Global Research

Talks aimed at ending Yemen’s war opened in Kuwait on April 21. The delay of the talks is explained by experts by the inability to achieve some key preconditions to start them. For instance, Saudi Arabia had demanded that the Houthi alliance has to hand over all heavy armament to the coalition. It’s obvious that it’s unacceptable for any warring side of the conflict.

The ceasefire exists only on the fronts where the sides can’t inflict a military defeat on each other. Considering the low morale and a poor level of coordination of the Saudi-led forces, they can’t do this almost everywhere. However, the coalition had been used warplanes massively against the Houthi alliance recompensing the situation on the ground.

Separately, Saudi Arabia made an important PR move which followed Obama’s visit to Riyadh. The Saudi-led coalition claimed to have killed more than 800 Al-Qaeda fighters seized the strategic coastal city of Mukalla in Yemen. However, local sources argue that there were no clashes in the area of Mukalla and no casualties among Al-Qaeda, for sure. The coalition made a pact with the terrorists and AQAP withdrew from the city. This move was made amid the US promises to provide additional technical and military aid to the UAE in order to fight jihadists in Yemen.

Furthermore, the sides achieved an agreement that, in this case, the US Navy will join the naval blockade of the country. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia de-facto continues to use AQAP to control different zones of Yemen.

In turn, the Houthi alliance has been expanding the zone of control in Shabwah Governorate and at the Western coast of the country. Thus, the negotiations haven’t even prevented the continuation of local firefights and it’s hard to expect that they could push the conflict to a peaceful solution in general. Moreover, 2 powerful Yemeni political forces: the Southern Movement and the Islamist party of Al-Islah. This is why any possible agreement dividing the spheres of influence in the country among the Houthi movement, Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Saudi-backed forces won’t guarantee a stable balance of powers in the country.

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No condition of life to which man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him – Tolstoy

The recent expose’ of the so-called “Panama Papers” brings to light again the morally troubling issue of tax havens and the flight of capital from taxation. The fallout from this, as is now widely known, has had serious political implications. There is already a major political casualty in the form of the former prime minister of Iceland, who resigned amidst allegations of financial impropriety by a member of his family. Politically, the issue remains a highly charged one; even David Cameron, who in recent times was one of the most vocal proponents of reforms to curb the excesses of the financial truancy of both rich corporations and individuals has not been entirely absolved from the scandal.

Some financial analysts have claimed that this is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. If true, the implications are staggering, because it gives pause to even the deeply worrying report recently published by Oxfam highlighting the global inequities of wealth which exists today. While economic inequality is a serious source of concern, it is merely a part of a larger pattern of discrimination and deprivation that afflicts all societies in the present. This question extends to far more than just economic ones; in fact, arguably the fixation on economic inequality is in danger of shifting attention away from more fundamental questions of social justice and fairness. It also gives an undue emphasis on an economic solution rather than a real one.

One of the key, though somewhat under-emphasised, aspect of Thomas Piketty’s global best-seller has not been to show the extent of the gaps between the rich and the poor but rather more pertinently how periods where the gaps have narrowed have been the rare exception rather than the rule. This in a sense gives us a more realistic appraisal of history. Seldom has the pursuit and agglomeration of wealth given pause to anything other than its own validation. If history is any guide, the impulse to accumulate wealth and power for its own sake is a universal drive that seems to transcend faith, cultures, language, politics and geography – as much as most faith and wisdom traditions counsel us against the deep spiritual and social ruin that will eventuate from such a pursuit. But in a global public culture dominated by a vain and arrogant, but more problematically, parochial ‘secularity’ promoted by the West and their allies, such discourses carry little weight.

Worryingly, even among the more visibly religious nations, there seems to be little enthusiasm to find alternative visions of progress and development.Even so called ‘alternatives’ to the dominant paradigms might not – on closer scrutiny – be so different. I think underneath the enthusiasms amongst Muslim nations, for example, over so called“Islamic” finance, the same ideological drives persist. Financial institutions no doubt understand its attractions as a marketing exercise; a more affluent, growing Muslim middle class enthusiastically embraces a means of increasing their wealth whilst palliating their ‘spiritual’ concerns!As global banks pursue this new wonderful marketing vehicle, we see hordes of both private and public conspirators – government agencies, university academics, financial consultants and so on – selling the public this new ‘product’!

However, at its centre nothing changes, and the practices of the past (profiteering for its own sake, the continued hegemony of the institutional structure of the present financial system, the ongoing valorisation of liberal capitalist values et al) continues. The terms of the process are now couched in a different language but the functioning and logical aims of the exercises remain the same. Moreover, the way in which global society speaks of the problem today – the way it has been conceived and what has been perceived as its effects is quite removed from similar episodes of social and economic distress in the past. I’ll come back to this later.

I’d wager that even the Wall Street Sit-In, applauded globally as a powerful indictment of the failures of a financial system run amok (a dubious pyramid scheme dressed under the sanctimony of the world’s most respectable financial institutions), symptomatizes the widespread moral vacuum surrounding the issue. Exemplified as a serious mass movement critique of developments which eventually led to the financial crisis of 2008, what it truly reflects is a reaction against the symptoms of failure rather than an outright questioning of the moral validity of its causes.

In other words, one cannot help but wonder whether many of those who came would have bothered to do so if they had not themselves been affected by the fallout. If the prevailing system had continued to lavish the same returns it had done prior, would have there been a call to re-examine its principles or values? And what exactly are the majority angry about? The failure of the system? Or of the principles which underpin them? Then why is there a lacuna of serious attempts to frame these issues in broader terms? If we do not take the time to think within the context of the kinds of society we are trying to build, then to paraphrase Santayana, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past in an unending vicious cycle.

One thing is clear. History tells us that the cycles of boom and bust is a natural part of the economic order. However, what is peculiar to the current malaise, is a seeming inability to articulate the problem(s) within any kind of moral compass. The way we talk about economic activity is disconnected to any view of how this is an intrinsic part of how we imagine the kinds of societies we wish to have. Even when we are angry about disparities between the rich and poor, this is seen and discussed in isolation from thinking about wider morality. It has not always been so. Even in the most celebrated totem of free-market thinking, Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, published more than two centuries ago, the idea of free enterprise and the freedom of exchange, was an attempt to augment a liberalism and individual autonomy thought in the best interests of an Enlightenment morality. Free trade was seen as a critical element in the flourishing of a ‘good’ society. It was grounded on a moral claim (what Smith terms as “moral sentiments”), not the kind of vacuous argument put forward today by economists talking about “efficiencies”.

This laxity, described so vividly by Tony Judt, as ‘economism’ (“the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs”) is frankly, intellectually lazy. He asks a deeply pertinent question, “why do we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities troubles us so?”. Why is it we no longer seem to have the wherewithal to question the present in fundamental ways? Why is it so difficult to conceive “a different set of arrangements to our common advantage”? And perhaps most worryingly, we appear to lack a sufficient vocabulary to enter a public discourse without need for an arbitrative reference to profit and loss, or what Judt refers to as an “etiolated economic vocabulary”.

These questions are, of course, not new. Decades before the publication of his report which became in 1942, the foundation of the British welfare state, William Beveridge had given a lecture in Oxford in which he bemoaned the dangers of obscuring proper political philosophy with classical economics in public debates. In some ways anticipating the intellectual malaise we face in the present, he warned of the deleterious effects of restricting public policy considerations to mere economic calculus.

We seem to live in an age where the functioning of society is seen in almost purely instrumental terms. The economic and commercial, the pursuit of leisure, securing justice and fairness, political participation and the fulfilment of spiritual needs and religious obligations are almost always discussed and seen as separate realms of values and conduct – microcosmic and through separate flows of life seemingly unconnected with one another. This is of course, a false depiction of the human condition. Under such conditions, it is extremely difficult – if not downright impossible – to speak of ‘society’ in a collective and holistic sense. All things are judged in their own terms and in their own sense; it is almost as if the kind of Thatcherite verbiage (“there is no such thing as society, merely individuals” and so on) we thought we had left behind in the 80s, has quietly subsumed the principles of public debate over everything from education, health, transport, housing and so on.

Over two centuries ago, one of the key figures of the European Enlightenment, and perhaps its keenest observer of the emergence of commercial capitalism, Marquis de Condorcet, anticipated the dire prospects that “liberty will be no more in the eyes of an avid nation, than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations”. For many of us today, this may actually sound too familiar for comfort.

Khaldun Malek is an academic who is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

Saudi Arabia’s Alleged Involvement in the 9/11 Attacks. “Red-Herring”, Propaganda Ploy

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 29 2016

The UK government is not only guilty of silent complicity, it is actively suppressing BDS – a global grassroots movement calling for justice 

Last week’s Human Rights and Democracy Report, published by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), exposes the UK government’s hypocrisy on human rights, particularly considering its close relationship with Israel and its attacks on UK grassroots justice movements.

As the FCO celebrates the report, boasting of the UK’s role in promoting democracy as a “core British value”, its close friends in the Israeli government have declared open season on Palestinian human rights defenders, arresting some and threatening others with travel bans, revoking residency rights and deportation. One Israeli government minister has even called for “targeted civil assassination” of activists at the forefront of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The UK government has not uttered a word to suggest that it will protect those human rights defenders. In fact, it has created its own campaign to crack down on the BDS movement here in the UK. This means that the UK government is not only guilty of silent complicity, it is actively suppressing a global grassroots movement calling for justice.

Empty words

The FCO report mentions the “Israeli government’s violation of international human rights and humanitarian law in the context of Israel’s occupation” and that the UK government pledges to “hold to account those responsible for the worst violations and abuses”. The current deepening of the UK-Israel relationship makes these statements nothing but empty words.

Israel currently holds over 7,000 Palestinians as political prisoners, 700 of whom are administrative detainees, held without charge or trial. That’s over three and a half times more than in 2014, showing that Israel has been dramatically increasing its use of arbitrary arrest as a form of mass political repression. The number of children arrested and detained has also skyrocketed in the past six months, up to 438 children in detention this month.

The vast majority of political prisoners are arrested in the West Bank and East Jerusalem where they reside and then held in prisons inside Israel, constituting a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Currently, the British company G4S has contracts with the Israeli prison service (although the company recently announced, following campaign pressure, its intention to exit those contracts in the next two years).

What has the UK done to take action on this situation? The FCO expresses “concern” in the report, but that’s it. In March of this year, a delegation of UK lawyers was commissioned to conduct site visits to investigate the case of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention. The delegation was cancelled because Israeli authorities refused to meet with the UK lawyers.

Such refusals have become commonplace. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Makarim Wibisono, resigned this year because Israel denied him entry entirely.

Yet the UK government ignores these actions and commits to increasing UK-Israel trade.

Deadly weapons

While the number of Palestinians in Israeli detention increases, those who are not in prison are hardly safe. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip live in permanent danger, unable to access necessary goods because of the Israeli-imposed siege, resulting in high levels of unemployment, food insecurity and aid dependency. On top of that, Palestinians in Gaza live in the constant shadow of Israeli military violence, struggling to recover from the attacks in 2014, when over 2,200 Palestinians were killed, and thousands more injured.

But the military doesn’t only use its weapons on Gaza. Israeli soldiers and armed police regularly invade Palestinian towns and villages to confiscate land and destroy Palestinian homes. And when Palestinians dare to protest this and the other aspects of military occupation, Israeli soldiers take aim at unarmed protestors. Israel has been roundly criticised by international human rights bodies, including the United Nations, for its use of extrajudicial execution.

So what has the UK government done about this indiscriminate use of force?

Aside from making a single unfavourable statement on its website (which is listed as an “action” in the FCO report), the UK government continues to buy weapons from and sell weapons to Israel, an arms trade worth millions of pounds. The weapons that the UK sells to Israel, many of which are made in UK factories and have been the target of protests, are used directly in Israel’s military occupation.

The FCO report reiterates that the UK government will not approve weapons exports where there is a “clear risk the items might be used for internal repression or in the commission of a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), or might be used aggressively against another country or to assert by force a territorial claim.” These criteria perfectly describe Israel’s occupation, and yet the deadly arms trade continues.

Crack down

In the absence of any UK government action to hold Israel to account, the BDS movement has stepped up to end UK complicity in these violations. The global BDS movement was launched by Palestinians in 2005 to call on people internationally to take action where their governments have failed to hold Israel to account. In this country, the BDS movement fills the gap between what the FCO report claims it will do and what it actually does.

And yet, in the past six months the UK government has taken unprecedented steps to crack down on BDS activities in the UK. In November, it announced a new proposal to ban local authorities from choosing to divest from companies complicit in these human rights abuses.

In February, when arrests of Palestinians reached the highest number in six years, UK Cabinet Minister Matthew Hancock went on a trade visit to Israel and announced from there his commitment to cracking down on BDS activists calling for human rights and accountability.

If the UK government is serious about democracy and human rights, it needs to take action to end its material support for Israeli violations. It needs to end the two-way arms trade with Israel and it must ensure the rights and protection of human rights defenders, including BDS activists, in the UK and in Palestine. Until then, the FCO report is just adding injury to insult with such empty words.

Ryvka Barnard is senior campaigns officer on militarism and security at War on Want

The ongoing presidential race in the United States has revealed a number of phenomena that seem to have been brewing under the surface of neoliberal austerity economics for years. For one thing, it has shown a widespread popular discontent with the status quo. For another, it has revealed that the American public is no longer averse to socialistic ideas.

The relative financial security of the “golden” years of the U.S. economy (late 1940s–early 1970s), along with the Cold War propaganda of the “communist threat to our lives,” had created a strong aversion to socialism in the American psyche. But the change in the objective conditions (precipitated largely by the switch from New Deal economics to Neoliberal economics) has led to change in consciousness. Evidence shows that the success of Sanders’ campaign has been not despite but largely because of his unabashedly professing to be a “democratic socialist.” This obviously means that, tired of the agonizing austerity economics, considerable segments of the electorate have come to view socialism as an alternative to Neoliberalism.

Under the prevailing conditions that are clearly favorable to an alternative to neoliberal economics, a logical question to ask is: where are the labor leaders? Where are Messrs. Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and his high-ranking labor lieutenants at the head of big unions? Why aren’t these influential labor leaders, representing 12.5 million union members, taking advantage of the popular anger to challenge the austerity economics of neoliberalism and chart an independent labor and/or grassroots movement that could lead to meaningful changes in favor of the working class and the broader masses of the dispossessed?

Tragically, not only are the leaders of big unions not tapping into the rebellious popular mood to challenge the status quo, but they are, in fact, working very hard to contain rank-and-file workers not to vote for Bernie Sanders and, instead, vote for the candidate of the status quo, Hillary Clinton. This was clearly reflected, for example, in a recent confrontation between the Clinton-endorsing leaders of big unions such as AFSCME (public employees), the Service Employees (SEIU), the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the American Federation of Teachers, on the one hand, and the Sanders-supporting leaders of smaller unions, on the other.

The face-off took place in a late February meeting in the Washington headquarters of the AFL-CIO. The big union leaders had planned the gathering to solidify the labor endorsement of Clinton’s candidacy. As Ralph Nader recently commented on the meeting,

Tempers flared up when smaller unions challenged the Hillary-endorsing big unions. . . . Listening to the nurses union head speak out for Sanders’ strong pro-labor history, Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, interrupted her, exclaiming: I ‘will not allow you to do a commercial for Sanders.’ She retorted, ‘You mean for the only candidate who has a 100% labor record?’ A union leader of postal workers charged the unions backing Hillary as being ‘completely out of touch with their workers.’ AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka then cut off their microphones. . . . Few union leaders allow a worker referendum to make the endorsement decisions. The 700,000-member Communications Workers of America (CWA) does, and the result was a decisive endorsement of Sanders [1].

Nader further pointed out:

The volunteer Labor for Bernie grassroots drive is not just growing rapidly but cutting across all union categories and gaining support with non-union workers. . . . Typical of this exodus is Northern California Food and Commercial Workers Local 5, whose executive board voted 30 to 2 for Sanders, reflecting the views of most of its 28,000 members [2].

Class collaborationist policies of the labor bureaucracy follow from a self-defeating philosophy that is called “national business unionism,” or “union-management partnership.” National business unionism accepts capital’s needs for profitability as a precondition for labor’s need for survival, advocates collaboration with the capitalist class on a national or nationalist basis, and shoulders the burden of onerous economic sacrifices to maintain corporate profitability. A major outcome of this policy has been the change of many unions into labor syndicates: they have turned into businesses that seek a share in the profits sweated out of the workers.

For example, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is today a major holder of stocks in the Big Three automakers. Its income is tied to driving up the profits and stock prices of the companies at the expense of the workers. Its leaders forced an agreement on its members that included a six-year strike ban as part of the wage- and benefit-cutting contract dictated by the Obama administration’s Auto Task Force in 2009. The agreement also included curtailment of wages and benefits of new workers to about 60% of what auto workers previously made, elimination of overtime pay, and the policing of the shop floor by union representatives on behalf of the bosses. It is not surprising, then, that rank–and–file members no longer look to union leaders, “with their legions of six-figure-salaried officials and joint union-management slush funds, as instruments of struggle” on behalf of the working class [3].

Sanders and Trump Win by Default

Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trumps’ campaign successes have been largely by default: they have greatly benefitted from the fact that the discontented working people are passionately vying for change but their class-collaborationist leaders are trying to block change by supporting the candidate of the status quo, Hillary Clinton. How tragic, and what a shame: in the absence of an independent labor organization and agenda, the dispossessed and working people’s energy devoted to supporting Sanders and Trump is bound to either dissipate or serve others’ agendas.

By channeling the popular outrage to further their campaigns, Trump and Sanders would inevitably end up channeling the energies and votes of their supporters to the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates have been quite successful in stirring up the popular anger against the status quo. But they have also diverted attention from the main source of economic distress, inequality and injustice. While Trump blames ethnic, racial or religious scapegoats for the economic hardship of the largely white working people, whose long-cherished American dream has in recent years turned into nightmares, Sanders blames symptomatic manifestations of the capitalist system, Wall Street and/or big banks, not the system itself.

And while Trump’s diversionary tactics of sanitizing the capitalist system by blaming its sins on immigrants and other scapegoats is, more or less, obvious, Sanders’ sanitization of the system is more subtle. Despite the fact that his moralistic condemnation of Wall Street, of inequality and of injustice is reasonable enough to attract millions to his campaign, it falls way short of a causal explanation of economic problems. The real culprit is the profit-driven system of capitalism, especially its recent developments and manifestation: neoliberal economics.

Wall Street and/or big banks are of course products of capitalism. Sanders’ “exposition” of economic problems is, at best, half-hearted, at worst, obfuscationist. Many people applaud his courage to take on the giants of the Wall Street. But not many realize that in so doing, that is, in focusing on the effects of market mechanism, he tends to camouflage the cause, the systemic mechanism that gives rise to those giants.

What is that mechanism, the mechanism that systematically transfers economic/financial resources from Main Street to Wall Street, thereby further enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor?

Although expertly obfuscated and mystified, the planned or premeditated mechanism by which redistribution of economic resources from the bottom to the top takes place is fairly straightforward. The insidious mechanism of redistribution in favor of the financial oligarchy is benignly called monetary policy. Private central banks (such as the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S.) are the main institutional vehicles that carry out the monetary policy of redistribution. Central banks’ polices of cheap or easy money benefits, first and foremost, the big banks and other major financial players that can outbid small borrowers who must borrow at much higher rates than the near-zero rates guaranteed to the big borrowers.

By thus gaining privileged access to nearly interest-free money, the financial elites can enrich themselves in a number of ways. For one thing, they can snap-up income-producing assets at the expense of small borrowers who lack access to cheap money. For another, they can boost the value of their wealth by creating an artificial demand (such as stock buybacks) for those ill-begotten assets with the cheaply borrowed money. In addition, they can skim vast wealth by loaning out the cheap they obtain from central banks to everyone below the top of the wealth/income pyramid—at near four percent (mortgages), at seven or eight percent (auto, student and other loans), and above 15 percent (credit cards).

This shows how the proxies of the financial oligarchy, ensconced at the helm of central banks and their shareholders (commercial banks), serve as agents of subtlely funneling economic resources from the public to the financial oligarchy—just as did the rent or tax collectors and bailiffs of feudal lords collected and transferred economic surplus from the peasants/serfs to the landed aristocracy. Instead of regulating or containing the disruptive speculative activities of the financial sector, economic policy makers have in recent years been actively promoting asset-price bubbles—in effect, further exacerbating inequality.

It also shows that as long as this dynamic process of fostering the development of inequality and the rise of big business/big finance remains in place, no moral condemnation of Wall Street, of big banks and of social injustice, as repeatedly articulated by Bernie Sanders, would bring about meaningful economic relief to the overwhelming majority of the people. Nor would the actual break-up of big banks bring about the urgently-needed relief. For, breaking up a number of big banks while leaving the mechanism that precipitates the rise of big banks intact would be an exercise in futility: it makes little sense to fight symptoms without challenging the system that produces them.

Beyond Sanders, Trump and the Labor Aristocracy

The fact that tens of millions of the discontented Americans are rallying behind Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders because these candidates claim to be anti-establishmentarians is a clear indication that the working class and other dispossessed masses are ready for radical changes. To challenge and (ultimately) change the status quo, however, the labor and other grassroots need to decisively break with the two-party system and the bureaucratic labor leaders. They need new politics and new organizations. What is needed to reverse the decline of labor and the living standards of the overwhelming majority of the people is a new type of union strategy and a new labor movement. Whatever the new labor organization is called (call it a party, a labor coalition, or anything you like), it has to be different not only from the U.S. business union model but also from the Social Democratic model of Europe: trade unions + party.

Crucial as they are in the struggle for labor rights (the right to organize, the right to strike, and the right to bargain collectively), trade unions have their limitations in the fight against the vagaries of a market economy. For one thing, they encompass only a small portion of the working class. For another, trade unionist politics is usually limited to economic demands such as wages and working conditions. While critical to the economic welfare of union members, broader social issues such as democracy, economic justice, universal health, affordable education, and environmental concerns remain outside the purview of trade union politics.

Many would argue that in the face of the escalating automation of the workplace, fierce labor rivalry at both national and international levels and the decline in the existing labor organizations projections of a new, anti-establishment labor movement sounds outlandish. Let us take a closer look at such pessimistic arguments.

It is true that in the older industrialized countries the percentage of the labor force working in large manufacturing and mining enterprises has declined, compared to those working in the so-called service industries. But this is no more than diversification of the work force, which follows diversification of technology and economic activity. And the conclusion that it represents a decline in the overall weight or importance of the working class is unwarranted. The type of one’s work uniform, the color of a wage earner’s collar, or whether one’s pay is called wage or salary does not make one more or less of a worker than the so-called traditional “blue collar” workers.

Indeed, statistics on wage and benefits of the work force show that, on the average, the so-called white collar workers are paid less and are much less secure economically than the traditional industrial/manufacturing workers. Growth of the service industries has also meant growth of minimum-wage and no-benefits workers. Concentration of large numbers of workers in telecommunications, transport, banks, hospitals, energy sector, and the like can today paralyze the capitalist economy as effectively as their “blue-collar” counterparts in the manufacturing sector.

Furthermore, “professionals” and salaried employees such as teachers, engineers, physicians, and even middle and lower level managers are increasingly becoming wage workers, and are thus ruled by the supply and demand forces of the labor market. The tendency for wage work to become the dominant or universal form of work means that, overall, the ranks of the working class are expanding, not contracting, despite the relative decline in manufacturing employment [4].

More numerous than ever before, the working class can influence, shape, and ultimately lead the world economy if it takes on the challenge (a) in the context of broader coalitions and alliances with other social groups that also struggle for equity, environmental protection, and human rights; and (b) on an international level.

Cross-Border Solidarity: Globalization from Below

A logical response to globalization from above is globalization from below. In the same fashion that, in their fight against the working class in pursuit of profit maximization, the elites of the international capitalist class are not bound by territoriality or national boundaries, so does the working class need to coordinate its response internationally. Representatives of transnational capital and their proxies in capitalist governments routinely meet at international conferences in order to synchronize their cross-border business, implement global austerity measures and entrench neoliberal policies worldwide. These include the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the World Bank and IMF annual meetings, the Periodic G20 meetings, the Aspen Institutes Ideas Festival, The Bilderberg Group annual geopolitics forum, and the Herb Allen’s Sun Valley gathering of media moguls—to name only a handful of the many such international policy gatherings.

A commonsense, first step deterrent to transnational capital’s strategy of blackmailing labor and communities through threats such as destroying or exporting jobs by moving their business elsewhere would be to remove the lures that induce plant relocation, capital flight or outsourcing. Making labor costs of production comparable on an international level would be crucial for this purpose. This would entail taking the necessary steps toward the international establishment of wages and benefits, that is, of labor cost parity within the same company and the same trade, subject to (a) the cost of living, and (b) productivity in each country. A strategy of this sort would replace the current downward competition between workers in various countries with coordinated bargaining and joint policies for mutual interests and problem-solving on a global level. While this may sound radical, it is not any more radical than what the transnational capitalist class has been doing for a long time [5].

If at an earlier stage of capitalist development “workers of the world unite” seemed an impossible dream articulated by the leading labor champion Karl Marx, internationalization of capital has now made that dream an urgent necessity. As capital and labor are the cornerstones of capitalist production, their respective organizations and institutions evolve more or less apace. Thus, when production was local, so was labor: carpenters, shoemakers, bricklayers, and other craftsmen organized primarily in their local communities. But as capitalist production became national, so did trade unions. Now that capitalist production has become global, labor organizations too need to become international in order to safeguard their rights against the profit-driven whims of the footloose and fancy-free transnational capital.

Many radicals have dropped class politics at exactly the moment it is needed most. The ongoing presidential elections in the U.S., revealing both opportunities (as evidenced by the support for Bernie Sanders) and dangers (as shown by the support for Donald Trump), confirms Rosa Luxemburg’s pithy statement that socialism is the only humane alternative to capitalist barbarism. Barbarism stares us in the eye in many disguised forms. Yet, much of the left these days shy away from using words such as class struggle, organization, or the crucial role of labor for social and economic change. “It is fashionable these days,” as Walden Bello puts it,

[T]o describe the desired alternatives [to capitalism] as an equitable, democratic, and ecologically sustainable social and economic organization. But once one begins to attempt to spell out the concrete implications of this abstract ideal, one cannot avoid describing a system of social relations that checks or restrains the devastating logic of capitalism. . . . Whatever one wishes to call it, conscious cooperative organization must supplant both blind competition and monopolistic collusion as the strategic principle of production and exchange if the economy is brought back to its appropriate relationship to the community [6].

The road to a social structure not regulated by capitalist profitability imperatives would be a long and tortuous one; it cannot be traveled in one jump, but rather through a series of transitional steps, programs and demands. Based on the needs of the working class and the broad masses of the dispossessed, such demands should start with realistic, concrete and simple bread and butter needs or issues. While the exact nature of transitional demands will depend on the concrete conditions of many specific movements along the way of this long struggle, the following seem to be some of the logical demands in most social contexts.

1. The right to employment for all those able to work. Employers and their representatives in government will obviously cry out at this demand that “there are simply not enough jobs.” The labor coalition can then respond by raising the following demand: a sliding scale of working hours, which means that the new international labor movement should correlate the length of the work week to labor productivity so that as productivity rises the number of working hours will automatically fall, and no jobs will be lost. If it takes less time to produce the same amount of goods and services, we should all work less rather than eliminating some people’s jobs. There is absolutely nothing outlandish or radical about this demand; it only makes sense.

2. A sliding scale, or indexing, of wages. This means adjusting wages to the rate of inflation so that workers’ purchasing power and their standard of living will not fall as prices rise. Closely related to this demand is the demand that the share of wages as a percentage of national income should not fall relative to the share of profit, rent, and interest. Studies of income distribution in the U.S. show that the relative share of capital as a percentage of national income has been steadily rising at the expense of the share of labor in the post-WW II period.

3. The right to a guaranteed universal health care and an affordable education system.

These and similar demands such as the right to breath fresh air, the right to drink uncontaminated water, and the right to equal treatment of workforce regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation are certain to rally diverse segments of society behind the labor coalition, thereby paving the way toward the end of the status quo and the beginning of a superior civilization free from capitalist profitability imperatives [7].

References

[1] Ralph Nader, Big Union Leaders Betray Sanders and Workers

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jerry White, Michigan’s right-to-work law

[4] For more on the diversification of the labor force see, for example, Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012; Michael Yates, Why Unions Matter, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2009; and Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

[5] I have provided a longer discussion of these issues in Chapter 8 of my book, Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014).

[6] Walden Bello, Dark Victory, London: Pluto Press, 1994, p. 114.

[7] Among the many labor advocates who have written on these strategies and demands, the term “transitional program/demands” is most closely associated with or attributed to Leon Trotsky who systematically formulated these strategies in his The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977).

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

“Obrigado, presidente Obama. A Itália prosseguirá com grande determinação o empenho pela segurança nuclear”: escreve em seu twitter o premier Renzi, após participar na cúpula de Washington sobre este tema em abril. “A proliferação e o uso potencial de armas nucleares – escreve o presidente Obama na apresentação da cúpula – constituem a maior ameaça à segurança global. Por isso, há sete anos em Praga, assumi o compromisso de que os Estados Unidos deixem de difundir armas nucleares”.

Exatamente enquanto declara isto, a Federação dos Cientistas Americanos (FAS) fornece outras informações sobre o B61-12, a nova bomba nuclear estadunidense em fase de desenvolvimento, destinada a substituir a atual B61 instalada pelos EUA na Itália, Alemanha, Bélgica, Holanda e Turquia.

Estão em curso testes para dotar a B61-12 de capacidade anti-bunker, ou seja, de penetrar no subsolo, explodindo em profundidade para destruir os centros de comando e outras estruturas subterrâneas em um first strike nuclear.

Para o uso desta nova bomba nuclear guiada com precisão e com potência variável, a Itália fornece não só as bases de Aviano e Ghedi-Torre, mas também pilotos que são treinados para o ataque nuclear sob o comando dos EUA. É o que demonstra, escreve a FAS, a presença em Ghedi do 704º Munitions Support Squadron, uma das quatro unidades da U.S. Air Force deslocada para as quatro bases europeias “onde as armas nucleares dos EUA são destinadas ao lançamento por parte de aeronaves dos países hóspedes”.

É o que confirma, sempre dos EUA, o Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (uma das mais autorizadas fontes sobre armas nucleares) que, em 2 de março de 2016, escreve: “À força aérea italiana (com a aeronave Tornado PA-200) são destinadas missões de ataque nuclear com armas nucleares dos EUA, sob controle de pessoal da U.S. Air Force até que o  presidente dos Estados Unidos autorize o uso”.

De tal modo, a Itália, oficialmente um país não nuclear, é transformada em primeira linha e portanto em potencial alvo, no confronto nuclear entre os EUA/Otan e a Rússia. Confronto que se tornará ainda mais perigoso com a implantação na Europa das novas bombas nucleares dos EUA, que abaixam o limiar nuclear: “Armas nucleares deste tipo mais precisas  – advertem diversos especialistas entrevistados pelo New York Times  – aumentam a tentação de usá-las, inclusive de usá-las em primeiro lugar”.

Em face do crescente perigo que paira, não advertido pela esmagadora maioria devido ao blecaute político-midiático, não bastam apelos genéricos ao desarmamento nuclear, terreno fácil de demagogia. Basta pensar que o presidente Obama, depois dessa escalada nuclear de 1 trilhão de dólares, declara querer “realizar a visão de um mundo sem armas nucleares”.
Devemos denunciar  –  como faz o Comitê Não à Guerra, Não à Otan – o fato de que, hospedando e preparando-se para usar armas nucleares, a Itália viola o Tratado de Não-Proliferação das armas nucleares, ratificado em 1975, o qual estabelece: “Cada um dos Estados militarmente não nuclear se compromete a não receber de ninguém armas nucleares, nem o controle sobre tais armas, direta ou indiretamente” (Artigo 2).

O único modo concreto que temos na Itália de contribuir para desarmar a escalada nuclear e  realizar a completa eliminação das armas nucleares, é exigir que a Itália deixe de violar o Tratado de Não-Proliferação e, com base nisso, impor aos Estados Unidos que removam quaisquer armas nucleares do nosso território nacional e não instalem as novas bombas B61-12.

Há alguém no Parlamento disposto a exigir isto sem meios termos?

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original em italiano :

Manlio Dinucci: Bombas nucleares para a Itália “não nuclear”

Traduzido por José Reinaldo Carvalho para Resistência

Manlio Dinucci é jornalista e geógrafo

A simple decree by the Argentine government regarding food inspection may signal an even bigger step in the right direction for the South American country in the future.

The issue surrounds the fact that Monsanto has been demanding that exporters inspect cargo to determine whether or not farmers had paid the requisite royalties to produce the company’s genetically modified soybeans. Monsanto is claiming that Argentine farmers have benefited immensely from the Intacta technology and is demanding that everyone pay to use it.

For about a year, Monsanto has been pressuring shipping companies and demanding that the companies notify it when crops produced with Intacta technology are scheduled to be exported without corresponding documentation proving that royalties had been paid to Monsanto.

Image credit: truthalerts.com

The Intacta soybeans in question are genetically engineered to have a gene that protects them against worms that target the plant. Monsanto is demanding royalties for grains produced even by second generation seeds. Farmers, however, argue that Argentinian law does not require that they pay for second generation production and are asking the government to stop private companies from acting as food inspectors.

The Argentine Rural Society (SRA) an organization that represents medium and large scale producers said the inspections were unwarranted. “These methods were not only not authorized, but furthermore, we saw them as an abusive power for a company to be acting like the police,” SRA president Luis Etchevehere said.

In an official bulletin that was issued on Thursday, April 14th, Argentina’s Agricultural Ministry stated that any inspection needs prior government authorization.

While it did not mention Monsanto or the dispute between the farmers and the company, it appears that the Argentinian government is asserting itself in the face of a company that is essentially strong-arming exporters into acting as the company’s own private inspection service.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies,Five Sense SolutionsandDispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 600 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

It was considered by the Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs to be inevitable and logical.  The indefinite detention of 850 refugees and asylum seekers in the Manus Island Detention Centre, a large warehouse for humans seeking refuge from persecution, has been deemed illegal by the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court.[1]  Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill, has taken the next step in attempting to close down the processing centre.

An Australian Labor government created the centre, but those associated with it claim that it was not intended to be open for such a duration.  The shibboleth of offshore refugee processing persists on both sides of the aisle in Canberra, making any direct criticism of the camp system incidental and irrelevant.

To expect a constructive response, to that end, would have been too much. Shadow immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, has thrown the rhetoric of saving human lives at sea back at the government. What will happen after the closure?  Why aren’t Australian officials converging in desperation upon the facility to shore it up?

The reasons for an imminent closure are simple.  Unlike Australia, the PNG constitution contains human rights provisions specific to liberties of the subject.  The Australian High Court has proven reluctant to imply any such provisions, a situation which has permitted indefinite detention regimes to flourish.

In contrast, the PNG provisions speak against holding people on the basis of unlawful entry into the country, or lawful removal of a person from the country, or the process of fulfilling either purpose.  Amendments passed in 2014 effectively qualifying this could only be “reasonably justifiable in a democratic society having a proper respect for the rights and dignity of mankind”.  The Supreme Court remained unconvinced.

The decision has placed the fate of the detainees in an absurd state.  The Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has decided to lob the issue back to PNG authorities, claiming that he had anticipated this move all along.[2]  (How such a keystone copper could have anticipated the deliberations of judges of a supreme court in another country is anybody’s guess.)

Having arranged to dump human cargo on Manus Island, with PNG connivance, the Australian federal government now insists that the 850 asylum seekers and refugees are their responsibility.  “The Memorandum of Understanding is fairly clear, and that’s understood by both sides.”

The nature of this understanding entails that the detainees, once they are “found to be owed protection – that is, they’re found to be refugees – then they settle in PNG.”  The monstrosity of expecting designated refugees to be settled in PNG has become something of a running joke.

As with all memorandums of understanding, what is understood differs depending on the party.  The PNG High Commissioner to Australia, Charles Lepani, disagrees with Dutton’s dismissive approach, arguing that the Memorandum only extended to those refugees who decided to settle in the country.  “Those who are found to be legal refugees, we invite them to stay in Papua New Guinea, to be part of our community but if they refuse, we cannot force them.”

Such sober observation was complemented by Labor MP Melissa Clarke’s observations that international law made Australia responsible for the human cargo it so unceremoniously dumped on PNG.

The resettlement program in PNG has hardly been a stellar success.  Everything in it suggests a grizzly failure.  In a sharp attack of Stockholm syndrome, some refugees have even wished to return to the camp centre after release. Yaser Afshar, for one, was sent to Lae to take up a carpentry apprenticeship.  Feeling far more suited for a job in hospitality and catering services, but finding no support from the PNG authorities to pursue such an aim, he purchased a ticket to return to Manus. He has been refused readmission.

The hunt is thus on to find room at other centres.  A rancid rumour is being fed through the channels that Nauru might receive some of the detainees.  Dutton himself wishes to consider other options on Manus in what would amount to a reconversion.  “I think there is an opportunity for the detention centre to remain in place in a different form, perhaps an open centre arrangement.”  Such figures are slow to learn.

Christmas Island has been suggested, an option Dutton would rather not embrace.  With characteristic moral myopia, the minister has suggested that doing so would encourage greater movement to Australia.  “That would be a green light for people smugglers… you would have drownings at sea.”

Everything is stacked, in logic and principle, against the camp system. Far from being “misty-eyed” about such immigration policy, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has cautioned against, much well informed criticism about this anti-refugee leviathan is possible. In legal terms it has been found to be wanting as an affront to liberties. In terms of safety, the camps have been abysmal failures.  In budgetary terms, the Australian Parliamentary Budget Office has argued that closing offshore detention centres would save the tax payer to around $2.47 billion over the 2015-6 budget.

Turnbull has decided to give the detainees no reassurance, insisting that they will not be resettled in Australia. The costly exercise of running such camps will continue, though the entire program risks, in the most necessary sense, imploding.  This is image making of the worse sort, and respective Australian governments are bound to continue this sham in some form.

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

Notes:

Two US Air Force A-10 warplanes carried out airstrikes on Aleppo Wednesday, destroying nine facilities, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported. The same day, the Pentagon accused Moscow of bombing two hospitals, despite no Russian flights over the city.

Russia has become the world’s leader in the export of wheat, surpassing the United States and Canada, Russian Minister of Agriculture Alexander Tkachev said Thursday.

“Russia supplies about 25 million tons of wheat on the external market by the end of the agricultural 2016 year. We became the world’s leading wheat exporter, surpassing the United States and Canada,” Tkachev was quoted as saying by Russian news agency TASS.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Russia last year achieved record levels in the harvest of corn (13.2 million tons), rice (1.1 million tons), soybeans (2.7 million tons) and buckwheat (900,000 tons). The total grain harvest amounted to 104.8 million tons.

These are strange days on Samos. Unlike the previous 11 months the flow of refugees to the island has slowed down dramatically since the EU/Turkey pact came into force at the end of March. Days pass now with no new arrivals. But still some are arriving even though they tell us that it is now difficult to find smugglers in Turkey prepared to help them cross to Samos. In the past 7days around 100 have arrived.

It is not just that the flow of refugees is now smaller but they have little or no visibility on the island. In that sense it is like earlier years for all the refugees who arrive are now locked in the camp. There are very few refugees on the streets and in the bars. Only those who are given a pass to leave the camp after 25 days detention are able to get out for some of the day. As most have no money the bars and cafés have taken down their notices in Arabic which once advertised their menus.

Of course, this is what the authorities want. Refugees are bad for tourism. And the holiday season is here. This season looks especially bad with hotel and flight bookings well down on previous (also poor) years. What we don’t hear though is the benefits some gain from the refugee business. There are a myriad of people here involved in this business from the police, Frontex, the various NGOs (the MSF for example, spend around 200,000 euros a month on their Samos intervention) as well as volunteers. They stay in hotels and apartments, they rent cars, jeeps, buses, they rent store houses and offices, they employ local people, they eat, buy food, go to the bars all of which brings benefit to businesses on the island. It would be a good day when we are told exactly how big this refugee business is on Samos.

But that refugees are bad for tourism is a widely held truth here. But need it be? What if Samos decided to become a beacon of humanity. What if the island came to stand in solidarity with the refugees and not only cared and welcomed the arrivals but from its direct experience and contact with refugees over many years now made it clear that we were dealing with victims of plunder, chaos and violence, to satisfy the US and its western European ‘allies’. Many now ask why are ‘they’ here, bothering us. Well it is simple, ‘they’ are here because ‘we’ are there. The west dropped 30,000 bombs in the ten month bombardment of Libya killing tens of thousands of innocent people. As we write Aleppo is being smashed to pieces under bombs and armaments.And it  goes on and on in so many places. Just who are the terrorists in our world today? Who is making and supplying all these weapons? These are some of the questions which Samos ought to be asking. Thousands are dying and thousands are running for their lives because ‘we’ are there. And, if we cared to ever listen to the refugees we would understand all too well why they are here and the reasons for their migration.

Instead we are back to an island which is staggeringly beautiful but which has a vile tumour throbbing less than a kilometre from the centre of the main town. There are hundreds of children amongst the inmates, languishing behind a double fence topped with razor wire. On every possible ground imaginable the camp is not a safe place for children. Even though the camp has doubled its capacity the new, bottom half, has yet to open so all the refugees are crammed in the older part which was constructed for 250 people. The principled opposition of the big NGOs not to work or co-operate with closed camps makes life more difficult.

Yes they are being fed, but the food is pitiful. Lots of pasta with red sauce, little meat or fresh vegetables. These meals arrive on Samos frozen and then re heated in microwaves. Nasty. And what makes it so much worse is that the food is distributed in ways which humiliate the refugees and lead to scuffles and chaos. This week the police fired tear gas in the Moria Camp on Lesvos to control the refugees who were protesting the visit of a Greek and Dutch minister. The Greek minister talked of the sad necessity of resorting to violence but said there was no alternative. He continued by saying that we had to expect such ‘explosions’ in the hotspots and they had to consider how to manage such events in the future. But why should we accept the inevitability of explosions? Why doesn’t he act to defuse the bombs for which he and his fellow European ministers are responsible for creating?

These ‘hotspots’ such as the one here on Samos were supposed to be transformed under the EU/Turkey pact. They were no longer to be transit points undertaking some preliminary processing before allowing refugees to move on to the mainland, but to become holding camps working as EU courts for determining asylum applications (only for Greece) and basically deporting the rest to Turkey. The frontier islands such as Lesvos, Chios, Samos and Kos are expected to become the new fence guarding Europe’s south eastern border. Here and no further. In a vain attempt to satisfy some of the weak protections refugees offered under international law, the hotspots are expected to respect the individual rights of refugees including the right to appeal and the provision of legal advice and support. Other guarantees were also made about restrictions on detention, and a commitment to support refugees with regard to their needs and dignity.

With no capacity and no competence it was always likely that this system would not materialise. What we have on Samos at the moment is a hotspot which is all about detention. Nothing else. There is no movement. Refugees are stuck in a nasty place with no idea what might happen next. They have no information. This is what is so destructive to so many refugees. Those with children and families have unlike the young male refugees even fewer options. With so many borders around Greece now blocked off the routes out have become more dangerous and arduous and virtually impossible for young families. Even the younger refugees are discovering that it is not easy to get off an island. Everyday we hear reports of refugees being arrested in the town, in the port or at the air port for trying to get out using false papers. The lists posted of the cases coming before the Samos court for prosecution overwhelmingly involve refugees.

If you don’t look European/Greek you are conspicuous on Samos and in constant danger of being stopped and searched. And there are many police here now, many in plain clothes.

The camp is but a cell in the bigger cage of Samos which in turn is part of the prison of Greece. This is the reality for the majority of refugees here.

In the meantime the camp continues to fill. It is a ticking bomb. It is a bomb made here but be sure when the explosions come it will yet again be the victims who will be blamed and who will suffer.

The EU Commission is clearly determined to approve a “probable human carcinogen”, glyphosate, despite overwhelming evidence of its toxicity. They are clearly content to side with Monsanto and the agribusiness chemical weed-killer lobby and with Washington above the health and safety concerns of EU citizens. A legal mind might call this criminal negligence. The issue is the upcoming renewal of the license to use the probable carcinogen, glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s widely-used weed-killer, Roundup®. The intensity of the lies and attempted deception by EU faceless bureaucrats on the controversial glyphosate issue is indicative why more EU citizens are demanding an “opt-out” entirely from the European Union.

Earlier this year, the EU Commission had recommended re-approval for another 15-years of the license for the controversial glyphosate. They declared that their “yes” decision was based on the determination by the EU’s European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that there was no reason to believe glyphosate is a carcinogen.

That determination, not even backed up by open disclosure of the relevant health and safety studies EFSA claimed to rely on, went totally against the 2015 determination by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate, the weed-killer used in most every GMO plant worldwide and most other crops and even home gardens as well, was a “probable human carcinogen.” In lay terms that means odds greater than 50% are that it causes human cancers on exposure, which has been tested in ordinary drinking water or in food crops sprayed with Roundup of other glyphosate-based weed-killers.

EFSA, basing its view solely on a report by Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), which in turn took it from a clearly biased report by Monsanto and other agrochemical industry groups, said it is “unlikely” to pose a cancer risk. IARC used only data that was in the public domain, but the corrupt German BfR based its report on secret industry studies that it refused to release to IARC or to the public.

Public pressure, the objections of several EU states and an EU-wide petition signed by more than one million EU citizens demanding an end to glyphosate use as well as a letter of protest signed by almost one hundred leading scientists to EU Health and Food Safety Commissioner (also known as DG SANTE) Vytenis Andriukaitis, led to a statement by Andriukaitis in early April suggesting a new sensitivity to the clear desire of people not to be willfully exposed to cancer agents in their food or drinking water from the widespread spraying of glyphosate.

Now, only two weeks later, the same unhealthy EU Health bureaucrat, Andriukaitis, has again flipped. On April 26, the DG SANTE commissioner met with leaders of the bloc of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament. In the meeting, displaying callous disregard of any proposals for restrictions on the dangerous weed-killer, Andriukaitis announced his plan to re-authorize glyphosate for ten years without any specific restrictions.

Washington strongarm tactics on EU Commission

Notably, EU Health and Food Safety Commissioner Andriukaitis went to Washington in December, 2015 where he met with US Trade Representative Michael Froman. According to internal EU Commission documents of that Washington meeting, obtained by several NGOs under the Freedom of Information Law, Washington strongly pushed Andriukaitis to exempt plants and animals produced through “gene-editing” and other new techniques from existing EU GMO rules. As Greenpeace EU food policy director Franziska Achterberg said: “The Commission must recognise that gene-editing is genetic engineering.” The name change is yet another deception being attempted by Washington and Monsanto’s GMO cabal to bypass rigorous safety tests and labelling.

The documents show that Washington wants the EU to drop all health and environmental safeguards on GMOs to pave the way for a transatlantic trade agreement (TTIP). The next round of TTIP negotiations started on 25 April in New York. EU Health Commissioner Andriukaitis’ rush to ram through a re-lisensing of glyphosate in May is clearly another reflection of immense Washington pressure on the unaccountable EU Commission bureaucracy. It’s known as the “democratic deficit.”

Not surprising then that DG SANTE’s Andriukaitis entirely ignored the parliament’s majority vote early in April, passed by 374 votes in favor to 225 votes against, of several restrictions on glyphosate based on the “precautionary principle.” That principle states if there is any serious question of human or animal risk, err on the side of caution. A majority of members of the advisory European Parliament voted to recommend a cut in re-licensing duration from 15 years to 7. Further, they called for significant restrictions on glyphosate use:

• No approval of non-professional use

• No approval in or close to public parks/playgrounds/gardens

• No approval where integrated pest management systems are sufficient for necessary weed control

• Strict limitations on pre-harvest applications (desiccation), which are deemed unacceptable

According to groups such as the UK Soil Association and the GMO watchdog group, Sustainable Pulse, the EU Parliament resolution demands strict limits on ‘pre-harvest’ applications of glyphosate on crops. This refers to the practice of spraying crops up to two weeks before harvest to ‘desiccate’ the plants and make harvesting easier. Such pre-harvest application of glyphosate is a route for human exposure to glyphosate via the harvested crop. Currently glyphosate formulations are licenced for a wide range of crops including wheat, barley, oats, oilseed rape (canola), linseed, field beans and peas. This use of glyphosate is believed to be the main source of the toxic glyphosate herbicide and its residues in bread.

This European Parliament vote is non-binding on the Commission and EU member states, but carries moral weight. Now the moral balance rests with the various EU member states. The EU member states take the final glyphosate vote in May. The stakes are huge. An EU ban on glyphosate could well sound the death knell for Genetically Modified agriculture worldwide. Now wouldn’t that be a healthy turn?

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan released a consultation document earlier this month to kick off the Liberal government’s much touted defence policy review.

The document, whose principal author was the Canadian Armed Forces’ high command, is aimed at laying the political groundwork for a massive expansion of militarism at home and abroad.

It makes clear the real significance of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s repeated declarations since coming to power last October that Canada “is back” on the world stage, and his pledge to re-engage with United Nations’ “peacekeeping” missions. This multilateralist, humanitarian rhetoric is aimed at legitimizing a vast escalation of Canadian military interventions on a global scale, including in cyber and outer space, while concealing their predatory purpose.

The document is part of a phony public consultation process that is to be concluded by July. The four-member panel of experts that is conducting the policy review is to submit its recommendations to the cabinet before the end of the year. The review will conclude with the government unveiling the public articulation of Canada’s new defence policy in early 2017.

Canada’s defence policy review, as was the case with the like reviews Germany and Australia recently conducted, is being accompanied by a public relations blitz on the part of the political elite and military-security establishment aimed at overcoming the deep-seated popular opposition to military-spending hikes and increased participation in foreign wars. The corporate media is fully onboard with the push for a more aggressive foreign policy, from the pro-Liberal Toronto Star, which recently reaffirmed its support for a “genuinely robust fighting force, interoperable with our American and other allies,” to neoconservative pundits such as Conrad Black, who has described the Liberals’ defence review as an opportunity for Canada to take a major “step forward.”

The Canada-US alliance

From the outset, the consultation document makes clear Canada should deepen its longstanding strategic partnership with the United States and that Ottawa is fully onboard with Washington’s key geostrategic offensives: threatening Russia in the Baltic, Eastern Europe, and the Black Sea; the current Mideast war, which is the continuation of a decades’ long drive to strengthen US dominance over the world’s most important oil-exporting region; and the anti-China “pivot” to Asia, which is aimed at encircling and preparing for war with Beijing.

“Canada,” the document declares, “faces an uncertain, complex and fluid security environment,” including a “multi-faceted array of threats and challenges, both traditional and conventional.”

The document singles out Russian “aggression” in Ukraine, before going on to cite “geopolitical rivalries and disputes in the Asia-Pacific region,” a clear swipe at China.

Although the document makes no mention of this, Canada is already deeply integrated into Washington’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea and its broader military build-up in East Asia. In 2013, the Canadian military concluded an Asia-Pacific cooperation agreement with the Pentagon whose provisions remain entirely secret.

Having painted a picture of a menacing world, the document proceeds to make the ominous declaration that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) must be in a position to “achieve stability in conflicts far from home.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned during last year’s election on the promise to intensify Ottawa’s already close strategic partnership with Washington. During a visit to the White House in March, he invoked Canada’s three-quarters of a century-old military-security alliance with US imperialism to pledge Ottawa’s collaboration in US military operations across the globe.

Canada’s military-intelligence apparatus is in the forefront of pushing for t his agenda . Last fall it was reveal ed that in 2013 the Canadian and US militaries held discussion s a t the highest levels about c reatin g a joint military taskforce capable of conducting offensive operations anywhere in the world. ( See: HYPERLINK “https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/06/usca-o06.html” Why are Canada’s politicians mute about the Canada-US military integration plans? )

Military-foreign policy issues played a significant role in the rallying of decisive sections of big business behind the Liberals during last fall’s election campaign. Trudeau won ruling class support by promising to raise military spending, push through numerous military procurement projects that had stalled under the Harper Conservatives, and to reset relations with the US, which the Liberals charged had been damaged by the previous government’s focus on securing Washington’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Canada’s elite now hope to move forward on all these fronts with the Liberals’ “progressive internationalist” façade providing useful political cover.

Trudeau laid out his government’s priorities in his mandate letter to Sajjan. In it, he urged the defence minister, who served with the military in Afghanistan, to strengthen Canada’s commitment to NATO and the North American Aerospace Defence (NORAD) system, renew Canada’s commitment to “peacekeeping” missions, and ensure that the military had sufficient equipment to carry out these tasks.

The consultation paper expands on these points. It calls for reopening the Martin Liberal government’s 2005 decision not to participate in the US-led ballistic missile defence system (BMD), whose ultimate aim, its name notwithstanding, is to make it feasible for the US to wage a “winnable” nuclear war. The policy review consultation document states, “Given the increase in the number of countries with access to ballistic missile technology and their potential to reach North America, this threat is expected to endure and grow more sophisticated in the coming decades.”

The document further suggests that NORAD needs to “evolve or modernize” and that this should include “expansion beyond the air and maritime domains.”

These remarks are all the more revealing in light of Trudeau’s agreement with Obama during his White House visit to expand US-Canadian cooperation in the Arctic. The consultation paper contains a separate section on the Arctic. It raises concerns about the lack of radar systems above 65 degrees north and otherwise suggests the military should become more active in the far north. While this is in part put down to increased trading activity resulting from climate change, the document goes on to pointedly remark, “Recent Russian activity in the Arctic has only added to this challenge.”

Significantly, the figures appointed by Sajjan to the four-member expert panel overseeing the review are all trusted representatives of Canadian imperialism. Bill Graham, who served as foreign and defence minister during the Chretien-Martin Liberal governments, is on record as supporting Canada’s participation in the US-led ballistic missile defence system, having described it two years ago as an “amazing new form of weapons system.” Ray Henault is a former Chief of Defence Staff, whose term in office from February 2001 to 2005 was largely devoted to overseeing the CAF’s role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Margaret Purdy worked for the government for decades as a defence and national-security expert, while Louise Arbour is a former Supreme Court justice who went on to play a prominent role at the United Nations as the High Commissioner for Refugees and later headed the International Crisis Group. She is a leading exponent of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine, which the Canadian government was central in developing in the early 2000s and which has served as the justification for one imperialist war crime after another ever since

“Peacekeeping” missions

While the Conservatives proclaimed Canada a “warrior nation,” the Liberals are seeking to conceal their and the Canadian elite’s militarist agenda behind phony humanitarian and pacifist phases. Thus, the Trudeau government is touting a commitment to “re-engage” with UN “peacekeeping.”

The claims that Canada has a special “peacekeeping” vocation were always a fraud. The peacekeeping missions Canada undertook during the Cold War were always done at the say-so of the great powers, above all the US, and with the aim of defusing crises that threatened to undermine NATO, as in the 1956 Suez crisis and the Cyprus conflict, or otherwise undermine imperialist interests.

However, the defence policy document makes clear that in the name of “peacekeeping,” the Trudeau government intends to deploy CAF troops in a very different type of mission—missions where they will be expected to violently suppress targeted groups. “Peace support missions,” states the document, “are increasingly deployed to hostile environments where violence is systemic and there is a desperate need to end violations of human rights. Unlike ‘traditional’ peacekeeping missions of the past, most current missions operate where there is no clear peace accord to be monitored.” The missions are, moreover, frequently “authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, thereby allowing use of force.”

Even more revealing is the choice of examples the document offers to illustrate Canada’s involvement in “peace and security” operations. It speaks of the “combat operations” in Afghanistan; the training of soldiers loyal to Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist, pro-western government to fight pro-Russian separatist rebels; the CAF’s deployment to train Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Iraq; and Canada’s involvement in the UN mission in Haiti.

All of these missions have been aimed at strengthening the hegemony of US imperialism, which the Canadian bourgeoisie views as vital to advancing its own global interests. In Afghanistan, the CAF waged a brutal counterinsurgency war against the Afghan population, while in Iraq it is backing Kurdish forces who have been accused of atrocities and who aim to ethnically partition the country. In Ukraine and Haiti, Canadian forces openly collaborated with far-right and outright fascist forces, most notably in Ottawa’s outspoken support for the 2014 coup in Kiev.

Military spending and domestic deployment

The defence policy review document leaves no doubt about the need for increased financial resources to be devoted to the military to ensure it has the equipment necessary to carry out its expanded role. A section on defence spending notes that the CAF has been resourced with spending levels of 1 percent of GDP for the past decade, before mentioning the commitment made by NATO leaders in 2014 to move towards spending 2 percent of GDP on the military. The Liberals have already committed to increasing military spending by vowing to implement the previous Conservative government’s plan for an additional 1 percent rise in military spending each year for nine successive years beginning in 2017.

The investments will include the purchasing of new weapons systems. The document argues this should potentially include equipment to enable defensive and offensive operations to be carried out in cyberspace and to defend Canadian satellites.

Chief of the defence staff, General Jonathan Vance, is an outspoken advocate of the purchasing of drones, and he has made no secret of the fact that he believes they should be armed. The consultation document explicitly refers to this issue as being a critical matter for debate during the review.

The procurement process to replace the air force’s fleet of CF-18 fighter jets is under way, and major purchases of sea rescue aircraft, naval destroyers and helicopters are in the works. A strong domestic armaments industry, the paper writes, enables Canada to retain an “agile and combat capable force.”

The increased resources to be made available to the CAF are not only intended for use abroad. The document outlines proposals for expanded armed forces’ deployments within Canada, to assert territorial claims in the Arctic, provide disaster relief, and collaborate with law enforcement in “counter-terrorism” activities. This last point is significant, since the definition of “terrorism” in Canadian law is so broad that political opposition and protest groups can fall under its scope.

The review consultation document ends by emphasizing the scale of operations the ruling elite envisages for the military when it states,

“The CAF remain focused on defending Canada and North America and contributing to a wide spectrum of operations globally. However, the security environment has shifted and the time is right to reflect on the CAF’s role domestically, on the continent, and globally, as well as on how the CAF should be resourced and equipped.”

Hundreds of thousands of people marched across France yesterday in the fourth day of action called by trade, high school, and university student unions against the labour law reform of Socialist Party (PS) Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri. Rail, airport, and port workers walked off the job. Riot police, who have savagely attacked youth on every protest against the El Khomri law, again clashed with protesters in cities across the country.

While estimates varied widely of how many people marched—170,000 according to the authorities, 500,000 according to the Stalinist General Confederation of Labour (CGT)—it was clear that participation was sharply down from the over 1 million people who protested on March 31.

This does not reflect any lessening of the broad opposition among workers and youth to the El Khomri Law. Even pollsters, whose findings generally conform to the needs of the ruling class, admit that the law remains wildly unpopular. It would lengthen the work day, undermine job security for young workers, and allow trade unions to negotiate contracts inferior to the standards set by the Labour Code. Rather, the protest is coming up against a key obstacle: masses of workers and youth marching in the protests do not have a viable strategy for a struggle against the PS government.

Several youth asked questions of WSWS reporters at rallies yesterday on how to really oppose the PS. This reflects a basic political reality: the organisations controlling the protests are allies of the PS and have not mounted any real struggle against the El Khomri Law. They defend the PS. The CGT’s political ally, the Left Front, together with the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), called for a vote for President François Hollande in 2012. All have worked for decades in various alliances with the PS.

They have not called for any broad mobilisation of the workers against constant police attacks on the protests, fearing this could bring down the extremely weak and unpopular PS government of President Hollande. The workers have largely ignored their calls for impotent symbolic protests. This has allowed the PS to try to impose its law with brute repression, under the pretext of the state of emergency: relying on the unions to demobilise the workers, thus isolating student protesters, police savagely attacked the youth at each successive day of action.

Even today, when it is clear that the PS is determined to forcibly impose the austerity agenda advanced across Europe by the European Union, and trample the opposition of over 70 percent of the population, these organisations are only proposing more impotent appeals to the PS. As the government prepares to present the El Khomri Law to the National Assembly on May 3, the unions have issued a statement proposing that holding strike meetings in work places would allow workers to “obtain new collective guarantees to produce social progress.”

These false and empty promises, designed to give political cover to corrupt bureaucracies allied to the PS, go against the experiences thousands of workers and youth are passing through. The PS and the other parties in the National Assembly are determined to slash wages and working conditions and will stop at nothing to accomplish it.

The only way that the working class can defend itself, in France and across Europe, is by mobilising

en masse in an open political struggle for socialism—in France, against the Socialist Party government and its pseudo-left allies. The central difficulty facing workers and youth in France is that currently, no political party advocates such a struggle. Every nominally “left” party has for decades treated the PS, a big business party, as a representative of socialism and of the workers movement.

As a result, though Hollande is France’s most unpopular president since World War II, broader layers of workers have not entered into struggle, and a small layer of protesters is forced into fruitless street battles, facing off against hordes of riot police.

Clashes broke out in and around protests including in Paris, Le Havre, Lyon, Rennes, Nantes, and Marseille. Police assaulted youth protesters in Marseille and confined a number in St. Charles train station, while a car was burned during fighting between police and protesters in Nantes.

WSWS reporters attended the main protest in central Paris, attended by a number of delegations of trade union officials, members of PS and Left Front youth organisations, and groups of students from various local schools and universities. They spoke to a student from the 13th district of Paris who has participated in the Paris demonstrations against the El Khomri Law.

She strongly opposed the El Khomri Law, saying,

“We’re already precarious enough, if we lose even more on job security, it will not be pretty. There is nothing good in it for the future of the youth, and not just of the youth, for employees, for workers of all descriptions.”

She attacked the state of emergency imposed by the PS, calling it “a good cover to prevent people from going out and marching on the streets … But there is a good turnout, so that’s good, their plans are not working so well.”

She also criticised the PS government’s sudden floating of a reactionary proposal to ban the Islamic veil in French universities as a measure to divide students protesting the El Khomri Law. She said,

“They are bringing up the issue of banning the Islamic veil in the universities now, by pure coincidence, when all the youth are out on the streets protesting a government measure … I do not agree with this.”

She also criticised the war in Syria:

“Western policy is not for nothing in what is happening in these countries, either Gaddafi’s fall or his death. Youth today who leave France, Belgium, Germany or wherever to go in Syria or the Middle East, it’s not for no reason. It’s maybe that they were sort of pushed to go, and it was made clear to them that here they had no future … I feel sadness for those who were killed in the [terrorist] attacks, the victims, and for youth who see no other solution than to leave for those countries. And behind it all, there is a lot of manipulation.”

WSWS reporters attended a youth rally in Marseille and spoke to several students. One high school student told a WSWS reporter that he opposed the El Khomri Law because it

“constrains our future, because wages are not going up though working time is going up. Even if work is less physically demanding than it was in earlier periods, they are making us work much more.”

He also sharply opposed police violence, particularly in Marseille, where police have steadily escalated their deployments and the PS have called for sending in the army to impose law and order. He said, “I think people have to open their eyes. It’s not just at the protests that there is police violence, there are certain areas of Marseille where there are those problems every day.”

He regretted that no political organisation in France defends social equality, saying, “I want equality for all, but that’s a utopia because no one is pushing for it, especially in the workplaces. But I think we are in a society where we have to help each other.”

Lying Media Planting Nato Agenda Articles:

In a lengthy April 27 BBC propaganda piece, when it finally got to the issue of Aleppo, the article said nothing about the current situation in Aleppo, and for some reason felt the need to use quotation marks when referring to established terrorist groups Da’esh and the Nusra Front:

“Russia, of course, has said it is largely striking at IS and al-Nusra “terrorists”.”

Granted, the piece is meant specifically to be anti-Russian propaganda, but yet, not a single mention of the past few days of al-Nusra and other terrorists’ horrific bombardment of Aleppo’s residential areas.

Instead, BBC inserts an undated photo of Aleppo “subjected to airstrikes”, a photo with two hefty men resembling Nusra or other terrorists in the background, one of whom seemingly wearing military fatigues, incidentally.

A search on BBC’s website, using the query “Aleppo”, unsurprisingly turns up zero other articles (other than the anti-Russia piece) on Aleppo the past four days of terrorists’ bombardment of Aleppo.

The Guardian ran the same photo in its April 26 piece by authors based in Turkey, this time with the photo caption: “A wounded boy is helped out of a ruined building after an air strike on the Fardous neighbourhood in Aleppo.”

The Guardian omitted the fact that Fardous is occupied by terrorists.  Further, had the Guardian done a search on the photographer, Ameer al-Halabi, they would have found photos like thisshowing the photographer’s proximity to clearly armed terrorists, as well as this Feb 2016 photoshowing so-called “White Helmets” “rescuers” in Aleppo.

Rather than being “civilian” rescuers, White Helmets have a different claim to fame: foreign-funded “regime change propagandists & terrorist allies” operating primarily in al-Nusra and Da’esh strongholds, as explained in detail in investigative writer, Vanessa Beeley’s, “Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception” and “Syria’s White Helmets: War By Way of Deception ~ ‘Moderate Executioners’“.

As for the Guardian piece, it is full of the standard MSM obfuscations, and does not highlight the crisis that is Aleppo under terrorists’ bombardment. Instead it employs the standard accusatory rhetoric, mourns for the “Civil Defence” aka “White Helmets” aka terrorist supporters and propagandists.

In fact, BBC, Guardian, AFP, CBC, etc, all read from the same tired, lying script: pretending that WH are rescuer workers, lambasting the Syrian army/airforce/government, and utterly ignoring or downplaying the immense tragedy of the massacres actually taking place by western-backed terrorists.  None of this is surprising, but it is most certainly infuriating. There is no respect for actual loss of life by terrorists in Syria; the humanitarian cards are played and manipulated only to serve the long-dead rhetoric of the NATO-alliance criminals.

Enduring the Bombardment:

Syrian political analyst and freelance writer, Kevork Almassian, noted an uplifting development: “The “Syrian Specialist Hospital” in Aleppo declares it will treat the injured civilians by the Turkish Western backed terrorists for free.”

But as western/corporate media continue to ignore the terrorists’ bombardment of Aleppo, and as Syrians there continue to endure the worsening situation, independent media must ensure that the reality is told and the lies refuted.

The fantasy of liberal ‘political correctness’ was shattered this week when a raging mob of South Sudanese refugees rioted in the western Ethiopian region of Gambella and killed at least 14 people.

The rampage was sparked by a road accident in which an NGO vehicle crashed into and killed two young girls. The victims were Nuer and the car was driven by what some have termed a “highlander”, or an individual from the central mountainous regions around which the Ethiopian state historically crystallized, and this caused the majority-Nuer South Sudanese refugees to explode into an orgy of violence and carry out their killings. While the official death toll is slightly over a dozen people, another report cautions that it “could rise further since the refugees chased the victims to the forest, where they mutilated the bodies”. 41 refugees have since been arrested, but it’s unclear whether any more murder suspects still remain at large.  

Breaking The Narrative

None of this was ever supposed to happen, well, according to Western Liberals and Cultural Marxists at least. In their ‘picture-perfect’ view of the world, only “racists”, “fascists”, and “white supremacists” would ever dare allege that overwhelming refugee influxes could destabilize host countries, but lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened in Ethiopia’s Gambella region. The western area of the country is hosting 270,000 mostly-Nuer South Sudanese refugees, despite only having an indigenous population of about 300,000. This has contributed to Ethiopia becoming the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, and it also means that there are almost more refugees in Gambella than there are locals. Seeing as how most South Sudanese refugees are Nuer, this has destabilized the already tense ethnic balance in this part of Ethiopia and can be said to have demographically reengineered it to a large degree. Under such pressure, it’s little wonder that all that it took was a small-scale vehicular accident to put the region on the edge of civil war.

Political Sabotage

Not even a week prior to the refugee riots, South Sudanese rebels invaded Gambella, killed over 200 people, and kidnapped around 100 children, prompting the Ethiopian military to stage a cross-border operation in attempting to free them. This incident shook regional stability and showed that South Sudan’s conflict was increasingly spilling over the Ethiopian border, and no longer just in humanitarian terms, but militant ones, too. The timing of both of these attacks – the rebel and refugee ones – appears to have coincided with South Sudanese Vice-President Riek Machar’s return to the capital of Juba in order to implement the peace process that was agreed to in August. Tellingly, Machar, an ethnic Nuer, was in Gambella at this time en route to returning to his home country from the talks in Addis Ababa, and the Nuer refugee riots and preceding rebel raid might have been timed to sabotage his return at the last minute.

The Anti-China Plot

To expand on that idea, it actually makes sense if considered from a global strategic standpoint. South Sudan’s civil war has served the tangential purpose of unleashing a couple hundred thousand “Weapons of Mass Migration” against Ethiopia, which itself is a very ethnically diverse and demographically fragile state. In a sense, South Sudan’s post-independence destabilization can be seen as also achieving the goal of putting long-term asymmetrical pressure on Ethiopia through the planting of hundreds of thousands of identity-conflict “time bombs”, which is essentially what some of the Nuer refugees are regretfully beginning to function as. The reason that Ethiopia is being targeted with such uncouth weapons of war is because of its pivotal role in China’s global One Belt One Road network, particularly through the Chinese-built Djibouti-Ethiopia Railroad and the Chinese-financed LAPSSET Corridor from Kenya’s Lamu port to Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa. Taken together, these two access routes will allow Ethiopia to unleash its full economic potential and become one of China’s closest multipolar allies, provided of course that a series of internal crises doesn’t offset that first.

Hybrid Warfare

For these reasons, the US would like to stir up identity conflict within the diverse state in order to incite another civil war there, but this time one which would result in the fragmented Identity Federalism of the country or its formal dissolution into a scattering of tribal- and ethnic-based states. The grand strategic purpose of China’s ambitious multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects would thus neutralized in comparison to their original intent, fully in line with the “Law Of Hybrid War” which states that the US is seeking to provoke such identity conflicts for these very same purposes. In response to this Hybrid War threat, the Ethiopian government has tried hard to foster a strong sense of civilizational patriotism in order to unite its disparate ethnic and regional identity groups, but the threat remains that local differences could still be exploited by foreign factors in order to spark an uncontrollable conflagration of chaos.

Setting The Stage

The author wrote about the latest attempt to use identity conflict as a trigger for a nationwide crisis at the end of last year when the Oromo, the largest ethnic plurality in the country, staged a series of high-profile riots in response to the government’s controversial use of eminent domain. Prior to that, the author also wrote two related pieces, one for Katehon and the other for The Saker, about how the GCC is planning to use Eritrea as a launching pad for anti-Ethiopian activity in the future, predictably through the provocation of internal identity conflict. The former article specifically warned that the “current tribal violence in South Sudan (could) motivate a spillover effect into the neighboring Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (home to 45 different ethnic groups) or Gambella Region that ‘naturally’ creates the state-fragmenting process”, and as fate would have it, part of that forecast has already come true with the South Sudanese refugee rampage in Gambella and the preceding cross-border kidnapping raid. Although the situation presently appears to be under control, it can’t be certain that a repeat of either of these two conflict triggers will occur, especially considering that the nearly 300,000 refugees in Gambella could once more fall victim to manipulative crowd control techniques in turning them into “Weapons of Mass Migration” for indirect use against China.

Concluding Thoughts

To wrap up the article, it’s important to return back to its title and speak about how the weaponization of South Sudanese refugees against Ethiopia disproves one of the foundational tenets of modern-day “political correctness”. It would never be countenanced by Western Liberals and Cultural Marxists, let alone admitted after the fact of its provable occurrence, that refugees could be used to destabilize their host country, let alone when the evidence of this happening is of African-on-African aggression. The post-modern employment of “Weapons of Mass Migration” is a very real phenomenon that the author investigated in a two–part series earlier in the year, but in this specific context, it’s being leveraged against China’s New Silk Road interests in the Horn of Africa.

The “political incorrectness” of what happened in Gambella doesn’t take away from the destabilization that it caused, and ignoring the on-the-ground facts in favor of maintaining ideological “clarity” and “consistency” results in nothing more than the creation of an imagined reality that’s completely divorced from actual events. Moreover, denying that “Weapons of Mass Migration” exist actually ‘legitimizes’ “Israel” and enables the use of such unconventional strategies against other multipolar countries as well. Therefore, it must be underscored that the sooner that observers come to recognize the use of this enhanced form of post-modern weaponry, whether waged indirectly against Russia by using Arab refugees in Europe or against China through the utilization of South Sudanese ones in Ethiopia, the sooner that they can collectively put their energy together in exposing other similar such plots and devising appropriate countermeasures in responding to them.

 

Russia says it wants detailed information about a new US plan to send 250 special forces to Syria, including the precise purpose of their deployment.

“We would like to comprehend what this is all about; whether this is a one-time action, who these people are and where they will be stationed,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in Moscow.

“What they are dispatched there for and whether this is part of a program or a plan,” she added.

Zakharova also said the UK is indirectly supporting Daesh by failing to close down funding channels for the terrorists.

The remarks came two days after US President Barack Obama announced that an additional 250 special troops will be sent to Syria in the coming weeks.

The deployment will be the biggest expansion of US ground forces in Syria since the beginning of the foreign-backed militancy in the Arab country in 2011.

Washington has already deployed dozens of special forces to eastern Syria in what it claims is an effort to shore up local militant groups against Daesh terrorists.

Russia has been carrying out an aerial campaign against terrorist groups in Syria since September 2015 at the request of the Syrian government. US activities, however, have not been authorized by or coordinated with Damascus.

Image: Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin  

UN blacklisting of militants

In New York, Russia asked the UN to blacklist a major Syrian militant group, which has been present at UN-brokered Syria peace talks in Geneva.

Russia’s Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said he asked the UN to add Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham to a blacklist that includes Daesh and al-Qaeda.

Churkin said the two groups are “closely linked to terrorist organizations” in Syria, primarily Daesh and al-Qaeda. The groups exchange “financial, material, technical and military support” with the terrorist groups, he said.

Churkin submitted the request to the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee.

Mohammed Alloush, a key figure in Jaysh al-Islam, was the chief negotiator of the opposition group High Negotiations Committee (HNC) — which is backed by Saudi Arabia — at peace talks in Geneva.

The latest round of the talks, which began on April 13, was brought to a halt as the HNC walked out of the negotiations on April 19 and militants declared a new war in Syria.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011.

UN special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which has furthermore displaced over half of Syria’s pre-war population of about 23 million.

Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled Monday that an opposition-proposed constitutional amendment reducing the presidential term from six to four years will not apply to the current president, Nicolas Maduro. 

Last week, the majority opposition bloc in the National Assembly approved in first discussion a constitutional amendment that would shorten mayoral, gubernatorial, and presidential terms from six to four years and prohibit more than one consecutive reelection.

However, the proposed amendment has stirred controversy with a special clause that would render the changes retroactive, cutting short President Maduro’s 2013-2019 term and triggering new elections this year.

In its latest decision released Monday, the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled that the new shortened presidential term will not take effect in the case of the current head of state, citing Article 24 of the Bolivarian Constitution’s “absolute non-retroactivity” of all laws.

“To accept the assumption [of retroactivity] would constitute an unquestionable violation of the exercise of sovereignty outlined in Article 5 of the Magna Carta, since it would amount to a rejection of the will of the people,” the high court stated, referring to the fact that President Maduro was democratically elected to a six-year term in 2013.

In its historical review of past amendments shortening presidential terms, the tribunal pointed to the precedent of the 22^nd Amendment to the US Constitution approved in 1951, which established a two-term limit for the highest office, but explicitly specified that the new restriction would not apply to the current office-holder.

According to the Supreme Court, the effort by the right-wing parliamentary majority to use a constitutional amendment to “immediately cut short the exercise of a popularly elected office such as the president” represents a “fraud to the constitution”.

The judicial body went on to note that the constitution contains “other mechanisms for expressing the popular will”, such as a recall referendum.

Nonetheless, the high court upheld the proposed modifications to the constitution as “perfectly viable” in the case of future presidential terms provided that the amendment is approved by national referendum.

The ruling comes as a blow to the right-wing opposition coalition, the MUD, which has spearheaded the constitutional amendment as part of its four-pronged strategy for ousting Maduro that additionally includes a recall referendum, a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, as well as street mobilizations.

National Assembly President Henry Ramos Allup blasted the ruling, calling the Supreme Court Justices “thugs” and accusing them of “constitutional fraud” for failing to wait for the final text of the amendment before issuing a verdict.

The opposition legislator did not respond to the content of the verdict.

Following its approval in first discussion last Wednesday, the amendment must now pass second and third discussion in parliament before being subject to referendum.

The struggle in Britain between those fighting for Brexit and those fighting against it is a very unequal struggle.

The two sides in the struggle

On the one side there are the entire Transnational and British elites, i.e. the entire network of economic, political and media elites which run the New World Order of Neoliberal Globalization: from the Nobel Laureate Obama, who managed to bomb 7 countries in the first 6 years of his presidency, to the transnational economic and political elites, such as the business federations of Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and BusinessEurope — representing organisations in 34 European countries – which joined the UK’s CBI to argue that EU membership is an important factor in maintaining and attracting investment to the UK.

The reason the elites are fighting so hard against Brexit is because they know that a victory for Brexit could set in motion a domino effect that could demolish the EU. This is particularly the case now that an anti-EU tsunami is blowing all over Europe, both in the South and in the North. A Brexit could set in motion forces that could lead to the dismantling of the elites’ entire globalization plan, which involves firstly the effective abolition of economic and national sovereignty within economic unions like the EU and, secondly, the unification of such unions through deals like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which puts at risk even the NHS – the major social achievement of the post-war period. The end result of all this may well be that, soon afterwards, poor Britons suffer the same fate as that of poor Americans, who now have the same life expectancy as the Sudanese according to a very recent study![1] In fact, the very reason that Obama rushed to London and then to Berlin was to co-ordinate the fight for TTIP, so that this agreement would not be put at risk by a Brexit.

On the other side, there are the victims of globalization in Britain and throughout the world: i.e. the millions of workers all over Europe who have lost their jobs since globalization began taking effect about 30 years ago, from the miners – after being defeated in the 80s following a long and heroic struggle – to the steelworkers who are about to suffer the miners’ fate, as soon as the referendum is out of the way.

That is, on the other side are all those who are the victims of the opening and liberalization of markets for capital, labour and commodities. As even the Financial Times admitted a few days ago, “we are close to the point where globalization and membership of the Eurozone in particular have damaged not only certain groups in society but entire nations”.[2] In other words, we are talking about all those in Britain (and beyond!) who are forced to work for survival wages and zero contract hours, not to mention the victims of a continuously deteriorating social welfare system (health, education and so on). This system is under the constant threat of further funding cuts while, at the same time, having to cover the needs of more and more people because of the so-called “four freedoms” of the EU, introduced by the Maastricht Treaty and those that followed it (i.e. freedom in the movement of capital, commodities and of course labour).

But it is exactly the imposition of these so-called “freedoms” that could explain why Britain – where supposedly there is almost full employment – is experiencing stagnant real-term wages at the same time. The present ‘job miracle’ in Britain, for instance (which is characterized as “the job creation capital of the western economies”), hides the fact that, as an analyst pointed out, “unemployment is low, largely because British workers have been willing to stomach the biggest real-terms pay cut since the Victorian era”.[3]

What is really at stake in the British referendum

However the elites, including the Blairite Labor Party (its new leader Jeremy Corbyn has already shown his true ‘Left’ colors—which remind one of Tsipras and Varioufakis of whom he is an admirer!–– with his about turn on the EU issue and the suspension of Ken Livingstone, according to the demands of the Transnational and Zionist elites) and the associated trade unions, do not say a word about the real issue of the plebiscite: namely, globalization. Instead, they try desperately to disorient the people to make them believe that the issue is about worker’s rights, with Alan Johnson declaring the other day that “Europe remains the backstop guarantee for workers’ rights”.[4] Of course, working people know full well that their rights have always been won and protected through their own struggle, while the EU is well known for continuously passing legislation, ever since Maastricht, to restrict workers’ rights severely, so that European labor can compete with that of the US, if not China and India. This is what people in Greece, Portugal, Spain and now throughout France as well, are resisting.

So, what is really at stake is the economic and national sovereignty of the European peoples, not the democratization of Europe, as its “Left” supporters assert in a very disorienting way.[5] Democracy presupposes people’s sovereignty, and this sovereignty cannot be secured at the European level. The people’s sovereignty can only be secured at the local level. European sovereignty simply means the sovereignty of the unelected economic and political elites running the EU, or at most, the more powerful countries within it.  Furthermore, democracy presupposes the economic sovereignty of the people, i.e. their power to determine their own monetary and fiscal policy, as well as control of their country’s resources, in a sovereign way. But this right disappears as soon as a country joins the EU, or even worse, the Eurozone.

Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations[6]

Finally, from the point of view of the Left, which is supposedly fighting for radical social change, such change is impossible in a globalized world without economic and national sovereignty.

What we therefore need in Britain, in Europe and in the world as a whole, is to start building Popular Fronts for National and Social Liberation (PFNSL), in every country which is integrated into the New World Order. Such fronts would fight for the recovery of national and economic sovereignty and the self-reliance of each country, in their struggle for the creation of a new democratic world order based on the values of solidarity and mutual aid, rather than the principle of competitiveness which has led to the present record level of inequality in the distribution of wealth and income throughout the world, as well as to an ecological disaster. Such a process of recovery would necessarily involve the creation of an alternative pole of sovereign self-reliant nations, and Brexit is a precondition for this.

 Notes

Highlighting the strategic importance of the Maldives, a 1,190-island Indian Ocean archipelago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Maldives’ President Abdulla Yameen have signed an “Action Plan for Defence Cooperation.”

Speaking April 11, at the conclusion of a two-day official visit to New Delhi, Yameen declared India “the most important friend of Maldives” and pledged to pursue “an India first foreign policy.” Modi, meanwhile, boasted about India’s role as a “net security provider” in the Indian Ocean region.

Military-security collaboration between India and the Maldives is not new. However, enhanced strategic ties between New Delhi and Male take on great importance under conditions where India is aggressively seeking to limit China’s economic and political influence in the region and integrating itself ever more completely into the US “pivot to Asia”—that is Washington’s drive to strategically encircle and prepare for war with China.

Yameen and his government have come under sharp criticism from the opposition Maldives Democratic Party (MDP) and the US and European imperialist powers for accepting large-scale Chinese investment and offers of military-security collaboration. India, albeit less publicly, has also communicated its keen displeasure to Male over its “pro-China” tilt.

Yameen’s pledges of fealty to India and the new defence cooperation agreement were clearly intended to placate New Delhi.

They came just the day before US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar, announced that Washington and New Delhi have “agreed in principle” on a “logistic exchange agreement” which will enable the US military to make routine use of Indian bases and ports for resupply, repair, and rest.

By persuading the Maldives’ government to sign the Action Plan, the Modi government provided Carter, the Obama administration and the Pentagon a clear demonstration of India’s strategic heft in the region and potential as a “frontline” ally in thwarting China’s rise. For its part, the US has been urging India to press forward with its plans to develop a blue-water navy, including offering to work with it to develop and produce aircraft-carrier technology.

While details of the Action Plan are scant, a description on the Indian Ministry of External Affairs web site says that it “envisages an institutional mechanism” at the level of “Defence Secretaries to further bilateral defence cooperation.”

At his joint press conference with Yameen, Modi described the main elements of the Action Plan as development of Maldives’ port facilities, continuous training and capacity-building of Maldives’ police and security forces, enhanced exchange of information between the countries’ security agencies, and Indian assistance in supplying Maldives with military equipment and maritime surveillance capabilities.

India has long viewed the Maldives as part of its regional sphere of influence. Its determination to act as the Maldives’ principal “security-provider” has only been spiked by its ambitions to become a major power in the Indian Ocean.

Lying to India’s south-west, the Maldives straddle some of the world’s most important shipping lanes—including those that provide China, Japan, South Korea, and India with Mideast oil. Eight hundred miles directly south of Male lies Diego Garcia, the US’s principal Indian Ocean base.

Like the western powers, India has become nervous about the growing Chinese influence in the Maldives. This has increased since MDP leader Mohammed Nasheed resigned the presidency in 2012 amid protests led by loyalists of the longtime former president Mamoon Abdul Gayoom, the current president’s brother-in-law.

While the US and European powers have been exploiting the February 2015 arrest and imprisonment of Nasheed, censuring the current Maldives’ government and threatening sanctions, India has used a carrot-and-stick approach to compel Male to adhere to its strategic agenda. In this, it has sought to leverage its longstanding ties to the current ruling clique. For three decades, India worked closely with Gayoom including intervening militarily in 1988 to prevent him from being overthrown.

Last year, Modi cancelled a scheduled visit to Maldives under the pretext of opposing Nasheed’s jailing. From February 15 to 18 this year, India dispatched its largest and most potent warship, aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, accompanied by destroyer INS Mysore and Tanker INS Deepak, to the Maldives.

During his joint press conference with Indian Prime Minister Modi, Yameen made statement after statement aimed at reassuring New Delhi that the current government acknowledges its regional primacy and welcomes even greater Indian involvement in Maldive affairs.

“The security of the Maldives,” declared Yameen, “is intimately linked with the security of India.” He requested Modi’s “assistance in strengthening government and the democratic process in the Maldives” and invited the Indian Prime Minster to make an official visit to Male this year.

For his part, Modi emphasized India’s readiness to forcibly assert its interests. “India understands its responsibility as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean Region,” said Modi. “And India is fully ready to protect its military interest in this part of the globe.” Modi added that Yameen had agreed that “Maldives will be sensitive to our strategic and security interests.”

In addition to the Action Plan, Modi and Yameen signed five other agreements, covering taxation, tourism, joint research and surveys, and satellite tracking.

Modi also announced that “India is ready to partner (with) Maldives in its ambitious Ihavan (or Ihavandhippolhu Integrated Development Project)” project. Ihavanddhipppolhu atoll is Maldives’ northern-most island. In the hopes of taking advantage of its proximity to what a Maldive government website describes as the “channels through which the main East-West shipping route, connecting South-East Asia and China to the Mid-East and Europe” run, the atoll is being developed as a major Indian Ocean transport hub, with an airport, port, docks and warehousing facilities. To entice investors, the mega-project is being developed under Special Economic Zone (SEZ) provisions that give them tax breaks and exemptions from financial, environmental and labor laws.

Modi’s offer to partner in the Ihaven project is a clear challenge to China, which has been developing close ties with Maldives, including negotiating its formal inclusion in Beijing’s Maritime Silk Road.

In September 2014 Chinese President Xi visited the Maldives and a year later the two countries agreed to launch free trade negotiations. The Chinese government, banks and engineering firms are also financing and building a series of major infrastructure and development projects, including a US$ 200 million bridge connecting Male and Hulhumale, the modernization of the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport, and a road between the interlinked islands of Gun and Funadhoo in Laamu atoll.

Beijing is also developing closer military ties with Male. Maldives’ Minister of Defense and National Security, Mohamed Nizam, visited Beijing in November 2014 and met with his Chinese counterpart. Recently, China started providing training to Maldive maritime security personnel.

The Maldives’ ruling elite is clearly anxious to profit from the bounty of Chinese investments, but it is also desperate not to run afoul of New Delhi and Washington. Hence Yameen’s bowing and scraping during his visit to New Delhi earlier this month.

Yameen may be hoping he can still balance between Beijing, on the one hand, and New Delhi and Washington, on the other. But the ever-widening geo-political fissures are rendering such a policy increasingly untenable.

The US “Pivot to Asia” has pulled all of South Asia and the Indian Ocean into the maelstrom of great power conflict and war preparations, underscoring the urgency of building a socialist anti-war movement uniting the workers and toilers across South Asia in opposition to imperialism and all the rival national bourgeois cliques.

Interrupted thirty times by applause at the stately Mayflower Hotel on April 27, Strongman Donald Trump issued his “America first” foreign policy speech to the nation and world.

Mr. Trump’s self-made altered reality that magnetizes white working-class admirers drew immediate reality-based consensus from the Right, Center and Left. (excerpts)

We provide below the full transcript of Donald Trump’s April 27 address, the complete video of his presentation followed by a compilation of selected media excerpts pertaining to Trump’s Foreign Policy.

1. TRANSCRIPT OF DONALD TRUMP’S ADDRESS ON US FOREIGN POLICY (CENTER FOR NATIONAL INTEREST)

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you, and thank you to the Center for National Interest for honoring me with this invitation. It truly is a great honor. I’d like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.

TRUMP: It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy. It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold, something we have to do. The direction I will outline today will also return us to a timeless principle. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else. It has to be first. Has to be.

That will be the foundation of every single decision that I will make. America…

(APPLAUSE)

America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration. But to chart our path forward, we must first briefly take a look back. We have a lot to be proud of.

In the 1940s we saved the world. The greatest generation beat back the Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Then we saved the world again. This time, from totalitarianism and communism. The Cold War lasted for decades but, guess what, we won and we won big. Democrats and Republicans working together got Mr. Gorbachev to heed the words of President Reagan, our great president, when he said, tear down this wall.

(APPLAUSE)

History will not forget what he did. A very special man and president. Unfortunately, after the Cold War our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which led to one foreign policy disaster after another.

They just kept coming and coming. We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper. Very bad. It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy.

We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans and just killed be lives, lives, lives wasted. Horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill that void much to their really unjust enrichment.

They have benefited so much, so sadly, for us. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision. No purpose. No direction. No strategy. Today I want to identify five main weaknesses in our foreign policy.

First, our resources are totally over extended. President Obama has weakened our military by weakening our economy. He’s crippled us with wasteful spending, massive debt, low growth, a huge trade deficit and open borders. Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year.

We’re rebuilding other countries while weakening our own. Ending the theft of American jobs will give us resources we need to rebuild our military, which has to happen and regain our financial independence and strength. I am the only person running for the presidency who understands this and this is a serious problem.

I’m the only one — believe me, I know them all, I’m the only one who knows how to fix it.

(APPLAUSE)

Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share, and I’ve been talking about this recently a lot. Our allies must contribute toward their financial, political, and human costs, have to do it, of our tremendous security burden. But many of them are simply not doing so.

TRUMP: They look at the United States as weak and forgiving and feel no obligation to honor their agreements with us. In NATO, for instance, only 4 of 28 other member countries besides America, are spending the minimum required 2 percent of GDP on defense. We have spent trillions of dollars over time on planes, missiles, ships, equipment, building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia.

The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense, and if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. We have no choice.

(APPLAUSE)

The whole world will be safer if our allies do their part to support our common defense and security. A Trump administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded, and funded beautifully.

Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us. We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country. He negotiated a disastrous deal with Iran, and then we watched them ignore its terms even before the ink was dry. Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, cannot be allowed. Remember that, cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

(APPLAUSE)

And under a Trump administration, will never, ever be allowed to have that nuclear weapon.

(APPLAUSE)

All of this without even mentioning the humiliation of the United States with Iran’s treatment of our ten captured sailors — so vividly I remember that day. In negotiation, you must be willing to walk. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table.

When the other side knows you’re not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win — you just can’t win. At the same time, your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them. You’ve made that agreement, you have to stand by it and the world will be a better place. President Obama gutted our missile defense program and then abandoned our missile defense plans with Poland and the Czech Republic. He supported the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt that had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, and then helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in its place.

Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel, a force for justice and peace, for acting as an impatient peace area in the region.

President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power. Iran has, indeed, become a great, great power in just a very short period of time, because of what we’ve done. All of the expense and all at the expense of Israel, our allies in the region and very importantly, the United States itself.

We’ve picked fights with our oldest friends, and now they’re starting to look elsewhere for help. Remember that. Not good.

Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us. In fact, they’re just as confused as our allies, but in an even bigger problem is they don’t take us seriously anymore. The truth is they don’t respect us. When President Obama landed in Cuba on Air Force One, to leader was there, nobody, to greet him.

Perhaps an incident without precedent in the long and prestigious history of Air Force One. Then amazingly, the same thing happened in Saudi Arabia. It’s called no respect. Absolutely no respect.

TRUMP: Do you remember when the president made a long and expensive trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, to get the Olympics for our country, and after this unprecedented effort, it was announced that the United States came in fourth — fourth place? The president of the United States making this trip — unprecedented — comes in fourth place. He should have known the result before making such an embarrassing commitment. We were laughed at all over the world, as we have been many, many times.

The list of humiliations go on and on and on. President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach. Our president has allowed China to continue its economic assault on American jobs and wealth, refusing to enforce trade deals and apply leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea. We have the leverage. We have the power over China, economic power, and people don’t understand it. And with that economic power, we can rein in and we can get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.

He has even allowed China to steal government secrets with cyber attacks and engaged in industrial espionage against the United States and its companies. We’ve let our rivals and challengers think they can get away with anything, and they do. They do at will. It always happens. If President Obama’s goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.

Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy. One day, we’re bombing Libya and getting rid of a dictator to foster democracy for civilians. The next day, we’re watching the same civilians suffer while that country falls and absolutely falls apart. Lives lost, massive moneys lost. The world is a different place.

We’re a humanitarian nation, but the legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion and disarray, a mess. We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before. We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.

(APPLAUSE)

We have done nothing to help the Christians, nothing, and we should always be ashamed for that, for that lack of action. Our actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria have helped unleash ISIS, and we’re in a war against radical Islam, but President Obama won’t even name the enemy, and unless you name the enemy, you will never ever solve the problem.

(APPLAUSE)

Hillary Clinton also refuses to say the words radical Islam, even as she pushes for a massive increase in refugees coming into our country. After Secretary Clinton’s failed intervention in Libya, Islamic terrorists in Benghazi took down our consulate and killed our ambassador and three brave Americans. Then, instead of taking charge that night, Hillary Clinton decided to go home and sleep. Incredible.

Clinton blames it all on a video, an excuse that was a total lie, proven to be absolutely a total lie. Our ambassador was murdered and our secretary of state misled the nation. And, by the way, she was not awake to take that call at 3 o’clock in the morning. And now ISIS is making millions and millions of dollars a week selling Libya oil. And you know what? We don’t blockade, we don’t bomb, we don’t do anything about it. It’s almost as if our country doesn’t even know what’s happening, which could be a fact and could be true.

TRUMP: This will all change when I become president.

To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be reliable again. It’s going to be a great and reliable ally again. It’s going to be a friend again. We’re going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies.

(APPLAUSE)

We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water’s edge. We need a new rational American foreign policy, informed by the best minds and supported by both parties, and it will be by both parties — Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, as well as by our close allies.

This is how we won the Cold War and it’s how we will win our new future struggles, which may be many, which may be complex, but we will win if I become president.

(APPLAUSE)

First, we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world. Events may require the use of military force, but it’s also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.

In this, we’re going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence, attacks and everything else. It is a dangerous world, more dangerous now than it has ever been.

We should work — thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street. They must also be good to us. Remember that. They have to be good to us, no longer one way. It’s now two-way. And remember, us and all we’re doing, they have to appreciate what we’ve done to them. We’re going to help, but they have to appreciate what we’ve done for them. The struggle against radical Islam also takes place in our homeland. There are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism. For every case known to the public, there are dozens and dozens more. We must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies. We have no idea where these people are coming from. There’s no documentation. There’s no paperwork. There’s nothing. We have to be smart. We have to be vigilant.

A pause for reassessment will help us to prevent the next San Bernardino or frankly, much worse. All you have to do is look at the World Trade Center and September 11th, one of the great catastrophes, in my opinion, the single greatest military catastrophe in the history of our country; worse than Pearl Harbor because you take a look at what’s happened, and citizens were attacked, as opposed to the military being attacked — one of the true great catastrophes.

And then there’s ISIS. I have a simple message for them. Their days are numbered. I won’t tell them where and I won’t tell them how. We must…

(APPLAUSE)

… we must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We’re sending troops. We tell them. We’re sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now.

But they’re going to be gone. ISIS will be gone if I’m elected president. And they’ll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly.

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy. The Russians and Chinese have rapidly expanded their military capability, but look at what’s happened to us. Our nuclear weapons arsenal, our ultimate deterrent, has been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization and renewal. And it has to happen immediately. Our active duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today. The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during this same period of time. The Air Force is about one-third smaller than 1991. Pilots flying B-52s in combat missions today. These planes are older than virtually everybody in this room.

And what are we doing about this? President Obama has proposed a 2017 defense budget that in real dollars, cuts nearly 25 percent from what we were spending in 2011. Our military is depleted and we’re asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming.

We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest, single investment we can make. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned, and I mean unquestioned, by anybody and everybody.

But we will look for savings and spend our money wisely. In this time of mounting debt, right now we have so much debt that nobody even knows how to address the problem. But I do. No one dollar can be wasted. Not one single dollar can we waste. We’re also going to have to change our trade, immigration and economic policies to make our economy strong again. And to put Americans first again.

This will ensure that our own workers, right here in America, get the jobs and higher pay that will grow our tax revenues, increase our economic might as a nation, make us strong financially again. So, so important. We need to think smart about areas where our technological superiority, and nobody comes close, gives us an edge.

This includes 3D printing, artificial intelligence and cyber warfare. A great country also takes care of its warriors. Our commitment to them is absolute, and I mean absolute. A trump administration will give our servicemen and women the best equipment and support in the world when they serve and where they serve. And the best care in the world when they return as veterans and they come back home to civilian life. Our veterans…

(APPLAUSE)

Our veterans have not been treated fairly or justly. These are our great people and we must treat them fairly. We must even treat them really, really well and that will happen under the Trump administration.

(APPLAUSE)

Finally, we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests. Businesses do not succeed when they lose sight of their core interests and neither do countries. Look at what happened in the 1990s. Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — and this was a horrible time for us — were attacked. and 17 brave sailors were killed on the USS Cole.

And what did we do? It seemed we put more effort into adding China into the World Trade organization, which has been a total disaster for the United States. Frankly, we spent more time on that than we did in stopping Al Qaida. We even had an opportunity to take out Osama bin Laden and we didn’t do it

And then we got hit at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, the worst attack on our country in its history. Our foreign policy goals must be based on America’s core national security interests. And the following will be my priorities.

In the Middle East our goals must be, and I mean must be, to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change. We need to be clear sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies. And believe me, we have groups that no matter what you do, they will be the enemy.

TRUMP: We have to be smart enough to recognize who those groups are, who those people are, and not help them. And we must only be generous to those that prove they are indeed our friends.

(APPLAUSE)

We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests.

Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism. I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.

Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can’t make a deal under my administration, a deal that’s great — not good, great — for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It’s as simple as that. We’re going to find out.

Fixing our relations with China is another important step — and really toward creating an even more prosperous period of time. China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect.

We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They’re not supposed to be doing it.

No respect for this country or this president. We can both benefit or we can both go our separate ways. If need be, that’s what’s going to have to happen.

After I’m elected president, I will also call for a summit with our NATO allies and a separate summit with our Asian allies. In these summits, we will not only discuss a rebalancing of financial commitments, but take a fresh look at how we can adopt new strategies for tackling our common challenges. For instance, we will discuss how we can upgrade NATO’s outdated mission and structure, grown out of the Cold War to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism.

(APPLAUSE)

I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. But if America fights, it must only fight to win.

(APPLAUSE)

I will never sent our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V.

(APPLAUSE)

Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction. The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy. With President Obama and Secretary Clinton we’ve had the exact opposite — a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy, one that has blazed the path of destruction in its wake.

After losing thousands of lives and spending trillions of dollars, we are in far worst shape in the Middle East than ever, ever before. I challenge anyone to explain the strategic foreign policy vision of Obama/Clinton. It has been a complete and total disaster.

I will also be prepared to deploy America’s economic resources. Financial leverage and sanctions can be very, very persuasive, but we need to use them selectively and with total determination.

TRUMP: Our power will be used if others do not play by the rules. In other words, if they do not treat us fairly. Our friends and enemies must know that if I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce that line in the sand. Believe me.

(APPLAUSE)

However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength. Although not in government service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, very proudly, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East. Sadly, I was correct, and the biggest beneficiary has been has been Iran, who is systematically taking over Iraq and gaining access to their very rich oil reserves, something it has wanted to do for decades.

And now, to top it off, we have ISIS. My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations. That’s why I also look and have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war. We have to look to new people.

(APPLAUSE)

We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing, even though they may look awfully good writing in the New York Times or being watched on television.

Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.

(APPLAUSE)

These are my goals as president. I will seek a foreign policy that all Americans, whatever their party, can support, so important, and which our friends and allies will respect and totally welcome. The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends become allies, that’s what we want. We want them to be our allies.

We want the world to be — we want to bring peace to the world. Too much destruction out there, too many destructive weapons. The power of weaponry is the single biggest problem that we have today in the world.

To achieve these goals, Americans must have confidence in their country and its leadership. Again, many Americans must wonder why we our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than in defending their own. Americans…

(APPLAUSE)

Americans must know that we’re putting the American people first again on trade.

(APPLAUSE)

So true. On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy. The jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority.

(APPLAUSE)

No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must start doing the same. We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism. The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down and will never enter…

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: And under my administration, we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.

(APPLAUSE)

NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the United States and has emptied our states — literally emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. And I’ve just gotten to see it. I’ve toured Pennsylvania. I’ve toured New York. I’ve toured so many of the states. They have been cleaned out. Their manufacturing is gone.

Never again, only the reverse — and I have to say this strongly — never again; only the reverse will happen. We will keep our jobs and bring in new ones. There will be consequences for the companies that leave the United States only to exploit it later. They fire the people. They take advantage of the United States. There will be consequences for those companies. Never again.

Under a Trump administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of a foreign country.

(APPLAUSE)

I will view as president the world through the clear lens of American interests. I will be America’s greatest defender and most loyal champion. We will not apologize for becoming successful again, but will instead embrace the unique heritage that makes us who we are.

The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest. America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.

(APPLAUSE)

And always — always, always, we must make, and we have to look at it from every angle, and we have no choice, we must make America respected again. We must make America truly wealthy again. And we must — we have to and we will make America great again. And if we do that — and if we do that, perhaps this century can be the most peaceful and prosperous the world has ever, ever known. Thank you very much, everybody. I appreciate it. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you.

..

3. COMPILATION OF US MEDIA COMMENTARY ON TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY PERSPECTIVE

New York Times:

Donald Trump’s Strange World View – Editorial Board (April 27, 2016)

When one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when one’s experience is limited to real estate deals, everything looks like a lease negotiation. Hearing Mr. Trump describe his approach to foreign relations, one imagines a group of nations sitting at a table with him at its head, rather like a scene from “The Apprentice,” with him demanding more money, more troops and policy changes in exchange for American protection, trade and friendship. And if he doesn’t get what he wants? “In negotiation, you must be willing to walk,” Mr. Trump said.

“Mr. Trump says he knows how to negotiate, and to him that seems to mean putting forward maximal positions that he can then walk back. That won’t work in foreign policy. Mr. Trump did not display any willingness to learn or to correct his past errors. For someone who claims he is ready to lead the free world, that is inexcusable.

Washington Post

Trump’s crazy attempt not to sound crazy – Dana Milbank (April 27, 2016)

Trump, who routinely mocks President Obama and Hillary Clinton for using a teleprompter and who said that presidential candidates “should not be allowed to use a teleprompter,” used a teleprompter.

He carefully read a speech somebody else had written, demonstrated both by his lack of familiarity with the content — he pronounced Tanzania as “Tan-ZANY-uh” — and by its un-Trumpian phrases such as “the false song of globalism” and “the clear lens of American interests.” This speech was at an eighth-grade comprehension level, five years beyond Trump’s usual.”

Trump’s hosts, a conservative foreign-policy think tank dedicated to Nixonian realism, were only somewhat more hospitable. Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the center’s publication, the National Interest, has written that “a Trump presidency would likely be a foreign policy debacle.”

The group’s vice chairman, Dov Zakheim, signed a letter with other GOP foreign-policy leaders calling Trump and his policies “unmoored,” a “recipe for economic disaster,” “inexcusable,” “hateful,” “unacceptable,” “fundamentally dishonest” and “a distinct threat to civil liberty in the United States” and calling him “utterly unfitted” to be president.

Perhaps the most unnerving promise Trump made was his determination to be erratic. “We must as a nation be more unpredictable,” he said. “We have to be unpredictable, and we have to be unpredictable starting now.”

On this vow, Trump has already made good — and that’s just the problem.

USA Today

Trump’s unreal foreign policy: Our view – Editorial Board (April 27, 2016)

As with The Apprentice, the show that helped him become a household name, the Republican front-runner sought to provide appealing fare for a certain class of people. In this case, the primary audience was voters opposed to trade, resentful of immigrants, distrustful of foreign governments, and wistful for a time when America wielded more power in a simpler world.

In reaching out to this group, Trump vividly portrayed a world that does not exist: America’s allies would be more respectful after being lectured to, while its enemies would be dealt with by bluster. China would fall into line after enduring unspecified economic pressure. And troubled regions of the world would be stabilized through U.S. disengagement.

Trump’s secondary audience was the Washington establishment, the equivalent of TV critics. And the early reviews were harsh. On CNN, foreign policy experts Fareed Zakaria and David Rothkopf used the same word: incoherent. Fellow Republican Lindsey Graham tweeted, “Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy, but I can understand why he’s not revealing their names.

In Trump’s worldview, things happen because he says they will. He made a number of proclamations to this effect. His unspecified plan to defeat the Islamic State terrorist group echoed Richard Nixon’s secret plan in 1968 to win the Vietnam War. ISIL “will be gone if I’m elected president,” Trump vowed, ” And they’ll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly.

Things might happen that way on TV. But not in reality. Or perhaps we should say real reality.

The Atlantic

Trump’s Incoherent Foreign-Policy Plans – Russell Berman (April 27, 2016)

So that is what a “presidential” Donald Trump looks like.

The Republican frontrunner delivered the most scripted, and stilted, speech of his 10-month presidential campaign on Wednesday. He used a teleprompter. He spoke softly and deliberately. And at different points in the nearly 40-minute address, he pledged as president to develop a foreign policy that would both be “unpredictable” and “consistent.”

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, picked up on Trump’s mispronunciation of Tanzania—he called it Tan-ZAY-nia. “Apparently the phonetics are not included with the TelePrompter,” Earnest said.

At times, he ad-libbed a “Not good!” or “Bad!” or “A mess!”—as if to signal to his fans that it was really him speaking, not some low-energy impostor with a battery missing.

Washington Times

Pundits rip, ridicule Trump’s foreign policy speech – Kelly Riddell (April 27, 2016)

There’s a group of conservative pundits – and some in the media – who, no matter what businessman Donald Trump says, will view it with a certain smugness and disdain.

Before Mr. Trump even finishes a speech, they’ll say he’s wrong, didn’t bother to fact check, ignorant or cringe-worthy. What they don’t seem to realize is, it’s their own self-righteousness that the American public despises, and why trust in the media remains at historical lows.

On Wednesday, before Mr. Trump even finished his first foreign policy speech, the pundits reviews were in, and they were bad.

I mean it. I have literally less of an idea what Trump thinks about foreign policy after this speech,” wrote Hayes Brown, the world news editor and reporter at BuzzFeed, who obviously is a foreign policy expert.

Ana Navarro, a conservative pundit on CNN and former Florida Sen. Marco Rubio supporter wrote: “Trump said he wasn’t going to change, act more ‘presidential.’ Judging from incoherent foreign policy speech…yes, he kept his promise.”

John Noonan, who worked national security for former presidential contender Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney was equally as dismissing.

“Trump has said one thing I buy. That he will introduce unpredictability to US foreign policy. Based on this speech, my God is that true,” Mr. Noonan tweeted.

David Rennie, the Washington Bureau Chief of the Economist, was also unimpressed.

“Trump doctrine-mercantilism, nationalism, Russophilia, distrust of grasping allies-is basically @PatrickBuchananwithout the book-learning,” he wrote.

Andrew Kirell, a senior editor at the Daily Beast, questioned Mr. Trump’s authenticity – you know, because he’s in the position to question.

“Genuinely curious: How does reading a speech someone else wrote for you mean you’re suddenly serious on policy?” Mr. Kirell tweeted.

The list goes on, trust me.

Who’d have thought all of these foreign-policy experts and pundits would be absolutely wigged out at the prospect of making America first? Perhaps they need to get off Twitter and get more in touch with the American public.

Because obviously, Mr. Trump’s message – and not theirs – is the one that’s registering.

FOX News

It’s what was left unsaid in Trump’s speech that matters most – Judith Miller (April 27, 2016)

It is unclear whether the speech will reverse the perception abroad of Mr. Trump as a foreign policy amateur, a businessman too ignorant of world affairs and ill-disciplined to learn about them – “Berlusconi with nukes,” as one foreign pundit called him, a reference to Italy’s flamboyant, controversial ex-prime minister.

Again and again, he vowed to move toward an “America first” model in domestic and foreign policy, seemingly unaware that “America First” was the slogan of the isolationists who fought to prevent Roosevelt from aiding Britain and other allies threatened with Nazi and Japanese aggression prior to World War II.

Foreign Policy

In Foreign Policy Speech, @realDonaldTrump Comes Through Despite Efforts To Appear Presidential – Molly O’Toole (April 27, 2016)

Gone were most of the characteristic one-liners and mud slinging.

The speech also offered a look at Trump’s emerging worldview: That an anti-interventionist, nativist foreign policy that gives rise to economic and military power alike can be wielded as a bludgeon against allies and enemies. On the campaign trail, however, Trump wraps his views in conservative Republican red meat about “radical Islamic terrorism” and hawkish bluster on military force.

Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and former State Department official who has helped organize Republican national security experts around a “Never Trump” push, said if Trump’s intention was to recast himself as presidential, the speech was “a failure.”

Trump’s speech was “the usual mixture of bombast, braggadocio, self-contradiction, and assertions that only he understands, and only he can rescue the United States,” Cohen told Foreign Policy.

“When you’ve got votes, you don’t need endorsements,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s only supporter in the Senate. His colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is reluctantly backing Sen. Ted Cruz, could not have agreed less. Graham tweeted of the speech: “Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.”

National Review

Trump’s ‘Foreign Policy’: Incoherent and Shallow – Andrew C. McCarthy (April 27, 2016)

You see, while conservative Republicans (like your humble correspondent) were pleading that we should stay out of Libya — that we should avoid siding with, arming, and training the “rebel” forces (the popular Washington euphemism for the Libyan mujahideen) — Donald Trump was squarely on the wrong side, demanding that Obama take action to overthrow Qaddafi.

[Libya] fell apart because, just like you, the bipartisan Beltway ruling class — whose pockets you’ve been lining for decades — is willfully blind to the difference between “civilians” and Islamists, including the violent jihadists they inevitably breed. The country fell apart because Obama did what you demanded: He bombed Libya to get rid of its dictator — aggression that was neither authorized by Congress (which the “oust Qaddafi” crowd refused to consult) nor endorsed by a U.N. mandate (which approved only the protection of civilians, not toppling of the regime).

What is incoherent, though, is populism — Trump’s brand. It is knee-jerk demagoguery: Say whatever will get a rise out of the masses; don’t fret over whether it is at odds with whatever bromide you’ve previously spouted; and, when called on the inconsistencies attack the messenger.

The Nation

Trump Attempted a Foreign Policy Makeover Today. Did it Work? (Who’s advising this guy?) – James Carden (April 27, 2016)

[P]erhaps unintentionally evoking Nixon’s “madman theory,” Trump declared that, as regards foreign relations, “we have to be unpredictable.” This, and much else besides, raises the question: Who’s advising this guy? It would be hard to believe, given the content of the speech, that the realists of the National Interest (think-tank) are informing Trump’s foreign-policy vision.

Trump noted that one of those shared interests [with Russia and China] is fighting terrorism; Russia, he said, “has seen the horror of Islamic terrorism.” The idea that the United States and Russia actually have some common interests must have cheered the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak, who was watching from the front row.

Nevertheless, the speech was, on balance, a confused and muddled effort. And yet, what does it say that it was less hawkish than anything the presumptive Democratic nominee [Hillary Clinton] has said on foreign policy thus far?

New Republic

Donald Trump’s big foreign policy speech was a little Dangerfield, a little Tan-ZAYN-ia – Ryu Spaeth (April 27, 2016)

Attempting to sum up Trump’s foreign policy vision is an impossible task. He declared that America is “finally going to have a coherent foreign policy,” but literally nothing could be less coherent than the rambling, uncharacteristically telepromptered speech he gave today.

He said America should resist “the false song of globalism.” He referred to Tanzania as Tan-ZAYN-ia. He made sense only in snatches, and even these rare moments of common sense were contradicted. Will his supporters care? They don’t seem to…

Breitbart

This Is the Donald Trump That Could Win 40 States – Virgil (April 27, 2016)

In his 38-minute address, Trump got right down to it: “It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy.  It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold, something we have to do.”

That is, indeed, the sort of new broom that the voters have been looking for; it has animated not only the Trump campaign but also, we can observe, the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) campaign.

Yes, we’ve had quite enough of “experts” who get their “genius” thoughts published in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, thereby shaping the failed foreign policies of the last three presidents.

As Trump said, under his leadership, “If America fights, it will only fight to win… victory with a capital ‘V.’” In the preceding sentence, we might note, first, the “if” and, second, the “V” for “Victory.” It’s thus easy to see Trump sewing up the military vote, which is generally Republican.  So sorry, Huffington Post, your attempt to stir the politico-military pot is not going to succeed.

Huffington Post

Donald Trump’s Frighteningly Erratic Foreign Policy Speech – Jon Soltz (April 27, 2016)

In his first foray into foreign policy and military policy, Trump delivered one clear message – he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care enough to think up his own thoughts.

He doesn’t even care enough to make sure that the words being pumped onto his teleprompter and out of his mouth make any sense.

I’ve heard him take more interest and command in talking about the tacky Trump Doral resort than anything in today’s speech. That tells me, as a Commander-in-Chief, he really won’t care too much about what orders are delivered down to the men and women in uniform, in his name. It gives me no confidence that he would even care to hear about what the military is doing out in the field.

TIME

Donald Trump and the Rise of Loudmouth Politics – Joe Klein (April 27, 2016)

Donald Trump has overturned American politics in ways we can’t even imagine yet. His signature policies—building the wall, banning the Muslims, a trade war with the Chinese and Mexicans—are ridiculous, but his signature style has rendered the status quo in American politics obsolete.

I am certain that there are hundreds of young, over-ambitious, would-be politicians out there who are taking lessons from Trump in how to behave, how to make a splash. It will not be hard for them to move on from the relatively staid, marketing-muffled state of our politics: antic egotism is not a quality foreign to most politicians. We seem destined to suffer a loudmouth politics in the years to come…until, at least,

something really serious happens,

as opposed to our current splay of trumped-up crises,

and the absolute need for political sobriety—

—the need to make real tough life and death decisions—reasserts itself once more.

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] “Donald Trump’s Strange World View”. Editorial Board of the New York Times. April 27, 2016.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/opinion/donald-trump-to-world-im-willing-to-walk.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

[2] “Trump’s crazy attempt not to sound crazy”. Dana Milbank. Washington Post. April 27, 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-crazy-attempt-not-to-sound-crazy/2016/04/27/bf275902-0cb0-11e6-bfa1-4efa856caf2a_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

[3] “Trump’s unreal foreign policy: Our view”. Editorial Board of USA Today. April 27, 2016.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/04/27/donald-trump-foreign-policy-isil-china-editorials-debates/83608222/

[4] “Pundits rip, ridicule Trump’s foreign policy speech”. Kelly Riddell. Washington Times. April 27, 2016.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/27/donald-trump-foreign-policy-speech-ridiculed-rippe

[5] “It’s what was left unsaid in Trump’s speech that matters most “. Judith Miller. FOX News. April 27, 2016.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/04/27/judith-miller-it-s-what-was-left-unsaid-in-trump-s-speech-that-matters-most.html

[6] “Trump’s Incoherent Foreign-Policy Plans”. Russell Berman. The Atlantic. April 27, 2016.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-trump-doctrine-is-america-first/480204

[7] “In Foreign Policy Speech, @realDonaldTrump Comes Through Despite Efforts To Appear Presidential”. Molly O’Toole. Foreign Policy. April 27, 2016.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/27/in-foreign-policy-speech-realdonaldtrump-comes-through-despite-efforts-to-appear-presidential/

[8] “Trump’s ‘Foreign Policy’: Incoherent and Shallow”. Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review. April 27, 2016.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434660/donald-trump-foreign-policy-incoherent-shallow

[9] “Trump Attempted a Foreign Policy Makeover Today. Did it Work? (Who’s advising this guy?). James Carden. The Nation. April 27, 2016

http://www.thenation.com/article/trump-attempted-a-foreign-policy-makeover-today-did-it-work/

[10] “Donald Trump’s big foreign policy speech was a little Dangerfield, a little Tan-ZAYN-ia” – Ryu Spaeth. New Republic. April 27, 2016

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133131/donald-trumps-big-foreign-policy-speech-little-dangerfield-little-tan-zayn-ia

[11] “This Is the Donald Trump That Could Win 40 States”. Virgil. Breitbart. April 27, 2016.

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/04/27/donald-trump-win-40-states/

[12] ”Donald Trump’s Frighteningly Erratic Foreign Policy Speech”. Jon Soltz. Huffington Post. April 27, 2016.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-soltz/donald-trumps-frightening_b_9790058.html

[13] “Donald Trump and the Rise of Loudmouth Politics”. Joe Klein. TIME. April 27, 2016.

http://time.com/4309663/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-2/?xid=homepage

Good to see that history, if it does not possess historical cunning, as Hegel rather foolishly observed, has, at the very least, some humour. US President Barack Obama has been busy making it his business to make sure that Britain remains in the European Union after the referendum elections of June. The urging has all the meaning of a Wall Street plea. If Britain leaves, there will be instability. A world of chaos will ensue.

Obama in imperial mode has been some sight. Armed with words of condescension, he has treated Britons in a fashion they are rarely used to: being lectured as subjects in need of a good intellectual thrashing. For years, the nostalgic establishment Briton has become the supposedly sagacious backer of US power in various parts of the planet. The US has been assured that it can count on vassal insurance when Washington’s more bizarre imperial failures come to light.

The mood from Obama on Friday was, however, not so breezy and confident. He had one target in mind: Brexit, and the consequences that might arise from it. The Vote Leavers’ campaign favouring Britain’s exit from EU torpor and pseudo-tyranny took a considerable battering.

Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian observed that the Vote Leavers premise of finding that other symbolically appropriate wife – the US of the “Anglosphere”, rather than the more problematic European Continentals – was shattered. The Obama White House “spelled out that America had no intention of forming some new, closer relationship with Brexited Britain.”[1]

Should Britain, he suggested in a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, decide to exit the troubled bosom of Europe, it would place the country “in the back of the queue” when coming to forging a new trade deal with the US. (This, on its own, might not be such a bad thing, given the nasties that lurk within the current trade proposals.)

Then came the treading upon an article of faith: Britain’s incurable obsession with the Second World War. Obama decided to issue a reminder to his hosts on the US gaze upon Europe – and a Europe free of internal squabbles. “The tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries are a silent testament to just how intertwined our prospect and security truly are.”

The papers were full of scornful reproach, though they tended to centre on opinions favouring a departure. Those wanting to leave Europe were a mix of fury and desperation, while those urging a stay vote were happy to allow Obama much leg, and fist room. What is at stake in the debate is not a truly sovereign Britain, so much as who is the best overlord in the business.

Former Tory cabinet minister Liam Fox, for one, wished that Obama consider British views on the subject for a change. He proved so keen to force the point he managed to gather a hundred MP signatures for a letter to the US ambassador to the UK urging the White House to keep its nose out of Britannia’s sacred business. The hegemon’s views on the subject would have to be silenced.

The US, he argued, would never permit a foreign court to overrule the decision of Congress. “The president is, of course, welcome to his view when the US has an open border with Mexico, a supreme court in Toronto and the US budget set by a pan-American committee.” This otherwise meaningless distinction did shore up one vital point: a foreign power, fraternal, brutal and intrusive, was showing its hand in the domestic affairs of a client state.

The noisy anti-EU leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, abandoned any sense of compunction altogether.

“Mercifully, this American president, who is the most anti-British American president there has ever been, won’t be in office for much longer, and I hope will be replaced by somebody rather more sensible when it comes to trading relationships with this country.”[2]

The Telegraph ran with a dominant headline about the president’s “woeful ignorance” in the damage the EU is said to be doing to Britain’s security. Naturally, that allegation came straight from Penny Mordaunt, whose brief on the subject of keeping Obama at bay was made crystal clear during the president’s visit. As Armed Forces minister, Mordaunt has little time for European institutional functions, seeing devils across the continent that need bottling.

Mordaunt’s political pedigree on this point should be noted. Having been reared by experience working for George W. Bush, whose grasp of security issues was always shaky at best, her propensity to see dangers everywhere starts making political sense. It is reactionary to the highest degree, a condition that sees enemies as viral phenomena and liberties as abstractions to be regarded with suspicion.

The European Court of Justice, for instance, had an alarming tendency to throw the book of laws at the ability of the US and Britain to share intelligence (read, pinching it from others). Bulk-sharing of intelligence remains an ideological point of contention, never mind the fact that the actual nature of such indiscriminate gathering undermines cardinal principles of efficiency.

Obama’s view that the EU was actually a vehicle for magnifying British influence was dismissed sheer geopolitical fiction. “Unfortunately,” signed Mordaunt, “this opinion betrays a woeful ignorance of the practical reality of the EU’s impact on our security, and the interests of the UK and the US.”[3]

The storm of disagreement with the current White House approach continued with views that Obama had confused the virtues of “collective action and defence through Nato with the integration-at-all-costs-and-damn-the-consequences ideology that too often motivates the EU.”

What has emerged on this presidential tour is a list of political realities. Imperial centres will lecture their irresponsible satellites; hidden power will eventually manifest itself in speech and warning, and the only thing left, irrespective of which side of the debate one endorses, is that Britain is being roasted by the prong of the EU and the strategic thrust of the United States. Either way, a truly sovereign Britain is hardly likely to eventuate.

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

Notes:

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/22/barack-obama-crush-brexit-fantasy-eu-referendum

[2] http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/661483/Barack-Obama-Brexit-interference-Liam-Fox-Nigel-Farage-warning

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/barack-obamas-views-betray-a-woeful-ignorance-on-the-impact-of-t/

Not long ago I wrote that every American institution, public and private, is corrupt.  

And every week Robert Parry’s reports prove the truth of my statement.

In his latest,  http://www.globalresearch.ca/from-brady-to-mh-17-power-defines-reality/5522142 ,

Parry says that “Power – far more than fact – determines what is defined as true in America, a nation that has become dangerously disconnected from reality in matters both trivial and important.”  To illustrate he uses the orchestrated “Deflategate” scandal and the orchestrated MH-17 storyline.

It was nearly three years ago that the Malaysian airliner MH-17 was shot down over the Ukraine. US Secretary of State John Kerry immediately declared that the US had complete proof that the Russians were involved.  Kerry has never released the “proof,” which tells us that a US Secretary of State again lied to the world.

The black boxes were recovered undamaged:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mh17-crash-black-boxes-show-plane-suffered-massive-explosive-decompression-following-shrapnel-hit-9632881.html

However, the investigation was taken out of the hands of the indepenent international body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and given, at Washington’s insistance, to the Dutch, with the rationale that so many of the victims were Dutch.

The real reason is that it is easy for Washington to control the Dutch.  After three years there is  still no conclusive report.  During this time Washington has succeeded via propaganda in placing the blame on the Russian separatists and Putin.

I addressed the issue contemporaneously:

July 19, 2014

What Happened to the Malaysian Airliner?

Paul Craig Roberts

Washington’s propaganda machine is in such high gear that we are in danger of losing the facts that we do have.

One fact is that the separatists do not have the expensive Buk anti-aircraft missile system or the trained personnel to operate it.

Another fact is that the separatists have no incentive to shoot down an airliner and neither does Russia. Anyone can tell the difference between low-flying attack aircraft and an airliner at 33,000 feet.

The Ukrainians do have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems, and a Buk battery was operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.

Just as the separatists and the Russian government have no incentive to shoot down an airliner, neither does the Ukrainian government nor, one would think, even the crazed extreme Ukrainian nationalists who have formed militias to take the fight against the separatists that the Ukrainian army is not keen to undertake–unless there was a plan to frame Russia.

One Russian general familiar with the weapon system offered his opinion that it was a mistake made by the Ukrainian military untrained in the weapon’s use. The general said that although Ukraine has a few of the weapons, Ukrainians have had no training in their use in the 23 years since Ukraine separated from Russia. The general thinks it was an accident due to incompetence.

This explanation makes a certain amount of sense and far more sense than Washington’s propaganda. The problem with the general’s explanation is that it does not explain why the Buk anti-aircraft missile system was deployed near or in a separatist territory. The separatists have no aircraft. It seems odd for Ukraine to have an expensive missile system in an area in which it is of no military use and where the position could be overrun and captured by separatists.

As Washington, Kiev, and the presstitute media are committed to the propaganda that Putin did it, we are not going to get any reliable information from the US media. We will have to figure it out for ourselves.

One way to begin is to ask: Why was the missile system where it was? Why risk an expensive missile system by deploying it in a conflict environment in which it is of no use? Incompetence is one answer, and another is that the missile system did have an intended use.

What intended use? News reports and circumstantial evidence provide two answers. One is that the ultra-nationalist extremists intended to bring down Putin’s presidential airliner and confused the Malaysian airliner with the Russian airliner.

The Interfax news agency citing anonymous sources, apparently air traffic controllers, reported that the Malaysian airliner and Putin’s airliner were traveling almost the identical route within a few minutes of one another. Interfax quotes its source: “I can say that Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft at 15:44 Moscow time. The contours of the aircrafts are similar, linear dimensions are also very similar, as for the coloring, at a quite remote distance they are almost identical.”

I have not seen an official Russian denial, but according to news reports, the Russian government in response to the Interfax news report said that Putin’s presidential plane no longer flies the Ukraine route since the outbreak of hostilities.

Before we take the denial at face value, we need to be aware that the implication that Ukraine attempted to assassinate the president of Russia implies war, which Russia wants to avoid. It also implies Washington’s complicity as it is highly unlikely that Washington’s puppet in Kiev would risk such a dangerous act without Washington’s backing. The Russian government, being intelligent and rational, would obviously deny reports of an attempted assassination of the Russian president by Washington and its Kiev puppet. Otherwise, Russia has to do something about it, and that means war.

The second explanation is that the extremists who operate outside the official Ukrainian military, hatched a plot to down an airliner in order to cast the blame on Russia. If such a plot occurred, it likely originated with the CIA or some operative arm of Washington and was intended to force the EU to cease resisting Washington’s sanctions against Russia and to break off Europe’s valuable economic relationships with Russia. Washington is frustrated that its sanctions are unilateral, unsupported by its NATO puppets or any other countries in the world except possibly the lap-dog British PM.

There is considerable circumstantial evidence in support of this second explanation. There is the youtube video which purports to be a conversation between a Russian general and separatists who are discussing having mistakenly brought down a civilian airliner. According to reports, expert examination of the code in the video reveal that it was made the day before the airliner was hit.

Another problem with the video is that whereas we could say that separatists conceivably could confuse an airliner at 33,000 feet with a military attack plane, the Russian military would not. The only conclusion is that by involving the Russian military, the video doubly discredited itself.

The circumstantial evidence easiest for non-technical people to understand is the on cue news programs organized to put the blame on Russia prior to the knowledge of any facts.

In my previous article http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/17/sanctions-airliners-paul-craig-roberts/   I reported on the BBC news report which I heard and which was obviously primed to place all blame on Russia. The program ended with a BBC correspondent breathlessly reporting that he has just seen the youtube video and that the video is the smoking gun that proved Russia did it. There is no longer any doubt, he said. Somehow the information got on a video and on youtube before it reached the Ukrainian government or Washington.

The evidence that Putin did it is a video made prior to the attack on the airliner. The entire BBC report aired over National Public Radio was orchestrated for the sole purpose of establishing prior to any evidence that Russia was responsible.

Indeed the entire Western media spoke as one: Russia did it. And the presstitutes are still speaking the same way.

Possibly, this uniform opinion merely reflects the pavlovian training of the Western media to automatically line up with Washington. No media source wants to be subject to criticism for being unamerican or to find itself isolated by majority opinion, which carries the day, and earn black marks for being wrong. As a former journalist for, and contributor to, America’s most important news publications, I know how this works.

On the other hand, if we discount the pavlovian conditioning, the only conclusion is that the entire news cycle pertaining to the downing of the Malaysian airliner is orchestrated in order to lay the blame on Putin.

Romesh Ratnesar, deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, provides convincing evidence for orchestration in his own remarks of July 17. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-17/the-malaysia-airlines-shootdown-spells-disaster-for-putin?campaign_id=DN071814  Ratnesar’s opinion title is: “The Malaysia Airlines Shootdown Spells Disaster for Putin.”

Ratnesar does not mean that Putin is being framed-up. He means that prior to Putin having the Malaysian airliner shot down, “to the vast majority of Americans, Russia’s meddling in Ukraine has largely seemed of peripheral importance to U.S. interests. That calculus has changed. . . . It may take months, even years, but Putin’s recklessness is bound to catch up to him. When it does, the downing of MH 17 may be seen as the beginning of his undoing.”

As a former Wall Street Journal editor, anyone who handed me propaganda like Ratnesar published would have been fired. Look at the insinuations when there is no evidence to support them. Look at the lie that Washington’s coup is “Russia’s meddling in Ukraine.” What we are witnessing is the total corruption of Western journalism by Washington’s imperial agenda. Journalists have to get on board with the lies or get run over.

Look around for still honest journalists. Who are they? Glenn Greenwald, who is under constant attack by his fellow journalists, all of whom are whores. Who else can you think of? Julian Assange, locked away in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on Washington’s orders. The British puppet government won’t permit free transit to Assange to take up his asylum in Ecuador. The last country that did this was the Soviet Union, which required its Hungarian puppet to keep Cardinal Mindszenty interred in the US Embassy in Budapest for 15 years from 1956 until 1971. Mindszenty was granted political asylum by the United States, but Hungary, on Soviet orders, would not honor his asylum, just as Washington’s British puppet, on Washington’s orders, will not honor Assange’s asylum.

If we are honest and have the strength to face reality, we will realize that the Soviet Union did not collapse. It simply moved, along with Mao and Pol Pot, to Washington and London.

The flaw in Putin’s diplomacy is that Putin’s diplomacy relies on good will and on truth prevailing. However, the West has no good will, and Washington is not interested in truth prevailing but in Washington prevailing. What Putin confronts is not reasonable “partners,” but a propaganda ministry aimed at him.

I understand Putin’s strategy, which contrasts Russian reasonableness with Washington’s threats, but it is a risky bet. Europe has long been a part of Washington, and there are no Europeans in power who have the vision needed to separate Europe from Washington. Moreover, European leaders are paid large sums of money to serve Washington. One year out of office and Tony Blair was worth $50 million dollars.

After the disasters that Europeans have experienced, it is unlikely that European leaders think of anything other than a comfortable existence for themselves. That existence is best obtained by serving Washington. As the successful extortion of Greece by banks proves, European people are powerless.

Here is the official statement of the Russian Defense Ministry: http://www.globalresearch.ca/mh-17-crash-in-ukraine-official-statement-from-russian-defense-ministry/5392000 

Washington’s propaganda assault against Russia is a double tragedy, because it has diverted attention from Israel’s latest atrocity against the Palestinians locked up in the Gaza Ghetto. Israel claims that its air attack and invasion of Gaza is merely Israel’s attempt to find and close the alleged tunnels through which Palestinian terrorists pour into Israel inflicting carnage. One might think that at least one journalist somewhere in the American media would ask why bombing hospitals and civilian housing closes underground tunnels into Israel. But that is too much to ask of the whores that comprise the US media.

Expect even less from the US Congress. Both the House and Senate have passed resolutions supporting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. Two Republicans–the warmonger Lindsey Graham and the disappointing Rand Paul–and two democrats–Bob Menendez and Ben Cardin–sponsored the Senate resolution backing Israel’s premeditated murder of Palestinian women and children. The resolution passed the “exceptional and indispensable” people’s Senate unanimously.

As a reward for its policy of genocide, the Obama regime is immediately transferring $429 million of US taxpayers’ money to Israel to pay for the slaughter.

Contrast the US government’s support for Israel’s war crimes with the propaganda onslaught against Russia based on lies. We are living all over again “Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” “Iranian nukes.”

Washington has lied for so long that it can’t do anything else.

URL to article: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/19/happened-malaysian-airliner-paul-craig-roberts/

I followed up two days later:

July 21, 2014

Guilt By Insinuation

How American propaganda works

Paul Craig Roberts

Why hasn’t Washington joined Russian President Putin in calling for an objective, non-politicized international investigation by experts of the case of the Malaysian jetliner?

The Russian government continues to release facts, including satellite photos showing the presence of Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft missiles in locations from which the airliner could have been brought down by the missile system and documentation that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet rapidly approached the Malaysian airliner prior to its downing. The head of the Operations Directorate of Russian military headquarters said at a Moscow press conference today (July 21) that the presence of the Ukrainian military jet is confirmed by the Rostov monitoring center.

The Russian Defense Ministry pointed out that at the moment of destruction of MH-17 an American satellite was flying over the area. The Russian government urges Washington to make available the photos and data captured by the satellite.

President Putin has repeatedly stressed that the investigation of MH-17 requires “a fully representative group of experts to be working at the site under the guidance of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).” Putin’s call for an independent expert examination by ICAO does not sound like a person with anything to hide.

Turning to Washington Putin stated: “In the meantime, no one [not even the “exceptional nation”] has the right to use this tragedy to achieve their narrowly selfish political goals.”

Putin reminded Washington: “We repeatedly called upon all conflicting sides to stop the bloodshed immediately and to sit down at the negotiating table. I can say with confidence that if military operations were not resumed [by Kiev] on June 28 in eastern Ukraine, this tragedy wouldn’t have happened.”

What is the American response?

Lies and insinuations.

Yesterday (July 20) the US Secretary of State, John Kerry confirmed that pro-Russian separatists were involved in the downing of the Malaysian airliner and said that it was “pretty clear” that Russia was involved. Here are Kerry’s words: “It’s pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia into the hands of separatists. We know with confidence, with confidence, that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point and time, so it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists.”

Kerry’s statement is just another of the endless lies told by US secretaries of state in the 21st century. Who can forget Colin Powell’s package of lies delivered to the UN about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” or Kerry’s lie repeated endlessly that Assad “used chemical weapons against his own people” or the endless lies about “Iranian nukes”?

Remember that Kerry on a number of occasions stated that the US had proof that Assad crossed the “red line” by using chemical weapons. However, Kerry was never able to back up his statements with evidence. The US had no evidence to give the British prime minister whose effort to have Parliament approve Britain’s participation with Washington in a military attack on Syria was voted down. Parliament told the prime minister, “no evidence, no war.”

Again here is Kerry declaring “confidence” in statements that are directly contradicted by the Russian satellite photos and endless eye witnesses on the ground.

Why doesn’t Washington release its photos from its satellite?

The answer is for the same reason that Washington will not release the videos it confiscated and that it claims prove that a hijacked 9/11 airliner hit the Pentagon. The videos do not support Washington’s claim, and the US satellite photos do not support Kerry’s claim.

The UN weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq reported that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. However, the fact did not support Washington’s propaganda and was ignored. Washington started a highly destructive war based on nothing but Washington’s intentional lie

The International Atomic Energy Commission’s inspectors on the ground in Iran and all 16 US intelligence agencies reported that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. However, the fact was inconsistent with Washington’s agenda and was ignored by both the US government and the presstitute media.

We are witnessing the same thing right now with the assertions in the absence of evidence that Russia is responsible for the downing of the Malaysian airliner.

Not every member of the US government is as reckless as Kerry and John McCain. In place of direct lies, many US officials use insinuations.

US Senator Diane Feinstein is the perfect example. Interviewed on the presstitute TV station CNN, Feinstein said: “The issue is where is Putin? I would say, ‘Putin, you have to man up. You should talk to the world. You should say, if this is a mistake, which I hope it was, say it.’”

Putin has been talking to the world nonstop calling for an expert non-politicized investigation, and Feinstein is asking Putin why he is hiding behind silence. We know you did it, Feinstein insinuates, so just tell us whether you meant to or whether it was an accident.

The way the entire Western news cycle was orchestrated with blame instantly being placed on Russia long in advance of real information suggests that the downing of the airliner was a Washington operation. It is, of course, possible that the well-trained presstitute media needed no orchestration from Washington in order to lay the blame on Russia. On the other hand, some of the news performances seem too scripted not to have been prepared in advance.

We also have the advanced preparation of the youtube video that purports to show a Russian general and Ukrainian separatists discussing having mistakenly downed a civilian airliner. As I pointed out earlier, this video is twice damned. It was ready in advance and by implicating the Russian military, it overlooked that the Russian military can tell the difference between a civilian airliner and a military airplane. The existence of the video itself implies that there was a plot to down the airliner and blame Russia.

I have seen reports that the Russian anti-aircraft missile system, as a safety device, is capable of contacting aircraft transponders in order to verify the type of aircraft. If the reports are correct, the transponders from MH-17 might record the contact.

I have seen reports that Ukrainian air control changed the route of MH-17 and directed it to fly over the conflict area. The transponders should also indicate whether this is correct. If so, there clearly is at least circumstantial evidence that this was an intentional act on the part of Kiev, an act which would have required Washington’s blessing.

There are other reports that there is a divergence between the Ukrainian military and the unofficial militias formed by the right-wing Ukrainian extremists who apparently were the first to attack the separatists. It is possible that Washington used the extremists to plot the airliner’s destruction in order to blame Russia and use the accusations to pressure the EU to go along with Washington’s unilateral sanctions against Russia. We do know that Washington is desperate to break up the growing economic and political ties between Russia and Europe.

If it was a plot to down an airliner, any safety device on the missile system could have been turned off so as to give no warning or leave any telltale sign. That could be the reason a Ukrainian fighter was sent to inspect the airliner. Possibly the real target was Putin’s airliner and incompetence in implementing the plot resulted in the destruction of a civilian airliner.

As there are a number of possible explanations, let’s keep open minds and resist Washington’s propaganda until facts and evidence are in. In the very least Washington is guilty of using the incident to blame Russia in advance of the evidence. All Washington has shown us so far are accusations and insinuations. If that is all Washington continues to show us, we will know where the blame resides.

In the meantime, remember the story of the boy who cried “wolf!” He lied so many times that when the wolf did come, no one believed him. Will this be Washington’s ultimate fate?

Instead of declaring war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and Syria, why did Washington hide behind lies? If Washington wants war with Iran, Russia, and China, why not simply declare war? The reason that the US Constitution requires war to begin with a declaration of war by Congress is to prevent the executive branch from orchestrating wars in order to further hidden agendas. By abdicating its constitutional responsibility, the US Congress is complicit in the executive branch’s war crimes. By approving Israel’s premeditated murder of Palestinians, the US government is complicit in Israel’s war crimes.

Ask yourself this question: Would the world be a safer place with less death, destruction and displaced peoples and more truth and justice if the United States and Israel did not exist?

Two days later I followed up again

July 23, 2014

US Intelligence: Russia Didn’t Do It

Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/23/us-intelligence-evidence-russia-paul-craig-roberts/

A flood of uncontrolled war refugees from Syria, Libya, Tunisia and other Muslim countries destabilized by Washington’s ‘Arab Spring’ Color Revolutions, has created the greatest social dislocation across the EU from Germany to Sweden to Croatia since the end of World War II.

By now it has become clear to most that something quite sinister is afoot, something which threatens to destroy the social fabric of the very core of European civilization. What few realize is that the entire drama is being orchestrated, not by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or by faceless EU bureaucrats of the Brussels EU Commission. It is being orchestrated by a cabal of NATO-linked think tanks.

Last October 8, 2015 amid the great stream of hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into Germany from Syria, Tunisia, Libya and other lands, a newly self-confident German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed on a popular German TV program, “I have a plan.” She took the occasion to take a sharp dig at coalition partner, Bavarian CSU head, Horst Seehofer, a stauch critic of Merkel’s open arms refugee position since spring 2015 that saw more than one million refugees enter Germany last year alone.

Since that point, with iron-hard resolve, the German Chancellor has defended the criminal Erdogan regime in Turkey, an essential partner in her “plan.”

Most of the world has looked on with astonishment as she ignored principles of free speech and decided to prosecute publicly a well-known German TV comedian, Jan Böhmermann, for his satirical remarks about the Turkish President. They were astonished as the symbol of European democracy, the German Chancellor, chose to ignore Erdogan’s imprisonment of opposition journalists ands his shutting of Turk opposition media as he proceeded with plans to establish a de facto dictatorship rule within Turkey. They were puzzled as Berlin’s government chose to ignore overwhelming proof that Erdogan and his family were materially aiding and abetting ISIS terrorists within Syria who were in fact creating the war refugee crisis. They were astonished to see her push through an EU committment to give Erdogan’s regime billions of euros to supposedly deal with the refugee flow from Turkish refugee camps across the border into EU neighbor land, Greece and beyond.

The Merkel Plan

All of those seemingly inexplicable actions from the once-pragmatic German leader appear to go back to her embrace of a 14-page document prepared by a network of pro-NATO think-tanks, brazenly titled “The Merkel Plan.”

What the newly-self-confident German Chancellor did not tell her hostess, Anne Will, or her viewers was that “her” plan was given to her just four days earlier, on October 4, in a document already titled The Merkel Plan, by a newly-created and obviously well-financed international think-tank called the European Stability Initiative or ESI. The ESI website showed that it had offices in Berlin, Brussels and in Istanbul, Turkey

Suspiciously, the authors of the ESI plan titled their plan as if it had come from the German Chancellor’s office and not from them. More suspicious is the contents of The Merkel Plan of ESI. In addition to already taking more than one million refugees in 2015, Germany should “agree to grant asylum to 500,000 Syrian refugees registered in Turkey over the coming 12 months.” In addition, “Germany should accept claims from Turkey…and provide safe transport to successful applicants…already registered with the Turkish authorities…” And finally, “Germany should agree to help Turkey obtain visa-free travel in 2016.”

That so-called Merkel Plan was a product of US and NATO-linked think tanks and of governments of NATO member countries or prospective members. The maxim “follow the money trail” is instructive in this case to see who really runs the EU today.

The European Stability Institute (ESI)

The ESI came out of NATO-led efforts to transform South East Europe following the US-instigated war in Yugoslavia during the 1990’s that resulted in the Balkanization of the country and establishment of a major USA and NATO airbase, Camp Bond Steel in Kosovo.

Current ESI Chairman directly responsible for the final Merkel Plan document is Istanbul-based Austrian sociologist, Gerald Knaus. Knaus is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and an Open Society Fellow.

Founded in London in 2007, the ECFR is an imitation of the influential New York Council on Foreign Relations, the think-tank created by the Rockefeller and JP Morgan bankers during the 1919 Versailles peace talks to coordinate an Anglo-American global foreign policy.

In virtually every US State Department-backed Color Revolution since the collapse of the Soviet Union, including in Serbia in 2000, in Ukraine, in Georgia, in China, in Brazil and in Russia, the various offshoots of the Open Society Foundations have been in the shadows financing “democracy” NGOs and activists to install pro-Washington and pro-NATO regimes.

The select members, called Council Members or associates, of the London-based ECFR include ECFR co-chairman Joschka Fischer, former German Green Party Foreign Minister who arm-twisted his party into backing Bill Clinton’s illegal 1999 bombing of Serbia without UN Security Council backing.

Other members of the Council of the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank include former NATO Secretary General, Xavier Solana. It includes former German Defense Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg; Annette Heuser, Executive Director Bertelsmann Stiftung in Washington DC; Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman, Munich Security Conference; Cem Özdemir, chairman, Bündnis90/Die Grünen; Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, German Liberal Party (FDP) MP; Michael Stürmer, Chief Correspondent, Die Welt; Andre Wilkens, Director of Mercator Foundation; Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the European Parliament. Cohn-Bendit, known as “Danny the Red” during the May, 1968 French student riots, was a member of the the autonomist group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle) in Rüsselsheim, Germany along with his close ally, now ECFR chairman, Joschka Fischer. The two went on to found the “realo” wing of the German Greens.

The Open Society Foundations is the network of tax-exempt “democracy-promoting” foundations created to promote “free market” pro-IMF market liberalization of former communist economies that opened the doors for the systematic plundering of invaluable mining and energy assets of those countries. Soros’ Open Society Foundations were also involved in supporting the liberal economic team of Boris Yeltsin including Harvard “Shock Therapy” economist, Jeffrey Sachs, and Yeltsin liberal adviser, Yegor Gaidar.

Already it becomes clear that the “Merkel Plan” is the ECFR Plan in fact. But there is more if we wish to understand the darker agenda behind the plan.

The ESI Funders

The European Stability Initiative think-tank headed by Gerald Knaus is financed by an impressive list of donors. Their website lists them.

The list includes, in addition to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the German Stiftung Mercator, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. ESI funders also include rthe European Commission. Then, curiously enough the funder list for The Merkel Plan includes an organization with the Orwellian name, The United States Institute of Peace.

Some research reveals that the United States Institute of Peace has anything but a peace-loving background. The United States Institute of Peace is chaired by Stephen Hadley, former US National Security Council adviser during the neo-conservative war-waging Bush-Cheney administration. Its Board of Directors includes Ashton B. Carter, current Obama Administration neo-conservative hawkish Secretary of Defense; Secretary of State John Kerry; Major General Frederick M. Padilla, President of the US National Defense University. These are some very seasoned architects of the US Pentagon Full Spectrum Dominance strategy for world military domination.

The “Merkel Plan” authors at the European Stability Initative, in addition to the largesse of Open Society Foundations, list as “core” funder, the German Marshall Fund of the United States. As I describe in my book, The Think Tanks, the German Marshall Fund is anything but German. With its seat in Washington, as I noted in the book,

“It’s an American think tank with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. In point of fact, its agenda is the deconstruction of postwar Germany and more broadly of the sovereign states of the EU to fit them better into the Wall Street globalization agenda.”

The German Marshall Fund of Washington has been involved in the post-1990 USA agenda of regime change around the world in league with the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society Foundations, and the CIA front called USAID. As I describe it in the think tanks book,

“The major focus of the German Marshall Fund according to its 2013 Annual Report was to support the US State Department agenda for so-called democracy-building operations in former communist countries in eastern and south-eastern Europe, from the Balkans to the Black Sea. Significantly their work included Ukraine. In most instances, they worked together with the USAID, widely identified as a CIA front with ties to the State Department, and the Stewart Mott Foundation which gives funds to the US Government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.”

Notably, the same Stewart Mott Foundation is also a funder of the ESI-authored Merkel Plan, as is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

This all should give pause for reflection as to who and for what goals the Merkel-Erdogan deal for dealing with the EU refugee crisis is intended.

Does the Rockefeller-Bush-Clinton faction in the United States intend to use it as a major social engineering experiment to create chaos and social conflict across the EU at the same time their NGOs such as the NED, Freedom House and Open Society Foundations are stirring things up in Syria and Libya and across the Islamic world?

Is Germany, as former US presidential adviser and Rockefeller crony, Zbigniew Brzezinski called her, a “vassal” of US power in the post-1990 world? To date the evidence is pretty strong that that’s the case. The role of US and NATO-linked think tanks is central to get an understanding of how the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union are actually controlled from behind the Atlantic curtain.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

On April 26, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the winner of Australia’s Future Submarine contract. DCNS, a French industrial group that specializes in naval equipment, bested rival Japanese and German companies.

According to the $39 billion contract, DCNS, will build 12 subs to replace and double the size of the Royal Australian Navy’s outdated submarine fleet. The new submarines are set to be built in Adelaide’s ASC shipyard.

DCNS offers to supply a 4,500-tonne diesel-electric version of its 4,700-tonne nuclear-powered Barracuda submarine. The sub with a pump jet-propulsion system offers a quieter traveling capabilities and will be called Shortfin Barracuda. The Shortfin Barracuda is over 90 meters in length and displaces more than 4,000 tons when dived. Shortfin Barracuda is expected to remain in service until the 2060s and the Block 1A platform will be updated and upgraded with new technology developed in France and Australia.

Beyond the economics of the arms trade, however, the project is directly linked to the ambitions of Japan. Japan entered the race with some advantages. Their Soryu class subs are already in service and are a proven design. Japan and Australia are also a part of the US-led block that Washington builds up in the Asia-Pacific region to counter China’s strengthened naval capabilities.

However, Japan’s lack of awareness when it came to work with local Australian shipyards showed. The inability to follow successfully the requirements of intensive participation of the Australian shipyards as a condition of arms tenders likely damaged the chances of success.

Japan believed that the Australian contract would expedite Tokyo’s ascension in the arms export business. Its ambitions have taken a heavy blow. Nevertheless, Japan will continue to operate, making attempts to compete for significant foreign orders in the region and over the world. More important, these attempts to intervene the arms sales market are a part of the ongoing militarization of the island state. Amid the incensement of spending on the so-called “Self-Defense Forces”, Tokyo definitely needs to realize a return on its investment in the defense industry sometime soon.

Obama announced that the US will increase its military presence in Syria by deploying additional special operations forces to the war-torn country, but the administration has been vague on who exactly these troops will train and assist. The White House has to set the record straight, former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof told RT.

This morning, the security forces of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) apprehended a vehicle loaded with a large amount of Israeli-manufactured weapons in Syria’s southern As Swaida’a governorate.

According to military sources, the vehicle was heading towards the western countryside of As Swaida’a. However, it failed to reach its destination due to a SAA ambush which was enabled through intel of local residents.

The vehicle was packed with land mines, RPG’s with ammo, B9 cannons, mortars (120mm, 80mm & 60mm) and grenades; all of which had Hebrew inscription which suggested them to have been provided by Israel. The weapons were likely delivered to Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions in the Golan Heights and then driven to as Swaida’a through the Daraa governorate.

The pro-government forces supported by Russian warplanes continued their operations against terrorist groups in the Lattakia province near the border with the neighboring province of Idlib. Reports said Al-Nusra militants sustained heavy casualties in cliashes with the SAA and the NDF in the outskirts of Kabani on April 26. Up to 45 militants were killed and injured.

In Damascus, the loyalist forces liberated from ISIS militants the Badr Brigade Base near the Dumayr Military Airport. The operation was a part of the ongoing efforts to secure the area of the Syrian capital.

The Russian warplanes conducted air raids against the militant positions near the villages of al-Mansoureh and Khan al-Assal in the Western part of the province of Aleppo. The Russian Air Force also targeted terrorists near the hilltop town of Tal al-Eis. The Syrian Arab Air Force conducted raids against the terrorist positions at the Western outskirts of the Aleppo city including Rashedeen 4.

ISIS seized 5 villages from the the Free Syrian Army and Jabhat Al-Shamiya militants in Northern Aleppo: Tahmoul, Jariz Kafrah, Fayruziyah, Tilal Al-Hussein and Dudiyan. Thus, the ISIS forces are successfully advancing in the direction of Azaz.

We remember, the tensions between ISIS and other militants escalated in Northern Syria after the FSA and its allies violated the ceasefire with the group in an unsuccessful attempt to expand the influence in the border region.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, militants of the al-Nusra Front terrorist group keep on arriving in the north-eastern regions of the Syrian province of Latakia from the territory of Turkey.

Russian Centre for reconciliation in cooperation with the Syrian government provided humanitarian aid to civilians, which had been evacuated from the Idlib province to the city of Latakia. Refugees have received about 2 tons of humanitarian cargos. Specialists of the UN and Red Crescent supported by Syrian leadership have delivered humanitarian convoy to al-Rastan in the province of Homs.

Damascus and Moscow have signed nearly a billion dollars worth of agreements to rebuild war-torn Syria, according to the Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi. The two countries intend to develop energy, trade, finance and other sectors of the economy.

Dear President Rousseff,

Please do not let go! Don’t let the corrupt neoliberal right wing with the help – no, at the instigation of Washington steal your country – take away Brazil from the Brazilians, rip-off and destroy all you and Lula have achieved in the last 14 years, free education, health services, efficient and modern public transportation, a basic social safety net – a more equal society. During the past decade and a half, you were able to distribute the benefits of Brazil’s riches to the majority of Brazilians, slowly turning the tide from the oligarchs, the latifundios – to the people, to those who work the lands, who have built and are still building and are eager to continue building a Brazil for all Brazilians.

The dying beast in the North is roaring; it cannot tolerate a free and autonomous ‘backyard’. A new sort of ‘coups’ is being invented – less blood, more fraud, election fraud, like in Argentina ), and in Venezuela

In the case of Brazil, it is legislative fraud, buying and putting into key positions crook-politicians, like Vice-President Michel Temer and Eduardo Cunha, President of the Lower House, who miraculously ascended (was ‘elected’) to his current position in February 2015 – and this in the midst of the huge, so-called ‘Car Wash’ corruption scandal, in which he is involved with bribes amounting to tens of millions of dollars allegedly from Petrobras. A similar parliamentary impeachment coup was carried out in Uruguay in 2012, removing President Fernando Lugo, by the same US instigators. The pattern is notorious.

The accusations – and proofs – against Eduardo Cunha, are disproportionally graver than the mild accusations of ‘administrative accounting’ manipulation that Dilma Rousseff is alleged having committed. Though there is no proof of this in the case of President Rousseff, every country and its neighbor does it. Among the worst offenders of this practice is the North American creation of NATO in Europe.

Please, Dilma, do not allow the oligarchs and latifundios to return and to run Brazil under the direction of Washington. Mr. Temer has already mentioned how, as new President, he would undo the social benefits and equality you and your predecessor have let Brazilians enjoy; he would return Brazil to the bankers, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and of course to the IMF – back to the debt trap, call it the death knell.

Just look what is happening to your southern neighbor Argentina under the neoliberal, also Washington imposed Mauricio Macri, who is selling the country back to the debt czars, Wall Street, the FED and – of course – also the all commanding IMF. In his four months in government, he has already rolled back Argentina’s economy – some call it ‘fast-forwarded’ – to the levels of 2004 / 2005, with poverty levels at 34% by end of March 2016, up from about 12% last November. Unemployment and inflation are exploding after Macri terminated contracts of over 120,000 state employees, giving an example to private industry to do likewise. He also vowed more was to come.

On the day of his inauguration, 10 December, as he promised before, Macri set the peso afloat, triggering a devaluation of at one point close to 60% (from about 9.4 pesos to the US dollar in November 2015 to 15.8 pesos at the end of February 2016). It has since recovered slightly, hovering presently at around 14 pesos to the dollar (30% devaluation from pre-December 10 levels). The ensuing inflation is enormous, sinking already a vast segment of Argentinians into poverty. And this is only the beginning.

——-

Brazil’s Attorney General, Eduardo Cardozo, declared the impeachment process against you, President Rousseff, illegal. He calls it an attempted ‘coup d’état’

This is done as an outright state delinquency, hardly evidenced anywhere in the world. The Brazilian coup executioners, puppets of the Washington masters, are crooks, with corruption trials around their necks. Yet they proceed, of course with the full in-country political support of the chief instigators sitting in and around the White House in Washington. The world is just a silent onlooker. The six Anglo-Saxon western media giants which literally control 90% of all the ‘news’ consumed by the west, make sure there is no mainstream paper or TV station that dares questioning this flagrantly illegal and anti-democratic process. – If it wasn’t such a horrendous fraud on the Brazilian people, it could be seen as a previously unheard-of laughable political soap opera.

You, Dilma, and Lula have liberated Brazil from western colonization – which was maintained by US-supported military dictatorships during the last century. Don’t let it go back. Defend your position; with force if it must be. I join my friend Andre Vltchek, when he calls on you to use muscle to counter this coup of the neo-oligarchs and latifundios, and protect Brazilians from another onslaught of neoliberal economic fascism

Ban all western mainstream media in Brazil! – This is not censuring ‘free expression’- this is stopping the lie propaganda machine against your government, against your achievements. Prevent the manipulation of people’s minds by the presstitute western communication systems. There is hardly anybody in the world who does not know that this so-called ‘information media’ has nothing to do any more with the old believe of the ‘right to free speech’ and ‘free expression’ as an essential virtue of democracy.

This type of democracy, the one that was thought out by Greek philosophers in Delphi some 2,500 years ago, doesn’t exist anymore. It was hijacked long ago, gradually, almost imperceptibly, by Washington and its allies and vassals. Now it’s a shell of propaganda; words that can be manipulated to fit any believe – and people at large still swallow it as ‘democracy’.

Bring the tanks to the streets, surrounding the ‘Palácio do Planalto’ – by no means for provoking violence, but for showing the President’s power to protect the people and the country from theft by the neo-fascists and foremost from the interests of Washington, who are behind this incredible spectacle of literally ordering and directing a bunch of crooks – criminal crooks that is – to take over Brazil and its riches, as proxies for US interests – and of course, to break apart the block of the BRICS countries that together with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) are seriously threating the western dollar-based casino system.

Brazil is rich alright, in natural resources, and so is Argentina, and so is Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia Ecuador – all of Latin America is rich in those resources the west covets for its lush standard of living and to feed its war machine – almost the only generator of GDP, plus consumption, of course; an endless and ever growing circle of armed conflicts and globe destructive consumption.

The Amazon and Guarani Basins

But what is the particular resource of which Brazil has arguably one of the largest reservoirs? Water. Fresh water. Water fit for drinking after relatively simple purification. The entire Amazon Basin, almost half of the country’s surface, is covered with a nearly endless stream of waterways. The FAO estimates that about 12% of the world’s surface fresh water is located in Brazil. This amounts to a total of about 8.2 billion cubic meters (BCM) per year, of renewable water, of which 6.3 BCM originate in Brazil. This corresponds to a per capita availability of more than 43,000 m3 per year, compared with the world average of about 8,200 m3. – In addition, Brazil counts with 112,000 km3 of good quality renewable groundwater.

Another little known, and especially little talked about fresh water groundwater reserve is the Guarani aquifer, named after the Guarani people. It covers 1.2 million km2 and lays beneath the surface of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Its water volume is estimated at 37,000 km3 (37 BCM), by far exceeding the surface water in Brazil. It is arguably the world’s largest single body of underground water, with an annual recharge rate of an estimated 170 km3 (The Great Artesian Basin in Australia, below 23% of the Continent’s surface, contains about 65,000 km3 (65 BCM) of fresh water, but is not comprised in a single aquifer and is vulnerable to cyclical droughts).

These enormous water reservoirs are invaluable. They far exceed already today the value of all the world’s known hydrocarbon deposits. In less than 20 years the earth is expected to suffer serious water shortages. Some areas have suffered from water scarcities already for years, and they are growing and expanding gradually to other regions of the globe.

Not because water is actually disappearing from the world’s ecosystems. Not at all. The total amount of water on Mother Earth is constant. But it is ever more contaminated by our consumption and greed driven industry. The powers that be, and responsible for most of the resources’ pollution, know about it, and are attempting to appropriate the still existing unspoiled waters to feed their elites, when We, the People, are perishing from lack of water and lack of food due to lack of water.

No wonder, the Unites States of Chaos and Greed has a vital but, of course, unspoken interest in these water resources, especially those in its southern ‘backyard’. One could revise Henry Kissinger’s infamous edict on controlling the world, ‘who controls the water controls the universe’.

Dear Dilma – please do not let go! – Do not allow the neo-fascist elite, driven by the northern empire take over your country, the country of Brazilians, and their invaluable resources – especially humanity’s lifeline – water.

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.

On April 27th, NATO member-state Turkey, which on 24 November 2015 had shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet near the Syria-Turkey border, refused Russia’s request to investigate Turkey’s having murdered the surviving Russian pilot. (The plane’s weapons-systems officer was rescued, but the pilot was shot dead while parachuting down from the plane.)

Turkey admits having in custody the man, Alparslan Celik, who murdered the parachuting pilot. On April 25th, Turkish authorities had said that they might try Celik for murder; but, now, the Turkish Ambassador in Moscow says Turkey won’t. 

 Also related to the step-up to war, Russia has reported on April 25th, that it’s responding to America’s recently announced quadrupling of its troops and armaments in the Baltic republics on and near Russia’s northwestern Black Sea borders, by Russia’s sending “more than ten” warships of its own to coastal waters there, for “training exercises,” just as the U.S. troops and weapons are likewise there for “training exercises”, as both sides prepare for an increasingly likely war between NATO and Russia.

 If such war occurs, it will be World War III; so, that’s where things are heading, unless and until these escalations reverse on both sides, to avert it.

 U.S. President Barack Obama gives, as his cause for his economic sanctions against Russia and for NATO’s subsequent increases in men and materiel being stationed on and near Russia’s borders, what Obama calls Russia’s ‘seizure’ of Crimea from Ukraine. The Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev had transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, but polls of Crimeans always showed overwhelming public opposition to that, and this opposition became especially intense right after the Obama Administration’s coup in Ukraine in February 2014 overthrew with much bloodshed Ukraine’s freely elected President Viktor Yanukovych, for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted. That’s when Crimeans asked Russia to protect them. Russia complied, and Obama and NATO call that restoration of Crimea to Russia a ‘seizure’ of Crimea by Russia. This is supposedly what has sparked the post-February-2014 military escalation between the U.S.-NATO and Russia — and, perhaps (unless the U.S.-NATO side decide to accept Crimea’s return to Russia) WW III.

On April 25th, Obama personally asked the leaders of Germany, France, UK, and Italy, to contribute to the increased NATO troops and weapons near Russia’s Baltic borders. Nothing was announced from that meeting. Clearly, the U.S. is leading the movement toward WW III. Neither the main leaders of Europe, nor — certainly — Russia, seem to be nearly so eager. However, U.S. President Obama says that his concerns are purely of a ‘defensive’ nature — to ‘defend’ the NATO alliance, and the entire world (including Ukraine), from ‘Russian aggression’. He denies that Russia is taking necessary defensive measures against America’s aggression. However, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says that that’s the way he is seeing things.

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.

To understand the ongoing developments in Armenia, read the article below first published by Global Research in April 2016.

Another day, another protest in Armenia [April 2016]. And if we were to simply believe the Western media regarding this ‘other protest,’ we might get the impression that the Armenian people are upset with Russian policy and “Putinism.” In reality, the protests are led by the same verified US-proxies exposed at the height of the “Electric Yerevan” protests mid-2015 which sought to undermine and overthrow the current government of Armenia in favor of a pro-Western political front more to Wall Street, London, and Brussels’ liking.

The International Business Times in their article, “Armenia-Russia Ties Under Question Amid Fighting, Anti-Moscow Protests,” would report regarding the recent protests that:

At a recent thousand-strong demonstration in the capital of Armenia, Davit Sanasaryan took out a couple of eggs and threw them at the Russian Embassy. 

The gesture provoked both ridicule and approval in this small landlocked country that traditionally values very close ties with its large northern neighbor. “Our protests are not against Russia but against Russian policy and Putinism,” activist and politician Sanasaryan said in an interview with International Business Times last week.

Davit Sanasaryan (also spelled “David Sanasaryan”), among other things, is an opposition politician with the Heritage Party who helped lead the previous US-backed “Electric Yerevan protests in mid-2015. He is also an associate of the Armenian-based National Citizens’ Initiative (NCI), revealed in the NCI’s own news bulletin titled, “NCI Focuses on Armenia’s Mining Sector,” which reports (emphasis added):

NCI associate Davit Sanasarian welcomed the audience with opening remarks. “The exploitation of the Teghut mine is an actual matter and it calls for serious discussions and proper suggestions prior to the undertaking of this project,” he said.

This bulletin alone seems innocuous enough, however, another NCI bulletin would reveal itself to be coordinating with and receiving aid from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The bulletin titled, “NCI Partakes in a Civil Society Meeting,” states (emphasis added):

The National Citizens’ Initiative (NCI) representatives attended, between 14 and 15 April 2011, the conference entitled “Assisting Armenia’s Civil Society Organizations.” This event was an initiative of the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD) organization and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Yerevan Office, and it was organized with the assistance of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). 

The objective of the conference was to contribute in developing the capacity of Armenia’s civil society organizations by way of cooperation and exchange of know-how with Central and Eastern European civil society associations.

Of course, considering that the US NED is chaired by pro-war corporate-financier representatives, “developing the capacity of civil society organizations” in Armenia was not actually on the agenda. Instead, creating a proxy front with which to control Armenia on behalf of foreign interests was, merely couched behind “civil society.” Sanasarian’s “association” with the NCI in this context, is troubling to say the least.

But Sanasarian’s association with the US NED extends far beyond this. He is also on the board of trustees of the Armenian Institute of International and Security Affairs (AIISA), an alleged think-tank that is directly funded by the US NED. His position on the board of trustees is revealed in an AIISA bulletin titled, “AIISA’s Third Evening DemSchool: “Challenges to Democracy,”” which claims:

In partnership with the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the third 11-day evening DemSchool was launched at the Armenian Institute of International and Security Affairs with “Challenges to Democracy” heading.

It also stated:

Certificate award ceremony was held on the DemSchool 11th day. David Sanasaryan, member of AIISA Board of Trustees, young politician and activist, also participated in it. 

Added to this, is Sanasarian’s role in the US-backed 2015 protests. It was revealed in mid-2015 that the so-called “Electric Yerevan” protests were in fact led entirely by US-funded and directed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Sanasarian’s involvement then, again implicates him in coordinating with and receiving aid from a foreign government in a bid to undermine his own government. At the time, US State Department-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) would report in its article, “Armenians Say They’ll Restart ‘Electric Yerevan’ Protest,” that:

At a Yerevan rally attended by several hundred activists on July 17, Rise Armenia leader and opposition Heritage party city councilor Davit Sanasarian said a new campaign against the electricity price hikes would take place from July 27 to July 31, with demonstrators blocking the central streets of Yerevan and other cities around the country. 

“We continue our fight. We will be distributing leaflets from door to door,” Sanasarian said. “We will be successful.”

RFE/RL would inadvertently admit that the protesters were simply using electricity prices as a pretext to come out into the streets and that their next move would be of a more political nature, targeting Armenia’s sitting government. In other words, it was a US-funded color revolution couched behind legitimate concerns regarding utility prices.

Considering these extensive ties to US-backing, Sanasarian’s role leading the current anti-Russian protests portrays him not as a ‘politician’ or an ‘activist,’ but as a foreign-funded proxy, and the protests themselves as foreign-engineered meddling, not legitimate dissent. Claims that he is fighting against Russian influence, while all along he is serving as a conduit for Wall Street, London, and Brusssels’ influence touches upon the sort of hypocrisy seen again and again amid engineered protests targeting the many enemies of Western hegemony worldwide.

*

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

 “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.” (Albert Camus 1913-1960.)

On 1^st May 2003, George W. Bush stood in a dinky little flying suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and in a super stage managed appearance told the lie of the century: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (1)

The illegal occupation and decimation of Iraq continued until December 2011. In June 2014 they returned to bomb again in the guise of combating ISIS. As the thirteenth anniversary of Bush’s ridiculous appearance with a vast “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, Iraq is largely in ruins, Iraqis have fled the murderous “liberation” and it’s aftermath in millions and there are over three million internally displaced.

The nation is pinned between a tyrannical, corrupt US puppet government, a homicidal, head chopping, raping, organ eating, history erasing, US-spawned ISIS – and a renewed, relentless US bombardment. So much for the 2008 US-Iraq State of Forces agreement, which stated that by 31^st December 2011: “all United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory.”

On the USS Abraham Lincoln Bush stated: “In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world … Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.”

In what has transpired to be monumental irony, he continued: “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaida, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.” There was of course, no al-Qaida in Iraq, no funding of fundamentalist terrorism under Saddam Hussein, it is the invasion’s conception, birth, now reached maturity from Baghdad to Brussels, Mosul to the Maghreb, Latakia to London.

In Iraq, US terrorism from the air is back in all its genocidal force.

Incredibly on 23^rd April, the Independent (2) reported another staggering piece of either disinformation or childish naivety, in a predictably familiar script : “A spokesperson for the US military said all possible precautions were taken to avoid ‘collateral damage’ “, but in approaching 7,000 airstrikes the number of confirmed civilian deaths had risen on Planet Pentagon to just – forty one.

In another past it’s sell by date mantra: ‘Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for Central Command, said the casualties were “deeply regretted” but maintained that the campaign was the “the most precise air campaign in the history of warfare.” ’

And here’s another familiar one: “In this type of armed conflict, particularly with an enemy who hides among the civilian population, there are going to be, unfortunately, civilian casualties at times.” The Geneva Convention, amongst other Treaties, Principles and Conventions, is specific on the protections of populations in conflict, Colonel Ryder should familiarize himself with the texts.

So another onslaught in a quarter of a century of bombing Iraq is underway – another mass murder with a silly name: “Operation Inherent Resolve.”

Here is reality from Dr Souad Al-Azzawi, Award winning environmental scientist who gained her Ph.D from the Colorado School of Mines.

She states of just the onslaught on Mosul, her home, the ancient university city of 1.5 million, that the stated figures from US spokespersons are: “ either misinformed about the real situation on the ground, since they are using drones and guided missiles, or airstrikes blindly, intentionally not saying the truth.

“I would like to list SOME of what the American’s airstrikes have been targeting and killing in Mosul:

* Destroyed are all state services buildings, including Municipalities in right and left sides of Mosul. When they bomb at night, all security personnel get killed or injured, also residents of close by areas, and adjacent properties are destroyed.

* Bombed and destroyed all communication centers.

* Destruction of Dairy Production Factories in both left and right sides of Mosul. Casualties of these two are one hundred deaths and two hundred injuries among civilians who gathered to receive milk and dairy products from the factories.

Dr Al-Azzawi reminds that this is reminiscent of the bombing of the baby milk factor outside Baghdad in 1991 with the claim it was a chemical weapons factory. This writer visited the factory ruins just months later, there were still charred containers of milk power – the machinery was provided and maintained by a company in Birmingham, England which specialized in infant food prodiction.

* Bombing of Mosul Pharmaceutical Industries.

* Mosul University was bombed with ninety two deaths and one hundred and thirty five injuries. Earlier estimates were higher, but many were pulled from the rubble alive. “They were students, faculty members, staff members, families of faculties, and restaurants workers.”

*Al Hadbaa and Al Khadraa Residential Apartments compounds. Fifty people killed (families) and one hundred injured.

* Hay al Dhubat residential area in the right side of Mosul, two days ago, five women women and four children killed and the whole house. The father is a respected pharmacist who has nothing to do with ISIL.

* Destruction of houses in front of the Medical College, killed twenty two civilians – eleven in one family.

* Bombing Sunni Waqif Building, twenty deaths and seventy injuries   which included those in nearby commercial and residential buildings.

* Car maintenance industrial areas in both left and right sides of Mosul destroyed with civilian’s casualties.

* Bombing of flour factories in both sides of Mosul.

* Rafidain and Rasheed banks and all their branches in both sides of Mosul. Destruction of all commercial and residential areas in the vicinity of these places, with as yet unknown civilian casualties. (My emphasis.)

* Central Bank of Mosul in Ghazi Street, with nearby residential and commercial properties.

* Pepsi factory, currently producing ice cubes only. Three deaths and twelve injuries among the workers.

* The Governor’s house and close by guest house.

* Mosul’s old industrial compound destroyed, with parking area for fuel Tankers and cars. Three days ago, huge explosion of fuel tankers, one hundred and fifty deaths and injuries.

* Urban Planning Directory in Hay al Maliyah bombed.

* Engineering Planning Directory in Hay al Maliyah bombed.

* Food Storages in left side of Mosul bombed.

* Drinking water treatment plants bombed.

* All electrical generation and transformer stations in the left side of Mosul bombed.

* Domez land communications center in left side of Mosul destroyed.

*Al Hurairah Bridge – and many more.

There is a sickening familiarity to some of the targets – food, pharmaceuticals, water treatment plants, electricity generation, communications and educational facilities, bridges (the country, towns and cities are divided by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers) have been favoured targets since 1991. Every time painstakingly and imaginatively restored they have been re-bombed for a quarter of a century.

During the 1990’s a Canadian film crew captured footage of US ‘planes dropping flares on harvested wheat and barley, incinerating entire harvests in a country, which due to the strangulating embargo there were near famine conditions in parts of society.

“When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength, and kindness, and good will”, said George W Bush in his “Mission Accomplished” speech. No, they saw invaders destroying their lives, their families, their history, raping, pillaging. They saw Falluja’s destruction, Abu Ghraib’s horrors and the eleven other secret prisons and nightmares ever ongoing.

On 25^th April Dr Al-Azzawi added: “More war crimes have been committed by American Coalition, yesterday April 24, 2016. The coalition airplanes bombed Rashidiya water treatment plant left side of Mosul city and Yermouk electricity generation station in the right side of Mosul. Through targeting these populations’ life sustaining necessities, the coalition is committing genocidal action towards Mosul residents in the pretext of fighting ISIS.”

Also on 25^th April, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore, on returning from a week in Iraq wrote starkly of the government: “Iraqis are crying out for fairness, recognition, justice, appreciation and meaningful participation in shaping their future – a process that goes forward and not backwards … We all have responsibilities towards the people of Iraq. While there is an international military coalition in place, a comparably resourced international coalition of practical compassion is also needed to help with the building blocks towards a sustained peace in Iraq.” (3)

In the US military lexicon it seems “compassion” has been replaced by their missiles of choice.

Ms Gilmore also stated that Iraq was being run by a failed government and warned foreign powers not to be “complicit” in its neglect of the plight of normal Iraqis. (4)

Further: “The international community must not allow itself to be made complicit with the failed leadership of Iraq … There is political paralysis in Iraq. There is no government in Iraq”, she stated blisteringly of America and Britain’s illegal, abortive, parliamentary project.

“Our commitment to Liberty is America’s tradition … We stand for human liberty”, concluded Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Were mistruths ever bleaker? And when will George W. Bush, Charles Anthony Lynton Blair and their cohorts answer for their crimes in a Court of Law?

Notes

1.     http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-bush-speech-01-05-2003/

2.     http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/official-civilian-death-toll-from-us-air-strikes-against-isis-in-syria-and-iraq-doubles-to-41-a6997341.html

3.     http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=19871&LangID=E

4.     http://jordantimes.com/news/region/un-envoy-says-war-goals-iraq-obscuring-humanitarian-crisis

 

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida – Former Florida Atlantic University (‘FAU’) Professor James Tracy, who was fired from his tenured faculty position in January, has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the University, several top school officials, and his faculty union representatives, alleging that the firing violated his First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights, including his rights to due process and academic freedom.

Dr. James Tracy, filed the lawsuit today in a U.S. federal court in the Southern District of Florida, in West Palm Beach, represented by the Florida Civil Rights Coalition and Medgebow Law. The suit raises constitutional challenges to Florida Atlantic University’s vague and confusing “Conflict of Interest/Outside Activities” policy and also alleges that the manner in which Professor Tracy was fired by FAU officials—including the President, University trustees, and several senior administrative officials—violated Tracy’s constitutional rights to free speech and due process of law.

The suit also accuses FAU of violating the University’s own long-standing principals of academic freedom and breaching its collective bargaining agreement with FAU’s faculty union. Additionally, the suit names as defendants the United Faculty of Florida (“UFF”) and Florida Education Association (“FEA”) and two FAU faculty union representatives and officials, who conspired with and aided the University’s Administration in violating Tracy’s contractual and constitutional rights.

Dr. Tracy, an award-winning American academic with expertise in communications, media, and conspiracy studies, was awarded lifetime tenure by Florida Atlantic University in 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in mass communications and taught courses at FAU in Communications, including a course entitled “Culture of Conspiracy”. Tracy won a Project Censored award in 2013 for the story, “Wireless Technology: A Looming Health Crisis,” which was featured in Censored 2013: Dispatches From the Media Revolution.

FAU school officials first threatened Tracy with disciplinary action after a defamatory local and national media attack concerning Tracy’s online postings in early 2013. However, the University’s administration withdrew its initial threats following intervention by Tracy’s union representatives at UFF and FEA.

In late 2015, Professor Tracy was again threatened with disciplinary action for requesting clarification on and questioning changes made to the University’s vague and confusing “Conflict of Interest/Outside Activities” policy. Instead of coming to his aid, Tracy’s faculty union representatives, including representatives and officials from UFF and FEA, conspired with and aided the University in terminating Tracy’s tenured employment—denying him meaningful representation and defense against the University’s threatened discipline.

Despite repeated assurances made by Tracy’s union representatives that a response and grievance would be filed for Tracy in a timely manner, as required by the University’s collective bargaining agreement, Tracy’s representatives failed to ever file a response or grievance, resulting in Professor Tracy’s automatic termination on January 6, 2016.

The lawsuit seeks Tracy’s reinstatement and monetary relief, including compensation for economic and reputational damage suffered.

“Both Florida Atlantic University administrators and the University’s faculty union claim they are committed to protecting constitutional rights and principles of academic freedom, but their actions speak loud and clear…” said Louis Leo IV of the Florida Civil Rights Coalition and Medgebow Law.

“Tenure, free speech, due process and academic freedom are under attack. Without judicial intervention, employees and faculty at Florida Atlantic University and other universities around the United States, will continue to be censored, deterred or chilled from sharing unpopular information or opinions for fear that they will be disciplined on a pretext.”

Inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

Power – far more than fact – determines what is defined as true in America, a nation that has become dangerously disconnected from reality in matters both trivial and important.

The way it works now is that, in case after case, the more powerful entity in the equation imposes the answer and the rest of us are invited to join in by throwing stones and jeering at the weaker party. Two current examples make the point:

On the more substantive side, there is the 2014 case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people – and blamed by U.S. officials and the Western media on ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (More on that below.)

On the more personal side is the case of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who has been defined by the powerful National Football League as a perjurer for denying under oath the NFL’s scientifically dubious charges that he was part of a scheme to slightly deflate footballs.

Image: A Malaysia Airways’ Boeing 777 like the one that crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. (Photo credit: Aero Icarus from Zürich, Switzerland)

On Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had the power to do to Brady or any other player pretty much whatever Goodell wants in acting as judge, jury and executioner.

In the Brady case, the NFL and Goodell were the stronger parties, so they got to define the reality as far as the major U.S. media was concerned, depicting Brady as a liar and cheater although there was no direct evidence that any footballs had actually been deflated.

NFL officials, who launched the brouhaha known as “Deflategate,” admitted that they didn’t know that cold air and moisture reduce a football’s internal air pressure. They simply assumed that the drop in PSI, detected at the halftime of the AFC Championship game more than a year ago, could only come from letting air out of the balls.

A Vendetta on a Roll

Once the vendetta got started, however, it took on a life of its own. In the major U.S. media, the NFL and Goodell controlled the narrative and – with rival NFL owners playing a significant behind-the-scenes role – engineered both a four-game suspension of Brady and the stripping of draft picks from the Patriots.

Despite many scientific experts challenging the NFL’s sloppy scientific claims, the U.S. media – from The New York Times to ESPN – took the NFL’s side while fans of other teams joined in the mocking of Brady and laughing at any attempts to apply science and reason to the case.

Image: New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady.

The NFL and Goodell were allowed to decide what was “true” despite their corrupt role in covering up the dangers from concussions to players. In other words, the NFL’s history of lying on a matter as consequential as the safety of all football players – both amateur and professional – was not taken into account when balancing the league’s credibility against the denials of Brady and two locker-room assistants linked to the supposed scheme to intentionally deflate footballs.

And, despite all the time and attention this silly scandal absorbed, there was almost no examination of the science involved and no one in the major U.S. media looked at the conflict of interest in rival NFL owners on the NFL’s Management Council pressing Goodell to impose harsh penalties against Brady and the Patriots.

The Management Council controls whether Goodell gets to keep his $35 million job and these rival owners made anti-Brady recommendations to Goodell as he was considering Brady’s initial appeal of his suspension, according to Goodell’s own appeals decision.

After Goodell rejected Brady’s appeal – calling Brady’s sworn testimony false – the NFL got to choose which federal court would handle the case, picking one in New York that was known to be heavily pro-management.

Although District Court Judge Richard Berman last year overturned Brady’s four-game suspension on largely technical grounds, the deck was stacked against the player when the NFL appealed.

Image: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

On Monday, the NFL got a 2-to-1 favorable ruling from appellate judges who reinstated Brady’s suspension and asserted that Goodell had nearly unlimited authority in disciplinary matters. [For more on the history, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Deflategate Slapdown of NFL and MSM.”]

New Claims on MH-17

On a far more serious level, there’s the tragic case of MH-17, which has been thrust back into the news by British press reports about an upcoming BBC documentary that cites seven eyewitnesses in Ukraine who reported seeing a warplane in the vicinity on July 17, 2014, just before MH-17 was shot down – and one witness saying he saw the warplane firing what looked like an air-to-air missile.

That account, if taken seriously, would put another chink in the West’s narrative absolving the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government of any responsibility and blaming ethnic Russian rebels and Putin.

In the MH-17 equation, the rebels and Putin have been the weaker parties, subject of an intense U.S.-led propaganda campaign aimed at getting Europe to impose economic sanctions that serve a larger neoconservative goal of weakening and destabilizing Russia.

So, at the time of the shoot-down, eyewitness reports from Ukraine of people seeing one or two Ukrainian warplanes in the sky – a claim apparently backed up by Russian radar – were dismissed in Western media. The Ukrainian government claimed it had no warplanes in the area and that assertion was widely accepted in the West.

But the regime had turned off its primary radar systems over the area supposedly for reasons of malfunction and maintenance. That left only Ukraine’s secondary radar, which tracked aircraft equipped with transponders such as commercial flights but would not show military aircraft, which don’t identify themselves with transponders for obvious reasons of stealth.

The Russians said their radar, looking into Ukraine, appeared to detect a possible warplane approaching MH-17, but they said their primary radar was not saved because it was outside their jurisdiction. They offered only the visual screen images, which Western investigators discounted.

A Divergent Finding

However, within days of the shoot-down, the official U.S. story blaming Russia and what U.S. intelligence was discovering sharply diverged, a source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me. The source said U.S. spy data revealed what looked like an ambush by a Ukrainian warplane and a ground-to-air missile fired by a rogue element of the Ukrainian military associated with a hardline Ukrainian oligarch.

Image: A side-by-side comparison of the Russian presidential jetliner and the Malaysia Airlines plane.

The source said CIA analysts gave serious weight to the possibility that the attack was originally intended to kill President Putin who was returning from a state visit to South America aboard his official plane with markings similar to MH-17.

But this analysis contradicted the out-of-the-gate public statements by Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior U.S. officials and thus, the source said, would “reverse the narrative,” making the pro-U.S. Ukrainians look like the bad guys and the Russians not so much.

So, if the source’s information is correct, the needs of America’s global power took precedence over any mandate for honesty in reporting the facts to the American people and the world’s public, including the families of the MH-17 victims.

Since summer 2014, the MH-17 investigation has moved at a glacial pace with the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and a Dutch criminal investigation still not issuing any official findings as to who was responsible.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to withhold the data that Secretary Kerry cited shortly after the crash, which he claimed implicated the rebels and Russia.

Image: Secretary of State John Kerry speaking about the Ukraine crisis on April 24, 2014. (Screenshot from state.gov)

While Kerry declared that the U.S. government knew almost immediately where the ground-to-air missile was fired, the Dutch Safety Board report last October could only put the firing location within a 320-square-kilometer area (covering both government and rebel territory) and a Dutch intelligence report stated that the only operational missiles in the area capable of downing a plane at 33,000 feet were controlled by the Ukrainian military.

But the Western media still reports routinely that a “Russian-made” Buk missile was fired from rebel territory, leaving the public impression that the Russians were responsible (although the “Russian-made” element was always misleading because the Ukrainian military also uses “Russian-made” equipment).

What impact the BBC program may have on the West’s dominant storyline blaming the Russian rebels and Putin is hard to know since the U.S. government has invested so heavily in that narrative and would face a serious loss of credibility by reversing its position at this late date. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry Balks at Supplying MH-17 Data.”]

Plus, there is the arrogance of powerful institutions,whether the NFL or the U.S. government, that they can literally define reality for us commoners — and who’s to stop them. [Also, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Media Unmoored from Facts.”]

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

The United States, the European Union, as well as their allies in the Middle Eastern region consider Syrian President Bashar Assad to be illegitimate and call for his resignation, while Russia and Iran insist that it was up to Syrian people to decide the fate of their country and leadership.

“Acceptance of the dictator’s role, who wages a civil war against his own people, is not considered,” Mogherini told the France Inter radio station, when asked about the prospects for Assad’s political future.

As Saudi war crimes and crimes against humanity continue apace in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is now apparently attempting to gain public support and better reception from the viewing audience by painting itself as an enemy of al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite the fact that the feudal monarchy’s reputation for supporting these very same terror organizations has been documented time and again. From Syria and Libya to Yemen, Saudi Arabia has proven itself repeatedly as a funder, organizer, and supporter of ISIS and al-Qaeda while, at home, it has demonstrated that its own government and ISIS are more alike than they are different.

Still, Saudi Arabia is attempting to show that it is, in fact, the enemy of al-Qaeda by issuing claims that the Saudi “coalition” in Yemen has recently fought a large-scale battle against the terror organization and that it was able to capture the city of Mukalla after killing around 800 terrorists.

As AFP reports,

Yemeni troops backed by Arab coalition air strikes killed more than 800 members of al-Qaida in an attack on a southeastern provincial capital held by the group for the past year, the coalition said Monday.

Pro-government forces recaptured an oil terminal as well as the city of Mukalla, which was considered a jihadist stronghold, military sources said.

“The operation resulted… in the death of more than 800 al-Qaida members and some of their leaders, while some others fled,” Arab coalition commanders said in a statement published by SPA, the official Saudi news agency.

AFP notes, however, that the death toll cannot be independently verified and pointed out that no civilian deaths were reported. This latter detail is most questionable to say the least.

What is interesting is that the alleged operation is part of another alleged operation “aimed at securing parts of the country captured by jihadist militants who have exploited a 13-month war between Gulf-backed loyalists and rebels supported by Iran.” The operation itself takes place alongside the UN-brokered ceasefire was enacted on April 11 where jihadist groups are excluded.

What is even more interesting, however, is the description provided by “military officer” sources quoted by the AFP as to the nature of the battle for Mukalla.

As AFP reports,

“We entered the city centre (of Mukalla) and were met by no resistance from Al-Qaeda militants who withdrew west” towards the vast desert in Hadramawt and Shabwa provinces, a military officer told AFP by phone from the city the jihadists seized last April.”

The officer, who requested anonymity, said residents of Mukalla, home to an estimated 200,000 people, had appealed to the jihadists to spare the city the destruction of fighting and to withdraw. Yemeni military sources said Emirati military vehicles were used in the operation and that troops from the Gulf country, a key member of the Saudi-led coalition, were among the forces that entered Mukalla.

AFP could not immediately confirm these reports from officials in the United Arab Emirates.

While it was reported that the coalition members had conducted airstrikes against “AQAP positions” in Yemen, it is important to note that coalition forces admittedly met no resistance when entering Mukalla. Putting aside the fact that the Yemeni people would scarcely be able to tell the difference between AQAP and Saudi Arabian control of their country to begin with, at what point did the Saudis kill 800 AQAP members? Was it in the alleged and unconfirmed airstrikes which apparently kill only terrorists but no civilians?

Is it not extremely convenient that Saudi forces would bomb Yemen back into the Stone Age, allow AQAP to gain vast amounts of territory against Houthi, rebel, and government forces in the process and then retake it from them “without any resistance” shortly after a ceasefire agreement is made that does not include AQAP?

Was the Saudi bombing merely an act of death squad herding or was the Saudi bombing never aimed at AQAP at all? Were the casualties actually civilians simply labeled as terrorists for propaganda purposes? Was there actually a bombing campaign?

What kind of military operation kills 800 militants while, at the same time, faces no resistance from those militants?

All of these questions are relevant and must be asked of any reports suggesting Saudi military action against AQAP in Yemen. While it is impossible to draw concrete conclusions based on the reports currently circulating throughout Western media, considering the nature of the Saudi involvement and their history of supporting terrorism across the world, one must question their motives as well as any claims made by the Saudi government.

Al-Mukalla is a strategic city in the Abyan Governate, a very important territorial gain since it provides access to the coast.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 650 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

Iran says the deduction of around USD two billion in frozen Iranian assets recently authorized by a US court ruling is “highway robbery,” vowing that the Islamic Republic will retrieve the sum.

According to Press TV, last Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ruled that the money had to be turned over to the American families of the people killed in a 1983 bombing of a US Marine Corps barracks in the Lebanese capital of Beirut and other attacks blamed on Iran.

Iran has denied any role in the attack, and the money confiscated under the US court ruling belongs to the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). The assets have been blocked under US sanctions.

“The judgment by the Supreme Court and the other, even more absurd judgment by a New York circuit court deciding that Iran should pay damages for 9/11 are the height of absurdity,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told The New Yorker in an interview published on Monday.

The top Iranian diplomat asked how Americans would feel should such a thing happen to their properties.

“The United States has committed a lot of crimes against Iranians, against the people of Vietnam, the people of Afghanistan, the people of Iraq. Can they legislate in their own countries that for every collateral damage suffered because of American bombing, for every person who was tortured by the SAVAK (the intelligence service of the deposed Shah’s regime), which was created by the United States, those people can claim money from the United States and go confiscate it? Would you be willing to accept it?” he questioned.

Zarif said the US Supreme Court only has jurisdiction over the US, not Iran, and its rulings are therefore not recognized by the Islamic Republic.

“The Supreme Court is the Supreme Court of the United States, not the Supreme Court of the world. We’re not under its jurisdiction, nor is our money,” he said.

Referring to the confiscation of the USD two billion in frozen Iranian assets, Zarif said, “It is a theft. Huge theft. It is highway robbery. And believe you me, we will get it back.”

He again referred to the other court ruling that held Iran responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US — which were carried out by a total of 19 individuals, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals — and said the “absurd” ruling speaks to how the US judicial system has lost its credibility.

“How would you explain Iran being held accountable for the damages to the victims of 9/11 — and others being absolved of any responsibility, those who were actually responsible for it? These cases cannot stand in any serious civilized court of law. When a US court condemns Iran for 9/11, it finishes the credibility of the US justice system when it comes to Iran,” he said.

“I have lost every respect for US justice,” Zarif said.

On Monday, Zarif had said that Iran would act to sue the United States at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague to retrieve the USD two billion.

“We hold the US administration responsible for preservation of Iranian funds, and if they are plundered, we will lodge a complaint with the I.C.J. for reparation,” he said.

During the interview, the Iranian foreign minister was asked about Iran’s missile activities, the United States objection to them, and whether the issue would be subjected to potential negotiation in the future.

“Our defense is not subject to bargaining,” the Iranian foreign minister said. “That’s the problem with the United States. It believes it can control everybody’s behavior. The missile tests are our right.”

On October 11, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) successfully test-fired its first guided ballistic missile dubbed Emad. Washington slammed the test, claiming the projectile is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and vowed to respond with sanctions.

Zarif reiterated that Iranian missiles are for defensive purposes only, recalling the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when, he said, “missiles [were] pouring on Iranian cities with chemical weapons,” and Iran “didn’t have any to defend ourselves.”

He also reiterated the assertion by the Iranian government and military officials that none of the country’s missiles are nuclear-capable.

On April 25, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) took control of the Bala Al-Kadhima region of the East Ghouta, following heavy clashes with Jaysh Al-Islam and allied militant units. The control of Bala Al-Kadhima allows the government forces to split the militant forces in the region and cut off the supplies to Deir Al-‘Assafir and Zibdeen. Now, the Syrian forces are going to advance on Harasta Qantara and Hawsh Jarabo.

The SAA and the allies are advancing in the province of Homs with special attention to the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor highway. Following the recent gains near Palmyra, the Syrian forces deployed near the ISIS-controlled town of ‘Arak. If the oil-rich town is liberated, the next expected target of the loyalists is T-3 Military Airport.

Iraq’s forces continue military operations in the province of Anbar. Following the liberation of the Hit city, they are advancing inside the ISIS-controlled village of Dulab, which is located between Al-Bagdhadi and Hit.

Iraqi volunteer forces engaged in clashes with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in the town of Tuz Khurmatu during the late hours of April 23. 9 people were killed and 30 others wounded during the fighting that broke out when a small explosion near the positions of the two sides sparked shootings between the communities in neighborhoods across the town. The death clashes continued on Sunday. The two sides’ delegations have been reportedly holding discussions in Tuz Khurmatu since late Sunday as military reinforcements are reportedly gathering outside the town.

Iran doesn’t recognize the US Supreme Court’s decision to almost $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets must be turned over to American families of people killed in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and other attacks blamed on Iran.

SouthFront remembers the plaintiffs accused Iran of providing support to Hezbollah, the Shiite political and military group allegedly responsible for the 1983 attack at the Marine compound in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service members. They also sought compensation related to other attacks including the 1996 Khobar Towers truck bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. service members.

The Iranian money will go to the estates of service members who died in the attack, their families and to those who survived the attacks. Payouts will range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

“The US knows this well too that whatever action it takes with respect to Iran’s assets will make it accountable in the future and it should return these assets to Iran.” Foreign Minister of Iran, Mohammad Javad Zarif commented the situation.

Earlier, U.S. District Judge George Daniels in New York issued a default judgment against Iran for $7.5 billion to the estates and families of people who died at the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The decision was made amid the allegations that Hezbollah, which the US designates as a terrorist organization supported by Iran, provided “advice and training” to Al-Qaeda members. Meanwhile, the US government avoids to release of a 28-page classified chapter from the 9/11 report that may point the finger of Saudi collusion into the attacks that struck New York and Washington.

Considering that Shia Iran has hardly ever assisted to Sunni extremists from Al Qaeda, the US actions look as political moves amid the ongoing implementation of the nuclear deal with the Islam republic. The harm of such decisions are clear for both the nuclear deal and the confidence to the US law. If these initiatives are implemented, an outflow of the investors from the US financial system could be easily forecasted. Furthermore, the US actions push the dedollarisation of the national economics by itself.

The implementation of the nuclear deal is also threatened. The Iranian elites can’t ignore the US actions building their foreign and internal strategies. It isn’t hard to forecast how these strategies will be changed. Thus, the US is undermining the gains of the P5+1 group and setting the ground for further cooling down with Iran.

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April 26 marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and those old enough to remember the event can recall the explosion, the evacuation, and the dread. But they rarely remember an immense milestone in the response to the disaster: the completion in November 1986 of a concrete encasement of Chernobyl’s reactor number four. Workers drawn from all across the Soviet Union built this “sarcophagus” under extreme radiological conditions, on the ruins of the destroyed reactor. They used unimaginable amounts of concrete—and a great deal of imagination. This concrete mausoleum has held up, with some assistance, for 30 years now. (A larger containment structure that will fit over the existing sarcophagus is now being built.)

Over the years, as the ranks of those who responded to Chernobyl have thinned, new generations of nuclear professionals have been trained to prevent another disaster. Their training has emphasized “safety culture.” This, along with “inherently safe designs,” was going to guarantee an accident-free nuclear future. For a while, it seemed as if the world was on the verge of forgetting forever what responding to a nuclear emergency really required. Then, in March 2011, multiple reactors at one of the world’s largest nuclear power plants melted down as a consequence of a massive earthquake, a tsunami, and a sustained power outage.

As a student of the Soviet nuclear power program and the Chernobyl disaster, it was painful for me to watch the blame game that played out immediately after Fukushima. Almost to the letter, the Chernobyl “script” was followed. First, the plant’s operators were blamed. Then the reactor design was at fault. Finally, it was the turn of the national nuclear regulatory structure. “Culture,” of course, received a great deal of blame as well.

But while Chernobyl could ultimately be dismissed as a Soviet-made disaster that “could never happen here”—wherever “here” happened to be—Fukushima has not allowed such steadfast denial. Indeed, Fukushima has proved the death knell for a nuclear safety philosophy that focused exclusively on preventing accidents. Disaster preparedness and response were given scant attention in the years between Chernobyl and Fukushima, but now they have been added to the vocabulary of the world’s nuclear industries. Curiously, however, this shift is only partial. Disaster prevention retains the greatest emphasis; preparedness is sometimes treated adequately; but resources (and imagination) devoted to actual response strategies remain limited.

The “lessons learned” from Fukushima—and new reports on these lessons continue to be published—focus predominantly on technical and legal fixes, organizational reform, and liability concerns. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission responded to Fukushima by overhauling its rules and guidelines for accident prevention, preparedness, and response. The US nuclear industry, meanwhile, implemented “FLEX,” a program designed to provide nuclear reactors in distress with hardware such as extra pumps and generators, both on site and stored at regional centers. In Europe, power reactors were subjected to “stress tests” after Fukushima, and these tests sparked conversation among nations hosting nuclear power reactors about harmonizing, if only loosely, national regulations concerning natural (and other) hazards to nuclear power plants.

Steps such as these go in the right direction. But emphasizing prevention and preparedness over response ignores a simple fact: Nuclear disasters tend to exceed people’s worst expectations. There is a good reason that the nuclear industry refers to disasters as “beyond design-basis accidents“—only a limited number of scenarios can be anticipated and prepared for. Disasters, therefore, require the development of creative, skill-based, and team-based response strategies (along with strenuous efforts to avoid disasters entirely).

Training for emergency responders in general tends to emphasize flexibility and imagination, with a premium placed on performing quick assessments and triage in unprecedented situations. But in nuclear emergency response training, the situation is different. The nuclear industry seems deeply troubled by using human imagination to address situations that go “beyond the checklist.” In Europe and the United States, at least—I can’t speak for the entire world—the nuclear industry seems hung up on the idea of control. There is a plan for every conceivable situation. Should plans fail, there are more plans. Staff are trained to follow procedures and execute instructions. If they don’t, that’s always bad.

Such an approach, as documented by the anthropologist Constance Perin, fundamentally fails to acknowledge the messiness of operating imperfect, real-world technologies (and all technologies are imperfect). Worse yet, it incapacitates an aspect of creativity that, though it’s more often associated with jazz, can be tremendously important in nuclear emergencies: improvisation. In music, improvisation calls to mind wild, random, and perhaps solitary acts. But if emphasized in training for nuclear emergencies, the metaphor of improvisation can help prepare responders to pursue skill-based, team-oriented, and highly organized actions under challenging conditions.

In any disaster, improvisation occurs. It happened at Chernobyl, even if creative imagination was thoroughly expunged from all written reports. Improvisation happened at Fukushima, and in fact a lot more improvisation will be necessary if the Fukushima disaster is ever to “end.” It is tempting to remember creative action only when it fails. Making this mistake locks in a mindset of control and controllability. Any such mindset will be exploded—yet again—by the next nuclear emergency.

When an explosion tore through a reactor in present-day Ukraine 30 years ago, it triggered the worst nuclear disaster in history. While officials in the former Soviet Union took frantic action, the rest of the world did not learn of the catastrophe for two days.

Even three decades later, it is impossible to determine the true impact of the released radiation on the health of the local population and environment.

A huge area, roughly the size of Rhode Island, remains sealed off to the public. However, there is activity in that zone: Hundreds of workers, who are carefully monitored for overexposure to radiation, are building a second containment unit near the reactor. This gigantic structure, scheduled to be completed next year, will be pushed over the smaller shell that currently limits the amount of radiation escaping from the reactor.

“Only” 30 workers were either killed by the explosion or soon thereafter from exposure to massive amounts of radiation. But the World Health Organization estimates that nearly 10,000 will eventually die of cancers related to the disaster. The international environmental group Greenpeace believes that the number of victims will ultimately be ten times higher.

The haunting footage in the following video provides a rare glimpse of the vast area around the reactor that is now deserted and will remain abandoned for the foreseeable future.

VIDEO Inside Chernobyl (RT / YouTube)

With leaders all over the world on the take for millions, the defense industry has spawned a global business that profits from war, supports corruption everywhere, and must, for its survival, fan the flames of civil wars and global conflict.

That is the premise of “Shadow World” — a powerful new documentary.  In this week’s podcast, WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schectman talks to the film’s director Johan Grimonprez and its writer Andrew Feinstein.

As a member of the African National Congress in South Africa, Feinstein saw firsthand how the corruption and payoffs worked — and their grim consequences:

Within five years of the advent of our democracy, our country decided to spend $10 billion on weapons that we didn’t need, that we barely used, and the primary reason for that was that $300 millions in bribes were paid. And it had a profound effect of South Africa’s democracy.

I tried to investigate the deal… but was stopped by my own political party —  which itself had benefited from the bribes…

At a time when South Africa had six million people living with HIV or AIDS, our president at the time, Thabo Mbeki, said that we didn’t have the finances to provide these people with antiretroviral medication.

This story reveals the other side of the arms trade — how it can kill without even firing a shot: by using up precious resources that should have been devoted to controlling lethal diseases and other problems the world faces.

Feinstein has many more horror stories — the worst of which involves former US Vice President Dick Cheney.

His book — The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade — and the film based on it, take us through the Reagan and Bush administrations and show us how the arms trade reached the highest levels of government, contributing to or leading to Iran/Contra, 9/11, the war in Iraq, and many seemingly never-ending world conflicts.

The book, published by Picador in 2012, was the first major exposé on the global arms trade. According to the The Washington Post, “Feinstein writes with a crusading spirit and a depth of detail that lend The Shadow World urgency and authority….A comprehensive treatment of the arms trade, possibly the most complete account that has ever been written.”

Here’s our podcast, with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman and the filmmakers.

In yet another sign of obvious Western escalation in the war against Syria, U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Monday that an additional 250 American military personnel will be deployed to Syria under the guise of defeating ISIS.

In his speech at Hannover, Germany, Obama stated:

Just as I approved additional support for Iraqi forces against ISIL, I’ve decided to increase U.S. support for local forces fighting ISIL in Syria, a small number of special operations forces are already on the ground in Syria and their expertise has been critical as local forces have driven ISIL out of key areas.

So given their success I’ve approved the deployment of up to 250 additional U.S. personnel in Syria including special forces to keep up this momentum.

Obama made a point to state that the troops will not be “leading the fight on the ground” but will be engaged in “training” and providing “assistance” to local forces.

Obama also restated the U.S. position that “Assad must go” when he said,

“Just as we remain relentless on the military front we’re not going to give up on diplomacy to end the civil war in Syria because the suffering of the people in Syria has to end and that requires an effective political transition.”

CNN reports that

The troops will be expanding the ongoing U.S. effort to bring more Syrian Arab fighters into units the U.S. supports in northern Syria that have largely been manned by the Kurds, an official told CNN earlier.

The plan calls for the additional U.S. forces to “advise and assist” forces in the area whom the U.S. hopes may eventually grow strong enough to take back territory around Raqqa, Syria, where ISIS is based.

These troops are not expected to engage in combat operations or to participate in target-to-kill teams but will be armed to defend themselves, one official said.

. . . . .

The official said the President was persuaded to take this additional step because of recent successes against ISIS.

Image: Image Credit

What these statements mean, of course, is that the United States is deploying troops to better assist, train, and organize the terrorists on the ground who are fighting Assad and the Syrian military. After all, these “fighters that the U.S. supports” are nothing more than ISIS, al-Qaeda, FSA, Nusra, and other numerous groups and groupiscules that are ideologically identical to one another and whose only real tangible difference is the names they themselves.

Not only that, any talk of “recent successes against ISIS” is clearly not the successes of the United States, NATO, or the anti-Syria coalition. They are the successes of Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Indeed, the latter forces have achieved in weeks what the former could not achieve in over a year (ten years according to the U.S.), a true testament to what can be achieved when one actually targets the terrorist organization as opposed to supporting it.

Still, it is important to point out that, regardless of Obama’s recent announcement, U.S. Special Forces have been present in Syria for quite some time, with NATO member Special Forces known publicly even earlier.

In October, 2015, it was announced by the White House that 50 Special Forces troops would be sent to Syria. This announcement came days after it was reported that U.S. Special Forces commandos were working with Kurdish forces to “free prisoners of the Islamic State” in Syria. Later, the presence of U.S. Special Forces in Syria was tacitly acknowledged in 2015 when the U.S. took credit for the killing of Abu Sayyaf.

Reports circulated in October, 2014 that U.S. soldiers and Special Forces troops were fighting alongside Kurdish battalions in Kobane. An article by Christof Lehmann published in March 20, 2015 stated,

Evidence about the presence of U.S. special forces in the Syrian town Ayn al-Arab a.k.a. Kobani emerged. Troops are guiding U.S. airstrikes as part of U.S support for the Kurdish separatist group PYD and the long-established plan to establish a Kurdish corridor.

A photo taken in Ayn al-Arab shows three U.S. soldiers. One of them “Peter” is carrying a Bushnell laser rangefinder, an instrument designed to mark targets for U.S. jets, reports Ceyhun Bozkurt for Aydinlik Daily.

The photo substantiated previous BBC interviews with U.S. soldiers who are fighting alongside the Kurdish separatist group PYD in Syria.

The photo of the three U.S. troopers also substantiates a statement by PYD spokesman Polat Can from October 14, 2014, reports Aydinlik Daily. Can admitted that a special unit in Kobani provides Kurdish fighters with the coordinates of targets which then would be relayed to “coalition forces”.

The first public U.S. Special Forces raid in Syria took place in July, 2014 when Delta Force personnel allegedly attempted to rescue several Americans being held by ISIS near Raqqa. Allegedly, the soldiers stormed the facility but the terrorists had already moved the hostages. While the raid would provide evidence that U.S. Special Forces were operating in Syria in 2014, many researchers believe the story is simply fabricated by the White House to provide legitimacy to the stories of murdered hostagesand thus the subsequent pro-war propaganda that ensued as well as to promote the gradual acceptance of U.S. troops on the ground in Syria.

In 2012, an article published in the Daily Star by Deborah Sherwood revealed that SAS Special Forces and MI6 agents were operating inside Syria shortly after the destabilization campaign began in earnest. Sherwood writes,

Special Forces will help ­protect the refugees in Syria along the borders.

Last week as the president ignored an international ceasefire, plans were being finalised to ­rescue thousands of Syrians.

SAS troops and MI6 agents are in the country ready to help rebels if civil war breaks out as ­expected this weekend.

They also have ­hi-tech satellite computers and radios that can instantly send back photos and details of refugees and ­Assad’s forces as the situation develops.

Whitehall sources say it is vital they can see what is ­happening on the ground for ­themselves so Assad cannot deny atrocities or battles.

And if civil war breaks out the crack troops are on hand to help with fighting, said the ­insider.

. . . . .

“Safe havens would be an invasion of Syria but a chance to save lives,” said a senior Whitehall source.

“The SAS will throw an armed screen round these areas that can be set up within hours.

“There are guys in the communications unit who are signallers that can go right up front and get ­involved in close-quarter fighting.”

In addition, in March 2012, it was reported by Lebanon’s Daily Star that 13 French intelligence agents had been captured by the Syrian government, proving not only that Western Special Ops presence in Syria did, in fact, exist but also that it existed essentially from the start.

Thus, the presence of NATO Special Forces and U.S. Special Forces specifically are nothing new at all. Obama’s announcement is simply the advertisement of a policy that is gradually escalating in regards to Syria and, as a result, threatens to provoke a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 650 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

Well-documented facts pertaining to the 9/11 wars, all supported by sustainable evidence, have barely made inroads into the collective consciousness of Western media consumers.

The War on Syria is no exception.  Despite the presence of five years of sustainable evidence that contradicts the Western narratives, people still believe the “official” lies.

The consensus of ignorance is sustained by what Michel Chossudovsky describes as an “American Inquisition”. Beneath the protection of this psychological operation, the engineered enemy is Islam, and the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) has become a brand to disguise imperial wars of aggression as “humanitarian”.

Thus, huge sums of public monies are diverted from worthwhile, domestic projects such as healthcare schools and roads, to support a criminal Project for a New American Century (PNAC) that is globalizing death, poverty, and destruction as the U.S led empire tries to impose a  unilateral model of control over the world.

The U.S is said to be “exceptional”, and therefore the rightful ruler. Manifest Destiny writ large.

Dissent is suppressed within the framework of corporate media monopolies.  Predominant narratives are supported by corrupt “NGOs” – totally bereft of objectivity — and intelligence agency “fronts”. Real investigative journalism offering historical context and legitimate evidence are relegated to the fringes, far outside the domain of the broad-based “consensus of misunderstanding.”

The “Progressive Left” has been co-opted.  So-called “progressives” (presumably unwittingly) support Canada’s close relationships with Wahabbi Saudi Arabia, Apartheid Israel, and even the foreign mercenaries currently invading Syria (ie ISIS and al Nursra Front/al Qaeda).

The source upon which the pretexts for war are built and perpetrated are taboo topics, despite longstanding evidence that the official narratives explaining the crimes of 9/11  – and the subsequent “Gladio B” operations — are flawed.  The truth is seen as “heresy”, and fact-based narratives are derided as “conspiracy theories”.

Thus, a firm foundation of lies that serves as a sanctified justification for global war and terror, remains strong.

But the stakes are high, as Western hegemony presses us closer and closer to a real prospect of widespread nuclear war.  Already, the use of nuclear weapons is being “normalized” through the introduction of “mini-nukes” into the equation, and the blurring of lines between conventional and nuclear war.

Michel Chossudovsky explains in “Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust?|Will the US launch ‘Mini-nukes’ against Iran in Retaliation for Tehran’s ‘Non-compliance’?”  that

“The Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations outlines the procedures governing the use of nuclear weapons and the nature of the relationship between nuclear and conventional war operations.

The DJNO states that the:

 ‘use of nuclear weapons within a [war] theater requires that nuclear and conventional plans be integrated to the greatest extent possible’

(DJNO, p 47 italics added, italics added, For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 )

The implications of this ‘integration’ are far-reaching because once the decision is taken by the Commander in Chief, namely the President of the United States, to launch a joint conventional-nuclear military operation, there is a risk that tactical nuclear weapons could be used without requesting subsequent presidential approval. In this regard, execution procedures under the jurisdiction of the theater commanders pertaining to nuclear weapons are described  as ‘flexible and allow for changes in the situation …’ ”

The taboos need to be lifted, and the repeated lies contradicted.

Some of the more pernicious lies covering the escalating war on the democratic republic of Syria include unsubstantiated memes that fit neatly into the propagandists’ toolbox of false representations, and of projecting the West’s crimes onto the victims (Syria and Syrians).

The War on Syria is not a “civil” war; the “uprising” was not “democratic”; Assad does not “starve his own people”; Assad, does not “bomb his own people”; Assad is the democratically-elected president of Syria, and not a “brutal dictator”.

Conclusive evidence demonstrates, and has demonstrated for years, that the war is an invasion by Western proxies, which include ISIS and al Qaeda/al Nursra Front, and that there are no “moderates”.

The initial uprisings were marred by foreign-backed violence perpetrated against innocent people, soldiers, and police. Peaceful grassroots protests were hijacked by these murderous foreign-backed elements (as was the case in Ukraine) – all consistent with “hybrid war” as elaborated by Andrew Korybko.

The illegal sanctions imposed by the West – including Canada – coupled with terrorist practices of theft and hoarding of humanitarian aid – are responsible for the starvation.

Assad is a democratically elected reformer, and hugely popular with Syrians, not a brutal dictator. Claims that he “kills his own people” were further debunked when the so-called “Caesar photos” evidence was proven to be a fraud.

Many Syrians criticize Assad for not carpet bombing terrorist occupied areas (as US occupiers did in Fallujah, for example).  Syrians sometimes refer to Assad as “Mr. Soft Heart”.

Unfortunately, though, the well-documented truth is not widely accepted.  We need to shatter the “Inquisition” which serves to protect the criminal cabal perpetrating and orchestrating this global catastrophe.  Truth and justice must prevail over lies and crimes.  Currently, the opposite is the case.

The U.S. admits that the upcoming Aleppo offensive by the Syrian government and its allies is designed to hit al-Qaeda and associated terrorist forces and not primarily the “moderate” unicorns the U.S. propaganda blushes about. But the openly U.S. supported forces will also be hit as they are very much integrated with al-Qaeda. The U.S. has for long considered al-Qaeda a secret ally in its attempt to destroy the Syrian state. The French magazine L’Orient Le Joursees the U.S. relation with al-Qaeda in Syria as part of the attrition strategy the U.S. is waging against Syria (and Russia).

Secretary of State Kerry tried to convince the Russian that al-Qaeda should not be attacked during the cessation of hostilities. But the Russian’s did not agree. Al Qaeda is a UN recognized international terrorist organization which, under UNSC resolutions, must be fought. The U.S. only succeeded in downgrading the permanent ceasefire the Russians had preferred to into a temporary cessation hostilities. It thought to use the time to rearm and to regroup its proxy forces.

But then thing went wrong. An offensive along the Turkish border to push away the Islamic State and to seal the border between the Islamic State and Turkey failed. Al-Qaeda convinced other groups, including directly U.S. supported CIA assets, to prematurely attack Syrian government forces south of Aleppo on Tal el-Eis. The attack mad only little progress before it was stopped.

Now al-Qaeda and the U.S. proxies are heavily targeting the government held western arts of Aleppo city:

Elijah J. Magnier ‏@EjmAlrai 13h13 hours ago
#Aleppo observed the most violent day in d history of d war in #Syria causing 21 killed & 95 wounded. Every single street was hit by rebels+Since the announcement of the cease-fire, over 492 killed & wounded were registered in the only 2 hospitals in regime held area in #Aleppo.

Rebels hell bombs fell on all streets w/o exception while a group of rebels were trying 2infiltrate d city in West #Aleppo, trapped n sewage

This continued today

Elijah J. Magnier ‏@EjmAlrai 2h2 hours ago
17 killed and 92 wounded in #Aleppo regime controlled area today following rebels Hell cannon bombing. #Syria.

These attacks on the population are designed to bait the Syrian government forces into an immediate all-out attack into the al-Qaeda held parts of Aleppo city. I doubt that they will fall for it. The response for now will be more intense bombing in preparation for a well thought out attack later on.

Kerry recently again tried to convince the Russian government of partitioning Syria into “zones of interest”. This would shield terrorist forces form further Syrian and Russian attacks:

We’ve even proposed drawing a line, an absolute line, and saying, ‘You don’t go over there, we don’t go over here, and anything in between is fair game.’ And they are considering that, and I think we will get there in the next week or so.

The rather harsh public response to that Kerry nonsense came in today:

MFA Russia @mfa_russia
#Lavrov: Splitting Syria into zones of influence is a simplistic idea; the main objective must be to route terrorism @mod_russia @RussiaUN#Lavrov: US has not fulfilled its promise made two months ago to move “good opposition forces” away from the terrorist front lines in Syria

#Lavrov: The US State Dept. may shy away from cooperation with Russia, but there is no place for shyness in the fight against terrorism

#Lavrov: The UNSC declared Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist group. Those who want to distance themselves from this group should do so physically

Translation: Get your proxies out of the way or they will get hurt badly.

The U.S. “plan B” of splitting Syria into statelets has been rejected by the Syrian government and its allies.

The Syrian government and its allies are convinced that they can beat al-Qaeda and its various associates on the battle field. They are preparing a large attack against al-Qaeda and anyone nearby. There is little the U.S. can do to help the designated terrorists of al-Nusra in west Syria. But it continues its attempts to split Syria by inserting more of its special forces into north east Syria. These and their Kurdish proxy fighters have the task to take as much of eastern Syria from the Islamic State and others as possible before the Syrian government forces can do so. The thinking is that any captured town will be an asset in future negotiations. It will be interesting to see how the Syrian government and its allies will counter that move.

 

Chinese debt levels have risen to a record 237 percent of gross domestic product, according to a report published in the Financial Times over the weekend, prompting warnings that the country could be heading for a Lehman-style financial crisis or a protracted period of low growth like that which has afflicted Japan over the past two decades.

The report said that total debt in China, including both foreign and domestic borrowing, had climbed to $25 trillion as a result of a rapid expansion of borrowing since the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. In 2008, Chinese debt stood at 148 percent of GDP.

When the crisis erupted, leading to a contraction of world trade in the first months of 2009 at a faster rate than in the initial period of the 1930s Depression, the Chinese export model of economic growth collapsed, leading to the loss of 23 million jobs. The government responded with a stimulus package of half a trillion dollars and a massive expansion of credit to state-owned corporations and local government authorities. The credit expansion has been estimated to be the equivalent of the entire US financial system.

The expectation of the Chinese authorities was that the world economy would experience a recovery after the crisis and exports would resume their previous path. But nearly eight years after the financial crisis, the world economy continues to stagnate. Most significantly, world trade, which prior to the crisis grew at a faster rate than global GDP, is now running at a level below growth.

Since 2013, Chinese government and financial authorities, recognising that the expansion of infrastructure investment—especially in property—is inherently unsustainable, have been trying to effect a “rebalancing” of the economy away from capital intensive development and towards consumption and the expansion of services.

Growth rates have fallen from their previous levels of around 10 percent, lowering the government’s official target for economic expansion to between 6.5 percent and 7.0 percent. But even this lower level is proving difficult to sustain.

Economic turbulence in the last half of 2015, flowing from the stock market crisis in August and slowing growth, prompted fears of a “hard landing,” leading the government to reopen the credit spigots to sustain the economy. The first quarter 2016 estimate of growth was 6.7 percent, in line with government projections but nevertheless the lowest rate since the depths of the financial crisis. That result was achieved only through a major expansion of credit.

The Financial Times reported that according to central bank data and its own calculations, new borrowing increased by 6.2 trillion renminbi in the first quarter of this year, the biggest-ever increase over a three-month period, and more than 50 percent higher than the same period last year. The China chief economist at BNP Paribas, Chen Xingdong, said the first quarter GDP result was achieved only through the expansion of industrial production, fixed-asset investment, and what he called an “astonishing” increase in construction start-ups. At the same time, growth in the service sector, which is supposed to provide the basis for a “rebalanced” Chinese economy, slowed.

There is a divergence of opinion among economists and financial analysts as to how the Chinese debt problems will play out. Some warn that it will end in a “Lehman-style” crisis, with bank failures and a collapse in credit. According to Jonathan Anderson of the Emerging Advisors Group, whose remarks were cited in another Financial Times article over the weekend, the banks are relying on the sale of high-yielding products rather than deposits to finance credit—a formula that led to the 2008 collapse of the US banks Bear Stearns and, later in the year, Lehman Brothers.

“At the current rate of expansion” he wrote recently, “it is only a matter of time before some banks find themselves unable to fund all their assets safely. At that point, a financial crisis is likely.”

Global hedge fund investor George Soros has compared the Chinese economy to the situation that prevailed in the US before the collapse of 2008. Others maintain that China’s central bank will keep pumping money into the financial system in order to ward off a collapse, but this will lead only to Japanese-style stagnation.

Whatever the immediate outcome, the mounting debt crisis has far-reaching implications for the global economy as a whole, with a large number of economies, ranging from Australia and Brazil to the economies in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, highly dependent on continued Chinese economic growth.

In a report issued earlier this year, Ha Jiming, an investment strategist with Goldman Sachs, noted: “Every major country with a rapid increase in debt has experienced either a financial crisis or a prolonged slowdown in GDP growth.”

In its recent Global Financial Stability Report, the International Monetary Fund drew attention to the rising debt problems. It estimated that more than 15 percent of total commercial lending in China was “potentially at risk,” meaning that banks faced a loss of 4.9 trillion renminbi, an amount equivalent to 7 percent of GDP. Others estimate that the stock of non-performing loans may be even higher.

The organisation’s World Economic Outlook report, prepared for its spring round of meetings earlier this month, pointed to substantial and rising “spillover” effects on advanced economies from the Chinese financial system.

It is not clear what impact the growing concerns over Chinese debt levels will have in the short-term. But other short-term potential sources of instability are looming.

The Bank of Japan will meet on Thursday amid growing pressure for a further easing of its monetary policy, after it initiated negative interest rates at the end of January. While the central bank insisted that the lowering of the value of yen was not an official aim of the new regime—governments and central banks maintain an official fiction that they do not target the value of their own currency, lest they be accused of engaging in a currency war—the Bank of Japan and the government had hoped that the yen would fall.

Instead, in the three months since negative rates were introduced, the value of the yen has been rising, increasing the deflationary pressures on the Japanese economy and making it harder for Japanese companies to compete in global markets.

The official position of Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is that the monetary policy is working. However, he put forward a similar position in the lead-up to the surprise introduction of negative interest rates at the end of January.

Much will depend on what the US Federal Reserve decides to do at its meeting on Wednesday. If it points to an interest rate rise in June, this will likely lead to a rise in the US dollar and a fall in the yen. However, if it pushes future interest rate rises further out, the dollar will tend to fall, putting more upward pressure on the yen—an outcome that could produce another surprise announcement from the Bank of Japan.

Soon after the impeachment motion against President Dilma Rousseff was approved in the Brazilian Congress by what I chose to call Hybrid War hyenas, President-in-Waiting Michel «Brutus» Temer, one of the coup’s articulators, dispatched a senator to Washington as special paperboy to deliver the news on the coup in progress. The senator in question was not on an official mission for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Brutus Temer was alarmed by global media reaction, which is increasingly interpreting what he’s doing – allied with Brutus Two, notoriously corrupt head of the lower house Eduardo Cunha – for what it is: a coup.

The senator’s mission was allegedly to launch a PR offensive to counter the coup narrative, which is, according to Brutus One, «demoralizing Brazilian institutions».

Nonsense. The paperboy senator was sent to tell the US State Department that everything is proceeding according to plan.

In Washington, the paperboy senator mumbled, «we will explain that Brazil is not a banana republic». Well, it was not, but now, thanks to the Hybrid War hyenas, it is.

When you have a man holding 11 illegal bank accounts in Switzerland, listed in the Panama Papers, and already under investigation by the Supreme Court controlling the political destiny of a whole nation, you have a banana republic.

When you have a self-righteous provincial judge threatening to imprison former President Lula for a modest apartment and a ranch that he does not own, but at the same time is incapable of laying a finger on Brutus Two, alongside largely pompous Supreme Court judges, you have a banana republic.

Now compare Washington’s non-reaction with Moscow’s. The Russian Foreign Ministry, via the irrepressible Maria Zakharova, stressed the crucial BRICS partnership as well as the common Brazil-Russia positions within the G20. And Moscow made it clear that Brazil’s problems should be solved within «the constitutional legal framework and without any external interference».

Everyone knows what «external interference» means.

Full Spectrum Dominance Reloaded

I have been following the Brazilian coup-in-progress with a special emphasis on the US-backed/driven Hybrid Warfare bent on destroying «the neo-developmentalist project for Latin America – uniting at least some of the local elites, invested in developing internal markets, in association with the working classes». The key Hybrid War objective in this case is to install a neoliberal restoration.

Obviously the key target had to be Brazil, a BRICS member and the 7th largest economy in the world.

Imperial hacks go straight to the point when listing the Hybrid War tools and aims of what the Pentagon defined as Full Spectrum Dominance way back in 2002. So, «US power flows from our unmatched military might, yes. Anything that expands the reach of US markets – such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in trade, for example – adds to the arsenal of US power. But in a deeper way, it’s a product of the dominance of the US economy».

Yet the US economy is far from dominant. What matters now is what drives «business away from America, or allow other nations to build a rival financial architecture that’s less encumbered by a smorgasbord of sanctions». 

«Rival financial architecture» has BRICS written all over it. And a «smorgasbord of sanctions» was not enough to make Iran cry uncle; Tehran will continue to practice a «resistance economy». Not by accident, two of the BRICS – Russia and China – as well as Iran, feature as the Pentagon’s top five existential threats, alongside nuclear-armed North Korea and, as the last lowly priority, «terrorism».

Cold War 2.0 is essentially about Russia and China – but Brazil is also a key player. Edward Snowden revealed how NSA spying was centered on Petrobras, whose proprietary technology was responsible for the largest oil discovery of the young 21st century; the pre-salt deposits. US Big Oil is excluded from its exploitation. That’s anathema; and that requires deployment of Hybrid War techniques inbuilt in Full Spectrum Dominance.

Brazilian comprador elites have been gleefully playing the game. Over two years ago JP Morgan analysts were already conducting seminars with neoliberal macro-economy enforcers preaching how to destabilize the Rousseff government.

Industry, commerce, banking and agribusiness lobbies have ostensibly favored impeachment, as representing the end of the Lula-Dilma social democracy experiment. So it’s no wonder President-in-Waiting Brutus Temer made a comprehensive deal with Big Capital – including no limits for interests on public debt (way above the international norm); the relation between debt and GDP bound to go up; more expensive credit; and the corollary being cuts on health and education.

As far as Washington is concerned, and that’s bipartisan, it’s absolutely out of the question to allow an autonomous regional power in the South Atlantic, blessed with unrivalled eco-wealth (think the Amazon rainforest and all that water, coupled with the Guarani aquifer) and on top of it closely linked to key BRICS members Russia-China, which have their own strategic partnership.

The pre-salt factor is the cherry in the tropical cake. Out of the question for US Big Oil to allow Petrobras to have the monopoly of exploitation. And just in case, if need be, the US 4th Fleet is already in position in the South Atlantic.

One BRICS down, two to go

The Cheney regime-declared «war on terra» distracted the Empire of Chaos for too long. Now finally comes a – coordinated, global – chaos offensive. From Southwest Asia to South Asia, the Hybrid War dream would be some sort of Iraqi chaos to replace the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Egypt – as the leading-from-behind Empire of Chaos is trying hard in Syria even though the Assad dynasty was a «secret» US ally for decades.

The Masters of the Universe above paperboy Obama decided to stab the House of Saud in the back – not necessarily a bad thing – over Iran; the prevailing wishful thinking was to have Iranian natural gas replacing Russian natural gas going to Europe, thus collapsing the Russian economy. Major fail.

Yet there’s still another option; the Qatari natural gas pipeline through Saudi Arabia and Syria, also replacing Russian natural gas to Europe. That remains the CIA chief goal in Syria – no matter what; Daesh, the phony Caliphate – this is all just propaganda.

The CIA is also keen on Saudi Arabia destroying the Russian economy through an oil price war – and they do not want that to stop; thus holding over the Saudis those famous 28 pages on 9/11 to keep the oil price war going.

The CIA has also been trying like mad to lure Moscow into a Syrian trap as in 1980s Afghanistan, and as they did with the Kiev coup, even to the extent of ordering the Turkish military, which is their agent, to shoot down a Russian Su-24. The «problem» is that the Kremlin did not bite the poisoned apple.

Way back in the 1980s, the mix of House of Saud unleashing their reserves along with the GCC petrodollar gang, driving the price of oil to $7 a barrel in 1985, together with the Afghanistan Vietnam op, ended up driving the USSR bankrupt. Arguably, the whole op was brilliant – in conception and execution; a Hybrid War of economics plus Vietnam. Now, «leading from behind», Dr. Zbig «Grand Chessboard» Brzezinski – Obama’s foreign policy mentor – is trying to pull off a similar trick.

But oops, we got a problem. The Beijing leadership, already preoccupied with tweaking the Chinese development model, clearly saw the Empire of Chaos’s effort to Divide and Rule (and Conquer) the entire world. If Russia went down, China would be next.

It was only, virtually yesterday, around 2010, when US intel regarded China as their major military threat, and were starting to move against the Middle Kingdom via the «pivoting to Asia». But suddenly the CIA realized that Moscow had spent a trillion dollars jumping two generations ahead in defensive and offensive missiles – not to mention submarines; the weapons of choice for WWIII.

That is when Russia was enthroned as the major threat. Carefully surveying the chessboard, the Beijing leadership then accelerated the alliance with Russia and the BRICS as an alternative force, creating an earthquake in Washington of absolutely devastating proportions.

Now, Beijing has deftly engineered the BRICS into play as a serious alternative power structure – with their own IMF, SWIFT payment system, and World Bank.

Beware the wrath of an Empire of Chaos scorned. That’s what’s in play now against the BRICS; Brazil under siege, the fall of South Africa, the weakness of India, China and Russia progressively surrounded. Hybrid War variations from Ukraine to Brazil, mounting pressure in Central Asia, the «Syraq» powder keg, all point to a concerted Full Spectrum Dominance offensive to break up the BRICS, the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership, and ultimately the New Silk Roads uniting Eurasia. Oil price wars, the ruble collapse, the refugee flood in the EU (caused by «erratic» Sultan Erdogan), 21st century Operation Gladio remixes all over, distract the masses against imaginary enemies while terrorism of the phony Daesh variety is manipulated as a sophisticated diversionist tactic.

It may be brilliant, even masterful, in its conception and in its execution, and it’s so flashy in a cinematic sense. But make no mistake; there will be blowback.

The Balfour Declaration was a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. It read:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non ­Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, successive British governments have deliberately ignored the very specific safeguards for the protection of the indigenous peoples of Palestine that were explicitly contained within the Foreign Secretary’s Declaration of November 1917.

David Lloyd George, who was Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, told the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937 that the Declaration was made “due to propagandist reasons.”

In his Memoirs, published in 1939, Lloyd George further elucidated his position:

The Balfour Declaration represented the convinced policy of all parties in our country and also in America, but the launching of it in 1917 was due, as I have said, to propagandist reasons…. The Zionist Movement was exceptionally strong in Russia and America…. It was believed, also, that such a declaration would have a potent influence upon world Jewry outside Russia, and secure for the Entente the aid of Jewish financial interests. In America, their aid in this respect would have a special value when the Allies had almost exhausted the gold and marketable securities available for American purchases. Such were the chief considerations which, in 1917, impelled the British Government towards making a contract with Jewry.

Meanwhile the British government continues to ignore the very explicit safeguards that were contained within the said Declaration, which is accepted to be the foundation block that led to the subsequent establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 at the expense of the indigenous population that had been in continuous occupation of the land for over a thousand years.

The United States feigned surprise during the simulation of an attack by the Russian aviation against the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea. And yet, as we have reported, Russia already has the capacity to block the ship’s Communications & Commands, and did so, observes Manlio Dinucci, because the ship was in the process of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Furthermore, the US nuclear deployment occurred as China is developing hypersonic launchers, a part of whose trajectory will be in glide mode, inspiring new research by DARPA. As from now, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are participating in the Tactical Boost Glide Program.

Translation
Pete Kimberley

Courtesy of Voltaire Net

How broken is American government? Other senators A-OK with current killing patterns, or prefer increase

It sounds a little like a joke (and in a sense it is): Two US senators introduce a resolution based on fraudulent representations of reality, seeking to make the president insist that the Saudis bomb fewer civilians in Yemen, and this darkly hilarious hoax is still better than anything the other 98 senators (and the whole House) are doing about the US illegal war in Yemen. Our would-be heroic duo in the Senate doesn’t actually oppose the US war on Yemen, even though they acknowledge its savage daily violations of international law (currently suspended during a tenuous ceasefire). Regardless, these two senators are simultaneously misrepresenting US participation in those ruthless crimes (which the rest of the Senate simply ignores and the State Department trivializes).

Following 15 years of special ops there, the US has been openly at war against Yemen for more than a year, in support of a genocidal Saudi coalition (mostly the Gulf Cooperation Council that President Obama met with privately recently). Once again, the US is in a war undertaken without Constitutional consultation with Congress, and without Congress raising a peep of an objection. This is a criminal war in which the US is at least accomplice to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The US drone war’s toll on civilians arguably makes the US guilty of committing both sets of crimes.

Most of this is acknowledged in Senate Joint Resolution 32, which the senators introduced on April 13, after which it was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for further consideration possibly. Resolution 32 states in part:

Whereas the Panel of Experts established pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 2140 (2014) reported on January 22, 2016, that the military coalition led by the Government of Saudi Arabia in Yemen ‘‘had conducted air strikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation of International Humanitarian Law, including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, residential areas, medical facilities, schools, mosques, markets, factories and food storage warehouses, and other essential civilian infrastructure such as the airport in Sanaa, the port in Hudayadah, and domestic transit routes’’…. [emphasis added]

The same UN Panel of Experts cited in Resolution 32 also reported attacks on civilians by the Houthi-Saleh forces (usually referred to as the “rebels”) in Aden and Taiz, but the panel did not accuse the Houthi-Saleh forces of a systematic, countrywide campaign in violation of international humanitarian law. Yemen has been engulfed by civil war time and again in recent decades, but the current civil war is overwhelmed in brutality and carnage caused by the international aggression of the US/Saudi coalition. Theirs is the only bombing campaign in a largely defenseless country. The US/Saudi allies are responsible for most of the war’s 3000-plus civilian deaths and the destruction of at least three Doctors Without Borders hospitals among other atrocities.

Resolution 32 fails to acknowledge that this is a war that could not have begun without US blessing. The resolution obliquely acknowledges that this is a war that could not be fought without US weapons, or certainly not fought as easily and devastatingly. But the resolution does not oppose the war. The resolution seeks to leverage the Yemen war in favor of a preferred war elsewhere, in places where civilians might be more easily disregarded as would-be “enemy combatants.”

Senate response to criminally murderous war: use fewer bombs, maybe

There is no peace movement in the US Senate. There is no anti-war movement in the US Senate. There is no anti-criminal-war in Yemen movement in the US Senate. There is no active anti-war-crimes movement in the US Senate. But there are two senators who have co-sponsored Resolution 32, the gist of which is to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to drop fewer bombs on Yemeni civilians unless they start dropping more bombs on ISIS, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Resolution 32 is not a proposal designed to save lives, merely to take different lives in different places, and not necessarily fewer lives. Fortune Magazine reported the resolution with standard, unexamined foreign policy clichés and an appropriate emphasis on the weapons business:

A major U.S. ally is in the crosshairs.

The U.S. defense industry has sold at least $33 billion worth of weapons to its Persian Gulf allies over the past year as dual bombing campaigns against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and Houthi rebels in Yemen have depleted stores of aerial bombs and other munitions. But as civilian casualties mount in Yemen in particular, a bipartisan duo in the U.S. Senate is working to tighten the free-flow of weapons and cash between the U.S. and one of its most important Gulf allies. Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced legislation on Wednesday [April 13] that would restrict the sale of U.S. aerial bombs and missiles to Saudi Arabia unless certain conditions are met.

Fortune has a funny way of seeing things: Saudi Arabia, without significant military risk, bombing civilians to the point of running out of bombs, is somehow seen as “in the crosshairs.” These so-called crosshairs are merely an empty threat by two senators to sell them fewer bombs. So long as the Saudis get the president to certify that they’ll bomb ISIS more, then everyone involved can go on about the business, the very lucrative business, of random killing as usual, even if the Saudis don’t bomb ISIS more. There is no purpose here beyond more killing, with little regard for who gets killed. Well, that’s pretty much a summary of the post-9/11 American zeitgeist, isn’t it?

Is the United States capable of governing honestly about anything?

Senators Murphy and Paul falsely describe the American role in the war on Yemen this way in Resolution 32:

Whereas the United States Armed Forces provide dedicated personnel and assets to the armed forces of Saudi Arabia to support their military operations in Yemen, including over 700 air-to-air refueling sorties, and to assist with effectiveness and reduction of collateral damage….

This is true as far as it goes, but it minimizes complicity: how much bombing would be possible without air-to-air refueling? The answer to that question would provide a measure of direct US responsibility for bombing at will in a country with no air defenses.

The senators refer in deceitfully benign language to US personnel who “assist with effectiveness and reduction of collateral damage” the US/Saudi bombing raids. In reality, US personnel work side by side with Saudi counterparts in Riyadh, planning, authorizing, and assessing the bombing missions that began over a year ago and have produced a world-class humanitarian crisis. That result suggests that any effort to reduce collateral damage has been limited, incompetent, or both.

But the senators also deceive by omission. Resolution 32 omits the moral (if not legal) war crime that the US commits every time it supplies the Saudi coalition with a cluster bomb, a devastating anti-personnel weapon, that leaves explosives littered around each bomb site, where they remain lethally dangerous, especially to children. That’s why most of the rest of the world has banned cluster bombs, while the US and other rogue states have not. Senators Murphy and Paul, like their 98 peers, lack the courage even to admit they’re on the wrong side of the law of war on this.

And while the senators acknowledge “the systematic and widespread blockade” that has substantially deprived Yemen of food, fuel, medicine, humanitarian aid, and commercial goods, they omit any hint of US participation in that blockade by land, air, or sea. The US Navy in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean reinforces the Saudi-dominated blockade. Yemen, the poorest country in the region, has long depended on food imports to feed its population of some 25 million. The result of the blockade, not unexpected, is that Yemen has been brought to the verge of mass starvation by the US/Saudi coalition. And the blockade further heightens the crisis by preventing Yemenis from leaving this nation-sized prison purgatory.

An elaborate, meaningless charade is better than nothing, right?

The US has been militarily engaged in Yemen since 2000, when suicide bombers attacked the US Navy destroyer Cole while refueling at port in Aden. The attack killed 17 crew members and wounded 39.US counter-terrorism operations in Yemen since then have included Special Forces, an extended drone campaign, and the current US/Saudi war. In that time, the al Qaeda presence in Yemen has increased to control much of the eastern part of the country, including the port of Mukalla, where Saudi battleships control access from the sea. As of April 23, Saudi coalition forces, including a large contingent from the United Arab Emirates, were massing for an attack on Mukalla, according to UAE official media.

In almost identical press releases from Sen. Murphy and from Sen. Paul, they define the intent of Resolution 32 as a means

to prevent the United States from continuing to support Saudi-led military campaigns in places like Yemen where Saudi Arabia’s year-long campaign has led to a devastating humanitarian crisis and a security vacuum that has empowered our terrorist enemies al Qaeda and ISIS. The Murphy-Paul bipartisan legislation will require the President of the United States to formally certify that the Government of Saudi Arabia is demonstrating an ongoing effort to target terrorist groups, minimize harm to civilians, and facilitate humanitarian assistance before Congress can consider the sale or transfer of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia.

In other words, Resolution 32 is a Rube Goldberg contraption designed to give the impression of moral decency while leaving the reality of the US/Saudi war unlikely to be affected even in the unlikely eventuality that this proposal becomes law. (A companion resolution has now been introduced in the House, where it too will be sent to committee to await further action, if any.)

We pay senators $174,000 a year (plus their perks and staff) and this is the best any of the hundred of them can suggest “to prevent the United States from continuing to support Saudi-led military campaigns in places like Yemen”? Seriously?

The conventional beltway banalities, the bipartisan deceits, the continuing failure of business as usual are worthless. We need someone who will stand up and say, simply: US OUT OF YEMEN NOW

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.

Malaysian Airlines MH17 Brought Down by Ukrainian Military Aircraft. The BBC Refutes its Own Lies?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 26 2016

The following interview with Professor Chossudovsky was published in September 2013

Michel Chossudovsky, renowned Canadian professor and award-winning author, argues [2013] that a US plan for military intervention in Syria could result in escalation and the integration of  “four distinct war theaters”– Afghanistan-Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine and Libya– setting the stage for “a World War III scenario.”

Global Research Editor’s Note

This article  first published on July 30, 2014 contradicts the substance of the recently released Dutch Safety Board Report. We are bringing it to the attention of our readers in view of the soon to be released BBC TV documentary, which suggests that the  MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian jet fighter.  (GR Ed. M.Ch.)

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