Global Research

While the situation at the contact line between Ukraine and the Lugansk People’s Republic is quiet, militia units of the Donetsk People’s Republic report about sporadic clashes and shellings. According to the DPR side, the Ukrainian Armed Forces violated the ceasefire more than 300 times during last 7 days.

The most intense shellings from heavy weapons prohibited by the Minsk Agreements were observed at Gorlovka, Zaitsevo, Shirokaya Balka, Golmovskoi, Nikitovka, Verkhnetoretskoye, Vesyoloye, Zhabichevo, Yasinovataya, Spartak, Sakhanka, Kominternovo, Donetsk and the Donetsk airport.

Meanwhile, Kiev deployed additional forces to the area:

• 2 motorised artillery installations and 2 battle tanks tanks arrived in Prokhorovka

• up to 300 personnel arrived in Donskoye

• 100mm antitank cannons ‘Rapira’ were deployed in Novosyolovka

• 3 armored personnel carriers, 2 IFVs and 50 personnel arrived in Nikolayevka-Vtoraya

• 4 IFVs and 70 personnel were observed at Semigoriye

• 17 armored personnel carriers, 8 IFVs and 120 personnel were deployed to Pervoye Maya

The Donbass militia also report about the infighting between Ukrainian nationalist battalions and military units. On April 18, fighters of the 81st airmobile brigade shelled the ‘Ural’ vehicle with nationalist battalion fighters in the area of Yasinovataya. As result, 9 fighters were killed and 22 wounded. The shooting was caused by the appearance of a vehicle from the direction of the contact line overnight.

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“We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply.  They need some bombing and that’s what they are going to get.”  This was how then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the draft peace agreement during a break at the conference in Rambouillet (February 1999). 

At the time the Yugoslav delegation had stated its willingness to concede many points, with the exception of independence for Kosovo (which was nonnegotiable for the Albanians).  But the Yugoslavs did not see the final draft of the accord until the last day of the talks, and as it turned out, two-thirds of that document was entirely new to them (and they were presented with it literally only a few hours before the signing deadline).  In particular, one of the newly introduced chapters (no. 7, appendix B, p.79) called for NATO troops to be deployed not only in Kosovo but throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  Moreover, alliance personnel would, in this case, “be immune from the Parties’ jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offenses” and would “enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters.” (para.6-8)

Feeling like they were being asked to accept terms of occupation and surrender, the officials from Belgrade refused to sign the agreement.  NATO then treated this rebuff as a casus belli: after the Serbian government definitively rejected the ultimatum thrust upon them in the document, the alliance began missile and bomb strikes in Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999.  It is telling that even Henry Kissinger later called the draft of the Rambouillet agreement “a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.”

As a result, NATO’s 78-day OperationAllied Force, which was never approved by the UN Security Council, damaged or destroyed 89 factories and industrial plants, 48 hospitals and infirmaries, 70 schools, 18 kindergartens, 9 university buildings, 4 dormitories, 82 bridges, 35 churches, and 29 monasteries.  At the time the government put a price tag of $100 million on the damages inflicted on the country’s infrastructure and economy.  But the biggest tragedy was that during the bombing campaigns (which employed banned cluster bombs and shells plated with depleted uranium), approximately 2,000 civilians were killed and another 10,000 seriously injured.

Paradoxically, on Feb. 12, 2016, the Serbian parliament ratified a new agreement with NATO that included terms very similar to those demanded in Rambouillet 17 years ago.  In other words, the bar that at the end of the 20th century Belgrade considered to be “set too high” and which they could not stomach even as a cost of war has now been accepted – little by little, unobtrusively, and almost meekly – over the past decade by Serbia’s new leaders.

In particular, the Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the NATO Support and Procurement Organisation (NSPO) on Logistical Support Cooperation requires the government in Belgrade to allow NSPO staff: to move freely throughout the country (article 10, paragraph 2), access to public and private facilities (article 11, paragraph 1), and diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention (article 10, paragraph 1), as well as to exempt the alliance’s property and representatives from customs duties and taxes (article 10, paragraphs 4 and 5).

This agreement was signed back in September 2015, but received almost no media coverage, and thus the “alarm bells” only went off for the public after it was ratified in February 2016.  Responding to popular discontent and criticism from his opponents, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić asked, “If we’re going to demand that NATO protect Serbs in northern Kosovo, how can we at the same time not allow it to enter northern Kosovo?”

But in fact, this rhetorical question is nonsensical (and not just because NATO has its own airfields in Kosovo as well as Camp Bondsteel, the second-largest American military base in Europe).  NATO has never played any role in protecting Serbian interests in Kosovo.

Here’s an example.  On Nov. 3, 2013, local elections were held in northern Kosovo for the first time under the authority of the government in Pristina.  By the end of the day, voter turnout in many cities ranged from 5% to 14%.  Because the Serbs did not want to take part in legitimizing the self-proclaimed republic, a campaign was launched to boycott what they called the “Albanian elections” (“šiptarske izbore”).  Violence erupted in the evening: a group of men wielding bats pulled up in a black jeep without a license plate and broke into a polling station in Kosovska Mitrovica, smashing the ballot boxes (it is interesting that the police and OSCE staff had left that station half an hour before the attack).  Although the leaders of the boycott campaign were neither involved nor complicit in that incident, Belgrade, Pristina, and Brussels blamed them for it and even claimed that the low voter turnout was the result of public “intimidation” by opponents of the election.  A new election date was set for Nov. 17.

On that day Kosovska Mitrovica was literally inundated with soldiers and police, armed to the teeth and even driving armored vehicles (they included NATO’s KFOR troops, the EU Police Mission, and the Kosovo police force)!  All this is to say that nothing prevented the alliance from interfering in events in northern Kosovo when it had something to gain from doing so.  However, at that time its role was to deter peaceful protests and demonstrations of the strength of the local Serbian population.  This was an example of an election (which had been initiated by the EU) that was literally held at gunpoint.  Despite being pressured and threatened with layoffs and the loss of benefits payments from Belgrade, as well as other dirty little games – only 22.8% of the voters ultimately showed up to the polls.  But that did not stop the EU from recognizing the elections as valid, despite the fact that in February 2012, Brussels had refused to accept the results of a referendum in northern Kosovo in which 75.28% of the voters turned out and 99.74% of them voted against recognizing the government of the “Republic of Kosovo.”

It is a fact that after NATO troops entered Kosovo, approximately 210,000 people were forced to leave (according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees), and over 300 Serbs were killed and 455 went missing just during the five-month stay of the international peacekeeping force.  In addition, during the infamous wave of violence that took place March 17-19, 2004, NATO representatives passively allowed Albanian extremists to burn more than 900 Serb homes and to set fire to, severely damage, and desecrate 35 Orthodox monasteries (many of which date back to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries and some are even under the protection of UNESCO), while also driving over 4,000 Serbs from the region.

Partnering but not joining

Serb leaders never tire of assuring their citizens that they have no aspirations to join the NATO Alliance.  “Serbia has no plans to enter NATO, it wants to be militarily neutral,” stated Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić once again (on March 2, 2016), commenting on the opposition parties’ demand that a referendum be held on the issue.  The head of the government does not think that there is a need for the public to vote on the matter.  And it’s true that the people’s will would be easy to predict, because according to the latest public surveys, which were conducted in January and February of this year, only 10.5% of Serbian citizens support the idea of NATO membership, while 79.1% are opposed (10.4% declined to answer).  A recent study by IPSOS revealed a similar pattern: only 7% hold a positive opinion of the alliance.

This was precisely why the ratification of the agreement was only covered by the media after the fact, and President Tomislav Nikolić hurriedly signed the ensuing law (confirming the treaty) on Feb. 19, the day before a scheduled protest to demand its veto.  Immediately after many thousands of protesters flocked to an anti-NATO rally in Belgrade on Feb. 20, President Nikolić published an article titled, “Why I Signed the NATO Law,” in which he tried to convince the public that the legal underpinnings and prerequisites for the statute had been established ten years earlier when Serbia joined the Partnership for Peace (PFP) program.  Overall, the article resembles an attempt to shift the bulk of the responsibility for the rapprochement with the alliance onto the shoulders of previous administrations.  But let’s look at how this process unfolded, in order to grasp the significance of the agreement and get an idea of what the future realistically holds for Serbia.

It all began right after the first-ever “electoral revolution,” which broke out in Belgrade in October 2000 (with Washington’s support).  During this revolution, Slobodan Milošević – the president of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but who had fallen from favor in the West – was deposed.  The new government quickly redirected the country’s foreign policy toward the ideal of European integration – which meant that Serbia was then predestined for assimilation into Europe’s security architecture, which is tightly bound to NATO.

The first turning point was the July 2005 agreement with NATO to allow transit for the purpose of conducting peacekeeping operations (this was primarily needed so that KFOR forces could pass through Serbia).  In a way this was a precursor to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was a key document that was signed in Washington in near secrecy in January 2014 by Nebojša Rodić, the then-minister of defense, and was just quietly and without public debate ratified by the Serbian Parliament in July 2015.

According to the SOFA, Belgrade will offer the alliance the opportunity to use Serbia’s military infrastructure, to train its soldiers at Serbia’s Jug military base, to bring the legal framework regulating defense into line with EU rules, and to introduce the standards of NATO and the Bologna Process into the military education system for Serbian officers.  The agreement also includes a detailed description of the legal issues affecting the status, powers, and responsibility of both the military personnel arriving from overseas as well as the servicemen in the host country.

The next step was the signing in January 2015 of the operational document known as the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), which dictates a broad spectrum of cooperation between Serbia and the NATO Alliance – not only in regard to security and defense, but also pertaining to the issues of human rights and economic, domestic, and foreign policy, including the prospect of European integration.  It may seem baffling, but Serbia has even pledged to “[i]ntroduce a public information strategy on cooperation with Euro-Atlantic structures through PfP with the aim of gaining public support,” which means that Serbian taxpayers must shell out from their own pockets to pay for the propaganda directed against them. (!)

All of the above documents, in addition to the recent Logistical Support Agreement, so firmly tie Belgrade to the alliance that no particular purpose would be served by officially joining it (which at any rate would be impossible because of the negative opinion of the alliance and the unresolved problem of Kosovo).  As the editor-in-chief of the magazine Nova srpska politička misao (“New Serbian Political Thought”), Đorđe Vukadinović, has aptly stated, “although Serbia has not officially entered NATO, NATO has effectively entered Serbia.”

“Geopolitical split”

Yet at the same time, and despite the escalating Euro-Atlantic propaganda, Russia’s popularity in Serbia is growing, and the idea of “European choice” is gradually losing its devotees.  This is backed up by a study from the company Ipsos: in 2014 54% of the public would have voted in favor of EU membership, but by early 2016 that number had dropped to 48%; and while 46% of respondents expressed a positive opinion of Russia in 2014, this year that number has risen to 72%!

A survey conducted by the weekly Vreme (“Time”) not only came up with an almost identical number – 50.9% – after tabulating the responses about European integration, but the news magazine also included the question “Do you support an alliance with Russia?” to which 67.2% answered affirmatively (18.8% were opposed and 14% declined to answer).

And finally, according to the most recent study conducted by a Serbian NGO, the Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID), which is funded by Western foundations and states, on the eve of the snap elections for parliament (scheduled for April 24th), 71.6% of the public is against the idea of  “Serbian membership in the EU and NATO” (with 11.2% “in favor” and 14% “undecided”), and 55.2% of the electorate have indicated their preference for the “traditional affiliation with Russia” (with 19.2% “against” and 21.5% “undecided”).

In this context, the oft-delayed signing of the agreement to grant diplomatic status to the Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center in Niš (as was recently granted to the NSPO) looks very suspect.  It’s worth remembering that in May 2014, when Serbia was hit by a devastating flood, Russian rescue teams were the first to arrive and in only two days managed to evacuate more than 2.000 residents (including over 600 children) from the flood zone, while the Russian Ministry of Emergency Management delivered over 140 tons of humanitarian relief to Serbia (as well as to Bosnia and Herzegovina).  According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the real problem lies in Germany’s desire to prevent any expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans.  The periodical stated that “Merkel telephoned Serbian Prime Minister Vučić, urging him not to sign such an agreement because Berlin is afraid that this center could become a permanent base for Russian espionage.”  At an April 1 press conference hosted by the foreign ministers of Serbia and Russia, Sergey Lavrov made an interesting statement, “Over the years of this center’s operations we have responded to this type of fear and grumbling by inviting the EU and US to visit the center and see for themselves what the staff are doing.  As might be expected, the EU has refused our invitations.  They know that their claims are false.”

Serbian government officials continue to chant the phrase “military neutrality” at every opportunity, like a mantra.  This is because a 2007 parliamentary resolution made reference to NATO’s negative role in recent Serbian history while announcing a “decision to proclaim the Republic of Serbia’s military neutrality toward existing military alliances until such time as a referendum is held that will render a final decision on the matter.”

However, under international law – specifically the Hague Conventions of 1907 – during wartime it is “forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.”  In other words, in the event of a regional or international conflict, NATO’s Logistical Support Agreement could invalidate Serbia’s neutral status.  In addition, the very idea of EU integration presumes a “common policy toward security and defense” – which is also somewhat inconsistent with euphemisms such as “military neutrality.”

The questionable principle of “balance” has also been turned on its head in regard to military cooperation: in 2015 only two Russian-Serbian joint exercises were conducted, while the Serbian army took part in 22 exercises alongside NATO.  And even this limited cooperation with Moscow was sharply condemned by the EU.  Maja Kocijančič, a spokesperson for the European Commission, denounced Serbia’s consent to Moscow’s proposal to hold two special-forces joint exercises in 2016: “Under the current circumstances, such a joint military exercise [between Serbia and Russia] would send the wrong signal.”

The new government that will be formed after the April 24 elections won’t have it easy: the rapidly growing estrangement between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia means that Belgrade will eventually emerge as a geostrategic fault line.  When, figuratively speaking, the earth begins to shift under the feet of the Serbian elite, no virtuoso “geopolitical splits” will allow them to avoid answering key question – whose side are they on, anyway?

Sergey Belous is the Expert journal correspondent in Belgrade.

Source in Russian: Expert

Translated and adapted by ORIENTAL REVIEW.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, and suddenly there was light, and warmth, and the gathering at the hearth. The gods never forgave, and ever since periodically they thrust a torch into villains’ hands and watch the hearths burn and bring the roofs down. Civilization weeps, in Troy, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria.

In Ukraine, this May 2^nd will mark the second anniversary of a fire, a show of force to demonstrate that Ukraine’s boss was the US-installed nationalist Kiev regime. The House of Trades in Odessa was set on fire. Officially forty-eight people died, but witnesses, survivors, and journalists say the number may be tragically higher—perhaps up to 180. Inside the burning building, people died of fume inhalations. They were also shot, suffocated by the toxic exhalations of a mysterious greenish gas, beaten to death on the ground after jumping out of windows. There were rapes, authenticated by autopsies.

On that day, there was to have been a soccer match between the teams of Odessa and Kharkov. About 3,000 Ukrainian para-military fascists or “ultras” (they are called “Maidan activists” in the Western media) announced they would march in the center of the city. They were members of Pravy Sektor , Svoboda, and other Ukrainian groups who exalt the leadership of wartime Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. They were not spontaneous, independent agents. A proper investigation would show that their actions were orchestrated by Kiev, then unleashing its Anti Terror Operation (ATO) in the Donbass with an act of fiery Wagnerian resonance. Odessa’s opposition movement to the Maidan, Kulikovo Pole (“Camp Kulikovo,”) determined to stop them. At 2 pm, about 400 Kulikovo men and women gathered in front of the House of Trades but were provoked into violent clashes. Kulikovo members took shelter in the House of Trades, where the horrors of that day began.

Survivors have noted that what occurred in the House of Trades in Odessa reminded them of what the Banderists had done in WWII in Galicia, in Western Ukraine, to the Poles, the Jews, and all those—Russians and Ukrainians—who supported the Soviet Union. Some noted the similarity between 2 May in Odessa and the massacre of Khatin (not be confused with Katyn) on 22 March 1943, when the Nazis, occupying Belarus, gathered 149 civilians in a building and burnt them alive as collective punishment for an action carried out by the partisan resistance. Others suggest that the purpose behind the aggression on the Kulikovo Pole group was to clear the square they had occupied before the anniversary on 9 May of the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis in WW II. The anniversary would have called to the square thousands of people, which would have strengthened the Kulikovo Pole movement’s opposition to the Kiev regime.

What appears to be evident is that the fire and brutality in Odessa, hero city of the Soviet Union for its resistance to Nazi occupation in WW II, was to serve as a lesson to all those who would stand up in opposition to the Kiev junta. Today, after two years, not one of those responsible for the massacre is in jail, but some survivors still are. On March 27, about 100 neo-Nazi Ukrainians attacked a group of relatives of the victims, which every Sunday commemorates the massacre gathering at the House of Trades of Odessa. Though the European Union swear up and down not to be supporting the fascists, their support for Petro Poroshenko belies their vows. Survivors of the fire note that the fascists have become part of institutions: they head the police and the punitive battalions (Azov and Aidar), for example.

The latest report (16 March 2016) by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR) documents the cost in distress to Ukrainians of the American-engineered coup, which in turn cost American taxpayers five billion dollars:

* In total, from mid-April 2014 to 15 February 2016, OHCHR recorded 30,211 casualties in the conflict area in eastern Ukraine, among Ukrainian armed forces, civilians and members of the armed groups. This includes 9,167 people killed and 21,044 injured.

* 6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs),

* 800,000 and 1 million IDP are living in territories controlled by the Government, where some continue to face discrimination in accessing public service

* 8,000 to 15,000 civilians cross the contact line on a daily basis, passing through six checkpoints in each transport corridor: three checkpoints operated by the Government, and three by the self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk people’s republic ‘with a stretch of no-man’s land in between. OHCHR has regularly observed up to 300-400 vehicles – cars, minivans and buses – waiting in rows on either side of the road. Passengers spend the night in freezing temperatures and without access to water

Distress is not all. The OHCHR reports summary executions, enforced disappearances, unlawful and arbitrary detention, and torture and ill treatment:

* Throughout the country, OHCHR continued to receive allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, and torture and ill-treatment of people accused by the Ukrainian authorities of ‘trespassing territorial integrity’, ‘terrorism’ or related offenses, or of individuals suspected of being members of, or affiliated with, the armed groups [meaning, Donetsk and Luhansk forces]

* During the reporting period, OHCHR documented a pattern of cases of SBU detaining and allegedly torturing the female relatives of men suspected of membership or affiliation with the armed groups. In addition to being a violation of the prohibition of torture, these cases raise concerns of arbitrary deprivation of liberty and gender-based violence.

* OHCHR remains highly concerned about consistent allegations of detainees being held in unofficial places of detention by SBU. These places are not accessible to the National Preventive Mechanism and international organizations. Reliable accounts from victims and their relatives indicate a widespread pattern of conduct across several SBU departments. Since the outbreak of the conflict, a network of unofficial places of detention, often located in the basement of regional SBU buildings, have been identified from a large number of reliable accounts from victims and their relatives. OHCHR recalls that the prohibition of unacknowledged detention is not subject to derogation.

* OHCHR has received alarming allegations that in Odesa [sic], detainees are held for up to five days incommunicado at the SBU building following their arrest, without any contact with their family or access to a lawyer. Information recorded by OHCHR indicates that, as of February 2016, 20 to 30 people were detained illegally and incommunicado at the Kharkiv regional SBU building. When asked about their fate and whereabouts, SBU officials have systematically denied any involvement. According to information gathered by OHCHR, the vast majority of those held in the Kharkiv SBU were [sic] not arrested in accordance with legal procedures and have not been charged, despite being held because of their presumed affiliation with the armed groups.

The OHCHR’s report on violence against women would have had the Western media hoarse with shouting “foul”—had the deeds been perpetrated by Russia:

On 8 December 2015, in Shchurove village, Donetsk region, SBU officers arrested a 74-year-old woman at her house while they were looking for her son. She was detained at the SBU building in Mariupol, charged with ‘terrorism’, and beaten. OHCHR visited her in the Mariupol pre-trial detention facility (SIZO). After OHCHR communicated this case to the Office of the Military Prosecutor, a criminal investigation was initiated into her allegations of ill treatment. On 27 January 2016, the woman was relocated to the SBU SIZO in Kyiv. OHCHR believes she is at risk of further abuse. The SBU informed OHCHR that she and her son are suspected of being informants for the “ministry of state security” for the “Donetsk people’s republic.”

OHCHR also documented the case of three women, who were detained in May 2015, in a town under Government control in Donetsk region. The victims included the wife of an armed group commander and her daughter. The latter was allegedly severely tortured, and both were allegedly threatened with sexual violence.

Such is the nature of the “maidan democracy” Victoria Nuland’s boss, President Obama, bestowed on Ukraine. Nor does there seem to be any lessening of support by the Obama administration to this oppressive US protectorate regime—a Nazi-era throwback. The 2016 US Consolidated Appropriations Act secures $250 million (“Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative”) “to provide assistance, including training; equipment; lethal weapons of a defensive nature; logistics support, supplies and services; sustainment; and intelligence support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine.” Moreover the US (you and me) will spend at least $658.2 million on “bilateral economic assistance,” “international security assistance,” “multilateral assistance,” and “export and investment assistance” for Ukraine in 2016. Since the Maidan coup in February 2014, the US has lavished on Ukraine $760 million in “security, programmatic, and technical assistance” and $2 billion in loan guarantees.

Was it “worth it”—burning people alive in the Odessa Trade Building on 2 May 2014 to consolidate Kiev’s power through fear? No doubt, from Kiev’s point of view it was totally worth it. Look at the loot they got. It certainly was worth it to the US neoliberal and military establishment—the transfer of wealth from our pockets to theirs.

But was it worth to us, the people in the US, who footed the bill for terror in Ukraine?

Sometimes I think that our consciences are so burdened by the guilt of crimes committed in our names and through the pilfering of our purses that one more drop of blood on our hands will tip us over, and we’ll finally cry out, “In the name of humanity, stop.”

Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: [email protected]

Who will hold Israel accountable? 

The answer, so far, is no one. But on this rare trip to the U.S., I am seeing signs that suggest the dam is breaking. The cracks in the dam are coming from civil society, and with it will follow a tidal wave of grassroots support for Palestinian freedom. 

The Israeli government is going to unprecedented lengths to destroy and silence opposition to Israel’s oppressive and racist policies against Palestinians. This ranges from the Israeli government’s shoot to kill policy that has taken the lives of over 200 Palestinians since the beginning of October 2015, to actions aimed at silencing both Israeli and Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations. Personal threats against the lives of Palestinian human rights defenders have been issued, as well as against supporters of the global anti-occupation movement supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a tool for achieving Palestinian freedom, justice, and equal rights.

To describe what is happening in Israel today as fascism is not hyperbole.

These extreme measures come in the context of nearly 50 years of Israeli occupation for an illegal colonial enterprise, where nearly every aspect of Palestinian lives has been controlled.

Israel’s culture of impunity creates an environment where not only are those who resist targeted, but also those who simply exist. The mere presence of Bedouins in ‘prime’ territory is deemed such a threat to the security of the state of Israel that their homes have been demolished and they have been displaced at alarming and unprecedented rates. Hanan Al Hroub, the Palestinian teacher who won the 2016 Global Teacher’s Prize and was named the best teacher in the world, is now being threatened by an Israeli campaign to strip her of this title.

With official representatives of states and the “international community” sitting idly on the sidelines, non-governmental organizations and broad-based civil society groups have to step up to challenge Israeli discrimination and occupation.

For years, Al-Haq and other civil society organizations have worked tirelessly to hold Israel accountable for its violations of Palestinian human rights and international law. And like other defenders of human rights, Al-Haq has a storied history of being subjected to intimidation, threats, and attacks by third parties seeking to undermine our work. Al-Haq’s office has been raided, our field researchers have been detained, cumulatively for years, while doing their job, and I was subjected to an arbitrary travel ban for more than six years.

Over the last few months, Al-Haq has come under a defamatory smear campaign by unknown sources, which culminated in death threats directed at myself and another Al-Haq colleague. We believe that those behind the campaign are trying to send us a strong signal that we have crossed a red line by working at the level of the International Criminal Court to hold Israel accountable for decades of international law violations.

These threats do not deter us. To the contrary, they propel us to move forward and signify that we have been successful in working toward our mission to end the Israeli occupation and promote and protect Palestinian human rights.

The Israeli government has played a lead role in vilifying civil society organizations. In October of 2015, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, in meetings with foreign counterparts, attempted to link Al-Haq with terrorism and demanded that European countries cease funding the organization.

We are not alone in coming under such attack. The Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon called the director of the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence a traitor, and her grandparents received calls defaming her.

The movement to end the occupation through support of BDS has also come under attack. Modeled after the campaign that played an important role in bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa, BDS supporters have been working for over a decade to achieve freedom, justice, and equality for Palestinians, advocating for Palestinian human rights across the globe. As the movement has gained momentum, so too have the parties that seek to undermine its work. Supporters of BDS have been labeled “delegitimizers” and numerous anti-boycott laws have passed in Israel – and even in state legislatures in the United States in open defiance of your First Amendment.

These threats have become personal. During a recent conference in Jerusalem on combating BDS, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz incited violence against supporters of BDS, using language that suggested their “civil targeted killing.” While the Minister went on to say that Israel will combat BDS with everything at its disposal but stopped short of including physical harm, given the tense and increasingly racist political climate, defenders of Palestinian human rights would be imprudent not to take these threats seriously.

Israel is also not alone. Its efforts to silence defenders of Palestinian human rights have been bolstered and supported in the United States (including by some U.S. academic institutions) and several European Union (EU) member states. France has effectively criminalized boycott as “hate speech,” and the United Kingdom issued guidelines banning public bodies from engaging in boycott. The United States Congress is considering the Combating BDS Act of 2016, which seeks to authorize state and local governments to divest assets from, and prohibit investment in, any entity that “engages in a commerce or investment-related boycott, divestment or sanctions activity targeting Israel.” Notably, that draft legislation extends its reach to BDS-actions targeting business operations in “Israeli-controlled territories” – meaning the Israeli settlements in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, which are recognized as illegal under international law, and as illegitimate by the U.S.

Instead of observing their international legal obligations to hold Israel accountable for violations of human rights, the United States and members of the EU are chilling, punishing, and criminalizing what is protected political speech and one of the most effective non-violent tools available to Palestinians to combat the occupation.

Despite these actions, the recent call for an investigation into Israeli human rights violations by several members of the United States House of Representatives provides a glimmer of hope.

So, who will hold Israel accountable? As a civil society organization, we will continue to fight for an end to the occupation, and freedom, justice, and equality for all Palestinians, but the international community – and particularly grassroots American supporters of Palestinian freedom – will also play an important role.

Shawan Jabarin is Director of Al-Haq, the oldest Palestinian human rights organization based in Ramallah. He is currently in the U.S. on a CCR-sponsored trip with Raji Sourani, Director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza.

Despite Syria’s ongoing conflict, life in many parts of the nation goes on. Syria’s election schedule is no exception. The last parliamentary elections before the latest held this month were in 2012. Since these elections are held every 4 years, the recent elections were far from a “political stunt” to bolster the legitimacy of the current government, but instead represented the continuity of Syria’s ongoing, sovereign political process.

Attempts to undermine the credibility of the elections have become the primary objective of US and European news agencies, however, even the US government’s own election monitoring nongovernmental (NGO) agencies have conceded the last presidential election in 2014 saw soaring voter turnout, and despite attempts to leave voter turnout this year omitted from US-European press reports, it appears to also have been high.

The Washington-based, USAID-funded “Election Guide” reported a 73.42% voter turnout in Syria’s 2014 presidential election, a turnout that would be astounding had they been US elections. Voter turnout for the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections in the US, for example, were 57.1% and 54.9% respectively. The 2016 Syrian parliamentary elections appear to have also enjoyed a high turnout, with the International Business Tribune in its article, “Syria Elections 2016 Updates: Geneva Peace Talks Resume Amid Scrutiny Of Country’s Ballot Process,” reporting that:

Voting hours for the Syrian parliamentary elections Wednesday were extended for an additional five hours because of such a high voter turnout. A religious leader there lauded the number of voters participating, saying that it was an indication to voters’ apparent opposition to the “cruelty, terrorism and destruction” experienced in Syria’s civil war.

Despite high turnouts in previous elections and indicators like that reported in the International Business Tribune regarding this latest poll, US papers like the New York Times (NYT) decided to sidestep facts and intentionally indulged in unconfirmed, anecdotal stories to portray turnout as low as possible and the credibility of the elections nonexistent.

Anne Barnard’s questionable NYT article titled, “Syrian Parliamentary Elections Highlight Divisions and Uncertainty,” claimed that:

Large parts of the country that are controlled by insurgent groups did not participate in the voting on Wednesday. Despite a fragile partial cease-fire, government and Russian warplanes have continued to hit areas controlled by nationalists and Islamist rebels, as well as territory held by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. An American-led coalition is also bombing areas held by the group.

Throughout Barnard’s NYT piece, she categorically fails to inform readers that while the geographical areas “controlled by insurgent groups” might be “large,” the majority of Syria’s population does not reside within them, and clearly chose to vote in large numbers both in 2014 and 2016 for the current government.

Claims that Kurdish regions also did not participate, omitted the fact that Syria’s total Kurdish population is less than 10% of Syria’s population and that not all Syrian Kurds reside in these regions and refused to vote.

Dispelling the Displacement Myths 

It is usually the US that reminds the world of Syria’s displaced population. What it often doesn’t mention is the fact that most of these displaced Syrians have not fled abroad either to Turkey or Jordan or further beyond to Europe, but have instead sought safe haven in Syria’s capital of Damascus and the protection of its government and the Syrian Arab Army.

The US-EU-funded Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) would reveal precisely this in its 2012 report, “Syria: No safe haven – A country on the move, a nation on the brink,” stating:

Syria’s two biggest cities Damascus and Aleppo were seen as safe havens from the violence and gradually saw a large influx of IDPs [internally displaced persons] fleeing from the zones of conflict.

It is clear that the majority of Syria’s population are fleeing from US-EU backed “freedom fighters” and seeking sanctuary under the protection of the “regime” Western powers have attempted to convince the world led by villains. With this in mind, poll results in favor of the ruling government should be of no surprise, despite rhetoric circulating in US-European media.

The West’s Worst Fears Confirmed 

This reality confirms the West’s worst fears, that despite all attempts to divide and destroy the modern nation-state of Syria, the people remain relatively united in cause to restore peace and order within the nation, and to do so with the current government leading the way.

It is also ironic that the United States and Europe endlessly expound the virtue of self-determination but now attempt to undermine an exercise in that very self-determination by the Syrian people.

It is clear by the statements made by the United States and several European nations regarding the recent elections that the problem was not necessarily the manner in which the elections were held, but who they included. It was not candidates Syrian law excluded from the elections, but candidates the United States and Europe simply do not approve of. In other words, the US and Europe are doing precisely the opposite of promoting self-determination in Syria and are in fact attempting to undo or otherwise undermine the credibility of the results of the recent elections.

NPR in an article titled, “Parts Of Syria Vote In Parliamentary Elections That Critics Say Are A Sham,” would report that:

Mark Toner, U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson, said this week that “to hold parliamentary elections now given the current circumstances, given the current conditions in the country, we believe is at best premature and not representative of the Syrian people.”

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman called the elections a “sham,” while his German counterpart said that country “will not accept the results,” Reuters reported.

It should be remembered that the US and its European allies eagerly supported elections held in Ukraine amid fierce fighting in the nation’s easternmost region. Despite the inability or unwillingness of many in Ukraine to vote, the elections were both held and recognized by the US and Europe. The reason for this hypocrisy should be clear. Those running in Ukraine’s elections were candidates the US and Europe approved of, supported, and knew would win, while those running and most likely to win in Syria’s elections are not.

Thus, “democracy” from an American or European point of view, is more about special interests in the West selecting a foreign nation’s future government, not its people, unless of course, the people can be convinced to back those candidates Washington and Brussels supports as well.

Not only does the recent election in Syria confirm the West’s worst fears of a failed campaign to divide and destroy the nation, casting doubts on the viability of installing a Western-friendly regime into power during the proposed “transition,” but rather than exposing the alleged illegitimacy of Syrian democracy, it is the West’s brand of selective meddling and manipulation of polls that has been laid out for all the world to see.

With any luck, Syria may serve as an example for other nations to follow in resisting and overcoming foreign interference in their domestic political processes.

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

The pro-government forces are advancing in the province of Homs, Syria. On April 21, the clashes are observed near the Arak village and T3 Airport with no confirmation that the SAA was able to take these sites. Earlier, the Syrian forces took control of the Brigade 550 base and launched an opration towards the ‘Antar Mountains.

Russian experts have completed clearing Syria’s city of Palmyra of mines and explosives set by ISIS militants, the head of the Russian Army’s engineering unit, Yury Stavitsky, reported on Thursday. In total, 2991 explosive devices, including 432 makeshift bombs, have been defused. Since April 2, Russian engineers with the help of Uran-6 robots have cleared 234 hectares of land, 23 kilometers of roads and 10 architectural objects.

In the Latakia province, units of al-Nusra and allied militants took efforts to launch offensive on positions of the government troops near Ikko, Bsharfa, Nehshebba and Sandran.

Some 50 NDF fighters have been reportedly taken captive by Kurdish forces in the town of Qamishli iafter fighting between the NDF and the Kurdish militia, Asayish, entered a second day.

Separately, the Kurdish units seized Allya prison. In turn, NDF units captured the Abu Raghab and Kurayris checkpoint, Al-Salaam Hospital and the Municipal Stadium. The Syrian government and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) are reportedly negotiating the terms of the ceasefire.

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Barack Obama ended opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan in 2009, effectively green lighting Afghan opium production and the Afghan heroin trade. By 2010, all US efforts to eradicate Afghan opium ceased. It has been US policy to allow Afghan opium growing and the heroin trade since. US heroin deaths tripled from 3,036 in 2010 to 10,574 in 2014 as a result. 

Vanda Felbab-Brown at the Brookings Institution. a liberal think tank that often writes reports supporting the Obama Administration, penned “No Easy Exit: Drugs and Counternarcotics Strategies in Afghanistan” in advance of the April 2016 UN Summit on Drugs (UNGASS). No way out for Uncle Sam is more like it. The report is notable for what it omits, which is any mention of the heroin epidemic, the deadliest illicit drug epidemic in history, or any of the tens of thousands of Americans killed by heroin since Obama took office.

The Bush Administration had an Afghan opium eradication program in effect, carried out by DynCorp. Obama didn’t renew DynCorp’s eradication contracts, effectively ending all US efforts to eradicate opium. (Afghan government eradication efforts in 2014, resulted in 1.1% of the Afghan opium crop being eradicated. The NY Times reported that the Afghan government will no longer eradicate opium crops as of 2016.) Heroin is made from opium.

Ms. Felbab-Brown might as well have said “let them eat cake” to the tens of thousands of Americans killed by heroin since 2009, the millions now hooked on heroin and the tens of millions living in terror because of loved ones now hooked on this deadly poison.

US policy changed to permit opium growing and the heroin trade during Obama’s first year in office, as a way to minimize US troop casualties in Afghanistan. And to maximize US civilian casualties in the US from heroin.

The CIA defines blowback as the ‘consequences at home of operations overseas.’

Since ending eradication efforts, US heroin deaths shot up from 3,036 (2010) to 5,925 (2012) to 10,574 in 2014. The heroin death toll continues to shoot up as does the number of heroin users, from the 1,500,000 US heroin users in 2010 to 4,500,000 users in 2015. As heroin deaths under Obama tripled, so has heroin usage.

There were 7,600 hectares of Afghan opium poppies when the War in Afghanistan began in 2001. (1 hectare = 2.5 US acres.) In 2009, there were 123,000 hectares. By 2014, Afghan poppy fields spread to 224,000 hectares resulting in a bumper crop of 6,400 tons of opium, enough to make 640,000 kilograms of heroin, thanks to Obama. Opium yields far greater profit than foods like wheat or corn, so opium production will continue to rise without serious eradication efforts.

Afghanistan is by far the number one producer of opium and heroin. Total worldwide opium production was 7,554 tons in 2014, of which 85% came from Afghanistan. The remaining 1,154 tons are primarily from Myanmar, Laos, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam.

 

Mexico produced 162 tons of opium in 2014, enough to make 16,200 kilograms of heroin. An average heroin addict takes 0.15 kg of heroin a year, meaning Mexican heroin could only supply 108,000 heroin addicts. Heroin from Mexico cannot supply even 10% of US heroin demand.

Yet the DEA claims most heroin in the US is from Mexico. I asked Barbara Carreno and Russell Baer at the DEA questions like how such a mathematical impossibility was told by the DEA. They dodged many questions, claiming only 4% of heroin is from Afghanistan and the rest is mostly from Mexico. Carreno and Baer acknowledged 90% of heroin in Canada is from Afghanistan, but wouldn’t acknowledge that the USA has a border with Canada, only with Mexico.

We’re getting hit with the largest ever illicit drug epidemic in American history and the DEA is asleep at the wheel.

USA’s now #1 for heroin use. US heroin demand is 415,000 kilograms a year. The whole world, except Afghanistan, could only produce 115,400 kilograms of heroin (2014), not enough for even a third of the mushrooming US demand. Most heroin in the US is coming from US-occupied Afghanistan, there is no other mathematical possibility. There is no other physical possibility.

Carreno and Baer stated “we are a small press office with many queries to answer, and your line of questioning is expanding. I’m sorry to have to say that we will not able to assist you further.” I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about what the DEA has been doing (if anything) about Afghan opium and heroin.

I also asked the DEA people if they know how bad the heroin epidemic’s gotten or have any sense of urgency about it, they dodged these questions too. An American now gets killed every 32 minutes by heroin. Carreno and Baer seemed like they couldn’t care less and they don’t feel like answering most questions asked.

Perhaps the DEA people would answer questions (or plead the 5th) at Congressional Hearings.

Basic math shows that Mexico cannot produce enough heroin for even 1/10th of US demand. Besides 4,500,000 American heroin users (2,500,000 addicts and 2,000,000 casual users) and 10,000+ US heroin deaths a year, are the tens of millions of loved ones and neighbors living through hell because of this biggest ever drug epidemic in history.

One New Yorker summed it up “with heroin addicts on every block now, it’s like a zombie invasion.” One small American town has 190 HIV+ people due to IV narcotics use. The War in Afghanistan is the longest ever war in US history and the “collateral damage” of Americans being killed by Afghan heroin is shooting up.

Afghanistan has been known as the Graveyard of the Empires since Alexander the Great. Afghan heroin may yet destroy the American Empire. Since Obama green lighted Afghan opium and heroin, crime’s been shooting up in many places like Baltimore, considered to be ground zero for the heroin epidemic and the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the nation.

False narratives have proliferated recently about the heroin epidemic. One such narrative is ‘the Mexicans did it.’ Mexico, producing enough opium for 16.2 tons of heroin (2014), has enough for only 4% of current US heroin demand. The Mexicans didn’t do the heroin epidemic. (Colombia produced 2 tons of heroin in 2014, not enough for even 1% of the US heroin market.)

Another false narrative, ‘the doctors did it’ alleges patients got hooked on painkillers then turned to heroin. Not true. Only 3.6% of patients taking narcotic painkillers go on to take heroin.

‘Myanmar did it.’ Myanmar, a distant 2nd for heroin production, produced enough opium for 67 tons of heroin (2014), not enough for even 1/4th of US demand. Plus, Myanmar’s heroin goes to Asia, Australia and Europe. Not US.

“Genetics did it” which says ‘10% of people are prone to addiction, so genetics is the reason for the heroin epidemic.’ Human genetics hasn’t changed much the past 15 years. What has changed is Afghan opium production shot up from 7,600 hectares (2001) to 224,000 hectares (2014), a 29-fold increase.

‘Treatment is the solution.’ Treatment is a few fingers in a dyke that has sprung millions of holes. As Afghan heroin floods in, heroin use shoots up.

In Afghanistan, where heroin’s been as readily available as Coca-Cola since 2009, 8% of the people are addicted to narcotics. Following the footsteps of US policy in Afghanistan would mean 8% of the US population, 25,500,000 Americans, becoming addicted, which would be more like a zombie victory than a zombie invasion and would solidify Obama’s legacy as Heroin Dealer In Chief.

‘Decriminalize’ and “marijuana is like heroin” are additional narratives, about marijuana legalization in some places and Portugal’s decriminalization of personal possession of all drugs in 2001. Heroin’s not marijuana and trafficking tons of heroin is not personal possession. Apples and oranges.

Heroin is physically addictive within 30 days of daily use. Heroin kills 40x more than cocaine does and over 100x more than marijuana. Just as there are vast differences between swallowing a pint-size OJ, a Heineken or 3 liters of rum, so too there are vast differences between drugs. Decriminalizing personal possession of drugs is not comparable to decriminalizing trafficking tons of heroin.

Heroin traffickers no doubt want decriminalization instead of life imprisonment just as the makers of the world’s #1 narco state, Afghanistan, want people confused and distracted away from what they did.

The latest DEA narratives: ‘W-18 did it’ and ‘heroin deaths are over-reported’. Synthetics like W-18 are a drop in the overflowing heroin epidemic bucket. Heroin breaks down to morphine in the body within hours, gets recorded by American coroners as morphine (prescription drug) overdoses, resulting in under-reporting of heroin deaths by as much as 100%. The real US heroin death count in 2014 was closer to 20,000 than to 10,574.

It’s as if the recent media flurry of false narratives and distracting narratives have been to try to confuse and distract people away from the most lethal ever illicit drug epidemic (the heroin epidemic 2009-present), Afghanistan (source of 85% of all heroin) and how the heroin is getting to US. It appears as if certain elements within the US government are afraid of the epidemic of Afghan heroin being discussed and Congressional Hearings, sanctions (or worse) for what they did in making Afghanistan into the deadliest narco state ever in human history.

The Taliban ruled Afghanistan until Fall 2001. In mid-2000, the Taliban outlawed opium, within a year it was all but gone, from 91,000 hectares (1999) to 7,600 hectares (2001). Since the Taliban effectively outlawed opium within a year, then why hasn’t the latest US-supported Afghan regime and US Administration done the same?

If serious efforts are not made to eradicate heroin at it’s source, then the heroin epidemic will get worse.

Besides prioritizing eradication first, which will take a year if done in earnest, there are additional solutions.

Second, outlaw precursor chemicals, like acetic anhydride, needed to make heroin from opium. The chemicals to make methaqualone were outlawed in the 1980s. Methaqualone overdoses then stopped.

Third, US government and government-chartered planes can be searched.

Fourth, buying opium for medical morphine in the meantime, until eradication is complete, will alleviate this surge of heroin shocking and awing America.

Fifth, millions of addicts need treatment. There aren’t enough inpatient beds or outpatient seats for even 1/8th of the surge in narcotic users. $25 billion constructs 100,000 inpatient treatment beds and $10 billion annually provides another million seats in outpatient treatment. So far, Obama has ponied up less than 1% of the money needed for treatment, only $0.116 billion, for the heroin disaster he made. Day late, dollar short.

Sixth, decriminalizing personal possession in order to focus on big heroin traffickers would result in lower overall prison costs and fewer non-violent drug users serving expensive lengthy sentences.

US government agencies and departments involved in Afghanistan, 2000 to present, can come clean and tell all about Afghan opium and heroin.

One giant step forward would be Congressional Hearings to determine facts:

1)how did Afghan opium surge from 7,600 hectares to 224,000 hectares, 2) why did annual heroin deaths surge from 1,779 to 10,574 on up,
3)how did the Taliban effectively eradicate Afghan opium within a year, 4) why hasn’t the current Administration done likewise,
5)what exactly have the DEA, CIA and DoD been doing about Afghan opium and heroin, and
6) why did Obama green light the Afghan opium trade and heroin trade leading to the most lethal illicit drug epidemic ever.

The UN has been given the power to hold inquiries focusing on getting honest answers to honest questions and voting on censure or sanctions against the US government and current Afghanistan regime until opium is eradicated as it was under the Taliban in 2001.

Obama green lighted the end of US eradication efforts against Afghan opium in 2009, which green lighted the Afghan opium and heroin trade, which green lighted the deadliest illicit drug epidemic ever. The 10,000+ Americans getting killed every year by heroin, that’s just “collateral damage” to “the little people” from the lingering War in Afghanistan, Mr. President?

Eradicate the Afghan opium crops, stat, the way the Taliban eradicated the Afghan opium crops, within a year. No need to re-invent the wheel on this one.

Has the British political establishment had an atrophying episode on the science front?  Suggestions that this might be the case came last week when there were suggestions that a gag of Britain’s scientists might be in the works. The Cabinet Office had busied itself with proposals in February that, if implemented, would prevent organisations from using tax-payer funds to lobby parliamentarians.

Initially, the ban would have covered academics, effectively eliminating them from the public debates on such matters as transport, genetic modification, stem-cell research, climate change and energy.[1]  It would also effectively siphon and control the award of grant money in tighter fashion.

The point would be to target the logical conclusions to be drawn from certain research that might, just might, lead to a particular policy change. The more relevant the research, the greater the need to keep matters shut. The perverse outcome of such a move would be to effectively open the field to various lobby groups keen on skewing the angle and controlling the discussion.

As Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy argued, such changes would “make it much more difficult for independent university experts to advise ministers and civil servants, and hence make it easier for lobbyists, companies and campaign groups to divert policies towards vested interests instead.”[2]  In such an abhorrent vacuum, the disgusting will thrive.

This prompted a storm of protest from a group that all too readily capitulates in the face of government bullying.  Up to 20,000 academics signed a petition taking aim at the policies, and asking for an exemption.  The confusion was compounded by a blurring between the lines of lobbying and scientific research.

On Tuesday, Lord Bridges of Headley, parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet Office, announced that exemptions would be put in place with respect to national academies, research councils and the Higher Funding Council for England.

As astronomer royal Martin Rees observed, the delay in making the exemption was baffling.  “This clarification is welcome but should have come sooner.  It’s regrettable that it was preceded by months of confusion and ambiguity that generated needless anxiety, ill-feeling and time-wasting.” In the cautious words of Sarah Main of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, “We now need to the detail right to make sure this solution works for all government and all of science.”

Gagging the loquacious scientist has been the business of authorities for centuries. Galileo’s views on celestial matters were shut up because of attitudes distinctly at odds with the Church (Less known is the fact that he was not quite as radical in knowledge as others make out.)

Modern democracies have certainly been twitchy on the subject of allowing scientists to speak readily.  They are the moral irritants who wish to see the record kept accurate.  In 2013, Canadian scientists were given a good old dressing down in cases where they apparently spoke without ministerial approval.[3] The tendencies were already being observed as far back as 2008.

The measure was motivated in large part by the Harper government’s persistent love affair with extractive industries, though its consequences were far reaching in their absurd applications.

Portrait of GalileoCanadian biologist Steve Campana gave an example of how extensive the ban was in a discussion with CBC News.  Something as seemingly inoffensive as discussing techniques behind aging a lobster, a point applicable to the fishing industry, could not see the light of public discussion.[4]

Another scientist in Canada’s employ, pseudonymously named Janet, told Motherboard about the screening conducted by a “media officer” of her work.[5]  These officers were naturally faceless creatures, operating a general account, and filtering, editing and adjusting information at will.

There were “a list of ‘hot-button’ issues that can’t be mentioned, like climate change, or the oil sands.”  This went so far as to urge the particular scientist in question to refrain from using specific phrases or any matter linking the findings to an industry.

The effect of such none-too-subtle gagging (or muzzling, as it has been termed) was to effectively reduce such scientists as Janet to a state of unwarranted imbecility.   Ignorance had to be feigned for the greater government good.  “They’ve told me: ‘Say you don’t know the answer to that question,’ even if I do.  They make me look like an idiot.”

The freshly-elected Trudeau government has repealed the measure. Navdeep Bains, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, made the point that “government scientists and experts will be able to speak freely about their work to the media and the public.  We are working to make government science fully available to the public and will ensure that scientific analyses are considered in decision making.”[6]

Good for Trudeau and his new government, but the recent behaviour in Britain on matters of lobbies remains a potential threat to broader discussions of science.  Even in bastions of democratic discussion, enemies of enlightenment can thrive with viral menace.

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

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/19/ministers-back-down-on-rule-gagging-scientists

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/20/scientists-attack-muzzling-government-state-funded-cabinet-office

[3] http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/when-science-goes-silent/

[4] http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/canadian-federal-scientists-can-now-speak-freely-media

[5] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fight-to-unmuzzle-canadas-scientists

[6] http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/canadian-federal-scientists-can-now-speak-freely-media

 

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar is a senior Indian journalist. He is also a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington. The Cato Institute has a strong association with the billionaire Koch brothers (who have links to the pro-GMO lobby) and describes itself as a public policy research organisation dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace: in other words, it is driven by neoliberal ideology.

On the Times of India website, Aiyar recently penned a pro-GMO puff piece peppered with the usual predictable unsubtle claims and smears that many of us have come to expect from the GMO lobby.

Aiyar states that India must move people out of agriculture into industry and services. He then asserts GM crops will raise yields but they have been opposed by various NGOs on pseudo-scientific grounds. According to Aiyar, the introduction of GM mustard to India will raise yields by 20-30% and will also reduce India’s dependence on imported edible oil.

He argues that farmers’ leader Chengal Reddy says GM mustard and GM brinjal could replicate the stunning success of GM cotton and says the impact of GM cotton in the last decade has been stunning.

Aiyar then goes on to argue that Bangladeshi farmers are already growing GM brinjal, getting higher yields and incomes, while using less pesticide.

In a rhetorical fanfare, Aiyar says:

“For the sake of consumers as well as farmers, let the GM revolution spread fast and wide.”

He then rounds on critics of GM by saying that well-funded NGOs like Greenpeace have enormous budgets and claim GM foods are unsafe. However, Aiyar says this is flatly disproved by the simple fact that in the US, which grows a wide variety of GM foods, over three trillion meals have been eaten without any adverse consequences. He claims activists seek to delay GM crops by using the courts and rented mobs financed partly by dollar inflows. As a consequence, they have increased approval time in many western countries.

By referring to lobbyist Patrick Moore in his piece, Aiyer seems to think he can strengthen his argument. He notes Moore is seeking funding to prosecute Greenpeace and other NGOs for what he calls “crimes against humanity” for supposedly depriving farmers and hungry people of the benefits of GM crops.

Parroting pro-GMO neoliberal dogma

As someone associated with the Cato Institute, Aiyar certainly promotes the kind of politically-motivated, irrational, pro-neoliberal ideology that one might expect.

Perhaps he would like to answer this: with GDP growth slowing and automation replacing human labour, where are the jobs going to come from to cater for hundreds of millions of agriculture sector workers who he would like to see removed from the agriculture sector? Jobless ‘growth’ is a global phenomenon.

While underinvesting in and deliberately running down agriculture has become the norm and part of the neoliberal project in India, the corporate-industrial sector has failed to deliver in terms of boosting exports or creating jobs, despite the massive hand outs and tax exemptions given to it (see this and this). The number of jobs created in India between 2005 and 2010 was 2.7 million (the years of high GDP growth). According to International Business Times, 15 million enter the workforce every year (see here).

Although Aiyar attempts to depict his views as being in the interests of India, as previously outlined the type of sentiments he expresses part of the push towards privatised, commercialised, industrial agriculture at the behest of private capital and Western agribusiness interests channeled through the World Bank, WTO and the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture.

Part of this agenda is the promotion of GM. In its fully-referenced report of September 2014, Food & Water Watch rejects the type of implication Aiyar and others like him make: the pro-GMO lobby has science on its side and opponents indulge in pseudo-science. This issue has also been addressed previously and is shown to be baseless, ideological and politically motivated.

In India’s case, Aiyar implies that (better yielding) GM Mustard is required to cut down on edible oils imports. But consider that India was almost self-sufficient in edible oils by the mid-1990s. Its farmers met 97% of domestic need. However, its edible oil import bill has increased dramatically since then. By 2013, India was the world’s second biggest importer of edible oils.

Aiyar’s argument is little more than a smokescreen to divert attention from the deliberate running down of the indigenous edible oil sector, which stems from neoliberal trade policies driven by the vested interests of global agribusiness. Readers may consult this article that outlines the cynical nature of the argument being put forward: that the indigenous edible oil sector exhibits low productivity and GM mustard is required to increase productivity. It’s not low productivity but trade policies that are the real issue. GM is offered as a bogus solution.

Desperation time

That Aiyar would try to convince his readers of his case by referring to Chengal Reddy displays a certain desperation. Reddy is not a ‘farmers’ leader’. Reddy’s (lack of) credentials and background can be read about here, where it states:

“Pro-GM lobbyists describe Reddy as speaking “on behalf of small-holder farmers,” but he actually lobbies for Andhra Pradesh’s big commercial farmers. And although Reddy sometimes presents himself as ‘a farmer’, in interviews he has admitted to knowing little about farming having never farmed in his life.”

The fact he cites Reddy and not the 50 farmers’ unions that oppose GM mustard speaks volumes. These unions issued a statement that pitched for the promotion of already available “feasible alternatives that are safe, affordable and farmer-controlled”:

“In the case of mustard, for instance, there are non-transgenic hybrids already available in the market, in addition to high-yielding mustard varieties. Further, new agro-ecological approaches like System of Mustard Intensification are out-yielding these unsafe solutions significantly, ensuring vastly-increased profitability for farmers, if yield is a concern.”

Let Aiyar scientifically back up his claim that three trillion meals containing GMOs have been consumed without adverse consequences. His assertion is pure rhetoric. Since GMOs entered the US (fraudulently), various illnesses have spiked and, as with the tobacco industry before GMOs, the pro-GMO lobby employs similar tactics by saying ‘prove it’ (GMOs are harmful) and attempts to roll out ‘studies’ like ‘three trillion meals‘ to confuse the issue. Pinpointing the specific health impacts of a cocktail of pesticides, fungicides and GMOs can be difficult, but there is growing evidence as to which causes what illnesses.

Moreover, the onus should have been on the GMO sector to prove safety prior to the mass release of GM (which it never has) and not on everyone else to play catch up to prove they are not safe. It is a very convenient tactic that the industry employs.

Aiyar seems a little late to the game by bringing up the ‘crimes against humanity’ cliché. He seems to think he can make a valid point by referring to Patrick Moore and his rhetoric (exposed here). The use of the ‘crimes against humanity’ slur has become tiresome and has been shown to be what it is: an industry-inspired attack that attempts to depict critics of GM as being beyond the boundaries of common decency. Readers can consult this article that exposes this kind of tactic for what it really is.

Whose influence should we really be focusing on?

It should come as no surprise that anyone associated with the Cato Institute would attack groups that challenge international capital and its neoliberal globalisation project. Indeed, in his piece, Aiyar implies opponents of GM are a bunch of Marxists (or former Marxists). Readers can see more about the institute here, its right-wing ideology, impact on the former Bush administration, links with the Kochs and its privatisation/deregulation agenda.

It should also therefore come as no surprise that Aiyar has nothing to say in his piece about the influence of transnational biotech/agribusiness sector both globally and within India, while he chooses to focus exclusively on the ‘enormous influence’ of anti-GM groups who are supposedly blocking GM. The political clout and influence of critics of GM is dwarfed by that of the pro-GMO industry and associated international private capital in general, which is conspiring to destroy indigenous agriculture the world over and impose green revolution technology and GMOs on nations and people: look no further than ‘corporate America’ and its infiltration of Africa, facilitated by Bill Gates.

In India, from research institutes, regulatory agencies and decision-making bodies riddled with conflicts of interests to strings-attached trade deals and nuclear agreements and pressure from the World Bank, it is not difficult to see just whose interests are being served.

Aiyar has nothing to say about the smearing and ruining of independent scientists whose credible research highlighted findings that questioned the safety of GM. And he has nothing to say about how the pro-GMO lobby employs unscientific polemics and targets the heart of science to ensure its will prevails, while there is silence about the conflicts of interests and industry links (also see this) of those who carry out these attacks.

So just who is engaging in ‘pseudo-science’ and just who is displaying bought-and-paid-for mob mentality?

The report Seedy Business shows how science is swayed, bought or biased by agribusiness in many ways, such as suppressing adverse findings, harming the careers of scientists who produce such findings, controlling the funding that shapes what research is conducted, the lack of independent US-based testing of health and environmental risks of GMOs and tainting scientific reviews of GMOs by conflicts of interest.

Is “unremitting fraud” and “regulatory delinquency” perfectly fine?

Aiyar is irked by hold ups in the sanctioning of the commercialisation of GMOs in India and elsewhere. He should consider that most consumers in the EU are against GMOs in their food – not because they have been brainwashed by Greenpeace but because they have genuine concerns – and Europe has largely kept out GM on the basis of a precautionary principle based on sound reasoning and science.

But perhaps in India’s case, the pro-GMO lobby in the media is willing to support unremitting fraud and regulatory delinquency.

The decision to sanction the commercialisation of GM mustard has been delayed due to accusations of  “unremitting fraud” and “regulatory delinquency.” Further evidence has comes to light about the underhand tactics that have been used to fudge and manipulate field trial data under a veil of secrecy.

Should we also ignore four high-level reports advising against the adoption of these crops in India (the ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’; the ‘Sopory Committee Report’; the ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ Report on GM crops; and the ‘Technical Expert Committee [TEC] Final Report’)?

The higher yields often attributed to the GM mustard under discussion are not due to GM but to the hybridisation of normal crop genes (ie conventional breeding) and rigged testing. And there lies the crux of the matter. Conventional breeding and traditional seeds and patterns of agriculture developed over centuries are better suited to adverse climatic conditions and Indian soils than anything that GMOs can offer. So what is the point of GMOs: ‘helping the farmer’ or pure commercial gain for the corporations?

The ‘stunning success’ of Bt cotton

Aiyar claims Bt cotton in India has been a runaway success. However, despite neoliberal ‘free’ market ideologues saying that farmers have overwhelmingly chosen to adopt it, it has been highlighted time and again that GM cotton in India is nowhere near as successful as he claims it to be (for instance, see this and this) and that farmers do not necessarily actively choose GM (see here, here, here, here and here).

GM cotton in India has been a disaster for farmers in rain-fed areas according to the peer-reviewed paper referred to in this piece, and there is enough evidence to show that the GM revolution Aiyar calls for may not lead to ‘rich harvests’ but often human and ecological disaster and the undermining of self-sufficiency and food sovereignty (see this and this).

Moreover, if Aiyar is concerned about drought, maybe he should pay attention to how planting Bt cotton ahead of traditional crops that are better suited to Indian soils has actually contributed to drought conditions.

And as for Bt brinjal in Bangladesh being a success (and GM in general reducing pesticide use – which is not the case), Aiyar again needs a reality check. This article addresses similar claims made by the BBC highlights the baseless nature of such statements.

Aiyar’s piece is standard pro-GMO PR. Unfortunately, this type of article is becoming all too common (see this and this). Instead of informing the public, this form of ‘journalism’ is designed to misrepresent facts and misinform the public on behalf of powerful commercial interests.

Salim Lamrani, académico especialista de las relaciones entre Cuba y Estados Unidos, conversa sobre la cuestión de los derechos humanos, punto de divergencia entre ambos países.

Sébastien Madau: Estados Unidos ha indicado que iba a evocar con Cuba el tema de los derechos humanos, ¿a qué aspectos se refiere?

Salim Lamrani: Estados Unidos siempre ha instrumentalizado el tema de los derechos humanos con fines políticos. Conviene recordar que desde 1991 Washington esgrime el argumento de los “derechos humanos” para justificar su hostilidad hacia La Habana y mantener las sanciones económicas que estrangulan a la población de la isla. Para explicar el estado de sitio contra Cuba, la retórica diplomática fluctuó según las épocas: desde 1960 Washington aludió sucesivamente a las nacionalizaciones, a la alianza con la Unión Soviética, luego a la ayuda que brindó Cuba a los movimientos de independencia en África y a los grupos revolucionarios en América Latina y finalmente a los derechos humanos.

Para Estados Unidos los derechos humanos y la democracia son automáticamente sinónimos de multipartidismo, de economía de mercado y de medios de comunicación privados. Desde luego los cubanos no comparten este punto de vista.

SM: Cuba, por su parte, dice estar dispuesta a abordar esta problemática, pero siempre que se hable también de la situación en Estados Unidos, ¿qué quiere subrayar exactamente?

SL: Cuba siempre ha estado dispuesta a abordar todos los temas con Estados Unidos con tal de que se respeten tres principios: la igualdad soberana, la reciprocidad y la no injerencia en los asuntos internos.

Cuba considera que los derechos económicos y sociales son tan importantes como los derechos civiles y políticos. Así, es imprescindible que todos los ciudadanos, cualquiera que sea su origen étnico, geográfico o social, tengan acceso universal a la educación, a la salud, a la cultura, al ocio y a la seguridad, sin ninguna discriminación. Evidentemente la sociedad de Estados Unidos está lejos de ofrecer todas estas garantías. Cerca de 50 millones de personas no tienen acceso a una protección social digna de ese nombre. Las minorías de ese país tan rico sufren desempleo, precariedad y son las principales víctimas de la violencia que cometen las fuerzas del orden. La repartición de las riquezas es inexistente. Ahora bien, toda democracia debe proceder a una repartición equitativa de la riqueza nacional para que cada ciudadano pueda vivir con dignidad.

SM: Entre Cuba, que no piensa renunciar a su sistema socialista, y Estados Unidos que tiene como objetivo mantener su posición de primera potencia capitalista del mundo, ¿acaso se puede imaginar que este debate termine en un statu quo y que se restablezcan al mismo tiempo las relaciones?

SL: Conviene recordar que el conflicto que enfrenta a Cuba y Estados Unidos es asimétrico. De un lado hay un agresor, Estados Unidos, que impone sanciones económicas que afectan a todas las categorías de la población desde hace más de medio siglo; que ocupa ilegalmente una parte del territorio nacional de un país soberano, Guantánamo; que financia a una oposición interna para subvertir el orden establecido, lo que es ilegal según el derecho internacional; que fomenta, mediante la Ley de Ajuste Cubano y el Programa Médico Cubano, la emigración ilegal exclusiva de cubanos para vaciar el país de su capital humano; y que multiplica los programas de radio y televisión, Radio y TV Martí, destinados a sembrar la discordia en Cuba, en violación, otra vez, de la legislación internacional.

Por otra parte se encuentra Cuba, una pequeña nación de 11 millones de habitantes, con sus virtudes y límites, que nunca agredió a Estados Unidos, que siempre declaró su voluntad de mantener relaciones pacíficas con todos los países del mundo, basadas en el derecho internacional, y que aspira a elegir su propio camino y a edificar una sociedad diferente respetando la voluntad del pueblo soberano.

Así, todo depende de Washington. Si el vecino del Norte acepta la realidad de una Cuba diferente, independiente y soberana, que no negocia su sistema político, ni su modelo social, ni su política exterior, entonces ambos países podrán coexistir en un entendimiento cordial y los dos pueblos, que tienen tantas cosas en común, podrán reforzar sus lazos fraternales.

 

Articulo en francés :

Cuba / Etats-Unis : « Un conflit asymétrique »

Fuente original:

http://www.lamarseillaise.fr/analyses-de-la-redaction/decryptage/47247-cuba-etats-unis-un-conflit-asymetrique

 

Doctor en Estudios Ibéricos y Latinoamericanos de la Universidad Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, Salim Lamrani es profesor titular de la Universidad de La Reunión y periodista, especialista de las relaciones entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. Su último libro se titula Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2014, con un prólogo de Eduardo Galeano. http://monthlyreview.org/books/pb4710/Contacto: [email protected] ; [email protected]

Página Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SalimLamraniOfficiel

Author Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Having removed the reformist President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Washington is now disposing of the reformist President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.

Washington used a federal judge to order Argentina to sacrifice its debt restructuring program in order to pay US vulture funds the full value of defaulted Argentine bonds that the vulture funds had bought for a few pennies on the dollar.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/us-vulture-funds-argentina-bankruptcy

These vultures were called “creditors” who had made “loans” regardless of the fact that they were not creditors and had made no loans. They were opportunists after easy money and were used by Washington to get rid of a reformist government.

President Kirchner resisted and, thus, she had to go.  Washington concocted a story that Kirchner covered up an alleged Iranian bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994. This implausible fantasy, for which there is no evidence of Iranian involvement, was fed to one of Washington’s agents in the state prosecutor’s office, and a dubious event of 22 years ago was used to clear Cristina Kirchner (image right) out of the way of the American looting of Argentina.

In Brazil, Washington has used corruption insinuations to get President Rousseff impeached by the lower house.  Evidence is not necessary, just allegations.  It is no different from “Iranian nukes,” Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” Assad’s “use of chemical weapons,”  or in Rousseff’s case merely insinuations. The Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, notes that Rousseff “hasn’t been accused of anything.” The American-backed elites are simply using impeachment to remove a president who they cannot defeat electorally.

In short, this is Washington’s move against the BRICS.  Washington is moving to put into political power a rightwing party that Washington controls in order to terminate Brazil’s growing relationships with China and Russia.

The great irony is that the impeachment bill was presided over by the corrupt lower house speaker, Eduardo Cunha, who was recently discovered to have stashed millions of dollars in secret Swiss bank accounts (perhaps his pay-off from Washington) and who lied under oath when he denied having foreign bank accounts.  You can read the sordid story here:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-complicity-after-vote-to-remove-brazils-president-key-opposition-figure-holds-meetings-in-washington/5521059

Kirchner and Rousseff’s “crimes” are their efforts to have the governments of Argentina and Brazil represent the Argentine and Brazilian peoples rather than the elites and Wall Street.  In Washington these are serious offenses as Washington uses the elites to control South American countries.  Whenever Latin Americans elect a government that represents them, Washington overthrows the government or assassinates the president.

Washington is close to returning Venezuela to the control of the Spanish elite allied with Washington.

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2016/04/new-coup-plot-hatched-in-venezuela.html

The presidents of Ecuador and Bolivia are also targeted.  One reason Washington will not permit its British lapdog to honor the asylum Ecuador granted to Julian Assange is that Washington expects to have its own agent back in as President of Ecuador, at which time Assange’s asylum will be repealed.

Washington has always blocked reform in Latin America.  Latin American peoples will remain American serfs until they elect governments by such large majorities that the governments can exile the traitorous elites, close the US embassies, and expel all US corporations. Every Latin American country that has an American presence has no future other than serfdom.

The Brussels Terror Attacks: Fake Videos and Images. “The Man in the Hat”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 20 2016

Andrew Jackson “Demoted”, Replaced by Civil Rights Activist Harriet Tubman on New $20 Dollar Bills

By Stephen Lendman, April 21 2016

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist who is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his article exposing the My Lai massacre by the U.S. military in Vietnam. More recently, he exposed the U.S. government’s abuse of detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison facility.

Hersh’s new book, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, is a corrective to the official account of the war on terror. Drawing from accounts of a number of high-level military officials, Hersh challenges a number of commonly accepted narratives: that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the Sarin gas attack in Ghouta; that the Pakistani government didn’t know Bin Laden was in the country; that the late ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in a solely diplomatic capacity; and that Assad did not want to give up his chemical weapons until the U.S. called on him to do so.

Ken Klippenstein: In the book you describe Saudi financial support for the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was being kept in Pakistan. Was that Saudi government officials, private individuals or both?

Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know what role was played by whom.

KK: So you don’t know if the hush money was from the Saudi government or private individuals?

SH: The money was from the government … what the Saudis were doing, so I’ve been told, by reasonable people (I haven’t written this) is that they were also passing along tankers of oil for the Pakistanis to resell. That’s really a lot of money.

KK: For the Bin Laden compound?

SH: Yeah, in exchange for being quiet. The Paks traditionally have done security for both Saudi Arabia and UAE.

KK: Do you have any idea how much Saudi Arabia gave Pakistan in hush money?

SH: I have been given numbers, but I haven’t done the work on it so I’m just relaying. I know it was certainly many—you know, we’re talking about four or five years—hundreds of millions [of dollars]. But I don’t have enough to tell you.

KK: You quote a retired U.S. official as saying the Bin Laden killing was “clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder” and a former SEAL commander as saying “by law we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is homicide.”

Do you think Bin Laden was deprived of due process?

SH: [Laughs] He was a prisoner of war! The SEALs weren’t proud of that mission; they were so mad it was outed…I know a lot about what they think and what they thought and what they were debriefed, I will tell you that. They were very unhappy about the attention paid to that because they went in and it was just a hit.

Look, they’ve done it before. We do targeted assassinations. That’s what we do. They understood—the SEALs—that if they were captured by the Pakistani police authorities, they could be tried for murder. They understood that.

KK: Why didn’t they apprehend Bin Laden? Can you imagine the intelligence we could have gotten from him?

SH: The Pakistani high command said go kill him, but for chrissake don’t leave a body, don’t arrest him, just tell them a week later that you killed him in Hindu Kush. That was the plan.

Many sections, particularly in the Urdu-speaking sections, were really very positive about Bin Laden. Significant percentages in some areas supported Bin Laden. They [the Pakistani government] would’ve been under great duress if the average person knew that they’d helped us kill him.

KK: How did it hurt U.S./Pakistan relations when, as you point out in your book, Obama violated his promise not to mention Pakistan’s cooperation with the assassination?

SH: We spend a lot of time with [Pakistani] generals Pasha and Kayani, the head of the army and ISI, the intelligence service. Why? Why are we so worried about Pakistan? Because they have [nuclear] bombs. … at least 100, probably more. And we want to think that they’re going to share what they know with us and they’re not hiding it.

We don’t really know everything we think we know and they don’t tell us everything… so when he [Obama] is doing that, he’s really messing around with the devil in a sense.

…. He [Bin Laden] had wives and children there. Did we ever get to them? No. We never got to them. Just think about all the things we didn’t do. We didn’t get to any of the wives, we didn’t do much interrogation, we let it go.

There are people that know much more about this and I wish they would talk, but they don’t.

KK: You write that Obama authorized a ratline wherein CIA funneled arms from Libya into Syria and they ended up in jihadi hands. [According to Hersh, this operation was coordinated via the Benghazi consulate where U.S. ambassador Stevens was killed.] What was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role in this given her significant role in Libya?

SH: The only thing we know is that she was very close to Petraeus who was the CIA director at the time … she’s not out of the loop, she knows when there’s covert ops. … That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.

KK: In the book you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only—nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure.

What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?

SH: Do you really think that at any time this is discussed? You know who’s sanest on this: Dan Ellsberg. When I first met Dan, it was way early—in ’70, ’71, during the Vietnam War. I think I met him before the Pentagon Papers were around. I remember him telling me that he asked that question at a meeting while planning the war [regarding B-52 targets] and nobody had even looked at it.

You really don’t get a very good hard, objective look. You can see a movie in which they seem to do it, but that’s not really so.

I don’t know if [regarding Syria] they looked at collateral damage and noncombatants, but I do know that in wars in the past, that’s never been a big issue. … you’re talking about the country that dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki.

KK: In a recent interview with the Atlantic, Obama characterized his foreign policy as “Don’t do stupid shit.” 

SH: I read the Jeff Goldberg piece…and it of course drove me nuts, but that’s something else.

KK: As you point out in your book, Obama originally wanted to remove Assad. Isn’t that the definition of stupid? The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups.

SH: God knows I can’t tell you why anybody does anything. I’m not inside their head. I can tell you that the same question was asked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—Dempsey—which is why I was able to write that story about their going, indirectly, behind his [Obama’s] back because nobody could figure out why.

I don’t know why we persist on living in the Cold War, but we do. Russia actually did a very good job. They not only did the bombing that was more effective than what we do, I think that’s fair to say. Russia also did stuff that was sort of more subtle and more interesting: they renewed the Syrian army. They took many major units of the Syrian army offline, gave them R&R and re-equipped them. Got new arms, got a couple weeks off, then they came back, got more training and became a much better army.

I think in the beginning, there’s just no question, we wanted to get rid of Bashar. I think they misread the whole resistance. Wikileaks is very good on this…there’s enough State Department documents that show that from 2003 on, we really had a policy—not very subtle, not violent, but millions of dollars given to opposition people. We certainly were not a nonpartisan foreign government inside Syria.

Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period.

One of the things that comes across just in the current stories about all the travails we’re having about ISIS allegedly running all these terror teams in Brussels and in the suburbs of Paris… it’s very clear, ironically, that one of the things France and Belgium (and a lot of other countries) did was after the Syrian civil war began, if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’

So they actually pushed a lot of people to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas. And they would spend four or five months, come back and do organized crime and get in jail and next thing you know they’re killing people. There’s a real pattern there.

I do remember when the war began in 2003, our war against Baghdad, I was in Damascus working for The New Yorker then and I saw Bashar and one of the things he told me, he said, ‘Look, we’ve got a bunch of radical kids and if they want to go fight, if they want to leave the mosque here in Damascus and go fight in Baghdad, we said fine! We even gave them buses!’

So there’s always been a tremendous, Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?

KK: So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational.

SH: I don’t know. I would also say, why wasn’t the first door we knocked on after 9/11, Russia’s? They just had a terrible 10-year war with Chechnya. Believe me, the Chechen influence in the Sunni world in terms of jihadism is strong. For example I’ve been told by my friends in the intelligence community that al-Baghdadi (who runs ISIS) is surrounded by a lot of guys with experience in Chechnya. A lot of people involved in that operation did.

So who knows the most about jihadism? You look at it from the Russian point of view—we never like looking at things from other people’s point of view.

KK: In the book you quote a Joint Chiefs of Staff adviser who said that Brennan told the Saudis to stop arming the extremist rebels in Syria and their weapons will dry up—which seems like a rational request—but then, you point out, the Saudis ramped up arms support.

Seymour Hersh: That’s true.

KK: Did the U.S. do anything to punish the Saudis for it?

SH: Nothing. Of course not. No, no. I’ll tell you what’s going on right now … al Nusra, certainly a jihadist group… has new arms. They’ve got some tanks now—I think the Saudis are supplying stuff. They’ve got tanks now, have a lot of arms, and are staging some operations around Aleppo. There’s a ceasefire and even though they’re not part of it, they obviously took advantage of the ceasefire to resupply. It’s going to be bloody.

KK: Just to be clear, the U.S. hasn’t done anything to punish or at least disincentivize the Saudis from arming our enemies in Syria?

SH: Quite the contrary. The Saudis and Qatar and the Turks put money into those arms [sent to Syrian jihadis].

You’re asking the right questions. Do we say anything? No. Turkey’s Erdogan has played a complete double game: for years he supported and accommodated ISIS. The border was wide open—Hatay Province—guys were going back and forth, bad guys. We know Erdogan’s deeply involved. He’s changing his tune slightly but he’s been deeply involved in this.

Let me talk to you about the sarin story [the sarin gas attack in Ghouta, a suburb near Damascus, which the U.S. government attributed to the Assad regime] because it really is in my craw.  In this article that was this long series of interviews [of Obama] by Jeff Goldberg…he says, without citing the source (you have to presume it was the president because he’s talking to him all the time) that the head of National Intelligence, General [James] Clapper, said to him very early after the [sarin] incident took place, “Hey, it’s not a slam dunk.”

You have to understand in the intelligence community—Tenet [Bush-era CIA director who infamously said Iraqi WMD was a “slam dunk”] is the one who said that about the war in Baghdad—that’s a serious comment. That means you’ve got a problem with the intelligence. As you know I wrote a story that said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the president that information the same day. I now know more about it.

The president’s explanation for [not bombing Syria] was that the Syrians agreed that night, rather than be bombed, they’d give up their chemical weapons arsenal, which in this article in the Atlantic, Goldberg said they [the Syrians] had never disclosed before. This is ludicrous. Lavrov [Russia’s Foreign Minister] and Kerry had talked about it for a year—getting rid of the arsenal—because it was under threat from the rebels.

The issue was not that they [the Syrians] suddenly caved in. [Before the Ghouta attack] there was a G-20 summit and Putin and Bashar met for an hour. There was an official briefing from Ben Rhodes and he said they talked about the chemical weapons issue and what to do. The issue was that Bashar couldn’t pay for it—it cost more than a billion bucks. The Russians said, ‘Hey, we can’t pay it all. Oil prices are going down and we’re hurt for money.’ And so, all that happened was we agreed to handle it. We took care of a lot of the costs of it.

Guess what? We had a ship, it was called the Cape Maid, it was parked out in the Med. The Syrians would let us destroy this stuff [the chemical weapons]… there was 1,308 tons that was shipped to the port…and we had, guess what, a forensic unit out there. Wouldn’t we like to really prove—here we have all his sarin and we had sarin from what happened in Ghouta, the UN had a team there and got samples—guess what?

It didn’t match. But we didn’t hear that. I now know it, I’m going to write a lot about it.

Guess what else we know from the forensic analysis we have (we had all the missiles in their arsenal). Nothing in their arsenal had anything close to what was on the ground in Ghouta. A lot of people I know, nobody’s going to go on the record, but the people I know said we couldn’t make a connection, there was no connection between what was given to us by Bashar and what was used in Ghouta. That to me is interesting. That doesn’t prove anything, but it opens up a door to further investigation and further questioning.

This interview was lightly edited for readability.

“Periodic vigilance will protect us against new generations of lords and masters who exploit national myths to lure us into enterprises born in timidity and corrosive mateship.” -Andrew Hamilton, Eureka Street, May 6, 2015

Old countries have baggage so heavy it drags, stifles and even drowns.   Incapable of getting it off, history becomes the assault of the present for those who wish to grope for the future.  Young countries like Australia (youth here is only from the perspective of the invasive settlers), struggle to create a baggage to be bound to.

Comically, then, a state like Australia yearns to have a blood soaked, folly-driven set of variables that make it a state, when in actual fact, it might do something different.  This might, in part, explain the foolish insistence on the part of its vassal politicians to crave the breast of maternal empire, terrified that being weaned off it might lead to yellow-coloured extinction.

The Anzac tradition is one of those desperate calls to cling on. It is an attempt to create a baggage of patriotic necessity, stubbornly masculine and oblivious.  (Excuses are always needed for creating piles of corpses.)  It is an attempt to catch up with other nations with centuries of assumed legacies and concocted contributions, be they flags brought down by divine inspiration, or the sign of the Chi-Rho, as Constantine was meant to have witnessed before the Battle of Milvian Ridge in 312.  But little Australia (only in terms of population) must behave like the sullen child of history, hoping to be acknowledged in great patriotic traditions.

A glance at the historical incidents of the morning of April 25, 1915, and one sees an opportunistic force invading Gallipoli at the behest of Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty.  As A. P. Rowe noted when Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide University during the 1950s, “If you care to look at the newspapers of the time you will find that life in Australia had not been much affected by war” (Australian Quarterly, Mar 1957).

Churchill had been boasting about his military imagination and intuition.  “I have it in me to be a successful soldier,” he claimed with self-evident conviction.  “I can visualise great movements and combinations.”  Not quite what would transpire in the Dardanelles.

Even before the slaughter on that day began, Churchill was already aware that a good lot of bloodletting would be in store in his effort to put down the sick man of Europe.  His combinations and movements would come with carnage.

“The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli would no doubt be heavy, but there would be no more war with Turkey.  A good army of 50,000 and sea-power – that is the end of the Turkish menace.”

Within a month of the landing by French, British and Australian and New Zealand forces (collectively known as Anzac), the Allies found themselves 45,000 men short.  The campaign would last for nine months and see over a hundred thousand deaths, and casualty lists on both sides peaking at a quarter of a million.

Historical baggage is useful political ballast, the bird seed for demagogic intent. It feeds the apologetics of war, providing the alibi for the next righteous military action. Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, was a warring wet dreamer, a dull clerk who wished to be great. His desperation to attach Australian interests to the carriage of Washington’s folly should be a matter of criminal consequence.

Other features always find their message in the Anzac Spirit, sprung forth from Gallipoli.  An industry of commemoration soon crept up, barely as the bodies were buried.  The Veteran Affairs Department knows its sacred cow, and polices the “branding” of Anzac with an accountant’s dedication.

Australian servicemen and women, fighting in distant theatres without knowledge, awareness or understanding – this is the Gallipoli heritage, the inverted idea that being on foreign soil for pre-emptive gain is somehow a good idea.  Australian resources have been deployed in what was then Malaya during the Emergency, on the Korean peninsula, secretly in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq, with other theatres.  All needing the oddly crafted Anzac image which, let’s face it, was forged in the heat of invading a sovereign state.

Re-deployed again after September 2001, the invasion theme was embroidered with tortured notions of liberty and freedom.  This was always pure nonsense.  Australia’s involvement in such countries is as fatuous as the next western state. Its politicians, however, remain desperate to justify their complicity, their desperation in being in the stream of history.

The final point of all of this manufacture lies in the strange symbiotic relationship between Turkish contributions and Australian worship.  On Turkish soil, distant from Australia, the country’s youth, the veterans, the relatives, will engage in a ceremony of acknowledgement to the slaughtered, those lives expended in an obscene chess move on the part of the Royal Admiralty. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his successors should receive posthumous Australian awards for having permitted the annual pilgrimage by tourist collectives of vowel-killing Australians.

The perverse logic of the Dardanelles engagement remains as an annual reminder, one that Churchill himself alluded to when reminded about the calamity on the election trail.  “Don’t imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it.”

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

Earthquakes caused by injection of shale oil and gas production wastes — and methane leakage from shale gas pipelines — have proliferated in recent years, with both issues well-studied in the scientific literature and grabbing headlines in newspapers nationwide.

Lesser-mentioned, though perhaps at the root of both problems, is a key exemption won by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact (IOGCC) via a concerted lobbying effort in the 1980’s. That is, classifying oil and gas wastes as something other than “hazardous” or “solid wastes” under Subtitles C and D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), thusexempting the industry from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement.

The RCRA exemption has played a front-and-center role in two recent federal lawsuits on both of these issues — the frackquake case just started and the pipeline emissions one recently resulted in a favorable judgment for the industry.

Those cases, Sierra Club v. Chesapeake Operating LLC, Et Al and Northern Illinois Gas Company  (a Nicor subsidiary) v. City of Evanston, offer an opportunity for a history lesson. At the center of that history, a DeSmog investigation reveals, is theIOGCC.

IOGCC, a recent InsideClimate News investigation demonstrated using documents obtained by DeSmog and GreenpeaceUSA, is a constitutionally-authorized interstate compact that more or less has served as a Congress-chartered industry lobbying node since signed into law way back in 1935.

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IOGCC’s RCRA Exemption

Beginning in the late 1970’s, IOGCC entered the fray in the battle to lock in an oil and gas industry RCRA exemption. The earliest IOGCC model resolution dealing with RCRA dates back to one passed in 1979.

As with the Halliburton Loophole and the Energy Policy Act of 2005, in its own newsletter the IOGCC readily admits the prominent role it played in landing the industry a RCRA enforcement loophole in a 2006 retrospective by IOGCC.

In 1980, the ball got rolling on landing this exemption with the Bentsen Amendment, named after the late U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX). Bentsen ran on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket in 1988 as Michael Dukakis’ vice president pick.

Located in the Solid Waste Disposal Act Amendments of 1980, the Bentsen Amendment called for the temporary exemption of EPA toxic wastes enforcement of “drilling fluids, produced waters, and other wastes associated with the exploration, development, or production of crude oil or natural gas” under RCRA. EPA was then called on by Congress to study the environmental and public health impacts associated with all of the cradle-to-grave impacts of the oil and gas exploration and production process.

Bentsen, as it would happen, had a staffer who worked on the RCRA issue named Lee Fuller. Fuller would eventually pass through the government-industry revolving door and become a lobbyist for the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), the creator of the powerful fracking front group Energy in Depth, where he still works today.

“Lee Fuller was Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s staff during the 1979-1980 RCRA development and debate on the provision; more than any other person, he is the architect of the current law,” IPAA proclaimed in a September 2010 IPAA newsletter.

A push to make the temporary exemption a permanent reality ensued over the next eight years and ended with a major industry triumph in 1988.

One of the reasons the push lasted eight years instead of two: it wasn’t supposed to take that long, at least legally. Under the dictates of the statute, EPA had until October 1982 to publish its report.

Failing to abide by its duty to do so, the Alaska Center for the Environment brought a lawsuit in 1985 against the EPA to force it to comply with the Bentsen Amendment. A docket sheet obtained by DeSmog documents that American Petroleum Institute, Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia and West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association all served as intervenors for the case.

Image Credit: U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska

“Happy New Year”

DeSmog has also obtained documents from Tarleton State University’s Charles Stenholm collection offering a rare glimpse inside of the eight-year push that took place in the years between passage of the Bentsen Amendment and the eventual settlement of the Alaska Center for the Environment case.

The documents show that U.S. Rep. Stenholm (D-TX) appeared elated to do the bidding of the industry upon hearing of itsRCRA concerns, as well exemplified in a 1987 letter exchange he had with the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.

Image Credit: Tarleton State University Charles Stenholm Collection

By the end of 1987, with the RCRA oil and gas wastes exemption more or less locked in, Permian Basin Petroleum Association sent a “Happy New Year” card to Stenholm thanking him for his service to the oil and gas industry.

Image Credit: Tarleton State University Charles Stenholm Collection

“Right Decision”

In 1988, J. Winston Porter — who then served as EPA’s Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response and now is a climate change denier who runs his own consultancy — wrote a memo calling for EPA to continue the RCRAexemption as applied to the oil and gas industry. Instead of regulating oil and gas wastes, Porter argued for a collaborative approach between IOGCC and EPA called the Council on Regulatory Needs.

“We were concerned about layering on another level of regulations,” Porter told The Washington Post in 1988.  “It was a tough decision but I think we made the right decision.”

An Associated Press story also reported that the oil and gas industry played a key role in maintaining the RCRA exemption and named some of the congressmen who helped make it happen. One of those included, once again, Lloyd Bentsen.

“Sens. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and Don Nickles, R-Okla., pressured the agency, as did the Interior and Energy departments and some states,” reported AP. “EPA administrators deny their call was swayed by political pressure.”

Don Nickles, also listed, now works as a lobbyist representing clients such as Anadarko Petroleum and ExxonMobil through his firm Nickles Group.

At the time of the rule-making decision, Don Clay — now Managing Director of Environmental and Regulatory Affairs for Koch Industries — headed up EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. Clay started his own firm called Don Clay Associates after leaving his EPA gig, where one of his clients was Koch, thereafter landing the Koch job. Don Nickles also now works as an oil and gas industry lobbyist.

And IOGCC was involved until the 11th hour too, coordinating comments for submission among IOGCC member states’ governors on the RCRA guidelines in April 1988. One of those comments came from then-Oklahoma Governor Henry Bellmon, whose state is now the epicenter of the proliferation of frackquakes.

“I support EPA’s conclusion that the full RCRA regulations appear unnecessary and impractical at this time, but I would go one step further–it is unnecessary and impractical period,” wrote Bellmon. “EPA’s decision to recommend no additional regulations does not mean that an industry will go unregulated–rather that it recognizes the abilities of the state agencies to regulate oil and gas activities with proper concern for health and the environment, and the importance of the oil and gas industry to the security of this nation.”

An Earthworks report released in April 2015 details that many states, though, have adopted their own versions of the RCRAexemption, including New York, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

West Virginia’s then-Governor Arch A. Moore was among those to submit a comment to the EPA, citing the adequacy of his state’s regulatory program for oil and gas wastes. Representatives from Ohio and Pennsylvania also weighed in.

Image Credit: Oklahoma Historical Society

RCRA Referendum

A few short years later, a de facto RCRA exemption congressional referendum was held by Congress in 1991 and 1992 on the law at-large’s reauthorization, resulting in the continued oil and gas wastes exemption. IOGCC fought hard to make it so.

“The EPA’s report to Congress and the regulatory determination two years ago found no necessity to declare these wastes ‘hazardous,’” then IOGCC executive director W. Timothy Dowd testified in front of Congress on September 11, 1991:

Nothing has happened since to change that decision…There is no evidence that these wells…have caused significant environmental damage either to the crops and livestock that flourish around the well locations or to the farm families that live nearby. The IOGCC and its member States support the exemption of E&P wastes from RCRAsubtitle C classification…We see no reason for the Congress to impose burdensome and duplicate regulations on top of those that are presently working in the States

Dowd also testified at the 1991 hearing that IOGCC had already passed not one, but nine RCRA-centric model resolutions.

One of those resolutions, passed in March 1991, called for the creation of a “Council on Exploration and Production Wastes,” which would have been a 12-person committee (six from oil and gas regulatory agencies, six from state environmental regulatory agencies) with nine advisory committee members (three from oil and gas regulatory agencies, three from state environmental regulatory agencies and three industry members).

Image Credit: Rutgers School of Law-Newark

Further, currently IOGCC Executive Director Carl Michael Smith, then vice president of Oklahoma Independent Producers Association, was part of a pro-RCRA exemption lobbying team sent from Oklahoma to lobby Congress and the EPA not to overturn the loophole in 1992, according to a piece published by Oklahoma’s Journal Record. Smith formerly served as Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy for Department of Energy for the Bush Administration and as a lobbyist for former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham’s lobbying firm, The Abraham Group.

RCRA Exemption Efforts Continue

As the 20th century turned into the 21st, IOGCC stayed on top of monitoring and fighting back against efforts to overturn theRCRA exemption it had helped the oil and gas industry carve out.

Ensuring the exemption remained on the books, former IOGCC chairman and Alaska Governor Tony Knowles told those in attendance at the June 2000 IOGCC midyear meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, was a top objective of the compact.

Carol Browner, the EPA Administrator at the time, ensured IOGCC’s Knowles, former IOGCC chairman and Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating and IOGCC executive director Christine Hansen that the exemption would remain on the books during a private meeting.

“We wanted to make sure she knew the states are doing a great job managing the oil and gas conservation business and that neither she, nor her agency, need concern themselves with already successful programs like the ones we use to manage produced fluids,” theKnowles speech transcript still existing on the Way Back Machine, details.

I think she agrees that there are more important issues for her agency to address right now. She hears us loud and clear and there should be no barriers for RCRA reauthorization.

Just about a year later in April 2001, memoranda obtained by DeSmog show, IOGCCexpressed internal worry about the contents of the EPA’s “Brown Book” — the IOGCC-influenced publication that came out back in 1987 — and potential revisions to it. One memo shows that then-IOGCC Washington, DC Representative (lobbyist) Kevin Bliss, which he wrote to then-IOGCC executive director Christine Hansen, set up a meeting with EPA scientists Steve Sounder and Daniel Derkics to make sure it included no substantive policy changes and asked for a review copy and EPA said they could make that happen.

EPA, then run by the Bush Administration and not the Clinton Administration, ensured him no major policy changes loomed, while offering IOGCC a review copy as it had requested.

Dead on Arrival: Overturning RCRA

Some advocates have tried to overturn the RCRA exemption, albeit to date, doing so with little success.

For example in 2010, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition for rulemaking with the EPA, calling forEPA to end the RCRA exemption as applied to oil and gas. NRDC followed that up with a 2012 report documenting the environmental costs of the RCRA exemption.

With little delay and just a couple weeks later, IPAA pledged in its newsletter that it would utilize its resources and political connections like Lee Fuller and others, to fight back.

“While the RCRA Regulatory Determination is not an issue that should be addressed, clearly, the industry must respond to the NRDC threat,” IPAA wrote. “Clearly, American oil and natural gas production faces another compelling challenge by special interests dedicated to preventing new development, seeking to shut down existing operations…However, IPAA is well positioned to respond – and will keep its membership informed as it does and as this issue progresses.”

Fuller told industry publication Natural Gas Intelligence, commenting on the gravity of NRDC’s petition, that many wells would no longer be “economic” if NRDC’s push to overturn the RCRA exemption succeeded. NRDC told DeSmog it has yet to hear back from EPA on the status of the petition.

A few years after NRDC filed its petition, U.S. Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-PA) introduced a bill calling for reversal of the RCRAoil and gas wastes exemption.

Called the CLEANER (Closing Loopholes and Ending Arbitrary and Needless Evasion of Regulations) Act (H.R. 2825), a seven-person IPAA team that included Lee Fuller advocated against the bill’s passage, according to lobbying disclosure forms. Thebill made no progress in Congress and sat on the desk of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.

On the same day Cartwright introduced H.R. 2825, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources held a hearing on a different bill that would do the opposite of what the CLEANER Act called for: deregulation of fracking. That bill, Protecting States’ Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act (H.R. 2728), passed in the House and failed to pass nin the U.S. Senate.

At the hearing, Alaska’s IOGCC representative Catherine Foerster testified on behalf of both IOGCC

“The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission applauds Congressman Flores for introducing this bill and the members of this sub-committee for their interest in considering it,” she said. “The last thing the United States needs right now is duplicative regulation of an already stringently regulated process, unless, of course, we need increased federal spending and bureaucracy; delays in providing jobs, revenue, and affordable domestic energy; confusion among operators and regulators; and one-sizefits-all regulations that are ignorant to regional differences.”

Beyond testifying on behalf of H.R. 2728 at the congressional hearing, IOGCC played a central role in pushing that bill as a shadow non-registered lobbying squadron — alongside registered lobbying interests such as IPAA, Devon Energy, Chevron, Devon Energy, Chesapeake Energy, API, ANGA, ExxonMobil and others — behind the scenes.

E-mails obtained via the North Dakota Industrial Commission expose that IOGCC coordinated with the office of then-U.S.House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to gather signatures from state-level regulatory commissions in support of H.R.2728’s passage.

Image Credit: North Dakota Industrial Commission

Maryam Brown, who wrote the email to IOGCC Executive Director Carl Michael Smith that he then forwarded onto his state-level IOGCC oil and gas regulatory agency colleagues, formerly worked as a public policy manager for ConocoPhillips according to her LinkedIn page.

Cartwright gave the CLEANER Act a second try in December 2015, this time in the form of H.R. 4215. Mirroring its H.R. 2825 predecessor, it was dead on arrival and sat on the desk of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.

Back to the Future: RCRA, Frackquakes, Methane Leakage

The history of RCRA and its exempt status as applied to the oil and gas industry, brings us back to the future with the City of Evanston and Sierra Club cases.

As the ruling laid out in City of Evanston, “Methane gas was first detected in and around James Park [near a Nicor pipeline] in Evanston, Illinois, in 2012. If this methane were to reach concentrations at or exceeding the gas’s ‘lower explosive limit,’ it could combust when exposed to an ignition source.”

James Park is located near both an elementary school and a senior center and methane is a greenhouse gas more potent in terms of its global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Yet, even with those facts on the ground, the Court ruled that theRCRA exemption trumps all else.

“Congress has authorized the EPA to oversee the implementation of RCRA and to issue regulations with the force of law in furtherance of this effort,” wrote the Court. “And the EPA has concluded…that uncontained gases do not fall within RCRA’s definition of solid waste.”

It appears Nicor, and thus now the industry at-large due to the legal precedent City of Evanston sets, also got a bit of help from the Obama White House’s industry-friendly Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs along the way. OIRAconcluded, according to a November 2011 document, that “EPA interpretation of the term ‘contained gaseous material’ demonstrates that RCRA only applies to ‘contained’ gases, to the exclusion of ‘uncontained’ gases.”

John Z. Lee cited this OIRA interpretation in his ruling. It’s a simple conclusion from there, given the legal and regulatory state-of-play, wrote Judge Lee.

“Because the Court concludes that methane gas does not meet the definition of RCRA solid waste,” he wrote, “Evanston cannot base a RCRA claim on the release of methane gas from natural gas pipelines.”

The methane storage and leakage issue is not just a thing of the past, however, for IOGCC. In the wake of the California methane leakage crisis in California, IOGCC has created a natural gas storage working group.

Gas storage impacts are also exempt from Safe Drinking Water Act enforcement, a lesser known provision within the “Halliburton Loophole” that IOGCC played a central role in inserting into the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Meanwhile in the Sierra Club case, the plaintiffs utilized RCRA to say that Chesapeake and other companies have violated the law, calling on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma to set a new legal precedent: RCRA as applied to disposal of an oil and gas waste injection, which is causing rampant earthquakes in the state.

In exhibits cited as part of the complaint, Sierra Club points to the upswing in earthquakes in Oklahoma in recent years, juxtaposing this with figures depicting the accompanying upswing in levels of waste injection volume. As an exhibited map shows, the ‘quakes have increased alongside oil and gas waste injection levels increasing.

Image Credits: U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma

Yet even armed with damning facts and scientific truths on their side, by definition and as the history has shown, an oil and gas-related RCRA victory for Sierra Club in this case would prove unprecedented.

During the negotiations that had led to the Syrian peace talks, a key question was whether Russia and the Syrian army would be allowed to continue uninterrupted, their military actions against ISIS and al-Qaeda (al-Qaeda in Syria is called “al-Nusra”.)

Throughout the negotiations between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, there was agreement that ISIS (the US Government calls it ‘ISIL’) has no place there, and must continue to be bombed and attacked without interruption until exterminated; but Kerry opposed Lavrov’s demand to include al-Nusra’s (al-Qaeda’s) forces as also having no rightful place in Syria. Kerry finally accepted that al-Nusra should have no part in ruling Syria, and thus he reluctantly acceded to Russia’s demand. This agreement by Kerry enabled the peace talks to begin.

These talks broke down on April 18th because Al-Nusra was facing imminent defeat in the key city of Aleppo, and because such a defeat was unacceptable to Mohammed Alloush, the Saudi agent, and head of the Saudi-Wahhabist group, the Army of Islam. He was selected by King Saud to lead the rebel side at Syria’s peace negotiations. “There was ‘no way’ the opposition could resume formal talks amid a military escalation and a worsening humanitarian situation”, senior opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush told Reuters on April 18th.

Mohammed Alloush is allegedly a cousin of the recently deceased founder of the Army of Islam, Mohammed Zahran Alloush, who was called simply “Zahran Allous”. Mohammed Alloush now runs it. The fathers of Zahran and Mohammed were allegedly brothers, and their father, Sheikh Abdullah Mohammed Alloush, had immigrated to Syria from Saudi Arabia, and he led the growing Saudi Wahhabist, fundamentalist Sunni, community, in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, which is the place where the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack that US President Barack Obama has used as his excuse to invade Syria took place. Zahran Alloush had actually helped US President Obama, and Turkey’s President Erdogan, and King Saud, and Qatar’s Emir Thani, to plan and to carry out that sarin attack, so as to blame it on Assad, in order that the US President would then be enabled to mobilize public opinion in the US to invade Syria and overthrow Assad – which is what they want; but, after this fraud started to become exposed, Obama temporarily backed down – and, yet, Saud, Thani, and Erdogan (all fundamentalist Sunnis allied with the US), remained determined to overthrow the secular Shiite Assad (who allies with Russia and with Shiite Iran). The Sauds have the attitude that unless all Shiites die, the Sauds will die, that it’s an “existential” matter for them. And the American Government backs their war against Shia.

Obama will now need to decide whether Alloush’s ending the talks can serve as an excuse to blame Assad and Russia’s Putin for the breakdown of the talks, and resume overt support of ‘the Syrian opposition’ (the US-Sunni-backed jihadists, all of whom are fundamentalist Sunnis, like the Sauds), which one might more properly call the Saud-Thani-Obama invasion of Syria, to overthrow the secular Shiite Assad.

Sometimes, the ways of hiding a foreign invasion of a country can become almost irrelevant, and the only thing that actually still matters is whether the time appears to be ripe, to resume, or escalate, a war that one remains determined to win. So it is with the US Government under Barack Obama, who still remains determined to replace Bashar al-Assad by a fundamentalist Sunni proponent of Sharia law.

During the peace talks period, the US has sent to the Syrian rebels 3,000 tons of weapons, including surface-to-air missiles that can shoot down Russia’s planes. So, for the jihadist side in this war, the peace talks might turn out to have been the pause that refreshes.

Last week, the secular alliance, including Christians and Sunnis as well as Shiites, and also including many women, were re-elected, and newly elected, to constitute the next Syrian Parliament. Syria has the only non-sectarian government in the Middle East. Almost of all of the fundamentalists are foreign mercenaries, salaried jihadists, paid by the Sauds and Thanis, and armed by the Americans.

Global Research Pays Tribute to Prince

Prince = an amazing musical genius, guitar virtuoso. Purple Rain, When Doves Cry.

I remember his battle when my work was entertainment law. He battled racist musical industry, left a proud legacy.

A straight arrow, no b.s. with Prince. He wouldn’t allow the industry to categorize his artistry…to take his masters forever.

Thank you so much Prince Rogers Nelson for the hits you took, for the amazing music, for never selling-out. Rest in Power Prince. Danm! The music of my youth… He was bold, he was bad, he was the quintessential artist and he was a thinker. We’ll miss you Prince.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Michael Jackson’s Thriller created a new paradigm for the music industry, Purple Rain, which had much deeper lyrics, would have won the awards.

Russia is the target of a multi-faceted, asymmetric campaign of destabilization that has employed economic, political, and psychological forms of warfare — each of which has been specifically designed to inflict maximum damage on the Kremlin.

This article is part of a series on Western meddling to foment unrest and destabilize BRICS nations in an effort to ensure the continuation of Western economic and political control over the Global South. The first two parts, focusing on Brazil and South Africa, can be found here and here. Up next: Part II on the assault on Russia, which focuses on the political, psychological and military aspects that run in tandem with the economic war on Moscow.

The U.S.-NATO Empire, with its centers of power in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the city of London, is on the offensive against the BRICS countries. This assault takes many forms, each tailored to its specific target.

The ongoing soft coup in Brazil has recently entered a new stage with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the left-wing Workers’ Party. Simultaneously, the destabilization of the ANC-led government in South Africa continues as political forces align to remove President Jacob Zuma. These two situations illustrate clearly the very potent forms of subversion via Western-funded political formations and movements being employed against Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the bloc of emerging economies also known as BRICS.

However, when it comes to a country as large as Russia, with its vast military capabilities, consolidated and wildly popular political leadership, and growing antagonism toward the West, the tools available to the Empire to undermine and destabilize are in some ways more limited.

Indeed, in the context of Russia, the popular mobilization pretext does not apply, and so that weapon in the imperial arsenal is blunted considerably. But there are other, equally potent (and equally dangerous) methods to achieve the desired effect.

Russia is the target of a multi-faceted, asymmetric campaign of destabilization that has employed economic, political, and psychological forms of warfare, each of which has been specifically designed to inflict maximum damage on the Kremlin. While the results of this multi-pronged assault have been mixed, and their ultimate effect being the subject of much debate, Moscow is, without a doubt, ground zero in a global assault against the BRICS nations.

Economic war: Hitting Russia where it’s vulnerable

People walk past a sign indicating the US dollar, top, and euro, bottom, rates of a currency exchange in Moscow, Russia, 2009. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

While Russia is a world class power militarily, it is highly vulnerable economically. For that obvious reason, this area has been a primary focus of the destabilization thrust.

Russia has for decades been overly reliant, if not entirely dependent, on revenues from the energy sector to maintain its economic growth and fund its budget. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Russia’s Federal Customs Service, oil and gas sales accounted for 68 percent of Russia’s total export revenues in 2013. With more than two-thirds of total export revenues and roughly 50 percent of the federal budget, not to mention 25 percent of total GDP, coming from oil and gas revenue, Russia’s very economic survival has been as dependent on energy as almost any country in the world.

In light of this, it’s no surprise that the drop in oil prices over the 18-month period from April 2014 to January 2016, which saw prices dive from $105 per barrel to under $30 per barrel, has caused tremendous economic instability in Russia. Even many leading Russian officials have conceded that the negative impact to Russia’s economy is substantial, to say the least.

At the World Economic Forum in January, former Russian Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin explained that not only has the drop in oil prices badly hurt the Russian economy, but the worst may be yet to come. Kudrin noted the potential for prices to drop even further, possibly even below $20 per barrel, and he warned that the impact to the economy will be significant.

Specifically, it’s not just the loss of revenue, but the negative effect on wages and the currency which have many economic analysts and political figures worried.

According to the Russian Federal Statistics Service, real wages for Russian workers have dropped significantly since the end of 2014, with steep declines throughout 2015 continuing into early 2016. This has been felt by ordinary Russians, whose wages have stagnated while inflation causes prices to shoot upwards and who have had to endure belt-tightening in terms of personal consumption, and at the national level, where the Russian government has been facing a potentially large budget shortfall for 2016.

It must be noted, however, that recent months have seen an improvement in the relative performance of the ruble, but the long-term outlook from experts remains gloomy.

This has led many Russian analysts and policymakers to advocate yet again for a decreased dependence on energy revenues. They argue that the current climate could force economic restructuring away from the critical energy sector. Aside from Kudrin, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev made the case for potential “structural economic reforms,” as did Vladimir Mau of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

Writing earlier this year in Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business publication, Mau explained:

The demand for oil as a commodity depends on technological progress…And it’s not obvious that oil as a fuel will be always in demand in times of economic growth. With the change of the technological model, it is not ruled out that oil will become just a stock commodity for the energy and chemical industry.

This last point — how oil is used relative to the market — is the most salient; in other words, it’s the financialization of oil. But the analysis must go a step further and explore how the financialization is, in effect, a weaponization process as oil prices become increasingly the playthings of powerful financial institutions, particularly the major banks on Wall Street and in the city of London. And this is no mere conspiracy theory.

How Wall Street targeted Russia using oil

In July 2013, Sen. Sherrod Brown, chair of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, opened a hearing to probe just how connected major Wall Street banks were to the holding of physical oil assets, and the attendant ability of these companies to manipulate oil prices. The findings of the hearing, considered damning by multiple analysts knowledgeable on the subject, prompted an investigation by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, published as “Wall Street Bank Involvement with Physical Commodities.”

The report highlighted just one of the big banks, Morgan Stanley, noting:

One of Morgan Stanley’s primary physical oil activities was to store vast quantities of oil in facilities located within the United States and abroad. According to Morgan Stanley, in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area alone, by 2011, it had leases on oil storage facilities with a total capacity of 8.2 million barrels, increasing to 9.1 million barrels in 2012, and then decreasing to 7.7 million barrels in 2013. Morgan Stanley also had storage facilities in Europe and Asia.  According to the Federal Reserve, by 2012, Morgan Stanley held ‘operating leases on over 100 oil storage tank fields with 58 million barrels of storage capacity globally.’

Pam and Russ Martens of the well-respected financial analysis site WallStreetOnParade.com succinctly notedin their analysis of this issue: “With financial derivatives and 58 million barrels of physical storage capacity, it might not be so hard to manipulate the oil market.”

Indeed, the sheer scope of Morgan Stanley’s market influence demonstrates the obvious fact that the major Wall Street banks, and their cousins in the city of London, are able to significantly affect global prices using multiple levers like supply and derivatives, among others.

The Senate report’s brazen honesty is likely the main reason the corporate media failed to cover it all.  As noted in the report:

Due to their physical commodity activities, Goldman, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley incurred increased financial, operational, and catastrophic event risks, faced accusations of unfair trading advantages, conflicts of interest, and market manipulation, and intensified problems with being too big to manage or regulate, introducing new systemic risks into the U.S. financial system.

But perhaps most jaw-dropping is this January 2014 statement by Norman Bay, director of the Office of Enforcement at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Subcommittee. He plainly outlined how the big banks manipulate global oil markets:

A fundamental point necessary to understanding many of our manipulation cases is that financial and physical energy markets are interrelated … a manipulator can use physical trades (or other energy transactions that affect physical prices) to move prices in a way that benefits his overall financial position. One useful way of looking at manipulation is that the physical transaction is a ‘tool’ that is used to ‘target’ a physical price.

When one considers how much influence these large banks have on global prices, it’s almost self-evident that they would be able to use oil prices to execute a political and geopolitical agenda. With that in mind, it seems highly suspicious (to say the least) that the collapse of the oil price coincided directly with Russia’s move to annex Crimea and assert its dominance over its sphere of influence, thereby effectively stopping the eastward expansion of NATO in Ukraine.

It’s amusing then when one reads The New York Times reporting this month that “simple economics” explains the drop in oil prices. In fact, it’s clear that it’s just the opposite: The collapse of oil is the result of financial manipulation by Wall Street in the service of the broader agenda of the Empire.

Indeed, in late 2014 Russian President Vladimir Putin implied strongly that the oil plunge had less to do with economic factors than with political decisions. Putin openly theorized: “There’s lots of talk about what’s causing (the lowering of the oil price). Could it be the agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

Of course, Putin was not alone in this assessment, as many international observers spread “conspiracy theories” about collusion between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to deliberately depress oil prices by not cutting production despite all market indicators pointing to a needed decrease.

With U.S.-Russia relations having reached their nadir at precisely that moment, and with Venezuela and Iran also on the enemies list, it is no surprise that many analysts around the world concluded that Washington and Riyadh were conspiring on oil for political reasons.

Of course, the other major impact of the oil plunge on Russia has to do with the burgeoning energy-trade relationship between Russia and China. After the massive oil and gas deals announced between Russia and China in 2014 — deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars over the next three decades, it seems that Washington calculated that while it could not prevent the deals from moving forward, it could undermine them by fundamentally changing the calculus of the deals by tanking oil prices. In so doing, not only have the contracts been rendered less profitable for Russia, they are now subject to decreasing demand from China, which is experiencing its own economic slowdown.

In short, Russia’s attempt to break free of its dependence on revenue from gas sales to Europe by shifting its focus eastward has left Moscow in a bind. Facing the prospect of significantly less revenue than it anticipated coming from the deals with Beijing, Russia has been forced to adjust its own estimates and outlook for the coming years.

Sanctions: The other economic weapon

The overall impact of Western sanctions against Russia is a hotly debated subject. Russian media tends to downplay the overall impact of the sanctions, while the Western media paints a picture of imminent collapse. Notably, Paul Krugman, the leading liberal doomsayer, prognosticated in The New York Times in 2014 that “Putin’s Bubble Bursts,” warning that Russia was headed for economic meltdown thanks to the courageous sanctions regime imposed by the fearless leader President Barack Obama.

In reality, the sanctions had little immediate, direct impact on the Russian economy, but the indirect bruising might be significant, particularly over the medium- and long-term. Last year, the International Monetary Fund issued a report, noting:

IMF estimates suggest that sanctions and counter sanctions might have initially reduced real GDP by 1 to 1½ percent. Prolonged sanctions may compound already declining productivity growth. The cumulative output loss could amount to 9 percent of GDP over the medium term. However, the report’s authors underline that these model-driven results are subject to significant uncertainty.

But, looking beyond the raw numbers, one must realize that the policy prescriptions outlined by the IMF and leading economists internationally are perhaps the actual target for the West.

The IMF recommended “reforming the pension system” (read: reduce pensions), reducing energy subsidies, reducing tax exemptions, and other measures, while also suggesting that education, health care, and public investment be safeguarded. However, the subtext of the recommendations is that austerity, which by its very definition starves public programs of much needed funding, is the way to go for Russia.

There are likely strategic planners in Washington who recognize that the political subversion model employed in Brazil and South Africa simply won’t work in Russia. If nothing else, the failed “White Revolution” protests of late 2011 led by Russian liberals and various pro-Western political forces, demonstrated unequivocally that the Russian state was prepared to prevent precisely this sort of outcome.

And so it seems that those who play on what former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously called “The Grand Chessboard,” have made their moves in an attempt to corner Russia economically. Whether that strategy has been, or will be, effective likely depends on perspective. While it alone will not bring about the Western pipe dream of regime change in Russia, the Empire’s elites are banking on the collective assault on Russia and the BRICS broadly to do what political subversion alone could not.

Israel is walling off an area in the Upper Galilee near the Lebanese border and the Israeli-occupied side of Golan, citing what it claims are security threats from Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement. 

Israel’s Channel 2 News has aired footage of Israeli troops constructing a wall in Kibbutz Misgav Am near the Lebanese border by placing sections of concrete next to each other.

Israeli regime officials claim the wall is meant to prevent the potential entry of Hezbollah fighters to conduct attacks.

Israel waged two wars on Lebanon in 2000 and 2006. About 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, lost their lives during the 33-day war in the summer of 2006.

A senior Israeli military official warned that another war would be “devastating” to Lebanon as Tel Aviv would unleash all of its military capabilities on the Arab country.

Major General Yair Golan, Israel’s deputy chief of staff, said on Wednesday Hezbollah had developed capabilities that present “unprecedented” threats to Israel.

In 2012, a similar wall was set up by Tel Aviv near the Lebanese town of Metulla.

The recent wall construction came two days after the Israeli army started a military drill in the northern occupied territories. The military exercise reportedly involved large numbers of Israeli aircraft, vehicles and army troops.

The drill was geared toward “maintaining competency and vigilance of the troops,” an Israeli military statement said.

The Israeli army also held a two-day general drill in and around the northern city of Safed on the weekend.

The latest development came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday ruled out any possibility of returning the Israeli-occupied section of the Golan Heights to Syria.

Iran, Germany, the Arab League and the US joined Syria in rejecting Tel Aviv’s claim over the occupied Golan Heights.

Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria after the 1967 Six Day War and illegally annexed the region in 1981 – a move unanimously rejected the same year by the UN Security Council.

The Doha summit this past weekend that was supposed to enshrine a cut in oil production by OPEC, in tandem with Russia – it was practically a done deal – ended up literally in the dust.

Among the more than a million refugees that have flooded into Europe over the past year are the Afghans, the second-largest group behind the Syrians. Yet the humanitarian crisis affecting this land-locked South Asian country, like most news regarding Afghanistan, has received little attention in the United States.

Robert Crews, an associate professor of history at Stanford, said,

“In Washington, it has become common to view Afghanistan as a country defined by a never-ending struggle among warlords, tribal chiefs, and religious fanatics. This has been particularly attractive as a way of explaining why the American intervention in that country, despite costing more than 2,300 American lives and roughly a trillion dollars, has achieved so few of its goals in over 14 years.”

Crews examines America’s role in policies that have fueled Afghanistan’s economic and cultural crises in his book, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation. The work explores the extent to which U.S. influence has shaped Afghanistan over the past seven decades, including the American intervention against the country’s fundamentalist Taliban in 2001 in response to their presumed role in the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

“Long before 2001, Americans came to Afghanistan with the goal of remaking their lives along lines that would advance U.S. interests,” said Crews, a historian whose research and teaching interests focus on Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, Russia, Islam, and global history.

Enduring images

Crews starts from the premise that the way Americans conceptualize the country –in journalism, public-policy debates and scholarly work – remains mired in stereotypes that bear little resemblance to historical reality.

“One of the most enduring images of Afghanistan evokes a desolate, inward-looking, primitive and isolated place,” said Crews, whose recent courses at Stanford include The Global Drug Wars, The Islamic Republics and Modern Islamic Movements.

Drawing on a variety of archival and secondary sources in Afghanistan, Europe and the United States, as well as first-hand oral histories he collected personally from Afghans in half a dozen countries, Crews portrays an Afghanistan that is hardly a static and backward collection of tribes or ethnic groups, but rather a central global player in modern politics.

Among the people whose stories inform his narrative are Afghan traders in Africa, poets in Iran, scholars in Iraq, pilgrims in Jerusalem, seafarers in India, entrepreneurs in Australia, carpenters in California, students in Turkey, workers in London and a novelist in Denmark.

Crews became fascinated with Afghanistan in the late 1990s, when he lived with Afghan merchants in Uzbekistan while working on a project in Central Asia. “I was struck by their generosity, hospitality and cosmopolitan sophistication, which clashed with the American image of Afghans as being medieval peasants,” he said.

Making of a global state

Crews begins his book by examining the making of the Afghan nation-state within and beyond its borders as they exist today, exploring interactions between a sizeable Afghan diaspora abroad and the rulers of the kingdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

He then takes up the pivotal period of the 1930s and 1940s, in which Afghanistan became deeply embedded in global financial networks. With the onset of the Cold War, Afghanistan was awash with foreign advisers and experts eager to turn Afghan elites’ rush toward the industrial era to the advantage of one or the other superpower. Along the way, the country became a major supplier of opium and cannabis to satisfy world demand.

Crews turns his attention to the seizure of power in 1978 by an underground Afghan socialist party, which, he says, “triggered a proxy war between Moscow and Washington.” He describes the struggle between Soviet communists and Muslims that ensued, later spawning al-Qaida, the Taliban and other revolutionary groups.

“U.S. backing for the mujahedeen – the Islamist groups that mounted resistance to the leftist government and its Soviet backers in the 1980s – would have fateful consequences for Afghanistan and the world for years to come,” Crews observed.

The American intervention against the Taliban, claimed to be responsible for the 9/11 attacks, opened up yet another distinctive era in the history of Afghan globalism, he demonstrates. “Afghans became the object of an American-led humanitarian mission that was, simultaneously, a campaign to remake Afghans in the name of American security,” he noted.

A critical view

Afghan Modern is a scathing critique of U.S. military policies in the global arena. “In the aftermath of the war on that country,” Crews asserted, “Americans bear considerable responsibility for a government whose rule has been authoritarian, corrupt, and, in the eyes of so many Afghans, illegitimate.”

When the Bush administration decreed Afghanistan a place that was beyond international law, he said, “Washington was merely ratifying what many officials had already concluded: that this was a wild place, where force was the only language of communication.”

Reliance on Afghan militias, night raids, assassinations and imprisonment without charge were the logical outcomes, he added.

“The new Afghan state was built on an American legacy of torture and impunity,” Crews said. Moreover, the United States has been shockingly stingy in compensating civilians for unintended casualties, paying as little as $2,500 per fatality – and, in one documented case, less than $200.

Afghan Modern chronicles how by 2014, facing stalemate with the Taliban movement, Washington had abandoned many of its earlier ambitions. “Over the decades, the United States has not only lacked the capacity to fix Afghan society, but has played an essential role in breaking it,” Crews said.

“The current American approach – maintaining a modest contingent of special operations forces to prevent total victory for the Taliban or other insurgents – is unlikely to forestall the downward spiral of the Afghan state,” he argued. “It is a formula for war without end.”

Crews calls for new approaches to Afghanistan, especially how we imagine its past and act in the present.

“One of the remaining alternatives, long-neglected by Washington, is a sustained commitment to a political settlement to Afghanistan’s civil war and its regional entanglements,” he said. “This is a challenging but not impossible proposition.”

Latin America sent three quarters of the world’s rescuers to Ecuador, Europe the second-highest amount, and the United States zero.

Latin America far surpasses any region in sending humanitarian aid and rescue experts to Ecuador for earthquake relief, with Venezuela sending almost a third of all rescue specialists and Palestine sending 19—19 more than the United States.

Palestine is the only country outside of Europe and Latin America that sent rescue experts to Ecuador, though Russia sent 30 tons of humanitarian aid, and China sent a satellite and a 911 system, mobile hospitals and US$100,000 to the Ecuadorean Red Cross.

Latin America sent a total of 702 rescuers, with even impoverished and violence-ridden Honduras sending a rescuer. Cuba sent the most after Ecuador’s neighboring countries and Mexico, followed by left-wing Bolivia.

Europe also sent almost 200 rescuers, some collectively with most of the rest from France and Spain.

Though U.S. President Barack Obama told Ecuador’s Rafael Correa that he would do whatever possible to help, the most up-to-date list from Tuesday night does not include rescuers from the United States. USAID, however, said it will coordinate with the United Nations disaster team and send US$100,000 for “critical supplies.”

Correa said Tuesday that South America should have its own Secretary of Natural Disasters, since no one country could have enough resources possible to mobilize in such large-scale emergencies. Ecuador is one of the smallest countries in the continent, with a population barely above 16 million. It could only send 18 trained rescuers to affected areas, compared to Venezuela’s 212. Brazil, South America’s largest country, sent no rescue workers, and Argentina, the second largest, sent five.

Watch video here

As the Saudi, Yemen “peace talks” finally kick off in Kuwait, Vanessa Beeley spoke to Mike Robinson, host of UK Column LIVE daily news program.

Vanessa Beeley has recently returned from the UNHRC, 31st Session, where she testified on behalf of Yemen against the illegal use of US supplied Cluster Munitions against civilian targets by the Saudi Coalition. In this programme Vanessa discusses the UK, US and UN complicity in a genocidal war of aggression and the crippling economic and humanitarian land, air and sea blockade of 27 million Yemeni people.

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.

Fresh reinforcements arrived in the Kabani front to join the pro-government forces’ operation against al-Nusra and its allies and to retake the strategic city of Jisr al-Shughour near the border with the Lattakia province. Sources argue at least 1,000 the Syrian Arab Army’s soldiers, trained by Russian military advisers, have been deployed there. We remember the SAA and allies recently launched an offensive on the town of Kabani in the Kurdish Mountains. It’s a part of the wider operation aimed on Jisr al-Shughour.

The Emir of Jeish al-Islam called at least nine militant groups: Ahrar al-Sham, Faylaq al-Sham, Ansar al-Sham, Sham al-Islam, Jeish al-Nasr, Jeish al-Eza’ah, Jeish al-Mujahidin, al-Firqa al-Shamaliyeh and al-Ferqa al-Owla Saheliyeh to deploy forces to Lattakia’s border with Idlib to take part in a joint operation against the loyalists. The coalition of these militant groups launched an operation in Lattakia codenamed Rad al-Madhalem. The goal of the operation is to drive back the Syrian army units from the border with Turkey and repel the offensive on Jisr al-Shughour. On Monday the militant coalition launched a counter-attack on the Syrian forces’ positions, however, it weren’t able to succeed.

Al-Qaeda-linked militants advanced in the Al-Ghaab Plains and captured the village of Khirbat Al-Naqous near the Hama-Idlib border. Then, the militants attepmted to storm the town of Haqoura, but hasn’t seized it. The SAA is deploying reinforcements to the area.

Amid the escalation on the border of Latakia province and in Aleppo City, the Syrian government reportedly delayed the long-awaited offensive through the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor highway and redeployed some part of the military grouping located there to other fronts.

Meanwhile, the Saudi-backed Syrian opposition has withdrawn from the Geneva peace talks amid the militants’ offensive operations. The Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee accused the Assad government in violating the ceasefire and slammed the UN’s diplomatic mediator for “bias.”

On the grounds that it wants to protect the privacy of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has stymied attempts byWhoWhatWhy to find out if Tsarnaev is still being held under Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs are a repressive type of confinement that severely limits one’s ability to communicate with anybody outside of one’s prison cell.

DOJ claimed that without Tsarnaev’s consent, revealing such information about the prisoner’s status “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of [his] personal privacy.” This was in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by WhoWhatWhy, seeking updated details of Tsarnaev’s confinement.

As WhoWhatWhy previously noted, SAMs were established in 1996 to prevent presumably dangerous inmates — those accused of terrorism, espionage, mob or gang activity — from communicating to the outside plans that could result in death or bodily harm.

This form of gag order was originally imposed only by a judge. Since 9/11, the US attorney general has the power to unilaterally decide which prisoners merit this repressive confinement regime.

While it is the attorney general who approves the SAMs, the initial impetus for gagging the prisoner typically comes from a federal law enforcement or intelligence agency — in this case, the FBI. Tsarnaev was placed on SAMs August 2013 which must be renewed every 120 days.

Given the legal rationale for SAMs, the government’s determination to keep Tsarnaev incommunicado seems self-contradictory, since the FBI has repeatedly maintained that Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan (who was killed in a police shoot-out) were not connected to any wider conspiracy. Hence, by the government’s own admission, no confederates remain “out there” to whom Dzhokhar could transmit terror instructions.

The attorney general’s denial of our request, citing Tsarnaev’s “personal privacy,”seemed a little strange. But what happened next was downright Kafkaesque.

Bureaucracy vs. Common Sense

When WhoWhatWhy filed an inmate-interview request with the warden at the Bureau of Prison’s USP Florence ADMAX facility in Colorado, that request was also denied. The stated reason? Tsarnaev is being held under SAMs “at the direction of the Attorney General… he is not allowed to talk with, meet with, correspond with, or otherwise communicate with any member or representative of the news media, in person, by telephone, by furnishing a recorded message, through the mail, or otherwise.” (As a sidenote, the Bureau’s response letter was signed by Acting Warden “B. True.”)

So now the Bureau of Prisons (which is part of the Department of Justice) was acknowledging what the DOJ earlier said it could not reveal without violating the inmate’s privacy.

With this acknowledgment of the SAMs in hand, WhoWhatWhy filed an administrative appeal through FOIA with Attorney General  Loretta E. Lynch. In that appeal, we made the case that since the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had already confirmed the existence of the SAMs, the public’s interest in understanding why it was necessary to curtail an American citizen’s First Amendment right to free speech outweighs any nominal concern Tsarnaev may (or may not) have about his privacy.

For one thing, if Tsarnaev was allowed to exercise that right to free speech, he would be able to actually tell us how he feels about his privacy.

Our appeal was denied under the same exemption to the Freedom of Information Act as the original request —  U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(C) —  which allows federal law enforcement to neither confirm nor deny the existence of records that “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

It is worth noting that Boston-based US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s Public Information Officer, Christina DiIorio-Sterling, also confirmed via e-mail the ongoing confinement of Tsarnaev under SAMs. Apparently, the rank-and-file can’t bring themselves to deny the obvious — something that bureaucrats in Washington appear to do as a matter of routine.

In an effort to get at the truth, WhoWhatWhy has approached this issue from multiple angles. We filed another request with BOP headquarters seeking Tsarnaev’s inmate records. That agency responded by sending us three pages of “public records,” which amounted to very basic information such as inmate number and type of sentence. The real meat of our request, information about the conditions of Tsarnaev’s confinement, was withheld, using logic which must have come straight out of the DOJ’s playbook: we had not included “a signed authorization from the person to whom the records pertain.”

For rather obvious reasons, we will not be able to secure that signature.

Overriding the Public Interest

Is the government really that concerned about protecting Tsarnaev’s privacy, or is something else going on? A look at how the existence of Tsarnaev’s SAMs became public to begin with helps shed a little light on this question.

Back in October 2013, before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s murder trial got underway, his lawyers filed a motion challenging the imposition of SAMs on their client. The motion described in great detail the conditions under which Tsarnaev was to be held essentially incommunicado, as well as the justifications offered by the government. If US District Court Judge George O’Toole thought releasing the facts about his confinement conditions would violate Tsarnaev’s privacy, he would presumably have sealed the motion But he did not.

Which raises the question: Why does the DOJ think releasing the details of Tsarnaev’s SAMs now is a violation of his privacy? Are they even more draconian now? Has another agency, such as the CIA, asked that Tsarnaev’s communications be restricted to protect some matter of “national security?” We just don’t know.

FOIA expert and privacy attorney Scott Hodes, who runs The FOIA blog, told WhoWhatWhythat while Tsarnaev is indeed entitled to expect some level of privacy, the Bureau of Prison’s acknowledgment of the SAMs lessens that expectation. In any case, the decision to protect an individual’s privacy “should be weighed against the public interest.”

Attorney Bradley P. Moss — who specializes in matters relating to national security, federal employment and security clearance law, and FOIA — challenges the very basis for the government’s use of privacy laws in such a case.

He told WhoWhatWhy, “The U.S. Government is increasingly relying upon a stricter and narrower view of what constitutes an overriding public interest”

By withholding information about the treatment of a prisoner in this well-known case, Moss said, the government is “perverting the purpose” of the privacy protection statute, “which arguably was designed more to protect the privacy of individuals” whose connection to criminal investigations was not public knowledge.

Turning this protection of privacy against an individual’s right to be heard in public, if he so wishes, sounds like something out of the bureaucratic nightmares that Franz Kafka presciently warned us against.

The author thanks Jill Vaglica who contributed to this article.

Our economy has increasingly been financialized, and the result is a sluggish economy and stagnant wages. We need to decide whether to stop the cycle and save the economy at large, or to stay in thrall to our banks and bondholders by leaving the debt hangover from 2008 intact. Without a debt writedown the economy will continue to languish in debt deflation, and continue to polarize between creditors and debtors. This debt dynamic is in fact themajor explanation for why the U.S. and European economies are polarizing, not converging.

As a statistical measure, financialization is the degree to which debt accounts for a rising proportion of income or the value of an asset, such as a company or piece of property. The ratio tends to rise until defaults lead to a crisis that wipes out the debt, converts it into equity, or transfers assets from defaulting debtors to creditors.

As an economic process, financialization makes money through debt leverage — taking on debt to pay for things that will increase income or the value of assets — such as taking out a loan for education or a mortgage on a property to open a store. But instead of usingcredit to finance tangible industrial investment that expands production, banks have been lending to those who want to buy property already in place — mainly real estate, stocks and bonds already issued — and to corporate raiders –those who buy companies with high-interest bonds, raising debt/equity ratios. The effect often is to leave a bankrupt shell, or at least enabling the raider to threaten employees that bankruptcy would wipe out their pension funds or Employee Stock Ownership Plans if they do not agree to replace defined benefit pensions with defined contribution schemes that are much more risky.

The dynamic is more extractive than productive. Corporate financial managers, for example, can raise their company’s stock price simply by buying back shares from investors — financing the move by borrowing money.  But in addition to raising debt-to-equity ratios, these short-term tactics “bleed” companies, forcing them to cut back on research, development and projects that requirelong lead times to complete. Corporate managers are paid by how much they can raise their companies’ stock prices in the short run. When earnings are diverted to pay dividends or buy back shares, growth slows. But by that time, today’s manages will have taken their money and bonuses and run.

On an economy-wide scale, rising debt can inflate prices for real estate, stocks or bonds on credit. Asset prices reflect whatever banks will lend against them, so easier credit terms (such as lower interest rates, lower down payments and more time to pay back loans) increase the asking prices of everything else.

Banks have found the biggest loan markets (and targets) in mortgages for real estate, natural resources (oil and mining) and infrastructure monopolies. Most of the interest that banks receive from their lending thus is paid out of property rents and monopoly rents. To leave as much revenue as possible “free” to pay for more bank loans or stock issues, the financial sector defends tax benefits for these major customers, recognizing that whatever the tax collector leaves behind can come back to the banks in form of interest payments on further loans. These loans create debt-leveraged “capital” gains, which receive favorable tax treatment compared to profits and wage income. But the savings end up in the hands of banks rather than individuals who would spend that money back into the economy.

At the household level, buying a homewith a 25-percent down payment leaves the home buyer with 75-percent equity. This was the normal rule of thumb for mortgage lending in the 1960s. If interest and loan payments absorb a quarter of the buyer’s overall income (a rule of thumb for bankers in the 1960s), then that person’s income  is said to be 25 percent financialized.

But today, homebuyers can put up as little as 3-percent down payment for a Bank of America mortgage guaranteed by the government agency Freddie Mac (and 3.5 percent for an FHA-insured mortgage), leaving homeowners with 97 percent financialization.

Government-guaranteed home mortgages absorb a maximum 43 percent of the buyer’s income just to service their debt. Student loans, auto loans, credit cards and other bank debt may absorb another 10 percent of the debtor’s income. This leaves only half of personal income available to spend on anything else one might need.

Meanwhile,wage withholding for Social Security and Medicare (paying in advance to build up a fund that may not even exist to help them later in life) absorbs more than 15 percent of income, and other taxes (income taxes, property taxes and sales taxes) take up another 10 to 25 percent. In the end, the combination of financialization and the taxes shifted off the finance sector and onto individuals can eat away as much as 75 percent of a wage-earner’s income. The result is regressive taxes reducing purchasing power, on top of debt deflation as more income has to be paid tobanks and other creditors.

Loading the economy down with debt therefore leaves less disposable income for both individuals and businessesthat could otherwise be buying consumer goods and investing in real production. To illustrate this, just take a look at how our economy has changed since financial institutions inflated asset prices in the housing market until the bubble burst in 2007. The cost of paying the mortgage loans that bid up real estate prices has led to austerity: markets have shrunk, and new investment and hiring slowed as profits and wages have stagnated. The asset-price inflation that seemed to be making the economy richer has turned into debt deflation, leaving many households strapped to meet their monthly “nut.”

As the “One Percent” of banks puts the “99 Percent” deeper into debt, financialization has become the major cause of increasing inequality of wealth and income. In due course, the amount of debt will exceed the economy’s ability to produce a large enough surplus to pay it back. This makes a financial breakdown inevitable.

This financial dynamic always leads to a transfer of property from debtors to creditors, unless debts are forgiven or brought in line with the debtor’s ability to pay and the current market value of homes that are over-mortgaged and owe more debt than they are worth. In 2008, banks convinced governments to “solve” the debt problem by taking bad bank debt onto the public balance sheet and then bailing out the banks. Butwhile a government bailout or IMF loan may enable private creditors to jumpship, it shifts the burden onto the government – mainly to be borne by taxpayers. This requires governments to cut back spending, or to raise taxes to transfer income from taxpayers to bondholders.

In the end, society must choose whether to save the economy at large, or to save bondholder and banking claims on the economy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a “clear message” to the international community about the Golan Heights (an area that was originally part of Syria and now occupied by Israel since 1967) being part of Israel. Netanyahu called for a cabinet meeting on April 17th to declare that the Golan Heights will be under Israeli sovereignty indefinitely. What was insulting to the Syrian people was not only Netanyahu’s declaration that the Golan Heights belonged to Israel; it was the same day Syria celebrated the 70th anniversary of ‘Evacuation Day’ or Syria’s‘Independence Day’, which was the end of the French occupation when its forces left the country in 1946. Now the Syrians have to suffer another occupation by led by Israel. According to an RT news report, Netanyahu told his cabinet members “I convened this celebratory meeting in the Golan Heights to send a clear message: The Golan will always remain in Israel’s hands. Israel will never withdraw from the Golan Heights.” Netanyahu continued:

It is time that the international community recognized reality,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying by The Times of Israel. “Whatever happens on the other side of the [Syrian] border, the border itself will not move.” “And secondly,” Netanyahu added, “the time has come after 40 years for the international community to finally recognize that the Golan Heights will remain under Israeli sovereignty forever

The Israeli government claims that the Golan Heights is a strategic territory for Israel’s security, but it is also a fact that a third of Israel’s water supplies comes from the occupied territory. It is also important to note that 25% of Israeli wines are produced in the Golan Heights and between 30-50% of certain fruits and vegetable are also grown in the occupied territory. Water in the Middle East is similar to the value of gold since water is becoming a scarce commodity. According to the World Resources Institute (www.wri.org):

Fourteen of the 33 likely most water stressed countries in 2040 are in the Middle East, including nine considered extremely highly stressed with a score of 5.0 out of 5.0: Bahrain, Kuwait, Palestine, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Lebanon. The region, already arguably the least water-secure in the world, draws heavily upon groundwater and desalinated sea water, and faces exceptional water-related challenges for the foreseeable future

Oil is another commodity just discovered in the Golan Heights. According to RT news, a 2015 report by an Israeli business website (www.globes.co.il ) said that a discovery of oil in the Golan Heights will make Israel “self sufficient.”Globes stated what the latest oil discovery would mean for Israel:

After more than a year of round-the-clock drilling, large amounts of oil have been found on the Golan Heights. Estimates are that the amount of oil discovered will make Israel self sufficient for very many years to come. Afek Oil and Gas chief geologist Dr. Yuval Bartov told Channel 2 News, “We are talking about a strata which is 350 meters thick and what is important is the thickness and the porosity. On average in the world strata are 20-30 meters thick, so this is ten times as large as that, so we are talking about significant quantities. The important thing is to know the oil is in the rock and that’s what we now know.”

Three drillings have so far taken place in the southern Golan Heights which have found large reserves of oil. Potential production is dramatic – billions of barrels, which will easily provide all Israel’s oil needs. Israel consumes 270,000 barrels of oil per day

Another important fact to consider is that Israel’s military uses more than 240, 000 BPD for its war machine according to various estimates. With Israel’s aggressive posture towards Syria, Hezbollah, Iran and the Palestinians, oil is an essential commodity especially for its military. If war between Israel and its adversaries were to take place today, oil production can be affected especially in the Iraqi Kurdistan which recently started to import more than 75% of its oil to Israel or in the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia (an Israeli Ally). Any disruption of oil imports to Israel can affect its military projections in the Middle East; therefore the occupation of the Golan Heights is in their best interests in terms of hegemonic power.

The Six-Day War: An Israeli Offensive War for Land and Water

The Golan Heights known as the ‘Syrian Golan’ has been at the center of conflict between Syria and Israel decades before the Six-Day War took place. In 1949, the Golan Heights was partially demilitarized by the Israel-Syria Armistice Agreement to officially end the 1948 Arab-Israeli War between Israel and its Arab neighbors including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria which did establish armistice lines or the “Green Line” between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Jordanian-Iraqi forces. After the signed agreements by both parties, thousands of violent incidents occurred by both sides of the borders which violated the armistice agreement due to disagreements over the legal status of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and disputes over land and water resources.

After the Six-Day War, The IDF gained control over the Golan Heights and the Upper Mount Hermon which has given Israel unlimited access to the Upper Jordan River’s water supplies. Then the Yom Kipper War of 1973 began where Egyptian and Syrian forces collaborated in the invasion of the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights which was still under Israeli control. Washington approved foreign aid in the form of arms shipments to Israel and the former Soviet Union supplied Egypt and Syria with arms during the conflict. The U.S. and the Soviet Union was at the height of the cold war. After the Yom Kipper War, Israel agreed to return about 5% of the Golan Heights for Syrian control with the agreement that a demilitarized zone was declared a ceasefire zone. The ceasefire zone extended east under the United Nations Peace Keeping forces. In 1981, Israel officially annexed the Golan Heights which was not internationally recognized.

According to author Tanya Reinhart who published ‘Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948’ spoke about an interview with former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan on April 27th, 1997 in the Yediot Aharonot regarding Israel’s aggression towards Syria. The interview was conducted after the 1973 Yom Kipper War where Dayan claimed that the attack on Syria was a grave mistake in regards to any future peace agreements between Israel and Syria:

In a 1976 interview, Moshe Dayan, who was the defense minister in 1967, explains what led to the decision to attack Syria in the war of 1967. In the collective Israeli consciousness of the period, Syria was conceived as a serious threat to the security of Israel, and a constant initiator of aggression toward the residents of Northern Israel. But according to Dayan, this was “bullshit”-Syria was not a threat to Israel before 1967. “just drop it,” he said as an answer to a question about the northern residences. “I know how at least 80 percent of all the incidents with Syria started. We were sending a tractor to the demilitarized zone and we knew that the Syrians would shoot, if they did not shoot, we would instruct the tractor to go deeper, till the Syrians finally got upset and started shooting. Then we employed artillery, and later also the air force…I did that…and Yitzhak Rabin did that, when he was there (as commander of the Northern front, in the early sixties)”

According to Dayan, what led Israel to provoke Syria this way was the greediness for the land-the idea that it was possible “to grab a piece of land and keep it, until the enemy gets tired and gives it to us.” The Syrian land was as he says, particularly tempting, since, unlike Gaza and the West Bank, it was not heavily populated. Dayan insisted that the decision to attack Syria in 1967 was not motivated by security reasons. “The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not threatening us.” He adds that the decision was also influenced by a delegation sent to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol by the northern kibbutzes, “who did not even try to hide their greed of that land.” The 1967 war brought Israel much land (and water)

The Syrian population of the Golan Heights before the Israeli occupation was estimated at 130,000 people, today the population is at around 36,000 people including 16,000 Syrian Druzes and more than 20,000 Jewish settlers.

International Condemnation Takes Center Stage

The Jerusalem Post reported Hezbollah’s reaction to Netanyahu’s declaration “saying that the vow is evidence of Israel’s “expansionist character.” Hezbollah also said that “This move affirms the Zionist aggression against our nation and its people,” according to the report. Can Netanyahu’s arrogance lead to a new war? Hezbollah said “It shows that the only way to face the enemy is by resistance, using all possible means to struggle, first and foremost through popular uprising as we have seen today when the Golan’s inhabitants resisted the Zionist meeting in the area.” Press TV also reported that Iran, the Arab League, Germany and the U.S. (which means little when you consider Washington’s unbreakable bond with Israel) all reject Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights:

The Islamic Republic of Iran, Germany, the Arab League and the United States have joined Syria in rejecting Tel Aviv’s claim over the occupied Golan Heights, a day after the Israeli premier said the region will be part of Israel “forever”

Israel knows full well that the U.S. economy is in collapse mode; therefore, it is vital that Israel remains in the Golan Heights for its vast natural resources if it wants to maintain its power in the Middle East. Netanyahu’s reckless claims ignited a call for Arab unity in declaring that the Golan Heights is Syrian and that the illegal Israeli occupation is a Zionist plan to expand its territory across the region. Israel knows how to provoke its neighbors; Moshe Dayan clearly stated how the Six-Day War began.

Time is short for the U.S. Empire and Israel knows this. Israel wants another war to solidify its position in the Middle East even if it means using its nuclear weapons. Let’s hope that Israel’s leadership is not run by madmen willing to use nuclear weapons on its adversaries, then again if you look at Israel’s history since 1948, all of its leaders were zealots including Netanyahu himself. The question is how to we stop Israel’s expansionist policies? The world has to demand Washington breaks its “unbreakable bonds” with Israel once and for all. Will Washington listen to the international community?

According to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March of last year, U.S. taxpayers have already injected $187.5 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies that prior to the 2008 financial crash traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had shareholders and their own Board of Directors while also receiving an implicit taxpayer guarantee on their debt. The U.S. government put the pair into conservatorship on September 6, 2008. The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab. But in an astonishing acknowledgement on February 25 of this year, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, issued an audit report of the U.S. government’s finances, revealing that the government’s “remaining contractual commitment to the GSEs, if needed, is $258.1 billion.”

This suggests that somehow, without the American public’s awareness, the U.S. government is on the hook to two failed companies for $445.6 billion dollars. And that may be just the tip of the iceberg of this story.

The official narrative around the bailout of Fannie and Freddie is that they were loaded up with toxic subprime debt piled high by the Wall Street banks that sold them dodgy mortgages. While that is factually true, the other potentially more important part of this story is the counterparty exposure the Wall Street banks had to Fannie and Freddie’s derivatives if the firms had been allowed to fail.

The New York Fed’s staff report of March 2015 concedes the following:

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac held large positions in interest rate derivatives for hedging. A disorderly failure of these firms would have caused serious disruptions for their derivative counterparties.”

Exactly how big was this derivatives exposure and which Wall Street banks were being protected by the government takeover of these public-private partnerships that had spiraled out of control into gambling casinos?

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The following Op Ed was submitted to MovieMaker Magazine by its author, Philippe Diaz of Cinema Libre Studio. As the leading magazine devoted to independent film we believe it important to allow this independent distributor to express his firsthand view of the newsworthy event that led to his company’s film Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe being pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival and Worldfest-Houston lineups, and the role played by the media. The opinions and statements are solely those of the author. MovieMaker‘s editors welcome the organizers of these festivals, organizations we deeply respect, as well as others interested in the topics and issues raised by this Op Ed, to contribute their own viewpoints. MovieMaker Editors

When the call came from the heads of the Tribeca Film Festival, specifically Jane Rosenthal and Paula Weinstein, to let my head of distribution, Rich Castro, and me know that they had decided to “de-select” our film Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, I didn’t want to believe it.

I couldn’t understand how it could even be possible—when the selection had been confirmed publicly by Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro himself the day before.

Being the distributor of the film and having received all the paperwork confirming the selection, I was in total disbelief, as I had personally advised the filmmakers to submit the film to Tribeca.

The conversation became very heated when I asked the festival executives for the reasons. The answer I received was that they had “issues” with the content of the film. I said, “Fine—let us know what issues you are having and we will give you all the back-up documentation and set you up with the filmmakers so that you can get any clarification you need.” But I got no specific answers.

It was clear that the actual content of the film (a documentary by Andrew Wakefield about Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who believes that crucial information was omitted in a 2004 report on the Measles-Mumps-Rubella [MMR] vaccine and its link to autism) was not the full cause of the festival’s change of heart. They had already indicated in a previous conversation that their sponsor had issues with the film—specifically, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It became even more heated when I asked Rosenthal and Weinstein, both highly accomplished professionals, if they realized the responsibility they were assuming and the message it would send to the filmmaking world at large. They were effectively telling the festival’s sponsors that it was perfectly OK to censor a film they didn’t like. They were also telling filmmakers around the world that they should only make movies that corporate powers and sponsors alike will approve of, otherwise they will have little chance to ever have their movies seen. I told them they were setting a huge precedent, but it was clear that they could not have cared less.

Unfortunately, I was proven right. A few days later, Hunter Todd, director of WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, which had selected the film for its documentary closing night, sent me an email saying that his festival also had to withdraw its invitation. Hunter added that he had received “very threatening calls yesterday from high government officials in Houston (the first and only time they have ever called in 49 years)… Heavy-handed censorship to say the least… they both threatened severe action against the festival if we showed it… Their actions would have cost us more than $100,000 in grants.” In another email, he said that “[the officials] went to all our major sponsors… and even the private foundations that support us… I have never been threatened so strongly before, comparing this to Hitler’s propaganda films and worse…”

“Hitler’s propaganda films?” I thought that was interesting! I’ll come back to that later. I was not as upset with Hunter, who did what he could, had no choice and told us the truth. It is a totally different situation with Tribeca. To this point—even after Robert De Niro himself reversed his stance and said in a TODAY interview that it is a movie that people should see and that he pretty much regretted having been forced to pull if from the festival—Jane Rosenthal continues to argue that in factVaxxed‘s “de-selection” was due to an outcry from some filmmakers.

The filmmakers? Seriously? Well, that’s even a worse excuse than claiming it’s because of the sponsors. Everybody understands the power of money, but she is trying to make us believe that if filmmakers disagree with the film selection at a festival like Tribeca, that the festival will reverse its decision. I see that as the end of festivals as we know them and, of course, the end of free speech! That is censorship, pure and simple!

L-R: Director Andrew Wakefield, editor Brian Burrows and producer Del Bigtree review the data from the CDC Autism/MMR study in Vaxxed. Photograph by Andrew Debosz

Rosenthal’s statement makes very little sense apart from continuing a strategy that was started months ago. The first voice who came out screaming bloody murder about the selection of Vaxxedwas the director Penny Lane (Our Nixon). The problem here is that Penny Lane has made only two feature-length films and both were financed by Tribeca Enterprises, the company that owns the Tribeca Film Festival. She came out with a vitriolic paper telling Tribeca—her prestigious financier—that they “made a very serious mistake,” after having judged the film solely on its trailer (Seriously! I hoped that filmmakers had more respect for each other’s work) and, deciding that the film presented “dangerous misinformation,” labeling its director an “anti-vaccination quack” who was “literally killing people.” Not only can she be sued for defamation and libel, but it is funny to get a lesson on ethics in filmmaking from someone who made a doc portraying Richard Nixon as an upstanding human being! More importantly, she asked Tribeca to “apologize… and cancel the screening.” Really? How could a filmmaker in her right mind so virulently attack her prestigious financier for selecting a film she didn’t even see? That makes no sense, of course. I suppose it might make sense if Tribeca Enterprises asked her to start such a campaign—but that’s pure speculation on my part…

A couple of interesting articles came up exploring the relationship that Tribeca Enterprises has with the pharmaceutical industry. TruthKings.com explained that the president of Tribeca Enterprises is Jonathan Cale Patricof, son of the very powerful venture capitalist Alan Patricof. Patricof senior is the founder of Apax partners which owns a company… that specializes in vaccines! Furthermore, Alan Patricof is the brother-in-law of none other than Jane Rosenthal.

The Sloan Foundation is one of the largest and first sponsors of the festival, as confirmed to us by Rosenthal and Weinstein on the phone. As Richard Gale and Gary Null point out in an article entitled “Why is the CDC Petrified of the Film Vaxxed?”: “A bigger smoking gun is the presence of Dr. Peter Kim, former president of Merck’s Research Laboratories… and Paul Offit.” Merck’s Research Laboratories is the company that holds the MMR vaccine patent and monopoly in the U.S. Offit has been described (by Mark Blaxill, editor-at-large for the website Age of Autism) as a “Merck-made millionaire, a determined propagandist for expanding the medical industry’s vaccine profit pool and an active opponent of the need to stop the autism epidemic in its tracks.” Kim and Offit, say Gale and Null, both “sit on the [Sloan] foundation’s board of trustees.” (They also add that “vaccine fanatic Bill Gates is also a contributor” to Tribeca.)

The Hollywood Reporter indeed enlisted the same Paul Offit to write a so-called review on Vaxxed, even after we explained to them that he could not be objective for the above reasons. Based on his analysis, I personally believe that Paul Offit never saw the film, since we refused to provide him with a screener. It is tragic that The Hollywood Reporter would compromise the concept of a reviewer like that.

A still from Vaxxed shows the Center for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) headquarters

The whole thing goes even one step further. What was very interesting to us was to watch the whole scandal unfold. All the “negative articles” use the same language, sometimes word for word, from the by-now famous Penny Lane’s article—which was probably the result she was looking for—to Steven Zeitchik’s one in the Los Angeles Times and Eric Kohn’s at Indiewire.

The message is clear:

1. Discredit the film by calling it “anti-vaccine.” How can a movie and its director advocating for giving the MMR vaccine to children after three years of age, or for splitting the vaccine into three shots, be anti-vaccine?
2. Discredit the film by calling it “fraudulent,” “biased,” etc. which is interesting coming from people who never saw the film!
3. Discredit the filmmaker by bringing up his past when he was framed for daring to say that his research showed a potential link between MMR vaccine and autism and that more studies were needed.
4. Finally, go for the kill: in case there would be any doubt, compare the filmmaker or his work to Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. It is very interesting that the reference to Hitler comes back every single time, including in threats received by the director of the WorldFest-Houston.

I will not address here all the accusations against, nor the framing of, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, dating back 18 years, which have been discussed many times before and that we have made available to all. Instead, I ask why all this negative publicity is clearly originating from the same voice? Again, let’s refer to Gale and Null, who reveal the existence of the “CDC’s sophisticated public relations and media operation. Tax dollars are spent to train journalists about framing medical news and articulately contest [sic] controversial stories that challenge the federal agencies’ and pharmaceutical industry’s national health and vaccine agenda.”

This is probably the worst part of this very sad story. Whoever put out the framing of this debate was powerful enough to place it in major magazines and newspapers with the same wording, and the same irresponsible comparisons, with no objection from these publications. Of course the fact that filmmakers, and a prestigious institution like Tribeca, would participate in such a “lynching” is extremely grave, as it outlines the limitless power of mega corporations. Since the festival censorship, our ads have also been censored by The Village Voice and a positive article was censored by The Huffington Post (now owned by AOL, so perhaps that’s no surprise). These great publications did not see the film… nor did they even ask to see it.

Filmmakers beware! Most of the large festivals depend on financial support from sponsors. And with the Tribeca precedent, it is clear that if sponsors don’t like a film, they can refuse its selection or, even worse, “de-select” it. In my heated conversation with the heads of Tribeca, I also asked them if they realized the responsibility they were taking on. Not only have they risked ruining the professional lives of the filmmakers who have invested years of time and their money to make this film, but they are now risking more than that on an even greater level. Let’s suppose, for the sake of discussion, that Dr. Wakefield and the hundreds of doctors who support him are right and that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Furthermore, let’s suppose that Tribeca’s actions will serve to delay the CDC whistleblower’s testimony before Congress—such testimony being the ultimate goal of the film—by so many years. How many more children will be affected? How many more families will be destroyed?

That is the power of documentaries: to make a difference in the world! Let’s support the filmmakers who dedicate their lives to such an aspiration and to the festivals that give such voices a chance to be heard (or is it now time to create a “no-sponsors” film festival?). In this digital age, do we even need reviewers and film festivals? To counter all of these false accusations and negative publicity, we rushed the film into theaters, supported only by an immense grassroots community composed mainly of families with vaccine-injured children. And in New York and Los Angeles, most of the shows sold out before the film opened!

A display at the Laemmle Monica, showing sold-out screenings of Vaxxed

So, to finish on a positive note, let’s remember that our grassroots support is the number-one tool for a successful film release and that we should not let ourselves be intimidated by bullies, whomever they may be. As one Vaxxed audience member put it, “they tried to suppress a movie, instead they created a movement.”

For information on Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, visit its official homepage.

Back in December 2014, just before the ECB officially launched its initial phase of QE in which it would monetize government bonds, Mario Draghi was asked a very direct question: what types of assets could the ECB buy as part of its quantitative easing program. He responded, “we discussed all assets but gold.”

The reason for his tongue in cheek response was because over the prior few weeks speculation had arisen that gold could be part of the central bank’s asset purchases after Yves Mersch, a member of the ECB executive board and former Governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg, said on November 17 that “theoretically the ECB could purchase other assets such as gold, shares, ETFs to fulfill its promise of adopting further unconventional measures to counter a longer period of low inflation.”

Mario Draghi promptly shot down that idea.

But according to a provocative paper released by none other than Pimco’s strategist Harley Bassman, Yves Mersch’s inadvertent peek into what central bankers are thinking, may have been on to something.

In “Rumpelstiltskin at the Fed“, Bassman goes down the well-trodden path of proposing Fed asset purchases as the last ditch panacea for the US economy, however instead of buying bonds, or stocks, or crude oil, Bassman has a truly original idea: “the Fed should unleash a massive Fed gold purchase program that could echo a Depression-era effort that effectively boosted the U.S. economy.“

He is of course, referring to FDR’s 1933 Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for a citizen to own gold bullion or coins. Americans promptly sold their gold to the government at the official price of $20.67, with the resulting hoard of gold was then placed in Fort Knox.

The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 raised the official price of gold to $35.00, a near 70% increase. It also resulted in an implicit devaluation of the US dollar. As Bassman points out, over the three years from January 1934 to December 1936, GDP increased by 48%, the Dow Jones stock index rose by nearly 80%, and most salient to our topic, inflation averaged a positive 2% annually, despite a national unemployment rate hovering around 18%.

In short, a brief economic nirvana which was unleashed by the devaluation of the dollarconfiscation of gold. In fact, we have frequently hinted in the past that another Executive Order 6102 is inevitable for precisely these reasons. However this is the first time when we see a “respected economist” openly recommend this idea as a matter of monetary policy.

Bassman says that the Fed should “emulate a past success by making a public offer to purchase a significantly large quantity of gold bullion at a substantially greater price than today’s free-market level, perhaps $5,000 an ounce? It would be operationally simple as holders could transact directly at regional Federal offices or via authorized precious metal assayers.”

What would the outcome of such as “QE for the goldbugs” look like? His summary assessment:

A massive Fed gold purchase program would differ from past efforts at monetary expansion. Via QE, the transmission mechanism was wholly contained within the financial system; fiat currency was used to buy fiat assets which then settled on bank balance sheets. Since QE is arcane to most people outside of Wall Street, and NIRP seems just bizarre to most non-academics, these policies have had little impact on inflationary expectations. Global consumers are more familiar with gold than the banking system, thus this avenue of monetary expansion might finally lift the anchor on inflationary expectations and their associated spending habits.

The USD may initially weaken versus fiat currencies, but other central banks could soon buy gold as well, similar to the paths of QE and NIRP. The impactful twist of a gold purchase program is that it increases the price of a widely recognized “store of value,” a view little diminished despite the fact the U.S. relinquished the gold standard in 1971. This is a vivid contrast to the relatively invisible inflation of financial assets with its perverse side effect of widening the income gap.

And before Krugman accuses Bassman of secretly being on our payroll, this is how Pimco’s economist defends his unorthodox idea:

Admittedly, this suggestion is almost too outrageous to post under the PIMCO logo, but NIRP surely would have elicited a similar reaction a decade ago. But upon reflection, it could be an elegant solution since it flips the boxes on a foreign currency “prisoner’s dilemma” (more on this below). Most critically, a massive gold purchase has the potential to significantly boost inflationary expectations, both domestic and foreign.

* * *

Many people will rightfully dismiss the gold idea as absurd, as just another fanciful strategy to print money; why not just buy oil, houses or some other hard asset? In fact, why fool around with gold; why not just execute helicopter money as originally advertised? I would answer the former by noting that only gold qualifies as money; and as for the latter, fiscal compromise on that order seems like a daydream in Washington today – don’t expect a helicopter liftoff anytime soon.

 

Let’s be honest; most people thought NIRP was just as nonsensical a few years ago, yet it has now been implemented by six central banks with little evidence it is effective. And while a gold purchase program should qualify as a fairy tale, what is unique here is that it actually occurred with a confirmed positive effect on the U.S. economy.

We agree, if for no other reason than everything central banks have done and tried in history has been a disastrous mistake, leading to either huge asset bubbles or massive busts, which in turn have needed even more spectacular bubbles to be reflated and so on. As such, the one thing that central banks should do is that which they are “genetically” against – purchasing the one asset class which is their inherent nemesis, the one Ben Bernanke said had value only because of “tradition”: Gold.

Of course, all of the above assumes Americans would be willing to sell their gold to the Fed at any prices, but as Bassman finally lays it out, it is worth finding out. Janet, are you listening?

* * *

From PIMCO, by Harley Bassman

Rumpelstiltskin at the Fed

Though it seems incredibly farfetched, a massive Fed gold purchase program could echo a Depression-era effort that effectively boosted the U.S. economy.

As our title alludes, I am about to spin a monetary policy fairy tale, a fantasy that could certainly never occur … except for the small detail that it’s happened before.

First I must remind you there are only two avenues out of a debt crisis – default or inflate – and inflation is just a slow-motion default. Thus in the darker days of the global financial crisis, the U.S. Federal Reserve set sail on a monetary experiment tangentially suggested by late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, the original coiner of the phrase “helicopter money.” (Ben Bernanke borrowed this clever construct in his famous November 2002 speech, “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here.”)

The notion was simple: Increase monetary velocity via financial repression to create inflation, depreciate nominal debt and deleverage both the public and private economies of the U.S. The toolkit of financial repression would include, but not be limited to, near-zero overnight interbank borrowing rates, massive asset purchase programs (also known as quantitative easing or QE), term surface restructuring (known as Operation Twist) and good old-fashioned jawboning, in this case taking the form of distant forward guidance.

Notwithstanding various political exhortations, there can be little doubt the Fed’s aggressive monetary policies after the collapse of Lehman Brothers were quite effective in cushioning the macro economy from the financial turmoil. Would the economy have cured itself without the Fed? We can’t prove a negative, but up until China allowed the devaluation of the yuan last August and Japan implemented negative interest rates in January, the Fed’s “Plan A” was working reasonably well.

But we do not operate in a vacuum, and various monetary machinations from the eurozone, Japan and China are now working in concert to export deflation to the U.S. This is quite worrisome as it may well hinder the U.S. economy from reaching the Fed’s target inflation level (2%) and escape-velocity economic growth.

Thus did Fed Chair Janet Yellen, in her most recent visit to Congress, tentatively start to explore a “Plan B” (which looks like Plan A on steroids) that includes, if only in theory, the barest remote possibility of a negative interest rate policy (NIRP).

There are a host of reasons PIMCO believes NIRP would be not only ineffective, but also possibly harmful to the U.S. economy, and these have been detailed by CIOs Scott Mather and Mihir Worah. But this does raise the question as to whether the Fed has indeed reached the bottom of its toolkit. Many things are possible, at least in theory, including the famous helicopter drop. Another option is to resurrect a plan that was actually implemented (with great success) 83 years ago.

The real fairy tale

From shortly after the October 1929 stock market crash to just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) declined by nearly 43%; during a similar timeframe, consumer prices declined by nearly 24%.

Employing what can only be described as force majeure politics, in April 1933 the U.S. government issued Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for a citizen to own gold bullion or coins. Lest they risk a five-year vacation in prison, citizens sold their gold to the government at the official price of $20.67. This hoard of gold was then placed in a specially built storage facility – Fort Knox.

The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 raised the official price of gold to $35.00, a near 70% increase; positive results were almost immediate. Over the three years from January 1934 to December 1936, GDP increased by 48%, the Dow Jones stock index rose by nearly 80%, and most salient to our topic, inflation averaged a positive 2% annually, despite a national unemployment rate hovering around 18%.

Such a pity that these halcyon days were soon sullied as the government tightened financial conditions (both fiscal and monetary) from late 1936 to early 1937, which many point to as the precipitant of the Dow’s 33% decline. Additionally, the 1938 calendar reported a 6.3% decline in GDP and a 2.8% deflation in consumer prices. (Many suspect it is the fear of a 1937 redux that motivates the Fed to contemplate additional extraordinary actions, including NIRP.)

So in the context of today’s paralyzed political-fiscal landscape and a hyperventilated election process, how silly is it to suggest the Fed emulate a past success by making a public offer to purchase a significantly large quantity of gold bullion at a substantially greater price than today’s free-market level, perhaps $5,000 an ounce? It would be operationally simple as holders could transact directly at regional Federal offices or via authorized precious metal assayers.

Admittedly, this suggestion is almost too outrageous to post under the PIMCO logo, but NIRP surely would have elicited a similar reaction a decade ago. But upon reflection, it could be an elegant solution since it flips the boxes on a foreign currency “prisoner’s dilemma” (more on this below). Most critically, a massive gold purchase has the potential to significantly boost inflationary expectations, both domestic and foreign.

Asset or currency?

While never an officially stated policy, there has been a slow-moving, low-intensity currency war taking place over the past decade. The U.S. was the first mover, implementing QE in 2009, which had the effect of depreciating the trade-weighted U.S. dollar (USD) by 16%. Japan was next, implementing “Abenomics” in 2012; this helped depreciate the yen (JPY) versus the USD by over 30% in eight months. Europe went last when Mario Draghi followed through on “whatever it takes” in 2014; the euro devalued versus the USD from peak to trough by 24%. China had pegged the yuan to the USD to help maintain a stable trading environment, however, the increasing value of their currency against their other trading partners was hindering growth, and thus the motivation for a slight realignment last August.

The problem the world’s major economies now face is that any attempt to depreciate their currencies to improve the terms of trade must effectively come out of the pockets of their partners; this creates a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Thus the interesting twist of a Fed gold purchase program.

Warren Buffett famously railed against the shiny yellow metal in 2012 when he noted all the gold in the world could be swapped for the totality of U.S. cropland and seven ExxonMobils with $1 trillion left over for “walking-around money.” His point was that these assets can generate significant returns while owning gold produces no discernable cash flow.

While this observation is certainly true, the rub is that this is not a fair comparison sincegold is not an asset; rather, it should be considered an alternate currency. Pundits often describe the five factors that define “money”:

1. Its supply is controlled or limited,
2. It is fungible/uniform – this is why diamonds cannot qualify,
3. It is portable – this is why land cannot qualify,
4. It is divisible – thus art cannot be money, and
5. It is liquid – this means people will readily accept it in exchange.

By this definition, gold is certainly a form of money, and to Mr. Buffett’s point, one also earns no cash flow on paper dollars, euros, yen or yuan.

Raising expectations

A massive Fed gold purchase program would differ from past efforts at monetary expansion. Via QE, the transmission mechanism was wholly contained within the financial system; fiat currency was used to buy fiat assets which then settled on bank balance sheets. Since QE is arcane to most people outside of Wall Street, and NIRP seems just bizarre to most non-academics, these policies have had little impact on inflationary expectations. Global consumers are more familiar with gold than the banking system, thus this avenue of monetary expansion might finally lift the anchor on inflationary expectations and their associated spending habits.

The USD may initially weaken versus fiat currencies, but other central banks could soon buy gold as well, similar to the paths of QE and NIRP. The impactful twist of a gold purchase program is that it increases the price of a widely recognized “store of value,” a view little diminished despite the fact the U.S. relinquished the gold standard in 1971. This is a vivid contrast to the relatively invisible inflation of financial assets with its perverse side effect of widening the income gap.

In coda I would respond to the argument that a central bank cannot willfully create inflation – I disagree; it just depends upon how hard one tries. There are plenty of examples ranging from Weimar Germany to Zimbabwe where central banks have unleashed uncontrolled hyperinflations.

The more interesting question is not whether the Fed can create a 15% to 20% price spiral, but rather can they implement policies that will result in a somewhat gentle and controlled 2% to 3% inflation rate that will slowly deleverage the U.S. debt load while simultaneously increasing middle class nominal wages.

Many people will rightfully dismiss the gold idea as absurd, as just another fanciful strategy to print money; why not just buy oil, houses or some other hard asset? In fact, why fool around with gold; why not just execute helicopter money as originally advertised? I would answer the former by noting that only gold qualifies as money; and as for the latter, fiscal compromise on that order seems like a daydream in Washington today – don’t expect a helicopter liftoff anytime soon.

Let’s be honest; most people thought NIRP was just as nonsensical a few years ago, yet it has now been implemented by six central banks with little evidence it is effective. And while a gold purchase program should qualify as a fairy tale, what is unique here is that it actually occurred with a confirmed positive effect on the U.S. economy.

So when the next seat for a Fed governor becomes available, I would nominate Rumpelstiltskin … just a thought.

US elections, despite all the media hype and endless rhetoric about ‘democracy in action,’ are in fact little more than manufactured political theater. The country that ceaselessly trumpets democratic values and transparency practices neither when it comes to its own elections.

As New Yorkers go to the polls in Democratic and Republican primaries this week, it is critical to once again highlight the myriad ways that democracy in the United States is, like most other things, a commodity to be bought and sold. From corporate control of the infrastructure of elections, to the creation of mass bases of support out of whole cloth, the candidates, as well as the system itself, cannot be trusted to be genuine.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this point more clearly than the results of multiple studies on Hillary Clinton’s online following which reveal that the majority of her Twitter fans, and indeed her social media following in general, are completely fake. Consider the implications of these findings from StatusPeople.com, and well-respected analytical tool TwitterAudit, which both found that no more than 44 percent of Clinton’s followers were actually real, active users of Twitter.

This may seem something trivial, but in fact it cuts to the very heart of the notion of democracy, and the legitimacy of a candidate who is perhaps the most obvious embodiment of the political and financial establishment in the US. Indeed, Bernie Sanders, among many others, has correctly noted that Clinton is in many ways the epitome of the ruling elite.

In a blistering commentary on Clinton during a nationally televised debate, Sanders proclaimed, “I will absolutely admit that Secretary Clinton… has the entire establishment or almost the entire establishment behind her. That’s a fact. I don’t deny it. I’m pretty proud that we have over a million people who have contributed to our campaign averaging 27 bucks a piece.” Sanders highlighted the fact that the political and financial elites back Hillary, and in so doing noted that his campaign is backed by millions of ordinary Americans.

But Sanders was equally, though perhaps inadvertently, illustrating the fact that the Clinton campaign is, in effect, being manufactured; that she has no real support except for a near consensus of establishment policy-makers and powerful individuals. And yet, here’s Hillary marching into yet another major primary with a double-digit lead. How much of that is based on a perception shaped – at least in part – by social media?

This phenomenon is not relegated only to Clinton’s campaign, however; this is true of most of America’s leading political figures. In 2013, it was revealed President Obama’s Twitter following was made up of a majority (53 percent) fake accounts. The Daily Mail at the time noted that Vice President Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the White House communications shop all had online followings consisting of mainly non-existent people. So too did the State Department under Hillary Clinton, which spent at least $630,000 to buy Facebook likes, essentially manufacturing a public following for itself.

But who cares, right? What does it matter if Twitter accounts and Facebook likes are fraudulent? How does that impact anything other than social media image?

How social media manipulation serves the Establishment agenda

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media have become very potent tools in the arsenal of the US Government as it wages a relentless information war in the service of the military-industrial complex and the agenda of the elite. In fact, social media goes far beyond just an image. Today, it has been made into an effective tool for the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation that conveniently buttresses whatever narrative the establishment wants. Take for example the lead-up to the criminal war on Libya. In early 2011, with the narrative of the ‘Arab Spring’ ubiquitous in western social media, the US-NATO machine set its sights on regime change in Libya, with social media as one of the critical tools used to achieve it. Close followers of that conflict will recall that dozens of Twitter accounts, purportedly from anti-Gaddafi Libyans, mysteriously emerged in the lead-up to the war that toppled the Libyan government, providing much of the “intelligence” relayed on western media including CNN, NBC, the New York Times, et al.

At that time (February 2011), PC World published a little publicized article entitled “Army of Fake Social Media Friends to Promote Propaganda” which noted that:

“… the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people.”

Clearly the US Government and intelligence community have known from the beginning the power of social media, and its ability to influence public opinion and lay the groundwork for policies, as well as its potential as a weapon. In fact, the CIA has taken its social media arsenal much further in recent years. There are literally dozens of companies that have received seed money from the CIA’s investment arm, known as In-Q-Tel, in order to provide the intelligence and security establishment the ability to do everything – from real-time surveillance of social media users to data mining and more. In effect then, social media has become the playground of the elite, the terrain upon which their manipulation and social engineering takes root.

Is This Democracy?

OK, so social media followings are meaningless as they can be manufactured, as we see currently with Hillary Clinton. But surely the actual mechanisms of voting in the US are clean? Well, not exactly.

In this election season alone there have been massive failures in multiple states that have left countless thousands of Americans without the right to vote for their candidates of choice, or victims of outright fraud. Even Arizona’s Secretary of State recently admitted that fraud had taken place on a large scale in her state. The hacktivist collective Anonymous has provided detailed analysis pointing to the fact that state databases were likely hacked and manipulated.

And then of course there’s the issue of the voting machines themselves. Recently the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law issued a comprehensive report entitled America’s Voting Machines at Risk which found that the voting machines currently in use are outdated, running the risk of catastrophic failures. The report highlighted many shocking examples that should give anyone pause when considering the validity of election results. The authors of the report noted that “Virginia recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to record voting data or inject malicious data.”

This finding only further substantiates the claims made by many experts that the hacking of voting machines and election databases is all but assured, not just in the US but internationally.

A case in point is Andrés Sepulveda, a Colombian hacker who literally stole the Mexican presidential election for the current president Enrique Peña Nieto. Sepulveda, who is linked with Miami-based political power broker Juan José Rendón (the right wing king-maker widely seen as the engineer of numerous fraudulent elections in Latin America), has laid bare the utterly fraudulent machinations just behind the artifice of so-called democracy. Does anyone really believe that US elections are not equally suspect?

Finally, were the problem just the age of the voting machines and the ability of outside hackers to manipulate them, the machines could simply be replaced with more advanced, high-security equipment, and the elections could be deemed legitimate, right? Not so fast.

The fact is that nearly all electronic voting machines are designed and manufactured by companies such as ES&S (owned by Warren Buffett), Dominion (previously Diebold), Smartmatic, and Hart Intercivic, all of which are connected to very powerful interests within the ruling elite circles. In fact, researchers at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University demonstrated that in under 60 seconds, anyone could bypass the lock and replace the memory card with another. As the researchers in the video explain, “Any desired algorithm can be used to determine which votes to steal and to which candidate or candidates to transfer the stolen votes.”

Put simply, there is little reason to trust the results of any election in the US. As Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis succinctly wrote:

“There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny.”

Given these inescapable facts, there is little reason to wonder why Hillary Clinton, the darling of the establishment, is always smiling. She knows the game is rigged in her favor.

Despite the momentum Sanders has generated with his grassroots support, the Clinton machine is alive and well thanks to a fake support base, dodgy election infrastructure, and elite-controlled nomination process; in other words, corporate control of the election circus.

Think of these things the next time you hear President Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or anyone else spouting off about America’s democracy and its “exceptional” place in the world.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City and the founder of StopImperialism.com. He is a regular contributor to RT, Counterpunch, New Eastern Outlook, Press TV, and many other news outlets. Visit StopImperialism.com for all his work.

Richard Nixon’s similarities to Hillary Clinton are remarkable:

1: Both were highly successful politicians who hadexceptionally negative net-approval ratings from the U.S. public, but were viewed highly favorably by the voters within their own Party.

2: Both were unsuccessful in their first run for the Presidency, but managed to come back and ran considerably more successful campaigns the second time around.

3: Both were highly distrusted, except by the voters within their own Party.

4: Both went into their Presidential campaign years (especially the second time around) as being “the candidate with experience.”

5: Both were war-hawks and proponents of a big military, but were also liberals on social policies and regulatory policies (for example, Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, several environmental initiatives including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Mammal Marine Protection Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency; and, he started the Earned-Income Tax Credit, which “now lifts more children out of poverty than any other government program”).

6: Whereas Nixon, running during the Cold War against the sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, lied that he had ‘a secret plan to end the Vietnam war’ (he actually had — and applied — a secret plan to extend the Vietnam war), and he won the Presidency on the basis of that lie; Hillary Clinton, running against the anti-restoration–of-the-Cold-War progressive Bernie Sanders in 2016, lies by saying that she has a plan to end the war in Russia-allied Syria. Sanders says:

“Of course Assad is a terrible dictator. But I think we have got to get our foreign policies and priorities right. The immediate — it is not Assad who is attacking the United States. It is ISIS. And ISIS is attacking France and attacking Russian airliners. The major priority, right now, in terms of our foreign and military policy should be the destruction of ISIS.”

Clinton says an emphatic no to that:

“Assad has killed, by last count, about 250,000 Syrians. The reason we are in the mess we’re in, that ISIS has the territory it has, is because of Assad.”

So, she is promising regime-change in Syria and saying that it’s the prerequisite to defeating ISIS — which is an absurd lie, since ISIS, and Al Qaeda, and all the other jihadist groups who have flocked into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad, are certainly not the way to defeat ISIS, nor to defeat the other jihadist groups there, all of which are anti-Assad, as is Clinton herself. Clearly, then, her ‘plan’ to win the war in Syria is, essentially, to replace Assad with jihadists — to whom the U.S. is sending thousands of tons of weapons. Her Big Lie there is merely stupider than Nixon’s (it’s transparently stupid, because both she and ISIS aim, above all, to overthrow Assad), but it’s just as much a lie about war-and-peace as was Nixon’s ’secret plan to end the Vietnam war’; and, in that sense, it is remarkably similar and (like Nixon’s lie was) can be believed only by liar-trusting fools, including virtually all members of the candidate’s own Party, plus a large percentage of political independents.

6: Both Richard Nixon and Hillary Clinton were/are famous for being secretive, and for distrusting everyone except his/her proven-loyal personal entourage — loyalty is a higher value to them than is any other. They are paranoid — very us-versus-‘them’ — and all-too-willing to use unethical means of defeating ‘them’ (not really the American people’s foreign ‘enemy’, but, above all, their own domestic “enemies-list”).

7: Both Nixon and Clinton famously use curse-words profusely in private, and treat their subordinates like trash, and rule them by fear.

8: Both of them had/have established records backing coups abroad, in order to impose the will of America’s President, no matter how bloody (such as the coups that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Allende in Chile in 1973, and the coups that overthrew Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, and Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014).

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.

 

Have you noticed that it is not only the presstitute media and the two establishment political parties that are beating up on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also the progressive left. 

Sometimes the messages overlap so much that the progressive left sounds like the One Percent.  But mainly the progressive left is down on Sanders because he is “not pure,” and they don’t like Trump because he hurts people’s feelings and doesn’t apologize.

This is astounding.  Here we are faced with the corrupt media and the corrupt party establishments determined to put in the Oval Office a tried and proven agent of the One Percent, and the progressive left is beating up on the only two alternatives!

I doubt that Sanders or Trump would be able to achieve much for the American people except to reduce the flow of official lies that the presstitutes turn into truths by constant repetition.

The Oligarchy is too strong.  It was more than a half century ago that President Eisenhower warned us of the threat to American democracy from the military-security complex.  That complex is much stronger today, and, in addition, we have Wall Street and the mega-banks that control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, the Israel Lobby that has the US Congress wrapped around its little finger, the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber) that prevails over the environment and preservation, and agra-business that poisons our food, exterminates honey bees and butterflies and produces chemical fertilizer runoff into waters that result in massive fish kills from algea blooms.   None of these powerful interests will permit the welfare of the American people to get in the way of their agendas and profits.

Nevertheless, the election of Sanders or Trump is important, because it demonstrates that American citizens are emerging from The Matrix and have no confidence in the two corrupt political parties that betrayed them.  The message would go out to the world as well that the American people have no confidence in the Washington Establishment.  These messages are very important and can only have beneficial effects.

So why is the progressive left helping the One Percent keep the lid on the rest of us?  Has the progressive left sold out or is the progressive left putting its emotional needs above the general welfare?

Image: Barack Obama, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

Whereas Obama has previously tried in public to downplay his preferences in this area, he has now been forced to display them and has announced to the US population that he sides with Saudi dictator Salman bin Abdulaziz over the 9/11 victims and their families. 

“Things are normal”, responded my friend by phone from Kathmandu. “Nothing has changed”. Oh dear; this means the situation there remains dire. Not a good sign—too much like news of a terminally ill relative.

Nepal has fallen into a troubling, dysfunctional state of ‘normality’ which has little to do with last year’s eruptions that destroyed villages, leveled temples and schools, killing almost 9,000 people in and around Kathmandu Valley.

The county’s capital, a city of four million, needs to awaken from its comatose state, a condition that may seem an outcome of the earthquake, but in fact is a result of deep-seated endemic problems:– bad leadership, misplaced and mismanaged development policies and funds, factionalism, and an over-dependence on India.

Yes, Nepal generates news: Britain’s Prince Harry was there helping out—not the political mess but something easy, like water pipes or village schools. A major newspaper devotes a full page to 3-D printers being introduced to isolated villages (their residents still live in tents waiting to rebuild homes crushed by the earthquake). Because hoteliers are readying tourist comforts and trekking trails are reopening, progress appears to be underway. You’ll find instagram images of spectacular glaciers and color-splashed youngsters frolicking at festival-time. Those unable to experience Nepal firsthand can order quality fabrics and carpets produced by foreign-run factories using advanced technologies there. For the spiritually minded, Patan’s ancient Hindu temples are being restored and yoga retreats can be booked online. Image-makers provide appropriate graphics for those who continue to deny Nepal’s reality—that is, a nation absent basic services for its people and where government responsibility is hard to find.

Winter has moved on so those cold nights without fuel have passed. But (unrelated to the earthquake) millions of Nepalis face ongoing hardships and bleak prospects about the democratic benefits promised them –first by the introduction of multi-parties, then by the ceasefire with Maoist rebels, then by the king’s ouster and declaration of Nepal as a republic, and finally, last summer, with the passage of a new constitution.

A long delayed agreement (after eight years) over the constitution may have been hastened by pledges for earthquake relief. In July, only weeks after the frightening upheaval, extremely generous relief funds were committed, and presto the interim parliament approved the constitution. In those intervening years of delay however, in response to new freedoms of expression and the trashing of Nepal’s Hindu kingdom that denied civil liberties to the majority, ethnic awareness flourished. Once-marginalized localities and social groups insisted that their rights be built into the new constitution.

The Constituent Assembly patched something together to accommodate miscellaneous demands from multifarious interest groups. One community, the Madhesi, who inhabit the strategic band of Nepal bordering India were unhappy. Feeling left out, their leaders objected by declaring an embargo that effectively closed the border with India where Madhesi enjoy dispensations and cultural affinity. Although India’s government denied any role in the blockade it was accused of cooperating with the Madhesi.

This landlocked country with few industries and declining agricultural production is deeply dependent on India for basic commodities, especially cooking gas and transport fuel. Life came to a standstill. Not only was earthquake reconstructionstalled millions slid into deeper misery. The incompetence and worthlessness of Nepal’s democratic government was irrefutable. To worsen matters, people with money could drive to the border to purchase whatever they needed, and the most enterprising among them bought up supplies in India to sell at extortionist prices back home. Corruption, already out of control, increased.

Opinions vary as to Nepal’s options: —negotiate with Madhesi leaders to amend the constitution; negotiate with India to open the border; find alternative suppliers in China on Nepal’s northern frontier; rally around a uniting force, the deposed king, for example. (This last option, once anathema, is still a remote possibility. As an expression of Nepal’s tolerance, its democracy leaders neither killed nor banished the disgraced king, nor confiscated all his property. And although Gayanendra maintains a low profile, he frequently appears in public and his comeback is a possibility, however remote.)

Still enjoying press freedoms, Nepalis vigorously debate their endemic crisis; political parties are flourishing, drawing into their ranks men and women still hopeful of redemption through legitimate democratic means. But many feel hopeless. What is most worrying is an incapacity of party leaders or any other authority to rise above personal and minor ideological squabbles. The successful Maoist revolution of the 1990s cannot be revived since Maoist leaders have joined the roster of present day corrupt and incompetent officials.

Remarkably (beyond India) foreign sympathy for Nepal remains high. Although tourism is a minor sector of the economy, it dominates the country’s public profile and helps bolster the important NGO sector that is a more critical although limited part of the economy. Why aid-giving democracies don’t want to step in and help with the dysfunctional democracy here is a mystery. Nepal stumbles along from festival to festival.

 

The nuclear power plant at Fukushima Japan, previously destroyed in 2011 by an earthquake and Tsunami, has been hit with a Magnitude 5.6 earthquake at 8:19 AM eastern US time, on April 20, 2016 

According to the Japanese Earthquake Center, these are the initial details:

Earthquake Information (Earthquake Information)
Issued at 21:22 JST 20 Apr 2016

Occurred at (JST)	Latitude (degree)	Longitude (degree)	Depth	Magnitude	Region Name
21:19 JST 20 Apr 2016	37.8N	141.7E	40 km	5.6	Fukushima-ken Oki

 

The Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power plant saw three reactors meltdown and explode in March, 2011.  Clean-up of the radiation continues to this very day, with spent fuel still remaining in some damaged fuel pools.  If those pools are further damaged, they could collapse, draining immediately, and causing a nuclear fire to erupt in the spent fuel rods.

Twitter has lit-up with reports about this quake, with users all the way south in Tokyo saying they felt the ground shake!

The quake was centered around 60 miles south east of Sendai, Honshu, near where a devastating quake and tsunami struck in March 2011.

Back in 2011, the disaster began with a quake about this size in the same area, and was followed a little while later by a massive magnitude 9.2 which generated the tsunami.  All eyes are now watching this same area of the ocean to see if history will repeat itself today.

The US Geological Survey is now also reporting the quake, but at 5.8 magnitude.  Report Here

Further updates as info becomes available . . . .

“Bernie’s gone. You know that? Bernie’s gone,” Trump said on April 20 at a rally in Indianapolis, Indiana, the day after Hillary Clinton routed Sanders in the New York primary. “I love running against crooked Hillary,” he said. “Bernie wouldn’t be as much fun.”

Every election year promises full employment in industry sectors that serve the public with almost daily opinion polls that tell you what one- to two-thousand people (a sampling) think about every candidate and issue; and, in case you can’t think for yourself, a generous assortment of pundits (usually biased) who will connect the dots and tell you what “most Americans think”.

“Don’t statistics lie?” an insurance company retiree asked me. I replied that people can lie when answering polls and companies can lie when structuring data for public release. But poll results must meet acknowledged standards for methodology, sampling, margin of error and accuracy (if not, garbage in=garbage out). To use results selectively and without context can lead to deceptive and distorted conclusions that bolster predetermined outcomes and biases.

How accurate were New York primary election polling forecasts that were conducted from April 11 to April 18 (data sources compiled at RealClearPolitics.com)?

Final Election results from the April 19 New York Primary are:

Clinton 58, Sanders 42 (Clinton +16)

Trump 60.4, Kasich 25.1, Cruz 14.5 (Trump +35.3)

Pollster/Results/Spread

April 18 Polls:

Emerson: Trump 55, Kasich 21, Cruz 18 (Trump +34)

Emerson: Clinton 55, Sanders 40 (Clinton +15)

Gravis: Trump 57, Kasich 22, Cruz 20 (Trump +35)

Gravis: Clinton 53, Sanders 47 (Clinton +6)

April 17 Polls:

CBS News/YouGov: Trump 54, Kasich 19, Cruz 21 (Trump +33)

CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 53, Sanders 43 (Clinton +10)

April 16 Poll:

NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist: Trump 54, Kasich 25, Cruz 16 (Trump +29)

April 15 Poll:

0ptimus: Trump 49, Kasich 23, Cruz 14 (Trump +26)

April 14 Poll:

NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist: Clinton 57, Sanders 40 (Clinton +17)

April 13 Polls:

Siena: Trump 50, Kasich 27, Cruz 17 (Trump +23)

Siena: Clinton 52, Sanders 42 (Clinton +10)

April 12 Polls:

Quinnipiac: Trump 55, Kasich 20, Cruz 19 (Trump +35)

NY1/Baruch: Trump 60, Kasich 17, Cruz 14 (Trump +43)

PPP (D): Trump 51, Kasich 25, Cruz 20 (Trump +26)

Liberty Research: Trump 52, Kasich 23, Cruz 19 (Trump +29)

Quinnipiac: Clinton 53, Sanders 40 (Clinton +13)

NY1/Baruch: Clinton 50, Sanders 37 (Clinton +13)

PPP: Clinton 51, Sanders 40 (Clinton +11)

April 11 Polls:

NBC/WSJ/Marist: Trump 54, Kasich 21, Cruz 18 (Trump +33)

NBC/WSJ/Marist: Clinton 55, Sanders 41 (Clinton +14)

Monmouth: Clinton 51, Sanders 39 (Clinton +12)

Final election results (April 19):

Clinton 58, Sanders 42 (Clinton +16)

Trump 60.4, Kasich 25.1, Cruz 14.5 (Trump +35.3)

Conclusions

All polls correctly predicted Clinton and Trump wins.

All twelve polls underestimated Clinton’s margin of victory except the April 14 NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist Poll: (Clinton +17)

All thirteen polls considerably underestimated Trump’s margin of victory.

All eleven polls correctly predicted Kasich as runner-up.

All eleven polls correctly predicted Cruz in third place.

Note: The Reuters Polling Explorer (polling.reuters.com) is a wondrous interactive tool for finding current and historical poll results on presidential candidates that can be filtered to demographic subsets (e.g., what percentage of white, middle-class millennials voted for Bernie Sanders vs. what percentage of hi-income evangelicals ages 65+ voted for Ted Cruz vs. what percentage of unemployed whites ages 18-29 voted for Donald Trump).

On the day following the New York Primary, April 20, political pundits carried on:

Following his sweeping victory in New York, Donald Trump “was markedly more disciplined, gentler and more appealing than the version of Trump we’ve seen for much of the last year,” wrote Chris Cillizza for the Washington Post. The new Donald Trump “should scare the hell out of the GOP establishment… ”

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt: “Donald Trump Will Be Nominee on First Ballot; Will Clear 1,237 Mark By 50 Delegates”. (RealClearPolitics, April 20)

Schmidt predicted Trump will not only get the required 1,237 delegates, but will have at least 50 more. Schmidt appeared on Wednesday’s Morning Joe, following Trump’s landslide victory in his home state of New York.

“He will clear the 1,237 mark by at least 50 to 60 delegates by the time the votes are counted on June 7th in the state of California. And that presumes really Ted Cruz over performing at a level that he hasn’t been able to perform at thus far in the campaign,” said Schmidt.

Trump strategist Roger Stone: “Even If Trump Wins 1,237 Delegates, Cruz Could Use ‘Procedural’ Means To ‘Take Away His Majority’”. (RealClearPolitics, April 20)

“Unfortunately just because Donald Trump gets the 1,237 [delegates needed to win], doesn’t mean we aren’t going to have a brokered convention,” Roger Stone told NJ 101.5 radio.

“My sources, who are pretty good in the Republican Party, indicate to me that Ted Cruz intends to work a ‘rules strategy’ to try to euchre this nomination away from Donald Trump.

“In kind of a shady, using political trickery and so on, utilizing these Trojan Delegates we have been talking about — Where Trump delegates, from the results of the primary — those seats are filled with non-Trump voters, non-Trump supporters who will vote against Trump on procedural issues in either rules or credentials that could be used to take away his majority.”

“It’s over for the Vermont senator,”

shouted Douglas E. Schoen at FOX News. (April 20)

“I in no way want to denigrate what Bernie Sanders has accomplished in this campaign, which has been truly remarkable. When he started out he was over 60 points down in New York and he made this a real race (as he has across the nation),”

admitted Schoen. “But after Tuesday night’s victory the reality is truly setting in that the delegate math just isn’t there for Bernie Sanders.”

Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki during election night coverage (April 19):

“[E]ven if Hillary Clinton secures the nomination through pledged and superdelegates the campaign would still challenge her at the convention …We’re going to go to the convention. It is extremely unlikely either candidate will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to get [the nomination]. So it’s going to be an election determined by the superdelegates,”

claimed Weaver.

As suspected by some that Bernie Sanders is a “gate keeper” for Hillary and despite gestures by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to run a third party independent campaign with her as VP, Sanders’ campaign aide says Sanders now will be Democrat for life. (msnbs & Bloomberg, April 19)

“He is a Democrat, he said he’s a Democrat and he’s going to be supporting the Democratic nominee, whoever that is,” Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on Bloomberg Politics show ’With All Due Respect.’

Trump says as President, he’d mull pursuing Clinton indictment. (FOX News & Bloomberg, April 20)

“You’d certainly have to look at it – very fairly, and I would only do something 100% fair ­­­­– but certainly that is something you would look at,” Donald Trump said in interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says: (TheHill, April 20)

Donald Trump’s blowout victory in Tuesday’s New York primary makes him the presumptive Republican presidential nominee that the party should unite behind, reported Jessie Hellmann in The Hill. Gingrich asserted Trump would win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention this summer in Cleveland. “It is time for the GOP establishment to work with this new reality rather than wage war against it,” he said.

In an exclusive interview for Politico on April 6, Hillary Clinton said

“she has had enough of Bernie Sanders. She is clearly frustrated with his easy appeal to voters under 35. She even suggested for the first time (in public, anyway) that the septuagenarian from Vermont was feeding a simplistic, cynical line of argument to turn young voters against her,”

wrote Politico interviewer Glenn Thrush.

“There is a persistent, organized effort to misrepresent my record, and I don’t appreciate that, and I feel sorry for a lot of the young people who are fed this list of misrepresentations,” Clinton said. “I know that Sen. Sanders spends a lot of time attacking my husband, attacking President Obama. I rarely hear him say anything negative about George W. Bush, who I think wrecked our economy.”

The pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA raised nearly $12 million in March, the bulk from a dozen six- and seven-figure contributions, according to Politico.

The PAC spent almost as much as it raised, with the vast majority — $10 million — marked for a digital ad reservation through Precision Network. Another $541,000 to Civis Analytics was labeled as “General Election Analytics.”

In her victory speech on April 19, Hillary Clinton asked her admirers: “I hope you will join the 1.1 million people who’ve already contributed at HillaryClinton.com—and by the way, most with less than $100—because we have more work to do.”

Hillary’s top donor during the month of March, hedge fund billionaire James Simons, contributed $3.5 million, and four other donors topped the $1 million mark. Two $900,000 donations from the Pritzker family were also listed as part of the haul.

“I love running against crooked Hillary,” Trump said. “Bernie wouldn’t be as much fun.”

Michael T. Bucci is a retired public relations executive currently residing in New England. He has authored nine books on practical spirituality collectively titled The Cerithous Material.

Notes:

[1] “Trump declares: ‘Bernie’s gone’”. Brianna Gurciullo. April 20, 2016. Politico.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/04/trump-bernie-sanders-campaign-over-222221

[2] Election 2016 Presidential Polls. RealClearPolitics. (caveat: site fires multiple pop-ups)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/ 

[3] Reuters Polling Explorer.

http://www.polling.reuters.com

[4] “The new Donald Trump should scare the hell out of the GOP establishment.” Chris Cillizza. Washington Post. April 20, 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/20/the-kinder-more-disciplined-donald-trump-should-scare-the-hell-out-of-the-gop-establishment/ 

[5] Steve Schmidt: Donald Trump Will Be Nominee on First Ballot; Will Clear 1,237 Mark By 50 Delegates. RealClear Politics. April 20, 2016.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/20/steve_schmidt_donald_trump_will_be_nominee_on_first_ballot_will_clear_1237_mark_by_50_delegates.html

[6] Stone: Even If Trump Wins 1,237 Delegates, Cruz Could Use “Procedural” Means To “Take Away His Majority”. RealClear Politics. April 20, 2016.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/20/stone_even_if_trump_wins_1237_delgates_cruz_could_use_procedural_means_to_take_away_his_majority.html

[7] “Clinton shuts down Sanders with a big win in New York. It’s over for the Vermont senator”. Douglas E. Schoen. FOX News. April 20, 2016

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/04/20/clinton-shuts-down-sanders-with-big-win-in-new-york-its-over-for-vermont-senator.html

[8] “Sanders campaign undaunted by NY loss, will fight to the end”. Steve Kornacki. MSNBC. April 19, 2016.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/sanders-campaign-undaunted-by-ny-loss-669591619932

[9] “Sanders Now Will Be Democrat For Life”. Chelsea Mes. Bloomberg Politics. April 20, 2016.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/trackers/2016-04-20/sanders-now-will-be-democrat-for-life-campaign-aide-says

[10] “Trump Says as President, He’d Mull Pursuing Clinton Indictment”. Chelsea Mes. Bloomberg Politics. April 20, 2016. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/trackers/2016-04-20/trump-says-as-president-he-d-mull-pursuing-clinton-indictment

[11] “Gingrich: Trump is presumptive nominee”. Jessie Hellmann. TheHill. April 20, 2016.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/277016-gingrich-trump-is-presumptive-nominee

[12] “Pro-Clinton PAC rakes in high-dollar donations, eyes general election”. Kyle Cheney. Politico. April 20, 2016.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/hillary-clinton-super-pac-222234

[13] “Full Transcript: Hillary Clinton’s New York Primary Victory Speech”. Newsweek. April 20, 2016.

http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-full-transcript-new-york-victory-speech-450349

[14] More information about polling can be learned at American Association for Public Opinion Research.

http://www.aapor.org/

The 13th Islamic Summit titled ‘Unity and Solidarity for Justice and Peace’ of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (IOC) finished its work on April 12 in Istanbul. The Summit Conference was chaired by Turkey’s President, Recep Erdogan.

Amid the numerous analytical and news reports about the event, SouthFront wants to mark the traces which could help to forecast the further actions and strategies of some states which participated in the summit.

The Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, stated the importance and pushed the issue of the “occupied Islamic territories”: Palestine, Nagorno-Karabakh and Crimea. He expressed concern over the situation there and emphasized that they should be rescued through cultural, religious and other means, because these territories are detached from the Islamic Ummah. Davutoğlu called this one of the main issues of the summit.

The Turkish version of the Communique wasn’t accepted. Nonetheless, the Final Communique condemned the aggression of the Republic of Armenia against the Republic of Azerbaijan and expressed interest in the situation of the Crimean Muslim Tatars in the light of the so-called “recent developments” in the Peninsula.

Furthermore, one of the leaders of Crimea Tatars extremists and a former Chairman of the so-called “Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People” Mustafa Dzhemilev was represented in the summit as an only legitimate representative of the Republic of Crimea. Dzhemilev participated in a joint meeting with the Turkish and Azeri Presidents.

The King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud also participated in the summit. Furthermore, when Salman stepped on the tarmac of Ankara’s airport on April 11, Erdogan was there. This was unusual, because according to the strict protocol of the Republic of Turkey, the official welcoming ceremony for a foreign guest of the president should be held at the presidential palace. In addition to the special reception in Ankara, Salman received Turkey’s highest award.

Evaluating the Turkish initiatives and the background of the summit, it becomes clear that the Salafi regimes of Qatar and Saudi Arabia are making an attempt to use the Erdogan regime as the vanguard of their expansion in Eurasia. They likely believe that Turkey which controls the migration flow to the EU could help them to expand the influence through the European territories. According to this plan, the ongoing migration crisis should strategically change the religious, cultural and ethnic map of the Europe.

Turkey has also accepted the strategy and is taking steps to destabilize the situation in the Russian Caucasus and Crimea. There is a significant chance that agreements on financial aid to Tatar extremists deployed on the border with Crimea in Ukraine’s Cherson region are set.

Thus, the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari regimes activated their own foreign policies, at least partly, independent from the US strategy in the Greater Middle East and neighboring areas. Their main tool is the destabilization of opponents and allies using Islamic extremism and controlling the migration of refugees

The European Commission has shelved a legal opinion confirming that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) produced through gene-editing and other new techniques fall under EU GMO law, following pressure from the US government. A series of internal Commission documents obtained under freedom of information rules reveal intense lobbying by US representatives for the EU to disregard its GMO rules, which require safety testing and labelling.

The documents show that US pressure is focussed on potential barriers to trade from the application of EU GMO law. They suggest that the EU should ignore health and environmental safeguards on GMOs to pave the way for a transatlantic trade agreement. The next round of TTIP negotiations starts on 25 April 2016 in New York.

Nina Holland, researcher for Corporate Europe Observatory, says:

“The biotech industry has waged an under-the-radar campaign to get new GM products absolved from GM regulation. The TTIP negotiations are seen by industry across the board and the US government as the perfect opportunity to block EU processes that are supposed to protect public health and the environment. The regulation of new GM techniques is a case in point.”

Franziska Achterberg, EU food policy director for Greenpeace, says:

“The Commission must come out of the bushes and state clearly that gene-editing is genetic engineering. Europeans need to be reassured that the Commission will apply GMO rules to all GMOs, whatever way they’re produced. This is the only way to ensure that GMOs don’t enter the food chain untested and unlabelled.”

Dr Helen Wallace, Director of GeneWatch UK, says:

“Gene-edited crops and trees pose risks to the environment. Before they can be marketed, these risks need to be properly assessed.  Farm animals, fish and insects could all be gene-edited in future. Changes to nature could be irreversible if this industry is not regulated”.

Please read the full media briefing here.

“In my opinion you have an impressive president,” said the German economics minister, vice chancellor and Social Democratic Party (SPD) chairman, Sigmar Gabriel, in reference to the Egyptian despot Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Gabriel made the remark during a press conference last Sunday in the Egyptian capital of Cairo.

This single sentence says a great deal about the character of the SPD. With this quote, Gabriel places himself directly in the tradition of Gustav Noske, who, as the first social democratic defence minister, declared during the 1918 November Revolution in Germany, “As far as I’m concerned, someone has to be the bloodhound! I will not shirk the responsibility!”

Noske drowned the workers’ uprising at the end of the First World War in blood, in the process overseeing the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

As the World Socialist Web Site has written, al-Sisi is on an equal footing with General Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the Chilean military junta, under whose rule between 1973 and 1990 tens of thousands were imprisoned, tortured and murdered.

The former head of military intelligence under Mubarak, trained in the United States, al-Sisi is the absolute ruler of one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world and the gravedigger of the Egyptian revolution. Since July 3, 2013, when al-Sisi seized power following mass protests against the Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, all opponents of the regime have faced the possibility of being murdered at the hands of al-Sisi’s security forces or being arrested and tortured.

According to Amnesty International, just in the first two years under al-Sisi, 41,000 people have disappeared into the country’s torture chambers. Thousands were shot during the suppression of protests and strikes or sentenced to death. Freedom of the press doesn’t exist even on paper in al-Sisi’s Egypt. Parties and organizations that merely criticize the regime are proscribed by the dozens.

In June 2015, when the German government rolled out the red carpet for the hangman of Cairo in Berlin, the World Socialist Web Site put together a partial timeline of the bloodiest crimes of al-Sisi’s military junta:

* July 8, 2013: Egyptian security forces shoot 53 Mursi supporters in front of the building of the Republican Guard in Cairo.

* August 14, 2013: The army and police storm two camps of anti-putsch protestors and kill more than 1,000 people, among them many women and children. Humans Rights Watch identifies the “massacre” as the “worst incident of illegal mass killing in the modern history of Egypt.”

* January 25, 2014: On the third anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution, military and security forces kill more than 100 opponents of the regime during demonstrations.

* March 24, 2014: On a single day of hearings in the largest mass trial in Egyptian history, 529 people are sentenced to death.

* April 28, 2014: In another mass trial, 683 more people are sentenced to death in less than 15 minutes.

* May 15, 2015: Mursi himself and more than 100 other co-defendants are sentenced to death.

* May 16, 2015: Six of those convicted are hanged. Amnesty International strongly condemns the trial and points out that the confessions of the accused were extracted under torture.

Since then, the state terror has only increased. Just weeks before Gabriel’s visit, the terrible news of the brutal torture and murder of Italian student Gulio Regeni on the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution provoked outraged protests worldwide.

There are strong indications that al-Sisi himself was involved in the murder. Relying on an anonymous source in the Egyptian security apparatus, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that Regeni’s transfer to military intelligence was decided by Interior Minister Gen. Abdel Ghaffar together with al-Sisi’s adviser general, Ahmad Jamal ad-Din. In a subsequent conversation, which concerned Regeni’s corpse, al-Sisi was revealed to have been present.

On the weekend of Gabriel’s visit, Egyptian security forces put down protests against al-Sisi’s reign of terror in Cairo, Gizeh and Ismailia, among other locations. According to media reports, large quantities of tear gas were used against demonstrators and at least 119 were arrested.

The protests were ignited by the handing over of two strategically important islands in the Red Sea, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia. Tens of thousands took to the streets throughout the country and chanted the slogan used during mass protests in 2011 against al-Sisi’s predecessor, the long-standing dictator and vice-regent of the West, Hosni Mubarak: “The people want the downfall of the regime.”

Gabriel’s embrace of the counterrevolutionary al-Sisi regime was so blatant and obvious that even some German politicians chose to criticize it. Green Party Chairman Cem Özdemir asked on broadcaster ARD’s morning news program, “I don’t know what it is about President Sisi that impressed Mr. Gabriel—is it the torture, is it the oppression, is it the censorship, is it the dealings with German foundations?” Bernd Riexinger, chairman of the Left Party, reproached the German government, saying “it should not be a fan club for despots.”

The criticism by these opposition parties is transparent and phony. When the “despot” al-Sisi was a guest in Berlin last year, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, leader of the Green Party’s parliamentary fraction, explained: “Certainly, one must, when necessary, also speak with a military dictator when it comes to the extremely difficult situation in the Middle East.” The then-chairman of the Left Party, Gregor Gysi, wrote at the time: “Because dialogue is the only possibility for influencing the solution to the conflict, it would be wrong not to speak with Sisi.”

Why do leading German politicians from all parties, who otherwise regularly spout phrases about human rights, feel so attracted to the Egyptian dictator?

The answer is obvious. German imperialism, hungry for exports and raw materials (the finance minister was accompanied by some 120 business representatives) has enormous interests in the Middle East and North Africa and fears nothing more than renewed mass uprisings in the most politically and culturally influential country in the region. Gabriel explained, “We have a real interest in maintaining the country’s stability.” Should Egypt, with its 90 million people, be destabilized, it would have immediate consequences for Europe.

Gabriel left no doubt that the German government intends to support al-Sisi with more than just words. Among other things, he promised “German aid” in the anti-terror fight—a code word for the suppression of all opposition—and the building-up of the Egyptian regime. Cairo has already received four German U-boats and expressed interest in border protection assets.

That Gabriel regards a man like al-Sisi to be “impressive” is a warning to workers and youth in Germany and throughout Europe. The same ruling class that brought Hitler to power in 1933 is once more prepared to adopt the methods of a brutal military dictatorship to defend its geostrategic and economic interests worldwide and suppress any opposition from the population.

On April 20, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said abolitionist/suffragist/civil rights activist Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of new $20 bills. The former president gets demoted to their reverse sides.

Tubman was born into slavery, escaped to freedom and worked to rescue dozens of enslaved families, using so-called Underground Railroad safe houses.

Post-war, she was active in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Former slave Frederick Douglas said he “kn(ew) of no one (else) who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.”

Honoring her can’t erase the longstanding stain of state-sponsored war on Black Americans – from chattel to wage slavery, Jim Crow to its modern-day version, freedom to mass incarceration.

According to Law Professor Michelle Alexander, “(m)ore black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1950 before the Civil War began.”

Racist drug laws largely affect “poor communities of color.” In America’s inner-cities, most Black youths can expect criminal injustice prosecutions one or more times during their lives.

Over 60% of Black men born in 1965 or later without high school degrees (following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination) have prison records.

They’re marked for life, targeted by militarized cops, leaving them vulnerable to re-arrest or death.

America is more police state than democracy, its inner-city streets battlegrounds, Blacks and other people of color terrorized.

Honoring Tubman belies US ruthlessness, waging war on its most disadvantaged, enslaving them by other means.

Jefferson opposed the first Bank of the United States, giving private interests the power to create money. He got Congress to refuse to renew its charter.

Madison signed a 20-year charter. When Congress renewed it, Jackson vetoed it, calling it “a hydra-headed monster,” knowing “(t)he hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead,” he said.

January 1835 was his finest hour, accomplishing something never done before or since. He paid off the first installment of the national debt, then reduced it to zero and accumulated a surplus.

Lincoln financed the Civil War with publicly created money, free from interest to private bankers. His 1862 Legal Tender Act let government issue its own money, rescinded post-war.

Powerful bankers rule the world by creating and controlling money, entrapping nations in debt. Since Jackson’s presidency, interest alone on America’s debt was paid – to bankers and other owners of US obligations.

The income tax was instituted to make the public pay interest to bankers on America’s debt. As long as private interests control the nation’s money, debt entrapment will continue – along with booms, busts, inflation, deflation, instability and crises.

The 1913 Federal Reserve Act empowering bankers to control America’s money was the most destructive legislation in US history.

No Jeffersons, Jacksons or Lincolns today vie to become president – only aspirants beholden to Wall Street, money changers ripping us off for profit.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Communities along Washington state’s Columbia River could be wiped out because of a leak in a massive nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Nuclear Waste Storage Site in Richland, Washington.  

Leak detectors sounded early Sunday morning and crews at Hanford lowered a camera into the two-foot-wide space between the tank’s inner and outer walls. They discovered 8.4 inches of radioactive and chemically toxic waste had leaked and was continuing to leak.  These tanks can hold upwards of one million gallons each!

“This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to hold waste safely from people and the environment,” said former Hanford worker Mike Geffre.  The graphic below shows the problems now faced by the people in Washington state  (Click image to enlarge):

Communities Below Could Be Wiped Out

The concern is simple: Once the radioactive waste leaks from the underground tanks, it gets into the ground, get to the ground water, flows to the nearby Columbia  River and wipes out the following communities (Click image to enlarge):

Geffre is the worker who first discovered that the tank, known as AY-102, was failing in 2011. In a 2013 series, “Hanford’s Dirty Secrets,” the Television station KING 5 Investigators exposed that the government contractor in charge of the tanks, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS),ignored Geffre’s findings for nearly a year. The company finally admitted the problem in 2012.

Until now, the leak found by Geffre was very slow. The liquid would almost immediately dry up, leaving a salt-like substance on the floor of the two-foot space between the tank’s walls, called the annulus.

Approximately three weeks ago, work began to pump out the contents of AY-102, which has the capacity to hold one million gallons of the deadly waste. The state of Washington has been pressuring the federal government, which owns Hanford, to pump out AY-102 for three-and-a-half years because of the cracking and slow leaking discovered by Geffre in 2011. Sources believe the disturbance caused by the pumping must have exacerbated the leak: essentially blowing a hole in the aging tank allowing the material to leak more quickly into the outer shell.

Tank AY-102 is one of 28 double-shell tanks at Hanford (there are 177 underground tanks total) holding nuclear byproducts from nearly four decades of plutonium production on the Hanford Nuclear Site, located near Richland, WA. Initially the plutonium was used to fuel the bombs dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in World War II.

Plutonium production continued throughout the Cold War. Since 1989 the work at Hanford has focused solely on cleanup – the most difficult being getting rid of the liquid waste left behind that threatens the health of people, wildlife and the environment, including the nearby Columbia River.

The new leak poses problems on several fronts. The outer shell of AY-102 does not have exhaust or filtration systems to keep the dangerous gases created by the waste, in check. Workers have been ordered to wear full respiratory safety gear in the area, but the risk remains.

“The hazards to workers just went up by a factor of 10,” said Geffre.

In addition, the breakdown calls into question the viability of three other double-shell tanks at Hanford that have the exact design of AY-102.

“The primary tanks weren’t designed to stage waste like this for so many years,” said a current worker. “There’s always the question, ‘Are the outer shells compromised’”?

The accumulation of waste in the outer shell also means the deadliest substance on earth is that much closer to the ground surrounding the tank. And currently there is no viable plan in place to take care of it.

“It makes me sad that they didn’t believe me that there was a problem in 2011,” said Geffre.

“I wish they would have listened to me and reacted faster. Maybe none of this would be happening now. It’s an example of a culture at Hanford of ‘We don’t have problems here. We’re doing just fine.’ Which is a total lie,”

said Geffre.

According to reports of Western media that refer to the propagandistic “Syrian Observatory for human rights”, on Tuesday, 19 April 2016, as a result of two strikes of the air force of Syria in Idlib province about 44 people were killed.

According to the “Syrian Observatory”, located in the UK, 37 people were killed in an airstrike on market in the town of Maaret an-Nouman. Seven more people died during the bombing of Kafr-Nabl city, according to the source of SOFHR. Both cities are controlled by the Syrian opposition.

According to the testimony of local residents, the air strikes were inflicted by barrel bombs on markets and residential areas.

The U.S. state Department spokesman J. Kirby speaking on the incident said that “an airstrike, most likely, was launched by the Syrian air force, however, new information continues to come”.

According to the source in the Syrian General Staff, April 19the Syrian Air Forces did not provide any combat sorties in Idlib province, as all the forces were deployed to repel the attack of terrorists in the Latakia and Aleppo provinces.

Propaganda and contradictory messages

Apparently, this is another fake of militants whose goal is to justification of “the Riyadh group” rejection to continue the negotiations in Geneva under the pretext of accusations of the Syrian government in attacks against civilians.

Interestingly, that one of the first media agencies who published this information was the Turkish propaganda Agency “Anadolu”. Erdogan’s media refers to its own sources in the ranks of the fighters:

“At least 33 people were killed and 47 wounded in attack of the Syrian Air Forces on the market in the region of Maarat an-Numan and the village Kafr Nubul in Idlib province in Northern Syria. As reported the representative of the office of civil defense in Maarat an-Numan Omer Alwan, in Maarat an-Numan market 28 civilians were killed, 35 were injured. Kafr Nubul was also bombed, five people died and 12 were wounded there. In result of the airstrike the region got major damages,”

writes “Anadolu”.

The custom nature of mass media publications is confirmed by the nature of the posts on this subject. Originally, the  April 19 evening, it was reported about the use of “barrel bombs” without specifying the exact time of the incident.

As is known, such munitions are dropped from helicopters, not planes, and the extent of the devastation demonstrated on the photos does not size up to one ton of trinitrotoluene. So by the next morning “barrel bomb” has already disappeared from reports in the Western media.

However, the crater from the explosion of even common bomb on dozens of photos from the place of the incident is not visible. Most likely, it was the staged attack to discredit the Syrian authorities.

Besides, the militants have established a system of photo and visual documenting of raids on settlements controlled by them, and in this case there were not published any photos demonstrating the helicopters of the Syrian Air Forces, that is causing another large doubts about the veracity of this information.

American Jews have long overwhelmingly supported an end to the occupation, but increasingly, we are building an organized critical mass who are also willing to push our institutions and politicians in the same direction. IfNotNow takes its Passover message of liberation to Hillel and AIPAC.

We gathered early in the morning, before the work day began. By the time I arrived at our meeting place, there were leaders milling about in neon vests to assist with logistics. There were megaphones. There were posters. I remarked to a friend, “This feels like trip day at my Jewish summer camp, but a bit edgier.”

We had come together as IfNotNow, a movement working to end American Jewish communal support for the Israeli occupation. Our action was the first in a week-long series of actions under the banner of Dayenu! No Liberation with Occupation. Because this Passover, when Jews gather around the country to reflect on the meaning of liberation in our tradition, we are not prepared to allow the American Jewish community to ignore our oppression of the Palestinian people. Not with the occupation about to turn 50.

The plan was to march to Hillel International — a Jewish institution complicit in perpetuating the occupation and stifling student dissent — and set up a seder table in front of its doors. We would then observe a Passover Liberation Seder affirming the liberation of the Jewish and Palestinian people. With the doors blocked, Hillel International would not be able to continue business as usual until we had completed our ritual. Just as the occupation disrupts the daily lives of Palestinians, so too would we disrupt the daily activities of Hillel International.

We did. And my God, was that seder beautiful.

As a Jewish anti-occupation activist, it can be easy to feel alone in this political climate. Last week, my friend and visionary anti-occupation activist Simone Zimmerman was suspended from her position as Jewish Outreach Coordinator at the Bernie Sanders campaign following intense pressure from right-wing Jewish establishment leaders. And just yesterday, hundreds of Jewish Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv to rally behind an Israeli soldier who shot and killed an already subdued Palestinian attacker in Hebron. Reportedly, many wore “Kahane Lives” paraphernalia and chanted “death to Arabs.” One sign read, “Kill Them All.”

But today I did not feel alone. I stood in the crowd with fellow Solomon Schechter Jewish Day school alumni; fellow North American Federation of Temple Youth (NFTY) alumni; fellow Hillel alumni; fellow J Street U alumni; fellow Tikkun Leil Shabbat minyan participants in D.C.; a fellow New Israel Fund — Shatil social justice fellow; colleagues, friends, loved ones.

We began the seder with the Shehecheyanu, the Jewish blessing for auspicious beginnings. When I hear the Shehecheyanu, I cannot help but to hear it in my father’s voice. I grew up listening to him in his capacity as Rabbi Gale, chanting the blessing at weddings, holiday celebrations, and bnai mitzvah. I burst into a smile as we blessed our auspicious gathering of Jews united for freedom and dignity for all.

We sang Lo Yisa Goy — a passage from Isaiah popular in many Jewish communities. It translates, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war anymore.” For the first time in years, I was able to sing the song loudly and freely without wondering whether those around me cared about the Israeli occupation at all. I knew I was surrounded by a Jewish community that did care, urgently.

And we crafted our own version of the Dayenu, the Passover recitation of thanks for liberation from Egypt and the many other gifts bestowed upon the Jewish people. Rather than chanting, “It would have been enough,” we chanted, “We should have said enough:”

The moment East Jerusalem came up, I thought back to my former colleagues at Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or ”City of Peoples”) who work every day for a more equitable and sustainable Jerusalem.  I thought back to my friend Anwar, a young Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem who Skyped with me earlier this year on flickering Internet as Israeli Border Police raided her village. I thought of my role model, Ahmad Sub Laban, who has spent the past year working against the clock to protect his family from eviction by settlers in the Old City of Jerusalem. Here, in this American-Jewish space, these individuals were finally welcome.

It dawned on me that IfNotNow, and the young Jews making it happen, herald a new era of American Judaism. For too long, our Judaism has been poisoned by Israeli military occupation and American Jewish complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people. When I walk into synagogue, my body wants to fall into the relaxed familiarity of Kabbalat Shabbat but the moment is tainted knowing that the congregation is silent on the occupation. When I sing the Psalm, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” all I can think about is Israeli Border Police spraying skunk water on Palestinian homes and schools in A-Tur, and how lonely it feels to think about that in a mainstream Jewish space. And when I join my community to fast in repentance for our sins on Yom Kippur, I cannot help but to feel utterly enmeshed in a silent web of hypocrisy as the day passes without one mention of the Palestinian people.

But young American Jews who love our tradition and decry the injustice of occupation are coming of age. And we are creating a Judaism together that does not force us to empty our prayers of meaning.

I feel in my bones like the times are finally changing. We are creating an actualized, morally consistent Judaism, and we are taking it to its next logical step. American Jews have long overwhelmingly supported an end to the occupation, but increasingly, we are building an organized critical mass who are also willing to push our institutions and politicians to make it happen. We may have been a silent majority in the past, but our silence has not served us, or the Palestinians. So we are finding the courage, and community, to get louder.

IfNotNow is growing, with chapters popping up in Jewish communities across the country. Just in D.C. alone, IfNotNow is leading training sessions every month, coordinating actions, and organizing with passionate intensity. And on the same day as the IfNotNow D.C. Liberation Seder, six IfNotNow leaders in Boston were arrested while holding a Liberation Seder in the lobby of the local AIPAC office. That’s not to mention the exponential growth of Jewish Voice for Peace, the student-led organizing of Open Hillel, or the incredible work of J Street U to demand transparency for Jewish institutional funding across the Green Line. As IfNotNow folks like to say, “We are the generation that will end American Jewish support for the occupation.”

On Passover, it is traditional to ask, “Why is this night different than every other night?” This Passover, hundreds of young Jews across the country are taking to the streets to demand liberation from the Mitzrayim, the narrowness, of occupation, for Jews and Palestinians alike. We are turning our prayers in protest, the way the Prophets intended. We are turning our Passover songs into cries for justice.

That feels pretty different to me. It feels like a new era.

Leanne Gale is a Jewish anti-occupation activist based in Washington D.C.

On 19 April 2016, China was rolling out its new gold-backed yuan. Russia’s ruble has been fully supported by gold for the last couple of years. Nobody in the western media talks about it. Why would they? – A western reader may start wondering why he is constantly stressed by a US dollar based fiat monetary systems that is manipulated at will by a small elite of financial oligarchs for their benefit and to the detriment of the common people. 

In a recent Russia Insider article, Sergey Glaziev, one of Russia’s top economists and advisor to President Putin said about Russia’s currency, “The ruble Is the most gold-backed currency in the world”. He went on explaining that the amount of rubles circulating is covered by about twice the amount of gold in Russia’s Treasury.

In addition to a financial alliance, Russia and China also have developed in the past couple of years their own money transfer system, the China International Payment System, or the CIPS network which replaces the western transfer system, SWIFT, for Russian-Chinese internal trading. SWIFT, stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a network operating in 215 countries and territories and used by over 10,000 financial institutions.

Up until recently almost every international monetary transaction had to use SWIFT, a private institution, based in Belgium. ‘Private’ like in the US Federal Reserve Bank (FED), Wall Street banks and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS); all are involved in international monetary transfers and heavily influenced by the Rothschild family. No wonder that the ‘independent’ SWIFT plays along with Washington’s sanctions, for example, cutting off Iran from the international transfer system. Similarly, Washington used its arm-twisting with SWIFT to help Paul Singer’s New York Vulture Fund to extort more than 4 billion dollars from Argentina, by withholding Argentina’s regular debt payments as was agreed with 93% of all creditors. Eventually Argentina found other ways of making its payments, not to fall into disrepute and insolvency.

All of this changed for Argentina, when Mauricio Macri, the new neoliberal President put in place by Washington, appeared on the scene last December. He reopened the negotiations and is ready to pay a sizable junk of this illegal debt, despite a UN decision that a country that reaches a settlement agreement with the majority of the creditors is not to be pressured by non-conforming creditors. In the case of Argentina, the vulture lord bought the country’s default debt for a pittance and now that the nation’s economy had recovered he wants to make a fortune on the back of the population. This is how our western fraudulent monetary system functions.

China’s economy has surpassed that of the United States and this new eastern alliance is considered an existential threat to the fake western economy. CIPS, already used for trading and monetary exchange within China and Russia, is also applied by the remaining BRICS, Brazil, India and South Africa; and by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), plus India, Pakistan and Iran, as well as the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan). It is said that CIPS is ready to be launched worldwide as early as September 2016. It would be a formidable alternative to the western dollar based monetary Ponzi scheme.

The new eastern monetary sovereignty is one of the major reasons why Washington tries so hard to destroy the BRICS, mainly China and Russia – and lately with a special effort of false accusations also Brazil through a Latin America type Color Revolution.

In addition, the Yuan late last year was accepted by the IMF in its SDR basket as the fifth reserve currency, the other four being the US dollar, the British pound, the euro and the Japanese yen. The SDR, or Special Drawing Right, functions like a virtual currency. It is made up of the weighted average of the five currencies and can be lent to countries at their request, as a way of reducing exchange risks. Being part of the SDR, the yuan has become an official reserve currency. In fact, in Asia the yuan is already heavily used in many countries’ treasuries, as an alternative to the ever more volatile US dollar.

It is no secret, the western dollar-led fiat monetary system is on its last leg – as eventually any Ponzi scheme will be. What does ‘fiat’ mean? It is money created out of thin air. It has no backing whatsoever; not gold, not even the economic output generated by the country or countries issuing the money, i.e. the United States of America and Europe. It is simply declared “legal tender’’ by Government decree.

No pyramid scheme is sustainable in the long run and eventually will collapse. It was invented and is used by a small invisible upper crest of elite making insane amounts of profit on the back of the 99% of us. Since these elitists are in control of the media with their lie propaganda, as well as the warmongering killing machine, US armed forces, NATO, combined with the international security and spy apparatus, CIA, MI6, Mossad, DGSE, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and more, we are powerless – but powerless only as long as we ignore what’s really going on behind the curtain.

Our western monetary system is based on debt has all the hallmarks of a failing global monster octopus. The US banking system was deregulated in the 1990’s by President Clinton. The European vassals followed suit in the early 2000’s. About 97% of all the money in circulation in the western world is ‘made’ by private banks by a mouse click in the form of ‘loans’ or debt. Every loan a private bank hands out is a liability on that bank’s books; a liability that bears interest, the key generator of the banks’ profits. Profit from thin air! No work, no production, no real added value to the economy.

If and when the banks within this web of debt begin recalling their outstanding liabilities, they may set a non-stoppable avalanche in motion – leading to a chaotic end of the system. This end-run may have just begun. We have seen a gradual build-up since the end of WWII with the armament of the Cold War farce, and a high point with the manufactured sub-prime crisis of 2007 / 2008 / 2009, prompting an artificial and endless global economic crisis which may come crashing down in 2016 / 2017.

The damage may be humongous, leaving behind chaos, poverty, famine, misery – death. With the invisible ruling elite having cashed in, remaining on top and being liable to start again from scratch. – If we let them. It always boils down to the same: An uninformed people can be manipulated at will and is left in awe when hit by unexpected events, like acts of terror by bombs or banks.

Let us be crystal clear – we are all uninformed as long as we listen to and believe in the mainstream media – which are controlled by six Anglo-Zionist media giants, feeding the western public with 90% of the information, the so-called ‘news’ that we consume so eagerly every day; the barrage of lies that repeat themselves in every western country every hour on the hour – and, thus, become the truth. Period.

We must get out of our comfortable armchairs, listen to that innermost spark in the back of our minds, telling us against all avalanches of lies that there is something wrong, that we are being fed deception. We have to dig for the truth. And it is there – on internet, on alternative media, like Global Research, Information Clearing House, VNN, The Saker, NEO, Russia Today, Sputnik News, PressTV, TeleSUR – and many more credible sources of truth-seekers.

Back to the impending collapse. – The ground rules for our pyramid monetary scheme have been laid in 1913 by the creation of the FED. Again, the FED is an entirely private, Rothschild dominated banking institution that serves as the US Central Bank. It is the omnipotent dollar making machine. It was fraudulently and secretly conceived in 1910 on Jekyll Island, Georgia, and described by Jekyll Island history (http://www.jekyllislandhistory.com/federalreserve.shtml ) as the “duck hunt” which

“included Senator Nelson Aldrich, his personal secretary Arthur Shelton, former Harvard University professor of economics Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Henry P. Davison, National City Bank president Frank A. Vanderlip and Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. partner Paul M. Warburg. From the start the group proceeded covertly. They began by shunning the use of their last names and met quietly at Aldrich’s private railway car in New Jersey.”

The concoction of these secretive “duck hunters” became in 1913 the privately owned Rothschild dominated Federal Reserve System, the US central bank by deceit.

After signing the FED act into existence, President Woodrow Wilson declared,

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

The Anglo-Saxon system had a central bank in England since way back in 1694. It was then already controlled by the Rothschilds, as was the entire banking system. Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild once declared:

“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”

The Rothschild family’s fortune cannot be properly estimated, but it must be in the trillions. What Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild may have said some 300 years ago, still holds true to this day.

No wonder, breaking loose of this sham monetary scheme is number one priority of most countries that treasure sovereignty, autonomy and freedom, though they do not dare say so openly, lest the empire lashes out at them punishing them with the very financial terror they want to escape from. And lashing out at the unaligned world the empire does, like a dying beast, attempting to pull with it much of the living world into its own shoveled grave.

Is it therefore coincidence or a rather a purposefully planned convergence of several events as a last ditch effort first to ravage then to salvage as much as possible before the collapse?

On 10 April, Zero Hedge reports “Austria Just Announced A 54% Haircut of Senior Creditors in First “Bail In” Under New European Rules”. The Austrian “bad bank”, the failed Hypo Alpe Adria, that became Heta Asset Resolution AG after the government’s nationalization, found a US$ 8.5 billion hole in its balance sheet, enough to trigger the new European ‘bail-in’ rule. Is it coincidence that also in Austria a major bank failure triggered the Great Depression also on a 10^th of April – in 1931? – This is a first in Europe. Be prepared for others to follow, as over-extension of European banks is estimated in excess of a trillion dollars.

On 15 April, the New York Times reported that – Five of Wall Street’s eight largest banks are in defiance of the US banking regulator. The FED and FDIC said that “JP Morgan, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York, all lacked ‘credible‘ plans to enter bankruptcy in the event of a financial crisis.” These banks have until October 2016 to comply. Under the new rules a tax-payer bail-out would be unlikely. Hence ‘bail-ins’ could affect millions of depositors and shareholders, their funds being stolen in order to self-rescue the too-big-to-fail banks. After all, non-compliance with the regulator’s requests, or insolvency, can easily be manufactured as a legal base for stealing common people’s savings. No worries, the TBTF banks will not go away, but your savings may.

The CIA released Panama Papers (for who still doubts about the CIA involvement in the release of the Panama Papers,

read here http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/09/the-panama-papers-the-people-deceived/),

aimed in a most rudimentary way at defaming the ‘usual suspects’, Presidents Putin and Assad, as well as Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, of course – and others. Strangely no notable EU or US citizens or corporations were on the list. Would anybody seriously believe that Mr. Putin, a former KGB agent, would be so ignorant as to putting his fortune (even if he had any to hide) into Panama, the epitome of a US puppet state, where you can’t flush a toilet without Washington knowing it?

Some token neocons appear in the published papers, like Argentina’s new ‘Washington appointed’ President Mauricio Macri, who is running amok ruining his country. Within less than four months he has rolled Argentina’s economy back by ten years, raising poverty from below 10% in November 2015 to 34% by the end March 2016. The Empire needs him to keep gradually turning Argentina into chaos, however not too quickly, lest he may be ‘deposed’ and replaced by a US adversary – that would not at all be appreciated in Washington. For the types of Macri that made it on the list, the Panama Papers are a warning signal to keep them in-check.

The publication of the Panama Papers may also be an incentive for US citizens and corporations to bring home trillions of undeclared dollar holdings stacked away in overseas tax havens into homeland financial shelters like those in Delaware, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nevada, thereby helping strengthen the gradually decaying dollar.

Simultaneously, some European countries and Japan introduced negative interest rates, so as to increase monetary liquidity, thereby hoping stimulating an ever stagnant economy. That’s the pretext. In reality however, negative interests are but a precursor to a wholly bank controlled financial system. Normally ‘bail-ins’ and negative interest would cause a run on the banks. This has not happened yet.

In Switzerland, one of the first countries to introduce negative interests, the Swiss National Bank reported that the demand of the 1,000 franc notes – one of the world’s highest value denominations (apparently to be maintained despite ECB Draghi’s call for elimination of high denomination bank notes) – increased by 17% (by CHF 4.7 billion – US$ 4.85 billion) in December 2014, the month following the introduction of negative interests. May it be an indication that the Swiss have quietly started hoarding big-denomination cash?

Future hoarding and runs on the banks will be countered by the introduction of a cashless society, i.e. all monetary transactions will gradually become electronic. The process has already begun. In Sweden and other parts of Europe, as well as Japan, cashless supermarkets and department stores claim big success, especially with the young consumers, who happily play along paying electronic cashiers by swiping their cell phones in front of an electronic eye.

The Young and Innocent – if they only knew that the banking oligarchs want to control their money and enslave them with a ‘fun gadget’, they may decide to resist.  But well know those who control the system that the young are the drivers of the future. We, the old resistance will eventually die out. Problem solved. – But we are not dead yet. The Times are A-Changing… (Bob Dylan, 1964).

The nefarious trio – ‘bail-ins’, negative interests, and a cash free society – will make living in the industrialized ‘first world’ a sheer nuisance, a stressful dance on toes, as the emperor’s proverbial Damocles Sword hangs intimidatingly above us.

Washington may have one last joker up its sleeve – reintroducing the ‘gold standard’, the very gold standard that Nixon abandoned in 1971. The US have also been accumulating huge amounts of gold over the past 25 years. A new US dollar gold standard would most likely be set at a ratio that would wipe out all US debt, including future ‘unmet obligations’ (GAO – General Accounting Office) of about US$ 125 trillion. It would attempt to keep the western industrialized world in Washington’s orbit, but might lose most of the developing world owning natural resources coveted by the west. These countries oppressed and colonized for centuries are likely to gravitate to the new China-Russia alliance – leaving the outsourced and outwitted west alone without workforce – and with a massive but outdated military power.

To counter the build-up of this criminal last ditch sham by the western Zionist banking czars, China and Russia have been preparing over the last few years an independent financial system, delinked from the US dollar and which now incorporates the BRICS, the SCO nations, as well as the Eurasian Economic Union. This association of countries and economies account for about half the world’s population and at least one third of the globe’s economic output; a fact totally ignored by the mainstream media, for obvious reasons. The Machiavellian sinking ship does not want its passengers to jump to safety.

The 19 April 2016, announcement by China of its gold-backed yuan, no longer convertible into dollars, may just trigger an economic shift into the ‘eastern camp’. Many countries are wary and tired of western exploitation, enslavement, threats of sanctions, oppression and an ever present danger of invasion by the killing machine. The decoupling of the dollar by a third of the world economy may indeed open new horizons, creating new alliances, new hope for a more equal and just world.

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

Today, April 20, 2016 marks the six-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that claimed the lives of 11 men and caused the largest man-made oil spill in history.

The cleanup crews abandoned the Gulf Coast years ago, claiming that the damage from the spill was “gone” and the media quit paying attention shortly after the wellhead was capped at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the lack of attention paid to the Gulf region in recent years, the lasting damage of the oil spill is something that remains fresh on the minds of everyone that calls this area home.

Like most disasters that don’t involve national security issues, Americans tend to operate under the belief that once the media attention has faded the issue is resolved. They don’t understand that the victims of the spill who lost their source of income are still fighting court battles against BP, Transocean and Halliburton.

Image: ©2010 Julie Dermansky

They haven’t heard about the sea life with abnormal growths and heart defects linked to the lingering oil and dispersants that have settled on the bottom of the Gulf. And they are unaware that tar mats and tar balls are still common sights on beaches throughout the region.

Here’s a quick primer on what the Gulf Coast has gone through in the last six years for those who haven’t been paying close attention:

First, we have the real extent of the damage caused by the oil. Photojournalist and DeSmogBlog contributor Julie Dermansky captured images throughout the oil spill and cleanup process and here are a few that really show, in detail, how bad things were along the shore:

Image: ©2010 Julie Dermansky

Image: ©2010 Julie Dermansky

Image: ©2010 Julie Dermansky

Image: ©2010 Julie Dermansky

Then there was the insulting report by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and offshore drilling in January 2011 that completely omitted some of the most damning information about the cause of the oil spill.

For example, the report failed to mention former Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in deregulating offshore drilling activities and the cozy relationship that BP, Transocean and Halliburton that allowed safety measures on the Deepwater Horizon rig to be ignored while safety inspections were virtually nonexistent. Had this relationship not been established, it is very likely that the disaster never would have occurred.

Additionally, there was almost no mention in the national media about BP’s long history of ignoring safety measures and actually creating presentations showing that it was cheaper for the company to pay for disasters instead of keeping their facilities up to date on safety measures, even when those disasters resulted in the loss of human life.

Another major story that went largely unreported were the negative health effects of the oil spill.

Workers tasked with removing oil from beaches and wetlands began showing up at doctor’s offices with respiratory illnesses as a result of exposure to massive amounts of oil and the dispersant used to break up the oil, Corexit.

Corexit itself has been linked to cancers in both humans and marine mammals, which is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initially didn’t want BP to use it in the cleanup. However, after BP refused to comply, the EPA backed off its Corexit ban and allowed BP to pour it by the barrel into the Gulf of Mexico.

Then came the PR offensive from BP. The victims along the Gulf Coast became the victims of a new attack from the fossil fuel giant, as they began taking out full-page ads in national newspapers claiming that the claims process was plagued by fraud. While a few cases of fraud were found, reports showed that nearly every claim filed against the company was legitimate, but that didn’t stop publications like Politico from allowing a BP executive to write an op-ed slamming the victims of the oil spill as “greedy.”

Finally and most recently, there was the fact that not a single executive went to prison for their role in the disaster and the few prosecutions that took place resulted in only probation sentences for things like perjury or hindering an investigation.

Bear in mind that 11 men were killed as a result of corporate negligence and the damage to both the Gulf of Mexico and the health effects of the oil spill are still currently incalculable.

These issues barely even begin to scratch the surface with regards to the extent of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

But a new report by Oceana has helped to paint a very clear and unpleasant picture of just how bad things are for the environment, human beings and marine life that call the Gulf home.

Here are a few key findings from the Oceana report:

• Mortality rates for common bottlenose dolphins living in Barataria Bay, Louisiana were 8 percent higher and their reproductive success was 63 percent lower compared to other dolphin populations.

• An estimated 600,000 to 800,000 birds died as a result of the spill.

• Harmful oil and/or oil dispersant chemicals were found in about 80 percent of pelican eggs that were laid in Minnesota, more than 1,000 miles from the Gulf, where most of these birds spend winters.

• Oil exposure caused heart failure in juvenile bluefin and yellowfin tunas, reduced swimming ability in juvenile mahi-mahi and caused gill tissue damage in killifish.

• The oil plume caused bleaching and tissue loss in deep-water coral reefs over an area three times larger than Manhattan.

• Endangered sea turtles that had migrated to the Gulf from Mexico, South America and West Africa died in the spill, demonstrating the global scale of impacts.

• The 50,000 people involved in the spill cleanup were exposed to chemicals that severely damage lung tissue.

• Cleanup workers and their spouses reported increased depression and domestic disputes.

• Even Gulf residents indirectly affected by the spill suffered from increased anxiety and depression.

• It can take a decade or more for oil spill victims to recover from the physical and psychological effects of an oil disaster.

• The impact of the oil spill on fisheries could total $8.7 billion by 2020, including the loss of 22,000 jobs.

While the rest of the world forgot to check to see if the victims on the Gulf Coast were made whole, many in the region are coming to terms with the fact that being made whole isn’t an option anymore.

The best they can hope for after struggling for the last six years is that they are able to put a few of the pieces of their lives back together as they continue to watch in horror as the environment in which they grew up slowly suffers from the negligence of the fossil fuel industry.

Israeli occupation prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided on Monday to officially prevent cement entry to Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu’s decision came in the wake of Israeli claim it uncovered an assault tunnel for Hamas crossing the Gaza borders to Israel.

Israeli newspaper Times of Israel reported Netanyahu saying: “We will not allow the entry of cement to the Gaza Strip in order to be used for military purposes.”

He added: “We will never allow building a seaport in the Gaza Strip and the only seaport to serve Gaza is Ashdod (the Israeli seaport near Gaza), which is under Israeli observation.”

The Israeli PM, who killed over than 2,260 Palestinians, wounded around 11,000 others, demolished more than 10,000 homes, hospitals, schools and mosques and levelled large farms to the ground in 2014, claimed he would like to help Gaza, but they are unable to run a seaport.

“My choice is very clear,” he said, “I will not sacrifice our security for a brilliant title. I will never allow setting up a sea artery to drop weapons to terrorism [in Gaza].”

It is worth mentioning that the Israeli occupation, assisted by Egypt and backed by the international community, has been imposing a strict siege on the Gaza Strip for 10 years.

During this time, the Israeli occupation waged four wars, killing thousands of Gazans and wounding tens of thousands. As well as, it demolished tens of thousands of homes and other civilian facilities, including major infrastructure projects.

At the same time, to justify the siege and letting the Gazans endure difficult conditions, Israeli officials claim that basic constriction material, food components, medicines, etc… are used for military purposes. Therefore, they ban them.

Regarding the tunnel, the Palestinian resistance said that it had been previously uncovered by the Israeli occupation forces and they pumped water inside it.

The National is an English-language publication owned and operated by Abu Dhabi Media, thegovernment-run media organization of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is no press freedom in the UAE. Government media report the government point of view, which rarely includes criticism of the government.

On March 26, the first anniversary of the UAE’s unprovoked attack on Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab states, the UAE’s official media published a document about the carnage in Yemen illustrative of George Orwell’s observation: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” The truth about the war in Yemen is a largely unreported secret. The UAE officially hides that truth from itself in an editorial in The National (which follows in its entirety, section by section). It begins with the headline:

After a year in Yemen, our resolve is firm

After a year in Yemen, the US/Saudi coalition has managed to reduce the region’s poorest country to an almost unthinkable condition, where some 20 million Yemenis – about 80% of the population – need humanitarian assistance. In a country both under attack and on the verge of mass famine, what does “our resolve is firm” really mean if not continued crimes against humanity? The UAE editorial’s first sentence has no discernible meaning at all:

The start one year ago of Operation Decisive Storm comes as a reminder of the importance of the war in Yemen.

The anniversary of an aggression – that the Saudis proclaimed would be brief and decisive – is important mostly for its irony. An official Saudi press release of March 25, 2015, quoted the Saudi ambassador to the US saying: “The operation will be limited in nature, and designed to protect the people of Yemen and its legitimate government from a takeover by the Houthis. A violent extremist militia.” By then the “legitimate” government of Yemen had fled to the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Not only has more than a year of US/Saudi-led war failed to achieve any significant military success, it has produced collateral damage on a massive scale, making the country of 25 million people perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. This reality makes a mockery of the UAE editorial’s next assertion:

The UAE joined the Saudi-led coalition campaign driven by its commitment and dedication to maintaining security and establishing peace in the region.

This is, almost literally, Orwellian in its “war is peace” mindset. From the start, the US/Saudi aggression has violated international law and committed war crimes against Yemeni civilians, using cluster bombs made in the USA (and sold to the Saudis with US taxpayer subsidies). The recently-released US State Department annual human rights report on Saudi Arabia for 2015 soft-pedals the allies’ slaughter of civilians in Yemen, and omits Saudi-dropped US cluster bombs entirely (perhaps because their lingering impact killing children over years and decades is deucedly hard to assess accurately, whereas profits can be tallied almost immediately). The full despicability of the Obama administration’s position on these inhumanities is revealed in its official unwillingness to speak on the record about the blatant hypocrisy of its morally indefensible defense of the murder of civilians for profit, as reported in The Intercept:

A State Department spokesperson, who would only comment on background, pointed out that the U.S. has called on both sides of the conflict to protect civilians. He also claimed that the use of cluster munitions is not a human rights violation because the United States has not signed the ban on cluster munitions.

The State Department spokesperson did not acknowledge that only one side bombs civilians (in schools, hospitals, markets, and homes) with US-made planes dropping US-made munitions. This follows a years-long US campaign in Yemen to kill civilians with US-made drones (still in use from outside the country).

Yemen is drawn as a coherent state on maps, but most of the Yemeni-Saudi border has never been officially defined. Yemen has an ancient culture in the western part of the country, but it has never been a coherent state. The Saudis and Yemenis have engaged in sporadic, armed conflict for decades. In particular, the Saudis and the Houthis have fought over northwest Yemen and neighboring southwest Saudi Arabia, which is home to a large Houthi population. Security in the region is not directly threatened by the Yemeni civil war. For any Arab state to talk like the UAE of establishing “peace in the region” is fundamentally hilarious.

The UAE has long been a source of support for the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh), as have Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait – all part of the coalition waging war on Yemen. Editorially, the UAE cloaks itself in the mantle of state legitimacy:

The coalition responded to the call by Yemen’s president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi to restore his internationally recognised government to power.

To call the Hadi government “internationally recognized” is to fudge the reality that the Hadi government has only limited recognition among Yemenis. Hadi came to power through what US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power called, somewhat falsely, the “peaceful, inclusive, and consensus-driven political transition under the leadership of the legitimate President of Yemen, Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi.” One problem with this US formulation is that Hadi’s “legitimacy” derives from his being installed as president by an international diplomatic coup, followed by his election in a race in which he was the sole candidate. Essentially, there is no legitimate government of Yemen and has not been for decades at least. The present war of aggression by outside powers intervening in a multifaceted civil war relies for its justification on a variety of dishonest fictions. The Houthis are a sub-group of the Shi’ite Zaidis, who number about eight million in Yemen. The Zaidis governed northwest Yemen for 1,000 years, until 1962. The UAE editorial invents a different historical identity:

Houthi rebels had captured the capital of Sanaa, with the support of Iran and loyalists to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and were advancing towards the southern city of Aden. On the way, they had killed civilians and destroyed neighbourhoods, leading to a vast humanitarian crisis.

Iran is widely scapegoated as a nefarious influence in Yemen, but there is little or no evidence of Iranian involvement on a scale that could possibly make a difference on the ground in Yemen. Iran’s support of the Houthis, their fellow Shi’ites, has been largely diplomatic, political, and presumably financial. Former president Saleh, who has a wide following of non-Houthis, was deposed in the coup that installed Hadi. When Saleh was president of Yemen, he also fought a Houthi insurrection. While there is little doubt that all sides in the Yemen civil war (including al Qaeda and ISIS) have committed war crimes of various degree, only the US/Saudi coalition has bombed defenseless civilian populations. There is a special deceit in the UAE suggestion that the Houthis in 2015 are the cause of the Yemen humanitarian crisis in 2016. A year of largely indiscriminate bombing by the US/Saudi forces is the more proximate and powerful cause, as is the year-long US/Saudi naval blockade that keeps Yemenis caught in the bomb rangewhile at the same time denying them food, medicine, and other essentials for survival. Nevertheless, according to the UAE editorial, the Houthis – who have suffered attacks by ISIL – are somehow responsible for ISIL attacking coalition forces in the south:

The Houthis’ disregard for Yemen’s security created fertile ground for extremism to thrive, leading to the latest attacks by ISIL that killed 20 people in Aden on Friday.

Whatever “security” Yemen has had in recent years has been largely illusory. The US drone program in Yemen spent years creating insecurity and killing civilians until the US withdrew just ahead of the fall of the Hadi government (president Saleh had also sanctioned the lethal US military presence in Yemen). And why was the US there? Because Yemen was already “fertile ground for extremism,” in particular AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which now controls roughly half of Yemen’s southern coast, about 370 miles including the port city of Mukalla, with a 500,000 population. The effective allies in the US/Saudi war on the Houthis include not only the UAE and other coalition members, but also al Qaeda and ISIS – not in the sense that these “allies” share the same goals, but in the sense that the US/Saudi genocidal obsession with the Houthis has allowed and helped both ISIS and especially al Qaeda to expand and solidify positions in Yemen.

All the same, the UAE tries to blame the ISIL (ISIS) suicide bomb attacks in Aden on March 14, 2016, on the Houthis, when Aden is more or less under the military control of the Hadi government. Saudi and UAE forces have been deployed to Aden at least since July 2015, in limited numbers, to protect the Hadi government. The UAE has also secretly deployed hundreds of Colombian mercenary soldiers to Yemen, along with other mercenaries from Panama, El Salvador, and Chile, frequently commanded by Australians. During this same time period, neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE deployed any troops to fight ISIS in Syria. UAE troop strength in Yemen reportedly peaked in the fall of 2015 at about 5,000 troops of one nationality or another. Currently the UAE is estimated to have about 2,500 troops in Yemen as well as other deployments in Libya and Afghanistan. The UAE, with a population of about 6 million, has a military of some 65,000 active frontline personnel.

The UAE’s editorial summary of its year of war-making in Yemen relies on an imaginary threat of a wider war that would somehow have magically emerged from the possibility that the Houthis might secure their own country, or just part of it:

The precarious situation last year required swift intervention to guard against a wider conflict in the region. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies, including the UAE, realised that the security of Yemen was critical for the Arabian Peninsula at large and that a military operation would be required. Iran, which has a history of meddling in regional affairs, has been backing the Shiite Houthi group to fulfil its own nefarious agenda of expanding its footprint in the Middle East. Quite simply, unless we had taken firm action, our security would have been at risk. This has come at a great cost, including the lives of more than 80 UAE martyrs.

More than a year after collaborating in an aggressive war against Yemen, the UAE can cite no credible or rational or legal basis for joining the attack – unless “a nefarious agenda” turns out to be an obscure casus belli under international law. Worse, the UAE doesn’t even acknowledge, much less try to justify, the criminal brutality of its war.

This criminal brutality has been documented over and over by non-governmental organizations. Most recently, on April 7, Human Rights Watch issued a report centered on the war crime of bombing a civilian market, killing 97 civilians, 25 of them children. This is no isolated incident. The responsibility and guilt for these atrocities extends to those who sell the weapons as well as those who use them. As Human Rights Watch reported in part:

Since March 26, 2015, the UN and nongovernmental organizations have documented numerous airstrikes by coalition forces that violate the laws of war. The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen, established under UN Security Council Resolution 2140 (2013), in a report made public on January 26, “documented 119 coalition sorties relating to violations” of the laws of war.

Human Rights Watch has documented 36 unlawful airstrikes – some of which may amount to war crimes – which have killed at least 550 civilians. Human Rights Watch has also documented 15 attacks in which internationally banned cluster munitions were used in or near cities and villages, wounding or killing civilians…. The coalition has used at least six types of cluster munitions, three delivered by air-dropped bombs and three by ground-launched rockets….

None of these war crimes could possibly be committed by the Houthis and their allies, since they have no air force. Whatever the atrocities committed by Houthis, Saleh’s forces, or others, the humanitarian suffering in Yemen is overwhelmingly the responsibility of the US/Saudi coalition, however the UAE editorial may spin it:

The UAE has also contributed greatly to humanitarian efforts in Yemen, especially as Operation Restoring Hope got under way. More than Dh1.6 billion has been spent on infrastructure and aid programmes to provide our brothers and sisters there with electricity, food, health services, water, sanitation, fuel and transport. We will continue to help the civilian population. Of course, the ultimate goal is a political solution that restores the legitimate government.

In late April a year ago, the Saudis announced that Operation Decisive Storm was over and had achieved its goals. Saudis also announced the beginning of Operation Restoring Hope, which included airstrikes and other military actions, as well as some relief missions.

The claim that the UAE has spent more than 1.6 billion Dirham ($436 million) in and on Yemen is misleading. In 2015, the UAE apparently contributed that amount to United Nations humanitarian programs in Yemen, an amount exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. A contribution in the hundreds of millions of dollars appears generous, but represents only a couple of days of the cost of the war. Saudi Arabia is reportedly picking up most of the cost of the war: $200 million per day ($6 billion per month).

Joining a military campaign is never an easy decision to make, but in this case it was a necessary one. As the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr Anwar Gargash, said on Friday, the UAE is more powerful today with the sacrifice of its martyrs, and history will remember the important role Operation Decisive Storm has played in drawing “a line between acceptance and submission, and determination and will.”

So ends the official UAE version of its Yemen adventure, a version that imagines with complete falsity that the Houthi rebellion somehow put the UAE under threat of having to accept and submit. Accept and submit to what? The Houthi rebellion was a thousand miles from the UAE and has yet to go beyond Yemeni borders (except for the sporadic fighting along the Saudi border in the northwest). In reality, the US/Saudi coalition has long demanded that the Houthis accept and submit to domination by their Sunni enemies of a thousand years. Now, in mid-April 2015, an open-ended ceasefire of sorts is settling over Yemen, with the Houthis still in control of much of the country, and the Saudis continuing to bomb at will. Ironically, if anyone has so far shown true determination and will, it is the Houthis, in their resistance to a ruthless and relentless international coalition.

As for “joining a military campaign,” which the UAE officially says is “never an easy decision to make,” the UAE has apparently managed the difficult choice once again. Now the UAE has reportedly asked the US for significant increases in military support in order to escalate the war in Yemen against AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Officials in the US and the UAE refuse to comment on the report, which would be an expansion of fighting long under way. According to Iranian Press TV, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE emerged after the UAE withdrew large numbers of troops following defeats in late 2015, leading to a recent plan by the Saudis to replace UAE troops with Jordanians.

On April 15, despite the five-day old truce, US drone strikes and US-made apache helicoptersattacked the city of al-Houta, near Aden in south Yemen. Coalition officials said al Qaeda forces had withdrawn and the government controlled the city, with five soldiers reportedly killed in an operation that took four hours.

The ceasefire that started April 10 has continued to remain in effect around most of the country, despite some violations. In the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, more than 100 miles north of al-Houta and still under Houthi control, tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out on April 15 for peaceful protest against continued airstrikes by the US/Saudi coalition.

The UN special envoy leading the peace talks scheduled to begin in Kuwait says peace has never been as close as it is today. Those talks include only “government” and “rebel” representatives. Most of the belligerents, including the US/Saudi coalition, al Qaeda, and ISIS, will not be taking part.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

On 21 May 2016, South Africans will once again unite, in numerous cities throughout the country, to protest Monsanto’s aggressive attempts to force genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, and their chemical Herbicides, onto South African consumers and farmers.  

The March Against Monsanto, is a part of a global, mass, pro-organic, anti-transgenic GMO campaign being held in over 500 cities worldwide in a bid to spread awareness about the harmful effects of genetically-modified foods, the toxic chemical herbicides that are used with them and the monopoly and ownership of our seeds,  to demand the right to natural medicines and to support and promote small and organic farmers and local food webs.

The FDA has placed the interest of a handful of biotechnology companies ahead of their responsibility to protect public health. By failing to require testing and labelling of genetically engineered foods, the agency has made consumers unknowing guinea-pigs for potentially harmful, unregulated food substances.

 – Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology Assessment.

GMOs are organisms whose genetic material have been artificially manipulated in a lab through genetic engineering, creating unstable combinations of genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods.  GMO’s are engineered to withstand direct application of herbicide &/or to produce an insecticide.  Despite biotech industry promises, GMOs have not produced increased yield, drought tolerance, enhanced nutrition, or any other consumer benefit, while scientific evidence connects GMO’s with health problems, environmental damage and violation of farmers’ and consumers’ rights.

Now in its fourth year, the March against Monsanto has continued to grow in momentum, as new research highlighting the negative impacts of GMOs and the associated chemicals is emerging.  Most recently the WHO has classified Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup®, as a Category 2A “Probable Human Carcinogen”. This is the chemical herbicide used on all Roundup-ready crops, as well as on sports-fields, parks, playgrounds and domestic gardens. It is readily available to all consumers (including children) at retail outlets and family stores.

Amidst rising global concern for human and environmental health, GMO’s are increasingly being banned in many countries, including Russia and China. South Africa remains the ONLY country with a whole GM crop as its the staple diet. There is poison in our pap

Why Monsanto

U.S. Agrochemical giant, Monsanto is the world’s largest agricultural seed company, owning a massive share of the global seed market. Monsanto operates in 80 countries, including 9 African countries.

In South Africa, Monsanto controls the majority of the maize seed market and dominates the GM maize market.  There is only one GM maize variety that does not contain a Monsanto owned trait.  Every GM variety sold is either directly by or under license from, Monsanto.

86% of maize hectares, 100% of cotton and 92% of soybean hectares are planted to GM crops.

Furthermore, Monsanto controls 60% of that glyphosate market in South Africa.  Its highly toxic herbicide – Roundup® – is used extensively on our food crops and is imposed on farmers who forfeit any right to compensation, in the event of crop failure, if not using Monsanto’s Roundup® brand of glyphosate.

In recent Nation Wide protests communities, concerned citizens and environmental activists questioned the selling of Roundup in family stores, without sufficient warning labels or age restrictions, calling for its removal from the shelves.

South Africa is a country where one in four people go hungry, even though the country as a whole is food secure. We find it unacceptable that our government supports a corporatist, profiteering model of food production, spearheaded by Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds, that lends itself solely to large-scale industrialized farming.

Various organizations supporting the March against Monsanto have the following to say

Sonia Mountford from EATegrity states

We must reverse to progress.

Is meddling with the genetic make-up of our food the answer? Before you say we have been modifying our food sources for decades, let me say yes we have and that is why we have an increase in food intolerances and chronic health issues caused by the way food is produced. For example, 50 years or so ago, wheat contained only five percent gluten, today it has risen to up to 50 percent gluten content. It’s only been since World War II, that wartime chemicals and technologies have found new uses in agriculture.

Traditional and Natural Health Alliance

The Traditional & Natural Health Alliance supports the March Against Monsanto Campaign and invites all it’s supporters in the form of natural health product manufacturers, retailers, practitioners and consumers to say No to GMO and toxic agro-chemicals.

African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB)

It is very encouraging to see people taking a stand against Monsanto and demanding a just, nutritious and democratic food system.

Transkei Animal Welfare Initiative (TAWI):

The damage being done to animals, wildlife and ecosystems by chemical herbicides and pesticides is devastating. TAWI fully supports this campaign and it’s work towards a glyphosate free South Africa.

Our Demands

We demand an end to the food fascism in this country, where people are being force-fed genetically modified foods without their knowledge or consent.

We demand a food system that is just and equitable, which makes food accessible to all people.

We demand an inclusive farming system that recognizes indigenous and local knowledge, as well as age old traditions of seed-saving and sharing.

We demand the democratization of our food systems.

We demand training and support for farmers who are practicing agro-ecological farming.

We demand the right traditional and natural medicines, free from patents.

We demand that the toxic pesticide, Glyphosate be removed from our food crops, in the form of dissication and in conjunction with GM crops

We demand that the herbicide Roundup (and other formulations containing the active ingredient glyphosate), be regulated in family stores , properly labeled (to stipulate the dangers), age restricted and a license required to use it

We demand that the South African government stops ignoring and enforces the SA labelling law for foods containing over 5% GMOs

We demand that the South African Police Service, based on the precautionary  principle, suspend the aerial spraying of Glyphosate based herbicides, as a method of law enforcement in the former Transkei

This year protests will take place in the Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pilgrims Rest, Port Elizabeth, Malmsebury,  Port St Johns, Nelspruit, East London, Bloemfontein on the 21st of May.

Living Seeds, Heirloom organic Seed company, has kindly sponsored FREE organic seeds to the participants of the March, to promote home gardens and the importance of protecting and cherishing our seed varieties.

Contact: Zakiyya Ismail     – 083 2737304 –  [email protected]

Rushka Johnson – 074 6491810 – [email protected]

For More Information:

Monsanto Factsheet from African Centre for Biosafety
http://www.acbio.org.za/…/02/ACB-factsheet_Monsanto.pdf

Glyphosate in South Africa

http://acbio.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Roundup-Environmental-impacts-SA.pdf

http://acbio.org.za/…/2015/06/Glyphosate-report-2015.pdf

The Dark History of Monsanto
http://www.seattleorganicrestaurants.com/vegan-whole-foods/dark-history-monsanto/

Monsanto’s Dirty Dozen
http://gmo-awareness.com/2011/05/12/monsanto-dirty-dozen/

March Against Monsanto South Africahttps://www.facebook.com/MAMSouthAfrica

 

ISIS/Daesh is on the retreat in Syria, which is very good news for the people of that beleaguered country and for the world. However, the Syrian tragedy is far from over and rebuilding the country, even under the best circumstances of an end to the war, will take many years.

Our little international delegation — we were two Americans, a Canadian, two Norwegians, a Palestinian from Jordan and another Palestinian from Lebanon — got to see the evidence for this first-hand, along with the horrific devastation left in the wake of the ISIS occupation of the world-famous ancient city of Palmyra and the neighboring Syrian town of Tadmor.

The tour was arranged and led by a Palestinian organization based in Australia that is very supportive of the Syrian government and it was facilitated by the Syrian Ministry of Tourism and other government agencies.

It took some very intense negotiations with the Syrian authorities to secure visas, especially for the Americans, who are understandably viewed with some suspicion given the very hostile policies toward Syria by the US government.  Even more complicated efforts were necessary to get permission – from the Syrian security agencies, the Ministry of Defense and the Russian military mission in Syria – to visit Palmyra, which was only recaptured by the Syrian army on March 26.  We were the very first group of international civilians to view the site and the aftermath of the battle that took place there.

Image: Some members of our delegation: Khaled, a Palestinian from Jordan, whose family is originally from Kufr Saba (now Kfar Saba) in central 1948 Israel, is in the white shirt; the author is second from the right.

Even with permission, traveling to Palmyra was not easy.  Because the direct route northeast from Damascus was not yet safe, it was necessary to travel first due north to Homs and then east across the desert along a road only recently cleared of armed rebels.  Even exiting Damascus required a detour to the west in order to avoid a dangerous stretch of highway threatened by fighters in the rebel-controlled town of Douma, just north of the capital.

There were also frequent military checkpoints along the way, at each of which Qusay (everyone here is identified only by first name), our liaison with the government, had to negotiate passage and show various documents and permissions – along with our passports. The drive to Palmyra, which in peacetime would have taken maybe two hours on the direct route, took us six hours to complete.

Even in the tense security situation, though, at least one Syrian officer at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus had not lost his sense of humor. When told that we were an international group on the way to visit Palmyra, his parting words after checking our documents was “Say hello to Zenobia!” He was referring to Zenobia, the famous queen of Palmyra who led a doomed revolt against the Roman Empire in the third century AD and has been adopted – quite ahistorically — as a kind of early freedom fighter and  Syrian national heroine.

In Homs we picked up or military escort, Colonel Sameer, who packed a Makarev in a shoulder holster and carried a gym bag inside of which it wasn’t hard to make out the bulges of a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a bunch of grenades.  Comforting.

With Colonel Sameer riding shotgun, it was relatively simple to negotiate the frequent military stations and roadblocks along the rest of the way to Palmyra.  As we approached the city we observed increasing signs of war damage – bullet-pockmarked and partially destroyed buildings, down electrical transmission pylons, burned out vehicles – but nothing prepared us for the utter devastation of the town of Tadmor/Palmyra when we arrived.

Image: The town of Tadmor/Palmyra when the delegation arrived.

The place had suffered both from the Daesh occupation and even more so from the fighting to retake it. There was hardly an undamaged building to be seen and although the rubble blocking the streets had largely been cleared, there were many areas where only the skeletons of destroyed buildings remained.  And the retreating Daesh fighters had left the town and the ruins riddled with mines and booby traps which took a huge effort, not yet completed, to disarm.  Most of the inhabitants had fled the Tadmor/Palmyra when it was taken over by Daesh last summer.

When we visited last Sunday, the town was crowded with busloads of former residents collecting their personal possessions and household furnishings to take away on buses and trucks. Only in the previous few days, weeks after retaking the town and extensive de-mining, was it possible for any of them to return safely in order to retrieve some of their surviving belongings.  But the town was still uninhabitable for civilians due to the severe damage and the lack of electricity or water.

The streets were guarded by soldiers and the somewhat more ragtag National Defense Forces militia fighters in various stage of partial uniform.

Image: Tour guide “Tony” in front of the ruins of the Temple of Baal blown up by Daesh’ He’s holding a drawing of the temple as it used to appear.

The systematic vandalism and destruction by Daesh at the historic archaeological site of Palmyra has been widely reported, but viewing the damage was still a shock. Our cultural guide Antoine (“Tony”), who had led countless groups to visit the Palmyra, was brought to tears.  Ya haram (“shameful”), he muttered repeatedly as we saw the remains of the formerly well-preserved monumental archway leading into the ancient city and the Temple of Baal which the Daesh fighters had blown up when they took the city last summer.

Only the remains of the theater had been left untouched, possibly as a monument to the brutal execution of 25 captive Syrian army prisoners that Daesh had carried out and filmed there.

We had to wait a while before entering the theater ourselves because there was a high-ranking group of Russian military officers visiting inside when we arrived.  Accompanying them was a contingent of very steely-eyed special forces soldiers, despite the heat, in full battle gear – body armor, helmets, boots and gloved hands with fingers poised close to the triggers of their automatic weapons.

There is a contingent of Russian military engineers and technicians engaged in the ongoing effort to disarm mines and booby traps it the city and among the ruins, with a large camp just outside the town.  Near the ruins is a former restaurant whose red sign announces, in Cyrillic and English, that it is the “Sappers Café.”  While we toured the site, explosions could be heard at regular intervals nearby and we could see the smoke of detonated mines.

Image: The streets were guarded by soldiers and the somewhat more ragtag National Defense Forces militia fighters in various stage of partial uniform.

When the officers and their guards exited the theater, our group leader Khaled, who like many Palestinians of his generation had received scholarships to study in the old Soviet Union (Leningrad, in his case), enthusiastically greeted the soldiers in fluent Russian, somewhat to their surprise.  Colonel Sameer had earlier told us that we could photograph anything we wanted – except the publicity-shy Russians.  Given the cordial chitchat with Khaled, I thought I might ask if I could take a picture.  The Russian translator answered, to everyone’s amusement, with an emphatic monosyllable — NYET.

What does the future hold for Syria?

Nearly everyone we met – and they were by no means all uncritical supporters of the Assad regime – told us that they believed any hope required, first of all, the defeat of the armed rebels and an end to foreign intervention in their country.  This was especially the sentiment of Christian and Druze religious representatives, along with ethnic minorities and secular people of any faith background, who together undoubtedly comprise a majority of the Syrian population.

Image: A Mahmoud Darwish quote

Regardless of the legitimate grievances at the root of the crisis which began in 2011, and even if the opposition may not all be “terrorists,” as the Assad regime charges, the armed rebels now overwhelmingly represent Sunni fundamentalists of various stripes, whose vision for Syria is a religiously exclusive Islamic state, not a secular democracy.  This is true of the so-called “moderate” opposition which the US and its allies are arming and financing, not only the recognized extremists and foreign fighters in ISIS/Daesh and the Nusra front.

Amid the destruction and despair of the current situation in Syria, there are also signs of hope and resilience.  In central Damascus the shops and restaurants are open, even if the hotels remain nearly empty.  In the Old City Bab Touma neighborhood where we stayed – especially since the partial cease-fire agreement that was established earlier this year has minimized the rebel mortar and rocket attacks – the streets were crowded with students and shoppers, even if there were also military checkpoints along the major streets and at the gates to the town. There was a vibrant nightlife at many cafes and eating places, often with live music and diners who took to enthusiastic and spontaneous dancing and singing along to the musicians.

In the midst of the near total destruction in the old city of Homs, which was under rebel control and the scene of intense fighting until 2014, the historic Khaled Ibn Walid mosque, heavily damaged in the fighting,  is now the site of a major restoration project.  But a hundred thousand new housing units will also be required to replace what was destroyed.

In another part of the city, not far from where the courageous Dutch Jesuit Frank van der Lugt was murdered by the retreating rebels, the vandalized Syrian Orthodox Notre Dame de la Ceinture de Marie is also undergoing restoration.  Across the street, one of the few re-opened shops is a café filled with young men and women – a circumstance unthinkable in zones under rebel control.  On the wall is a statement of hope, along translation of some famous lines by the famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who is also revered by Syrians.

The Dirty War on Syria: Election Day, Syrians Go to the Polls

By Prof. Tim Anderson, Stephen Lendman, and Michael Welch, April 20 2016

We should tell our brothers in Latin America and the world that the Cuban people will win, asserted the historic leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, in a special address at the closing ceremony of the 7th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, in session for four days at Havana’s Convention Center.

“I congratulate you all and firstly comrade Raul Castro for his wonderful effort,” pointed out Fidel, whose presence in the plenary session aroused prolonged applause from the nearly one thousand delegates and 280 guests present.

He considered that delegates chosen by the people to whom it delegated its authority “it’s the greatest honor they have received in life; added to this is the privilege of being revolutionaries.”

Why did I become a socialist? More clearly, why did I become a Communist?, he asked, and explained how he acquired his ideology, without a private tutor to help him in the study of Marxism-Leninism, and stressed that another 70 years should not elapse for an event like the Russian revolution to occur, for humanity to have another example of a great social revolution that represented a huge step in the fight against colonialism and its inseparable companion, imperialism.

However, he warned that the greatest danger now hovering over Earth derives from the destructive power of modern weaponry, because it could undermine peace in the world and make it impossible for human life on the surface of the earth to exist.

Future generations will know -he reflected- much more than us, but first they will have to solve a big problem: how to feed the billions of human beings whose realities collide against the limits of the natural resources they need.

“Let’s hope many humans worry about these realities and don’t continue like in the times of Adam and Eve, eating forbidden apples,” he commented, and expressed his concern about who will feed people without technology, or rain, or reservoirs or underground deposits. We must constantly insist on these issues, he stressed.

The historic leader of the Revolution recalled that soon he will turn 90 and that

“everyone will eventually die, but the ideas of Cuban communists will prevail, as proof that on this planet, if you work with fervor and dignity, the material and cultural goods that humans need can be produced, and we must fight relentlessly to obtain them. ”

“We will set out and will improve what should be improved, with utmost loyalty and united force, like Marti, Maceo and Gomez, in unstoppable march,”

he concluded.

The recent liberation of Palmyra by Syrian government forces was a significant defeat for ISIS and should represent a turning point in the fight against terrorism in Syria. It still may, but the determination of the USA, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bring down Bashar al Assad jeopardises continued progress and the ultimate defeat of ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria.

US co-operation with Russia to actively fight Islamist forces and the withdrawal of financing, weapons and supply of fighters from Turkey and Saudi Arabia would isolate, weaken and lead to the destruction of ISIS as a fighting force. 

The insatiable desire for control and influence in the Middle East drives the US and its allies to support Islamists as their proxies (enter ISIS) to achieve their goal of the overthrow of Assad, a stepping stone to the greater prize of regime change in Iran. 

These contradictory agendas are why ISIS, while in retreat, is far from a defeated force. ISIS are the key fighting force against Assad, so will continue to be supported directly or indirectly. Essentially, this means the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are aiding and abetting, not fighting terrorism. A perpetual war, chaos and the foreshadowed partition of Syria are the consequences of such destructive policies. John Kerry’s enunciation of Plan B threatens to be realised, sabotaging the gains of the Syrian government as it seeks to reclaim territory from Islamist forces and reunite the country.

ISIS has recently captured 11 localities in the north of the Aleppo province near the Turkish border. It is still capable of acquiring territory and can capitalise on Syrian army forces being stretched and tied up in other regions of the country. 

ISIS and Al-Nusra are currently attacking the strategically vital M5 highway from Aleppo to Homs, in order to aggravate the humanitarian situation. According to Press TV, ISIS “has taken control of most of the Palestinian Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria after pushing out a rival Takfiri terrorist group.”   

US and its Allies Backed ISIS Takeover of Palmyra

The Syrian Army faces a myriad of foreign supported Islamists who stretched it to breaking point, averted by the timely intervention of Russia in September 2015. Before this war changing intervention, the US and its allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel backed the ISIS takeover and destruction of Palmyra.

Most of the weapons ISIS used were from the US, with some ammunition from Israel. It had US Hummers, explosives, military rations, and who can forget the sight of convoys of Toyota 4 wheel drives, ISIS fighters jubilantly waving, anticipating the capture of large areas of North East Syria, including the majority of oil fields.

A disturbing element of ISIS takeover of Palmyra was the way it was able to move across expansive stretches of desert without being bombed by the US. To do so would have been assisting the Assad government and this is definitely not in the playbook of the US.

It is one thing to conquer territory; it is another to retain control. Assad faces this challenge in Aleppo, the site of fierce fighting, where control is divided and is a key supply route for weapons and fighters from Turkey.

Desperate to keep the supply corridor into Syria open, Turkey has repeatedly shelled the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and also Syrian army positions. Turkey intervened with artillery shelling in the battle for Azaz and to attempt to stop the YPG from capturing the Menagh airbase, making it clear they are willing to intervene directly on behalf of their proxy Islamist forces.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, speaking at a meeting of the parliamentary faction of the ruling Justice and Development Party, made Turkey’s position abundantly clear, saying:

“We will return our historic debt. At one time, our brothers from Aleppo defended our cities of Sanliurfa, Gaziantep, Kahramanmaras, now we will defend the heroic Aleppo. All of Turkey stands behind its defenders.”

Davutoglu made the statement after the Syrian military cut off terrorists’ major supplies channels in northern Aleppo province from Turkey.

Erdogan’s Dream of a Neo-Ottoman Empire Fuels ISIS Support

Oil Smuggling

The stream of accusations, backed by multiple sources of evidence is growing against Ankara over illegal oil trade and support of ISIS. Despite the impossible to ignore evidence, the Western mainstream media has framed the issue as tit for tat accusations in a bitter dispute between Russia and Turkey. Meanwhile the US government, decidedly uncomfortable at damning revelations, stubbornly continues to back its NATO ally.

The Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD), Syrian authorities, the Kurds and Iraqis have all exposed the smuggling of oil from Syria and Iraq into Turkey. The MOD, after extensive surveillance, released satellite images of convoys of tanker trucks smuggling oil across the Turkish border, unchallenged by Turkish border guards and officials. Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed 40 countries support ISIS at the G20 summit. Within days, Turkey, a key supporter of ISIS, and furious at Russian air strikes disrupting the lucrative oil smuggling trade, struck a blow, downing a Russian SU24 in a blatant act of aggression.

Erdogan’s Hatred of Assad and the Kurds

The dual imperatives of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of removing from power Bashar Assad, and preventing the strengthening of the Kurds in Syria aiding their territorial expansion, has led Turkey to collaborate with ISIS terrorists, vital tools in its war with Assad and the Kurds. Turkey is either supporting or turning a blind eye to terrorists crossing its border into Syria.

Captured ISIS fighters have said they were trained in camps in Turkey, received payments, were supplied with weapons and given passage across the border to fight in Syria.

Weapons Supply Through Turkish Border

Cumhuriyet journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül stand trial behind closed doors after publishing a report on the funnelling of weapons to Islamists in Syria. The two face multiple life sentences if convicted, amid suppression of Turkish media freedom. Turkey at first denied the accusations, saying the trucks were carrying humanitarian supplies, but later backtracked and claimed the weapons were for the Free Syrian Army, changing the story again later to supplying Turkmen who fight both Assad government forces and ISIS.

Diligent investigative reporting cost Lebanese-American journalist Serena Shim her life, dying mysteriously in a car accident while reporting on weapons being carried across the Turkish border for ISIS.  According to an article on the sott.net website

On October 17th last year, just two days before her death, Shim had told Press TV that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT) had accused her of “spying”. She stated it was “probably due to some of the stories she had covered” about Turkey’s role in the Islamic State terror group and particularly in regard to the militants in Kobani. It was Shim who had reported on ISIL militants being smuggled across the Turkish border into Syria in trucks deceptively bearing the symbols of NGOs like the World Food Organisation.

Chemical Weapons Supplied Through Turkey

Turkish MP Eren Erdem of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) has made allegations that chemical weapons materials were bought into Turkey and used to produce Sarin gas in Syria in ISIS camps.

Erdem told RT News that “All basic materials are purchased from Europe. Western institutions should question themselves about these relations. Western sources know very well who carried out the Sarin gas attack in Syria.”

Investigations by the General Prosecutor’s Office in the city of Adana in Southern Turkey revealed that a number of Turkish citizens assisted ISIS with acquiring Sarin gas.

Adana authorities conducted raids and 13 suspects were arrested. However, as quickly as the case was opened it was inconceivably closed, the suspects released, further investigations dropped and the case disappeared down a black hole. Erdem himself faced death threats and treason charges for daring to reveal Turkey’s role in supporting terrorists acquire illegal chemical weapons.

The US Role in the Creation of ISIS 

Opinion is divided on whether the USA deliberately created ISIS or created the conditions for ISIS to evolve.

The former argument says it was deliberately created, consistent with a long history of backing Islamists in pursuit of US geostrategic interests, while the latter argues the destruction and decimation of once prosperous Iraq fomented the rise of ISIS, which was able to rapidly accrue firepower by capturing and using to its advantage a vast array of weapons left in Iraq.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned in an August 2012 classified report that Salafists were the dominant insurgent forces fighting in Syria and that the US and its allies were fully aware of and supported the Salafist led insurgency. The report stated: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al- Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” being supported by “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey.”

“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria… and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

It is crucial to understand this report illustrates that far from being a popular revolt which evolved into armed defence against a deadly crackdown by Syrian security forces, the insurgency was directed and driven by jihadist Islamists, fully backed by Western and regional powers. The US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar capitalised on popular discontent, using it as false legitimacy to unleash their Islamist proxy forces on unsuspecting Syrians.

In truth, the US planned for the overthrow of Assad at least as far back as December 2006, Wikileaks releasing a State Department cable that recommended taking advantage of an “increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists” (in Syria).

Assad was merely one of 7 victims of planned regime change, to be achieved at a breakneck speed of 5 years. This staggering genocidal vision is in the pursuit of the geostrategic ambition of total control over the oil producing regions of the Middle East and North Africa. As Henry Kissinger said, “control oil and you control nations”.

Oil smuggling revenue for ISIS may have dried up after systematic and accurate bombing from Russian aerospace forces, revenue from antiquities ceased in Palmyra following its liberation and ISIS fighters are enduring their own brand of austerity following income streams being debilitated, but there is no cessation of support from Gulf States and Turkey, from whom the continued supply of weapons and fighters ensures this conflict will drag on.

Saudi and Turkish financed weapons supplies continue to cross the porous Turkish border, despite a cessation of hostilities agreement designed to ease the conflict and enable Geneva peace talks. The claim is made these are for “moderate rebels”, however it has been amply demonstrated these so called moderates are either killed by Islamists, or absorbed into their forces, surrendering their weapons as they do so. Infamous CIA training and supply of moderates was a debacle as they immediately surrendered their weapons to Al Nusra. ISIS too, have been able to capture weapons easily, so it is patently absurd to believe it is possible to target weapons into areas so hotly contested, with allegiances as fluid as the shifting desert sands and with widespread ISIS presence and control.

Afghanistan Redux?

Faced with the thwarting of their regional hegemonic ambitions, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have upped the ante, threatening to supply rebel groups with anti-aircraft weapons.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, in an interview with der Spiegel, said that arming Syrian rebels with shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles would shift the balance of power in Syria:

We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground. It will allow the moderate opposition to be able to neutralize the helicopters and aircraft that are dropping chemicals and have been carpet-bombing them, just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there. This has to be studied very carefully, however, because you don’t want such weapons to fall into the wrong hands.

An explanation is needed of just who these “moderates” are and what helicopters and aircraft would be “neutralized”. Sputnik News website explains who Saudi Arabia supports in Syria:

the militants that Saudi Arabia supports include al-Fatah, an Idlib-based coalition of Islamist groups including al-Nusra Front, Ahrar ash-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa, all three of which are affiliated with al-Qaeda. Elsewhere across the country, Riyadh has provided assistance to other al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham-affiliated groups, and to the Free Syrian Army, an organization which has been whittled down into a small group that actively cooperates with Islamist militants, and which the Pentagon itself has previously estimated consists of “more than 50%…extreme Islamist groups.”

As for aircraft and helicopters, the reference to how surface to air missiles changed the balance in Afghanistan is a none too subtle threat to Russia. In the der Spiegel interview al-Jubeir makes no secret of the unchanged desire to overthrow Assad, so clearly Syrian aircraft will be targeted. Al-Jubeir made the Saudi position crystal clear, saying:

“I don’t think anyone can predict what the short term will look like. In the long term, it will be a Syria without Bashar Assad. The longer it takes, the worse it will get.”

“We have always said there are two ways to resolve Syria, and both will end up with the same result: a Syria without Bashar Assad. There is a political process which we are trying to achieve through what is called the Vienna Group. That involves the establishment of a governing council, which is to take power away from Bashar Assad, to write a constitution and to open the way for elections. It is important that Bashar leaves in the beginning, not at the end of the process. This will make the transition happen with less death and destruction.”

“The other option is that the war will continue and Bashar Assad will be defeated.”

Plan B: Deadlier Weapons to “Moderate” Rebels 

The Wall Street Journal on 12 April reported on Plan B of the US, which carries on with its charade of pretending to support a negotiated peace in Syria. It revealed CIA plans to arm “vetted rebels” (obviously an evolution from moderates ones) with more powerful weapons, primarily manpads to counter Syrian aircraft, tanks and artillery. This was timed just before the start of the latest Syria peace talks in Geneva on 13 April.

The preparations for a so-called Plan B center on providing vetted rebel units with weapons systems that would help them in directing attacks against Syrian regime aircraft and artillery positions, the officials said.

The Wall Street Journal first reported in February that President Barack Obama’s top military and intelligence advisers were pressing the White House to come up with a Plan B to counter Russia in Syria. Since then, fresh details have emerged on the nature of the new weaponry that could be deployed under the covert program.

Officials said the CIA has made clear to its allies that the new systems, once agreed upon, would be given to the rebels only if the truce and the concurrent political track toward a lasting peace—Plan A—fall apart and full-scale fighting resumes.

An unmistakeable message is being conveyed by Washington. Sabotage the cease fire and “rebels” will receive more powerful weapons, transforming them into more potent fighting forces. The “lasting peace” of Plan A is the resignation of Assad. The Syrian government, backed by Russia has repeatedly stated that the will of the Syrian people, through elections will decide if Assad remains the President of Syria. These irreconcilable positions virtually guarantee a resumption of hostilities.

Sure enough, the breakdown of the cease fire appears set to be a fait accompli. The opposition’s High Negotiations Committee (HNC) spokesperson, Riyad Naasan Agha told Sputnik News there is a general feeling that the ceasefire in Syria has ended.

Agha posted a statement on behalf of the HNC on his Facebook page, which clarifies that the opposition has entered the realm of delusionality in making strident demands from a much weakened negotiating position. He posted “the main issue, which is forming a governing body in which Assad has no role.”

Almost on cue, the opposition has withdrawn from the peace talks and rebel forces have launched assaults against government forces in Latakia province and in Hama.

The HNC claim mounting frustration over deteriorating humanitarian and security situations, accusing government forces, backed by Russia and Iran, of violating the cease fire. Senior opposition negotiator Mohammad Alloush told Reuters there was no way the opposition could continue in peace talks while the humanitarian situation deteriorates.

Perhaps Alloush missed the breaking news of Russia delivering four tonnes of humanitarian aid to the Homs province.

The Syrian people have shown great courage and resolve in resisting the barbaric ISIS. They have endured assaults on multiple fronts, from terrorists coming across the Turkish border in the north to Israel supporting ISIS and Al Nusra in the Golan Heights to the south. Sustained by support from rogue regional regimes and US complicity, ISIS isn’t going anywhere. It needs to be crushed and rendered impotent. Hopefully the accomplishment of this task can occur without inflaming an escalated war with the US and Russia aiming their military firepower at each other.

A Casa Branca está « preocupada » porque caças russos sobrevoaram de perto um navio estadunidense no Mar Báltico. Assim informam as agências noticiosas. Sem dizer, entretanto, de que navio se trata e por que estava no Mar Báltico.

Trata-se do USS Donald Cook, um dos navios dentre as quatro unidades lança-míseis deslocados pela Marinha dos EUA para a « defesa de mísseis da Otan à Europa ». Essas unidades, que serão aumentadas, são dotadas de radar Aegis e de mísseis interceptadores SM-3, mas ao mesmo  tempo de mísseis de cruzeiro Tomahawk de dupla capacidade convencional e nuclear. Em outros termos, são unidades de ataque nuclear, dotadas de um « escudo » destinado a neutralizar a resposta inimiga.

O Donald Cook, partindo em 11 de abril do porto polonês de Gdynia, cruzou por dois dias a apenas 70 quilômetros da base naval russa de Kaliningrado, e por essa razão foi sobrevoado pelos caças e helicópteros russos. Além dos navios lança-mísseis, o « escudo » EUA/Otan na Europa inclui, na sua conformação atual, um radar « na base avançada » da Turquia, uma bateria de mísseis terrestres estadunidenses na Romênia, composta de 24 mísseis SM-3, e uma outra análoga que será instalada na Polônia.

Moscou adverte : essas baterias terrestres, tendo capacidade de lançar também mísseis nucleares Tomahawk, constituem uma evidente violação do Tratado INF, que proíbe o deslocamento para a Europa de mísseis nucleares de médio porte.

Que fariam os Estados Unidos – que acusam a Rússia de provocar com os sobrevoos « uma escalada inútil de tensões» – se a Rússia enviasse unidades lança-mísseis ao longo das costas estadunidenses e instalasse baterias de mísseis em Cuba e no México?

Ninguém pergunta sobre isso na grande mídia, que continua a mistificar a realidade. Última novidade escondida : a transferência de F-22 Raptors, os mais avançados dos caças bombardeiros estadunidenses de ataque nuclear, da base de Tyndall na Flórida à de Lakenheath na Inglaterra, anunciada em 11 de abril pelo Comando europeu dos Estados Unidos. Da Inglaterra os F-22 Raptors serão « deslocados para outras bases da Otan, em posição avançada para maximizar as possibilidades de treinamento e exercer uma dissuasão em face de qualquer ação que desestabilize a segurança europeia ».

Trata-se da preparação para o iminente deslocamento para a Europa, incluindo a Itália, das novas bombas nucleares estadunidenses B61-12 que, lançadas a cerca de 100 quilômetros de distância, atingem o objetivo com uma ogiva  « de quatro opções de potência selecionáveis ». Esta nova  arma entra no programa de potencialização das forças nucleares, lançado pela administração Obama, que prevê entre outras coisas a construção de 12 submarinos de ataque suplmentares (7 bilhões de dólares a unidade, estando o primeiro já em canteiro de obras), cada um armado com 200 ogivas nucleares.

O New York Times informa (17 de abril) que está em curso o desenvolvimento de um novo tipo de ogiva nuclear, o « veículo flutuante hipersônico » que, ao retornar à atmosfera, manobra para evitar os mísseis interceptadores, dirigindo-se para o objetivo a mais de 27 mil quilômetros por hora. A Rússia e a China seguem, desenvolvendo armas análogas.

Durante esse tempo, Washington colhe os frutos. Tranformando a Europa em primeira linha do confronto nuclear, sabota (com a ajuda dos próprios governos europeus) as relações econômicas entre a União Europeia (UE) e a Rússia, com o objetivo de ligar indissoluvelmente a UE aos EUA por intermédio do TIP. Impulsiona ao mesmo tempo os aliados europeus a aumentar a despesa militar, para lucro das indústrias bélicas estadunidenses cujas exportações aumentaram 60% nos últimos cinco anos, tornando-se o mais forte setor das exportações estadunidenses.

Quem disse que a guerra não paga ?

Manlio Dinucci

 

Fonte original :

http://ilmanifesto.info/escalation-nucleare-in-europa/

Tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho para Resistência

 

Manlio Dinucci é jornalista e geógrafo.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced a further escalation of the US war in Iraq to include deployment of at least 200 additional troops, along with Apache helicopter gunships and artillery.

Carter’s announcement, made during an unannounced visit to Iraq, is the latest in a steady drumbeat of US escalations in Iraq and Syria, which now occur on a near-weekly basis. This is despite the fact that current troop levels are already well above the Obama administration’s official limit of 3,870. US forces are increasingly involved in conventional and large-scale ground combat, making a mockery of Obama’s numerous vows to the contrary.

Carter made clear that the deployments are part of a generalized escalation of the US wars in Iraq and Syria, continuing into the indefinite future.

“We’ve gotten approval from the White House every time the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and I have gone to ask for something that we’ve needed to accelerate. So that really isn’t the issue for us, the issue for us is to identify more ways to accelerate the campaign.”

The additional US troops and heavy weaponry are being deployed in support of a joint US-Iraqi force overseen by American advisors. This force will use the reinforcements as part of an offensive for control of Mosul, Carter said. The new US forces will perform “training and advising” missions, and will embed themselves in frontline combat commands.

Carter’s announcement must be taken as a warning: a massive escalation of war in the Middle East and beyond is being readied for the period after the US elections in November. These plans—and the growing danger of world war—are being deliberately excluded from the election campaigns of both major parties and all of their candidates, including the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders.

The financial-corporate elite and the military-intelligence establishment do not want the war drive to become a topic of discussion in the elections, because they are well aware of the broad antiwar sentiment of the population. The exclusion of this, the most critical of all questions, highlights the antidemocratic character of the electoral process.

The additional US soldiers, drawn primarily from the US Army’s Special Forces, will link up with frontline Iraqi units as part of the preparations for “a punishing battle” to retake Mosul from ISIS, the Washington Post reported.

The US is also allocating an additional $400 million to fund Kurdish proxy forces in northern Iraq, which are being organized by US commandos and will be “critical in retaking Mosul,” Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said.

The Kurdish fighters, acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal on Monday as “the US’s most reliable partners in the fight against the Islamic State,” began carrying out regular airborne raids throughout northern Iraq this year, under the supervision of the “special targeting force” announced by Carter earlier this year.

The US plans to enlist regional states to assist American forces intervening in the ISIS-held regions of northern Iraq once Mosul and other ISIS-held cities are retaken, according to the Pentagon. Over the past year, the Pentagon has repeatedly announced measures to bolster the US military’s basing arrangements in Iraq, including the new firebases announced earlier this month as part of the “accelerated campaign against ISIS.”

The return of US forces to major combat operations, less than five years after the official “end” of the Iraq war, is aimed at propping up the US puppet regime installed after the 2003 invasion and reinforcing the US military presence in the oil-rich region. Having already lost significant parts of the north and west to ISIS forces, the Iraqi government faces a spiraling crisis, fueled by the fall in world oil prices. Oil exports account for more than 90 percent of Iraq’s revenues.

The decades of war crimes committed by Washington have wrecked Iraqi society nearly “beyond the point of repair,” according to a study by the Minority Rights Group International (MRG), which found that more than 8 million Iraqis are in dire need of humanitarian aid and more than 3 million remain internally displaced.

Dozens of New York voters are suing the state, saying that their voter registration changed without their input, costing them the ability to vote in Tuesday’s primary. The lawsuit, filed this afternoon in Long Island federal court by the group Election Justice USA, argues that the voters’ alleged registration changes deny them equal protection under the constitution, and demands a blanket order allowing “tens of thousands” of potential plaintiffs to vote in tomorrow’s presidential primary.

“Plaintiffs are in imminent harm of losing their right to vote,” the suit reads. “They have beseeched the various Boards of Elections without result. Nothing can save their right to vote save an order from this Court.”

New York’s primaries are closed, meaning only members of a given party can vote in that party’s primary, and the deadline to change parties is more than six months before Primary Day, the earliest in the country. Those who signed onto the lawsuit say that their paperwork was in order, and in many cases they had voted repeatedly in Democratic primaries from the same address, but that recent checks of their voter registrations revealed that their party had been changed or could not be found at all. The accounts echo online reports of other spurned would-be voters.

“We were seeing an alarming number of voter affiliations changed without people’s knowledge or consent, people who were registered listed as not registered,” said Shyla Nelson, a spokeswoman for Election Justice USA.

As the primary neared and the group solicited accounts of irregularities, reports poured in, she said: “What started as a trickle is now a river.”

More than 200 voters signed onto the lawsuit, Nelson said on Friday (she was still tallying late additions this afternoon as lawyers pushed up against the close-of-court deadline).

One plaintiff, a 24-year-old from Suffolk County, says that he registered as a Democrat in 2009, and that a change of affiliation form the BOE showed him, supposedly proving he left the party, bears a signature that is an “identical, pixel-by-pixel” copy of the signature on his driver’s license. Another plaintiff, a 58-year-old from upstate Onondaga County, had been registered as a Democrat since 1989, but on April 11th found that her registration was “purged.” An employee of the county told her that the change was a clerical error, but that she would not be able to vote on Tuesday, according to the suit. Others named in the lawsuit registered for the first time within days of the new voter deadline in March, or the party-change deadline last October.

Nelson, a Vermont performance artist, described Election Justice as nonpartisan, though she and several other core members identified on its website are vocal supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Most of the complaints we’ve seen publicized online center around spurned voters seeking to cast a ballot for Sanders in tomorrow’s Democratic primary. In recent days, the state Board of Elections has chalked up concerns such as these to voter ignorance of New York’s restrictive rules, and of the occasional data entry error.

Election Justice USA formed recently after Republican officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County drastically reduced the number of polling places for the state’s March primary, leading to lines as much as five hours long, with the worst impacts in majority-Latino districts.

“We wanted to develop a response to voter suppression, issues at polling—the widespread problem at polls this election cycle,” Nelson said.

In New York, voters certain that they should be registered Democrat have in many cases been unable to affirmatively prove their status. In one such case, Long Island resident Jonathan Carrillo, a DJ, said that he registered as a Democrat for the first time in March, but that he was listed in Board of Elections records as a Republican. Consultation with Nassau County election officials brought up a 2013 DMV form that shows he registered as a Republican when getting a license, which he says he never would have done.

In this situation, Carrillo’s only remaining option is to go to the county Board of Elections office on Primary Day and explain his case to a judge, in hopes of getting a court order to allow him to vote. This is unfair, Election Justice argues.

“The Board of Elections, not voters, holds the voting records and should be responsible to prove a voter’s ineligibility, rather than putting this burden on the voter. As it is currently structured, the statute places an onerous and excessive burden on the voter to prove their eligibility,”

said Blaire Fellows, one of the New York attorneys filing the suit. “It requires securing a court order, which takes time that many New Yorkers simply don’t have, as it means loss of income over and above what they lose by simply taking time off to vote.”

The other procedure available to voters with irregular registration records is to vote at a polling site using a provisional ballot, wherein one explains the nature of the irregularity, for commissioners to consider when they’re counting votes. This process, the lawsuit says, is the product of “one of the nation’s most opaque and oppressive voter laws.”

The suit asks for the state to preserve all provisional ballots and create a hearing process where voters can explain irregularities, adding a layer of due process, where currently, lawyers argue, the ballots are “discarded by the Board of Elections in a closed room.” What the lawsuit calls “purges,” its authors argue, disproportionately affect Hispanic, African-American, and Hispanic voters, as have previous electoral manipulations in the state’s history. The legal filing, which shows signs of being assembled in extreme haste, also cites the just-reported decline of registered Democrats in Brooklyn by 63,500, voters it also calls “purged.”

One Brooklyn resident recounts registering as a new voter last month and, upon being unable to find her registration, calling the Brooklyn BOE only to be told it was probably lost in the mail. Photojournalist Natalie Keyssar said she registered by mail within 48 hours of the March 25th deadline for forms to be postmarked, and that when she returned from an assignment in Mexico on Friday, she looked online to see where to vote, but found she is not registered. Repeated calls to the county board didn’t go through, and after an hour of trying again today, she said she reached a Ms. Jackson who told her that she “shouldn’t have left it till so close to the deadline,” that the office was receiving some 2,000 forms a day towards the end, and that her record can’t be found, likely because it hasn’t been processed yet.

“How can the U.S. actually tell its citizens their right to vote has been lost in the mail?” she wrote in a Facebook post.

She said she found it even more “shocking” when several friends reached out to say that they were having similar problems. “That’s just 8 of my random friends who just happen to be looking at Facebook, so this problem must be very widespread,” she said.

A call to the state BOE left her unsatisfied.

“What I’m waiting to hear is someone to take responsibility, to say that I did everything correctly and I’m still not a registered voter,” she said. “I have a U.S. passport, a driver’s license, a Global Entry photo ID, and an NYPD press pass—I am who I say I am. I just want to vote.”

Sanders bemoaned the closed primary setup in a recent speech.

“We have a system here in New York where independents can’t get involved in the Democratic primary, where young people who have not previously registered and want to register today just can’t do it,” Sanders said during his recent 27,000-strong rally in Washington Square Park.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has also bumped up against New York’s tight limits, as his children Eric and Ivanka just straight-up missed the deadline to register, and thus can’t vote for him. A state BOE spokesman has said that Trump supporters are also among those who have inundated his office with complaints.

An open primary would mostly eliminate the need to prove party affiliation in the first place, as Republicans would be able to vote in Democratic primaries and vice versa (and of course, Conservative, Green, and Working Families party members could vote outside their respective sandboxes).

In the 1970s, a group of New Yorkers sued to have the state’s early party-change deadline declared unconstitutional, but after two courts agreed with them, the Supreme Court overturned the decisions in a five to four ruling. In 2003, New York City’s independent/Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg pushed a ballot proposal to create nonpartisan primaries for city positions, in which the top two vote recipients would go on to the general election. Voters rejected this idea.

A bill currently before the Assembly would open up the presidential primary to those who are not members of a party. It is laid over in the election law committee, and if past efforts to expand voter access in New York are a guide, it may never see the light of day.

A state Board of Elections spokesman declined to comment, saying his office has not yet been served.

A hearing on the suit is set for 9 a.m. Tuesday.

For more information on voting in the Tuesday presidential primary, see our guide here.

NEW YORK CITY — Voters across the city trying to cast their ballot in the first meaningful state primary in years faced myriad problems at the polls.

New Yorkers from the Upper West Side to The Bronx showed up their longtime polling places only to find they’d been moved. Others found that their names had dropped off the voter rolls. And still others faced various paperwork snafus.

Matthew Spiegelman said he’s voted in the same location at P.S. 17 in Williamsburg since 2008 — but on Tuesday, poll workers couldn’t find his address in their books, he said.

“[The worker] double checked my address and quickly said ‘it looks like you’ll have to vote via affidavit also, that’s been happening a lot today,'” he told DNAinfo. “I never had this issue before.”

Frank Delessio, 35, said he had to fill out an affidavit to vote at P.S. 56 on Gates Avenue in Clinton Hill because poll workers sent him to the wrong table.

“I was like, something’s not right because I’ve lived in this neighborhood for five years… I just looked at their paper myself and saw they had sent me to the even address table,” he said.

“I think some people thought I voted twice. I put my ballot through and they were going to void my affidavit.”

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, an entire block of Lafayette Avenue was left off the voting rolls at P.S. 11, poll workers said. 

Some voters on Clinton and Washington avenues were also inexplicably left off the list.

Some residents who live on Clinton and Washington avenues were also left off the voter roll for no apparent reason, according to BOE employees.

“They should have been here, but we couldn’t find them,” said a poll worker who did not want to be identified. “They weren’t in the book and they should have been.”

The Board of Elections moved several longtime voting sites on the Upper West Side, but many voters were unaware of the change, they said.

“I was expecting to vote,” said Sarah, 77, who’d been going to P.S. 9 on West 84th Street, one of the longtime neighborhood polling sites that the BOE moved, for 40 years. “It’s sabotage.”

Some Upper West Side voters found that they had been deemed “inactive” by the Board of Elections if they did not vote regularly for other elections between presidential races, such as those for mayor and state assembly representatives.

“Some people only come vote every four years so the Board of Elections assumes they’re inactive,” said Rosalyn Perez, a coordinator at the polling site at P.S. 163.

Outside the Park Slope public library, where Mayor Bill de Blasio voted Tuesday, registered Democrat Eugene Manning said he wasn’t able to vote because his name wasn’t on the voter rolls — even though he’s voted there since 2008 and hasn’t moved.

He was given an affidavit ballot to fill out but chose not to because he didn’t trust that it would be tallied properly. And he said he didn’t plan to call the Board of Elections to complain because he didn’t think it would change anything.

“It’s hard to contact the Elections Board,” he said. “I tried to when I moved but didn’t get any action.”

Affidavits are handed out if a person’s address can’t be found in the voter rolls, according to the city Board of Elections.

In Windsor Terrace, other voters said they found the list of names of those approved to vote ended at the letter “N.”

City Councilman Ben Kallos, who is also the chair of Committee on Governmental Operations, said persistent issues at the polls will continue until the entire system changes.

He’s recommended an electronic poll book, but also said “patronage” at the Board of Elections will mean voters have issues during every election.

“It’s not going to get better until we replace the patronage system at the Board of Elections with people who got their with what you know instead of who you know,” he said.

“I’m focused on making sure elections actually work, which means showing up, finding your name in a poll book and voting.”

Cheryln Russo in Bushwick voted for the last four years in the same location but had to fill out an affidavit ballot because workers couldn’t find her listed, she said.

“A few weeks ago I checked online to make sure I was listed in the system, and I was,” she said. “Today it’s telling me I am not.”

Other issues plagued voters on primary day, including a last-minute change in voting locations on the Upper West Side and, according to some voters who said their polling sites weren’t open when they were supposed to be.

In the Bronx, 71-year-old Blanca, who declined to give her last name, said many voters were confused by the change of location.

“It was chaos,” at the Parkchester Condominiums, she said, where voting was moved to a different building in the large complex.

Voters throughout the sprawling complex weren’t notified of their changed location, she said, sending residents to multiple locations before getting the chance to vote.

Alexia Esannason, who has lived in the complex for more than 30 years, said she went to three places on Tuesday trying to cast her ballot.

“This is important,” she told DNAinfo, “and for them to keep moving it around every year, it’s ridiculous.”

A spokeswoman for the Board of Elections did not immediately return calls for comment.

Wednesday April 13th, the Syrian people in unprecedented numbers went to the polls and cast their ballots in 7000 polling stations in the 13 provinces the Assad government controls. Turn-out was so high that polls stayed open 5 hours longer to accommodate everyone wishing to vote. . According to figures tabulated by Syria’s Higher Judicial Committee for Elections, 11,341 candidates contested the election.

These elections however are taking place at the same time as the first round of Geneva based peace talks thereby contradicting and complicating a timetable for political transition insisted upon by the US. As a result, a number of Western powers, most notably Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States have been rejecting the election results as illegitimate.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour we speak with author and award-winning Independent journalist Stephen Lendman about the distorted media coverage of the Syria conflict. We also hear from scholar Tim Anderson, the author of The Dirty War On Syria who was in Damascus at the time of the elections, about the elections, the ceasefire and peace talks and the broader geopolitics in play.

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Global Research: We’re joined right now by phone by Professor Tim Anderson. Professor Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. He is a frequent contributor to the Global Research website, and the author of the recently released book, The Dirty War on Syria. He joins us right now from Damascus where he’s been observing the situation in the lead up to the parliamentary elections which are taking place as we speak. So, good evening Professor Anderson.

Tim Anderson: Good evening Michael.

GR: Okay. I guess I first of all, I just wanted to ask you… The elections are happening right now. What we’re hearing there has been a very …large turn-out. That they’ve extended the elections by about five hours. Am I correct about that?

TA: Yes. I’m not sure of the scale of the turn-out yet. But they say there’s been a strong turn-out, and there’s certainly been a very strong participation of candidates. Thousands of candidates.

GR: So Professor Anderson, I’m curious to know what do you anticipate in terms of the way the Parliamentary elections will play out? I know the voting is taking place as we speak. What are you anticipating given your sense of things on the ground?

TA: It’s not really possible to make any predictions. There aren’t any provisional figures as yet. I’d say they’ll have a result probably about this time tomorrow, in another twenty four hours. I’d say about twenty four hours. So I think maybe the parliament is still going on now, but another twenty four hours. But, from the candidates you can see that there’s a much wider variety of candidates. Everyone’s commented on that. Um, to what extent they’re going to get any votes I’m not sure. In the previous elections Baath party got about 60% of the vote. And the smaller parties…none of the smaller parties really got a, got a huge, they ended up with one, two, three members of Parliament, the other range of other small parties, but there have been a lot of individuals and new groups that have appeared in this election, so it’s not really possible to make any predictions yet.

GR: Okay. Fair enough. But, uh, can you talk about, you know, what is …what is being discussed in terms of election issues? Is it essentially, is there any sense of it being a referendum on Assad? Or are there any specific policy choices? What is..what are the people, would you say, voting on? What’s being discussed on the campaign trail?

TA: I think there’s, uh, first of all there’s a very strong uh, there’s a great economic, uh, depression here, effectively. Uh, the economy has been devastated by the war and by the sanctions in part, imposed by the US and Europeans and some others. So, to the extent of the real substantial issues, and remember that these people participating in the elections exclude all of those armed groups effectively but the groups that come out of Riyadh and which the US calls an opposition – they’re not really an opposition at all, they just want to create an Islamic State of some sort.

So the Opposition parties here are loyal in the sense of they are against the terrorist groups and trying to rebuild the country. But there’s tremendous economic difficulties here. And um, there have been some improvements. For example, in recent months, uh, the ceasefire did in fact have an impact in certain areas including in Damascus. But the prices are high and the salaries were low and there are shortages all of those sorts of things. The combined result of the terrorism and the economic sanctions by the Western Bloc. So, people in substance people want a change in map. Beyond that, there is a sense that when you talk to people having a say in the system, it’s quite visible the greater participation of women …amongst the candidates for example. So those sorts of things, have a more general sort of sense of maybe people can have a bit more of a say in the system.

GR: We’ve heard from major powers, uh, they’re questioning, essentially questioning the legitimacy of these elections. You’ve got Germany saying they won’t recognize the results. Great Britain, I got a quote from a spokesperson: “The decision of the regime to hold elections is a measure of how divorced it is from reality. They cannot buy back legitimacy by putting up a flimsy facade of democracy.” And then the France’s Foreign Ministry calls the election a sham by an oppressive regime. And of course the US State Department is saying the elections do not reflect the will of the people. So, I’m wondering what…what you would say to those… people who are …listening to those sorts of criticisms about the legitimacy of these elections.

TA: Yes. Well (those respective people who claim they) have no real participatory democracy in Syria certainly have no accountability for it. The United Nations resolutions, those passed on from the Security Council, they symbolize – they said, ‘I think the Syrians can decide their future.’ And the US (has signed up) to that, I mean the Europeans they have signed up to that It was a unanimous resolution saying that. The West can’t yet seem to understand that. Let them understand what it means that the Syrian people decide their future. It means that you don’t get to change the constitution. The Syrian people have to do it! This means that they vote for their representatives. They don’t seem to understand that. The Al – Qaeda groups that they back of course, the Riyadh opposition, coming out of Saudi Arabia..have never expressed any interest in democracy or elections. They want to overthrow the government and establish a sort of Islamic State . The US has made it very clear that they want to overthrow the Syrian government. They are arming groups to do precisely that. We have to you know, look at any statements they make about Syrian democracy in that sort of context. They have no real interest in Syrian democracy. Syria is the most inclusive nation in the entire Middle East region…not religious-based or racially based, and it has …public institutions – inclusive institutions. And I refer to a construct which gets a higher level of participation than the United States does in Presidential elections. So, these are all smoke-screens really, and I think the good side of that story is that it doesn’t really affect the Syrian people in their own internal processes, and as I said before it makes some people more determined to go out and vote even if they’re electing different (inaudible), they don’t really know that the Americans and Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are enemies effectively … although in the face of that.

GR: I’m just wanting to ask about the – the fact that these elections are taking place in the shadow of these UN led peace talks in Geneva…They took effect – the ceasefire taking effect February 27th , but we’ve seen an escalation in fighting in Northern Aleppo province, in parts of Hama province, and Damascus as I understand it. What can you tell us about what’s instigating that violence and why?

TA: Yes. It is quite complicated why because on the one hand I said very convincingly across the board that people saw the ceasefire had a very important effect certainly in Damascus, that is to say that the almost daily shellings that were happening in the eastern part of Damascus from the – the sectarian groups stopped. It largely stopped. They haven’t made – we’re surprised that it’d be so relatively peaceful, um partly because of the successes of the Syrian Army in bringing out a cordon around those occupied areas and diminishing them somewhat. But also because there was some genuine engagement

in the ceasefire, and so some actual benefits to ordinary people. And probably because the armed groups were trying to regroup themselves in a place that is back in Damascus.

Now you’re right we mentioned that in Aleppo the situation is rather different because … the Syrian Army and the alliance linking the Syrian Army with Russia, and Iran and Hezbollah and some other groups, having liberated Palmyra a short time ago have been trying to cut off the supply routes between Deir Ezzor and Raqqa and Aleppo so they’re trying to encircle Aleppo at the moment. And there’s been a counter-offensive by Jabhat al-Nusra from the north, the groups are coming from the north, there’s a couple of other groups that work with Jabhat al-Nusra – Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar ash-Sham. So those groups have mounted a counter-offensive at the very time that the Syrian Army is doing a push to clean up the entirety of Aleppo. Aleppo …the second biggest city in Syria, is the main target of the Syrian Army after Palmyra, except a dozen small (areas) in between. It’s standard operation. You can cut off the supply routes, cut off the links between the concentrations of those Islamist groups, and the links with Turkey, and so, genuinely you punch battle cry from in Aleppo at the moment and it meant that some of the groups who were indeed let’s say take advantage of the ceasefire, and breach it, the Russians have been monitoring these breaches, and then so many per day and so on, but effectively there’s abandoning of the ceasefire in large parts of Aleppo wherever fighting’s going on, but it’s being maintained more or less in the northeastern part of Damascus at the moment. So, it’s a complicated situation but it means that the deep focus of fighting right now is indeed in Aleppo.

GR: So, I’m wondering as we move forward, what, do you see the, you know, should the elections go in a way that supports or you know backs Mr. Assad,…how do you see things sort of resolving themselves on the international stage? Are we going to see increased efforts to kind of intimidate the government, or are we going to see compromises on one side or the other? Where do you see things going?

 TA: First of all, I think it’s important to recognize that there are two different things going on: the Syrian internal process and the Geneva process and both are very important. The Geneva process is important because the ceasefire has brought some genuine results at least in Damascus. And it’s also a very necessary part of ending a war that every effort is made to try and resolve violence without the deaths. But we should be very clear that there is no political resolution in terms of a new Syrian government going to come out of the Geneva process. That is simply not going to happen. Indeed it’s concrete to the wording of the Security Council resolution. Although there is this illusion in the Western countries that somehow or other, these external – despite the Security Council Resolutions it seems, the Syrian people have to resolve their own political processes. There is still this insistence that these international players are going to somehow select the next Syrian government. That’s not going to happen. It’s particularly not going to happen because the Syrian advances on the battlefield have got the advantage in the last few months. So whereas internally in the political process in Syria, there is a – the process of elections now includes the Congress elections back in 2012, four years ago, the amendments of the constitution in 2012 , the presidential elections in Hom in 2014, and the congress elections today are all according to Syrian law, that is to say there hasn’t been a failure to comply with the schedule of elections under the electoral law and the constitution.

So, when people have said in attack…oh it’s not the time to have an election because there’s a war going on and so on, well the US government has pursued no doubt delays, any sort of illegal or unconstitutional delays in the last elections but elections today really have nothing to do with the Geneva process. The Geneva process remains important (inaudible) that leads to the Syrian conflict, and also to perhaps isolate these states that have been (inaudible) all of these groups going back to all of the armed presences here and that’s why (inaudible) It’s not a civil war of course. It’s a war that’s being backed by a … alliance of United States, Saudi Arabia,Turkey, Qatar and UN.

 GR: Okay, so, um you were talking about the impacts of the sanctions. And the particularly, I know you wrote in your book you devoted a whole chapter to the system of the – the attacks on Syria’s health system and focused on how the sanctions were essentially…there was clearly driving away and alienating popular support. So, this is essentially an effort to just completely destroy, degrade the Syrian State in its capacity to provide support for the people. All those social institutions that were in place. Is it possible to provide an analog, I mean to compare it say directly to Haiti or Libya?… How would you describe that whole situation of that effort that strategy of just undermining the State’s ability to support its own people?

TA: That’s certainly part of Washington’s strategy – that on one side you’ve got armed groups attacking for example pharmaceutical factories you know. And hospitals they’ve got their own pretexts for what this hospital treating souls is there for you know. We’re going to blow it up and then film it – themselves blowing it up and so on. On the other hand you have got international sanctions which make a lot of things very difficult to obtain. Syria has been very self sufficient in the past because there have been sanctions in the past in a lot of areas like food and pharmaceuticals and so on. But they’re much weaker in that sense today. The economic damage is very real while it’s serving alliances of tremendous armed forces these days, despite the loss of soldiers there have been on the order of 80,000 soldiers in this conflict so a third or more of all of the casualties in the conflict have been Syrian security forces – despite that, it’s apparent that the army in its gain has strength to it and the alliances behind it very strong. But we’ve got this degradation is going on at the same time. There’s still a public health system and a public education system, but it’s lost a lot in terms of resources, in terms of people. Part of the migration problem are privatized because it’s very difficult for those people too. So I had to go from some people in the mass of personnel, the universities principally …that sort of area’s been damaged. So, even in … one group that was setting up a new private university because they were trying to rebuild target capacity in the higher education sector, but it was being weakened, undermined. There were many many young people studying in schools and hospitals in Syria, but you know their classes are getting bigger and bigger and the possibilities of small …and so on. There’s a very strong impact on the economy, as I mentioned before shortages in prices and so on. That’s going on at the same time and that’s aggravated by these sanctions. Of course, we know what happened with Iraq for example, in the sanctions during the nineties ahead of…they left a terrible toll because they went on so long. You remember that famous question to Madeleine Albright is, you know, it is estimated that half a million children have died years later by the sanctions and thereafter. Was it worth it? And she said well we think it is. You know?

These sanctions are a long term thing that have really – at the other side of the terrorism… they’re adding real damage to people… The one advantage, Syria has some very strong and loyal partners, particularly Iran and Russia, but also countries like Cuba and Venezuela that are helping in reconstructing the health sectors for example. So people are living in a very difficult situation at the same time as the Syrian armed forces have got the initiative.

Interview with Tim Anderson Part Two – April 15 interview.

Global Research: Okay we are joined now once again by Professor Tim Anderson. Uh, I am speaking to him now almost two days after our previous conversation to see if he has any updates on how the Syrian elections went and how he sees the political landscape shifting. Welcome back Professor Anderson!

Tim Anderson: Thanks Michael.

GR: So it’s been more than twenty four hours since the polls closed, but uh, I have yet to see anything in the English speaking press about the uh, election, other than commentaries from Western governments about how they were illegitimate. Uh, we talked about that before. I was wondering if there’s anything more you could tell me from your vantage point about how the elections went.

TA: Just a little bit about the participation. The figures aren’t out yet. They’re not published yet. I haven’t seen them yet. The polls were extended by some hours, possibly until we get to (the following) morning, far after the closing poll…The thing I have heard back is that the level of participation has been fairly strong. As far as the presidential election in 2014 you might recall that as around 73% from that despite the war in some parts of the country who couldn’t get to go. On this occasion, um in the Congress elections…had a lower participation than the presidential elections um. Back in 2012 it was only about 51% or so during the crisis. Now, they want to tell me that its higher, it’s not as high as the presidential but it’s higher than the last Congress, so it may be 60-something percent…They say it was pretty strong, and I think the factor there was that there has been quite an explosion of new candidates I am thinking the young people and women, which has certainly interested a lot of people but participation around the university is quite strong apparently. And in the past young people hadn’t voted that much, particularly in, these people who came to the elections. So that’s about all (inaudible) people (inaudible) . There was some incidents of corruption …which was then covered (inaudible) throughout those particular areas. Um…. (inaudible) Another thing to remember here is that the …of internally displaced people, but that there has been significant (INAUDIBLE) around Hom and Damascus, but (inaudible) of people who are being displaced around Aleppo and Hama they have homes in the city of Damascus and in the coastal cities and so on. There have been some facilities made for people who are out of their districts but wanting to vote…..

GR: When you talk about those internally displaced persons from those areas…are there any estimates on what percentage could have actually cast a ballot?

 TA: Well, as I said, the participation rate is probably sixty something percent, but I don’t know exactly what yet. And that means all eligible voters in the whole country. So, when I…there were 73% …in presidential elections, that means that 73% of eligible voters in the entire country, including the internally displaced people – I’m not exactly sure …people in the rest of the country but there was … twice as many people internally displaced as externally displaced. So, that’s a little bit unclear. There was a report on a few days ago from the … and Internal Organization for Migration … people were moving back to their homes. So that’s pretty much the state of the advances of the Syrian Army with its allies in the last six months. At one point seven million …possibly getting towards a third of the people who were internally displaced, but let me talk about the participation rate of a third, referring to the number of eligible people.

GR: What might conceivably be at stake here, I mean…my understanding is that the president, Assad, does wield most of the power in the country…How could the parliament shape the plans or the efforts of the president?

TA: Well the parliament … no methods. It’s quite similar in structure really to the congress/presidential system in the US. The President has executive powers and in the past he was the head of the Baath party but the Baath party since 2012 no longer has the same constitution, the role now…the role of the Baath party was more or less diminished in 2012 with a constitutional amendment. So…President Assad is pretty much like the US president in many respects.

GR: Do you have any kind of a read on how the… we discussed the rhetoric from the United States and Germany and so on…In terms of the real politik of the situation …as I brought up before, how do you see them reshaping their …approach? There’s been talk what they call a Plan B for Syria. I think they’re talking about some sort of a partitioning… Realistically, do you want to maybe address that point again?

TA: So what’s the, um, US plan? (They’re) very happy with the idea of an Islamic State in the east part of the country, driven by Al Qaeda and the other Salafi groups aligned with it. So that idea of partition is always in classical terms …it’s explicitly been on the US attainment from the beginning. It’s clear also that’s not going to happen. Because, effectively the role of captured states is diminishing pretty much in line with the security advances of the Syrian Army and its allies, particularly of course Iran, Hezbollah and Russia.

So, I think it’s fair to say that while the Geneva process, the international process is important in terms of trying to end the war, but then there are so many sponsors, external sponsors of these groups, it’s kind of clear that the Geneva Process is not going to have any real influence on and show them the future political system of Syria .It’s important to end the war, but it’s not really going to do it. What’s going to do it is really what’s happening here. At the moment which is very much a normal process in many respects. It’s just that people are devastated by this civil war and …economically they’re worse off. The economy is being (inaudible) seriously by the terrorist groups and at the same time, you’ve got international sanctions from those (inaudible) and countries that are demanding (inaudible) throughout the government, and those sanctions have of course led to shortages and higher prices and …You can tell that most of the country’s in poverty in dollar terms, (inaudible) and so those have been issues I think really that people are really concerned about when it comes to this election this week but that what’s going to happen to the economy? What about the basic needs of people who are (inaudible)?

Situation a few days ago where the government had stirred up a…were going to discuss the external situation and effects in Syria. And most of the delegates don’t want to talk about basic things like prices and food and a range of other economic issues basically. They’re the bread and butter issues of this election, indeed the presidential election to me. Effectively I think the crisis here hasn’t against external domination and against the terrorist groups…. (inaudible)

 GR: Well, Professor Anderson, I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanted to mention about the elections before we close, but, I suppose…

TA: Until we get some news…perhaps in an hour we might get some news.

 GR: Thank you so much for helping us decode what’s been going on out there, sir.

 TA: No Problems Michael. Thanks for your time.

 GR: We’ve been speaking with Professor Tim Anderson. The book is The Dirty War on Syria and it is now available through the Global Research website.