humanitarian sanctions against the Syrian people.

If this latest mechanised ‘NGO’ blueprint is successful then we could see it being re-deployed as key to future neo-colonialist projects. The White Helmets are a direct intra-venus line into the terrorist enclaves within Syria, acting as a conduit for information, equipment and medical support to maintain the US NATO forces.

Is this the future of warfare, is this the “swarming” outlined in a 2000 report produced by the RAND Corporation and entitled: Swarming and the Future of Conflict.

“The emergence of a military doctrine based on swarming pods and clusters requires that defense policymakers develop new approaches to connectivity and control and achieve a new balance between the two. Far more than traditional approachesto battle, swarming clearly depends upon robust information flows. Securing these flows, therefore, can be seen as a necessary condition for successful swarming.”

Is this why we are seeing what is, in effect, crowd funding for  proxy war? Do we really want to look back and be “judged by history” for enabling conflict and state terrorism, violating international law and invading sovereign nations.  Are we prepared to accept the consequences of such actions, consequences that should be taken by our governments alone but are now being diffused outwards to the general public.  Is this an attempt by our government to disassociate themselves from their criminal actions?

To condense our research on the Syria White Helmets, we have collated all relevant articles and interviews below.  We condemn wholeheartedly any senseless murder but we recommend that there is serious public and political re-evauluation of the morality of funding a US NATO organisation established to further “regime change” objectives in Syria.

Mass murder is being committed across Syria and the region by US and NATO proxy terrorist militants. Funding the White Helmets will serve to prolong the suffering and bloodshed of the Syrian people.

UK Column: White Helmets, Humanitarians or Executioners?

“Vanessa Beeley speaks to Mike Robinson of UK Column about recent executions of Syrian Arab Army soldiers celebrated by White Helmet operatives.” Watch:

Mint Press: Dissecting the “Humanitarian” Propaganda Driving US Intervention in Syria, Again.

“Speaking to Mnar Muhawesh on ‘Behind the Headline,’ investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley pulls back the curtain on the anti-Assad ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘moderate rebels,’ revealing a carefully calibrated propaganda campaign to drive US intervention in the war-torn country.”

Watch:

Hands Off Syria: The Syria White Helmets Exposed as US UK Agents Embedded with Al Nusra and ISIS

Video made by Hands Off Syria in Sydney Australia based upon the research of Vanessa Beeley on the White Helmets. Watch:

Mint Press: US Propaganda War in Syria: Report Ties White Helmets to US Intervention

“White Helmets primary function is propaganda” reported an independent journalist, who tied the group to George Soros and the controversial advocacy group Avaaz.”

Change.org Petition: Do NOT give 2016 Nobel Peace Prize to Syria White Helmets

This petition has currently garnered 1370 signatures. The White Helmets have received over $ 40 million in funding from the US Government [USAID] and the UK Foreign Office despite their claims of being “fiercely independent and accepts no money from governments, corporations or anyone directly involved in the Syrian conflict.”

Sputnik: Soros Sponsored NGO in Syria Aims at Ousting Assad not Saving Civilians

“One of the largest humanitarian organizations operating in war-torn Syria – the White Helmets – has been accused of being an anti-government propaganda arm that encourages direct foreign intervention.”

21st Century Wire: Syria’s White Helmets, War by Way of Deception Part 1

This piece examines the role of the Syria Civil Defence aka,’The White Helmets’ currently operating in Syria and take a closer look at their financial sources and mainstream media partners in order to better determine if they are indeed “neutral” as media moguls proclaim these “humanitarians” to be.

21st Century Wire: Part II. Syria’s White Helmets, “Moderate” Executioners

The NGO hydra has no more powerful or influential serpentine head in Syria than the Syria Civil Defence aka The White Helmets who, according to their leader and creator, James Le Mesurier, hold greater sway than even ISIS or Al Nusra confabs over the Syrian communities. This article explores the White Helmet involvement in terrorist executions of civilians particularly in Aleppo.

21st Century Wire: Humanitarian Propaganda War Against Syria – Led by Avaaz and the White Helmets

“The White Helmets in their haste to point the finger of blame at Moscow, managed to tweet about Russia’s air strikes several hours before the Russian Parliament actually authorized the use of the Air Force in Syria.” ~ Sott.net

UK Column: Syria White Helmets

“Mike Robinson speaks to Vanessa Beeley about the so-called NGO, the White Helmets. Are they really the humanitarian first responder organisation they claim to be?” Watch:

Eva Bartlett: Human Rights Front Groups Warring on Syria

This page will continue to expand as more so-called “Human Rights” groups are outed for propagating anti-Syria war rhetoric and false allegations against the Syrian government and Syrian Arab Army.  As it is, the list of players is quite extensive.  Below, I’ll list the known HR front people and groups (many, if not most, with links to the US State Department and criminals like George Soros).

Ron Paul Institute: Syria the Propaganda Ring

We have demonstrated that the White Helmets are an integral part of the propaganda vanguard that ensures obscurantism of fact and propagation of Human Rights fiction that elicits the well-intentioned and self righteous response from a very cleverly duped public. A priority for these NGOs is to keep pushing the No Fly Zone scenario which has already been seen to have disastrous implications for innocent civilians in Libya, for example.

White Helmets: One of the many suspect Hollywood style promo rescue videos

Please note that the child that is rescued is very clean considering she has allegedly been buried under the rubble of “regime” bombing raids..we do not in any way wish to detract from the heroic work of the true first responders on the ground in Syria, the real Syria Civil Defence and the Red Crescent who are never mentioned in the western media but we do wish to draw your attention to the propaganda methods being employed to amplify US and NATO narratives that are insisting upon “regime change.”

Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.

We discuss in detail with Dr. Michael Hudson, the concept of debt deflation; housing, student loan and automobile debt; the oil market; the stock market; negative interest rates; currencies; and the shrinking of the real economy.

Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces. But a growing part of the economy in every country has been the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which comprises the rent and interest paid to the economy’s balance sheet of assets by debtors and rent payers. More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That’s what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.

I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show: The Slow Crash.

Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, as well as at Peking University. His 1972 book, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, is a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. Due out soon, J Is for Junk Economics. Today we discuss in detail the concept of debt deflation; housing, student loan and automobile debt; the oil market; the stock market; negative interest rates; currencies; and the shrinking real economy.

* * * * *
Bonnie Faulkner: Michael Hudson, welcome.

Michael Hudson: It’s good to be here again, Bonnie.

Bonnie Faulkner: You have indicated that as a result of United States and European debt deflation, there is an economic slowdown. First of all, how would you define deflation?

Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson: There are two definitions of deflation. Most people think of it simply as prices going down. But debt deflation is what happens when people have to spend more and more of their income to carry the debts that they’ve run up – to pay their mortgage debt, to pay the credit card debt, to pay student loans.

Today, people are having to spend so much of their money, to acquire a house and to get an education that they don’t have enough to spend on goods and services, except by running into yet more debt on their credit cards and other borrowings.

The result is that markets are slowing down. Deflation means a slowdown of income growth. Markets shrink, new capital investment and employment also taper off, so wages decline. That is what’s happening as deliberate policy in Europe and the United States. Falling or stagnant prices are simply the result of having less income to spend.

Bonnie Faulkner: Well, thank you for that, because that is confusing, because I think a lot of people consider deflation simply a decrease in price. Does that have anything to do with it?

Michael Hudson: The price decline is a result of having to pay debts. That drains income from the circular flow between production and consumption – that is, between what people are paid when they go to work, and the things that they buy. Deflation is a leakage from this circular flow, to pay banks and the real estate, called the FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate. These transfer payments leave less and less of the paycheck to be spent on goods and services, so markets shrink. Some prices for some products go down when people can’t afford to buy them anymore. There are more sales, there’s shrinkage, but especially incomes go down. Real incomes in the United States have been drifting down for 30 years because there is slower and slower market demand.

That’s why Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are getting so many votes. When Hillary Clinton said she’s going to do just what Obama does and we’re going to continue to recover, most people know that we’re not recovering at all. We’re shrinking.

Bonnie Faulkner: So then, deflation has more to do with disposable income than it does with prices.

Michael Hudson: That’s correct, and that’s what is rarely pointed out. People tend to think that paying a debt is like going out and buying a car, buying more food or buying more clothes. But it really isn’t. When you pay a debt to the bank, the banks use this money to lend out to somebody else or to yourself. The interest charges to carry this debt go up and up as debt grows. As you have to pay more interest and amortization on what you owe, you’re left with less and less money to buy goods and services – unless you borrow even more and go further into debt.

So basically, unless you’re willing to write down debts and save the economy, you’re going to have deflation and a steady drain in purchasing power – that is, shrinking markets.

Bonnie Faulkner: So then the relationship between debt and deflation: Increasing debt creates more deflation. Would you say that’s the case?

Michael Hudson: Yes. In the 1930s, Irving Fisher wrote an article “The Debt Deflation theory of the Great Depression,” that established the obvious mathematical fact that paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.

Bonnie Faulkner: Oftentimes people wonder, what’s wrong with deflation? We’re always hearing about worries about inflation, but what is the danger in deflation, as you’ve defined it?

Michael Hudson: Markets shrink and unemployment goes up. Wages go down and living standards decline. When we say “people worry” about inflation, it’s mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. What was rising most rapidly were wages. Bond prices fell steadily during these decades. Stocks simply moved sideways.

Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible. They advocate austerity and permanent deflation. And the media say that anything that doesn’t help the 1% is bad.

But don’t believe it. When they say inflation is bad, deflation is good, what they mean is, more money for us 1% is good; we’re all for asset price inflation, we’re all for housing prices going up, and we’re all for our stock and bonds prices going up. We’re just against you workers getting more income.

Bonnie Faulkner: Right, because inflation puts more money, I guess, in circulation and we get more as a worker, for instance-

Michael Hudson: Well, if the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up. So the 1% always wants to keep unemployment high – it used to be called the reserve army of the unemployed. If you can keep unemployment high, then you prevent wages from rising. That’s what’s happened since the 1970s here. Real wages have not risen, but the price of the things that the 1% owns has risen – stocks, bonds, trophy art and things like that.

Bonnie Faulkner: So if I were to ask you what is wrong with deflation generally, would the answer ten be that it shrinks the economy?

Michael Hudson: That’s exactly it – lower wages, lower living standards, and more money siphoned off to creditors at the top of the pyramid. When there’s deflation, it means that although most markets are shrinking and people have less to spend, the 1% that hold the 99% in debt are getting all the growth in wealth and income. Deflation means that income is being transferred to the 1%, that is, to the creditors and property owners.

Bonnie Faulkner: Well, Michael, it sounds like in your definition of debt deflation that you are describing exactly what’s going on here in the United States and also in Europe.

Michael Hudson: Yep, that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s what I describe in Killing the Host.

Bonnie Faulkner: All sectors of the economy are certainly not deflating, that is if we’re going to talk about prices narrowly. What about the housing market? Are we looking at a housing bubble?

Michael Hudson: Certainly not a bubble yet. You still have 25% of American homes in negative equity – that is, when the mortgages are higher than the market value of the housing. So for many people, the mortgages they took out before 2008 are so high that they would be better off walking away from their houses. That is called “jingle mail,” returning the keys to the bank and saying, “You can have the house. I can buy the house next door that’s just like this for 20% less, so I’m going to save money and switch.” That’s what someone like Donald Trump or a real estate investor would do. But the banks are trying to convince the mortgage debtors, the homeowners, not to act in their own self-interest.

Bonnie Faulkner: Yes. I live in Northern California, in the Bay area, so I guess this is an exception to what’s going on overall across the country.

Michael Hudson: That’s a rich area, and houses in expensive areas are going up, but not as fast as they used to. Luxury housing in gated communities is going up. But for blue-collar-income neighborhoods and even middle-class neighborhoods, there has not been much of a recovery. It’s good news for burglar-alarm manufacturers, because crime is going up.

Bonnie Faulkner: It looks like the Bank of America is going back into the subprime loan market, albeit in league with U.S. Government. What do you make of Bank of America’s new Affordable Loan Program, which offers 3%-down mortgages with no mortgage insurance, and partners with Freddie Mac in something called the Self-Help Ventures Fund?

Michael Hudson: This reflects the degree to which the banks have been able to capture the Federal Housing Authority and Freddie Mac as well as the Federal Reserve. They are all trying to re-inflate the re bubble. The myth is that if housing prices go up, Americans will be richer. What banks – and behind them, the Federal Reserve – really want is for new buyers to be able to borrow enough money to buy the houses from mortgage defaulters, and thus save the banks from suffering from more mortgage defaults.

Actually, high housing prices don’t help the economy. They raise the cost of living. Everybody would be better off if they could buy housing for only, let’s say, a carrying charge of one-quarter of their income. That used to be the case 50 years ago. Buyers had to save up and make a higher down payment, giving them more equity – perhaps 25 or 30 percent. But today, banks are creating enough credit to bid up housing prices again.

The aim of promoting low down payments is to push prices back up so that fewer houses are going to be in negative equity and fewer people are going to walk away from the mortgages. That will save the banks from taking a loss on their junk mortgage loans.

Bonnie Faulkner: The FHA is offering subprime loans, as well. Isn’t that right?

Michael Hudson: For 3.5% downpayment. This was unheard of when I first went to work on Wall Street in 1961. I was working for the Savings Banks Trust Company – the central bank for New York State savings banks, which were the main mortgage lenders. At that time the rule of thumb was that home buyers needed a 30% down payment (equity), so that when the banks made a loan, the property would have to go down by 30% to make the bank in trouble. That was the homeowner’s equity that was at risk. It provided security for the banks.

Now, suppose that a homeowner puts down only 3% of their own money or 3.5% for the FHA. That means if prices go down by only 3%, the house will be in negative equity and it would pay the homeowner just to walk away and say, “The house now is worth less than the mortgage I owe. I think I’m just going to move out and buy a cheaper house.” So it’s very risky when you have only a 3% or 3.5% equity for the loan. The bank really isn’t left with much cushion as collateral.

Now, the banks argue, “Wait a minute. We’re making these loans to people with good credit ratings, and they have enough money to pay, even if the house’s price goes down.” But the banks are taking a risk that the homeowner is going to be naïve enough not to walk away and leave the bank holding a bad debt, so it’s very risky. It’s a degree of risk that no bank would have taken prior to Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed.

Bonnie Faulkner: Why would the United States government be encouraging these risky loans?

Michael Hudson: Because the government is dominated mainly by the financial, insurance and real estate lobby, the FIRE sector. It’s called regulatory capture. The real estate interests and banks are in a kind of symbiosis. They’re the largest-growing part of the economy. This is the sector that backs the political campaigns of senators, presidents and congressmen, and they use this leverage to make sure that their people dominate the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the federal housing agencies.

Bonnie Faulkner: Just for clarification, why would the banks be pushing these risky loans if there’s a high degree of default?

Michael Hudson: When you say “bank,” a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They’re the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don’t care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors. If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options. If the bank goes under, they get to keep all of these salaries and options – and the government will bail out the bank. These guys will take their money and run, which is pretty much what they’re doing now. I think we’re in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.

Bonnie Faulkner: Thank you for that distinction. What about automobile loans? You’ve referred to them as “junk loans.” How do you mean?

Michael Hudson: There’s been a large increase in loans to people to buy autos to get to work. Just like they’ve lowered lending standards on making home mortgages, they’ve lowered standards on auto loans. So default rates are going up, and so are repossessions of autos. It’s become a common sight in many neighborhoods. So banks are losing on defaults on auto loans, just as defaults are happening more and more on student loans, and are still going on in the mortgage market.

Bonnie Faulkner: You mentioned the student loan debt. How big is it?

Michael Hudson: It’s about $1.3 trillion by now. The government has guaranteed this student loan debt, so banks are eager to make loans to students. Often they’ll get the parents to countersign. The banks make money whether the students pay or not because the government has promised to pay the banks if the loans go bad. And defaults lead to lucrative penalty fees for the banks, which the government also guarantees.

The fact that you have government-guaranteed student loans has created a whole new sector in the American economy that didn’t really exist before – private for-profit universities that sell junk degrees that don’t help the students. They promise the students, “We’ll help you get a better job. We’ll arrange a loan so that you don’t have to pay a penny for this education.” Their pet bank gets them the government-guaranteed loan, and the student may get the junk degree, but doesn’t get a job, so they don’t pay the loan. The government pays the bank anyway, at a pretty high interest rate, 7% or 8%, plus all the penalties that banks charge. This makes student loans a way to organize a government giveaway to the banks and to the junk universities they subsidize.

Bonnie Faulkner: Is it true that one cannot declare bankruptcy on student debt?

Michael Hudson: That’s right. Someone in Congress said, “We want to make sure the government can collect and the taxpayer doesn’t lose on this. So these loans are not subject to being written down by a bankruptcy proceeding.” Normally, if someone goes bankrupt, you wipe out the debt and get a fresh start. But that’s not permitted with student loans. So the effect is to impoverish many graduates with very high debts.

Just like a house is worth whatever a bank’s going to lend against it, an education is worth whatever the bank is going to lend the student to pay the university. So the availability of government-guaranteed student loans has vastly inflated the cost of education, just like it’s inflated the cost of housing.

But in housing you have jingle mail and you can walk away and leave the bank holding the bag. In the case of student loans, the debt follows you through life, and the banks or government will turn it over to collection agencies that are not very nice people and can do all sorts of harassing things to you. It’s becoming a nightmare.

Bonnie Faulkner: I also have read that with regard to student loans they can attach your salary. They can even attach your Social Security check.

Michael Hudson: Even the Social Security – mainly for parents who have countersigned for loans for their children. Their Social Security can be sequestered and attached by collection agencies. Most of the defaults are on junk education, the private for-profit diploma mills.

Education is something that should not be organized on a for-profit basis, because in that case its purpose is not really to provide an education. It’s not to teach students how to get better work, but how to provide banks with a free giveaway opportunity from the government, by making junk loans that are defaulted on. The effect may be to wreck the futures of the graduates that fall for the false promises that are being made.

Bonnie Faulkner: The default rate on these student loans is pretty high, isn’t it?

Michael Hudson: High and rising.

Bonnie Faulkner: Then there’s also, I noticed, something called a workout where they adjust your payment length and other factors to keep you from defaulting.

Michael Hudson: They try to prevent defaults because if banks show higher default rates, this gets the regulators to say, “You’re going to need higher capital reserves against these default rates.” So the banks say, “We’ll stretch out the loan. We’ll give you more years to pay. We’ll slow it down.” But the workout just increases the overall ultimate amount of debt service that has to be paid. It’s a short-term solution.

That’s the problem with the financial sector. Banks and the financial sector live in the short run, not the long run. In principle the government is supposed to make regulations that help the economy over time. But once it’s taken over by the financial sector, the government lives in the short run too.

Bonnie Faulkner: There’s a technology boom in the San Francisco Bay area. Do you think this tech boom could be in a bubble?

Michael Hudson: It’s only a bubble if the prices of technology firms are going up in the stock market. Right now, the stock market is funded on credit, just as the housing market and the student loan market. One of the reasons the Federal Reserve is keeping the interest rates low with Quantitative Easing and low interest rates is to keep sending the flow of credit into the stock market.

The other dynamic keeping the stock market up – both for technology stocks and others – is that companies are using a lot of their income for stock buybacks and to pay out higher dividends, not make new investment,. So to the extent that companies use financial engineering rather than industrial engineering to increase the price of their stock you’re going to have a bubble. But it’s not considered a bubble, because the government is behind it, and it hasn’t burst yet. A bubble is only called that after it bursts, after the insiders get out, leaving the pension funds and small investors, Canadians and other naïve investors holding the bag.

Bonnie Faulkner: In terms of keeping the stock market up, I thought that the Fed had ended QE.

Michael Hudson: QE is still going on. It means a zero interest-rate policy. The aim is to hold interest rates low at 1/10 of a percent. The Federal Reserve continues to make sure that interest rates are low, so we still have near-zero interest rates. And now they’re even talking about negative interest rates to help spur Wall Street gains.

Bonnie Faulkner: That was going to be my next question: What is your opinion of these negative interest rates? There’s a lot of talk of if you have a bank account you have to pay the bank rather than vice versa.

Michael Hudson: The idea is, number one, that banks won’t have to pay interest on your account. They’ll actually pay you less and less, while they’re making 29% on many of their credit-card loans, and while they’re making a killing on student loans. They can pay you less while they make more, increasing their profit margins.

So that’s part of the problem, but the underlying strategy of the Fed is to tell people, “Do you want your money to lose value in the bank, or do you want to put it in the stock market?” They’re trying to push money into the stock market, into hedge funds, to temporarily bid up prices. Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it’s a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.

Bonnie Faulkner: That’s very interesting – the effect that a negative interest rate would have on stock market prices. I hadn’t thought of that.

Michael Hudson: They’re trying to convince people, “Do you want your savings deposits to go down or do you want to get a dividend return and buy stocks?” If a lot of money goes into the stock market, it’ll push up prices, making money for stock speculators. Then the insiders can decide that it’s time to sell out, and the market will plunge.

Stocks always go down much faster than they go up. That’s why it’s called a crash. People who put their money into the stocks will find, all of a sudden, that stock prices are no longer being supported by the debt leveraging that’s been holding them up.

Bonnie Faulkner: I understand that former Harvard University president Larry Summers has proposed the banning of large denomination currency, i.e., $100 bills. Similar proposals are being made regarding the euro. What do you make of this?

Michael Hudson: I think something like three-quarters of American currency is held abroad, by drug dealers, by tax evaders, Russians and Chinese. Other people think that they want to protect themselves against their own currency going down. When you have 75% of the currency and even more of the high-denomination $100 bills held abroad, you wonder whether these are people we really want to pay. If you get rid of the $100 bills, its foreign holders will be the main losers.

During the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, whole planeloads of shrink-wrapped $100 bills were used to buy off foreign officials and soldiers that are now ISIS. They bought off the Sunni army, they bought off the corrupt gangs, and essentially ISIS has been fueled by these shrink-wrapped billions of $100 bills that the US used to pay them to fight, people who wanted to control their own currency, or groups that want to be independent, such as Syria or Russia. So this basically is an attempt to hurt drug dealers and people who America doesn’t like.

Bonnie Faulkner: I was thinking that banning these larger denomination bills would take a lot of currency out of circulation. It seems to me that it would hurt the-

Michael Hudson: This is not really currency that circulates. It’s like the old joke about expensive vintage wine. Wine prices will go up and once in a while somebody will buy a 50-year-old bottle of wine and say, “Wait a minute. This has gone bad.” The answer is, “Well, that wine isn’t for drinking; that’s for trading.” These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving.

Bonnie Faulkner: You know, Michael, when I’m in line at, say, Costco here in California – it’s a big, major retail store – I see people at the checkout counter pull out rolls of $100 bills to pay their food bill with. It seems to me that $100 bills … Well, now that prices of food basically are so high people actually use these bills.

Michael Hudson: That’s correct, but the people who use these bills, that’s only about 10 or 15% of all the $100 bills that are in circulation. The vast majority of $100 bills are abroad, not in the United States. So yes, of course there’s a use here but nowhere near as much as there’s a use for $100 bills abroad.

By contrast, in China the largest denomination bill they have is 100 yen, and that’s maybe $7. So here you have a whole economy working with only a $7 note as the largest denomination. The euro wants to get rid of the 500-euro bill just as the United States years ago got rid of the $1,000 bill because only the criminals used $1,000 bills.

Bonnie Faulkner: Don’t you also think, though, that getting rid of $100 bills is going to hurt the little guy, maybe the guy that’s working for cash under the table, maybe they’re skirting taxes. Wouldn’t banning $100 bills also hurt the people that are on the edge to begin with?

Michael Hudson: It’s not that hard to have two fifties instead of a hundred. It really isn’t that hard to use smaller denominations. That’s why I mentioned China.

Bonnie Faulkner: The price of oil is very low by historical standards. There are even reports of a gasoline glut in addition to an oil glut. Is the low oil price due to speculation or oversupply?

Michael Hudson: High prices can be the result of speculation, and maybe plunging prices can be attributed to the end of speculation, but low prices over time aren’t caused by speculation. That’s oversupply, mainly by Saudi Arabia flooding the market with low-priced oil to discourage rival oil producers, whether it’s Russian oil or American fracking.

Bonnie Faulkner: What does the price of oil have to do with debt deflation? Is there a relationship there?

Michael Hudson: No, it’s different. Debt deflation is when there’s less money that people have to spend out of their paychecks on goods and services, because they’re paying the FIRE sector. Oil going down is a function of the supply and demand of oil in the market. It’s a separate phenomenon.

Bonnie Faulkner: So the oil glut is real, that there’s too much oil?

Michael Hudson: Yes, it’s real.

Bonnie Faulkner: I see. Okay. And then, of course, perhaps the lower oil prices – and you mentioned Saudi Arabia flooding the market with oil – that this could also constitute, do you think, a financial war against Russia and Venezuela? I guess you’ve implied that.

Michael Hudson: That’s why the United States wasn’t unhappy to see this. So yes, it’s a kind of war. Recently, there have been a lot of talks between Russia and Saudi Arabia to try to resolve this.

Bonnie Faulkner: What about fracking and tar sands and new technology in general? What effect does new technology have on the oil price?

Michael Hudson: It increased fracking and therefore it increased the supply of oil and gas, so it’s contributed to part of the oversupply. But because it was very high-priced oil and gas, it has not really been responsible for the flooding of the market. It’s below the cost of fracking production.

In other words, oil now, as a result of the Saudi production, is priced so low that there are not going to be new fracking investments made. A lot of companies that have gone into fracking are heavily debt-leveraged, and are beginning to default on their loans. The next wave of defaults that banks are talking about is probably going to be in the fracking industry. When the costs of production are so much more than they can end up getting for the oil, they just stop producing and stop paying their loans.

Bonnie Faulkner: With the price of oil lower than the cost of production, is this a dangerous situation for the economy in general or not?

Michael Hudson: Not for the economy in general, no. Only for the frackers. I think the less fracking there is, the better it is for the economy and society. You have a choice. Either you can have more oil, or more clean water. Fracking is not good for the water supply. So nothing could be better for the economy than to get rid of fracking. What’s bad for the frackers usually is good for the rest of the world.

Bonnie Faulkner: I had asked you about re-inflating commodity prices, and you said that it’s hard to inflate commodity prices without massive hoarding. How do you mean?

Michael Hudson: In the case of the oil spike a few years ago, there have been a number of studies that have showed that almost all of the demand for oil that suddenly pushed prices up was speculative demand. People began to speculate not only in stocks and bonds and real estate, but also in commodities. The market went up for old tankers, which were used simply to store oil in. A lot of the oil was simply being stored for trading, not used.

The same thing happened in the metals market. Speculators were buying metals simply to store away, thinking that maybe they can push the price up. I remember 50 years ago when the price of silver went up from about $3 an ounce to almost $50 an ounce. At that time, only the small buyers and the Canadians were buying silver, and then it was all left to collapse back to about $3 an ounce. So you have speculative binges in these.

I don’t think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they’re what the economy basically needs. The effect of metals speculation was to push up the prices that China had to pay to countries like Australia. This squeezed China. Once the speculative demand ended, all of a sudden the added production facilities that had been brought into production by the high prices went out of production again, and there was a glut.

Bonnie Faulkner: The price of gold is going back up. To what do you attribute the reversal in gold prices?

Michael Hudson: There are so many currency exchange rate problems that people are buying gold as a safe haven. Right now, gold looks like a safe haven if international exchange rates break down. The United States is pushing as policy division of the world into rival currency camps – the dollar area on the one hand, and the Russia-Chinese-Shanghai Cooperation Organization group on the other, especially now that the IMF has changed its rules. People think that if there are rival currency groupings and national currencies are going bust, we might as well use gold as a safe haven.

Bonnie Faulkner: We did an entire program on the change in IMF rules. That was very important. In terms of these rival currency camps, I guess you see the international financial system breaking down. What do you think the timeline is going to be on this? It’s already starting, right?

Michael Hudson: Probably later this afternoon. [Laughing.] I mean, it’s ongoing. Look at Ukraine. Its currency, the hernia (as the hryvnia is affectionately known) is plunging. The euro is really in a problem. Greece is problematic as to whether it can pay the IMF, which is threatening not to be part of the troika with the European Central Bank and the European Union making more loans to enable Greece to pay the bondholders and the banks. Britain is having a referendum as to whether to withdraw from the European Union, and it looks more and more like it may do so. So the world’s politics are in turmoil, not to mention the Mideast, where the US has mounted attacks from Libya to Iraq to Syria, and ISIS is attacking governments in today’s pipeline rivalry.

Bonnie Faulkner: Do you think the United States is conducting a financial war against Europe?

Michael Hudson: That’s a byproduct. The financial war is aimed first of all at China and secondly at Russia. Europe is the collateral damage in this, because the natural geopolitical arrangement is for Europe to be part of Eurasia, especially for Germany to develop trade and investment relationships with Russia. But US opposition to Russia and China has entailed sanctions against Russia, and Russia in turn has made counter-sanctions against Europe. So Europe is essentially sacrificing its opportunities for trade and investment in order to remain part of NATO. It is also agreeing to bomb Syria and the Near East, creating a wave of refugees that it doesn’t know what to do with.

It’s amazing that Europe says, “What are we going to do with these refugees?” It’s as if it doesn’t realize that being part of NATO and bombing these countries forces them to choose to live by fleeing, or to stay and get bombed. Europe is creating the flight of refugees that’s tearing it apart politically, and leading rightwing nationalist parties to gain power to withdraw from the Eurozone.

So Europe is acting in a very self-destructive manner, but is doing so because it’s trying to be loyal to the United States. Most of the European leaders look at themselves as having to follow the United States, because if the US opposes them, there will be a regime change.

Bonnie Faulkner: It seems as if the United States is willing to sacrifice Germany and the rest of Europe to conduct this war against Russia and China.

Michael Hudson: When you say the United States, we’re talking about really the neocons and a particular group within the U.S. Government. The neocons are led by the old Bush-Cheney people, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, who is to the right of Cheney. Hillary says that we should go back into Libya, that we should fight even more, and that Putin is Hitler. That means that when she comes to power you can be pretty sure that there’ll be a confrontation. If there is, a number of former generals in America have been warning that the chances of atomic war have never been higher. If Hillary gets in, Russia’s going to go on an immediate nuclear alert and there’s a good chance of war. But Hillary is not the United States, although the United States may end up electing her, in which case, in my mind, there’ll be a disaster.

Bonnie Faulkner: Yes, it’s very terrifying, the prospect of her becoming president. She’s very scary. You say that the real economy is suffering debt deflation, and by the real economy you mean goods and services and real production not the asset markets of the 1%. So then, would you say that there are two different economies?

Michael Hudson: That’s the essence of the book that I’m writing. That was what I was describing in The Bubble and Beyond, and later in Killing the Host. Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces. But a growing part of the economy in every country has been the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which comprises the rent and interest paid to the economy’s balance sheet of assets by debtors and rent payers. More and more money is being extracted from the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That’s what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.

Bonnie Faulkner: You have said that one could even say that China’s slowdown is a reflection of lower exports to the US and Europe as their economies shrink. In what ways would you say that our economy is shrinking? How would you describe it?

Michael Hudson: Well, employment, wage levels and overall wage payments for starters. And then, the shrinking proportion of net income available for spending after paying debts and real estate costs. If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up. All the growth in the last 10 years of the economy, the rise in national income, has gone to the 1%, not to the 99%.

So when I say the economy is shrinking, it’s the economy of the 99%, the people who have to work for a living and depend on earning money for what they can spend. The 1% makes its money basically by lending out their money to the 99%, on charging interest and speculating. So the stock market’s doubled, the bond market’s gone way up, and the 1% are earning more money than ever before, but the 99% are not. They’re having to pay the 1%.

So there are two economies, not only of the 1% and the 99%, but a division between the economy of consumption and production – consumer spending and tangible capital investment on the one hand – and payments to finance, insurance and real estate on the other. That includes healthcare, insurance, and also FICA wage withholding to produce more of a budget surplus enabling the government to cut taxes on the higher income brackets.

They’re also cutting back pensions. One of the big problems in America’s economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can’t be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting on rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.

Bonnie Faulkner: Do you think that there is another 2008 crash in the making, and if so, will this one look a lot different or will it be very similar?

Michael Hudson: Yes. It’d have to be very similar. The problems of 2008 were never cured. The Federal Reserve’s solution to the crisis was to lend the economy enough money to borrow its way out of debt. It thought that if it could subsidize banks lending homeowners enough money to buy houses from people who are defaulting, then the bank balance sheets would end up okay.

But the volume of debt was never written down. Mathematically, debts grow exponentially at compound interest. Banks recycle the interest into new loans, so debts grow exponentially, faster than the economy can afford to pay.

You’re having this in Europe, causing instability with Greece, Spain, and Portugal, even Italy now. And you’re having it here. You’re also having shrinking markets in Argentina, which has just voted in a rightwing government and cut back spending. So you’re having government spending on the economy being cut almost everywhere. That means that the only source of spending for growth has to come from borrowing from the banking system.

Bonnie Faulkner: So then if there is another 2008 crash in the making, you think it will look similar to what happened then?

Michael Hudson: Yes, that’s how it happens. It’ll be yet more real estate going down, more bankruptcies, and more government giveaways.

Bonnie Faulkner: I remember at that time, in 2008, the money market froze up. I remember this. It was really alarming.

Michael Hudson: This is why there’s been so much money going into treasury securities. Right now you can buy treasury securities and after you pay the management fees, whether it’s to Vanguard or someone else, you get a fraction of 1%, maybe a fraction of 0.1% in interest. People are putting their money into treasuries because they worry that the risk of putting their money into the bond market, the stock market or even the money markets is very high.

So Vanguard, for instance, which is one of the largest money management companies and best for the people – if you have a retirement account, Vanguard is no longer accepting treasury bond accounts into the overall money market because so much money is going in wanting to play it safe, that there aren’t enough treasury bonds to absorb all of this flight to safety.

Bonnie Faulkner: Wow. So then would you say it’s only a question of time before we hit another financial panic?

Michael Hudson: Yes.

Bonnie Faulkner: What do you make of this Panama offshore banking haven that has hit the news?

Michael Hudson: I haven’t followed it that closely, because I’ve been working on completing by the end of the summer the new book that I’m coming out with, J is for Junk Economics. So I really haven’t followed it. Apparently the Atlantic Council and the US Government have wanted to expose certain politicians who are not on its favorite list. So it’s part of a political stunt.

I notice that in the news they keep talking about Vladimir Putin, although he hasn’t been tied at all directly to this. There’s so much propaganda in the way that the popular press has been treating this that it’s hard for me to make head or tail of it.

Bonnie Faulkner: That’s right. The propaganda in the mainstream news is actually quite important, because in order to try and figure out anything, you have to try and decide what’s real and what isn’t. And so much of it isn’t real.

Michael Hudson: I guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account. And on the very day that he was increasing the attacks on the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, the export sector, he was signing documents to conceal his own money offshore. So the exposé of the Panama money laundering has hit some of the dictators that America is protecting and promoting.

Bonnie Faulkner: Would you like to describe your new book, Michael?

Michael Hudson: It’s basically a set of definitions on junk economics and showing that what people usually receive in the mainstream is what George Orwell would call Doublethink. It’s euphemism. When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that “real wealth.” It exposes what’s wrong in mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.

Bonnie Faulkner: Is there anything that you would like to say that you think is most important for people to understand about the present economy?

Michael Hudson: Just that the economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest. The bank’s product is debt, because the banks want to make sure that they can get paid for the debt. But ultimately the only party that can pay the debt is the government, because it runs the printing presses. So the debts ultimately either are paid by the government, or they’re paid by a huge transfer of property from debtors to creditors – or, the debts are written off. Throughout history, the only way of restoring stability is to write down the debts. That is treated now as if it’s something that can’t be done. But it’s the only thing that’s going to revive the economy.

Bonnie Faulkner: Michael Hudson, thank you very much.

Michael Hudson: It’s good to be here, Bonnie.

* * * * *

I’ve been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show has been: The Slow Crash. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972 book, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, is a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank. He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt and The Myth of Aid among many others. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. Due out soon, J Is for Junk Economics. Dr. Hudson acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide, including Iceland, Latvia and China, on finance and tax law. Visit his website at Michael-Hudson.com.

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter at gandbradio.

This transcript is a project of globalresearch.ca and gunsandbutter.org.

Ex-NATO Commander Breedlove was so bellicose toward Russia that the Germans objected to his dangerous provocations, but he is now strutting his stuff in hopes of landing a job in a Clinton-45 administration, says Gilbert Doctorow.

At this conclusive stage of the presidential campaign cycle, Foreign Affairs magazine is doing what it traditionally does, showcasing on its pages candidates for appointive office in the cabinet of the next president whom the magazine’s editorial board would like to see installed.

Thus, the current, July-August issue carries an article by Philip M. Breedlove, until recently Commander of the U.S. European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. His piece, entitled “NATO’s Next Act” might more honestly be called “Why I Have Earned My Next Job as Secretary of Defense in the Administration of Hillary Clinton.”

Image: Former NATO Commander Philip M. Breedlove.

During his service in Europe, General Breedlove was never bashful about being a politicking military officer who was keen to pick a fight with Russia. He met with the press often, making newsworthy pronouncements about Russia’s malevolent intentions and illegal actions that were unsupported by facts. Our European allies objected to Breedlove, stating openly that some of his allegations regarding Russian operations in Ukraine contradicted what their own intelligence services were reporting.

Indeed, on March 6, 2015, the Spiegel Online carried a story under a headline that says it all: “Breedlove’s Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine.” At the time, it was believed that Breedlove was trying to sabotage the recently instituted cease-fire in Donbas and overturn the Minsk-2 Accords in favor of resumed fighting in which the U.S. would provide Kiev with lethal weapons. By this scenario, a full-blown proxy war with Russia would follow.

The purpose of the new essay in Foreign Affairs is, as I say, to spread the word on what Breedlove achieved in his three years on duty in Europe by turning NATO around and giving it a new/old calling. When he arrived, NATO was busy extricating itself from its failed campaigns out of region, in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it had faced unfamiliar challenges for which it was ill-equipped, fighting insurgencies and irregular troops.

On his watch, a new threat was seen emerging in Eastern Europe. In Breedlove’s words, this took the form of a revitalized and aggressive Russia, seeking to reclaim its great power status and sphere of influence in post-Soviet space.

With its takeover of Crimea in March 2014 and involvement in the Donbas on behalf of Russian-speaking forces rebelling against the new Maidan government in Kiev, Russia demonstrated both defiance of the American-controlled New World Order and breathtaking military prowess. It thereby became a threat worthy of NATO’s finest traditions as defender of “law and order” on the European home front.

Still more recent Russian action in Syria awakened Breedlove to the fact that Russia’s ambitions are global. In this context he now declares Russia, with its nuclear arsenal, to be an “existential threat” to the United States which must be met by superior force. After all, Breedlove tells us, force is all that the Kremlin understands.

After going through this pre-history, Breedlove explains exactly what we are doing now to strengthen NATO in Poland, the Baltic States and Romania/the Black Sea so as to be prepared to resist Russian aggression and deter its existential threat.

Upside-Down Narrative

Most everything is wrong with what Breedlove tells us in his article. It is a perfect illustration of the consequences of the monopoly control of our media and both Houses of Congress by the ideologists of the Neoconservative and Liberal Interventionist School. We see a stunning lack of rigor in argumentation in Breedlove’s article coming from absence of debate and his talking only to yes-men.

Image: Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute.

Perhaps the biggest mistakes are conceptual: urging military means to resolve what are fundamentally political issues over the proper place of Russia in the European and global security architecture. Whereas for Clausewitz war was “a continuation of politics by other means,” for Breedlove politics – in this case, diplomacy – do not exist, only war.

In this respect, Breedlove is merely perpetuating the stone deafness of American politicians dating back to Dmitry Medvedev’s proposal in 2010 to negotiate an international convention bringing Russia in from the cold. The earnest offer of Russia’s most Westernizing head of state in a hundred years was left without response.

Breedlove’s entire recounting of what NATO is doing to stop a Russian threat to the Baltics and to Poland — through additional NATO boots on the ground and pre-positioned American heavy equipment fails — to mention, let alone explain what possible reason there might be for a Russian attack.

I contend that no realistic assessment of Russian national interest could justify their taking over the territories in question. The net result of any occupation could only be heavily negative due to hostile local populations even without considering its geopolitical consequences or retaliatory military and other action by the West.

Presumably the logic behind the assumption of Russian aggressive designs is illogic: the assumption of an insane Russian leadership. Such a line of thinking would be the direct fruit of the demonization of Vladimir Putin and of Russia more generally that the U.S. media has disseminated gleefully, with encouragement from the Obama administration.

Breedlove’s would-be boss in the Oval Office, Hillary Clinton, has likened the Russian ruler to Hitler. That obviates the need to examine rational calculations of your adversary.

Then there is Breedlove’s totally wrong-headed conceptualization of what constitutes the world order that he says is under threat. In his understanding, the United State is, by definition, the sole supplier of public good to the world and everything that it initiates is selfless and right.

This self-righteousness begins with history, with the sequencing of who did what to whom, who honored and who violated international obligations, who is the aggressor and who is the victim.  But this all comes down to one question: when did history start.

In Breedlove’s reading of history, the narrative that counts and is relevant to where we are today all started with the Russian “invasion” of Crimea. The controversial overthrow of the legitimately elected President of Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, the day after France and Germany brokered an agreement between the government and opposition (for reduced presidential powers and early elections) does not exist in Breedlove’s version of history. Nor, of course, does any other prior Western intervention in the intra-Ukrainian power struggle going back to the start of the Maidan demonstrations in December 2013.

This leaves us with the whole series of Russian reactions that he gives us without any reference to the missing actions by the U.S.-led West. There are other holes in Breedlove’s logic through which you could drive a tank, if I may use metaphors from his domain of expertise.

Reassessing Russian Might

It is in a way refreshing to see Breedlove recognize (within limits) the newfound capabilities of the Russian military, which just several years ago were mocked by Western commentators, even by the occupant of the Oval Office.

Image: A scene from “Dr. Strangelove,” in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.

Breedlove does underestimate the skills and equipment of the Russian air force and insists on the underlying military superiority of the U.S. and its NATO allies in the European theater. But, on balance, he asserts that today Russia poses an existential military threat to the United States. It would be nice if he finished the thought and explained exactly how and why (since Russia is not the only country with nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them but like those other countries – China, for instance – has no rational reason to do so unless directly threatened).

In any case, what is the appropriate response to an existential threat? Do you recommend the continued rapid build-up of NATO forces precisely at Russia’s Baltic and Black Sea borders to counter a perceived (though nonexistent) localized threat or do you address the existential threat by seeking to minimize tensions?

To date, and into the next five years, all of the U.S. and NATO measures which Breedlove describes and for which he takes credit have only unnerved the Russians and caused them to respond with equally provocative and dangerous counter-measures of a localized nature without in any way compromising their nuclear capability to wipe the United States off the map in any hot war.

Does this baiting the Russians near their borders make any sense? This was precisely the point that German Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank Walter Steinmeier has just called out in an interview published in Bild am Sonntag in which he speaks against any further saber-rattling by NATO in Poland or the Baltic States.

The seeming parallels between stepping up to the line today, and stepping up to the line in Berlin during the Cold War are illusory. The present line is not in a distant buffer zone which Joseph Stalin had created precisely for this purpose, to remove conflict from Russia’s borders.

It is so threatening to Russia’s survival that the Kremlin is now moving vast military resources from Central Russia into the Leningrad Oblast, within a very few miles of the new NATO presence just across the border in the Baltics. The time for either side to react to local military incidents has been shortened immensely compared to the past. This is a formula for Doomsday which Breedlove willfully ignores.

The $3.4 billion expenditure, which President Obama has allocated to bring forward depots of American heavy equipment and key personnel to Poland, Romania and the Baltic States, recognizes the logistical disadvantage of NATO forces under the remote defense perimeter that extends to Russia’s western and southern frontiers. But it cannot resolve this intractable disadvantage.

Territorial Disadvantage

It has been argued that a major factor that worked against Russian forces in World War I was logistical – the length of time it took Russia to move its men and equipment from the centers of population of the country hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away to its western borders where the fight against Germany was going on.

Image: NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Today, the U.S. and NATO have placed themselves in exactly the same disadvantage by seeking to fight Russia in a conventional war right where the Russians are concentrating the bulk of their strength and where NATO can at best only position “trip wire” forces having symbolic, not actual military defensive value.

The best that NATO can propose, it would seem, is to snatch the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad  (the clear mission of the Anakonda-16 games now going on in Poland) in case the Russians occupied the Baltic States (within the 60 hours or so that a recent Rand Institute study suggests is feasible).

However, as President Putin has stated clearly, such encroachment on Russian soil will unleash a nuclear response from Russia that will include missile attacks on the mainland USA, i.e. not limited to the European theater.

Finally, let’s consider another absurdity in General Breedlove’s letter setting out his candidacy for a cabinet position. He repeats, parrot-like, the position of the Obama administration and of putative Democratic candidate for President Hillary Clinton that we can selectively cooperate with Russia on issues of common interest like counter-terrorism, Pacific fishing rights (!) and the like even as we remain engaged in a life-or-death scramble for position on the ground in Europe.

In fact, the U.S. effort to totally isolate Russia by cutting off many, perhaps most of its bilateral programs of cooperation with the country have worked precisely to defeat cooperation, none more grievously so than in the area of fighting terrorism.

Meanwhile, what amounts to American encouragement of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria by pressing for the overthrow of the Russian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to this day under the guise of protecting the “moderate opposition” that happens to be embedded among the jihadist ‘’bad guys.’’

The fairy tales coming from Washington should not fool anyone, but Breedlove passes them along to his readers in the smug expectation that they will accept whatever he utters.

By lending its valuable “real estate” to the campaign for a high-level appointment by one of the most outspoken Cold Warriors within the U.S. military, the editorial board of Foreign Affairs magazine has shown yet again that it is incapable of guarding its own neutrality or balance.

Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016

The UK is not the only country with increasing doubts about the EU.

A Pew Research Center study on Euroskepticism Beyond Brexit shows a huge dip in EU favorability across the board.

France has an even lower overall favorable rating of the EU than the UK. The favorable score is 38% in France, 44% in the UK.

The British are not the only ones with doubts about the European Union. The EU’s image and stature have been on a roller coaster ride in recent years throughout Europe. In a number of nations the portion of the public with a favorable view of the Brussels-based institution fell markedly from 2012 to 2013 as the European economy cratered. It subsequently rebounded in 2014 and 2015. But the EU is again experiencing a sharp dip in public support in a number of its largest member states.

EU favorability is down in five of the six nations surveyed in both 2015 and 2016. There has been a double-digit drop in France (down 17 percentage points) and Spain (16 points), and single-digit declines in Germany (8 points), the United Kingdom (7 points) and Italy (6 points).

Young people – those ages 18 to 34 – are more favorable toward the European Union than people 50 and older in six of the 10 nations surveyed. The generation gap is most pronounced in France – 25 percentage points – with 56% of young people but only 31% of older people having a positive opinion of the EU. There are similar generation gaps of 19 points in the UK, 16 points in the Netherlands, 14 points in Poland and Germany, and 13 points in Greece.

Ever Closer Union – Not

Despite having an unfavorable rating of 61%, nearly as many French want more power given to the EU than taken away.

That said, there is not a single country in  support of giving the EU more power.

Migration Crisis

Every nation strongly disagrees with the Eu handling of migration.

Fed Up With the EU

Clearly the UK is not the EU’s only problem. People are fed up.

Frustration shows not only in EU polls, but in the rise of parties on the left in some countries and on the right in others.

Voters everywhere stew over the economy. We have not yet reached a flash point, but it’s coming.

Inciting hate towards Muslims has become a multimillion-dollar endeavor, supported by neocon corporate foundations, according to The Guardian quoting a recent report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the University of California at Berkeley’ Center for Race and Gender (CRG).

Of significance, several of the groups involved are working hand in glove with the Trump election campaign. 

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and University of California Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender (CRG), some 74 foundations, think tanks, research centers, etc “contribute in some way to Islamophobia in the US, the primary purpose of which “is to promote prejudice against, or hatred of, Islam and Muslims”.

Since the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, the constant struggle and chaos had engulfed the country. Corruption, violence, strong external influence and insecurity are some of the factors which are common in Somali’s day-to-day politics. From all of this, radicalised and extremist groups have emerged and started to take hold of the society, especially in the south of the country.

Al Shabaab was originally formed from the Al-Itihaad Al-Islamiya group, which emerged in the post regime change in the nineties. Al-Itihaad Al-Islamiya (AIAI) was focused on implementing strong Sharia law, seizing strategic locations in the country and bringing order and control in previously lawless areas. Though this may seem like a solid plan, establishing some kind of order in a chaotic region, even through Sharia, is better than total lawlessness; the Ethiopian government had other plans.

Neighbouring state, Ethiopia, which is predominantly Christian, saw the rise of Islamism, Wahhabism and Salafism as a serious threat in Somalia. Al-Itihaad Al-Islamiya as well as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) were destroyed by the Ethiopian military operations in 2004 and 2006, leaving only the most hardcore elements of these organisations still standing, thus the Al Shabaab, or “the youth”, emerged. The rise of Al Shabaab from the shadows was rather quick, the group rapidly grew from a core of just 33 to a force of more than 5,000 troops in less than four years. Their motivation and main objective at that time was to drive the Ethiopian forces out of the country; of course, that had to be done by a strong insurgency, which Al Shabaab was eager to lead.

Though the Ethiopians managed to quell ICU and the AIAI, Al Shabaab, which rose from it ashes, was much more radical and determined in its ideas of implementing Sharia law and some form of an Islamic caliphate/state. Ethiopia’s military actions hardened Somalis’ religious views and made a fertile ground for spreading extreme religious ideologies, which made recruitment and funding for Al Shabaab much easier. After the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces in 2009, a split occurred in Al Shaabab: two conflicting factions were trying to impose their own views and doctrine on the group. One was led by Sheikh Aweys, a spiritual leader with fundamentally domestic aims, and Sheikh Moktar Ali Zubeyr also known as Godane (educated in Pakistan), who had a more ambitious and extremist agenda, which ultimately prevailed and took control over the group. At that moment, the Al Shabaab agenda changed from nationalistic to a more global and ideological rhetoric, which ended with pledging allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and promoting Al Qaeda’s jihad across the horn of Africa. Although Al Shabaab’s impact during the past couple of years has decreased, mainly because of new battlefields in Syria and Libya, the group still poses a major threat in the region with the probability of expanding its influence further into the Sahel and also in Yemen.

Despite their grievous loss of their leader, Godane in 2014, his successor, Abu Ubaidah, is eager to follow in his footsteps. This can be seen in their constant raids and harassment in Mogadishu targeting primarily non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and United Nations (UN) facilities, extending their reach in Kenya, attracting young fighters and establishing some kind of limited government in some parts of the country which are under Al Shabaab’s control.

Before we go any deeper into understanding the structure of Al Shabaab, we first need to determine the doctrine and the ideology behind this radical group. Most of the time, the group is described as a Sunni extremist organisation supplemented with Salafism and Wahhabism. Besides this, Al Shabaab has a strict policy against takfir (bad Muslims), who usually get excommunicated or worse (punishments such as stoning and decapitation are common). The practice of Salafism and Wahhabism is not only used as some kind of ideology, but also as an instrument for attracting funds and finance (there had been rumours that some Gulf states are eager when it comes to funding organisations with this type of doctrine).

One of their most important goals is the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in the Horn of Africa; it should include not only Somalia but Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti as well. Various analysts cite that these radical pan-Islamic ideas come from AIAI, which was a predecessor of Al Shabaab which gave training and needed-knowledge for the future leaders of “the youth”. The concept of AIAI, and later ICU, is important in understanding the complex structure of Al Shabaab. Though it is radical and fundamental, it is not monolithic; tribal divides and internal fissures are rather common, especially when more leaders try to take control over the group, differences in their origin and training as well as indoctrination usually leads to conflict between them. Ahmed Abdi Godane, who triumphed over these internal conflicts in 2011 and 2013, suggests that core group doctrine and affiliation have been settled. Before Godane’s victory, the core leadership of Al Shabaab was heterogeneous with strong nationalist and politically pragmatic characters like Hassan Dahir Aweys and Mukhtar Roobow.

After the “cleansing” of the leadership, Godane saw a clear future which apparently lies with a strong affiliation with Al Qaeda. After the official pledge to Al Qaeda in 2012, these two organisations began close cooperation with each other in further indoctrination and training of the new recruits. Al Qaeda also played a major role in widening Al Shabaab’s vision in terms of globalised jihad rhetoric and propaganda. Implementation of strong Sharia law has become regular; punishments like stoning, decapitation and amputation are common for criminals and also apostates.

Structure, more precisely, the military organisation of Al Shabaab, consists out of five formations/brigades:

• Abu Dalha Al-Sudaani: Lower and Middle Juba
• Sa’ad Bin Mu’aad: Gedo
• Saalah Nabhaan: Bay and Bakool
• Ali Bin Abu Daalib: Banaadir, Lower Shabelle, Middle Shabelle
• Khaalid Bin Wliid: Hiiraan, Mudug, Galgaduud
• Liwaa’ul Qudus: Eastern Sanaag and Bari regions “Sharqistan”

Besides these formations, an important structure inside Al Shabaab is the “Amniyaad”. The Amniyaad is something resembling a secret police; at first they were in charge of providing intelligence (especially for internal purposes), but Godane managed to strengthen their position and gave them much wider authority. Al Shabaab’s internal coherency relies heavily on the work of Amniyaad, especially in Mogadishu and the surrounding areas. Some of the common tactics used by this “secret police” are targeted killings/assassinations, bombing and planting of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Amniyaad is also responsible for devising new tactics in order to improve Al Shabaab’s asymmetrical warfare. Last but not least is the media section, Al-Kataib: production of video materials for global and domestic audiences is used for spreading terror as well as for recruitment purposes.

Image: Map by crisisgroup.org

Tactics and strategies which are implemented by Al Shabaab are heavily based on local knowledge and experience from veterans and fighters who participated in former radical organisations in the nineties. This comes as no surprise – many members of Al Shabaab were active during the nineties and especially during the Ethiopian intervention. Also, their expertise in those battles was welcomed by Al Shabaab’s leadership in order to train new recruits and improve general combat.

A main aspect of the tactics and strategies used by this radical organisation is the asymmetrical warfare, which was executed with wide knowledge and precision. The group was cautious when it came to large-scale battles against larger and better-equipped adversaries, usually they would withdrew their forces in order to reorganise and strike at the right moment. This tactic was further improved by Godane, who decentralised much of the authority within the group making it more flexible and agile. Commanders or regional “governors” have been appointed, including field commanders who have improved intelligence gathering (Amniyaad), counter-intelligence work, better command of the troops etc. This decentralisation allowed Al Shabaab to easily shift into guerilla warfare style in 2013 and 2014 when the Somali government managed to extend its control over major towns, especially in the south of the country.

The jihadists, with their vast knowledge of the region, fled to the countryside and continued their fight. Though they have been driven from some populated areas, there is a growing sense of fear because of the sporadic raids and the retribution, which the terrorists pledged to carry out. Unlike its adversaries, Al Shabaab is quite mobile, which gives it the edge when it comes to fighting in urban areas. Constant raids and pressure, which they keep up thanks to their networks, allows Amniyaad a lot of freedom when conducting assassinations or even suicide attacks. The flow of foreign fighters into the group, especially those from Iraq and Afghanistan, has broadened the knowledge of military and guerilla tactics with a couple of major aspects:

• Extensive use of IEDs and suicide bombers which was not a common sight in Somalia in the past.
• Combat units consist out of nine members, unlike the regular Somali army, which practices with 11 member units, or the Ethiopian army with six member units.
• Heavy emphasis on infantry.
• High mobility of troops due to a limited number of members and a wide area which needs to be covered.
• Distinctive deployment of troops. Al Shabaab usually masses its troops on the borders of the areas which it controls, while there are not many of them in urban areas or city centers. Despite this, the strong psychological effects of fear and retaliation keep citizens in line, who are unable to revolt or oppose their aggressors.

Still two main weapons of Al Shabaab’s arsenal are IEDs and suicide bombers: a common tool for various Salafist/Wahhabist terrorist organisations. Al Shabaab also implements brutal tactics when initiating skirmishes. Although it usually targets government/military or international institutions, the group is always trying to fight in heavily populated areas. Interestingly enough, despite this bloody strategy, there isn’t an outrage from the domestic population against this terrorist organisation.

Recruitment and training of Al Shabaab members usually takes place in Somalia and Kenya, but foreign continents like Europe and North America (the US especially) are not the exception. The organisation started as a populist militarist group, focusing on younger parts of the population (staying true to its name, Al Shabaab/”the youth”) for mobilisation with constant struggle with the authority of the domestic and foreign factors. With its recruitment programme, Al Shabaab quickly realized that in order to amass new recruits, the idea of waging jihad should be constantly pushed on a daily basis. A regular flow of new recruits needed a population and land from which they could gather them.

These factors pushed Al Shabaab to become embedded into the Somali society, as some former members testified (which are often children or teenagers), the organisation gives a mobile phone and a monthly payment of 50 dollars, which for young people in Somalia, seems quite a lot. There are three basic principles on which Al Shabaab recruits its members:

• The use of da’wa [literally means “issuing a summons” or “making an invitation”] gives a strong impact on the youth mainly because they usually lack any deeper religious knowledge. This is often done by various propaganda techniques including videos, books and preaching the importance of jihad.
• Economic motivation also plays a major role. As I mentioned, earlier 50 dollars can mean a lot to a young man in the Somali society. Violence, which is a daily phenomenon in Somalia, makes people used to it and organisations like Al Shabaab largely profit from it. Payment for killing a man can sustain someone’s family for a period of time.
• The final part is de-socialisation and re-socialisation of the new recruits. This process can be highly rewarding for the terrorist organisation, since it usually promotes further unification of the new members.

Forced conscription is not an exception. In areas where Al Shabaab dominates, forced recruitment can often take place, though the exact line between forceful and “normal” recruitment is not always clear. Those who are forcefully made to join the group are often isolated from the outside world, they are later mixed with other recruits who have willingly joined the group (this is usually done in training courses). This constant shuffle of recruits finally blends them together and in the end, they are born again as fully-fledged jihadists. This has proven to be rather efficient with some political minorities since the feeling of belonging to some stronger organisation can be overwhelming.

Part of the recruitment is also exercised in schools or in religious institutions where Sheiks can usually navigate younger people to the way of Sharia and eventually, to Al Shabaab. The finance factor, which plays a major role in the recruitment phase is not only reserved for the fighters, suicide bombers or assassins; Al Shabaab employs workers for various duties inside the group. One of those positions is the clerical duty. Most of the training is done in Somalia due to the lack of government and military control. Al Shabaab is able to manage highly specialised training camps without much domestic interference. There are a couple of training camps which are specialised for hand-to-hand combat in Ras Kiamboni, suicide bombing camps in Elberde and Mogadishu and a hostage training camp in Eel Arfid.

There have also been reports on Al Qaeda operatives who have instructor duties, some of them are from Pakistan/Afghanistan and some come from the Arabian peninsula. The training courses usually last for six months, after which the new recruits become full members of the organisation. The trainees are also able to choose which branch of Al Shabaab they want to join; possibilities include combat units, bomb makers or the security apparatus of the Amniyat.

Many of the terrorist or insurgent groups have two main principles of funding which include “lootable” and “unlootable” resources. Those resources may include diamonds, narcotics, gas and similar riches which one territory may possess. Since Al Shabaab lacks this method of funding, the organisation was forced to create an innovative method of gathering financial resources. This new method can be defined as financial control and surveillance of cash flows. This control extends to both domestic and external funding and is directly controlled by the group so it does not rely on third parties.

The UN report from 2011 suggests that Al Shabaab was able to collect around 100 million dollars from fees at airports and seaports, taxes on various goods and checkpoints, jihad contributions and extortions justified by religious obligations. In order to maintain its “taxation” and healthy financial flows, good governance and discipline are essential. In this manner, Al Shabaab has made a wide range of administrative bodies that are far more efficient than the Somali government. These bodies include Maktabatu Maaliya (Ministry of Finance), which has domestic and international responsibilities.

On the local level when it comes to gathering taxes, the Amniyat plays a crucial role, while Maktabatu Maaliya is responsible for the macro-economy and development (example: controlling the charcoal exports). These “institutions” give a sense of government and order. For people who live in a state of perpetual chaos these administrative bodies, which were developed by the Al Shabaab, are seen as a more or less good thing; it also helps the organisation maintain its population and recruitment without the use of brutal force. Besides the domestic flow of funds which is reliable and easy to control, there is also an external source of funding. External sources include the Somali diaspora and “deep-pocket” individuals who sympathize with the rhetoric or have other interests in mind when donating financial resources to this group.

According to some estimates, 14% of the Somali population lives abroad. These people have certain moral obligations but also relatives who need help back at home. The much-needed help which is delivered from the Somali diaspora sometimes comes to Al Shabaab as well. In the past, especially when the ICU was active, the foreign aid coming from the Somalis living abroad was relatively easy to acquire. Luckily today this type of “foreign aid” is dramatically reduced, mostly due to international actions against those who fund Al Shabaab and domestic prosecutions. The group also has so-called “deep-pocketed” donors. These donors come from all over the world and when Al Shabaab pledged its allegiance to Al Qaeda, it became much more attractive for these donors.

Motivations for donating large amounts of money to terrorist organisations are various and they include: performing a proxy jihad by donating large sums of money to radical organisations, sponsoring those kinds of organisations since the donors themselves cannot be physically present, fight for that organisation or achieve honour for waging a proxy jihad. A 2013 US Treasury Designation Order on Umayr Al-Nuaymi (Qatar businessman) suggests that he allegedly funded Al Shabaab with more than 250,000 dollars. Though Al Shabaab promotes global jihad, it still has donors which support the nationalistic doctrine of the past. Aligning themselves with Al Qaeda (which is strictly orientated to global jihad), there is a probability that some of the donors, domestic and international, who  support the nationalistic doctrine, will cut the funds because of this shift in Al Shabaab’s goals and doctrine. This was even pointed out by the former leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden.

As an organisation, Al Shabaab demonstrated impressive talent for planning, strategy and military tactics, which must not be underestimated. Their social roots in Somalia still remain deep. According to some reports from 2014, the group is still controlling much of the southern part of the country. With the rise of Islamic State and chaos which engulfed much of North Africa and the Middle East, Al Shabaab is positioning itself accordingly, promoting Sharia rule, allaying with Al Qaeda and promoting the idea of an Islamic caliphate. Though the pan-Islamic idea is powerful, with Al Shabaab’s rhetoric they retain a strong grip over domestic affairs; this can be seen in their ways of funding via taxes.

Despite their rigorous ways of exercising Sharia law in a state such as Somalia, Al Shabaab does not necessarily represent the biggest threat or the biggest problem, hence the absence of any serious uprising from the local population against this organisation. There are also practical benefits provided by the Al Shabaab group, like religious education and some sort of basic institutions and administration. Yet these steps seem insignificant. Looking from abroad, for the locals they can mean a lot. Rooting themselves deep into the sociological sphere and bolstering their relations with the domestic population, it will not be an easy task to remove this radical organisation.

In geopolitical terms, Al Shabaab does not represent a major threat. Unlike the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, it lacks the logistic and foreign support in order to accomplish and spread terror on a global scale. On the other hand, they do represent a major threat in the region; something similar can be observed with Boko Haram. Though they are positioned in the south of the country, Somalia is the Horn of Africa. Somalia has access to the Gulf of Aden, and the proximity to Yemen and the Red Sea can serve not only the interests of Al Shabaab, but also those of foreign organisations which are present in Yemen and maintain contact with Al Shabaab. Al Shabaab’s regional influence can also be dangerous because of the instability of the Sahel region. If Al Shabaab manages to use the conflicts in the Middle East and Libya, it can spread further into Sahel. They already have the pattern of Islamic State, which uses different regions and countries in order to avoid total eradication. Thus, dealing with Al Shabaab must be done cautiously.

Ethiopian direct military engagement in the past destroyed two radical organisations but also delivered the third one, which is much stronger than its predecessors. Learning from their previous experience is one of the trademarks of Al Shabaab. Directly engaging this organisation may cause unwanted casualties and destruction, which will only strengthen the position of Al Shabaab in the Somali society (we must not forget that Al Shabaab also maintains nationalistic ideas besides global jihad). Thus, the approach must be done through soft power, political reconciliation, mediation support, political and religious education, military support and assistance. Only when the foreign powers realize the reality of Somalis’ struggle, can there be hope for a total eradication of radical organisations in that country.

Ma Igor Pejic  graduated in Political Science from the Foreign Affairs Department at the Faculty of Political Science. He is currently completing an MA in Terrorism, Security and Organised Crime at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Notes:

1. http://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/threat_pdf/al-shabab-threat-report.pdf
2. http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/africa/horn-of-africa/somalia/b099-somalia-al-shabaab-it-will-be-a-long-war.pdf
3. https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/publication/140221_Bryden_ReinventionOfAlShabaab_Web.pdf
4. https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201412_whr_2-14_keatinge_web_0.pdf
5. http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/sites/sciencespo.fr.ceri/files/art_RM2.pdf
6. http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/S_2014_726.pdf
7. https://somalianews.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/bryden-decline-and-fall-of-al-shabaab-22v2015.pdf
8. http://www.trackingterrorism.org/sites/default/files/chatter/TheAnatomyOfAlShabaab_0.pdf

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is calling for Europe, and especially NATO members, to work with Moscow and stop carrying out military exercises close to the Russian border.

Conducting military exercises close to the Russian border is no way to achieve greater security for Europe, which would be better off initiating a dialogue with Moscow, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Friday.Speaking at the close of NATO’s Anaconda 16 military exercise in Poland, Steinmeier warned the alliance against saber-rattling, and urged its members to work together with Russia for the security of Europe.

What we should not do now, is inflame the situation with loud saber-rattling and war cries,” he told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

Anyone who thinks that symbolic tank parades on the Eastern border of the alliance create more security is mistaken.

The Foreign Minister said that NATO members should invest in a partnership with Russia, and gave examples where that kind of cooperation has led to progress.”The prevention of an Iranian nuclear bomb, the fight against radical Islam in the Middle East and the stabilization of the Libyan state are recent examples,” Steinmeier said.The Anaconda 16 exercise was conducted in Poland from June 7 to June 17. It involved more than 31,000 participants from 24 countries, making it Europe’s largest military exercise since the end of the Cold War.

The exercise comes ahead of NATO’s summit in Warsaw on July 8-9, at which the alliance is expected to announce more of its military build-up in Eastern Europe.On Monday NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg informed the press about some of the undertakings that the alliance was expecting from NATO Defense Ministers at meetings last week, decisions which he said will pave the way for the Warsaw summit in July.His announcements included one concerning the establishment of eight new headquarters in Eastern Europe, and the deployment of four battalions on rotation in Poland and the Baltic states. Stoltenberg highlighted the larger NATO Response Force and new Spearhead Force, and called for further increases in military spending from members.”Last month, the Spearhead Force conducted an exercise which showed how far we have come. One thousand troops and four hundred military vehicles moved from Spain to Poland within four days,” boasted the NATO Secretary General.

© SPUTNIK/

NATO exercises and deployments near Russia since 2014

With virtually no discussion in the media and no mention in the presidential election campaign, the United States is moving ahead with its trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization program.

Last week, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published a report noting that the Obama administration is leading a global expansion of nuclear weapons programs. It said the US “plans to spend $348 billion during 2015–24 on maintaining and comprehensively updating its nuclear forces,” adding that “Some estimates suggest that the USA’s nuclear weapon modernization programme may cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years.”

Hans Kristensen, a co-author of the report, declared,

“The ambitious US modernization plan presented by the Obama administration is in stark contrast to President Barack Obama’s pledge to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the role they play in US national security strategy.”

In the latest milestone in this ongoing process, the House of Representatives last week voted down an amendment that would have slowed the development of a $37 billion program to construct a new nuclear-armed cruise missile called the Long Range Standoff Weapon.

Behind the scenes, the program had met with muted opposition from sections of the military establishment, who criticized it on the grounds of its exorbitant cost and the fact that it would make nuclear war, either intentional or accidental, more likely.

“Because they can be launched without warning and come in both nuclear and conventional variants, cruise missiles are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon,” wrote former defense secretary William J. Perry and former assistant defense secretary Andy Weber in a comment published in the Wall Street Journal last year.

They warned that such weapons, which do not trace the tell-tale arc into space of ballistic missiles, are hard to detect and impossible to distinguish from their conventional, or nonnuclear, counterparts. This makes deadly miscalculations by other countries more likely. However, with the latest House vote, such concerns were brushed aside.

Given the enormous nuclear superiority of the United States over all other countries in the world, why the rush to pour ever more money into the development of new nuclear weapons and delivery systems, especially ones that are so dangerous as to give pause even to sections of the military establishment?

The current US nuclear arsenal, which is large enough to kill everyone on the planet many times over, is a remnant of a period in which the use of nuclear weapons was envisioned as a last resort, and when the launching of a nuclear weapon was assumed to mean “mutually assured destruction.” During most of the Cold War, the idea that a nuclear war could actually be winnable was confined to the political fringe, and the theories of RAND Corporation military strategist Herman Kahn were pilloried—most famously Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove.

But in what is becoming known in policy circles as the “second nuclear age,” the thinking expressed by General Buck Turgidson in Kubrick’s film—that the consequences of a nuclear exchange are “modest and acceptable,” even though the United States might get its “hair mussed”—is becoming mainstream doctrine.

A report published earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments titled Rethinking Armageddon outlines a scenario in which the US responds to an intervention by Russian forces in Latvia. The Joint Chiefs of Staff give the president four options, three of which involve the use of nuclear weapons.

As a report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) noted, “The scenarios for nuclear employment have changed greatly since the ‘balance of terror’ between the two global superpowers.” As a result, the “second nuclear age” involves combatants “thinking through how they might actually employ a nuclear weapon, both early in a conflict and in a discriminate manner.”

The highly influential Washington think tank called for maximizing “flexibility and credibility” by moving to a “smaller but newer responsive stockpile, lower and variable yields, and special effect weapons, a more diversified set of delivery systems, greater distribution and forward deployment, and greater integration with nonnuclear capabilities.”

Components of this plan include the stationing of missile defense systems on the borders of Russia and China, such as the one installed in Romania last month, and the domination of key waterways, such as the South China Sea, Baltic Sea and Black Sea. These policies are intended to make it difficult for Russia and China to retaliate to a nuclear first strike, including by means of ballistic missile submarines.

But for all the money and resources being poured into US nuclear dominance, the idea that a nuclear war against Russia or China is winnable, even with the most advanced weapons systems a trillion dollars can buy, is just as insane as it was during the height of the Cold War. The use of low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons will very likely escalate into a conflict in which billions of people, or even the whole of humanity, will die.

The doctrine of the viability of a nuclear first strike mirrors the grandiose delusion, expressed in the 1998 book The Future of War by George and Meredith Friedman, that the advent of precision-guided bombs and missiles would make US military force uncontested in the 21st century, a theory disproven in the military debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

The relentless scheming of US military planners has its roots in deep-going historical process. The American ruling class, facing growing popular opposition at home and the long-term decline of its global economic power, seeks to resolve the intractable crisis it faces through military means. Its reckless actions have already resulted in one disastrous and bloody adventure after another. However, like a gambling addict, it seeks to win by upping the stakes, bringing into its crosshairs not only Russia and China, but the entire planet.

Despite the distinction of having waged war for nearly eight consecutive years, the Obama administration faces mounting pressure from a military and political establishment that is seeking an even more aggressive display of military force in the Middle East and against Russia and China. These pressures will erupt after the November election, with incalculable consequences, whether it is Clinton or Trump who is elected.

In a provocative move directed against China, the US Navy dispatched two huge nuclear-powered aircraft carriers—the USS John C. Stennis and the USS Ronald Reagan—to engage in three days of military exercises in the Philippine Sea—adjacent to, but not in, the South China Sea. The vessels and their accompanying strike groups of cruisers and destroyers carry 12,000 sailors and 140 military aircraft.

The war games, which finished yesterday, involved long-range strikes as well as sea surveillance, air defence drills and defensive air combat training. Rear Admiral John Alexander, commander of the USS Reagan carrier strike group, boasted: “No other navy can concentrate this much combat power in one sea … It was truly impressive.” While the navy neither confirms nor denies the presence of nuclear weapons, both aircraft carriers are capable of carrying them.

This massive show of force took place as the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague is due to rule in coming weeks on a US-backed challenge by the Philippines to Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. The judgment, which is expected to favour the Philippines, will become the starting point for Washington to ramp up its aggressive campaign against so-called Chinese “expansionism” and “bullying” of its neighbours.

An unnamed American official told the New York Times the message of the exercises was unmistakable and the timing was deliberate. Admiral John Richardson, chief of naval operations, told a Center for a New American Security (CNAS) conference yesterday that the war games provided “a terrific opportunity for us just to do some high-end war-fighting and training.”

Richardson declared that the rare exercises, involving two carriers, aimed at signalling the US commitment to its regional allies. Then, in a thinly-veiled warning to China, he added: “For anyone who wants to destabilise the region, we hope that there is a deterrence message there as well.” The exercises followed last week’s “Malabar” war games in the same waters involving the US, Japanese and Indian navies—again to practice “complex, high-end war-fighting.”

While Washington routinely accuses Beijing of “expansionism,” the US has deliberately stoked up tensions over the South China Sea disputes during the past five years as a means of driving a wedge between China and its South East Asian neighbours—particularly the Philippines and Vietnam. The US focus on the South China Sea is part of its broader “pivot to Asia” and military build-up throughout the Asia Pacific to subordinate China and ensure continued American hegemony in the region.

The US has mounted an increasingly strident campaign over the past year against China’s land reclamation activities and “militarisation” in the South China Sea. The US Navy has dispatched destroyers on three occasions within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limits surrounding Chinese-controlled islets—provocations that could result in a military clash, either accidently or by design.

The Obama administration has declared that the US has “a national interest” in ensuring “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, highlighting the extensive trade that passes through its waters. In reality, China has never threatened “freedom of navigation” and indeed relies on these sea lanes to import energy and raw materials from Africa and the Middle East.

Washington’s real concern is to ensure “freedom of navigation” for its warships in areas immediately adjacent to the Chinese coastline, including sensitive naval bases on Hainan Island. The Pentagon’s AirSea Battle strategy for war on China envisages a massive air and missile attack on the Chinese mainland, supplemented by a naval blockade to cripple the Chinese economy.

The Pentagon is already preparing to escalate its operations in the South China Sea following The Hague ruling, suggesting that China could declare an Air Defence Identification Zone over the area or begin land reclamation activities in the Scarborough Shoal, which is also claimed by the Philippines. Beijing has declared that it does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction and will not abide by its ruling.

Speaking yesterday on a panel discussing the next moves after The Hague ruling, Andrew Shearer, an analyst with the Center for Strategy and International Studies (CSIS), declared that “the current carrier deployment is a good step” but was not enough. He suggested that the US military must shift into “deterrence mode” for the next six months to block any moves by China. Fellow panelist Amy Searight declared there was “no easy solution” if China started reclaiming the Scarborough Shoal.

The CSIS has been the preeminent think tank of the US “pivot,” working closely with the Pentagon and the Obama administration on the military build-up and strategy in Asia. In March, two CSIS analysts published “a Scarborough Contingency Plan” that involved close collaboration with the Philippines and a public warning to China that the US would intervene if Philippine ships or aircraft came under attack. The plan’s final step involved sending Philippine warships to physically block Chinese dredging operations, with US navy assets “in position over the horizon to signal that they would be prepared to intervene.”

Under Washington’s Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the Philippines, completed earlier this year, the US military has access to five Philippine bases, including an airfield directly adjacent to the South China Sea. In April, the US and the Philippine militaries held their annual Balikatan exercises, which involved the USS Stennis carrier strike group and focussed on operations in the South China Sea. Last week, the US navy sent four sophisticated Growler electronic attack aircraft and 120 support personnel to the Clark Air Base in the Philippines to patrol airspace and sea lanes in the region.

Speaking at yesterday’s CNAS conference, Admiral Richardson, chief of naval operations, boasted that the US navy was expending “a lot of intellectual energy” in determining ways to counter and disrupt Chinese activities in the region—from China’s land reclamation to its Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) weapons designed to keep US forces out of waters immediately adjacent to its mainland. “We’ve got a lot of studies going on right now, [and] by the July-August timeframe, we are going to have a lot of exciting ideas,” he said.

If Richardson’s comments are any indication, the Pentagon is preparing a series of reckless provocations that go well beyond the “freedom of navigation” operations that have already taken place. The result will be a further heightening of the risk that a small incident, whether deliberate or not, could escalate into conflict between the two nuclear-armed powers.

Putin: “We Know and they Know that we Know…People do not Understand how Dangerous the Situation Really Is” (quoted  by Global Research)

Do you remember how close we came to Armageddon in the early 1960s when Washington put nuclear missiles in Turkey on the Soviet Union’s border and the Soviets responded by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba? Fortunately, at that time we had an intelligent president instead of a cipher.

President John F. Kennedy pulled us back from the brink and was assassinated by his own government for his service to humanity.

For a number of years I have been warning that the recklessness of a half century ago has reappeared in spades. The crazed, insane, nazified, neoconized government in Washington and Washington’s despicable Europeran vassal states, especially the UK, Germany, and France, are driving the world to extinction in nuclear war.

This is the most obvious fact of our time. Yet only the Russian government addresses Washington’s threat to life on earth.

Why is this?

Why was there no debate—or even mention—in the presidential nomination primaries of the road to nuclear war on which Washington has the world?

Washington is putting its nuclear missiles on Russia’s borders, conducting war games on Russia’s borders, and stationing its Navy off Russia’s coasts in the Black and Baltic seas. To cover up its reckless, irresponsible aggression toward a nuclear power, Washington accuses Russia of aggression.

The presstitute media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox “News,” CNN, and the rest of the despicable whores repeat the lie over and over until the Western populations are brainwashed.

Do you suppose the Russians, who know what is happening, are going to just sit there until they are so completely surrounded by nuclear missiles that they have to surrender?

Unless you believe this, you had best get busy saving your life and the life of our planet. Do not expect political leaders to do this for you. There are no political leaders in public office anywhere in the West, only paid puppets of powerful interests groups.

Do not expect experts, most of whom are dependent on these same interest groups, to bring influence to bear on government and media.

There is no one but us.

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.

Battle for Sirte and continuing division prompts imperialist rationale for further intervention

Fighting for control of the western coastal city of Sirte, Libya has resulted in the fleeing of more people from this embattled North African state which five years ago was targeted for regime-change by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Pentagon and NATO.

Sirte is the hometown of former leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi who was brutally assassinated while attempting to leave the city amid the massive bombing by the imperialist states during late October 2011. Since 2015, the Islamic State (IS) has controlled the city along with other areas extending across the western coast of the Mediterranean.

IS presence in Libya has accelerated in the aftermath of the bombing of their positions in Syria and Iraq by numerous countries including the United States, Britain, France, and Russia. Forces loyal to the recently-imposed United Nations “Government of National Accord” (GNA) have laid siege to the city in an effort to drive out the organization.

The bulk of military forces involved in the efforts to oust IS are militias from the city of Misrata who were notorious for their violence and racism during the war of regime-change in 2011. In addition, the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG) is also deployed under the banner of the GNA.

Anti-war.com reported on June 19 that the GNA spokesman “Reda Issa suggested the focus right now was not offensive, but rather to ‘bolster positions on the outskirts of Sirte to reinforce the siege and provoke ISIS fighters to come out of hiding.’ ISIS is estimated to have 5,000 fighters in Libya, with a large chunk of them in Sirte. Given the unity government’s forces mostly consist of the old Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), which was never built for offensive operations, it is unsurprising that the offensive isn’t the quick mop-up it was initially suggested to be.”

These heavily-armed fighters have taken some territory away from IS in Sirte but the Islamists remain dug into their positions slowing the drive to force them out of the area in order to break their main base in the central-western region of the oil-rich state. 80 percent of the country’s oil reserves are located under the Sirte basin.

War Continues for Oil in the Eastern Region

If this was not enough for the GNA regime to contend with, there are additional flashpoints in the eastern region where a renewed round of attacks have targeted oil installations. Another militia in the East calling itself The Benghazi Defense Forces (BDF) carried out attacks on PDF units said to be loyal to the GNA in an area close to oil facilities on June 19. The areas struck by the BDF included three oil terminals located north of the country’s major oil fields. At least three people were reportedly killed during the fighting.

BDF is composed of rebels that have been largely defeated by militias loyal to the Khalia Haftar, the renegade general under Gaddafi who later became a CIA asset. Haftar was flown back to Libya from Virginia during 2011 to ostensibly lead the counter-revolution supported by the imperialist states and their allies.  Hafter’s forces have been clashing with rebels for two years, including some with ties to IS.

PFG spokespersons stated that the oil installations were not under imminent threat. However, they reiterated that the PFG were prepared to prevent a serious attack. This flare-up in fighting followed a previous day of clashes between the BDF and the UN-backed GNA Libyan regime.

On June 18, the BDF clashed with militias loyal to the Eastern government in the town of Ajdabiya. The rival regime based in Tobruk called the House of Representatives (HoR), has not thrown its support behind the GNA which is headquartered in the capital of Tripoli in the West.

The Tobruk regime has been in constant conflict with both the General National Congress (GNC) faction in Tripoli as well. At present there are two different National Oil Corporations (NOCs) which are claiming to be the legitimate controllers of the petroleum resources.

Libyan oil production has dropped off considerably from the 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) under the Jamahiriya governing system led by Gaddafi and his supporters. Libya for years was the most prosperous state in Africa has now been reduced to producing less than 400,000 (bpd) leaving the country scrambling for foreign exchange amid an extreme decline in oil prices over the last year.

Migrant Crisis Continues Amid Internal Divisions

Despite the endorsement of the imperialist governments in Washington and the European Union (EU) member-states, the GNA junta has generated controversy among the two rival regimes and other factions vying for military and political control of the oil-rich state.

Compounding the Libyan instability in recent weeks is the fact that hundreds have died in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.  Officially well over 52,000 people have made the journey just this year alone. Many of the people who are subjected to the worst treatment by the human traffickers and militias occupying Libya are migrants coming from West Africa.

In a detailed article published by the British Guardian on June 17, it says “To even reach the sea, these West Africans all had to survive a horrific journey across the Sahara. If they don’t fall off the back of the smugglers’ pickup trucks, passengers are often kidnapped or beaten or die of dehydration.”

This same report goes on stressing “Their worst experiences, however, probably came inside Libya itself. Claimed by three rival regimes, and torn apart by a civil war waged between dozens of rival militias, Libya has become a hell on earth for migrant workers. In the security vacuum created by the absence of a strong central government, migrants have become easy prey for kidnappers and militias looking to raise money through ransoms, businessmen looking for slave labor and smugglers looking for passengers to exploit.”

The chaos engendered by the imperialist war of 2011 and its aftermath has turned Libya into a major source of African and even European instability. Governments controlling territories which are points of entry for the migrant population are seeking to halt the flow of people into their countries. Resistance to migration of people from Africa, the Middle East and Asia has strained relations between the European states in the South, Central and Eastern regions with those in the North and West.

Negotiations have taken place with the fractured regimes in Libya and the NATO state of Turkey to either prevent or return migrants and refugees who enter EU countries. In Europe itself, the displaced persons from the oppressed nations are subjected to institutional racism, xenophobia and violence from the security apparatus along with right-wing vigilantes.

The migrant, internally displaced and refugee crisis is one of the major issues facing the internationally community today yet remains absent from the discourse surrounding electoral politics and foreign policy. Reports from the UN Refugee Agency and other humanitarian organizations say that the problems of displacement is worse than it has ever been since the conclusion of World War II.

June 20 is designated as World Refugee Day and the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe said in a statement that “Around 75 million international migrants are estimated to be living in the European Region alone, accounting for one third of all international migrants worldwide.” WHO also notes the rapid escalation of the crisis saying “Europe has experienced this acutely: over 1 million refugees and migrants arrived in European countries in 2015 alone, and over the course of the first 5 months of 2016 there have been over 200,000 new arrivals on European shores and at borders.”

A group of Americans, concerned about the U.S. government’s obsession with “regime change” wars and frightened about the potential for a nuclear confrontation with Russia, urges a national debate on these policies.

On June 16, the New York Times reported:

“More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been ‘overwhelmed’ by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for ‘a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.’

A Tomahawk cruise missile launches from the USS Shiloh against air defense targets in Iraq on Sept. 3, 1996, as part of Operation Desert Strike, a U.S. military engagement against Iraqi government forces similar to what 51 State Department officials are now advocating for Syria. (DOD photo)

We are a group of concerned U.S. citizens currently visiting Russia with the goal of increasing understanding and reducing international tension and conflict. We are appalled by this call for direct U.S. aggression against Syria, and believe it points to the urgent need for open public debate on U.S. foreign policy.

We note the following:

(1) The memo is inaccurate. There is no ‘cease-fire’ in Syria. The ‘cessation of hostilities’ which was agreed to has never included the major terrorist groups fighting to overthrow the government in Syria. This includes Nusra (Al Qaeda), ISIS and their fighting allies.

(2) A U.S. attack on Syria would be an act of aggression in clear violation of the UN Charter. (Ref 1)

(3) The supplying of weapons, funding and other support to armed groups fighting the Syrian government is also a violation of international law. (Ref 2)

(4) A U.S. attack on Syria would lead to more bloodshed and risk potential military confrontation with Russia. With arsenals of nuclear weapons on both sides, the outcome could be catastrophic.

(5) It is not the right of the USA or any other foreign country to determine who should lead the Syrian government. That decision should be made by the Syrian people. A worthy goal could be internationally supervised elections with all Syrians participating to decide their national government.

(6) The memo reportedly says, “It is time that the United States, guided by our strategic interests and moral convictions, lead a global effort to put an end to this conflict once and for all.” Similar statements and promises have been made regarding Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In all three cases, terrorism and sectarianism have multiplied, the conflicts still rage, and huge amounts of money and lives have been wasted.

In light of the above, and the danger of escalating global conflict:

Map of Syria

–We urge State Department officials to seek non-military solutions in conformity with the U.N. Charter and international law.

–We urge the U.S. Administration to stop funding and supplying weapons to armed ‘rebels’ in violation of international law and end the policy of forced “regime change”.

–We call for an urgent nation-wide public debate on the U.S. policy of “regime change”.

The Center for Citizens Initiative (CCI) delegation currently visiting Russia includes:

Ann Wright, retired United States Army Colonel and U.S. State Department official. Ann received the U.S. State Department Award for Heroism in 1997 after helping evacuate several thousand persons during the Sierra Leone Civil War. She was one of three U.S. State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Elizabeth Murray, retired Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Raymond McGovern, retired CIA analyst (1963 to 1990) who worked in the Washington, DC White House and prepared daily briefs for seven Presidents. In the 1980s Ray chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and the U.S. Presidents’ Daily Briefs. Ray is the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Kathy Kelly, peace activist, pacifist and author. She is a founding members of Voices in the Wilderness and is currently a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Kathy has traveled to Iraq 26 times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of the US-Iraq wars. Her recent work took her to Afghanistan and Gaza.

David Hartsough, co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce and the “World Beyond War.” David is a life-long peace activist, peace maker, and author “Waging Peace: Global Adventurers of a Lifelong Activist.”

William H Warrick III, retired Family Physician and 25-year member of Veterans For Peace. Former US Army Security Agency Intelligence Analyst (1968 – 1971).

Sharon Tennison, President and Founder of the Center for Citizen Initiatives. Sharon has 33 years of experience working in USSR/Russia (1983 to present).

Robert Alberts, MBA, Accountant. Bob volunteers with Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Peter Bergel, Oregon PeaceWorks Board member and PeaceWorker news magazine editor.

Karen Chester, optometrist by vocation and a peace activist volunteer for two decades. Karen’s greatest concern has been and is the plight of Central American peoples, supporting those who come to the U.S. fleeing violence and poverty.

Alix Foster, Native Peoples Law Attorney in La Conner, WA. Alix volunteers for a number of positive causes, particularly with respect to Native America issues.

Jan Hartsough is an educator and community organizer. Jan worked for American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) for many years and currently works at the grassroots level to help African women gain access to safer water.

Paul Hartsough, Ph.D., clinical psychologist. Paul focuses on conflict resolution and how we can survive as one global family in the nuclear age.

Martha Hennessy, retired occupational therapist. Martha volunteers at the New York Catholic Worker.

Bob Spies, website developer, technical support for CCI, and activist for a number of non-violent causes. Bob previously was a participant in Beyond War.

Rick Sterling , retired aerospace engineer, Vice-Chair Mt. Diablo Peace & Justice Center, co-founder Syria Solidarity Movement, Board President Task Force on the Americas.

Hakim Young is a Singaporean medical doctor who lives in Afghanistan part of the year. He is active with Afghan Peace volunteers and is deeply concerned about US-Russia relations.

References:

(1) UN Charter Preamble: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other matter inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”. The first purpose of the United Nations is “To maintain international peace and security, to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.”

(2) On June 27, 1986 the International Court at the Hague issued its legal ruling in the case of Nicaragua vs. United States. The ruling was as follows:

Decision of the International Court at the Hague

Decides that the United States of America, by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the “contra” forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State.

By “training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying” the military rebel groups waging war against the Damascus government, the US and “friends” are committing the same crime that the USA was responsible for committing against Nicaragua in the 1980’s.

Board of trustees’ decision represents trend towards eurocentrism and economic austerity

At Western Illinois University (WIU) it was announced at the conclusion of the spring semester that degree programs in African American and Women’s Studies would be eliminated.

Programs dealing with these important areas of academic research would continue on a downgraded level. The decision to cut these programs was made by the Board of Trustees saying it was carried out after careful consideration and discussion.

WIU will allow students to minor in the program areas. Additional degree programs including philosophy and religious studies were also removed.

The Chicago Tribune reported that “The trustees’ vote follows a recommendation by Provost and Academic Vice President Kathy Neumann and a study by a program elimination committee. Trustee board Chairwoman Cathy Early said the decision to eliminate the majors was not one the board took lightly.” (June 11)

Providing a rationale for the nixing of the degree programs, the WIU registrar’s office said that not one degree in African-American studies and only two degrees in philosophy, women’s studies and one degree in religious studies were earned by students in the current graduating class. Neumann emphasized that the academic fields will still have a presence on the Macomb and Quad Cities campuses, noting that the students who are currently majoring in these areas will be allowed to complete their degree programs.

Nonetheless, the resolution to eliminate the degrees which passed the board of trustees emphasized that the decision could result in employees being retrenched. The decision to remove the degree programs did prompt opposition from both faculty and students.

An online petition opposing the abolition of the philosophy program collected 1,656 supporters. Brian Powell, an associate professor of Philosophy said the petition sent a message to the trustees that a lot of people “recognize the value of philosophy to the university.” (Chicago Tribune, June 11)

The Peoria Journal Star reporting on the WIU trustees’ decision pointed out as well that “The board also voted to modify bilingual/bicultural education, public health, geography and musical theater degree programs. Trustees also approved the university’s fiscal year 2017 preliminary spending plan of $221.3 million. The spending plan is a decrease of $24.6 million from fiscal year 2016 All Funds Budget. The university’s FY 2017 All Funds Operating Budget will be presented to the board in October.” (June 10)

Although the university trustees claimed that its decision was not based on financial considerations but on lack of enrollment, the two areas of governance cannot be separated. The overall slashing of assistance programs from both the state and federal governments are a major contributing factor in the operations of higher educational institutions across the country.

In the state of Illinois, the legislature has been in a battle over the fiscal budget. The state went for an entire year without an agreement over a budget impacting education, municipal and social services.

WGN TV emphasized the severity of the crisis saying absent of an agreement the results could be catastrophic for various sectors of the economy and public sector. The deadlock between the legislature and the governor is hampering investment into the state.

An article by Bill Kissinger says “The state has been without a budget for nearly a year, as an epic political standoff between republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and democratic leaders opposed to his agenda continues with no end in sight. Lawmakers have just more than two weeks to reach a compromise. Without a deal by the start of the new budget year on July 1, more than $9 billion in emergency funding that’s kept universities, domestic violence shelters and food stamps going will run out. There is also no funding for primary and secondary schools which could put opening on time in jeopardy.” (June 14)

Nationwide Decline in Public Funding at Root of Crisis

This situation in Illinois involving education and other public expenditures follows a pattern over the last several years where attacks on programs which challenge the dominant Eurocentric and male-oriented approach to scholarship have increased. This is coupled with the worsening problems of declining municipal services and infrastructure related to water, public transportation, environmental quality and assistance to low-income families and their children.

These cuts in academic programs are not only occurring in higher education but also in the public schools. In Chicago over the last four years, the teachers union has engaged in strikes and mass demonstrations in protests against the elimination of programs, the closing of school buildings and the reduction in salaries and benefits for educators.

In the city of Detroit, the imposition of emergency management in the public schools system periodically since 1999 has not only brought the district into near insolvency. The elimination of music, art, sports and other programs have severely reduced the quality of the education given to mainly African American and Latino youth.

At Wayne State University in Detroit, a decades-long center of higher education for working class and nationally oppressed peoples has experienced huge budget cuts prompting the raising of tuition and housing costs. Enrollment is down substantially while the largest corporations operating in Michigan are given huge tax breaks which are now threatening to send the state into monumental budget deficits and consequently more austerity measures.

The Need for a Renewed Fightback

With specific reference to academic programs aimed at the recruitment and quality education of oppressed groups, under the guise of deficits and budget tightening, these programs are being rapidly eviscerated.  Academic programs and curriculums designed to re-correct the racist and sexist approach to instruction and research, which were brought into the education arena as a result of protests and debate, are once again becoming the subject of ridicule and liquidation.

Certain states such as Arizona and Texas have placed restrictions on what can be taught about nationally oppressed groups within the public education system. In Arizona House Bill 2281 was passed in 2010 threatening districts with the loss of funding if they did not eliminate courses on Mexican American studies.

These actions however sparked a movement which insisted that these programs be reintroduced into the school system. Teachers and students held classes outside the schools igniting demonstrations which have gained some results in Arizona, Texas and California.

According to an article published by The Atlantic, “As the Tucson Unified School District’s governing board prepared to discuss removing Mexican American studies from a list of classes that would count toward core requirements (seen by many as another move to demean it), nine students rushed the boardroom. They pulled chains from around their waists. Behind a curved wood desk with microphones, they sat in the board’s rolling chairs and locked themselves in place. They pounded the table and chanted, ‘When education is under attack, what do we do? Fight back!’” (July 19, 2015)

The only way in which the maintenance and reintroduction of these academic programs servicing African Americans, Latinos, Women and other groups subjected to national and gender discrimination can continue is through a similar process that brought about their origination during the period between the 1960s and 1990s. Students backed up by their communities took over buildings and shutdown campuses creating a crisis that the administrations and the broader political establishment could not ignore.

With the growth of people of color communities throughout the U.S. and the rapid transforming of so-called “minorities” into majorities, militant action will be required in order to make public education relevant to these constituencies. These struggles must be combined with the fight against austerity which is a direct result of the crisis in modern-day capitalism and imperialism globally.

The American prison system is a massive — if invisible — part of our economy and social fabric.

Slavery has been abolished in the United States since 1865, when the 13^th Amendment was passed in the ashes of the Civil War.

Well, almost abolished. Actually, the amendment included a caveat: “except as punishment for a crime.” Since then, prison and forced labor have always gone together.

In fact, with over 2 million people behind bars in this country, the American prison system is a massive — albeit largely invisible — part of our economy and social fabric.

Recent years have seen a rise in both private prisons and the use of prison labor by private, for-profit corporations. This has created perverse incentives to imprison people and exploit them for cheap labor — often at 50 cents an hour or less.

Corporations such as Microsoft, Target, Revlon, and Boeing have all made products with prison labor. With over a third of home appliances and 30 percent of speakers and headphones made using prison labor, it’s likely most American households own inmate-made products.

(Photo: popularresistance.org)

Even Whole Foods, a famed destination for ethical consumers, was forced to stop selling certain artisanal cheeses last year when those “artisans” were revealed to be prisoners who made a base wage of 60 cents a day.

We won’t even get into what Whole Foods — sometimes called “Whole Paycheck” — was charging consumers for prisoner-made products, which also included organic milk and tilapia.

The problem is making its way into popular culture as well. A season three episode of the Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black, for example, illustrated a similar scam.

In the episode, a thrilling new job opportunity is marketed to the inmates. Most are beside themselves at the idea of working for $1 an hour — well above the compensation offered for any other job in the prison. A scheme is hatched to trick the women into clamoring for the job in a fake competition.

The episode closes with a scene showing the chosen women as their new job is revealed to them. They walk into a warehouse. The lights click on, and the viewer first sees the shock and disappointment on their faces. Then the camera turns to show rows and rows of sewing machines and a corporate logo overhead.

They’d competed to work in a sweatshop.

Real-life prisoners are starting to organize against this kind of abuse. This April, prisoners in Texas held a coordinated work stoppage with the help of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee — an arm of the global IWW union.

The striking inmates refused to do work assigned to them by Texas Correctional Industries, an arm of the state Department of Justice that uses inmate labor to make everything from personal care items to toilets. Incarcerated workers there are paid as little as 17 cents an hour, even as phone calls can cost $1 a minute and medical care requires a $100 copay.

Another union-coordinated strike is underway at several Alabama prisons, where inmates labor in deplorable conditions even as they generate profits for private industries. Unions and rights groups are gearing up for a national strike this September to derail this exploitative system.

Those most directly and negatively affected, the prisoners and their families, need and deserve our support. But the rest of us need to finish the work of the Civil War and end forced labor in our country for good.

93% of the people who are locked up in the U.S. in order to meet the minimum legal requirements for the number of people who must be locked up on possible violations of U.S. immigration laws, are locked in for-profit prisons, which are owned by corporations that heavily fund a few politicians, including Hillary Clinton.

That 93% finding was published on June 20th, in a study by the Center for Constitutional Rights, titled, “Banking on Detention: Local Lockup Quotas and the Immigrant Dragnet”.

Ghita Schwartz, Senior Staff Attorney for CCR, said, in releasing the report: “Almost all guaranteed minimums are found in facilities that contract with private prison companies, and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] actively collaborates with these companies to keep details of their contracts secret.”

On 28 April 2015, the Washington Post published an article, “How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about: Sen. Marco Rubio is one of the biggest beneficiaries.” It failed to include one crucial fact: Hillary Clinton is the other.

On 6 October 2015, Vice News revealed that fact when they headlined “How Private Prisons Are Profiting from Locking Up US Immigrants”, and showed that Hillary Clinton was by far the top recipient of funds from Corrections Corporation of America, and that Marco Rubio was by far the top recipient from the other of the industry’s giants, GEO Group, and that both candidates had raked in around the same total amounts from the industry. Furthermore: “The political contributions are the visible tip of the iceberg of the influence these folks wield.”

Consequently, U.S. immigration policies are highly shaped by corruption. Large corporations and their board members and their PACS don’t invest this money for nothing. They’re good at business. They’re buying policy, and the people who write and implement policy are basically their employees — just on the government’s payroll (and in order to get onto the government’s payroll, these politicians need those campaign contributions). After retirement from the government, government officials get hired by what libertarians naively call ‘the productive economy’ (other institutions that are as beholden to the big-money people as the government itself is). It’s like a person’s being hired by different subsidiaries of the same corporation.

This is the reason why 93% of the people who are locked up in the U.S. in order to meet the minimum legal requirements for the number of people who must be locked up on possible violations of U.S. immigration laws, are locked in for-profit prisons, which are owned by corporations that heavily fund a few politicians. It’s simply good business. Rotten government is good for the businesses that invest in it.

And this is the reason why, as The Nation headlined on 13 August 2014, “The US Keeps 34,000 Immigrants in Detention Each Day Simply to Meet a Quota”.

Interestingly, The Nation, since it’s a Democratic Party propaganda-sheet (just like, for example, National Review is a Republican one) headlined on 8 February 2016, “The Democratic Presidential Candidates Would End Private Prison Contracts: A Nation investigation found startling medical neglect inside privatized, immigrant-only federal prisons. Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton say they would end these, and all, private prison contracts.” However, the top people at that magazine aren’t really so naive as tobelieve that this would be the case if Clinton becomes their nominee. They’re just pretending to believe her words. They might try to find hires who are dumb enough to comply, if the hires aren’t themselves writing what they don’t really believe. That’s the way the ‘journalism’ game is played: the public be damned. And that way, for example, even a President as bad as Obama can still be praised, and so can such a catastrophically bad Secretary of State as Hillary Clinton.

The best thing that can be said about Donald Trump is thatthe Republican Party hates his guts and calls him a “fascist.”The second-best thing is that Trump has no record in public office and there’s thus no way of knowing what his policies really would be. What’s the best thing that can be said about Hillary Clinton? That she condemns some of the stupid things that Trump says? But why should one believe either person? Has either of them earned belief on the part of the public? Hillary has earned belief on the part of her mega-donors, but, has either of the two prospective nominees earned belief on the part of the public?

Such facts as “The US Keeps 34,000 Immigrants in Detention Each Day Simply to Meet a Quota” are merely symptoms of problems that run to the foundation of today’s America. The only prominent politician who has even been talking about those problems is Bernie Sanders, and his actual record in public office is remarkably close to his public rhetoric. That’s why I am hoping that his campaign for the White House will continue until November 8th — even if he then is no longer a ‘Democrat’. My vote can’t be bought or sold. It’s based entirely on a person’s record in public office — and only on that.

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), supported by Russian warplanes, has taken control of the Al Thawrah oil field from the ISIS terrorist group in the province of Raqqa. Now, pro-government forces are advancing on Al Hawrah, paving the way to the Tabaqa military airport.

On June 18, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (70-80% Kurdish YPG units), supported by the US-led “anti-ISIS coalition” airpower, launched a military operation, aiming to enter the ISIS-controlled city of Manbij in northern Syria. Following a series of firefights, the SDF seized al-Kateb Roundabout, Qanāt ash Shaykh and the Manbij hospital. Separately, US air strikes destroyed the Manbij silos. On June 19, ISIS militants re-seized the Manbij hospital and launched a counter-attack in the direction of al-Kateb Roundabout. Heavy clashes are ongoing in the area.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) released a statement on the bombing of the US-backed New Syrian Army (NySA) militant group. The MoD says that the Russian Aerospace Forces conduct air strikes against groups not separated from terrorist formations and not aligned to the ceasefire. Meanwhile, the US can not provide direct information about “coordinates of regions of activity of opposition controlled by the US.” Units of the NySA, targeted by Russian warplanes, were “located more than 300 km far from borders of territories claimed by the American party as ones controlled by the opposition joined the ceasefire regime”. Earlier there were reports that Russian warplanes have hit Pentagon-backed militants in Syria, killing at least 2 and wounding 8 members of the NySA.

A 28 y.o. Russian marine died from shrapnel wounds and 4 others were injured during clashes in Syria, a local Kaliningrad media outlet “Klops” reported on June 19, citing sources among relatives of the dead marine. The marine allegedly served in the town of Baltiysk near Kaliningrad, in the the airborne assault battalion of the 336th Marine brigade. Some reports indicate that Russian military servicemen have taken part in the recent clashes near the T-3 Airport in the eastern countryside of Palmyra.

Distorting Fascism to Sanitize Capitalism

By Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, June 18 2016

The facile and indiscriminate use of the term fascism has led to a widespread misunderstanding and misuse of its meaning. Asked to define fascism, most people would respond in terms such as dictatorship, anti-Semitism, mass hysteria, efficient propaganda machine, psychopathic leader, and the like.

Smearing Russia: The Privilege of Exclusive Blame, Russian Athletics and the Anti-Doping Sports Establishment

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, June 18 2016

First published by Global Research in November 2015. Of significance in relation to the IAAF’s recent decision to ban Russia from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro When the International Olympic Committee gets judgmental about a country, we…

Children’s Rights: The “UN List of Shame” a Sham

By Stephen Lendman, June 19 2016

The UN’s annual List of Shame is supposed to blacklist countries and groups “engage(d) in the recruitment and use of children, sexual violence against children, the killing and maiming of children, attacks on schools and/or hospitals and attacks or threats…

BREXIT vs. GREXIT – The True Face of Europe

By Peter Koenig, June 19 2016

With every day, the true face of Europe mirrors ever so clearer the abject inhumane colonial power that raped and usurped Asia, Africa and South America for hundreds of years, as so well depicted in numerous articles and essays by…

Fidel Castro and Cuba’s “Battle for Ideas”, For Peace and Justice

By Susan Babbitt, June 20 2016

Some suggest more abstract “theoretical” questions are a luxury. There is no time, given global crises, for such ivory tower work. Yet no less a revolutionary than Fidel Castro said that people suffer because of concepts. He made the point…

Crimeans Recount Their Experiences Following the US Sponsored Coup, When the West Took Ukraine

By Eric Zuesse, June 20 2016

This news-report consists of a compilation of accounts that Crimeans have given to human rights groups or directly posted to the internet, regarding their experiences when the freely elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had received 75% of the…

Some 3,000 supporters of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign met in Chicago June 17-19 for what was billed as the “People’s Summit.”

The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to take stock after the failure of Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. The real purpose was to prepare those assembled to support, actively or tacitly, an all-out campaign for the election of Hillary Clinton.

Despite a pretense of open discussion and respect for a diversity of opinions, the “summit” was tightly orchestrated and controlled. The mechanism for control was simple: no votes were taken on anything, and all decisions were taken behind the scenes, without any public discussion.

The conference organizers, for example, rejected a bid by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to attend and address the assembly. All discussion was premised on the acceptance of the political monopoly of the Democratic Party, even if harsh words were occasionally hurled at the Democratic National Committee and some of its leaders.

Image: The platform of the People’s Summit

The assembly was convened under the auspices of National Nurses United, which rented part of Chicago’s vast McCormick Place convention center and supplied the manpower as well as the money to run the event. NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro presided over the conference and other union officials and staff played major roles.

The NNU was formed in 2010 through the merger of several statewide nurses associations, notably in California, Minnesota and Massachusetts, and now has a membership of nearly 200,000 registered nurses. DeMoro, then head of the California Nurses Association, became executive director of the combined union and sits on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. She was one of the most prominent union officials to support the Sanders campaign.

Like most such gatherings of Democratic Party liberals, union officials and their pseudo-left apologists, there was a large element of political fraud. Speaker after speaker postured as a fierce opponent of Wall Street, “neo-liberalism” and various forms of oppression, despite having engaged in non-stop collaboration with the corporate bosses and their political representatives such as Hillary Clinton.

The tone of the conference was set at the opening session on Friday night, which combined “left” demagogy with political prostration before the Clinton presidential campaign. DeMoro of the NNU gave an opening address that praised those assembled as the “non co-opted and the un-compromised,” although the vast majority of those in attendance were long-time participants in groups that are either part of the Democratic Party, like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Progressive Democrats, or completely tied to it, including environmental, feminist, gay and anti-racist organizations. All these organizations have long since been co-opted by the corporate-controlled two-party system.

Image: Audience at the People’s Summit

Adopting a “left” pose, DeMoro declared, “Social and economic inequality, including racial and climate injustice, affects each of us in this country, except, of course, the privileged, who have extreme control over our political system, creating and perpetuating a system of exploitation that is predicated on private profit and greed.”

DeMoro declared that the Sanders campaign was the outcome of a series of protest movements, largely based on the middle class or sponsored by the trade union bureaucracy, including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights groups, feminist and gay rights campaigns, “Fight for 15,” and what she called “the climate justice movement,” among others.

In reality, the sum total of these protest efforts had very little impact compared to the Sanders campaign, which won 12 million votes, including margins of 70-90 percent among young people under 30. The broad support for Sanders has been as much a surprise to the middle class protest groups and the unions as it was to Sanders himself. It represents an initial stage in the political radicalization of masses of youth and working people who are being driven primarily by class issues—jobs, income, a future for the new generation, anger over the dominance of big money—rather than by identity politics based on race, gender or sexual orientation.

DeMoro called for keeping the protest groups united (i.e., subordinated to the Democratic Party and the unions), but she tried to give this a left face, warning about the experience of the Obama administration. “Regardless of who is in the White House, we need to learn the lesson from the Obama years, where that movement was built on hope and change,” she said. “The moment he got into office the movement went away and Wall Street occupied the White House, and like termites they ate away at the foundation of democracy. The most important thing here is there will always be termites and we can never go away regardless of who is in the presidency.”

The truth is that once Obama entered the White House, the various protest organizations completely subordinated themselves to Democratic Party rule. Previous opposition to the war in Iraq was scrapped once the commander-in-chief was a Democrat, who proceeded to expand the war in Afghanistan, bomb Libya, extend the campaign of drone missile assassinations and engage the US in further military operations in Iraq and Syria. This example would certainly be repeated in a Hillary Clinton administration, which would mark a further shift to the right from Obama in both foreign and domestic policy.

Following these introductory remarks, DeMoro gave way to a panel consisting of Juan Gonzalez, a former columnist for the New York Daily News and co-host of the “Democracy Now!” program; actress Rosario Dawson; John Nichols, a slavish apologist for the Democratic Party in his role as political analyst for Nation magazine; writer Naomi Klein, author of numerous books, most notably The Shock Doctrine, and a prominent leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada (she is married to Avi Lewis, grandson of longtime NDP leader David Lewis and son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis).

Juan Gonzalez spoke only briefly, but delivered the main political thrust. He recalled his own history of radical protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, followed by a refusal to vote for Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate in the election won by Richard Nixon. He urged the audience to “learn from this mistake,” a clear call for a vote for Hillary Clinton.

He also suggested that the Sanders campaign could pave the way for a more leftward development in US politics, along the lines of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, parties of the pseudo-left that are implacably opposed to the interests of the working class.

Nichols performed predictably, with demagogic salutes to the working class rebellion against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in 2011 (betrayed and smothered by the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO, with the assistance of Nichols and Co.); while solidarizing himself with efforts to push the Democratic Party to the left.

Naomi Klein claimed that Sanders had “moved Hillary Clinton to the left” on issues like fracking and the minimum wage, and called for continuing efforts to build social protest movements so that the next president (whom she referred to as “her”) would feel the pressure from below.

She compared the upcoming American presidential vote to the 2015 Canadian elections, in which Canadians “voted out the worst guy and created space to dream,” suggesting that this outcome—the defeat of the Conservatives and the election of the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau—was a possible model for the US.

Chuy Garcia speaking, with Nina Turner and Tulsi Gabbard seated next to him

The second main session of the conference, held on Saturday afternoon, featured the same type of populist demagogy, with Cook County Councilman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, defeated by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the latter’s reelection bid last year, and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, a prominent representative of the Bernie Sanders campaign, serving as the featured speakers.

The overriding feature of the main presentations, aside from the demagogy used to provide a left cover for the shift from Sanders to Clinton, was silence on the question of war and foreign policy. None of the speakers cited above made any reference to the ongoing US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, to the drone missile assassination program, or to the Obama administration’s continued build-up of police state powers for the NSA, the CIA and the rest of the military-intelligence apparatus.

The conference organizers likewise downplayed the issue of war: there were no panel discussions or workshops or presentations devoted to the subject of war and militarism, or to government spying and attacks on democratic rights.

The reason for that is clear: Hillary Clinton is identified publicly with calls to step up the US military interventions in Syria and Iraq. In general, she is known to favor an even more belligerent foreign policy than that pursued by the Obama administration, which is now confronting Russia and China, both nuclear-armed powers, in regions close to their borders: Moscow in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Beijing in the South China Sea.

The dangers that any discussion on war would pose to the pro-Clinton effort were demonstrated by the final speaker at Saturday’s main event, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran and major in the military police, has introduced legislation to cut off funding for US efforts to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. She made the growing threat of what she called “regime-change wars” the main focus of her remarks to the People’s Summit.

Gabbard said the same arguments used to justify US wars in Iraq and Libya were now being made in Washington on behalf of intervention in Syria. She cited the “dissent cable” by 50 State Department officials calling for military action against the Assad regime. And she warned that establishing a no-fly zone, as advocated by Clinton, would “lead to a direct confrontation between our country and the world’s other nuclear power, Russia. People have learned nothing from Iraq and Libya.”

Gabbard is not an antiwar figure, backing the US military operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But her somber statements in Chicago underscore how quickly the US government and military are moving towards major confrontations in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia once the 2016 elections are past, whether Clinton or Donald Trump is in the White House. No other speakers addressed these issues.

This is the reality that the Democratic Party—and especially the factions allied with Sanders and the pseudo-left—are seeking to conceal from the American people.

On Thursday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a speech to his supporters live over the Internet in which he laid out the next stage of his “political revolution” in the aftermath of the Democratic Party primaries. The speech exposed the real political content of his campaign: channeling the leftward political radicalization of workers and youth into the Democratic Party, one of the two main parties of American capitalism.

The speech was doubtlessly coordinated closely with the highest levels of the Democratic Party establishment. It followed by barely a week Sanders’ closed-door meeting with President Barack Obama after the California primary, and by only two days Sanders’ meeting with Hillary Clinton, the party’s presumptive nominee.

Sanders began his speech by noting the widespread support for his campaign: 12 million votes including huge majorities among young voters, victories in 22 state primaries and caucuses, rallies and meetings that attracted 1.5 million people and contributions from 2.7 million people, averaging $27 a piece.

He also listed the political and social conditions in the country motivating those who backed his campaign: an electoral system dominated by billionaires, “the grotesque level of wealth and income inequality,” declining life expectancy, child poverty, soaring student debt, poverty wages, collapsing infrastructure, increasing homelessness and record corporate profits.

All the anger over these conditions, Sanders insisted, must now go into support for Hillary Clinton. Though he did not formally concede the nomination, Sanders said, “The major political task that we face in the next five months is to make certain that Donald Trump is defeated and defeated badly. And I personally intend to begin my role in that process in a very short period of time.”

This is to be the basic political framework for drumming up support for Clinton: “Anybody but Trump.” Sanders made no effort to provide any analysis of the origins of Trump, who arises out of a political environment steeped in criminality and violence, overseen by both political parties. Moreover, Trump has been able to make an appeal to the most socially distressed layers in large part due to the right-wing policies of the Democratic Party, which long ago abandoned its program of limited social reform.

Sanders also made no mention of the fact that Clinton is planning to run arguably the most right-wing campaign in her party’s history, directing her appeal to sections of the military and the Republican Party opposed to Trump’s candidacy on the grounds that she is the more reliable choice for “commander-in-chief.”

Sanders went on to say that “defeating Trump cannot be our only goal.” He sought to focus the attention of his supporters on the Democratic Party convention, saying he would be involved in “discussions between the two campaigns to make certain your voices are heard and that the Democratic Party passes the most progressive platform in its history and that Democrats actually fight for that agenda.”

As everyone who is knowledgeable about the functioning of the Democratic Party knows, the platform is a meaningless document that has played no role in the actual formulation of policy for decades.

Sanders continued, “I also look forward to working with Secretary Clinton to transform the Democratic Party so that it becomes a party of working people and young people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors: a party that has the courage to take on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry and the other powerful special interests that dominate our political and economic life.”

Sanders’ portrayal of Clinton as a “progressive” ally of working people to “take on Wall Street” is absurd. She is a time-tested defender of the status quo, a stooge of Wall Street and corporate America going back to her days in Arkansas, when she sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart. As first lady, senator from New York and Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton has supported right-wing economic policies at home and war abroad.

Sanders did not try to explain the contradiction between his presentation of Clinton as a partner in “transforming the Democratic Party” and the campaign’s criticism, which the Vermont Senator has been downplaying in recent weeks, of Clinton’s incestuous financial ties to the banks and major corporations.

A major demand of his campaign, which Sanders repeated at debates and in his public appearances, was that Clinton release the transcripts of speeches she gave to private audiences of corporate executives and Wall Street bankers, for which she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These criticisms have been thrown down the memory hole.

Sanders makes no attempt to explain how he will accomplish the political alchemy of transforming the Democratic Party, which together with the Republican Party is the means through which the ruling elite asserts total political domination over every facet of American society, into “a party of working people and young people.” As he has done throughout his campaign, the Vermont senator also made no criticism of the Obama administration, which has overseen the largest transfer of wealth in US history and has helped create all the social ills that he listed in the beginning of his remarks.

It is worth remembering in light of the fact that Sanders is now serving as the chief promoter of illusions in the Democrats that until he formally registered as a Democrat in order to participate in the primaries, Sanders had spent his entire political career, dating back to the early 1970s, as either an Independent or third party candidate. If the Sanders of yesterday were to be believed, his decision to remain formally independent from the Democrats was because he did not have confidence in the capacity of that party to accept his program of “democratic socialism.” Suddenly, however, Sanders has shifted his position without giving any accounting of his own former political history.

In reality, Sanders’ nominal “independence” was always a political fraud, designed to provide himself with “left” or “outsider” credentials, while he caucused with the Democrats and voted with them more than 95 percent of the time. His decision to end this charade is due not to the Democrats demonstrating a greater receptiveness to social reform. Rather it is due to the Democrats’ need, under conditions of growing social opposition and deep alienation to the entire political process, for the political cover that his campaign could provide.

Sanders concluded his speech with a call for his supporters to seek “political engagement” at the state and local level, either running for office or volunteering in the campaigns of Democrats in order to oust local Republican officeholders. “I have no doubt that with the energy and enthusiasm our campaign has shown that we can win significant numbers of local and state elections if people are prepared to become involved,” he declared.

Through this mechanism, Sanders seeks to integrate the infrastructure of his campaign, and the popular support it has attracted, into a more or less permanent formation of Democratic Party volunteers and functionaries devoted to combating the party’s flagging electoral fortunes in many parts of the country. Undoubtedly, this statement is also in part an inducement to layers of the pseudo left that coalesced around his campaign, many of whom are meeting this weekend in Chicago at the so-called People’s Summit. He is essentially telling them that there will be positions available for them.

The winding down of Sanders’ campaign has forced some of the essential political content of his “political revolution” to extrude through his campaign’s fog of left-sounding rhetoric. No small number of people will begin to see through Sanders’ increasingly shopworn facade and view his pivot towards an open embrace of the Clinton campaign with contempt.

A hegemonic power never says sorry.

Three recent episodes underscore this truism.

When US President Barack Obama offered a floral wreath at the cenotaph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on 27 May 2016, some peace advocates in the United States, in Japan and in other parts of the world hoped against hope that he would say “sorry” for the Atom bomb that the then US President, Harry Truman, had ordered to be dropped over Hiroshima on the 6^th of August 1945. The deadly bomb claimed 140,000 lives. Three days later a second Atom bomb destroyed the city of Nagasaki killing another 80,000.

There is a view advanced by a number of scholars and activists that based upon documentary analysis Japan had already indicated to the US Military Command in the Pacific a couple of months before 6^th August  that it was prepared to surrender if there were some safeguards for the position of the Japanese Emperor. But the US leadership wanted to demonstrate to the world — and particularly to the Soviet Union — its military superiority which it was determined to exploit to the hilt in the post- war world that it hoped to shape and lead.

Of course, the vast majority of the US populace fed on State propaganda over decades is convinced to this day that it was the bombing that brought the war to a close. Since it was a military decision that was justified, in their reckoning, there is no need to apologise for the mass murder. Obama’s refusal to say sorry was in that sense a reflection of the public mood and mentality.

But more than an apology, it is Obama’s failure to work sincerely towards a nuclear weapons free world that is the most damning indictment on the man and his administration. A few months after he became President, in a stirring speech in Prague in April 2009, he pledged to strive to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. Not only has he been slower than his three predecessors in “reducing nuclear weapons but he has initiated a trillion dollar effort to upgrade America’s entire nuclear arsenal and delivery systems.” It is this that renders his remarks at Hiroshima where he again spoke about the obligation of leaders to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, hollow and hypocritical.

Just before his trip to Japan, Obama also visited Vietnam a country that the US had attacked brutally in the sixties and seventies allegedly in order to stop the advance of communism. What the US fought against was essentially a nationalist movement which had defeated its French coloniser and was in no mood to yield to another imperial power. As a result of Vietnamese resistance to the US ground and air war, more than 3 million Vietnamese and a million Cambodians and Laotians were killed.

Like Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Junior who had also visited Vietnam earlier, Obama saw no reason to apologise to the Vietnamese people. How could a hegemonic power that was vanquished by a technologically weaker foe apologise for the incredible atrocities committed in the course of the war?  The hubris of a hegemon would not allow for such a humiliation.

Besides, the Vietnamese government itself did not seek an apology partly because it was engrossed in rebuilding the country after two devastating wars. It was its goal of economic reconstruction that compelled Hanoi to turn to the market system especially since China, its ally during its resistance against the US, had also in 1978 chosen to adopt certain capitalist measures in its bid to transform its economy.

There is yet another aspect to Vietnam’s relationship with China which explains to an extent why an apology from the US is not on its agenda. Vietnam and China have clashed in the past. They fought a brief war in 1979. Chinese dynasties had exercised a degree of control over Vietnam centuries ago. Fear of Chinese dominance is one of the reasons why Hanoi has assiduously cultivated good relations with Washington for more than three decades now.

Initially these ties were largely economic culminating in Vietnam’s membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Now a military dimension is beginning to emerge. US military vessels have begun to visit Cam Ranh Bay. And, during Obama’s recent trip he lifted the ban on US arms sales to Vietnam. It is obvious that the US regards Vietnam as an important player in its bigger agenda of containing China. Given this situation, there is no way that any Vietnamese leader is going to demand that the US apologises for the pain and suffering it caused his people in the past.

Vietnam would be a classic case of how geopolitics and economics have trumped moral principles in bilateral relations.

This brings us to our third episode. On 1^st July 2015 Obama announced the restoration of formal diplomatic relations with Cuba, after a break of 54 years. However, the US will continue to maintain its commercial, economic and financial embargo of Cuba which makes it illegal for US corporations to do business with the island of 11 million people off the US coast.

The US had cut off ties with Cuba in 1961 mainly because it chose, after a popular revolution in 1959, to chart its own independent path to the future guided by Marxist Thought. In the decades that followed, US administrations went all out to crush the Cuban Revolution. Apart from a severe embargo, they sponsored a failed invasion, terrorist attacks on hotels in Havana, the downing of a Cuban airplane and countless attempts to assassinate the leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro.

It is perhaps not surprising that when diplomatic relations were re-established, the US leadership was not contrite about the terrible injustices of the past. One has come to expect this sort of behaviour from the military superpower of the day. It is the embodiment of the arrogance of power.

Cuba has not pressed for an apology. Its immediate concern is to get the embargo lifted and to persuade the US to return Guantanamo Bay where the US has a naval base, to Cuba.

From our three episodes, it appears that various factors are responsible for the unwillingness of the US leadership to say sorry to a nation or a people for past wrongdoings. Hubris arising from its hegemonic power is undoubtedly a significant factor. This is why hegemonic power at the global level has to end if that five letter word is to come out of the lips of the hegemon.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

This news-report consists of a compilation of accounts that Crimeans have given to human rights groups or directly posted to the internet, regarding their experiences when the freely elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had received 75% of the votes of Crimeans, was violently overthrown during January and February of 2014.

On 20 February 2014, eight busloads of people from Crimea, who had come into Ukraine’s capital Kiev and were holding signs there demonstrating in opposition to the “Maidan” movement, which was seeking to oust Yanukovych, were violently attacked by “Right Sector” people who were leading the Maidan movement; and those terrified Crimeans then scrambled back into their buses, which promptly sped southward, toward home in Crimea.

An organization “Ukraine Human Rights” created and posted to the internet, on 14 August 2014, a 25-minute video, with English subtitles, telling these people’s stories. It’s titled “The Pogrom of Korsun”, and it reports, with testimony and some of the videos from survivors, the attacks against those buses when a gang of Ukraine’s Right Sector members caught up with those escaping Crimeans, near the Ukrainian town of Korsun.

Private cellphone videos that were taken of these incidents were shown in the compilation by Ukraine Human Rights, but one other striking cellphone video, which was posted to youtube on 15 August 2014, isn’t fully available anymore, and it showed the view from the rear seat of a car as it was approaching a blockage, and the blocked buses, some of which were aflame. A few car-drivers were standing watching at a distance, while the Right Sector people beat and killed Crimeans alongside their buses.

One Crimean who managed to escape Kiev and survive, happened to be a minor official of the Ukrainian government under Yanukovych, an assistant prosecutor, Natalya Poklonskaya, who got into her car while the Maidan demonstrations were peaking, and escaped back to Crimea; she soon thereafter was unemployed, and was, in early April,interviewed on Crimean TV where she told about her experiences during the overthrow, and she was shortly thereafter appointed by Crimea’s new government to be a prosecutor.

She was then, on 12 May 2014, banned from travel to U.S-allied countries. In the announcement of this ban, she was listed as “Natalia Vladimirovna Poklonskaya: Prosecutor of Crimea. Actively implementing Russia’s annexation of Crimea.” In other words, she was banned for simply doing her job — if not for her still just being alive (and unwilling to work under the people who overthrew Yanukovych).

On 10 June 2016, “The Saker” posted a brief video from Russian Television, which realistically portrayed what almost certainly would have happened to Crimeans “If Crimea Didn’t Reunite with Russia?” A reader there posted his personal account of what he had, in fact, experienced in Crimea during that fateful time, when the news was coming to Crimeans of the horrors occurring (such as shown here in January 2014, and here in February). His entire comment is worth posting, and thus now follows:

Auslander on June 10, 2016 · at 5:16 am UTC

The return of Krimu and Sevastopol to Russia was a lot more of a near thing than many people think. I remember very well the day, if memory serves it was the day of the ‘Tatar’, read right sector and mejlis, riot at Krim Rada [Crimean legislature]in Simferopol, that the Russian Black Sea Flot [fleet]commander stated when asked by a news type, that his[obligation] was to defend the Flot, not Sevastopol or the citizens.

That statement was like a bucket of ice cold water thrown in our faces and more than a few of the ‘new patriots’ of Sevastopol were given pause but most simply understood how serious the situation was, doubled down and got to work.

Right sector operatives had been coming down to Krimu and Sevastopol starting in mid January, one could spot them a kilometer away with ease. However, they were here and did start to subtly intimidate some of the citizens. On the other hand most were quietly noted and their little nests, usually in private lodgings in dachi areas, were located and listed. They were interesting to watch, three or four young men with a few young women, lounging around during the day on street and park benches during the time when everyone else was working. They would also nose around to every back alley and side street and photo everything while trying to pass themselves off as ‘tourists’. In January and February? Nice try but no cigar.

The were two major turning points in the events leading up to the success of the Third Defense of Sevastopol during that fateful week after the coup in Kiev.

One, our Berkut [police] and Militsiya [militia] units that were in Kiev during the Maidan coup d’etat had literally fought their way back to Krimu and Sevastopol after their betrayal [escape] by Yanukovich and his stalwart allies. Their welcome in Naxhimova Square in City Center was a flower strewn tumult and from the hearts of Sevastopol Citizens, so much so that some of our Berkut and Militsiya were reduced to tears. Berkut then moved to their lager in City where a cordon of citizens was set up to protect them from SBU as armed Berkut guarded from inside. As an aside Ukraine SBU[Security Bureau of Ukraine] were faced down more than once as they attempted their usual foolishness. After the first face down the word spread like wildfire through the citizenry that they were nothing but a paper tiger, a semi armed criminal gang that were nothing. That was the end of SBU down here.

The citizens of Sevastopol and Krimea began to set up road block posts at the Krim-Ukraine borders and around Sevastopol, Simferopol and Yalta. They were armed with clubs and one or two ancient hunting weapons. In mid week Berkut, after negotiations with Sevastopol locals, declared for Sevastopol, armed up and headed for the barricades to assist and stiffen them. The thugs in Kiev were, to put it mildly, furious.

The second watershed event was thus. After the riot at Krim Rada in Simferopol where right sector, clearly identifiable in the overhead videos, were defeated, as they withdrew they expressed their extreme displeasure at the turn of events and swore they would be back to burn Rada to the ground and show the locals ‘who was boss down here’.

Not much more than 24 hours later a small convoy of aging civilian vehicles appeared at the Krimea Rada Complex in Simferopol, well before dawn. The vehicles disgorged a fairly large group of well armed men who calmly tossed a flash bang through the door of Rada Building and stormed in, much to the shock of the Militsiya Guard Detail stationed there who were expecting a different group to arrive around dawn, politely but firmly removed the pistols and cell phones from Militsiya and invited them to leave. The cell phones were returned to the Militsiya worthies as they left, the pistols stayed in Rada building with the men.

These two events, Berkut pledging allegiance to Sevastopol and moving to the barricades and the taking of Krim Rada by the citizens, were the two salient events that led to the success of the Russian Spring in this peninsula. Unarmed citizens had already begun to block all major and minor bases of the Ukraine Armed Forces, demonstrations and marches were held all over Krim and Sevastopol and Militsiya, DAI and SBU were relegated to bit players in the events who were made well aware of the consequences to themselves if one citizen was harmed by them.

I have no doubts that Moscow was watching these events keenly and it was these two salient events plus the spontaneous blockading of the peninsula, major cities and the Ukraine Armed Forces that in my opinion was the catalyst for Moscow to move and come to the assistance of Krimea and Sevastopol.

http://thesaker.is/what-if-crimea-didnt-reunite-with-russia-alternative-history-of-crimea-by-rt/

 

The United States and its allies are now pouring troops and armaments onto and near Russia’s borders, and have imposed economic sanctions against Russia, for Russia’s having helped the people of Crimea, which Washington and its allies call ‘seizing’ Crimea. Russia doesn’t like having nuclear weapons and tens of thousands of NATO troops etc., on and hear its borders (no more than America’s JFK liked having Soviet missiles 90 miles from the U.S. in Cuba), and therefore a nuclear war could result, from Russia’s protecting Crimeans against being seized like the rest of Ukraine was, by the U.S. and its allies.

While building up these forces on and near Russia’s borders, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on 15 June 2016, as he presented the excuse for doing that, “Allies do not, and will not recognise the illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea. And we will continue to call on Russia to stop its destabilisation of Ukraine [which isn’t even a member of NATO, and therefore isn’t even within NATO’s purview].” He wasn’t referring to the U.S. government’s — the Administration of U.S. President Barack Obama — having illegally taken Ukraine in February 2014, in what one expert called “the most blatant coup in history”, but instead to Russia’s and the Crimean peoples’ response to it, which occurred the following month.

So, the world is heading toward what would be the biggest war in history, over little Crimea, and on the basis of only false arguments — strained false arguments, whose underlying assumptions cannot even bear to see the light of day.

One might think that this would be the central issue in the U.S. Presidential campaign. However, Americans don’t even know about it — and almost all of the few who do ‘know’ something about it, misunderstand it. Why is that the case? Why is all of America’s political debate focused on gun laws and other issues that even collectively are far less important than this one issue, whose stakes are whether or not a livable planet will end within a few years, or perhaps even within months?

Whatever is responsible for this issue’s being ignored, could destroy the planet, because it’s an essential part of what has been getting us nearer and nearer to where we’re now heading — which is heading toward the end. If we’re to turn away from the end, then when will that turn happen? Isn’t doing that, more and more difficult, the closer we get, to the end? And, if the end is to come, no one will announce it ahead of time: announcing it, would be to nullify effectiveness of the attack that will start the war, which might last from ten minutes to an hour. Basically, every nuclear weapon that’s not eliminated within the first ten minutes will be fired, and probably all of the weapons will be gone before the hour is up. It won’t be at all like World War II. It will be unprecedentedly brief, and final. (Although some people think not — or at least not for themselves.) The nuclear winter and mass-starvation following it, will be much slower, but just as final — and far more widespread.

Practically speaking, a change in direction might already be too late. But at least one can spread the word about the issue that everyone should be (and to have been) talking and thinking and writing about, in precedence above all other public issues — even if it’s already too late. Thus, this news report is provided, so that at least some of the public (and notonly the few people, such as Obama and Stoltenberg, and NATO Supreme Commander Curtis Scaparrotti, who are making the decisions) can understand what’s actually happening, and why.

Apparently, for the people at the very top in The West, staying #1 is more important than anything else. Obama said on 28 May 2014, to graduating West Point cadets, “the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.” In other words: every other nation is “dispensable,” only the U.S. is not — and he is determined to dispense with any nation that challenges this. We’re heading there, right now. It can be said that we started on this path under U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, back in 1990. But now we may be near the end of it. And yet Americans aren’t even discussing it. In a Presidential election year, moreover. People don’t know about it; so, the government isn’t even being challenged on it. At all. This isn’t fiction; it is the reality.

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.

From the day a referendum on UK membership of the EU was first announced in 2013, the financial sector started using Cameron’s re-negotiation process to promote its deregulatory agenda. Sometimes lobbying was required, but more often the UK government did its work for them.

From the day a ballot on UK membership was first announced by David Cameron three years ago, the financial sector has sought and won significant lobbying victories thanks to a complicit UK government and EU efforts to keep the City of London happy. The appointment of Jonathan Hill as European commissioner for financial services, the deregulation agenda of the so-called “Capital Markets Union”, the impending roll-backs on rules to protect against financial instability, and special decision-making privileges for the UK should the interests of banks come under attack, are all highlighted as the key triumphs of the sector and its allies in the UK government since the prospect of Brexit was raised as a serious possibility.

Revealing the main developments, actors and methods used in various lobby battles surrounding financial services (de)regulation, the study also examines the work of the International Regulatory Strategy Group (IRSG) – in which the City of London Corporation is involved – to promote the interests of the financial sector.

It also reveals how multinational banking and financial services company Barclays helped convince Commissioner Hill of the need for a consultation on what regulations should be scrapped.

Read the full report by Corporate Europe Observatory HERE

As predicted, the FBI is revealed to have approached Orlando shooting suspect Omar Mateen in 2013 with informants posing as terrorists in an attempt to “lure” him into participating in a terrorist attack.

USA Today’s TC Palm reports in an article titled, “Exclusive: PGA Village residents want answers from security firm,” that (emphasis added):

The FBI launched an investigation into Mateen after Sheriff’s Office officials reported the incident to the agency. As part of its investigation, the FBI examined Mateen’s travel history, phone records, acquaintances and even planted a confidential informant in the courthouse to “lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite,” Mascara said. The FBI concluded Mateen was not a threat after that, Mascara said.

This is in line with the FBI’s practice of approaching and entrapping potential terror suspects by posing as terrorists themselves and aiding and abetting them in the planning and preparations for high-profile attacks. These undercover operations include everything from “casing out” potential targets, to the obtaining and training with actual, live explosives, to the purchasing of small arsenals of firearms including the sort of semi-automatic rifles and pistols used by Mateen during the Orlando shooting.

Image: As scary as any cartoon villain – and ironically – quite literally a manufactured villain. Marcus Robertson is not only a former US Marine, but also a long-time CIA and FBI asset. He runs an extremist website on American soil with absolute impunity and is likely one component of the FBI’s counterterror entrapment pipeline. 

While US politicians, law enforcement officials, and media networks attempt to claim Robertson’s extremist website, the “Timbuktu Seminary,” was his own independent project, the extent of his association with the US government makes this difficult, if not impossible to believe. Instead, it appears to be the perfect mechanism to feed the FBI’s entrapment pipeline, attracting and identifying possible suspects for the FBI to then approach and “investigate.”

The National Review’s article, “The Orlando Jihadist and the Blind Sheikh’s Bodyguard,” would report (emphasis added):

The National Review also reported that (emphasis added):

In Robertson’s case, it is reported that he agreed to work for the government, gathering intelligence both overseas and in the United States. According to Fox, however, he was expelled from the covert informant program in early 2007 after attacking his CIA handler in Africa.

But Robertson’s stint with the CIA was not the only time he would work for the US government after his service in the US Marine Corps. The National Review leaves out the fact that before his dismissal from the CIA, he was an informant for the FBI between 2004 and 2007.

The Daily Beast in its article, “Was Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen Inspired by This Bank-Robbing Ex-Marine?,” would report (emphasis added):

“Plaintiff worked as a covert operator for the FBI Terrorist Task Force from 2004 until 2007, performing operations in the United Sates and internationally with and against suspected and known terrorist organizations,” Robertson says in court papers.

Robertson remained in touch with American law enforcement and intelligence officials when he moved back to the United States, according to court papers filed by his attorney, “served as a confidential source in domestic terrorism investigations from Atlanta to Los Angeles.”

Is the American public expected to believe that a US government asset who received special training in the military and served as an informant and operative for both the FBI and the CIA would somehow, suddenly be allowed to drop off the US government’s radar and be allowed to run an extremist website in the United States?

Image: How far do undercover FBI investigations go? How about building a van-bomb for a suspect after taking him to a public park to detonate real explosives? The FBI’s own affidavit reveals that is precisely what FBI informants did while investigating Portland, Oregon terror suspect Mohamed Osman Mohamud. Did the FBI’s attempts to lure the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, into committing a terror attack contribute in his radicalization? The FBI must answer to this.

Indeed, no American should believe this. Robertson was step one in Omar Mateen – the Orlando shooter’s – radicalization. The FBI’s attempt to pose as terrorists to lure Mateen into going along with a terrorist attack was step two. Though the FBI has so far failed to disclose the details of that investigation, comments made by FBI Director James Comey himself indicate that FBI informants may have worked on Mateen for up to 10 months.
Between exposure to Robertson’s extremist propaganda, honed after years of working as an informant and operative identifying and exposing terror suspects, and the FBI’s own informants over the course of months, if not years, it is clear that the US government and its “counterterrorism” measures radicalized Mateen – not “ISIS.”

Image: FBI Director James Comey.

The Guardian in its article, “CIA has not found any link between Orlando killer and Isis, says agency chief,” further highlights this blatant truth by reporting (emphasis added):

The Central Intelligence Agency chief has not been “able to uncover any link” between Orlando killer Omar Mateen and the Islamic State, despite Mateen’s stated allegiance to the jihadist group during Sunday’s LGBT nightclub massacre.

If Omar Mateen was a “homegrown terrorist,” the FBI served as the gardeners.

The American public must now demand the details of the FBI’s undercover work regarding Omar Mateen, as well as the truth behind any enduring ties between Robertson and the US government. If Robertson has no connections with the US government, an explanation as to why he is allowed to operate an extremist website on American soil must be provided.

For political and ideological opportunists attempting to seize upon the Orlando tragedy to uphold an example of “Islamic extremism,” it is especially ironic that the facts indicate that the act of terrorism was entirely divorced from “Islam,” and instead the result of America’s ongoing view of terrorism as a convenient and versatile geopolitical tool, rather than a threat to genuinely combat.

That quite literally every aspect that contributed to Omar Mateen’s radicalization is directly connected to the US government itself, illustrates just who the real threat is that American’s should fear – the threat within the halls of its own government – not “terrorists” dwelling beyond them.

French jurists delayed their decision on whether to reopen an investigation into the cause of Yasser Arafat’s death, but mounting evidence of polonium poisoning and shocking admissions suggest an explosive assassination cover-up has been underway for over a decade.

On Friday, a French court ruled to postpone a decision on whether to resume an investigation into the death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat until June 24 or July 8. This comes amid growing suspicions that Israeli agents assassinated him using polonium poisoning.

In 2012, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader’s widow, Suha Arafat, filed a complaint after traces of polonium, a highly toxic radioactive substance, were found on Yasser Arafat’s personal effects.

Arafat drifted into a coma and passed away on November 11, 2004 at the age of 75, after suffering nausea, massive stomach problems, and other gastrointestinal related issues. His illness initially began on October 12, 2004, despite have previously been given a clean bill of health.

The French hospital treating the Palestinian leader determined that the cause of Yasser Arafat’s death was a stroke triggered by blood poisoning. Inexplicably, French officials have never inquired about the type of blood poisoning to which Arafat eventually succumbed.

Yasser Arafat’s demise is consistent with polonium poisoning, which causes gradual deterioration of the body, ending in death over the course of several weeks or months. Victims experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and hair loss.

Recognized as the leader of the Palestinian movement, some viewed Arafat as the father of Palestine.

On Thursday, Loud & Clear’s Brian Becker sat down with Dr. Ghada Talhami of Lake Forest College to examine what the evidence suggests about Arafat’s death.

“Well, the first thing that we know is that Souha Arafat succeeded in convincing the Palestine Authority in Ramallah to exhume his body so that they could take samples in order to have it investigated individually,” Talhami says.

“Additionally, according to Al Jazeera, she sent his toothbrush and some of his clothing to a Swiss agency to be tested for polonium and that was last year. The Swiss lab confirmed that there were, in fact, traces of polonium on his effects,” the professor explains. “Polonium is a radioactive material that has no smell, no visible color, and it is very secretive.”

“In order to pursue this one step further she would need to get a verdict, which can be done either by opening a new court case, that he was actually assassinated,” she adds.

Do Palestinians and Israelis believe that Yasser Arafat was assassinated?

“This is what I can tell you: According to a very well-known article by Uri Avnery, a member of the Knesset and a famous peace activist in Israel, said that he himself got some kind of confirmation by an individual named Uri Dan who was the loyal mouthpiece of Ariel Sharon for nearly 50 years,” she says.

According to professor Talhami, President George W. Bush authorized the assassination of the revered Palestinian leader when asked directly by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Uri Dan said that there was a conversation that Sharon had with him and President Bush, and Sharon apparently asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him on the condition that it must be done very quietly under the table,” Talhami says.

“When Uri Dan asked Sharon if it had been carried out, the former Prime Minister said that ‘it is better not to talk about that,’ so Dan took that to be a confirmation.”

Is there reason to believe that Israel would have killed Yasser Arafat?

“We have this and several instances that are very well known in Israel where the press would actually ask Sharon why didn’t you kill him when he was right under your nose, especially after Israel held Arafat’s headquarters under siege during the Second Intifada,” the professor says. “Sharon would say that I couldn’t do it because he had Israelis protecting him and living with him in his headquarters.”

“One of those Israelis was Uri Avnery who, along with two other Israelis, decided to live with Arafat as a human shield in order to protect him,” Talhami explains. “We also know during the Israeli siege of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War that as soon as the Israelis invaded Beirut on the eve of the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla, that Israeli soldiers would actually scour Beirut looking for Arafat.”

© AP PHOTO/ DOUG MILLS

George W. Bush sits in front photo of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

“You put all of this together and the fact that there was this strange illness that struck Arafat which nobody knew what it was. Was it the flu? No. The French hospital decided that he had died of a stroke caused by blood poisoning, but providing no further details,” she adds.

“Either the French hospital that was treating him does not want to release the full story or French authorities are masking the truth. In Israel, the story is really linked to Sharon.”

A police officer in Florida has revealed that Omar Mateen was targeted by an FBI informant in a failed attempt to push him to commit a terror attack.

Saudi Arabia is the UK’s biggest arms customer and most shameful relationship. 

One of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, its repression at home and aggression abroad is propped up and supported by UK arms sales.

Not only does it brutally repress its own population, it has used UK weapons to help crush democracy protests in Bahrain, and now UK-made warplanes are playing a central role in Saudi Arabia’s attacks in Yemen.

The conflict has triggered a humanitarian disaster and risks destabilising the region further. The UK has continued to support Saudi air strikes in Yemen and provide arms despite strong evidence that war crimes may have been committed.

The UK should never have been arming repressive Saudi Arabia in the first place. The UK’s military support for the Saudi regime makes us complicit in its wrongs.

Campaign Against Arms Trade is taking legal action against the UK Government to stop the arms sales.

But we need your support to increase the pressure on the government to act. Please sign the petition:

Stop the arms sales to Saudi Arabia, now. Saudi Arabia is the UK’s biggest arms customer and most shameful relationship. One of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, its repression at home and aggression abroad is propped up and supported by UK arms sales. The UK’s military support for the Saudi regime makes us complicit in its wrongs. The UK must end all arms sales and military support to Saudi Arabia.

Sign the petition.

The US anti-missile defense systems being installed near Russia’s borders can be “inconspicuously” transformed into offensive weapons, Vladimir Putin has said, adding that he knows “year by year” how Washington will develop its missile program.

Progressive politics and political pluralism aren’t Beltway attributes. America was never beautiful – now the greatest threat to world peace. Bipartisan neocons infesting Washington risk the unthinkable.

Many self-styled liberals support Clinton – the most recklessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history – a neocon war hawk representing, backed by Wall Street and other corporate predators.

Certain Sanders’ endorsement awaits to be announced, betraying his loyal supporters. Liberal progressive in name only Senator Elizabeth Warren backs her, saying “I’m ready to get in this fight and work my heart out for Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States and to make sure that Donald Trump never gets any place close to the White House.”

Noted academic, father of modern linguistics, political/anti-war activist Noam Chomsky said he’s against Trump, supported Sanders, intends voting for Clinton, adding, “I don’t think there’s any other rational choice” – a shocking statement by someone who knows better. He understands money-controlled duopoly power runs America, a one-party state, both flip sides of the other, in lockstep on issues mattering most – notably war and peace, corporate empowerment and cracking down hard on nonbelievers.

Trump and Clinton differ more in style than substance, both representing dirty business as usual, offering voters no choice – a billionaire businessman wanting greater wealth and power v. a war goddess threatening world peace.

Supporting either endorses what demands rejection and condemnation, both recklessly dangerous, evidence of America’s deplorable state – a democratic free society in name only, lurching toward full-blown tyranny no matter who succeeds Obama.

Voters’ only “rational choice” is opposing both duopoly power candidates, supporting grassroots revolutionary change, unattainable electorally, possible only by taking to the streets, paying the price, enduring sacrifice, battling for justice, resisting tyranny because it’s the only thing to do.

Liberals for Clinton betray what they claim to support, more evidence of America’s deplorable state, too debauched to fix, its electorate largely uninformed and indifferent – why things deteriorated so badly in the first place.

Terrorists provide alibis for hungry security establishments in search of themselves.  Their physical effect is always small relative to the psychic disturbances they cause.  Know thyself, urges the Delphic maxim, but self-knowledge implies an acceptance of ignorance. Nothing doing when it comes to the issue of finding the elusive “lone wolf” terrorist, a creature that has become more irritant than reality in security circles.

The efforts on the parts of lone wolves, and more importantly, terrorists in general, are never entirely calculable, reliable or clear.  Yet they remain ever useful for policy makers, think tanks and pundits bloated on the largesse of the national security state.

Money may not have smell, claimed Emperor Vespasian, but one can never deny its allure.  (In the emperor’s case, it was reaped from an infamous urine tax.)  Bodies and entities receiving it will always operate on that truest of public service mentalities: more is always better, whatever the cause.

With the Orlando killings, another spike in speculative assessment was bound to take place, charging the strategic boardrooms and think tank workshops with the next model, framework and means of assessment.  What matters in such workings is that they are sold as scientific, positivist formulae, methods that clarify a murky, sodden world of incalculable variables.

Bruce Riedel from Brookings makes his contribution to the world of counter-terrorism chat by considering the threat of “wolf packs”. In the scrounging for the exceptional term in a field of re-invented wheels, Riedel is thrilled to have come across terminology that was used for the German U-Boats of the Second World War.

Showing no sign of awareness about its origins, he enthusiastically applies the term to understand the “greater threat” of having “small groups of terrorists” operating on home soil. Be wary of ostracising the followers of the Prophet or “the wolf pack threat will grow”.[1]

Judging from the body count occasioned by guns, the threat to the modern US republic seems far more a case of individuals who believe that mediation is best left out of the dispute resolution process.  Grievance is primary; ideology is secondary.  The issue of marauding packs of Allah-inspired lone wolves revives a frontier motif that is charmingly anachronistic, but typical of this field.

Nonetheless, Riedel insists that there was an attempt to mount “a wolf pack” assault on the New York City subway system in 2009 that “was foiled because our intelligence services detected the conspiracy.”

Amy Zegart, whose interests lie in the areas of intelligence history and theory, sees the response to the killings in Orlando in terms of process and assessment rather than the type of terrorist.  Keep it smooth, informed and reliable and all will follow.  Ask the right questions, she seems to be suggesting, and you will be set free.

Zegart takes as her point of reference the 2009 attack in Fort Hood, and smugly proclaims how the FBI got it wrong. (Naturally, she is also flogging her findings in a forthcoming book chapter.)

Questions, she asserts, should be raised in four areas, though all of these seem steeped in the structure and resources of countering threats.  The big word common to all?  Radicalisation and with that gathering and acting upon “early intel” about its noxious consequences.

In Fort Hood, the Bureau dragged its feat about early signs about Nidal Hasan, “a radicalizing Muslim Army officer who was emailing AQAP’s Anwar al-Aulaqi nearly a year before the officer went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood”.[2]  Much of this dragging on Hasan’s emerging plumage was largely occasioned by cluelessness, a lack of coordination.

Forward the historical wheel to Orlando, and Zegart asks if the FBI was similarly confused in its 2013-4 investigations into Omar Mateen.  Sharing information is all, though Zegart then proceeds to wonder what the FBI’s version of an “investigation” (in the Fort Hood case, four hours was given) is.

Pinching the hat of FBI recruitment, she wonders whether adequate staff were also at hand to assess Mateen’s case.  (Are they ever?)  In terms of Fort Hood, the relevant personnel had “no serious counter-terrorism experience.”

Her greatest scolding is reserved for last.  The FBI erred in treating Hassan’s case “through a law enforcement lens, not an intelligence lens.”  The right question to ask about Hassan was whether he “might in future be involved in terrorist activities”. What Zegart clumsily sidesteps is the obvious point that intelligence agencies have hardly covered themselves in glory in the soothsaying department.  The future is unknowable – even the Bureau can only act in accordance with what has happened.

Staff, resources, making the right decisions; these points characterise the remarks of Garrett M. Graff, whose Politico pitch makes clear that the national security state is suffering from a lack of personnel.  Graff does not take the cane to FBI assessments as Zegart does, but suggests a growing “surveillance gap”.[3]

Such observations seem extraordinary in a country boasting such agencies as the NSA, whose penchant for unwarranted surveillance has been pressed home since Edward Snowden spoiled the party.

For Graff, those wise men and women of the counter-terrorism brother and sisterhood insist that the Bureau “isn’t big enough to tackle the new era of online radicalization and independent acting lone wolves.” Policing No-fly lists and the Terrorist Screening Database consume resources at a voracious rate, a veritable “resource crunch”.

There you have it; the age old appeal for greater resources and personnel when facing crises new and remarkable.  When a justification to feed a security habit is needed, it is sufficient to simply call the emergency exceptional.

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

“If we vote to stay, we are not settling for the status quo … we are voting to be a hostage locked in the boot of a car driven by others to a place and at a pace that we have no control over.” 

UK Justice Secretary Michael Gove (April 19, 2016)

–

.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Length (59:20)

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

As many Americans remain captivated by the bizarre political cage match between Hillary and Donald, otherwise known as the 2016 US campaign for President, there are other English speaking nations confronting the ballot box.

Of particular note is the debate over whether the people of the United Kingdom should stay within or leave the European Union.

Campaigning for and against keeping Britain in the EU has been ongoing for months following the introduction and passage of the European Union Referendum Act  2015. There appears to be a split among the general electorate and even within political parties.

The European Union is a major economic entity on the world stage. What would the departure of a major political Great Britain mean, not only for the UK itself, but for the wider region? This is a question that Dr. Binoy Kampmark spends some time exploring with us.

On the other side of the world, the people of Australia are preparing for a visit to the polls on July 2.

The campaign is one of the longest in the country’s election history. Will that length of time help or hurt the incumbents?

On this week’s installment of the Global Research News Hour we are attempting to examine these developments with the help of Australia-based scholar Binoy Kampmark.

Dr. Kampmark holds a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge.  He currently serves as Senior Lecturer in the School of Global Urban and Social Studies. He is a frequent commentator in various media and is a regular contributor to Global Research.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Length (59:20)

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

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.

The prospect of Hillary Clinton being President of the United States of America is one to fill our minds with dread concerning the likely posture of Washington in foreign affairs should she ever attain the Oval Office. There is no doubt she would continue or even increase the intensity of Washington’s military confrontations with China and Russia – and enjoy smacking the wrists of smaller countries whose actions might displease her. Indeed her castigation might go further, even to the extent of rejoicing in the murder of national leaders such as President Gaddafi of Libya, about whom she laughed «We came. We saw. He died».

There is no doubt that under her reign the US military presence around the world would expand and that there would not be closure of any of the armed forces’ bases surrounding China and Russia, or the slightest decrease in size or aggressive posture of the US nuclear-armed fleets that roam the seas and oceans.

Drone assassinations will continue and more innocent people like that poor taxi driver in Pakistan will be killed by US Hellfire missiles guided by gleeful techno-cretins who move control sticks and prod buttons to play barbaric video games from their comfortable killing couches in drone-control bases.

To remind you: on May 21 a taxi driver called Mohammad Azam was earning his tiny daily wage by picking up passengers who crossed the Iranian border into Pakistan. Sometimes he would take them only to nearby villages, but that day he picked up a client who wanted to go to the city of Quetta, eight hours drive away. He drove off in his Toyota Corolla, and a few hours later, when he stopped for a rest, the Pentagon’s Hellfires struck and blasted the car to twisted shards of metal – and reduced Azam and his customer to smoking corpses.

Another case of «We came. We saw. They died».

Azam’s passenger was the brutal Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, travelling under a false identity. His sought-for anonymity didn’t do him much good, however, because while he was in Iran or – more likely – when he was going through border crossing examination on the Pakistan side, a US-paid agent planted a chip on him that could be tracked by the missile-shooting video-gamers.

Azam didn’t know Mullah Mansour and was not associated with the Taliban or any other such organisation. He was an entirely innocent man trying to earn enough money to feed his family – his wife, four children and a crippled brother who stayed with them.

But Azam was killed by the same US Hellfire missiles that killed Mullah Mansoor.

The Pentagon stated that «Mansur has been an obstacle to peace and reconciliation between the Government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, prohibiting Taliban leaders from participating in peace talks with the Afghan government that could lead to an end to the conflict». So they killed him. And they also killed the taxi driver Mohammad Azam.

If a person in a foreign country that can’t retaliate to drone strikes is declared an enemy of the United States there is no question of arrest, charge and trial. They are killed by a drone missile strike, personally authorised by the President.

In 2013 President Obama announced that «the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to US persons». He stressed that there must be «near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed», and that «the United States respects national sovereignty and international law».

But the US president officially assassinated two people in a country whose prime minister said bluntly that the drone attack was a gross violation of national sovereignty. The White House and the Pentagon might – just might – be able to convince a War Crimes Tribunal that their killing of Mullah Mansur was a boon and a blessing to men. But how could they claim that their murder of the taxi driver Azam was justified? When did it become «respectful of international law» to deliberately slaughter a taxi driver?

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared that the assassination of Mansoor «sends a clear message to the world that we will continue to stand with our Afghan partners as they work to build a more stable, united, secure and prosperous Afghanistan». Which was no doubt solace to the widow and three children of driver Azam when his hideously charred fragmented corpse was delivered next day.

People like Obama and Kerry and Clinton and countless millions of others could not care less about the smashing, flashing, hideously agonising death of the innocent taxi driver Azam. The video-gamers had killed yet another totally innocent non-combatant, but no doubt they slept soundly on the night that Azam’s children began to realise their terrible loss.

Three weeks after the drone murder of Azam the taxi driver there was a massacre of 49 people in the US city of Orlando. It was horrible. Much (but far from all) of the world was aghast, and there was emotion displayed in Europe and North America, with candle-lit vigils, solemn silences of respect in parliaments and other demonstrations of sympathy and solidarity.

The day before the Orlando killings it was reported that «at least 30 people were killed after Islamic State militants fired at civilians trying to flee the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Most of the casualties were women and children who were trying to escape to reach the Amiriyat Al-Fallujah refugee camp». The slaughter of innocent human beings also continues in Libya and Syria and Afghanistan. Countless thousands have died – and there hasn’t been a western candle lit in sorrowful commemoration of one single Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian or Afghan in wars that are entirely the fault of Western powers.

Western governments are highly selective in displaying disapproval and grief following killings, be they mass or individual. It could hardly be expected that the US assassination of a Pakistani taxi driver would attract the slightest sympathy or censure.

The murder-by-drone of taxi driver Azam by the Pentagon’s video-game missile managers could be well summed up by Hillary Clinton’s happy rejoicing about the murder of President Gaddafi during the US-NATO blitz on Libya, when she laughingly declared that «We came. We saw. He died».

And thinking about the future… Would you be surprised if in twenty years or so one of the children of taxi driver Azam were to take up a gun and kill Americans?