Global Research

Biotech giant Monsanto reported multiple profit-plummets in 2015 relating to sales for both its genetically modified crop creations and its best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Once again, Monsanto has reported declining profits for the fiscal second-quarter earnings – by 25%.

For Monsanto’s 2nd quarter, total sales for Monsanto dropped 13%; with one of Monsanto’s top-sellers, corn seeds, falling 11%. The biotech giant cites an “unfavorable agricultural market” for its losses, pointing out that:

• Pressures in overseas markets is increasing

• Farmers are reporting less income due to less-than-ideal harvests

• The strength of the U.S. dollar made products more expensive

But the company makes little or no mention of the other key factors affecting its bottom line.

• Organic food demand is exploding like crazy – and the figures show no sign of it slowing any time soon.

• The world is seeing how toxic pesticides and herbicides really are.

• Record farmers are switching to non-GMO crops.

• Monsanto is one of the most hated companies in the world.

While the company is admittedly still seeing profits in the billions, the continuous decline paints a bleak picture for the agricultural giant. It means that the massive grassroots movement against Big Biotech giants such as Monsanto is working, and that our collective voice is being more than heard.

With awareness growing on the potential dangers of GMOs and the very real negative impact pesticides and herbicides have on human health and the environment, why wouldn’t anyone go against such an unsustainable, harmful business?

Earlier this year, Monsanto announced that sales in the company’s agricultural productivity segment, which includes its best-selling Roundup herbicide, fell 34% to $820 million for the quarter ending November 30. Monsanto also revealed that it plans to cut more of their work force – a total of 3600 jobs, which accounts for 16% of its global employee base. The biotech giant will also record $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion in ‘restructuring’ costs.

Amid the falling profits, the mega-corp not only lied to consumers about the safety of GM seed and their best-selling herbicide, but also lied to investors! The company was to pay an $80 million settlement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a penalty for lying about earnings for glyphosate-riddled herbicide, Round Up.

Also in 2016, it was announced that plans to construct a $90 million GM corn processing plant in Independence, Iowa would be scrapped due to a ‘struggling farm economy.’ [1]

The company’s recently-failed attempt to takeover Syngenta has also left them in a weaker position amid a steep downturn in the agricultural business.

“We no longer see large-scale M&A as a likely opportunity,” Mr. Grant told investors on a conference call after reporting fiscal second-quarter earnings that fell short of analysts’ expectations. “Our strategy is not and was not dependent on large-scale M&A.”

With organic food sales having approached $37 billion annually, up 12% from just a year ago, and farmers switching to organic crops at a growing rate, the future of food actually has a nice glow to it. The masses are seeing just how toxic our current approach to agriculture can really be, and we simply do not want it anymore.

Monsanto’s time seems to be slowly and steadily plateauing, and it’s all thanks to you.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the non-partisan auditor and investigator for Congress.

The GAO says that the U.S. government’s records are so poorly kept that it can’t really audit them. 

Specifically, the GAO provided a report to Congress yesterday stating:

The federal government was unable to demonstrate the reliability of significant portions of its accrual-based financial statements as of and for the fiscal years ended September 30, 2015, and 2014, principally resulting from limitations related to certain material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting and other limitations affecting the reliability of these financial statements. For example, about 34 percent of the federal government’s reported total assets as of September 30, 2015, and approximately 19 percent of the federal government’s reported net cost for fiscal year 2015, relate to three CFO Act agencies—the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—that received disclaimers of opinion on their fiscal year 2015 financial statements. As a result, we were prevented from providing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements.

The federal government did not maintain adequate systems or have sufficient appropriate evidence to support certain material information reported in its accrual-based financial statements. The underlying material weaknesses in internal control, which have existed for years, contributed to our disclaimer of opinion on the accrual-based financial statements as of and for the fiscal years ended September 30, 2015, and 2014.  Specifically, these weaknesses concerned the federal government’s inability to:

***

·         adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal entities;

·         reasonably assure that the government wide financial statements are (1) consistent with the underlying audited entities’ financial statements, (2) properly balanced, and (3) in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (U.S. GAAP); and

·         reasonably assure that the information in the (1) Reconciliations of Net Operating Cost and Unified Budget Deficit and (2) Statements of Changes in Cash Balance from Unified Budget and Other Activities is complete and consistent with the underlying information in the audited entities’ financial statements and other financial data.

These material weaknesses continued to (1) hamper the federal government’s ability to reliably report a significant portion of its assets, liabilities, costs, and other related information; (2) affect the federal government’s ability to reliably measure the full cost as well as the financial and nonfinancial performance of certain programs and activities;(3) impair the federal government’s ability to adequately safeguard significant assets and properly record various transactions; and (4) hinder the federal government from having reliable financial information to operate in an efficient and effective manner.

Moreover, the Pentagon hasn’t even attempted to comply with government audits …  and “$8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon [between] 1996 [and 2013] has never been accounted for.”  The military wastes and “loses” trillions of dollars.

In addition:

• Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz says the World Bank would view any country which had a banking structure like the Fed as being corrupt and untrustworthy. The former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said said he worried that the failure of the government to provide more information about its rescue spending could signal corruption. “Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be here,” he said

• We’ve known for a long time that the Bureau of Labor Statistics fudges the numbers to make unemployment look lower than it is really is. BLS itself has admitted that its “adjustments” skew unemployment data during recessions. Indeed, the former head of the BLS recently said BLS statistics are B.S. … and that unemployment is much higher than the government is letting on

• The Bureau of Economic Analysis is revising 84 years of economic history … which will make the economy magically look better

• The U.S. (and British) governments encouraged interest rate manipulation. And central banks have been directly manipulating interest rates for hundreds of years

• The government has long ignored energy and food prices when reporting on inflation

• Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy when they were not. The Treasury Secretary also falsely told Congress that the bailouts would be used to dispose of toxic assets … but then used the money for something else entirely

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has conspired with big banks to manipulate commodities prices for decades

• The government-sponsored rating agencies committed massive fraud (and see this)

• The Treasury department allowed banks to “cook their books”

• Regulators knew of and allowed the use of debt-hiding accounting tricks by the big banks

• The SEC has been shredding Wall Street documents for decades to help the big banks cover up their fraud

• The Secretary of Treasury (Tim Geithner) was complicit in Lehman’s accounting fraud, (and see this)

• The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud (a whistleblower also “gift-wrapped and delivered” the Madoff scandal to the SEC, but they refused to take action). Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen

• The regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks. But – instead of doing the right thing – they’ve done everything they can to help COVER UP THEIR SINS

• The non-partisan Government Accountability Office calls the Fed corrupt and riddled with conflicts of interest

• Congress recently told the courts that Congress can’t be investigated for insider trading

Yesterday’s GAO report also predicted:

By 2089 … debt held by the public as a share of GDP reaches 314 percent in our baseline extended simulation or 568 percent in our alternative simulation

As the head of the GAO put it, “We’re going to owe more than our entire economy is producing and by definition this is not sustainable.”

The Hill reported in November:

The former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion.

Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national debt is more than three times the number generally advertised.

***

“If you end up adding to that $18.5 trillion the unfunded civilian and military pensions and retiree healthcare, the additional underfunding for Social Security, the additional underfunding for Medicare, various commitments and contingencies that the federal government has, the real number is about $65 trillion rather than $18 trillion, and it’s growing automatically absent reforms ….”

But former Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and current Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff says that – when unfunded liabilities are taken into account – the fiscal gap for the U.S. is actually 3 times higher … $205 trillion as of 2013 (and getting worse all the time).

We believe that an accurate would show that the government already owes more than the entire economy is producing …Government Accounting Is Fraudulent

In an interview conducted with Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV, Syria’s Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun publicly accused the “Syrian rebels” of working with Israel. Hassoun, a major religious leader in Syria, claimed the “rebels” had repeatedly offered peace deals on the condition that Assad make concessions to Israel.

Ever since the Western-backed destabilization campaign began in 2011, Hassoun said, the Syrian government had repeatedly received unofficial offers from “rebel” groups suggesting that they would end their operations against Syria if the government would agree to various deals with Israel.

The “deals” proposed by the “rebel” groups included the expulsion of all the Palestinian resistance from Syria as well as the ending of all association with Hezbollah.

Hassoun also added that “al-Sham” (Syria) was once “a vast territory extending from the Sinai desert to Hejaz desert and was not divided into a small state,” but that France and Britain carved up for political purposes and that the same powers continue to try and divide it to this day.

Hassoun pointed out that “40,000 Muslims from Europe are fighting in Syria” and said that none of those fighters are pushing for the liberation of Palestine. He also pointed the finger at “several” Muslim countries who are fighting in Syria and Yemen, highlighting the fact that they are not fighting for Palestine. It is fairly clear that Hassoun was suggesting that these unnamed Muslim countries were also in league with Israel.

That ISIS fighters, “rebel” groups,” GCC and NATO forces are working with Israel for the purpose of destroying Syria is not really in question. Israel has long been providing healthcare to injured terrorists, patching them up and sending them back to the Syrian battlefield.[1] Israel has also been exposed for providing weaponry and other related supplies to terrorists fighting in Syria.

Israel has also repeatedly attacked Syrian military sites, bases, equipment, and personnel in support of Western-backed terrorists on the ground on a number of occasions.

In June, 2015, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon even admitted that Israel was providing aid to terrorists in Syria.

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.

Notes:

[1] Cohen, Gil. “Israeli Military Sheds Light On Its Humanitarian Aid To Syrians.” Haaretz. February 24, 2014.

Several weeks ago, I received a phone call from legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who had seen one of my recent stories about Syria and wanted to commiserate over the state of modern journalism. Hersh’s primary question regarding reporters and editors at major news outlets these days was: “Do they care what the facts are?”

Hersh noted that in the past – in the 1970s when he worked at The New York Times – even executive editor Abe Rosenthal, who was a hard-line cold warrior with strong ideological biases, still wanted to know what was really going on.

My experience was similar at The Associated Press. Among the older editors, there was still a pride in getting the facts right – and not getting misled by some politician or spun by some government flack.

That journalistic code, however, no longer exists – at least not on foreign policy and national security issues. The major newspapers and TV networks are staffed largely by careerists who uncritically accept what they are fed by U.S. government officials or what they get from think-tank experts who are essentially in the pay of special interests.

For a variety of reasons – from the draconian staff cuts among foreign correspondents to the career fear of challenging some widely held “group think” – many journalists have simply become stenographers, taking down what the Important People say is true, not necessarily what is true.

It’s especially easy to go with the flow when writing about some demonized foreign leader. Then, no editor apparently expects anything approaching balance or objectivity, supposedly key principles of journalism. Indeed, if a reporter gave one of these hated figures a fair shake, there might be grumblings about whether the reporter was a “fill-in-the-blank apologist.” The safe play is to pile on.

This dishonesty – or lack of any commitment to the truth – is even worse among editorialists and columnists. Having discovered that there was virtually no cost for being catastrophically wrong about the facts leading into the Iraq invasion in 2003, these writers must feel so immune from accountability that they can safely ignore reality.

But – for some of us old-timers – it’s still unnerving to read the work of these “highly respected” journalists who simply don’t care what the facts are.

For instance, the establishment media has been striking back ferociously against President Barack Obama’s apostasy in a series of interviews published in The Atlantic, in which he defends his decision not to bomb the Syrian government in reaction to a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.

Image: Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.

Though The Atlantic article was posted a month ago, the media fury is still resonating and reverberating around Official Washington, with Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt penning the latest condemnation of Obama’s supposed fecklessness for not enforcing his “red line” on chemical-weapon use in Syria by bombing the Syrian military.

Remember that in 2002-03, Hiatt penned Post editorials that reported, as “flat fact,” that Iraq possessed hidden stockpiles of WMD – and he suffered not a whit for being horribly wrong. More than a dozen years later, Hiatt is still the Post’s editorial-page editor – one of the most influential jobs in American journalism.

On Thursday, Hiatt reported as flat fact that Syria’s “dictator, Bashar al-Assad, killed 1,400 or more people in a chemical gas attack,” a reference to the 2013 sarin atrocity. Hiatt then lashed out at President Obama for not punishing Assad and – even worse – for showing satisfaction over that restraint.

Citing The Atlantic interviews, Hiatt wrote that Obama “said he had been criticized because he refused to follow the ‘playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment,’ which would have counseled greater U.S. intervention.” Hiatt was clearly disgusted with Obama’s pusillanimous choice.

The No ‘Slam Dunk’ Warning

But what Hiatt and other neocon columnists consistently ignore from The Atlantic article is the disclosure that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed Obama that U.S. intelligence analysts doubted that Assad was responsible for the sarin attack.

Clapper even used the phrase “slam dunk,” which is associated with the infamous 2002 pledge from then-CIA Director George Tenet to President George W. Bush about how “slam dunk” easy it would be to make the case that Iraq was hiding WMD. More than a decade later, brandishing that disgraced phrase, Clapper told Obama that it was not a “slam dunk” that Assad was responsible for the sarin attack.

Image: President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)

In other words, Obama’s decision not to bomb Assad’s military was driven, in part, by the intelligence community’s advice that he might end up bombing the wrong people. Since then, evidence has built up that radical jihadists opposed to Assad staged the sarin attack as a provocation to trick the U.S. military into entering the war on their side.

But those facts clearly are not convenient to Hiatt’s neocon goal – i.e., how to get the United States into another Mideast “regime change” war – so he simply expunges the “slam dunk” exchange between Clapper and Obama and inserts instead a made-up “fact,” the flat-fact certainty of Assad’s guilt.

Hiatt’s assertion of the death toll – as “1,400 or more people” – is also dubious. Doctors on the ground in Damascus placed the number of dead at several hundred. The 1,400 figure was essentially manufactured by the U.S. government using a dubious methodology of counting bodies shown on “social media,” failing to take into account the question of whether the victims died as a result of the Aug. 21, 2013 incident.

Relying on “social media” for evidence is a notoriously unreliable practice, since pretty much anyone can post anything on the Internet. And, in the case of Syria, there are plenty of interest groups that have a motive to misidentify or even fabricate images for the purpose of influencing public opinion and policy. There is also the Internet’s vulnerability as a devil’s playground for professional intelligence services.

But Hiatt is far from alone in lambasting Obama for failing to do what All the Smart People of Washington knew he should do: bomb, bomb, bomb Assad’s forces in Syria – even if that might have led to the collapse of the army and the takeover of Damascus by Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State.

Nationally syndicated columnist Richard Cohen, another Iraq War cheerleader who suffered not at all for that catastrophe, accused Obama of “hubris” for taking pride in his decision not to bomb Syria in 2013 and then supposedly basing his foreign policy on that inaction.

“In an odd way, Obama’s failure to intervene in Syria or to enforce his stated ‘red line’ there has become the rationale for an entire foreign policy doctrine – one based more on hubris than success,” wrote Cohen in a column on Tuesday.

Image: President Barack Obama shakes hands with U.S. troops at Bagram Airfield in Bagram, Afghanistan, Sunday, May 25, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Note how Cohen – like Hiatt – fails to mention the relevant fact that DNI Clapper warned the President that the intelligence community was unsure who had unleashed the sarin attack or whether Assad had, in fact, crossed the “red line.”

Cohen also embraces the conventional wisdom that Obama was mistaken not to have intervened in Syria, ignoring the fact that Obama did, in violation of international law, authorize arming and training of thousands of Syrian rebels to violently overthrow the Syrian government, with many of those weapons (and recruits) falling into the hands of terror groups, such as Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Climbing into Bed with Al Qaeda.”]

Neocon Ideologues

So, it appears that these well-regarded geniuses don’t appreciate the idea of ascertaining the facts before charging off to war. And there’s a reason for that: many are neocon ideologues who reached their conclusion about what needs to be done in the Middle East – eliminate governments that are troublesome to Israel – and thus they view information as just something to be manipulated to manipulate the public.

This thinking stems from the 1990s when neocons combined their recognition of America’s unmatched military capabilities – as displayed in the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 and made even more unchallengeable with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991– with Israel’s annoyance over inconclusive negotiations with the Palestinians and security concerns over Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.

The new solution to Israel’s political and security problems would be “regime change” in countries seen as aiding and abetting Israel’s enemies. The strategy came together among prominent U.S. neocons working on Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign for Israeli prime minister.

Rather than continuing those annoying negotiations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu’s neocon advisers — including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Mevray Wurmser — advocated a new approach, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

The “clean break” sought “regime change” in countries supporting Israel’s close-in enemies, whether Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under the Assad dynasty or Iran, a leading benefactor of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Two years later, in 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. PNAC was founded by neocon luminaries William Kristol and Robert Kagan. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

After George W. Bush became president and the 9/11 attacks left the American people lusting for revenge, the pathway was cleared for implementing the “regime change” agenda, with Iraq still at the top of the list although it had nothing to do with 9/11. Again, the last thing the neocons wanted was to inform the American people of the real facts about Iraq because that might have sunk the plans for this war of choice.

Thus, the American public was consistently misled by both the Bush administration and the neocon-dominated mainstream media. The Post’s Hiatt, for instance, was out there regularly reporting Iraq’s WMD threat as “flat fact.”

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and months of fruitless searching for the promised WMD caches, Hiatt finally acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. “If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction,” Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. “If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004]

Yet, Hiatt’s supposed remorse didn’t stop him and the Post editorial page from continuing its single-minded support for the Iraq War — and heaping abuse on war critics, such as former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson who challenged President Bush’s claims about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium from NIger.

The degree to which the neocons continue to dominate the major news outlets, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, is demonstrated by the lack of virtually any accountability on the journalists who misinformed their readers about an issue as consequential as the war in Iraq.

And, despite the disaster in Iraq, the neocons never cast aside their “clean break” playbook. After Iraq, the “regime change” strategy listed Syria next and then Iran. Although the neocons suffered a setback in 2008 with the election of Iraq War opponent Barack Obama, they never gave up their dreams.

Image: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)

The neocons worked through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Iraq War supporters who managed to survive and even move up through the government ranks despite Obama’s distaste for their military solutions.

While in office, Clinton sabotaged chances to get Iran to surrender much of its nuclear material – all the better to keep the “regime change” option in play – and she lobbied for a covert military intervention to oust Syria’s Assad. (She also tipped the balance in favor of another “regime change” war in Libya that has created one more failed state in the volatile region.)

But the most disturbing fact is that these war promoters – both in politics and the press – continue to be rewarded for their warmongering. Hiatt retains his gilded perch as the Post’s editorial-page editor (setting Official Washington’s agenda); Cohen remains one of America’s leading national columnists; and Hillary Clinton is favored to become the next President.

So, the answer to Sy Hersh’s question – “Do they care what the facts are?” – is, it appears, no. There is just too much money and power involved in influencing and controlling Washington and – through those levers of finance, diplomacy and war – controlling the world. When that’s at stake, real facts can become troublesome things. For the people who wield this influence and control, it is better for them to manufacture their own.

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).

Steel, in various global quarters, is in retreat.  Jobs are under threat. In Britain, the Indian steel manufacturer Tata steel has claimed it will sell its loss-making business, adding to the worried voices in Wales in January about what everybody there feared. Conditions, the company argues, have “rapidly deteriorated” due to oversupply, imports into the European market, and currency issues.[1]

The result is that one in six jobs in the UK steel industry risk being shed.  “If we shut [Port Talbot],” observed steelworker and union representative Mark Davies, “the problem will just move from the UK.  Without action in Europe to stop steel dumping, it will spread.”

Across Europe, the response is being replicated, with blast furnaces closing.  Ancelor Mittal has closed its Spanish plant in Sestao near Bilbao, citing the Chinese bugbear flooding the market with cheaper steel.

Governments are in a muddle about interventionist policies, a point Beijing simply does not share.  According to Germany’s steel association WV Stahl and union IG Metall, “political over-regulation and cheap imports” are depriving Europe of its plants.  German steelmakers, for instance, juggle the costs of green levies within a European Emissions Trading System in a manner that Chinese firms do not.

Erratic responses dominate the scene of rescue.  Neo-liberal vultures gave in to socialising banks to arrest the rot, seemingly shedding their ideas of letting a market operate by means of natural selection.  The social distortions arising from a loss of jobs in steel, however, does not seem to be moving the policy makers in the same way.  Whole working populations will vanish.

The economic disasters of Europe have also found form in other commodity markets. In Australia, steel maker Arrium faces collapse with the loss of 7,000 jobs across the country. The business pundits have come rushing out with ideas that steelmaking, while it has a “future in Australia”, can only thrive with “new business models and technologies.”[2]  The trumpet of patriotism is always at the fore: “many Australian steels,” insist Roy Green and John Hamilton Howard, “are world class, which allows a broad range of steels to be used in fabrication work” (The Conversation, Apr 8).

Arrium was certainly operating in a dreamland, suggesting in February that there had been a lift in earnings despite problematic external conditions.  One stark reality remained, with its main operations at Whyalla showing up a loss of $43 million. Delusion and market predictions tend to be false friends.

The country is facing the reality that has faced other towns and cities across the globe: when the demand for a commodity diminishes, be it through operating costs, and the phenomenon of “dumping”, capital will dash.

Marred as it is by a neoliberal fetish, Australian governments have found themselves reluctant to prop up certain industries, while assisting others. Other countries, such as a heavily subsidised China, have shown no such reluctance.  The Australian opposition leader, Bill Shorten, is speaking about a “nationalist” response to the steel industry.

The warnings in Australia over its undiversified economy have gathered over the years.  This is the economy of the unreformed, charging conquistador – appropriate, extract and export, and bank on the idea of endless demand. Finite resources are raided; demand provides an eternal resource of optimism.  The country is starting to pay a heavy price for this miscalculation.

In terms of steel manufacture, things have looked bleak for some years.  Between 2000 and 2014, steel production increased by a voluminous 96 per cent, much of it propelled by the Chinese economic miracle.  Chinese production dwarfs that of other states, with 2013 figures in terms of tonnes coming in at a weighty 779 million, or 48 per cent of the world’s total. (Japan is a distant second with 110.60 million.)  Such unqualified support has left competitors struggling with prices.

Even Chinese companies are selling overseas at a loss, which has bred something of a contradiction in the market. In January, China posted its first annual contraction in a quarter century.  Crude steel production diminished by 2.3 per cent (to 803.83 million metric tonnes).  The economic planners within the country are sensing the need to push the economy into growth led more by consumption than heavy industry.

For all that, as demand shrinks, exports have increased; far from shutting down, Chinese mills continue to operate with irrational vengeance.  On March 31, the secretary of the board of Baosteel of Shanghai announced that the company’s annual steel output would increase by 20 per cent to 27.1 million tonnes.[3] Similarities with the Saudi approach to oil come to mind.

The weak are being picked off; the resilient, boosted by the vitamins of government protections and subsidies are surviving. Even within Europe, business rates imposed by governments vary, with France and Germany looking far more attractive than their British counterparts.  The neo-liberals, yet again, are confused about where to go, and how best to deal with social policy and the losses arising from market shocks.

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

Notes:

Anti-semitism is rapidly rising throughout Europe for one specific reason. That is the factual evidence that a majority of Jewish communities in France and Britain – although certainly not all – remain intent on giving indiscriminate support to the extremist right-wing Likud government in Israel headed by Revisionist Zionist, Binyamin Netanyahu.

That government, and its predecessors, together have:

1. since 1967, induced over 600,000 of their own citizens to leave their homes in Israel to illegally settle on Occupied Palestinian land in an attempt to block the establishment of an independent state for 5 million indigenous Arabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and
2. for nearly seven years, imposed an illegal blockade of essential goods into Gaza to deliberately keep 1.8 million civilians at just on, or under, subsistence level in an inhumane and illegal policy of criminal oppression in a determined but failed attempt at regime change.
3. conspired to ensure that Israeli politicians have an undue influence over the US Congress and the White House and, consequently, over both American and British foreign policy.
4. Conspired to ensure that Israel is the only state in the world that is an undeclared nuclear power, that stands outside of the internationally agreed Non Proliferation Treaty and, therefore, a major threat to world peace.

EUnewsdesk London April 2016

A new series of charges of sexual violence against minors has been brought in recent days against UN forces soldiers in the Central African Republic (CAR), and especially against soldiers of the French operation Sangaris. This intervention of the French army had been endorsed in December 2013 by the United Nations Security Council following a resolution sponsored by France.

France has mobilised up to 2,500 troops as part of this operation and still officially has 900 men in CAR. The other UN operation, Minusca, currently has about 12,600 military and police.

The latest accusations were triggered by a report comprising the testimonies of victims of sexual violence by the NGO AIDS-Free World and transmitted to the UN, which said it would launch a formal investigation into recent allegations.

According to a UN official in New York the latest charges against French soldiers involved forced sex with animals in exchange for money. AIDS-Free World reports that three girls told a UN official that they had been stripped naked and tied up in a camp by a Sangaris commander then forced to have sex with a dog.

These are just the latest of persistent reports of abuse and sexual violence that have followed the intervention of French troops and UN “peacekeeping” operations for over two years. It has now reached the scale of a full-blown scandal. Press reports last year already pointed to the “multiplication of the number of cases” and the UN had relieved its Special Representative of his duties in Bangui, the CAR capital.

Recently, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had described the sexual violence committed by the troops operating in CAR as a “cancer.”

Six months after the start of the Sangaris operation, a UN humanitarian worker had already leaked to French authorities a United Nations report revealing that about 10 French soldiers in the Sangaris operation were accused of having sexually abused children between December 2013 and May-June 2014.

Jeune Afrique magazine quoted the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the UN, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, saying he “takes these [latest] allegations, some of which are particularly odious, extremely seriously.” And the French ambassador to the UN, François Delattre, said, “Cases of abuse and allegations of sexual exploitation are particularly shocking and heinous.”

Since the beginning of the year the cases of sexual violence against minors continue to multiply, according to the UN.

In the last several months, demonstrations of hostility to the French troops on the part of the local population are on the increase. French military convoys were booed as they passed by hostile crowds who shouted slogans alluding to theft and sexual attacks.

According to official statements, the Sangaris operation was intended to “stop communalist slaughter.” Hollande had claimed that the policy of his government was to disarm the warring groups and restore stability to avoid more bloodshed. The mission of France was “necessary if we want to avoid massacres taking place here,” he said.

“France is coming to defend human dignity with you,” contended Hollande in Bangui a few days after the start of the operation.

These scandals shockingly expose the pretext that the Socialist Party (PS) government sent its parachute regiments and the Foreign Legion to CAR for “humanitarian” reasons. The heinous acts the French troops are accused of are a true reflection in the psychology and behaviour of individual officers and soldiers of the oppressive imperialist relations of French capitalism with the oppressed masses in Africa.

In agreement with the Obama administration, the French military intervention was intended to counteract the growing influence of China in Central Africa, which is rich in mineral and energy resources. Paris aims to control this country, strategically located at the centre of Africa, and destroy the influence of China. Under former President François Bozizé the Chinese had concluded several key agreements with CAR, including oil contracts and military cooperation.

Bozizé himself accused French imperialism of trying to overthrow him because he had made oil deals with China before being overthrown by the Seleka militia encouraged by France.

When the operation was launched, the French company Areva was in the process of preparing one of the largest investments in CAR, a proposed uranium mine in the south of the country.

The recent elections held in the context of the Sangaris operation and the UN Minusca operation produced a new government backed by France in February. The French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and the defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, were present on March 30 for the inauguration of the new president, Bozizé’s former prime minister, Faustin-Archange Touadéra.

Le Drian announced the same day the withdrawal in 2016 of Sangaris forces, estimating that their mission had been accomplished. One of the first statements of Touadéra was to say he was worried about the departure of French troops. “Of course, there are the UN forces but these two entities complement each other in their actions,” he said. “Since the territory is large and the threats are still there, we still have concerns.”

The revelation of the behaviour of the French troops with regard to the African population exposes pseudo-left organisations such as the NPA (New Anti-capitalist Party), which, after greeting the attack on Libya by NATO on the basis of fraudulent claims of its “humanitarian” nature, has sought to cover the military intervention of the PS government in the Sahel and in Central Africa, claiming it sought to ensure “security.”

In September 2014, Jean Batou, a member of the Swiss SolidaritéS organisation affiliated to the NPA, expressly denied that the PS government had predatory aims in the English organ of the NPA, International Viewpoint, at the same time trying to recycle the discredited “humanitarian grounds” excuse with the claim of “Defending the security of the population” along with Hollande and the PS.

He wrote that “the economic ulterior motives” of Nicolas Sarkozy in Libya and Ivory Coast seemed “less clear when considering those of François Hollande in Mali, and very questionable in CAR.”

“It seems clear,” he wrote, “that sending shock troops to avoid the final shipwreck of ‘failed states,’ such as in Central Africa, obeys first the need to maintain security in its ‘backyard.’”

What “seems clear,” on the contrary, is that the shock troops of French imperialism became the refuge of fascist elements and pro-Nazis who reconnect with the traditions of those used by French imperialism in its colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, of which the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen is an example.

In December 2013 a photo appeared on the Facebook page of the French army. It was then removed. The photo showed a French sergeant from a paratrooper regiment in Castres in CAR. On his uniform he wore a badge with the SS motto “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” (My honour is loyalty).

In November 2013 the French press published a photo of a legionnaire in the Serval operation in Mali wearing a scarf depicting a skull on his face, another SS symbol. In 2008, an engineering paratrooper regiment based in Montauban was rocked by a scandal exposed by the Canard enchainé, which showed photos of three of its soldiers, neo-Nazis, making the Hitler salute whilst wrapped in a swastika flag.

The unbroken chain of revelations of sexual violence since the start of the French imperialist intervention in Central Africa shows that followers of these traditions, encouraged by the reactionary policies of the PS and the pseudo-left, and the rise of the National Front in France, now feel legitimised to practice all forms of oppression against the African population.

New pipelines from the Alberta to tidewater would do nothing to help Canada’s oil industry cope with low oil prices. Contrary to assertions made by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers today and Natural Resources Minister Carr on Tuesday in interviews, there is no longer a sound economic argument for increased market access to tidewater.

“Oil-to-tidewater is a dated argument that doesn’t match the reality of world markets anymore – using it suggests either a misunderstanding of how oil markets work, or a deliberate attempt to mislead Canadians into thinking that new pipelines are somehow good for our economy,” says Lorne Stockman of Oil Change International. “Alberta and Canada have so much potential to lead the world towards a safer climate future, but they will have to let go of their pipe dreams in order to get us there.”

A briefing note released by Environmental Defence, Oil Change International, and the Natural Resource Defense Council outlines three reasons why tar sands oil producers would not get higher prices if they had new tidewater access to global markets:

• Recent expansions in pipeline capacity have eliminated the regional bottleneck, and subsequent price discount, in the U.S. midwest markets;
• any oil sold to Asian and European markets would likely fetch lower prices than those received at the largest heavy oil markets in the world: the U.S. Gulf Coast and the U.S. midwest; and
• any price distortion created by the crude export ban in the U.S. has disappeared since the ban was lifted in late 2015.

“Suggesting that pipelines can power an economic recovery in Alberta and Canada is not only wrong, but threatens to lock Canada further into decades of further exposure to a boom and bust commodity cycle,” says Hannah McKinnon of Oil Change International. “The Federal and Alberta governments should avoid repeating the mistakes of yesterday and instead build a prosperous, stable economy based on clean energy.”

The Canadian Government has been firm on its commitment to climate action following an ambitious showing at the Paris climate talks, but a large gap still must be closed to meet even existing climate goals made by the previous government.

“If Canada is serious about climate leadership, it will step away from its fixation on hitching us to decades more production in the third largest oil reserves on the planet – the Alberta tar sands,” says McKinnon. “The tar sands simply can’t have a central role in a decarbonizing economy, and as it stands, they threaten to undo much of the good Canada is doing elsewhere to rebuild a climate legacy that we can be proud of.”

The full briefing note can be found here

For further inquiries:

Hannah McKinnon
[email protected]

Lorne Stockman
[email protected]

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is based right in the belly of the beast, Washington D.C. The ICIJ is an offshoot of the Center for Public Integrity (CPI). In an interesting note, ultra-propagandist CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was a former board member of the organization. The CPI is also funded by the CIA-connected Ford Foundation, George Soros’s ‘Open Society Foundation’, The Rockefeller Family Fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of the international banking cartel, the Rockefeller family.

The list of the main-stream media (MSM) news outlets has partnered with the ICIJ serve the political and financial establishment. The list includes the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Guardian (UK) and the Huffington Post (US). The ICIJ also partnered with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which was established during the Cold War as a CIA front to broadcast anti-Soviet propaganda in Eastern Europe. In 2014, a France 24 titled ‘’Radio Free Europe back on frontline over Ukraine’ reported that:

“A quarter of a century after it helped topple totalitarian Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is duelling Moscow again, this time in a media war over the Ukraine crisis.”

Journalist and author David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times who claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the apartment bombings across Russia in 1999 was an advisor at one time for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Well-known establishment mouthpieces such as the New York Times and the Washington Post has also partnered with the ICIJ which is highly influential in the Anglo-American foreign policy agenda for the Military Industrial Complex.

The ICIJ is also supported by the Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation’s connection to the CIA is a well-documented fact since the 1940’s. Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of ‘Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War’ wrote “the CIA considers foundations such as Ford “The best and most plausible kind of funding cover”. Open Society Foundation has collaborated on a number of occasions with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), another regime change organization.

Guilty by Association

President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are the first casualties of the Panama Papers scandal. According to the BBC, Putin recently commented on Russia’s “Western opponents” on Russian television when he said that they “are worried by the unity and solidarity of the Russian nation… and that is why they are attempting to rock us from within, to make us more obedient”.

NBC news, an American propaganda news outlet did not waste any time accusing Putin of money-laundering with his “close” associates:

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is not named in the documents, but there are allegations of a billion-dollar money-laundering ring controlled by a Russian bank that has links to associates of the Russian leader. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), one of the teams that has been analyzing the data, told CNBC the papers show Putin’s close aides were involved in a $2 billion money trail with offshore firms and banks

NBC interviewed one of the journalists from the ICIJ by the name of Jake Bernstein and said:

“We’ve found a network of people around Vladimir Putin,” ICIJ’s Jake Bernstein told CNBC Monday.  “It’s extraordinary, they are moving hundreds of millions of dollars at a time, they are taking money from a subsidiary, a Russian state bank, they are grabbing interests in major Russian companies and although we never see Vladimir Putin’s name in the documents themselves, these are people who are very close to him,” he added

Interestingly, NBC reported on the role played by the Open Society Foundation and how Putin would respond:

Russia, in particular, could respond aggressively, Bremmer added. Given that the ICIJ was partially funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Kremlin may wish to respond, he noted.

“I feel fairly confident that the Kremlin will be going after the U.S., Soros, the CIA and this is going to make Russian policy towards the U.S. actually much more sharp and antagonistic,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing authoritarian governments need to do to take forced transparency that makes them look bad at home, they have to gin up trouble with enemies abroad”

There is no evidence that Putin did anything illegal, it is Putin’s “close friend” and his “childhood friends” that has offshore accounts in Panama. What is also interesting is that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is implicated in the ‘Panama Papers’ despite no evidence whatsoever that Assad himself has any offshore accounts. It was Assad’s cousins who are maintaining the offshore accounts.

Is the West attempting to create revolutions in Russia and Syria on allegations of corruption since the Islamic State has failed to remove Assad from power? There were protests in Iceland against Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson for his links to an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands he and his wife set up with assistance by Mossack Fonseca law firm with money they inherited. Telesur reported that social movements in Mexico and Panama also began protests against the “Panama Papers corruption scandal.”

That is what the Western media and the regime change organizations such as the Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation with collaboration with the CIA and Washington hope for. The West is trying to achieve “regime change” in Russia and Syria with protests that would lead to violence which means more “good” propaganda for the MSM against Russia and Syria. Washington and its Western partners are clearly behind this operation because they are desperate for regime change even if their close allies are exposed in the Panama Papers including Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Bin Abdulrahman Al Saud. For Washington it is nothing personal against their allies who were sacrificed for a geopolitical agenda, it is just business as usual.

(Introduction by Russ Baker)

Orlando Letelier (image left, photo credit: Unknown / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)) was an exiled former Chilean diplomat. He had served in the socialist government of   Salvador Allende, who, in 1973, was overthrown in a US-backed coup. The notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet took over. Letelier was seized, tortured and imprisoned. He was released a year later as a result of international pressure. He was invited to Washington, DC where he became a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, the director of the Transnational Institute, and a professor at American University.

More important, he became the leading voice of the Chilean resistance — and thanks to his lobbying, he prevented several loans from being awarded to the Pinochet regime.

On the morning of September 21,1976, Orlando Letelier was driving to work with his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, and her husband when a bomb went off under his car. It blew off the bottom half of his body and severed both legs; flying shrapnel severed the larynx and carotid artery of Ms.Moffitt who was in the passenger seat. Both died soon after.

At the time, George H.W. Bush was CIA director. And as Peter Dale Scott asserts in the excerpt below, the CIA, a Latin American assassination apparatus, and international drug dealing were all bound up together.

Sound like fiction? Well, where do you suppose fiction writers get their ideas?

Excerpt from American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), Introduction. Deep History and the Global Drug Connection:

Drugs, the State, and the Letelier Assassination

A serious manifestation of sanctioned violence – or, if you will, of a mysterious deep force – was the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington. This was a covertly arranged deep event, an event in which key facts were certain from the outset to be suppressed, an event that mainstream information systems failed to discuss candidly, and an event that earned for those few scholars who have studied it the derisive label of “conspiracy theorists.”

In the nearly 40 years since, some basic facts about the Letelier assassination have slowly come to light. Those facts are, for the most part, no longer contested.

It is now known that Letelier was killed on orders from the Chilean intelligence agency DINA, with the aid of a supranational collaborative assassination apparatus, Operation Condor, which the CIA helped to create.(14)

We shall look more closely at Condor and its drug connections in this book. What is particularly relevant here is that DINA, Condor, and the Cuban Americans who were involved in Letelier’s assassination were all also involved in drug trafficking.

There were American aspects to the killing as well as Chilean ones.(15)  Shortly before the murder, secretary of state Kissinger blocked a proposed urgent State Department warning to Latin American Condor states not to engage in assassinations.(16)

Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger Photo credit: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0 CL)

Two days after the killing, CIA Director George H. W. Bush received a memo reporting the speculation (which proved to be accurate) “that, if Chilean Govt did order Letelier’s killing, it may have hired [Miami] Cuban thugs to do it.”(17)  Yet for weeks after the killing, the U.S. press ran stories that – as The New York Times put it – the FBI and CIA “had virtually ruled out the idea that Mr. Letelier was killed by agents of the Chilean military junta.”(18)

The CIA had evidence in its files against DINA when the FBI went to meet with Bush about CIA cooperation on the Letelier murder probe. But Bush did not turn over those files, making him arguably guilty of obstructing justice.(19)

I agree with author John Prados that in all this, the CIA was complicit in DINA’s and Condor’s terrorism:

The reluctance of U.S. authorities to investigate links between the Letelier assassination and DINA is a measure of the collusion at that point between Washington and Chile. Condor became in effect a terrorist network. . . . Through its actions in Chile the Central Intelligence Agency contributed to the inception of this horror. . . . In particular there is clear evidence that the Letelier assassination could have been prevented but was not.(20)

Even in the best accounts of the Letelier assassination, the drug aspect of the killing is usually ignored. Yet, as we shall see, the Cuban Nationalist Movement, from which Letelier’s Cuban assassins were picked, was reported to be financing itself through drug smuggling organized by DINA.(21) That the U.S. government covered up a drug-financed assassination in its own capital is another fact I continually repress from my own mind, even though I have twice written about it in the past. It is one more clue to a larger pattern easily repressed, that is, of recurring drug traffic involvement in CIA-related assassinations.

The continuous U.S. involvement in the global drug network, one of the main themes explored in this book, is a destructive pattern that persists to this day. In the next chapter, I shall argue that it is not a self-contained activity, extrinsic to the basic sociopolitical structure of America, but an integral cause and part of a larger war machine, an apparatus with a settled purpose fixed on achieving and maintaining global American dominance.

The car Orlando Letelier died in. Photo credit: Zinn Ed Project / Flickr

Deep Events and Illegally Sanctioned Violence

I call the Letelier murder a deep event because the involvement of protected covert assets made it an event that would, at least initially, be covered up rather than exposed by the mainstream American media. Furthermore, the forces underlying it were too deeply interwoven with backdoor intelligence operations to be promptly resolved by the normal procedures of law enforcement.

It was thus an example of sanctioned violence, by which I mean that at all stages the perpetrators were protected by others in higher authority. It does not mean it was affirmatively approved in advance by Americans (on this point I have no information).

Many Americans are at least dimly aware that we have had a number of similar deep events involving this form of sanctioned violence in the past half century. Some of these – including the murders of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy – have had significant structural influence on the subsequent evolution of American political history. I have argued in The Road to 9/11 that we should consider the attack of 9/11 as yet another example of a deep event, another chapter in our nation’s deep history.

The problem of illegally sanctioned and protected violence — violence regularly suppressed from our consciousness — is not necessarily attributable to the state as we normally think of it. We do not know if any state was directly involved in the recent unexplained murder of an Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, who was related to scandals at the Vatican Bank. It has even been argued that Pope John Paul I was murdered by those involved in these same scandals. But where there is cover-up, as in the Calvi case, the murderers have profited from a state connection.(22)

Inside the United States, the CIA’s involvement with sanctioned violence is inseparable from the occasional resort to the violence of organized crime by U.S. business. There is a long history here – from the use of violent gangs by fruit companies in the nineteenth century and in newspaper circulation wars soon thereafter; to the use of mobsters to combat labor unions by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and others; to the corrupt takeover of unions in the transport, garment, hotel, and entertainment industries; and possibly to the death in a plane crash of United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther.(23)

The politically minded rich, or what I have called the overworld, have reasons that ever occur to those of lesser means to tolerate mob violence. At a minimum, they are often not unhappy to see municipal law enforcement in cities like Chicago or New Orleans weakened by mob corruption.

Frequently they will turn to the same elements, on a local or national level, to influence corrupt legislators themselves. And sometimes they will turn to mob violence to achieve their own private political goals, with more impunity abroad in banana republics but occasionally also at home.

This history has never been properly written. But organized crime’s role in corrupting politics and politicians served the purpose of business interests who wished, on occasion, to do the same. When the CIA came to use mobsters for violence — such as John Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro — they too turned to the same resources.(24)

In so doing, they made the same drug connections that older multinational firms like American and Foreign Power had made before them around the world — a classic example being the lease on a Havana racetrack that in 1937 was granted to Meyer Lansky by the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank).(25)

I conclude from these business examples that in studying the politics of violence, we should look at the entire template of unrecognized or deep power that maintains a violent status quo in our society, a template that embraces bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, business and even media.

The drug traffic itself is part of this wider template and a recurring factor in our deep history. So, too, is that part of the overworld that launders drug money or hires criminals for its private needs.

Many ordinary people, in an extraordinary number of urban locations, are more governed in their daily lives by their debts to local drug traffickers than by their debts to the public state. They know that if they fail to pay their taxes, they face fines or even prison. But if they fail to meet a drug debt, someone, perhaps a loved one, may be killed.

Notes

16. Peter Kornbluh, “Kissinger Blocked Demarche on International Assassinations to Condor States,” National Security Archive, April 10, 2010, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB312/index.htm.

17. Peter Dale Scott, “Miami-Dade Reversal—A Cuban Terrorist Payback to Bush Family?” Pacific News Service, December 7, 2000.

18. New York Times, October 12, 1976.

19. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 81.

20. John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 424. Foreign Affairs Senior Fellow Kenneth Maxwell writing in 2004 for the Council on Foreign Relations reached the same conclusion. He noted that “other assassinations of opposition figures planned by Condor in Europe were in fact prevented because the United States tipped off the governments in question (France and Portugal) in advance” (David Maxwell, review of Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (“Fleeing the Chilean Coup,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040101faresponse83116/ william-d-rogers-kenneth-maxwell/ fleeing-the-chilean-coup-the-debate-over-u-s-complicity.html). Maxwell was here simply epitomizing the detailed arguments put forward earlier by John Dinges and Peter Kornbluh. Yet both the Council on Foreign Relations and its president, Richard Haass, arguably moderates in today’s distorted political spectrum, allowed a blustering denial to be published by Kissinger associate William D. Rogers and then refused Maxwell the chance to document his charges. Maxwell eventually resigned.

21. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 30–31, 33.

22. Robert Hutchison, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei (New York: St. Martin’s/Griffin, 2006), 262–65; David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Carroll and Graf,2007).

23. Scott, Deep Politics, 99–106 (banana companies), 154–59 (newspaper circulation wars); Thomas Repetto, American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 206–10 (Henry Ford), 198–206 (entertainment).

24. Thomas Repetto, Bringing Down the Mob (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 78–81.

25. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 279, citing Hank Messick, Lansky (New York: Putnam’s 1971), 89. Cf. Shanghai Power Company (American and Foreign Power) and Tu-Yueh Sheng of the Chinese Green Gang (Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 95–96).

Reinforcements reportedly arrived to Southern Aleppo to support the Syrian Arab Army and its allies efforts to liberated the militant-controlled areas near the northeastern border of the Idlib province. According to reports, a significant number of SAA, Hezbollah and Shia militia units are already there.

Up to 1,500 al-Nusra militants supported by 3 battle tanks and 20 automobiles with large-caliber machine guns attacked positions of Kurdish militia in Sheikh Maqsood from Ashrafiyah and al-Shababi. 18 civilians and 11 members of Kurdish units were killed. 36 were wounded. Russian warplanes hit positions of al-Nusra militants in suburbs of Aleppo and quelled their attempts for offensive.

Some 155 militants, formerly members of different militant groups which operate in the province of Homs province, laid down their arms and turned themselves to the Syrian officials in al-Rastan and Talbisa on April 6. Separately, 38 militants reportedly laid down arms in Qamishli in the province of Hasaka.

The Russian coordination center organized air delivering and dropping of humanitarian cargos on April 6. Military transport aviation crew of the Syrian Air Force has delivered 30 tons of food products from the International Red Crescent to Deir ez-Zor, which had been besieged by ISIS militants. The transport was escorted by Russian Su-30 and Su-35 fighters.

Meanwhile, the total number of settlements, the leaders of which had signed reconciliation agreements, remains 58. The number of ceasefire application forms signed with leaders of armed groupings remains 47.

The recent liberation of Syria’s Palmyra (a UNESCO world Heritage site) by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and allies is an important victory for numerous reasons. Not only does it send yet another message to the different Western-backed terrorist factions (which Syria has been fighting for the past five years) that they will eventually fall, but it also sends a message to the West and their gang of anti-Syrian states and actors – who have been fuelling this savage war on a sovereign Syria – that Syria and Syrians remain resilient, the SAA and allies remain relentless in their fight against terrorism, and that Syria’s political allies continue to support her. 

Further, the victory once again dispels the myth of “Assad’s army brutalizing the people”: footage from inside the liberated city of Palmyra shows residents praising President al-Assad and praising the Syrian Arab Army (a reported 200 of whom were killed in the battle to liberate Palmyra), much like footage from the liberated villages of Nubl and al-Zahra’a earlier this year, and every area, in fact, which the army has secured.

During Da’esh (ISIS) terrorists’ occupation of Palmyra, they blew up and destroyed numerous historic sites and brutally decapitated 82-year-old archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad. Ironically, while corporate media now twists the facts and alleges Syrian responsibility for the entry of Da’esh into Palmyra, they turn permanently-blinded eyes to the fact that the US-led coalition supposedly fighting Da’esh somehow, with all of their state-of-the-art technology, missed the convoy of Da’esh terrorists moving through vast stretches of open desert to reach Palmyra.

Image: Historic Palmyra, attacked by Western-backed terrorists

Now that the area is secured, Syrians can begin an assessment of the extent of damage to Palmyra. The Director General of Antiquities and Museums Directorate (DGAM) on March 27 issued a statement, which including the following:

“…we promise to restore the city as it used to be, in a cultural and intellectual message opposite to the destruction and terror, so the city will again represent the tolerance and multicultural richness that Palmyra has had through history…”

Restoration will need time and peace, but it is praiseworthy that some restoration in other liberated sites (Ma’aloua, old Homs, Krak des Chevaliers) has occurred while Syria is fighting the disease of Western-Gulf-Zionist-Turkish-inflicted terror.

Concerns over the fate of Palmyra were not exclusive to Syria’s DGAM, but also to the Ministry of Tourism (MOT), the work of which includes far more than merely promoting Syria’s touristic sites.

In a December 2015 meeting, Tourism Minister Besher Yazji spoke to me of Palmyra, the overall situation in Syria, and MOT initiatives to not only boost the Syrian economy – devastated by sanctions and war – but also the morale of Syrians and the image of Syria, which has been transformed by events over the past 5 years, and the corporate media’s distorted reporting:

“The heart of many civilizations is Palmyra. It’s not surprising that Saudi (Arabia) and Gulf states do not care about the destruction of Syria’s ancient ruins, because they don’t have civilizations in the first place. But what is sad is that Europeans, or other countries which have civilizations, they are not doing anything to help us. Politicians like François Hollande are purchased with Gulf money.”

Not only are they not helping Syria to preserve its heritage, many Western nations, including France, are overtly or covertly supporting the terrorists destroying Syria.

In February 2015, I wrote about the destruction of Syria’s heritage, noting the DGAM’s plea:

“A year has passed since we last sent an international call out to all those concerned with defending Syria’s heritage. At the time, we warned against a possible cultural disaster that might be inflicted on an invaluable part of the human heritage existing in Syria.”

As Minster Yazji alluded, the West ignored this call, ignored UNESCO warnings and Syria’s pleas, and additionally – and hypocritically – threw blame at the Syrian government.

Ministry of Tourism Work Increased 

Minister Yazji remarked that, to some outside of Syria, the importance of a tourism ministry might seem odd at this time.

Indeed Western corporate journalists have on numerous occasions mocked the MOT’s campaigns, ignoring the role the campaigns play with respect to Syria’s devastated economy, and also for the morale of the Syrian people, exhausted by years of life under foreign war.

Image: Western-backed terrorists, embodying the values of psychopaths in positions of power in the West, have been terrorizing the Syrian people.

Some Western commentators seem to think that Syrians should not be allowed to enjoy cultural events, hold festivals, or travel in their own country for the love of it. The arrogance of such assumptions aside, the numerous Syrian groups and individuals that do just those things defy such assumptions. In areas not 100% under the assault of Western-backed terrorists, not besieged like al-Foua and Kafarya or infested by terrorists as in Raqqa or Deiz ez Zor, Syrians do in fact celebrate, travel, and get on with life as much as possible.

This doesn’t render trivial the suffering of Syrians in troubled areas, but the notion that Syrians should just stay at home and not enjoy their culture or celebrate their country, is again arrogant and a notion that only someone who has never endured years of war could put forth. Additionally, when they have the opportunity to travel elsewhere in Syria, even Syrians living or serving in difficult areas act as tourists, as anyone would.

Nonetheless, even I was surprised when Minister Yazji said: “The work in the Ministry has doubled since before the crisis, when we had safety.”

Given that Syria’s tourism economy has plummeted dramatically over the years since the start of the foreign war on Syria, decimating that sector of the economy and taking countless jobs related to tourism with it, you might have thought that the work of the Tourism Ministry would be almost non-existent.

In fact, it is due to the combination of the war on Syria, and to the propaganda war against Syria, that the Ministry is busy:

“We are subjected to media terrorism, it has defaced Syria’s image. Syria’s image has become associated only with war. That’s why our work here has doubled. Our job is to restore the true image of Syria—not a dressed up image, but one of how the Syrian people are living, how they are suffering from terrorism, but also how our country is beautiful still.”

Religious Tourism and Investment Markets 

“Syria is well-known for its mosques, churches, temples, holy shrines, and other religious sites,” Minister Yazji told me. “Even now, there are over 300,000 reservations in Sayyida Zainab alone, with religious tourists flying in from various Gulf states, Iran, England, India and Pakistan.”

“Investing in tourism is difficult in safe periods, but during a time of war, it might come as a surprise that there is any investment. Yet, there have been high demands on hotels in Syria during the summer and during the last two seasons. Accordingly, there were many Syrian investors wanting to make new projects here. During 2015, 87 new tourist venues opened, including 8 new hotels: one 4-star and the rest 3-star. The other venues were restaurants and cafes, located in Homs, Latakia, Tartous, and Sweida.”

A press release from the MOT website noted that their priorities for 2011 and on included the Old City of Aleppo, Palmyra, the Old City of Damascus, and the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, “one of the largest and oldest mosques in the world. Located in one of the holiest sites in the old city of Damascus, it is of great architectural importance, and one of the most important mosques for Muslims from all over the world. The mosque holds a shrine containing the head of John the Baptist, honored as a prophet by Muslims and Christians alike…”

Sadly, these areas meant to be highlighted as tourist destinations are the ones which have been most heavily hit, vandalized, looted, and damaged during the last five years of the global war on Syria.

As I wrote in my February 2015 article:

Image: Western-backed terrorists have detonated car bombs in the Christian quarter of Damascus

“Terrorists’ car bombs and mortars, which have terrorized residents of the city (Damascus), have also hit historic places. The 11th-century Citadel, the 8th-century Umayyad Masjid, the 13th-century Great Madrasah, al-Adliya, the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch in Bab Touma, and the Armenian Orthodox Church in Bab Sharqi, have all suffered, according to UNESCO’s report.

The Aleppo section of UNESCO’s latest “Damage Assessment Overview” is lengthy. Some of the assessment includes:

• “At least 121 historical buildings have been damaged or destroyed — equal to 30-40% of the World Heritage property area — in addition to the destruction of more than 1,500 shops of the Suq.”
• “The 11th century Minaret, the prayer hall, and the main gate of the Omayyad Masjid have been destroyed….”
• “Terrorists from the Islamic Front exploded the 150-year-old Carlton Citadel Hotel in Aleppo’s Old City in May 2014, the destruction and damage extending to the 13th-century Citadel facing the hotel.”

My February 2015 article also noted al-Nusra and so-called “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) terrorists’ destruction and looting in historic Ma’aloua, the Old City of Homs (with numerous ancient churches), and elsewhere in Syria.

This vandalism, theft and destruction impacts Syria’s economy, heritage, and future tourism.

Artists and Artisans 

Aleppo has not only been the site of terrorist infiltration and mortar and rocket attacks on civilian areas, but its factories have been plundered by the West’s “moderates” and taken to Turkey. The resulting economic suffering in Aleppo is immense.

One of the MOT’s points of focus, throughout Syria but including Aleppo, are exhibitions highlighting the work of independent artists.

Image: John McCain met with “FSA” terrorists in Syria to support them in their war against the Syrian people

“We had an exhibition for women from Aleppo in which over 120 women participated, from the chambers of commerce and industry. Among them were businesswomen, but also women who started working during this crisis, to compensate for the loss of work or businesses of their husbands. Their work demanded a high level of technique, and at the same time there were many very creative ideas.”

The effects of the war on Syria have impacted on artisans and shop owners, leaving their shops devoid of tourist customers or simply closed down. Minister Yazdi said:

“Many traditional shops and markets were completely destroyed, especially in Aleppo and in Damascus in the Bab Sharqi (East Gate) district, where many of the shops were damaged and destroyed from the mortars. The government is trying to support artisans by giving them new shops and training them. The Syria Trust for Development provides them with training and the materials they need.

Some artists are already exporting, but we are supporting many others in doing so. There are, for example, people in the Gulf states who want chairs inlaid with shells. Bay leaf soap, produced in Aleppo, is now being exported to France. We encourage them to have their own websites. Some of them are on social media, like Facebook and Twitter.”

‘I Belong’ and ‘Creative City’ Campaigns 

One of UNESCO’s initiatives is that of the ‘Creative Cities Network’, including “116 Members from 54 countries covering seven creative fields: Crafts & Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Music and Media Arts.”

Image: The Bab Touma area of Damascus before Western governments launched a terrorist war on the Syrian people

Syria’s MOT is working on adding Damascus to that network:

“The file we are working on is Syrian traditional handicrafts and folklore, including Damascene glass, the brocade fabric, Aghabanitextiles, copper and Silver work, shells, mosaics.”

In doing so, this is one further way the MOT is trying to combat the effects of sanctions and war on Syria.

“Also, we have launched an initiative called ‘I belong’. The initiative is directed at Syrians living outside of Syria and for anyone who is heartbroken at the destruction of the terrorists, whether in Ibla and Mari, Palmyra, the souks in the Old City of Aleppo, or elsewhere. The initiative has two parts: financial support and moral support.

High quality miniature replicas have been made of historic sites in Syria. Revenues of the initiative will be used to support tourism sector and heritage sites in the country, and the rehabilitation of archeological sites. One of the icons that we made a replica of was one of the oldest peace treaties that exists, the Treaty of Kadesh, found in Ibla. We also focus on Ma’aloula, and are preparing something on Palmyra.

They will be available for Syrians around the world, with a certificate of thanks/recognition, including a serial number associated with each replica, to assure the buyer that the money is going to a safe place/towards this project.”

After over five years of this bloody war on Syria, Syrians defy all projections and instead of collapsing as per Western commentators’ expectations, Syrians continue to find creative means to support themselves, keep Syria’s heritage alive, and not be cowed by foreign intervention.

“This referendum handed Ukraine some black tulips: a symbol of farewell, often used to honor someone who has passed away.”

On April 6, 2016 the Netherlands rejected the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.  By all indications this was to be a small fringe phenomenon in the wider picture of EU politics.  Yet the surrounding issues make this result – a whopping 61% populate the Neen-vote – indicative of a lot of strife ahead within the EU and a rising international disenchantment with the Ukrainian rapprochement movement.

Dutch media had primarily focused on whether the referendum would achieve enough voter turnout to be legal.  Published polls tended to show only a small lead to the no-camp, and any notable exceptions to this fable were countered by actual strategies to make people stay home, and hence invalidate the referendum.  To be fair, this strategy almost worked, yet enough people were motivated enough to express their frustration and flood the voting booths towards the evening.  The turnout squeezed by the validity requirement of 30% to 32.2%.  What was more astounding was the landslide of the No-vote: in the map below, it shows in red the townships that voted No, and in green the few that irked out a win for the Yes-vote.

What does this mean?  Already, the EU Commission came out with a spokesperson statement that ‘The No-vote will have no influence on the Ukraine treaty‘.  Prime Minister Rutte stated clearly that ‘There cannot be a simple moving forward with ratification now’.   Claude Juncker, EU Commission president, ‘is sad about the result’.   Guy Verhofstadt, ex PM of Belgium and current leader of the EU Parliament’s liberal faction, ‘is not surprised about this result; the EU is unable to resolve any of its current crises’.

The past can teach us how the EU deals with the pesky referendum problem.  Overall, it is treated as a nasty skin infection.  The problem is viewed to be local, is treated locally, or with some temporary change in diet, but surgery is out of the question, and so is any thorough antibiotic or antiviral cure.  In one case, in fact in the rejection of the EU constitution by the Netherlands and French referendae in 2005, did the actual constitution proposal get cancelled and morphed into a smaller, less ambitious version of itself, the Lissabon treaty.  In several other cases, the particular countries were given opt-out options, or ‘the ability to not implement’.   The Dutch ruling coalition is, for the moment, quite adamant that they should try to cancel the agreement or renegotiate the most objectionable parts.  Most likely, Rutte’s efforts will focus on the latter.  The most objectionable part of the agreement to the No-camp was two-fold: the possible military cooperation and the appearance of the Association Agreement as a stepping stone towards EU membership.

Ukraine’s leading political class did try to involve themselves in the Dutch referendum, both by Poroshenko’s visit, by TV commercials provided to the yes-camp, by a US grant-funded project of Ukrainian students doing canvassing on public transport in some Dutch cities, by a flash mob outside the Dutch embassy in Kyiv.

Closer to the referendum, as the polls continued to point in the wrong direction, there was more of a dismissal of its importance, but as late as the morning of April 6 Ukrainian media were showing an exit poll strongly favoring the yes-camp: 59% for, 41% against!

It is telling for the web-savvy Ukrainian media to have found this utterly irrelevant poll through a Dutch diplomat in Tokyo (presumably, this poll actually reflected the few Dutch expats in Tokyo that came out to vote at the embassy).

But what does this actually mean?  I would like to point out three main points.

First, this referendum is another deep line in the sand to the EU.  Not because of the referendum itself, but because of the savvy and organized approach by EU skeptics, using the internet to harness widely ranging opinions skeptical of various EU policies into this one direction.  While the EU machine cannot be said to have ignored referendae in the past, overall the machine has rumbled on with only very small democratically fueled diversions.  This line in the sand co-joins with major cracks in the system: the EU migration policy, its foreign policy that is carefully wedded to NATO and US interests and sometimes goes against a growing number of EU member interests, and the overall growing disillusionment with government in general that is feeding the right-to-far-right parties in the UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands and multiple other countries.   The EU migration agreement with Turkey is under heavy fire right now, both from the left and the right.

Second, the Ukrainian story has failed at the European box office. The Dutch are famous for their no-nonsense, straight-as-an-arrow approach and the Ukrainian machinations have shattered the European Maidan value-fest of 2014. To most Europeans, Maidan itself now looks as an exception to the rule in Ukraine, a beautiful firefly but rare in the midst of the corrupt predators that roam this nation high and low.  Poroshenko’s Panama Papers role is unlikely to have moved the needle much further to the no-camp, but it likely confirmed the picture that has formed over the last two years: this country shouldn’t be touched, and shouldn’t be funded.  This referendum handed Ukraine some black tulips: a symbol of farewell, often used to honor someone who has passed away.

Third, in spite of the anti-Russian diatribe in pro-Ukraine video clips, in spite of a desperate delusional try by one of my social media antipodes, Putin really didn’t come and meddle in this referendum.  Russia, Putin, the FSB, or Rasputin cannot be blamed for this vote – the Ukrainians can search in vain for another Putin cretin under their bed.  The Dutch were perfectly able to make up their own minds, and the Ukrainian silly PR for the yes-camp always sounded hollow and out of place, like a Santa story in April.  This is not a pro-Russia vote; but it is a vote to look again at all the options, without the expensive and unwanted silliness that the Ukraine story provides.

“The big worry for Ukraine is that they have been lumped together with the wider EU issues of migration, loss of sovereignty, democratic alienation, and terrorism inspired by wrong domestic and foreign policy choices: those will continue until a bigger crisis.”

In conclusion, we can expect the Ukraine EU Trade Association Agreement to be implemented, with some delay of some of its clauses, some delay to some member states and a few minor adjustments to give the Dutch a pat on the back.   The big worry for Ukraine is that they have been lumped together with the wider issues of migration, loss of sovereignty, democratic alienation, and terrorism inspired by wrong domestic and foreign policy choices: those will continue until a bigger crisis. At which time the Dutch can now say, “We Told You So.”

Josh Vanhee is involved in international business and humanitarian work across most of North-America, Europe and Russia.  Canadian and native Belgian, fluent in Russian, he lived and worked in Belgium, Netherlands, Russia and Belarus, and writes political commentary on current affairs.

The Austrian President Heinz Fischer has just wound up his visit to Moscow (April 5-6). He made it clear Austria stands for lifting anti-Russian sanctions. In case of Vienna economic interests top the foreign policy priorities list. 

Later on Wednesday, April 6, Fischer told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that Austria could help remove sanctions if Russia ensures complete fulfillment of the Ukraine ceasefire deal.

“Those who are interested in the development of good economic relations between Europe and Russia are not contented with the existence of sanctions and would like to lift them,” Fischer said.

“But,” he added, “I would like to note that Austria is a loyal member of the EU and, as a loyal EU member – which it would like to remain – should adhere to decisions adopted regarding Russia.”

The Russian President noted that bilateral trade had fallen by about 25 per cent because of the sanctions, “though Russian exports to Austria, surprising as it might seem, actually increased slightly over the previous year,” according to a Kremlin statement.

“No side wins from the sanctions introduced by the European Union against Russia, it is necessary to find a way that would lead to the removal of most of them,” Heinz Fischer said meeting  Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament. “Our position in these [EU] discussions [on anti-Russia sanctions] includes that it is necessary to consider all the possibilities of relationship development between Russia and the European Union. The most important part is that it is necessary to find such a path, a common way for all of us, to develop it, which would result in the soon removal of most of the sanctions,” Fisher pointed out.

The Austrian President said he hoped the Austrian chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2017 will contribute to the resolution of Ukraine related problems.

Kremlin press-secretary Dmitry Peskov said Austria sticks to neutrality and does not support the sanctions. It broadens the agenda for the bilateral talks.

The Austrian President informed that Austria wanted to conclude a bilateral agreement for cooperation in fighting terrorism with Russia.

“It is necessary to promote struggle against terrorism but, naturally, it is also necessary to observe human rights and legislation,” Fischer noted.

“We believe that a new agreement for cooperation between the Interior Ministries of Russia and Austria should be concluded in the near future. We hope that we are going to achieve this goal,” the Austrian President emphasized.

In his turn, Vladimir Putin reminded that 2018 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the start of Soviet gas deliveries to Austria. “Austria was our first Western European partner in this area. Over this time, we have supplied more than 190 billion cubic metres of natural gas. Russia has been a reliable energy supplier throughout these years,” the Russian President emphasized.

Putin also pointed to the importance of the agreement reached last year between Gazprom and OMV Group about participation in the Nord Stream 2 project, and the conclusion of an agreement on joint development of the Urengoi oil and gas field.

The companies signed a number of new agreements on April 1 this year, in St. Petersburg. They include agreements on oil supplies and scientific-technical cooperation. Another symbolic project was the construction, with help from Gazpromexport, of an underground gas storage facility in Austria. This is Europe’s second-biggest gas storage facility in terms of active gas volumes in storage.

  The Russia-Austria dialogue was not limited to the agenda addressed by the two presidents. On April 5, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who had traveled on to Moscow directly after his meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington, met the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for dinner before joining the delegation headed by the Federal President due to arrive in Moscow in the evening. The Minister represents the younger generation of European politicians, he is only 29.  In his remarks, Kurz called for maintain contacts with Moscow through the Russia-EU dialogue.  Vienna is ready to make its contribution into the process. According to him, a dialogue is especially important when hard times come.

Austrian Chief of General Staff Lieutenant-General Othmar Commenda visited Moscow as a member of the presidential team. He met Chief of the Russian General Staff and First Deputy Defense Minister General Valery Gerasimov. During the talks he made some very candid remarks.  For instance, he specifically mentioned that Austria has been unable to invite the Russian General for a visit because of the “developments in Europe” and was expecting his Russian counterpart to visit Vienna in the near future. .  “Austria and Russia have a long history of mutual relations and, unfortunately, due to the developments in Europe in recent years we have had no possibility to invite Herr General [Gerasimov] to Austria. We are sorry for that. I hope very much that the situation will be improved with our help and your visit will take place in the following years,” Commenda told Gerasimov.

He said that one of the reasons for his visit to Moscow was the unwillingness to follow the diktat of some countries. “I’m not going to follow the directions and obey someone’s orders with whom I should communicate and with whom I shouldn’t. For this reason I wanted to visit you,” the Austrian Chief of Defense Staff said. According to him, only by joint efforts countries can settle the global problems. “Russia is much closer to Austria than other great powers of our world. Thus we are ready within the scope of our possibilities to work together wherever it is reasonable,” Commenda said.  The General emphasized the importance of cooperation on the problems related to the situation in the Middle East.

Gerasimov proposed that he and his Austrian counterpart “exchange assessments of international terrorism threats as part of the migration crisis” and discuss the issues of bilateral military cooperation. He shared the information on the results of the Russian Space Forces’ operation in Syria.

There is some progress in developing economic ties. On April 6, Austria asked Rosselkhoznadzor (the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance) to inspect the enterprises interested in exporting livestock and animal products to the Russian Federation. Austria already plans to start the supply of the goods as soon as the sanctions are lifted, said  in a statement Dr. Dietmar Fellner, Commercial Counsellor at the Austrian Embassy.

A few days ago Austrian business leader Christoph Leitl criticized anti-Russian sanctions, saying they had proved unsuccessful.

Leitl said Russia with its raw materials and Europe with its expertise would complement each other perfectly. The top Austrian business leader has criticized anti-Russian sanctions. Christoph Leitl, who heads the Federal Economic Chamber, says they have been unsuccessful for two years, and like a good doctor the EU should reconsider the treatment. Leitl intends to use a trip to Russia to discuss with President Vladimir Putin a free trade area across the continent from Lisbon to Vladivostok in the Russia’s Far East.

During the Austrian President’s visit Austrian Minister of Agriculture Andrae Rupprechter  said Vienna was interested in mending bridges with Moscow because Austrian agricultural exports had dropped by 50 percent since the introduction of the Russian food embargo, imposed as a countermeasure to the EU sanctions against Russia.

 At the moment, there’s no unity among the European Union concerning the automatic prolongation of economic sanctions against Russia that expire on July 31 this year. While Italy and Hungary have said that things can’t be taken for granted at this stage, some EU member states, such as Britain, the Baltic republics and Poland say the sanctions should continue.

The visit was an important event. Austria, one of EU leading members, has sent a clear signal it is tired of sanctions and wants them lifted. The delegation demonstrated the Austrian government strives for better relations and more intensive cooperation with Russia. Vienna is not alone here, its stance mirrors a strong trend, which is gradually picking up momentum and can hardly be reversed.

Once again, US equities have given up the ‘great’ jobs report gains and are plunging fast with The Dow sufferung its worst day in 6 weeks. FX markets are turmoiling (USDJPY <108) and bond yields are collapsing to on-month lows. European and US banks are tumbling as despite Dimon’s bottom and the coordinated ease-fest of the world’s central banks, investors prefer to sell a multi-trillion dollar opaque hole of derivatives debacle-ness than buy it. As one veteran trader put it, the central banks’ plans “are coming apart at the seams.”

Good jobs gains gone in stocks…

Bond yields have plunged to 6-week lows..

And USDJPY is collapsing…

As Deutsche heads the same way as Lehman…

And investors begin to realize that nothing has been fixed and nothing they have been told is true.

As of this moment, various European banks but most prominently Deutsche Bank…

… as well as Credit Suisse and RBS, have been crashing back to lows hit in early February and then all the way back to the March 2009 “the world is ending” lows.  We commented on this yesterday using, ironically enough, a note by Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid, in which we showed all the things that were not supposed to happen when Draghi unleashed his massive quad-bazooka QE expansion.

The problem is that now that global central banks are more focused on appeasing China and keeping the USD weaker (by way of a dovish, non-data dependent Fed), the pain for Europe (and Japan), and their currencies, and their banking sector, will likely only get worse. This is precisely the case proposed by Francesco Filia of Fasanara Capital, who explains below his “Short European Bank Thesis.”

Here is his note:

Here below, we update our views on negative rates and our consequential short European Banks equity and sub debt thesis. In a nutshell, we think that not only no bank is ever designed to survive in an environment of deeply negative rates for a prolonged period of time, but their business model is further impaired by negatively sloping interest rate curves. In a twisted unwelcome side-effect following ECB meeting, curves are ever closer to inversion in Europe. They recently became inverted in Japan, for the first time since 1994.

Drivers below, in no particular order:

1.    Deeply negative interest rates for a prolonged period of time.

Banks’ business model is at risk. If deeply negative interest rates is the way forward, it doesn’t matter consolidation or bad banks talks or country-specific policymaking (e.g. Italy or Europe): the business model is impaired, needs a rethink/restructuring, even before FinTech is taken into account. No bank is ever designed to function in durable negative rates environment. It is a profitability issue, not a balance sheet problem. Banks’ capitalisation then, however healthy it may seem today, may have to be looked at as no more but the number of years of negative profitability it can withstand before a recap is eventually needed. A fragile banking sector is the Achilles heel of the equity market overall, paving the way for gap risks to the downside.

2.    Inverted interest rate curves.

Now then, one more element is potentially adding to negative rates in impacting banks’ business: negatively-sloping interest rate curves. The spread between 10y JGBs and overnight rates turned negative in Japan last month. The same spread in Germany is only 20bps steep. Charts attached below. The curve steepness tightly correlates, in broad terms, to how much of a spread profit is left for banks when lending to good large businesses in Europe. No creditworthy business in Europe will accept borrowing for the longer term at much higher costs than that, especially when factoring in a weak-inflation environment. Incidentally, such business is better off borrowing for shorter terms, at more inverted curves, for then rolling-over such debt at a time when it has better visibility on how things evolve in the real economy and if the inflation outlook deteriorates from here or not.

3.    In  deflationary economy, demand for loans is anaemic.

By subsidising T-LTROs to the private business sector, Draghi was masterful in avoiding immediate damage to the banking sector. Banks’ agonising core business model was given a breathing space, in the name of helping the real economy. Surely a smart and well-thought system of incentives. However, as Keynes once wrote, quoting the old English proverb, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”. The lack of positive real expected returns dampens new investments in hiring plans, plant & machinery, and related borrowing and credit formation with it. Thus, making Draghi’s move just another artefact of financial leverage, not a game changer.

4.    No more safety net in the near term for markets.

If anything,  Draghi has now gone closer to full exhaustion of his arsenal of policy tools. Last year, we estimated for Central Banks to be 70% done; we may now argue for their arsenal to be more than 80% exhausted. Their lack of policy space from here is evident. The failed repression of volatility post ECB and the reaction of the EURUSD are there to testify it. Current policies can be expanded, new tools can be devised, but their marginal effectiveness is clearly free-falling. Next time around, a troubled equity market will have less of a safety net in the build-up of expectations into the subsequent ECB meeting.

* * *

In consequence of the risk assessment above, we resolve to stay out of banks equities and equity-like instruments (while we like banks’ senior debt) and equities in general, for limited upside is combined with the risk of a sizeable sell-off in the months ahead. We stay put. We keep dry powder ready should the market become way cheaper between now and September, as we expect.

* * *

Japanese 10yr JGB vs Japan Overnight Rate
The Japanese curve (10yr JGB’s minus overnight rate) is inverted

German 10yr Bund vs Refi Rate

Ratio of EU Banks / Eurostoxx vs German 10yr Bund

Banks tend to underperform the broader market index when interest rates fall

Ratio of EU Banks / Eurostoxx vs European Interest Rate Curve

Banks tend to underperform the broader market index when interest rates curves flatten/invert

On April 5, a Syrian Su-22 fighter-bomber was downed by militants in the village of Tel Eis in Southern Aleppo. Tel Eis has been under control of Al Nusra and Free Syrian Army units which operate in serried ranks in this area. A pilot rejected from the warplane, but he was captured and, according to initial reports, killed by militants. Further reports said that the pilot, Khaled Sa’id of Latakia City, is alive and the work is underway to rescue him.

Following the incident with the Su-22, the loyalist forces supported by Russian warplanes and helicopters conducted a new attempt to liberate Tel Eis and pushed militant groups from the village. Additionally, Russian warplanes conducted air raids on along the Banes-Tal Al-‘Eiss road.

The liberation of al-Eis set a foothold for further advances to cut of M5 highway which links Aleppo with parts of the Idlib governorate and grants access to M4 Highway heading to Latakia.

Pre-military reports indicate that the loyalists are deploying forces – mainly SAA, NDF and Hezbolalh units supported by Iranian and Russian military advisers – to the province of Aleppo to conduct a military operation in the provincial capital. Aleppo’s joint operations room in a statement asked the people to leave the regions where groups that ignore the ceasefire are presented

Order Professor Tim Anderson’s international bestseller directly from Global Research

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both symptoms of dissatisfaction on the part of many of the American electorate about the political status quo.

I have recently argued (see my essay) -with a focus on Trump rather than Sanders- that a victory by an outsider in the forthcoming United States Presidential Elections will change nothing.

The political system and its processes are run on the basis of favouring the ruling elite comprised of Wall Street and the large corporations.

This has maintained the unfair and frequently fraudulent culture in running the economy. It has also meant with the assistance of influential policymakers of the neoconservative stripe who are entrenched in layers of government that America has remained on the consistent but ultimately debilitating path of militarism.

In the meantime, broad segments of the American population will need to make assessments as to where their future political affinities will lie. This encompasses issues of race, gender and the default ideological bent of individuals.

To which party for instance will white working class males gravitate? Should black Americans continue to overwhelmingly support the Democrats? Will conservative-minded females for the most part only be minded to vote for a Republican nominee who is not named Donald Trump?

Some Americans, feeling that the respective establishments of Democrat and Republican parties will do all in their power to frustrate the candidatures of both Trump and Sanders, are already speaking in terms of protest votes against the preferred candidatures of Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. They speak of the primaries as affording a referendum of sorts on the future of the Republican Party. This would also seem to apply to the Democrats.

For it is that the schisms and fault lines apparent in both parties has the potential to create a political upheaval which may result in major voting realignments within the parties if not in their actual splintering.

How, it may be asked, can the Republican Party continue to accommodate a constituency of Tea Party-belonging working class whites alongside country club and boardroom oligarchs? The fracture in the Democrats is also apparent with a choice between the old-style socialism of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton who is clearly the candidate of Wall Street.

Both major parties pose as what they are not.

The Republican party cannot continue posing as the party of ‘limited government’, of ‘fiscal responsibility’ and ‘Isolationist’ foreign policy. The levels of public debt run up in the Reagan administration and which was brought to an extraordinary level during the tenure of George W. Bush are not consistent with ‘fiscal responsibility’. And the interventionist streak begun by George W. Bush took the party away from its traditional isolationist position in an extreme manner.

The Democrat Party which through its recent leaders has made itself beholden to the interests of Wall Street and Corporate America, can no longer hold itself as the party for the working man.

It is clear that part of the solution to America’s political morass concerns the need for a creation or at least a tangible ‘re-birth’ of political parties which are clear and transparent in their respective ideological platforms and which serve the interests of the constituencies who have consistently voted for them.

What is also clear is the need for an overturning of the successive Supreme Court decisions which have turned over the control of the electoral process to an oligarchy which ensures that government has been manifestly for the one per cent and not the country as a whole.

The mechanism for instituting regulations on election spending would be that of a constitutional amendment.

America needs to take stock of the underlying reasons for its disastrous foreign policy stances since the ending of the Cold War. Here a reassessment of the prevailing Wolfowitz Doctrine which maintains that America must retain a global hegemony at any and all costs is called for.

The provocations of American proxies in Georgia and Ukraine as well as the expansion of NATO in defiance of an agreement between the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union have threatened to create a conflict with the nuclear armed Russian Federation.

Further, the hand of the United States in the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria bear testament to a ruthless and cynical policy to foreign nations completely at odds with the Jeffersonian ideal of the United States serving as an ‘Empire of Liberty’.

The rise of Trump and Sanders has had the advantage of bringing to the fore a range of issues of critical importance for public scrutiny. The task is for the electorate to challenge itself to become better informed about the thinking of those in the political classes who rule them.

The general and widespread dissatisfaction with the system is shown through elements of congruence between Trump and Sanders, both of whom tap into an ‘America First’ feeling in regard to both foreign policy and free trade.

While certain criticisms of either man are understandable, in Trump’s case of fostering racial divisions and in Sanders case, the concern that he may be an old school class warrior dressed in different clothing, others such as that offered by the influential political thinker Robert Kagan, highlight the subterfuge that is the calling card of those who are members of the neoconservative movement.

Kagan, who is apparently a Republican, went on record in February to say that he would prefer Hillary Clinton as president rather than Donald Trump. This rationale can only be related to Kagan’s support for foreign interventions and unconditional support for the state of Israel.

While Clinton favours an aggressive foreign policy, Trump’s expressions of favouring a rapprochement with Russia and of questioning American spending on NATO and aid to Israel has brought condemnation from neoconservatives.

The fact that Kagan’s spouse, Victoria Nuland, was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and is now the head of the Eurasian section of the State Department under the incumbent Democrat President Barack Obama must give informed members of the American electorate some food for thought.

Nuland was of course the overseer of the 2014 coup which brought to power an ultra-nationalist government in Ukraine and fomented a state of strife between Kiev and the eastern region which persists to the present day.

The malevolent influence of those with a neoconservative agenda dates back to the era of Ronald Reagan during which period its adherents were involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Several were charged and indicted with federal offences only to be pardoned by the administration of George Bush the senior.

Their influence which rose during the tenure of Bill Clinton was at its highest during the administration of Bush the junior. As events in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine have shown, they are still a formidable presence on foreign policy in the Obama-era.

If the American public in its rumination on the causes of its flawed political process as well as its apparently bottomless national debt and seemingly endless foreign wars, can comprehend and grapple with the origins of the national malaise, then the controversial candidatures of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will have served a supremely useful purpose.

«La Libia deve tornare a essere un paese stabile e solido», twitta da Washington il premier Renzi, assicurando il massimo sostegno al «premier Sarraj, finalmente a Tripoli».

Ci stanno pensando a Washington, Parigi, Londra e Roma gli stessi che, dopo aver destabilizzato e frantumato con la guerra lo Stato libico, vanno a raccogliere i cocci con la «missione di assistenza internazionale alla Libia».

Over the past ten years, approximately five million people have moved away from the state of California, and as you will see in this article this mass exodus appears to be accelerating.  So exactly why is this happening?  Once upon a time, it seemed like almost everyone wanted to live in California.  The nearly endless sunshine, the incredible weather, the pristine beaches and a booming economy motivated millions of young Americans to move out there to pursue “the California Dream”.  In fact, in the early nineties I actually explored the idea of moving out there myself. 

But now the California Dream has become a nightmare.  Californians are being taxed to death, traffic in the major cities is absolutely horrific, violent crime and gang activity are on the rise, millions of illegal immigrants are putting an incredible strain on social support systems, and the ultra-liberal government in Sacramento seems to have gone completely insane.  In addition, the state faces constant threats from earthquakes, wildfires, droughts and mudslides, so it is quite understandable why so many people feel motivated to leave and never come back.

The number one destination for people leaving the state of California in recent years has been the state of Texas.  And according to Ali Meyer of the Washington Free Beacon, the number of people leaving California for Texas has reached “its highest level in nearly a decade”…

The number of Californians leaving the state and moving to Texas is at its highest level in nearly a decade, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service.

According to IRS migration data, which uses individual income tax returns to record year-to-year address changes, over 250,000 California residents moved out of the state between 2013 and 2014, the latest period for which data was available. The tax returns reported more than $21 billion in adjusted gross income to the IRS.

Of the returns, 33,626 reported address changes from California to Texas, which has been the top destination for individuals leaving California since 2007.

Certainly much of this exodus can be attributed to the absolutely suffocating tax rates in the state.  California has a 13.3 percent income tax, and that is in addition to a whole host of other ways that they have come up with to extract as much money out of the population as possible.

But if you really love living somewhere, most people will put up with high taxes.

To me, there are much greater concerns for those living in the state, including the fact that “the Big One” could literally strike at any moment.

According to a study that was discussed in the Los Angeles Times, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia fault could potentially produce a tsunami so large that it would “wash away coastal towns”…

If a 9.0 earthquake were to strike along California’s sparsely populated North Coast, it would have a catastrophic ripple effect.

A giant tsunami created by the quake would wash away coastal towns, destroy U.S. 101 and cause $70 billion in damage over a large swath of the Pacific coast. More than 100 bridges would be lost, power lines toppled and coastal towns isolated. Residents would have as few as 15 minutes notice to flee to higher ground, and as many as 10,000 would perish.

Scientists last year published this grim scenario for a massive rupture along the Cascadia fault system, which runs 700 miles off shore from Northern California to Vancouver Island.

That is very bad news for all of those million dollar homes along the northern California coast.  Once upon a time I dreamed of a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, but not anymore.  In fact, today I would not even dream of owning such a home.

And of course southern California is very much in danger as well.  The San Andreas fault gets most of the press, but there is actually a fault line that is far more dangerous.  According to one seismologist, the Puente Hills fault line could someday “eat L.A.” and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage…

Video simulations of a rupture on the Puente Hills fault system show how energy from a quake could erupt and be funneled toward L.A.’s densest neighborhoods, with the strongest waves rippling to the west and south across the Los Angeles Basin.

According to estimates by the USGS and Southern California Earthquake Center, a massive quake on the Puente Hills fault could kill from 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage. Under this worst-case scenario, people in as many as three-quarters of a million households would be left homeless.

The entire California coastline lies along “the Ring of Fire” which has become much more active in recent years.  Scientists assure us that it is only a matter of time before the state experiences absolutely horrific natural disasters, but most Californians have been lulled into a false sense of security.

In the end, I believe that the great shaking that will come to the state of California will be just part of the great shaking that is coming to the United States as a whole.  This great shaking is something that I discuss in my new book entitled “The Rapture Verdict” which is all about Bible prophecy and the last days.  I am fully convinced that the judgment of God is coming to America, and that everything that can be shaken will be shaken.

There are many people out there that are concerned that the state of California will fall into the ocean someday, but scientists tell us that is probably not likely to happen.  However, the U.S. Geological Service does admit that one day the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco will be right next to each other…

Will California eventually fall into the ocean?

No. The San Andreas Fault System, which crosses California from the Salton Sea in the south to Cape Mendocino in the north, is the boundary between the Pacific Plate and North American Plate. The Pacific Plate is moving northwest with respect to the North American Plate at approximately 46 millimeters per year (the rate your fingernails grow). The strike-slip earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault are a result of this plate motion. The plates are moving horizontally past one another, so California is not going to fall into the ocean. However, Los Angeles and San Francisco will one day be adjacent to one another!

And of course it is true that small parts of California are already falling into the ocean as this current El Nino weather pattern causes stunning erosion along the coast.

Yes, there are good things about the state of California, and I hope to get the chance to visit again at least one more time before it is too late.

But there is no way that I would want to live there, and if anyone that does live there asks me, I always encourage them to think about moving.

So what do you think about the future of the state?

American and British media agencies are celebrating the nomination and ascension by Myanmar politician Aung San Suu Kyi of her driver (see image below) and aid as “president,” as well as her pledge to “rule above” the president – effectively rendering the office as symbolic and subordinate to the unelected Suu Kyi.

The West celebrates such developments when it would otherwise condemn them as un-democratic, and Suu Kyi as an un-elected dictator – primarily because while the president will be subordinate to Suu Kyi, Suu Kyi will be subordinate to the US-British special interests that have spent decades building up her political movement leading to her ascension to power.

 Myanmar’s Puppet President Serves Washington’s Grand Strategy 

The larger agenda at play is part of a decades-old geopolitical plan to create a united front against Beijing throughout Southeast Asia, along with efforts in Asia Pacific and Central Asia to contain the emerging world power.

The Pentagon Papers released in the early 1970’s, admitted US involvement in the Vietnam War was in fact aimed at containing China. They also identified three fronts along which the US sought to achieve this containment from; the Japan-Korea front; the India-Pakistan front; and the Southeast Asia front.

America’s military occupation of Afghanistan, Japan, and South Korea, along with the South China Sea confrontation it is cultivating against Beijing illustrate how from the 1970’s to today, the US is still actively trying to contain China along precisely these fronts.

US attempts to manipulate the internal politics of Southeast Asian nations is also part of this wider containment strategy. While US proxies have been chased out of Thailand and imprisoned in Malaysia, US-British backed proxy Suu Kyi is now finally assuming office, albeit by proxy, in Myanmar.

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities exported by the global South (seconded only by oil and illegal drugs), generating billions of dollars in corporate profit each year. And yet, despite the expansion and increased visibility of fair-trade coffee, the majority of the world’s coffee families live in relative poverty. Gavin Fridell’s recent book, Coffee (Polity, 2014), not only charts coffee’s long and tortuous history of exploitation and colonialism, but endeavours to expose the culprit for such vast inequality.

Central to the book’s arguments are Fridell’s rejection of the contemporary fixation on “market-driven projects” as a solution to the problems of poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction associated with this tropical bean. He builds this critique by asserting that the state and the market are inseparable and that “coffee statecraft,” both good and bad, has been and continues to be central to the everyday operations of the coffee industry. Thus, even in an industry constrained by extreme market volatility and corporate oligarchy, Fridell asserts that the quest for more socially and ecologically just forms of coffee production cannot be resolved solely through market adjustments, but rather requires a greater push for “better coffee statecraft,” guided by the history of gains and losses in the highly imperfect global coffee market.

Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete (AEC): To begin with, can you briefly describe your academic background and how you came to take up research on agricultural commodity production and world trade arrangements?

Gavin Fridell (GF): I began to study commodity chains during my Ph.D. at York University during the early 2000s. My initial interest stemmed not necessarily from any particular concern for commodities themselves, but rather from attempts to regulate the market in different ways. So I started off working on fair trade coffee in Mexico, interested perhaps more in the model of ‘fair trade’ than coffee itself. That gradually led to working on commodities more generally, including later work on bananas in the Caribbean. In my mind, the consistent theme throughout has been the ‘market’ under capitalism, as I’ve looked to explore and critique the limits of market rule and the fantasies of ‘free trade’, while searching for new models that might point to a more socially just alternative.

AEC: In your previous book Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future, you discuss three commodities: bananas, wheat and coffee. What was it that made you want to focus exclusively on coffee in this book and how does coffee differ from other commodities in your prior research?

GF: The focus on coffee really stems from the nature of the Polity Resources Series, which asks authors to develop their ideas with a focus on a distinct resource or commodity. At the same time, the focus on coffee alone allowed me to tease out and develop some ideas from the Alternative Trade book as well as my earlier book Fair Trade Coffee. There are many differences between all commodities, of course, although my own work has tended to focus on the similarities: the growing concentration of power and wealth among the largest corporations, or persistent poverty among the smallest farmers and rural workers.

One interesting factor that has always drawn me to coffee, however, is its rich history and, in particular, the many historical examples of state involvement in coffee markets. I think there is a tendency among consumers to romanticize their favourite commodities, which in the case of coffee often includes notions around coffee’s exotic, ‘dark’, or wild history. Coffee certainly has a brutal history, and there is no shortage of extreme stories, from Black Frosts to stock market crashes, to fill volumes of entertaining books. And yet, at the same time, so much of coffee’s history has been dominated by what some might mistakenly think of as banal: a long history of intense state involvement, from the colonial era to the present day. Often this has taken the form of violent state activities to conquer people and land, and defend elite interests. At the same time, coffee offers some of the most unique, and I would say relatively successful, development models in modern times. From the 1960s to the 1980s, for example, the world’s coffee consuming and producing countries regulated coffee prices on a global scale. This is, in my view, a highly unique model that has received far less attention from academics and policy makers than it should. Many unique models also exist at the national level; Costa Rica built an impressive social welfare state in the post-war era, based on reforming its coffee sector. This used to be discussed more as a developmental model, and I think it should be again.

AEC: A particularly important theme that comes across from the book is how the state, for good and for bad, has remained absolutely central to how the global coffee market runs. You illustrate this through the notion of coffee statecraft. I wonder whether you see this as the main theoretical contribution of your book?

GF: Yes, I think this is the book’s main theoretical contribution. Drawing on the works of David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peter Gowan, and others, I argue that coffee statecraft has been and remains central to the functioning of the global coffee economy. I find Harvey’s work particularly useful regarding his understanding of capitalist states being driven by a “territorial” logic, to defend domestic industry, jobs, and profits, and a “capital” logic, to make sure the policies are in place to protect private property and the reproduction of capitalism.

The idea of coffee statecraft is not really that new to people who have long studied the capitalist state. It does, however, allow us to rethink some of the dominant assumptions around how the global coffee market operates. For example, from 1998 to 2002, the coffee world experienced a major crisis due to plunging coffee bean prices. Many have attributed this to a dramatic swing in the coffee market driven in particular by Vietnam’s rapid rise from an insignificant coffee exporter to the second largest in the world in a relative short amount of time. This is true at the general level. In my book, however, I point out that the rise of Vietnam was to a large extent driven by coffee statecraft on the part of the Vietnamese government, which encouraged migration to the coffee region while providing farmers with subsidized inputs, chemical fertilizer, extensive credit, irrigation, low-cost land, seedlings, and a wide range of state supports. As a result, Vietnam is one of the most efficient coffee economies in the world. Seen from this lens, the global coffee crisis and Vietnam’s rise occurred not strictly due to market forces, but was driven to a large degree by coffee statecraft on the part of Vietnam.

AEC: The International Coffee Agreement (ICA) had its shortcomings but, in economic terms, it oversaw a period of less volatility and higher standards of livings for small holder farmers worldwide. But what are some of the political insights we can gain from the rise and fall of the ICA?

GF: The ICA was created in 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and after Kennedy launched the “Alliance for Progress.” It ended in 1989, with the Cold War nearing its end. While there are a lot of specific political details around both the ICA’s creation and its eventual collapse, the overarching lesson, I think, centres on the political context at the time. Put simply, the U.S. was willing to accept something like international price regulation, and many Latin American countries were willing to pressure for and promote it, precisely because of the Cold War and the fears among elites of the “threat of Communism.” This “threat” was very real at the time, with socialist and communist movements springing up throughout the world, resulting in a very different political landscape than the one we see today. The lesson to be gained from this is that major changes can happen, but usually only when those in power are confronted with real political pressure for substantial change, in this case revolutionary change.

A great deal of the dialogue on the coffee world today is about how to bring together all the different “stakeholders,” in a more or less harmonious way. The history of coffee, however, reveals that it was often political confrontation that drove the most significant and substantial changes. The politics of the Cold War, and the threat of socialism and communism, set the context under which the ICA emerged, and the decline of socialism and communism set the stage for its abandonment.

AEC: In your book you talk about the corporate-driven scaling up of fair trade strategies and how this often weakens the standards of pro-poor policies and sustainability in the coffee sector. I wonder whether you see this growing convergence between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Fair Trade continuing in the foreseeable future and, if so, does this necessarily mean the continuing watering down of the fair trade project?

GF: Unfortunately, I think this is where things will continue to go. I think that the future of fair trade, and the general idea of ethical certification as an effective strategy for social justice, will be characterized by a gradual watering down, although one can never really predict the future. Many corporations are not interested in meeting Fair Trade’s standards, or if they are, only for a portion of their beans. Starbucks, for example, buys around 8.6 per cent of its beans Fair Trade certified. The rest it certifies with its own system, which is a watered down version of Fair Trade. And yet, Starbucks is the largest Fair Trade partner in North America, giving it significant influence over the future direction of Fair Trade.

Over the past few years, there has been significant pressure on Fair Trade to water down its standards to expand its sales or to develop common standards with other certification bodies and corporations. For example, Fairtrade America, Conservation International, Starbucks, the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), and many leading coffee groups have been meeting to develop common standards to certify all of the world’s coffee beans. One can only guess what this will lead to. I suspect, however, that it will eventually lead to a series of standards that allow for all of the world’s coffee farms to be certified, even while the majority of small farmers and workers continue to live in poverty. In the end, even Fair Trade certification as it currently stands, helps small farmers, but they remain in relative poverty.

AEC: Despite their limitations, do Fair Trade and similar programs still provide consumers with the most ‘ethical’ option within the current hegemonic corporate culture? As a consumer of coffee yourself, do you buy Fair Trade coffee?

GF: Yes, I do buy Fair Trade coffee. And I would encourage other people to do the same, and to try to buy it from dedicated Fair Trade and social justice partners, like Planet Bean in Guelph or JustUs! Coffee in Halifax. I do this because, as you suggest, it is the most ethical consumer option out there. And I do it because it’s important to support any project that seeks to work with marginalized farmers and workers in the global South, which many Fair Trade organizations do. At the same time, I always caution people that there is really only so much you can do for the world as a consumer. To go beyond the limits of consumerism, one needs to engage in what Ilan Kapoor calls the “necessarily messy terrain of politics.” The long-term solutions to fighting poverty and injustice in the global coffee industry can only come through collective politics, not through individual consumption choices.

AEC: How important is it to connect these small acts of consumer purchases with organized opposition to corporate trade deals?

GF: I think this is very important. And I think its important to have a broad understanding of what it means to be concerned about small coffee farmers and workers. International trade agreements that allow rich countries to subsidize their farmers while blocking poorer countries from supporting their own farmers with protectionist barriers and other supports are not good for small farmers. International trade agreements, like the TPP, which seek to expand the rights of corporations, through investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms, while providing no additional enforceable rights for labour or to protect domestic industry or the environment are ultimately not in the interest of small farmers and workers.

Its not just trade deals, of course, but the general political and ideological push toward “free trade,” which so often masks what are essentially pro-corporate policies. The fall of the Canadian Wheat Board is an excellent example. In 2012, the Conservative government eliminated the Wheat Board without a vote from farmers, and with relatively little protest on a national scale, outside of farmer groups. I recall that year teaching a class with several students that were passionate about Fair Trade and food sovereignty. Hardly any of them even knew that the Wheat Board had been eliminated. And yet here we had lost what is, in my mind, one of the most successful state trading enterprises in modern times. The loss of the Wheat Board does not just affect Canadian grain farmers, but also impacts the terrain of global politics; it narrows down what we can ask for, what we can demand, and what we can point to as a successful alternative model to support farmer livelihoods. Since that time, the main beneficiaries have been giant agro-businesses, which only further entrenches a corporate-dominated agricultural system. A recent report by Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board points out that while farmers used to receive 90 per cent of the port price under the Board, they are now receiving only 40-60 per cent, amounting to a loss of billions of dollars per year for Canadian grain farmers.

AEC: In the concluding chapter of your book, you make reference to a coffee leaf rust outbreak that hit Central America in 2012, resulting in yet another coffee crisis. How has the coffee rollercoaster played out since the publication of your book?

GF: The final tally on the impact of the coffee leaf rust outbreak on Central America still remains to be done, and I haven’t visited any Central American countries since the outbreak. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs during the peak years and small farmers have been hit hard. Overall production in most countries has just begun to recover to where it was in 2012. Either way, the long-term prospects for coffee in Central America remain uncertain, as some experts fear that rising temperatures due to climate change may wreck the quality of Arabica beans in many lower-lying coffee regions.

On a global scale, the rollercoaster has swung prices down once again since the publication of the book. Coffee bean prices are now at their lowest in two years, generally below the cost of production for most farmers. Some market analysts are optimistic that prices will begin to rise again soon, but one can never tell. In the end, as I highlight in the book, it is not just low prices that hurt small farmers and workers, but the constant swings in the coffee market, plunging below the cost of production one year, and then above the next. It creates a constant sense of chaos that differs sharply from the hopes of many market analysts, who seem to suggest that we are always on the verge of stable and upward prices, even though we never seem to arrive there. In my view, only a return to internationally regulated prices can resolve this problem.

AEC: You end the book by extending Peter Gowan’s observation that economic statecraft always entails a risky ‘gamble’ and that the state needs to play a much better hand with the cards it holds. I wonder if I can put you on the spot: what do you think a viable policy mix for better coffee statecraft, in the here and now, should look like?

GF: Well, I think better coffee statecraft is the kind of statecraft that builds off the best examples. This would involve, at the national level, a more equitable distribution of land and resources, a variety of state supports for small farmers, and strong labour rights for rural workers. At the international level, some form of international regulation is ultimately required to deal with low prices and intense price fluctuations.

In terms of the viability of these ideas, in the “here and now,” of course, that is a tough question in these neoliberal times. At the same time, if we look at specific national or regional contexts, the right policy mix may not be as far away as it sometimes seems. In Colombia, for example, coffee farmers protested in 2013 and were able to force the government to offer subsidies to farmers during a time of low coffee prices. With prices now low again, farmers are once again pressuring government for subsidies and supports. There are even some indications of shifting terrain at the global level. At the recent World Coffee Conference in Ethiopia in March, representatives of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) announced a new initiative to promote collective action strategies to stabilize global coffee prices. It remains to be seen what this could involve and how successful it might be, but the initiative has already received the support of the major African coffee grower organizations.

One final thought on the focus of coffee statecraft in my work, as opposed to the current vogue of fair trade and corporate social responsibility, is that it can seem to leave those in consuming countries, where no coffee is grown, with little recourse to act globally. In the end, there is only so much a Northern consumer can do to impact coffee statecraft in Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia and Brazil. At the same time, I would argue that there are still many things for someone in the North to do.

They can work in solidarity with a range of peasant and labour groups in the South that are working tirelessly to improve the lives of the poor. But, they can also look at home in ways they may not have before, supporting struggles for better wages among retail workers in the coffee chain (such as the recent battle that successfully unionized a Tim Hortons in Winnipeg), and paying greater attention to the importance of such things as the Canadian Wheat Board. In the end, buying Fair Trade is only one very tiny piece of a much larger puzzle. What we all need to do is resist neoliberalism and the purported inevitability of “free trade” policies by defending, promoting, and extending socially just alternatives, South and North, that allow us to point toward what better statecraft can look like and where we need to go.

The International Monetary Fund has been at odds with other partners in the Greek bailout saga.  Its economists have wondered whether strangling a state with the noose of austerity is a decent way of either eliminating debt, let alone stimulating growth.  Not that the body has gone entirely anti-austerity.

The European Commission, and the European Central Bank, have enjoyed taking the high road on trimming the Greek state while seeking debt repayments.  Their obsession with credit, and their reduction of states and their citizens to bank balances, has betrayed a mania for debt hood over sovereignty.  The point was amply illustrated by the financial occupation engineered in July, when Greece accepted a three-year, 86 billion-euro European Union bailout.  The Syriza dream of financial independence and a comprehensive renegotiation of terms was at an end.

The clash of positions within the Troika, and the IMF itself, has perpetuated something of an institutional, undermining perversion.  Athens has been effectively receiving funding from an organisation which has, as its main directive, an obligation not to fund insolvent states. This has caused a degree of dissatisfaction in the ranks of the organisation, one demonstrated by a conversation leaked by WikiLeaks that supposedly took place on March 19.[1]

The dialogue between Delia Velculescu, the IMF’s Greek mission chief, and Peter Thomsen, the same organisation’s European head, became something of a bomb shell between Athens, its European counterparts, and the IMF.  It hardly demonstrated a new won sweetness on the part of the IMF to be more generous. More accurately, it demonstrated the political haggling over how an oppressive debt-austerity regime could be handled for the next crisis.

For one, the transcript notes how the IMF was keen to factor “debt relief” for Greece in Troika negotiations.  The organisation, however, was worried about EU paralysis given the prospects of a “looming Brexit”.  To that end, some arm twisting of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel was suggested.   Should the IMF leave the Troika, things would “look bad and [would] lead to discomforting questions in the Bundestag.”

In Thomsen’s near conspiratorial words, “In the past there has been only one time when the decision has been made and then that was when (the Greeks) were about to run out of money seriously and then to default.”  Velculescu responds somewhat later with agreement, claiming that “we need an event, but I don’t know what that will be.”

This revelation riled Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sufficiently to make him shoot a letter to IMF Chief Christine Lagarde (image left).   Her response on Sunday was that, “Any speculation that IMF staff would consider using a credit event as a negotiating tactic is simply nonsense.”[2]

Having dismissed it as nonsense, Lagarde proceeded to reproach Tsipras for not guarding against such leaks.  It was “critical” that the Greek authorities respect the “privacy of their internal discussions and take all necessary steps to guarantee their personal safety.”

The further disagreement here suggests that an irritation on the part of the IMF regarding the Commission’s figures.  The latter insist on a Primary Government Budget Surplus of 3.5 per cent, while the former, as stated by Thomsen, put it at 1.5 per cent.  This comes down to whether Athens intends being compliant by accepting a revised austerity package plan.

This has made the negotiating stance of the Tsipras government difficult: does it hold out for a softer beating in terms of the next austerity package, or will the chop be even more severe?  The tipping point will be that calamitous “event”, no doubt a default to one of the Troika members.  Like disagreeable vultures, they fight over their quarry.

Greece’s former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis (image right), has his interpretation about IMF attitudes and the state of mind revealed by the Thomsen-Velculescu meeting.  Thomsen, recalled Varoufakis, met him in a Paris hotel in February 2014 keen to press for a debt write-off.  “At a minimum,” Thomsen is supposed to have said, “54 billion euros of Greece’s debt left over from the first ‘bailout’ should be written off immediately in exchange for serious reforms.”[3]

From the start, Varoufakis had been insisting on genuine reforms to combat the debt impasse.  The credit hungry rapacity of the German finance minister, however, intervened to make any such discussion impossible.  “It was a discussion that never got formally off the ground as Germany’s finance minister vetoed all discussion on debt relief, debt swaps (which were my compromise proposal), indeed any significant change to the failed program.”

As Varoufakis rather colourfully summed up, the revelations from WikiLeaks reveal “an attrition war between a reasonably numerate villain (the IMF) and a chronic procrastinator (Berlin).”

Another crisis event is brewing, bred with part malice, and part confusion. But without a comprehensive program of debt relief that encourages, rather than quashes, actual growth, the shackles will remain in place, and reform for Greece, and Europe in general, will be a just another superfluous word.

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

Notes:

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” – Raymond Williams

An old story well known to a few has been brought a new life for many with revelations of the rich stashing their wealth in tax havens that cost the rest of us trillions in their unpaid denial of social bills and national responsibilities. A whistle blower-leaked tale about a Panamanian firm handling accounts for some of the global rich cheats and scammers is being carefully screened by mind managers and consciousness controllers before revealing names, but ultimately the public will be better informed about still another way that the rich rule by their profit and the rest pay for it through our loss.

Initial names dropped in the western, especially American, media repeat Putin and Assad as often as possible, in keeping with propaganda campaigns  of demonization that will not stop until the balance of global power has changed for the good of humanity and ended for the very rich these revelations may help finally defeat. It seems that Putin’s daughter had a wedding in a hotel owned by someone whose name appears among those so far revealed, not surprising given that Russia is a capitalist country and numbers a minority of extremely rich people among its population. And wonder of wonders, Putin may even know and deal with some of them. Imagine. Nothing like that could be true in the USA. If we keep our heads stuffed in a part of our anatomy that never sees the sun.

Actually, many American politicians are rich even before elected, and many who aren’t become so shortly after. And ex presidents, and their wives, often become multi millionaires upon leaving office. This should not be a late breaking bulletin to our citizenry but given the status of our education and information dispensing institutions it may be. Nevertheless, with selected releases and even attempted censorship this enormous cache of elitist cash swindling info may ultimately drop some American names. Maybe.

It is important to know that our richest thieves and legal book jugglers really don’t need offshore tax havens since there are many right here in the USA, with Delaware and Nevada long offering comfortable places to incorporate firms without giving any names as to who actually owns them and thus protect identities and avoid responsibility. The issue of money remaining free from tax collection and being laundered so as to clean it from the criminal ways it is often procured by organized crime, corporadoes or politicians, are really very old stories which may not have originated here but have a long history of practice in the good old marketplace culture of the USA

Still, and despite this silly Putin-Assad stress that not only leaves Americans unmentioned but also seems not to notice quite a few Israeli firms and stockholders among the wealthy welfare chiselers – imagine that! – there is much that may be revealed to people for the first time, teaching them more about how they are robbed by the oligarchs in their societies. This, at a time when Americans and Europeans are under great stress having had government services and public spending viciously slashed in favor of private profits for that class of global royalty, may even help produce a bigger vote among the already great outpouring of disgust for established power through new parties in Europe and for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here in the almost endless American primary race. Sanders and Trump hardly speak the same language but attract some of the same people totally disgusted with the establishment parties they belong to but whose politics they hardly represent.

While the mass of information collected by what seems a major financed media funded source has led to healthy speculation, it has also caused much of the suspicion fueled by establishment lies that finds anything and everything that happens that seems to be even slightly anti-establishment to be a plot, conspiracy or twisted scheme organized by that very establishment. Or nearly mystical manifestations of power attached to often biblical codes, racial theories born of those codes, or simple beliefs that only a chosen few can possibly understand anything and the other billions of us are too dumb to fathom anything beyond the Super Bowl, the World Cup or Downton Abbey.

Just as many if not most American voters are brain bludgeoned into the crack pot realism ordering them to vote for lesser evils since nothing good can ever come from voting, the despair of ugliness at the core of so much of perceived reality can reduce once hopeful people to give up and accept less than half a loaf or no loaf at all.

But the growing reaction of anger at things as they are and desire to transform reality to something much better may ultimately bring even some of the most despairing to see a light at the end of humanity’s tunnel. We should expect that every step forward, including this small one towards revelation of another way in which the rich minority takes advantage of the majority, will be seen as just another ploy by “them” to further induce ignorance and despair such as the wise ones are all too aware of, and continue us on the path to failure. Truly, some of this could almost make the Pope succumb to cynicism, but his inherent hope and faith based on spiritual yearning balanced with material intelligence is very much like what is going on in the world among growing numbers of human beings of different nations and cultures.

Facing a near total breakdown of political economics and the environment that sustains us all, many are saying: enough, we can’t go on this way and must have radical change or the human race, let alone our various nations, will face disaster. Whoever the original revealers were and whatever provoked them, ultimately it is humanity which will be served by what is revealed, however established authority will try to suppress that information, and its gullible handmaidens in communities of perpetual doubt will innocently help by spreading their message of hopelessness and despair.

We live in a time of no secrets, anytime, anywhere. While it can seem that only means gossip, trivia and propaganda, at least to some, the rest of us are learning that there will be no place to hide for anyone on earth if we allow our world to succumb to the ravages of it and its inhabitants being treated like nothing more than a “branded” commodity for sale at a market. We also know that those most responsible for bringing us to this point have to be removed from power and replaced by democracy. Echoing the opening quote, it is time for the truly radical to so convince those remaining in despair.

That is our only hope, and it should be no secret anymore.

Frank Scott writes  political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate

[The following points present] a few simple reasons why PYD/YPG claims to federal autonomy and attempts to annex Syrian land are illegitimate, undemocratic, and could lead to genocide:

1. Kurds are not a majority in the Area PYD/YPG are attempting to annex

The region of Al Hasakah, which the Kurdish Nationalist Party (PYD) and its military wing YPG have declared a federal Kurdish state, does not have a Kurdish majority. Al Hasakah Governorate is a mosaic of Assyrian Christians, Armenians, Turkmen, Kurds and Bedouin Arabs. Of the 1.5 million population of Al Hasakah, only 40% are ethnically Kurdish. Moreover, parts of Al Hasakah Governorate, such as Al Hasakah district, is less than 15% Kurdish (!). In the other large minorities in the area the Arabs and Assyrian Christians form a majority. Declaring a small area with a wide array of ethnic groups as belonging to a specific ethnic minority is a recipe for oppression.

The Kurdish population of Al Hasakah has also been heavily inflitrated by illegal Kurdish immigration from Turkey. Kurdish immigration to Syria began in the 1920’s and occurred in several waves after multiple failed Kurdish uprisings against Turkey. It continued throughout the century. In 2011 the Kurdish population in Syria reached between 1.6 to 2.3 million, but 420,000 of these left Syria for Iraq and Turkey as a result of the current conflict. Some Syrian Kurds have lived in Homs and Damascus for hundreds of years and are heavily assimilated into the Syrian society. However, Kurdish illegal immigrants who mostly reside in north Syria, and who could not prove their residence in Syria before 1945, complain of oppression when they were not granted the rights of Syrian citizens. Syrian law dictates that only a blood born Syrian whose paternal lineage is Syrian has a right to Syrian citizenship. No refugee whether Somali, Iraqi or Palestinian has been granted Syrian citizenship no matter how long their stay. In spite of this, in 2011 the Syrian President granted Syrian citizenship to 150,000 Kurds. This has not stopped the YPG from using illegal Kurdish immigrants who were not granted citizenship as a rationale for annexing Syrian land. Those who promote Federalism are imposing the will of a small minority – that is not of Syrian origin – on the whole of Al Hasakah’s population and the whole of Syria.

2. It is Undemocratic to Impose Federalism on the Majority of Syrians

PYD did not bother to consult with other factions of Syrian society before its unilateral declaration of Federalism. The other ethnicities that reside in Al Hasake governate, which PYD claims is now an autonomous Kurdish state, have clearly rejected federalism. An assembly of Syrian clans and Arab tribes in Al Hasaka and the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO) rejected PYD’s federalism declaration. In Geneva, both the Syrian government and the opposition rejected PYD’s federalism declaration. Furthermore, PYD does not represent all of Syria’s Kurdish population. The Kurdish faction of Syrian national coalition condemned PYD’s federalism declaration. Most of Syria’s Kurds do not live in Al Hasakah and many that do work outside it. Thousands of Kurds have joined ISIS and are fighting for an Islamic State not a Kurdish one.

Unilateral declaration of federalism carries no legitimacy since federalism can only exist with a constitutional change and a Referendum. Federalism is unlikely to garner much support from the bulk of Syria’s population, 90-93% of whom is not Kurdish. Knowing this, PYD have banned residents of Al Hasakah from voting in the upcoming Parliamentary elections to be held across the nation. This shows the will of the people in Al Hasakah is already being crushed by PYD. It is undemocratic to continue to discuss federalism as a possibility when it has been rejected by so many segments of Syrian society. Ironically we are told the purpose of the US’ Regime change adventure in Syria is to bring democracy to the middle east.

3. Federalism May Risk Ethnic cleansing of Assyrian Christian and other minorities

Since the Kurdish population are not a majority in the areas PYD are trying to annex, the past few years have revealed that PYD/YPG are not beyond carrying out ethnic cleansing of non-Kurdish minorities in an attempt to achieve a demographic shift. The main threat to Kurdish ethnocentric territorial claims over the area are the other large minorities, the Arabs and the Assyrian Christians.

Salih Muslim, the leader of PYD, openly declared his intention to conduct an ethnic cleansing campaign against Syrian Arabs who live in what he now calls Rojava. “One day those Arabs who have been brought to the Kurdish areas will have to be expelled,” said Muslim in an interview with Serek TV. Over two years since that interview he has fulfilled his word, as YPG begun burning Arab villages around Al Hasakah Province hoping to create a demographic shift. It is estimated that ten thousands Arab villagers have been ethnically cleansed from Al Hasake province so far. The villages around Tal Abayad have suffered the most as Kurdish expansionists seek to connect the discontiguous population centres of Al Hasakah and Al Raqqa. “The YPG burnt our village and looted our houses,” said Mohammed Salih al-Katee, who left Tel Thiab Sharki, near the city of Ras al-Ayn, in December.

YPG have also begun a campaign of intimidation, murder and property confiscation against the Assyrian Christian minority. The YPG and PYD made it a formal policy to loot and confiscate the property of those who had escaped their villages after an ISIS attack, in the hope of repopulating Assyrian villages with Kurds. The Assyrians residents of the Khabur area in Al Hasaka province formed a militia called the Khabour Guard in the hope of defending their villages against ISIS attacks. The Khabur Guard council leaders protested the practice of looting by Kurdish YPG militia members who looted Assyrian villages that were evacuated after ISIS attacked them. Subsequently, the YPG assassinated the leader of the Khabur Guard David Jindo and attempted to Assassinate Elyas Nasser. At first the YPG blamed the assassination on ISIS but Elyas Nasser, who survived, was able to expose the YPG’s involvement from his hospital bed. Since the assassination YPG has forced the Khabour Guard to disarm and to accept YPG ‘protection.’ Subsequently most Assyrian residents of the Khabour who had fled to Syrian Army controlled areas of Qamishli City could not return to their villages.

The Assyrian Christian community in Qamishli has also been harassed by YPG Kurdish militia. YPG attacked an Assyrian checkpoint killing one fighter of the Assyrian militia Sootoro and wounding three others. The checkpoint was set up after three Assyrian restaurants were bombed on  December 20, 2016 in an attack that killed 14 Assyrian civilians. Assyrians suspected that YPG was behind these bombings in an attempt to assassinate Assyrian leaders and prevent any future claims of control over Qamishli.

It would be foolish to ignore the signs that more widely spread ethnic cleansing campaigns may occur if Kurdish expansionists are supported, especially since other ethnic groups are not on board with their federalism plans. It has only been 90 years since the Assyrian genocide which was conducted by Turks and Kurds. This history should not be allowed to be repeated. Assyrians have enjoyed safety and stability in the Syrian state since this time. Forcing the Assyrians to accept federalism is not going to ensure their safety. Establishment of a federal Kurdish state in Iraq has not protected Assyrian villages from attacks by Kurdish armed groups either. The campaign of ethnic cleansing against both Assyrians and Arabs in Al Hasakah has already begun and may now only escalate.

4. The Resources in Al Hasake are shared between all Syrians

While Kurds make up only 7-10% of Syria’s total population, PYD demands 20% of Syria’s land. What’s more, the region of Al hasakah that YPG want to annex has a population of only 1.5 million people. Much of Syria’s agriculture and oil wealth is located in Al Hasakah and is shared by Syria’s 23 million people. Al Hasakah province produces 34% of Syria’s wheat and much of Syria’s oil. The oil pumping stations are now being used by ISIS and YPG’s Kurds to fund their war efforts while depriving the Syrian people.

While headlines abound about Syria’s starving population, there is little talk of how federalising Syria could entrench this starvation into law for generations to come. Instead, promoters of Federalism talk about how giving the resources shared by 23 million people to 1.5 million people will lead to peace.

5. A Kurdish Region in Syria will be a Threat to Global Security

Since the majority of Syria’s population and Syria’s government oppose Kurdish annexation claims, PYD will not be able to achieve federalism through legal means. The only way the PYD and YPG can achieve federalism is through brute force. This brute force may backed by the US air force and an invasion by special forces which contradicts international law. Head of PYD Saleh Islam has already threatened to attack Syrian troops if they attempt to retake Raqqa from ISIS. A Kurdish state in Syria as the Iraqi Kurdistan ensures US hegemony in the region. Like the KRG [1] the YPG are already attempting to build a US base on Syrian soil. Russia, which has been an ally of Syria for a long time, will be further isolated as a result. This will once again tip the balance of power in the world.

All of Syria’s neighbouring countries are also opposed to an ethnocentric Kurdish state in Syria. The YPG is linked to the PKK, which is active in Turkey and which the United Nations has designated a terrorist organisation. Turkey will see YPG’s federalism claims as strengthening the PKK. Turkey may invade Syria as a result, guaranteeing at least a regional war. This regional war could involve Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Israel.

Israel wants to establish a Kurdistan, as a Sunni-Iranian rival to Shi’ite Iran. They hope such a Sunni state will block Iran’s access to Syria and will also prevent Lebanese resistance against Israeli invasion. This was all outlined in Israel’s Yinon Plan published in 1982. Israel is an extension of US influence and hegemony in the region, the Israeli lobby holds much sway over US politics. Strengthening Israel in the region will strengthen US influence over the region, once again shrinking Russian influence and  pushing the nuclear power into a corner. Journalists who show a sense of confusion about the reason the West is supportive of Kurdish expansionism should consider this point.

Finally, a designated ‘Kurdish area’ in Syria is deeply rooted in ethnocentric chauvinism. A US state strictly designated for Hispanic, White or Black ethnicity would be outrageous to suggest and would be considered racist. But the use of ethnicity as a means to divide and conquer is the oldest and most cynical form of imperialism. Syria must remain for all Syrians, not just for one minority. Voices who oppose this should be discouraged. The Syrian Constitution should continue to resist all ethnocentric religious-based parties. If there is a change to the Syrian constitution, it should be the removal of the word Arab from Syrian Arab Republic. In spite of the fact that the vast majority Syrians speak the Arabic language, the majority of Syrian are historically not ethnically Arab. All sections of Syrian society should be treated equally under the Syrian flag.

Notes:

[1] The Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq

A threadworm tactic employed for a decade by Big Pharma and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and their allies to combat the scientific evidence that the autism explosion is a manmade epidemic of recent origins has been to hint that there is no autism epidemic at all.

Public health agencies maintain a disciplined refusal to call the disease’s sudden explosion an “epidemic” or “crisis” and actively discourage scientific investigations of environmental triggers.

“You will never ever hear CDC characterizing the autism explosion as a crisis or an epidemic,” Dr. Brian Hooker, Simpson University epidemiologist, said. “So long as there is no epidemic, no one needs to look for the environmental trigger.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

All this accounts for the giddy excitement among Big Pharma funded media outlets at the debut of Steve Silberman’s book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. Parroting Pharma’s old propaganda canard, Silberman suggests that autism is a wholly genetic psychological ailment that has always been with us in prevalences similar to those found today. Silberman argues that we never noticed autism until recently, because affected persons with the illness were formerly stashed in mental institutions or misdiagnosed.

“Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past passed down through millions of years of evolution,” Silberman says on page 470 of his book. Silberman’s overarching message is that we should stop investigating the environmental cause of the autism epidemic—and potential cures—and simply celebrate humanity’s neurodiversity mosaic.

This, of course, is all crackpot stuff. When Cenk Uygur, CEO of TYT Network (5 million subscribers with 170 million monthly views), invited Silberman to debate me on the merits of his thesis (I recently wrote the book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, which summarizes the overwhelming scientific evidence linking mercury containing vaccines to the epidemic of neurodevelopmental diseases, including autism), Silberman declined. Despite his unwillingness to defend his hypothesis, Silberman has nevertheless become a media darling, appearing with hosts like George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, William Brangham on PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff on PBS, Terry Gross on NPR, Martha Kearney on BBC Radio and a parade of other talk shows. He has won coveted reporting prizes and preened for credulous print journalists who have promoted his tobacco science in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Forbes, Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and so forth. Welcome to the corporate media echo chamber! These are all platforms where dissenting voices never dispute Big Pharma/CDC orthodoxies and informed critics of vaccine safety science and CDC corruption are unwelcome.

Silberman rarely cites actual science to support his epidemic denial. He rests his thesis instead on anecdotal accounts of autism like features in historical figures long before Dr. Leo Kanner first described classic autism in 1943 and his rival, Hans Asperger, its milder forms in 1944.

It’s astonishing that a man could write a 700 page book on autism without coming across the basic science addressing his central assertion that the autism epidemic is an illusion. There happens to be lots of science on that question and the leading studies all debunk Silberman’s hypothesis.

Peer-Reviewed Science Says the Autism Epidemic is Real

Dr. Kanner coined the term “autism” 70 years ago. Autism was so rare at that time that Kanner, the father of American childhood psychiatry, described the disorder as “a behavior pattern not known to me or anyone else theretofore.” When researchers conducted the first surveys of autism prevalence in the mid-1960s through the 1980s, results indicated that around 1 in 2,500 children had autism. Its prevalence remained fairly stable until the generation born in 1989. That year the CDC dramatically changed the vaccine schedule, increasing mercury exposures to American children from 70 to 237.5 mcg before age two. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls 1989 “The Gateway Year,” because of the epidemic of neurodevelopmental and immune system diseases that suddenly appeared in children born that year and afterward, including ADD, ADHD, speech delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, SIDS, narcolepsy, seizure disorder, asthma, food allergies, and, of course, autism. Virtually all of these ailments were exceedingly rare prior to 1989.

Peer-reviewed science links all of these illnesses to mercury exposure. According to the CDC, a shocking 1 in 6 American children now suffer from developmental disabilities. The agency’s estimated prevalence rates of autism in the U.S., according to its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, is 1 in 150 children in the 2007 report that looked at 2000 and 2002 data, 1 in 110 children in the 2009 report that looked at 2006 data, 1 in 88 children in the 2012 report that looked at 2008 data and 1 in 68 children in the 2014 report that looked at 2010 data with the current rate of 1 in 42 among boys.

A central problem for Silberman is that no one has documented a parallel increase in autism among adults. If the rise were truly due to better diagnostics, as Silberman contends, we would see the increase across all age groups—not just children. California incidence data show that 80 percent of people identified as having autism are under 18. Many other studies rejected the self-serving flight of fancy originally advanced by the vaccine makers and its allies and now parroted by Silberman:

• A 2014 study by the Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology found that changes in diagnostic criteria did not significantly affect the reported incidence of autism. Silberman is correct in saying that some criteria for diagnosing autism were expanded in the 1980’s resulting in greater numbers of people who qualified under the new definition—however, other criteria were constrained, resulting in a wash.

• California documented the rapid increase in autism among that state’s children since the 1980s, noting that, as of 2003, that “autism, once a rare disorder, is now more prevalent than childhood cancer, diabetes and Down Syndrome.” No similar rise has been demonstrated in adults.

• After California’s Department of Developmental Services documented a 273 percent increase in reported cases of childhood autism between 1987 and 1998, the California state legislature commissioned the University of California’s Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute at UC Davis to conduct a comprehensive study to determine the reason for this increase. That seminal study specifically tested the hypotheses attributing the increase to expanded diagnostic criteria, or better recognition and rejected those theories as unsupported by science. The study found that the epidemic is real. The lead author of the UC Davis MIND Institute study, Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto concluded, “It’s time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California.”

• A 2009 Columbia University study examined the steady growth of autism in children born between 1987 and 1994 and came to identical conclusions. The autism epidemic is real.

• Another California study in 2009 examined annual autism increases in the 1990s and early 2000s. The authors concluded that expanded diagnostic criteria, the inclusion of milder cases and better diagnosis, could not explain the dramatic increases seen in the state.

• A study of children in Olmsted County, Minnesota, rejected expanded diagnostics as an explanation for the rise in autism rates since the early 1990s.

• A 2004 review article citing more than 50 studies on estimates of autism frequency, found that the large increases in prevalence cannot be chalked up to better diagnostics or case ascertainment.

• A 2005 retrospective study by Craig Newschaffer surveyed in all U.S. children 6 to 17 years of age between 1992 and 2001 in various disability category classifications—as documented by state departments of education and reported to the federal Department of Education—documented a year by year increase in autism rates, but not other neurological illnesses during that period.

• A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) documented a steep rise in real autism prevalence incidences over the previous decade. In 1992, OSEP first began collecting autism statistics from the states on the number of students identified as having autism and receiving special education and related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). That year, there were 5,208 students ages 6 through 21 reported to have autism nationwide. By 2004, the number had jumped to 166,424.

• In a 2013 study, researchers for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, the company that introduced thimerosal in the 1930s, confirmed that the increase in prevalence of autism is genuine and cannot be attributed to diagnostic criteria or misclassification. Company scientists suggest that some environmental cause is partly responsible for the epidemic.

Silberman’s thesis is not new. It’s been raised by Pharma/CDC flaks for 17 years and resoundingly rejected in scientific literature. Peer-reviewed published science overwhelmingly demonstrates that the autism epidemic is real. In a 2000 editorial, the late Dr. Bernard Rimland, a colleague of Leo Kanner’s and director of the Autism Research Institute from 1967-2003, scathingly rebuked the epidemic deniers:

“While there are few Flat-Earthers who insist that there is no real epidemic of autism, only an increased awareness, it is obvious to everyone else that the number of young children with autism spectrum disorders has risen, and continues to rise, dramatically.”

The Problem of Regressive Autism

The inconvenient fact of “Regressive” autism presents another lethal blow to Silberman’s thesis.

As the number of mercury containing vaccines rose after 1989 and on through the 1990s, so did a previously little-seen pattern of autism onset called regressive autism. In regressive autism, children developing normally over their first year or two suddenly become autistic, losing previously acquired language and social skills. Thousands of parents report watching their perfectly healthy and socially adjusted two and three year olds lose language, toilet training and social skills following vaccine related seizures and fevers. Many of these children suddenly became unable to point their finger, make eye contact, and they began, for the first time, engaging in stereotypical behavior, including stimming, head banging, swaying, hand flapping and screaming.

A 2005 study objectively validated the phenomenon of regressive autism by reviewing 56 home videotapes of children’s birthdays, documenting greater attention and use of vocalizations at 12 months compared to typical children or early onset cases of autism.

Many published case reports of patients have described developmental regressions with autism symptoms following fetal or early childhood mercury exposure. According to Autism Speaks, 30 percent of autistic children have experienced regression.

Data collected since 1965 by the Autism Research Institute indicate that the onset of autism at 18 months, rather than closer to birth, is a recent phenomenon. According to Dr. Rimland, writing in 2003:

“Late onset autism, (starting in the 2nd year), was almost unheard of in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s; today such cases outnumber early onset cases 5 to 1, the increase paralleling the increase in required vaccines.This changeover implies that regressive autism cannot be attributed to genetics, but rather is an acquired condition.”

“Genes don’t create epidemics”, says toxicologist, Boyd Haley, who is chairman emeritus of the University of Kentucky Chemistry Department. “Genetics can create vulnerabilities, but to have an epidemic, you need an environmental toxin.”

Of course, the sudden appearance of regressive autism after 1989 and its current predominance—all strongly documented in scientific literature—is a direct challenge to Silberman’s hypothesis. If autism has really “always been with us,” then where are all the historic accounts of bright, healthy children, who suddenly lose their faculties at age two or three? Characteristically, Silberman deals with regressive autism by simply suggesting it doesn’t exist. He dismisses the well-documented scientific fact of “babies that seemed to be developing normally” but who then regress into autism, as baseless wives tales that “circulate on the Internet,” Silberman says on page 42. Yes. Mr. Silberman, one can find these stories on the internet among the peer-reviewed studies archived on PubMed!

You Don’t Need All This Science to Know That the Epidemic is Real—If You Have a Big Toe in Reality

Silberman’s most vexing critic, of course is not science—it’s common sense. The ultimate proof of his hypothesis would be to show us the large population of adults—1 in every 42 grown men—with autism. You can pick out a child with severe autism across a crowded mall; so where are the adults? And I’m not talking about the geeky 50 year old man or a quirky recluse like Donald Triplett, the compelling subject of Washington Post reporters’, John Donvan and Caren Zucker’s companion book, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism.

Where are all the adults with classic autism? Where are the hand flapping, head banging, self-abusive, spinning, screaming, rocking, stimming, non-verbal and violent 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 year olds wearing autism helmets and diapers? Where are the grown-ups at the mall experiencing violent tantrums, seizures and GI tract problems? Extrapolating CDC’s 1 in 68 childhood prevalences to a population of 320 million, there should be 7 million American adults with autism. And they should be easy to find. Here’s what to look for. Twenty-five percent will be non-verbal. Half of them are prone to wandering. Thirty percent have seizures. Many of them will have horrific bowel disease and classic sleep disorders. Most of them will have extreme light and noise sensitivities. They will focus on spinning objects. They will endlessly repeat phrases (Echolalia). They will read without understanding (Hyperlexia). Their heads may be enlarged (Macrocephaly). They will be unable to point their finger or engage in eye contact. We see kids like this every day in our schools, neighborhoods and city streets. Where are the middle aged and elderly banging their heads and screaming? Silberman concedes that very few are in institutions.

Thanks to legislation originally sponsored by my father, those institutions were shuttered in the 1970’s and 1980’s. So why then aren’t we seeing these disabled populations? A search of group homes or hospitals will not reveal them. The darth of adult services is a universal lament. Nor are they living at home. How many 70 year old parents do you know who are staying at home to care for their 50 year old autistic son or daughter? CDC has never undertaken a study to show that autism prevalence in adults is the same as in children because everyone—except Steve Silberman—knows that it’s not!

And by the way, how did all those stupid parents, teachers, doctors and infirmary nurses, in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, somehow miss the enormous population of autistic children—2 percent of all kids—now filling our classrooms? Why was their presence never documented by the smart, diligent psychiatrists and psychologists who managed mental institutions and invaluably kept meticulous records of patients’ behavior, treatments and diagnoses? How did they miss an illness that now affects 1 in 68 children and 1 in 42 boys? Despite Silberman’s pernicious condensation, the answer is—they didn’t! Those who have been caring for our children diligently for decades report an unparalleled tsunami of neurologically injured children.

“The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage,” Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. “Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children.” Silberman’s theories aside, one doesn’t “miss” autism. “Missing autism,” Dr. Boyd Haley said, “is like missing a train wreck.”

Donvan and Zucker also endorse Silberman’s theory that the giant population of people with autism was invisible in olden days, because we stashed them in institutions. This is yet another easily debunked flimflam. Historian Jonathan Rose, Drew University’s William R. Kenan Professor of History, has crafted a devastating critique of the Donvan/Zucker book.

Donvan and Zucker’s most impressive detective work was locating Donald Triplett, the first autistic diagnosed by Dr. Kanner. Triplett, who spends his life in Forest, Mississippi, where all 2,874 residents knew and protected him. He was a famous figure in the town, because of his unique disease. Rose makes the salient observation that at today’s prevalences of 1 in 68—there should have been 63 other autistics in Forest. How come no one noticed them? Donvan and Zucker suggest they were in institutions. However, Rose points out that in 1948, there were 150 million people in America. Applying today’s 1 in 68 prevalences rate, there should have been more than 2 million autistic people in mental institutions. But there were, at that time, a grand total of only 554,454 patients in American mental institutions suffering the full range of mental, intellectual, emotional and neurological disabilities. Even if every one of them were autistic—they weren’t—that still leaves roughly 1.5 million people with autism unaccounted for.

A 2014 retrospective study by University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor David Mandell of 1950 state historical records of inmates at the Norristown state hospital concludes that 10 percent of state inmates had autism. Rose then compared that number to the state’s total population. Assuming that nearly all people with autism were then hospitalized, as Donvan, Zucker and Silberman contend, that would yield the estimated total population prevalences of 1 in 2,718—close to the historic levels of 1 in 2,500 prior to the 5,500 percent increase that accompanied the 1989 epidemic.

Like Silberman’s, Donvan and Zucker’s book is also a search for historical cases of autism. In their most interesting piece of research, the two reporters uncovered an 1846 estimate by Dr. Samuel Gridley, who found 1,300 patients in Massachusetts state institutions classified as “idiots.” Eureka! By slapping the autism label on these “idiots,” the two Washington Post sleuths solved the baffling problem. Zucker and Donvan had found the lost population of people with autism! Except they didn’t. As Rose points out, Massachusetts population was then 737,699—even if all those 1,300 patients were really autistic—as Zucker and Donvan ask us to believe—it still yields a prevalence of only 1 in 567. And “idiot” was a designation with wide application in 1846. By taking a far deeper dive into state medical records than Donvan and Zucker managed, Rose demonstrates that most of the patients discovered by Gridley had other diagnoses (e.g. microcephaly and mental retardation) and symptoms (adult onset) that are inconsistent with an autism diagnosis. Rose shows that taking all the patients Donvan and Zucker found with clear symptoms of autism and comparing that model to the contemporary adult population of Massachusetts—the prevalence would be about 1 in 18,900—much smaller than today’s.

By the way, I was inside those institutions in the 1960’s and I didn’t see this phantom population that Donvan, Zucker and Silberman claim they found in their historic research. I grew up at the spear tip of the movement to mainstream people with intellectual disabilities. My aunt Eunice Shriver is both my godmother and the godmother to that movement. I worked on weekends first as a hugger and later as a counselor at Camp Shriver every year as a youngster beginning in 1962, when I was eight years old until the program became the Special Olympics in 1968. I have continued to be involved thereafter with Special Olympics for 45 years. My cousin, Timmy Shriver is the director of Special Olympics. Special Olympics always prided itself on being able to accommodate every child—no matter how severe their disability. However, we could not, back then, have handled a kid with full blown autism—the violence, the agonizing gut ache, the tormenting light and noise sensitivity, the seizures. In 1965, my father toured Willowbrook on Staten Island and launched the national campaign to shut down these medieval warehouses for human beings. I worked for 200 hours in one of those nightmare facilities—Wassaic Home for the Retarded in Dutchess County, New York in 1968 and 1969. I worked around people suffering every kind of intellectual disability, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, schizophrenia and hydrocephaly, among many others. I never saw a case of autism. In fact, like most Americans, I knew nothing about the disease until I saw the extremely mild form depicted by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rainman in 1988. In a 2000 journal editorial, Dr. Rimland (Rimland’s autistic son was Hoffman’s model in the film), recalled the infrequency of the disorder earlier in his career:

I saw the word autism for the first time in the spring of 1958, five years after I had earned my PhD in psychology. My wife and I had taken our implacable, screaming newborn son to our pediatrician two years earlier. Dr. Black had been in practice for 35 years and had never seen a child like Mark. Nor had any other physician we consulted. When Mark was two years old, his strange, aloof, ritualistic behavior reminded my wife of a child she had read about in an old college textbook. There in that textbook, I first saw the word “autism.”

William Crook of Tennessee, a pediatrician who had received his medical training in the 1940s at Johns Hopkins, where Leo Kanner taught, became intrigued by autism and actively sought such cases by letting his pediatric colleagues throughout the South know of his special interest. It was not until 1973, 24 years after starting his practice, that he had his first autistic patient. Then came more. “I am absolutely certain that there is a huge increase in autism,” Dr. Crook told me. I have heard similar tales from many physicians as well as special education teachers and school administrators whose experience dates back to the early 1970s and before. Autism was truly rare in those days.

Unlike Silberman, Donvan and Zucker acknowledge the severe side of autism and its explosive prevalence among children. They worry that childhood autism is a ticking time bomb that will soon swamp our social service supplier. “In a decade, 500,000 teenagers are going to turn into adults, and there is really no place for them,” Donvan says in his book on page 550. Well, that does beg the question … Why aren’t we ready for them if this is an illness that has always been with us since the beginning of human history?

But even when acknowledging the autism explosion among children, Donvan and Zucker get all dodgy—one might say intellectually dishonest—when it comes to calling it an epidemic. They can’t bring themselves to follow Silberman down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole of epidemic denial and yet they don’t want to admit it’s an epidemic—with all that would imply. They settle for evasion; when “epidemic” is mentioned, it’s put in quotes as if they don’t know whether to believe it. Or they go vague, like in this NPR interview from 2010: “For whatever reason, these numbers exploded over the past two decades.” On Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos, John Donvan papered over his problem with a rather astonishing pronouncement: “It shouldn’t matter if there is an epidemic.”

I understand their reticence. If there is an epidemic, then there must be an environmental toxin. And that means we need to at least look at mercury in vaccines. This is verboten territory for journalists. So, after spending five years writing this book, these two clever investigative reporters can’t be sure whether or not there is an epidemic? Well, never mind they are dead sure that vaccines aren’t causing it; Donvan and Zucker dutifully dismiss the link between autism and vaccine mercury exposure without citing any scientific articles to support their conclusion. Instead they deftly sideline the issue by reporting the CDC’s obligatory formulation “the science disputing the link is overwhelming.” It’s not a question for polite company!

Weird Science: Peer-Review at People Magazine

Silberman takes a less cowardly tack. He actually ventures into the no man’s land of scientific debate. He quickly finds himself in a mine field.

For example, Silberman says that removing mercury from vaccines was unnecessary because “later studies would show that this had no impact on rising rates of autism diagnosis,” he says on page 419 of his book. The only science Silberman offers to support this supposition is a People Magazine article claiming “that rates of diagnosis were still climbing in Sweden, where thimerosal had been removed from vaccines in 1993…” he says on page 71 of his book. People Magazine aside, the CDC’s best and most recent science shows that autism spectrum disorder rates in Scandinavia dropped 33 percent following the removal of thimerosal in 1993. CDC’s Groenberg paper is among more than 50 published peer-reviewed studies on PubMed linking Thimerosal to the autism epidemic.

Silberman dismisses concerns that the mercury-containing vaccines are a culprit in the autism explosion by explaining that “the preservative was quickly phased out of most vaccines in the United States and Europe,” after those concerns first arose in 2003, he says in his book on page 419. In fact, thimerosal laced flu vaccinations are administered to 50 million Americans annually. Vaccine mercury exposures to children today are comparable to exposures in the 1990s, and, for the first time, thimerosal vaccines are being administered to pregnant women in America. One hundred million children in Africa, Asia and Latin America receive mega doses of neurotoxic thimerosal in many, many vaccines annually.

With equal confidence, Silberman assures readers that the mercury concentrations in vaccines were only “trace amounts,” meaning less than 1 microgram of mercury. This is an oft reported and wildly erroneous industry whopper. Thimerosal is still in the flu vaccine in massive concentrations of 25 micrograms per shot. To comply with the EPA’s maximum exposure level of .1 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, a baby would have to weigh 550 pounds to safely ingest that dose. At these levels, a growing fetus in a mother receiving the flu shot could rise over a million times the EPA’s recommended safe levels. Thimerosal’s own insert literature warns that it has never been tested safe for pregnancy.

Silberman’s fundamental scientific gaffs are the reliable pitfall for the rare journalist who actually tries to defend the CDC’s position on thimerosal safety by referencing scientific studies. The science is not there. The emperor has no clothing. The illusion of thimerosal safety is only preserved by blind repetition of the standardized formulation, “Overwhelming science shows no link.”

Instead of demanding robust and transparent science to identify the environmental triggers for the autism epidemic, Silberman, Donvan and Zucker take the Pollyanna approach that we should pretend that there is no epidemic and accept its victims as “different but not less.” What these writers present as compassion is really a thinly veiled defense of a monumentally cruel and indefensible orthodoxy. Thimerosal has helped give us not only an autism epidemic, but also a journalistic crisis. In order to airbrush away the clear scientific link, writers and reporters parrot the propaganda pronouncements of the Big Pharma/CDC cartel. They never read the science for themselves.

It is sad, but therefore not surprising, that Donvan and Zucker have neither read the science on autism prevalences, nor the science they cite to exculpate mercury containing vaccines from the autism epidemic. To paraphrase Voltaire: A corrupt pharmaceutical industry/CDC cartel that can get us to believe absurdities—that there is no autism epidemic—can also get us to commit atrocities, i.e. injecting massive doses of one of the world’s most potent neurotoxins into infants and pregnant women worldwide.

In an era when the leading news services are Pharma funded, the perils to journalists from committing heresy against these rigorously enforced orthodoxies are graver than ever. CBS’s, Sharyl Attkisson, calls the mercury/autism story “the most censored story of our century.” In a 2005 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Daniel Schulman reported that journalists consider the thimerosal/autism story “career ending.” Shulman quoted a national journalist (who asked to remain anonymous out of fear): “For some reason, giving any sort of credence to the side that says there’s a legitimate question here—I don’t know how it becomes this untouchable story. I mean that’s what we do, so I don’t understand why this story is more touchy than any other story I’ve ever done.”

Epidemic denial is the new capstone on the wobbly edifice of fraud, deceit and corruption constructed by the CDC and Big Pharma to defend their institutions against the rising tide of scientific studies linking mercury containing vaccines to the autism pandemic. Silberman, Donvan and Zucker have now made themselves the champion propagandists for a Kafkaesque reality where journalists are content to look an epidemic in the face and see nothing.

The Prime Minister’s office in Iceland has just issued a press statement in English to the international press saying that the Prime Minister has not resigned, merely stepped aside for an unspecified amount of time and will continue to serve as the Chairman of the Progressive Party.

The press release is as follows: 

Prime Minister of Iceland very proud of Government’s success – suggests Progressive Party Vice-Chairman take over the office of Prime Minister for an unspecified amount of time.

Today the Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson has suggested to the Progressive Party Parliamentary group that the Progressive Party Vice-Chairman take over the office of Prime Minister for an unspecified amount of time. The Prime Minister has not resigned and will continue to serve as Chairman of the Progressive Party.

The Prime Minster is very proud of the success of his Government’s policies that have resulted in the resurrection of Iceland’s economy, an unprecedented rise in purchasing power, record low inflation and a general improvement in living standards for the Icelandic people.

The Prime Minister is especially proud of his Government’s handling of Iceland´s situation with the creditors of the failed Icelandic banks. The Prime Minister has devoted much of his time in politics to the challenge of resolving the dramatic balance of payment problem Iceland faced due to banking crisis in 2008. If the creditors of the failed banks, which were nine times the size of the economy, had been allowed to take their claims and exit Iceland with foreign currency, it would have had a devestating impact on the standard of living for Icelanders. Instead the Prime Minister and his Government were able to bring to the table a solution which will have an exceptionally positive impact on the Icelandic economy. The net positive impact to the Icelandic economy is more than three billion GBP, or a quarter of Iceland´s GDP. The net external position of Iceland has never been as good as now.

These facts are acknowledged by international experts, including Lee Buchheit, the Government’s advisor on capital account liberalization and a world renowned authority on sovereign debt reconstruction, who said in a recent interview that the result achieved in settling the failed banks’ estates is unprecedented in world financial history and that this outcome could by no means have been expected.

The Prime Minister’s action reflects his wish to not stand in the way of the important issues that still remain on the Government’s agenda being finished in this term, issues like housing reform and the reform of the financial system that he will continue to fight for in the interest of the Icelandic people.

In recent weeks, the Prime Minister and his wife have provided detailed answers to questions about the assets of the PM’s wife. They have never sought to hide these assets from Icelandic tax authorities and these holdings in Wintris have been reported as an asset on the Prime Minister’s wife’s income tax returns since 2008 and taxes have been paid accordingly in Iceland. No Parliamentary rules on disclosure have been broken. Even The Guardian and other media covering the story have confirmed that they have not seen any evidence to suggest that the Prime Minister, his wife, or Wintris engaged in any actions involving tax avoidance, tax evasion, or any dishonest financial gain.

As up until now, the Icelandic Government continues to use every option available to prevent tax avoidance.

This article is dedicated to Greece, to the Greek people, as they have been victimized by a set of white collar criminal organizations – nothing less than the European Union (EU) with its unelected European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) – which is not really a Central Bank, but a mere instrument to serve the FED and Wall Street plundering Europe’s social safety nets and physical assets, plus the Washington controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF) – altogether, the so-called troika.

The Eurozone Made in America

The EU and its currency, the euro are doomed to collapse. It’s just a question of time. The EU is a purposeful miss-construct and its currency, the euro as fake and hollow as is the US dollar. As such they are bound to crash. How long can the Emperor of Chaos, the United States of America, and his European minions postpone such an implosion? And why is the US interested in preserving the EU? Because they created the EU for their economic and geopolitical / strategic purposes. That’s why.

The European Union is an invention of the United States. It was never a European idea. This Machiavellian self-serving concept of Washington was conceived after WWII under the command of the Anglo-Zionist-dominated financial oligarchs – Wall Street and the FED, both of which are linked by a revolving door. The Federal Reserve (FED), representing the US Central Bank, is unlike other central banks around the world, entirely privately owned. This financial oligarchy is heavily stained by the Rothschild and Rockefeller families. The FED and Wall Street, and the globalized worldwide (western) banking system constitute the one money-printing and money-making apparatus that (still) controls the world, the fiat dollar economy. It is debt-driven and operates like a pyramid Ponzi scheme.

After WWII, Europe was to be rebuilt under the command and strict control of the United States of America and under a series of iron-clad macro-economic and geopolitical strategies which would leave down-trodden Europe little alternative than being forever thankful to America, its purported savior and new partner (in crime) and ally, or better, their new masters. Part of this strategy was the Marshall Plan (also called the European Recovery Program), named after then Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. The Plan was a revolving fund, consisting of a donation by the US of US$ 13 billion, or about US$ 130 billion in 2016 terms.

Implementation started in 1948 and officially lasted for 4 years, benefitting 18 European countries. Most funds were on-lent as loans, reimbursed and lent again and again – the revolving fund principle. The initial 4-year implementation period was largely exceeded. In fact, some of the Marshall Plan funds are still in circulation, managed and lent to poor regions of Europe by a special department of the German Bank for Reconstruction (German acronym: KfW – Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau), the development bank, created to administer the Marshall Plan funds on the European side.

A precursor to the Marshall Plan was the foundation in 1944 of the Bretton Woods Institutions (Bretton Woods meeting, image above), the World Bank and the IMF. Both of them are dominated by the US having the only veto power. The objective of both organizations was to gear Europe in the ‘right direction’. The World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) was to administer the Marshall Plan from the US side and the IMF was to regulate and control the ‘hard currencies’, meaning, enforcing the gold / dollar parity of mostly European countries. Tying the ‘hard currencies’ to the US dollar was a key strategy to be managed by the IMF – that prevails almost without fail as of this date.

Other than reconstructing Europe, the Plan’s objectives had to help eliminate trade barriers, ‘deregulate’ Europe – and, foremost, prevent communism from spreading. The Marshall Plan was part and parcel of the US concept of a European Union. It was a first attempt to link Europe together by a common development fund.

Also part of the geopolitical strategy was to make Europe into a ‘buffer zone’ facing the Soviet Union, militarizing the Continent by NATO under the pretext of defending war-weakened Europe against a possible invasion from the Soviet Union. French President De Gaulle was the only European leader who recognized the scam, withdrew France from the Anglo-Saxon dominated NATO and called on Europe to build its independent defense force. De Gaulle was a visionary who foresaw that NATO was nothing but an occupation power, engaging Europe in aggressively confronting the Soviet Union, thereby enhancing and promoting the Cold War.

The Cold War too was a construct ‘made in USA’. It was based on false propaganda and fear mongering; on the pretense the Soviet Union was on a course of expansion and therefore meant a threat for Europe. This lie allowed the US military industrial complex to steadily expand, forcing Europe as a NATO partner to invest ever more of its economic gains in armament, causing an arms race between the US / NATO and the Soviet Union, an arms race that was zapping all the energy of developing and re-industrializing a war-torn and broken Soviet Union. Within the US the Cold War justified an ever growing weapons industry, with ever growing profits, with a steadily growing dependence on conflicts around the world, to the point where the American economy today could not survive without armed conflicts it foments and nurtures throughout the globe. Europe, the EU, driven by NATO, is fast moving into the same direction.

Europe, a natural partner of the Soviet Union, today Russia, was – and still is – obliged to follow Washington’s dictate in becoming an ‘enemy’ of its real liberator from Hitler-Germany. The Soviet Union lost about 25 million people in WWII most of them in defeating Germany to the point of surrender. The western allies at the end of the war, when the dirty work was done and the dice were cast, walked in and claimed victory. Nothing had changed in 70 years. The EU obeys blindly the wishes of the US caliphate, ordering it to impose sanctions on Russia, that damages Europe more than Russia.

Churchill’s “United States of Europe”

In 1946, shortly after the end of WWII, and just before the reconstruction of Europe began, Winston Churchill, the self-styled European ruler (sic) over the beaten Continent called already for a “United States of Europe”. The UK played then and still plays today, the US mole in Europe, clandestinely defending American interests. While WWII was devastating Europe, secret US-Zionist think tanks (sic) were concocting the way a common Europe may be shaped so as to later enslave it to serve the United States of America.

The corner stone for a future European Union was set by the foundation of the Council of Europe in 1949, followed by the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), hence, establishing the first US-dominated transatlantic trading link. Already in 1955, the Anglo-Zionist led Bilderberg Society pledged for a common currency and a common, integrating European market which emerged from the 1958 Treaties of Rome as the ‘European Economic Community’ (EEC).

Successive pacts, all driven by Washington, of course with Europe’s subservient consent, up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, followed by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007, made Europe into the world’s largest economic union of US vassal states in the world. At no point a political European federation was foreseen. That would have been too dangerous for America, possibly threating their world hegemony. For that reason, the EU does not have a Constitution. As can be testified by Greece and Cyprus, as well as Ireland, Portugal and Spain, today there is no solidarity between the 28 EU member states, let alone between those 19 nations that share the same currency, the euro.

The ECU (European Currency Unit), created in 1979, was a virtual currency of account (a common monetary measuring unit for goods, services and liabilities) among the then eight participating European states. It was the first currency to link the major European economies. The ECU was followed on January 1, 1999 by the euro, a hard currency. Like the dollar, the British Pound, Yuan, Yen and more, the euro is fiat money, not based on anything, other than a basket of the member countries national currencies. Their weight within the basket was based on the weight of the member countries’ relative economies. Likewise, the euro is produced at will, and increasingly so, as the neoliberal doctrine is debt über alles (debt above everything), an instrument for enslavement.

The economic crash of 2007 / 2008 / 2009 – and ongoing – in the US reflected an over-speculated sub-prime housing market. It was not a coincidence. Banks led by Wall Street, reaped in high profits before they collapsed – just to be ‘bailed-out’ by the state (tax-payers). Common wisdom goes that the ‘financial crisis’ that hit Europe at the same time, was intimately linked to the US man-made housing collapse.

In reality, however, the European economic downturn was and is a different cattle of fish. The crisis was manufactured, because the euro was strong, reflecting the state of the European economy. It steadily gained strength vis-à-vis the US dollar, thereby gradually replacing the dollar as reserve currency around the world – hence, endangering the dollar hegemony. That, of course, was not allowed to happen. The euro had to be weakened and subdued. And so the manmade crisis was born. The Greek ‘debt crisis’ was the finger-pointed and highly propagandized culprit. The ‘crisis’ lowered the value of the euro against the dollar, so that international markets were regaining confidence in the dollar. The ‘crisis’ offered also an exclusive opportunity to ‘experiment’ with countries of more vulnerable economies, to what extent they could be subdued, raped and looted – with nobody protesting, so to speak. It was a test on European non-solidarity – and it succeeded.

Living examples were Cyprus and Greece. In Cyprus, in March 2013 the banking system was made to collapse; but instead of rescuing the TBTF (too big to fail) banks with tax-payers’ money, a new concept was tested, the ‘bail-ins’, where rotting banks helped themselves, stealing depositors and shareholders’ moneys. Protests within the un-solidary Europe were not too loud; they were tolerable. Hence, the bail-in concept was born, now institutionalized within the US and Europe. The totally illegal institutionalization was done stealthily so as to avoid a run on the banks – which could still happen, if and when people wake up.

Cyprus was followed by Greece, a southern European highly strategic NATO country, that had arguably the highest debt in Europe in 2010 of about 140% of GDP. Although relatively high, the debt would have been manageable from within. In a country that contributes less than 2% of the European Union’s economic output, a debt of this size is insignificant in the context of Europe as a whole – and even less so in a EU that was supposed to be bound by solidarity. Instead, the mainstream presstitute media went in overdrive demolishing and demonizing Greece for living above its means – therefore she had to be reined in for her own good – no, for the salvation – of Europe.

This justified the heavy boots of the nefarious troika – ECB, EC and IMF – that started in 2011 demolishing the country with unwanted and un-needed way above hundred of billions of euro ‘rescue packages’ – debt at usurious interest rates and the harshest imaginable austerity programs. The country is gradually being strangled and looted to death with Germany on the forefront on behalf of the EC. Behind it all are the Anglo-Zionist financial masters which pull the strings on Washington which pulls the strings on the EU through the troika. Greece’s debt today is 180% of GDP and is expected to rise to 190% or higher by the end of 2016. GDP has contracted by a third since 2011. The official unemployment figure lays between 25% and 30%, and close to 70% for young people. Pensions have been cut 6 times so far.

The Greek centre-right New Democracy party’s interim leader Yiannis Plakiotakis described the new austerity budget as “anti-growth” and quipped, “They are getting ready to turn the pensions into tips.” The remaining country’s assets are offered at fire-sales prices, mandated by the troika.

The EU: An American Colony

Today it is fair to say that Europe’s monetary and economic policy is made by Wall Street and the FED. The intermediary to do so is the ECB (sic) led by former Goldman Sachs exec, Mario Draghi. Europe is geared to be used to ‘rescue’ the US economy, whenever needed, i.e. through the Washington 2008 / 2009 instigated and ongoing financial crisis. Indeed, there is no hope and no interest of the powers that be to stop ‘their’ highly profitable crisis – which carries on at the detriment of the people, the common people of Europe.

Europe is already largely, and increasingly more so, becoming a colony of the US of A. The infamous TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), secretly negotiated behind closed doors, would be (god forbid!) just the final nail in Europe’s coffin. Europe’s once excellent social infrastructure is successively being raped, privatized and its assets being stolen by the western Anglo-Zionist led financial oligarchy.

See also the list of leaders assassinated in Africa

In many of these cases the CIA’s / Mossad’s dirty and blood-stained hands played a role. Today, intimidation, torture and fear mongering are the standard tools of the white collar criminal neoliberal oligarchs, with the help of the US armed forces, NATO, as well as the secret services and police throughout the US and Europe. Unaligned leaders who don’t follow the Master’s orders are at high risk of simply being eliminated and replaced by puppets.

Greece and the Greek People

On March 17 delegates representing different ethnicities and nationalities–Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Syriacs, Turkomans, Armenians, Circassians and Chechen–along with representatives from the Syrian People’s Defense Units or YPG, and the YPJ womens’ defense   units declared a formal Federation of Northern Syria which would incorporate 250 miles of mostly Kurdish-held territory along the Syria-Turkey border. On March 15, two days earlier, Russian President Putin surprised much of the world by announcing “Mission Accomplished” in Syria, ordering Russian jets and personnel to begin withdrawal. The two events are intimately connected.

Combined and Conflicting Goals

Both Russia’s beginning of withdrawal and the Kurds declaration of an autonomous federal region within Syria are linked, but not in the manner most western media report. A distinctly different phase in the long-standing US State Department blueprint for a new Greater Middle East Project, first announced by Condoleezza Rice in 2003 after the US invasion of Iraq, has begun.

Ralph Peters Map: The Project for the New Middle East

What is the exact nature of the surprising Obama Administration apparent cooperation with Putin’s Russia to redraw the political map of Syria to pre-Sykes-Picot borders, or at least a modern-day imitation of that? Will Russian support for the newly proclaimed federal Kurdish-dominated Federation of Northern Syria lead soon to a Greater Kurdistan that united Kurds from Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran? And what is the significance of US Defense Secretary going to Syria in recent days praising the military successes of the Syrian Kurds?

There is clearly a very big, a tectonic shift underway in the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. The question is to what end?

Five Hundred Years of War

The ethnic Kurd populations, as a result of the deliberate Anglo-French carving up the map of the collapsed Ottoman Empire following the First World War, were deliberately denied a national sovereignty. Kurdish culture predates the birth of Islam and of Christianity, going back some 2,500 years. Ethnically Kurds are not Arab, not Turkic peoples. They are Kurds. Today they are predominantly Sunni Muslim, but ethnically Kurd peoples, numbering perhaps 35 million divided between four adjoining states.

Their struggles with the Turks, who invaded from the steppes of Central Asia during the Seljuk Dynasty in the mid- 12th century, have been long and volatile. In the 16th Century the Kurdish regions were the battlegrounds of wars between the Ottoman Turks and the Persian Empire. Kurds were the losers, much like the Poles over the past century or more. In 1514 the Turkish Sultan offered the Kurds wide-ranging freedoms and autonomy if they agreed to join the Ottoman Empire after the Ottoman defeated the Persian army. For the Ottomans the Kurds served as a buffer against possible future Persian invasion.

The peace between the Turkish Sultanate and the Kurdish people lasted into the 19th Century. Then, as the Turkish Sultan decided to force the Kurds of his empire to give up their autonomy in the early 19th Century, conflicts between Kurds and Turks began. Ottoman forces, advised by the Germans, including Helmut von Moltke, waged brutal wars to subjugate the independent Kurds. Kurd revolts against an increasingly bankrupt and brutal Turkish Ottoman Sultanate continued until the First World War, fighting for a separate Kurdish state independent of Constantinople.

In 1916 the secret Anglo-French agreement called Sykes-Picot called for the postwar carving up of Kurdistan. In Anatolia a traditional religious wing of the Kurdish people made an alliance with the Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal, who later became Kemal Ataturk, in order to avoid domination by the Christian Europeans. Kemal went to the Kurdish tribal leaders to seek support in his war to liberate modern Turkey from the European colonial powers, notably the British and Greeks. The Kurds fought side-by-side with Kemal in the Turkish War of Independence to liberate occupied Anatolia, and create a Turkey independent from a British-Greek occupation in 1922. The Soviets supported Ataturk and the Kurds against the British-Greek alliance. In 1921 France had handed over another of the four Kurdish regions to Syria, then a French booty of the war of Sykes-Picot, along with Lebanon. In 1923 at the Peace Conference at Lausanne, the European powers formally recognized Ataturk’s Turkey, a tiny part of the pre-war Ottoman Empire and gave the largest Kurdish population in Anatolia to the new independent Turkey with no guarantees of autonomy or rights. Iranian Kurds lived in a state of constant conflict and dissidence with the Shah’s government.

Finally, the fourth group of Kurds was in the newly-carved Sykes-Picot British domain called Iraq. There were known oil riches in and around Mosul and Kirkuk. The region was claimed by both Turkey and by Britain, while the Kurds demanded independence. In 1925 Britain managed to get a League of Nations Mandate over oil-rich Iraq with the Kurdish territories included. The British promised to allow the Kurds to establish an autonomous government, another British broken promise in the grim history of their colonial Middle East adventures. By the end of 1925 the country of the Kurds, known since the 12th Century as Kurdistan, had been carved up between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria and for the first time in 2,500 years was deprived of its cultural autonomy.

Puzzling timing or shrewd move?

With such a history of betrayal and war to extinguish or suppress their people, it’s understandable that the Syrian Kurds today would try to take advantage of their very essential military role in fighting ISIS in northern Syria along the Turkish border. However, with the future of Bashar al Assad and a unified Syrian state very much in question, it seems reckless of the Syrian Kurds of Rojava to declare their autonomy and risk a two-front war against Damascus and against Erdogan’s military who are conducting a brutal war against their Kurdish cousins in Turkey across the border. Assad has not recognized the proclamation of Kurd autonomy and is reported very opposed to it. There are reports of clashes between the Kurd YPG People’s Defense Units and troop of the Syrian Arab Army of Assad.

Here we must come back to the surprise announcement by Vladimir Putin on March 15 to announce the drawdown of Russian military presence in Syria.

The declaration of an autonomous Kurdish-dominated territory along the Turkish border backed by Moscow is a major geopolitical shift in the Syrian situation

On February 7 of this year a curious event took place little noticed by western media. The Syrian Kurds, represented by the Democratic Unity Party (PYD), the main political organization, were welcomed by Russia to open their first foreign office in Moscow. The opening ceremony was attended by Russian foreign ministry officials. Little-known is the fact that Russia’s positive relations with the Kurds goes back more than two centuries. From 1804 forward, Kurds played important roles in Russia’s wars with Persia and Ottoman Turkey.

Turkey and Washington refused to invite the PYD to participate in the Syrian reconciliation talks now ongoing in Geneva, despite strong Russian insistence to include them as legitimate Syrian anti-ISIS opposition playing a decisive role in defeating the ISIS and other terrorist organizations in the north. On the other hand, Washington refuses to yield to Erdogan and Turkish demands that Washington break off any support to the Syrian Kurds. There is a Washington double game that Russia appears to have intervened in. Does this herald a Grand Design between Washington and Moscow over the “Bosnia Solution” for Syria?

At this point it rather looks like a shrewd judo by Putin, himself an old judo master, with a Judo 8th Dan and sitting as Honorary President of the European Judo Union. It looks like Russia, despite its air force drawdown and troop pull-back, has just established the first “No Fly” zone in Syria, the most-wanted aim of the US Pentagon and Turkey only five months ago, as the necessary step to topple Assad and the Syrian government and create a weak government presiding over a Balkanized Syria. Only the Russian no fly zone has a quite different aim–to protect the Syrian Kurds from a possible Turkish military attack.

The creation of the 250 mile long Kurdish-dominated Federation of Northern Syria autonomous region, seals the porous Turkish border where ISIS and other terrorist groups are constantly being reinforced by the Turkish armed forces and MIT intelligence to keep the ISIS war going. A Russian de facto no fly zone stops that. While Russia has withdrawn much of its air force planes in the last days, Moscow has made clear Russia will retain its long-standing naval base at Tarsus and Khmeimim airbase near Latakia, as well as its advanced S-400 anti-aircraft batteries to enforce any air attacks from Turkey or Saudi Arabia into the Kurd autonomous region of Syria. As well, Russia has not withdrawn her air-to-air fighters–SU-30SMs and SU-35 from Khmeimim. And as Russia demonstrated in the first weeks of Russian intervention quite impressively, its SU-34s are long-range strike aircraft and they can attack objectives in Syria by taking off from southern Russia if needed. As well Russian cruise missiles, they have a range of 1,500km (Kalibr) and 4,500km (X-101) and can be delivered from the Caspian.

The Kurdish PYD and its armed wing inside Syria have been aggressively expanding the amount of territory it controls along the Syrian-Turkish border. Ankara is alarmed to put it mildly. The PYD is a subsidiary of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane), or PKK, which is in a bloody war for survival against the Turkish military. Russia recognizes both the PKK, which it supported against NATO-member Turkey during the Cold War, and the Syrian PYD. The PKK was founded by a Turkish Kurd named Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, and was supported by Russia and the Soviet Union from the onset. Russian-Kurdish relations go back to the late 18th Century. During the 1980’s in the Cold War era Syria under Hafez al Assad, Bashar’s father, was a Soviet client state, and the PKK’s most vital supporter, providing the group safe basing inside Syria.

In Syria, the PYD’s armed wing has received Russian arms and Russian air support to aggressively expand the amount of territory it controls along the Syrian-Turkish border in recent months so it’s little surprise it was Moscow, not Washington, that the PYD chose to open its first foreign representative office.

Since Erdogan broke off earlier peace negotiations with the Kurds in Turkish Anatolia before elections in 2015 and began military operations against them, the PKK has resumed its insurgency against Ankara forces across the border from Syria’s newly-declared Kurd-dominated autonomous region. PKK activists have declared Kurdish self-rule in their own Anatolia region bordering Syria, and PKK fighters are holing up in cities, digging trenches and taking on Turkish security forces with everything from snipers and rocket propelled grenades to improvised explosive devices. The PKK took advantage of the collapse of the Saddam Hussein’s rule after 2003 to establish their headquarters in exile in the secure Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq in the Iraqi Kurdish region of that country.

The PKK and Russia have a strategic synergy. Since the Turkish shooting down of the Russian jet late last year in Syrian airspace, Russia has dramatically turned policy to isolate and contain Turkey. That has meant that today the PKK and its Syrian affiliate together with Moscow share common enemies in ISIS and in Turkey, while the US must walk on eggshells because Turkey is a strategically vital NATO member. Working with the Kurds, Moscow can advance the war against ISIS, which is not in the ceasefire agreement, hence fair target, and punish Turkey at the same time. That, in turn, allows Putin to outmaneuver the US once more in Syria and provoke a rift in Turkish-US relations, weakening NATO.

Israeli President meets Putin

Into this already highly complex geometry comes Israel.

Relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv in recent months are more open than those between Netanyahu’s government and the Obama Administration. Immediately after start of deployment of Russian forces to Syria in September last year, Netanyahu rushed to Moscow to create a coordination mechanism between the Russian forces in Syria and the Israeli military.

On March 15, the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, came to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin and discuss Syria and the background to the Russian troop withdrawal. According to Israeli media, the two discussed continued coordination between Jerusalem and Moscow regarding military activities in Syria. In talks with Prime Minister Medvedev, Russia’s government also spoke of increasing imports of Israeli agriculture products to replace embargoed Turkish imports. Rivlin mentioned the bonds created as well by the one million Russian-origin citizens today in Israel. The Rivlin Moscow talks were sanctioned by Prime Minister Netanyahu who himself will soon meet Putin to discuss Syria and trade relations. An Israeli official told Israeli media that “over the last few months we had regular contact with the Russians at the highest level, and that will continue.”

A Russo-Israeli-Kurd Alliance?

As with the Iraqi Kurds, the Kurds of Syria are also in behind-the-scenes talks with the Netanyahu government to establish relations. According to Professor Ofra Bengio, head of the Kurdish studies program at Tel Aviv University, in an interview with The Times of Israel, the Syrian Kurds are willing to have relations with Israel as well as with Russia. Bengio stated, referring to Syrian Kurd leaders, “I know some that some have been to Israel behind the scenes but do not publicize it.” She herself said she has made personal contacts with Syrian Kurds who would like to send the message that they are willing to have relations. “This is like the Kurds of Iraq behind the scenes. Once they feel stronger, they can think about taking relations into the open,” she said. In 2014, Netanyahu stated, “We should … support the Kurdish aspiration for independence,” adding that the Kurds are “a nation of fighters [who] have proved political commitment and are worthy of independence.”

When Iraqi Kurds defied Baghdad in 2015 and began direct sale of the oil in their Kurd region, Israel became the major buyer. The oil revenues allowed the Iraqi Kurds to finance their fight to expel ISIS from the region.

Clearly there is more going on between Moscow-Tel Aviv and the newly-declared autonomous Syrian Kurds than meets the ordinary garden variety eye. According to a report in a natural gas industry blog, Israel and Russia are about to agree upon a modus operandi in the East Mediterranean. Israel would agree to end talks with Turkey’s erratic Erdogan on sale of Israeli Leviathan natural gas to Turkey to displace Russian Gazprom gas which still supplies 60% of Turkish gas despite sanctions. The report states that the Israeli military establishment “prefers maintaining military cooperation with Russia over potential Israeli gas sales to Turkey if they hurt Russian interests and anger Putin.”

The Israel-Turkey negotiations of Israeli weapons and gas was backed by US Vice President Joe Biden on March 14, in a Tel Aviv meeting with Netanyahu. According to Israeli press reports, Biden pressed Netanyahu to reach an agreement with Turkey to end the six-year stand-off in Turkey-Israel relations. According to Haaretz, Biden told Netanyahu that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was eager to conclude the reconciliation agreement with Israel and said he, Biden, was willing to assist “in any way possible” to get an agreement between the two allies of the US.

Kerry’s Plan B?

If in fact Putin now has managed to bring Netanyahu to cancel the Israeli-Turkish rapprochement negotiations in favor of closer cooperation with Russia in not-yet-disclosed areas, it would throw a gargantuan monkey wrench into US plans for Syria and the entire Middle East as well as US plans to isolate and weaken Russia.

On February 23, US Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a schizophrenic testimony that Russia had played a vital role in getting the Geneva and other peace talks to happen, as well as getting Iran to agree the nuclear deal. Then, without hesitating, he added the curious statement, “There is a significant discussion taking place now about a Plan B in the event that we do not succeed at the [negotiating] table.” Kerry didn’t elaborate other than to hint it included the Balkanization of Syria into autonomous regions, stating that it could be “too late to keep as a whole Syria if we wait much longer.”

Kerry’s ‘Plan B’ is reportedly a Brookings Institution think-tank report authored several years ago by Michael O’Hanlon, who very recently repeated his plan in the US media. It calls for dividing Syria into a confederation of several sectors: “one largely Alawite (Assad’s own sect), along the Mediterranean coast; another Kurdish, along the north and northeast corridors near the Turkish border; a third primarily Druse, in the southwest; a fourth largely made up of Sunni Muslims; and then a central zone of intermixed groups in the country’s main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo. The last zone would likely be difficult to stabilize, but the others might not be so tough. Under such an arrangement, Assad would ultimately have to step down from power in Damascus. As a compromise, however, he could perhaps remain leader of the Alawite sector. A weak central government would replace him.”

When asked about Kerry’s reference to a US “Plan B” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov replied that Russia is currently focusing on ‘Plan A’ in dealing with the situation in Syria.

Given the Janus-faced US policy of support and non-support for the autonomy of the Syrian Kurds, its talk about Plan B Bosnia-style Balkanization of Syria into a group of weak regions, its support for Erdogan’s reconciliation with Israel, the recent Russian moves raise more questions than answers. Is Russia ready to renege on its promised delivery of its advanced S-300 anti-aircraft systems to Iran and future relations with Teheran including integration into the China-Iran-Russia economic sphere within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the construction of the Eurasian New Economic Silk Road, in order to cut a deal with Israel against Turkey as some Israeli media suggest? If not, what is the real geopolitical strategy of Putin after the military draw-down in Syria, support for Kurdish autonomy, and the simultaneous talks with Rivlin? Is a huge trap being baited for Erdogan to go mad and invade the now autonomous Kurdish region along its border, to set the stage to force Turkey to cede autonomy also to Turkish PKK and other Kurds? Is that Washington’s intent?

What is clear is that all players in this great game for the energy riches of Syria and the entire Middle East are engaged in deception, all to everyone. Syria is nowhere near an honestly-negotiated peace.

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”.

The recent terror attacks in Burkina Faso, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire have shown a breakdown in anti-terror efforts in the region. France is the leading power that invests resources and efforts in fighting against the militant groups, but the current events bring to situation close to running out of control.

The ongoing anti-insurgent operation in Africa’s Sahel region, called “Operation Barkhane”, was launched on August 1, 2014. The French-led operation has been designed by five former French colonies: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. A permanent 3500-strong French forces headquartered in the capital of Chad, N’Djamena play a key role. The Forces consist of 17 helicopters, 4 fighter jets, 5 drones, 200 armored vehicles, 200 logistic vehicles and 6-10 transport aircrafts.

The operation had “to become the French pillar of counterterrorism in the Sahel region” and push Al-Qaeda (AQIM) and Ansar Dine to reduce their activity. However, recent attacks on hotels in Bamako, Ouagadougou and Abidjan highlight the lack of operation’s success. According to experts, the French-led forces can’t achieve a middle-term effect due to the insufficiency of regional and cross-border cooperation. The shortfall of intelligence sharing, terrain monitoring and control are the crucial problems for the operation. The 2-year long mission has also shown the lack of operable equipment. 6 drones are clearly not enough to monitor a territory larger than the territory of the European Union.

For instance, a group of 100 French soldiers equipped with 5 helicopters were deployed in Northern Mali last February. The group had to control some 1200 square kilometers and conduct combat operations assisting Mali’s military forces. Not long before the deployment all helicopters went unserviceable amid a lack of spare parts and qualified techs. Meanwhile the ground supplying ways were actually blocked due to militant’s mine-warfare activities. As a result of this, the things on hand didn’t allow the group to meet a goal objective.

The crucial lack of air support and supplies prevented any major offensive operations of the forces involved in Operation Barkhane. Chad armed forces suffered a permanent armament and supplies shortage. Finally, Chad withdrew troops back to Lake Chad’s area where by that time Boko Haram increased activity. In other words, the French leadership in the region has almost failed.

The core fault was that the French desire to resolve the issue fast and straight while relying mostly on its own battle-ready limited contingent of troops instead of making a time and resource-consuming contribution to develop joint forces and counterterror infrastructure in the regional countries. Somehow it looks like faults in operational and strategic planning or French military leadership came from the fact that they didn’t try to build-up of its regional allies’ military capacity.

The solution of the militancy problem in the Sahel region lies in the deepening of the regional and trans-border security cooperation in the framework of the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional organization. Relying on these bodies, it’s possible to extend a net of joint coordination centers and military bases of rapid deployment forces composed of the African Union and ECOWAS Standby Forces, strengthen by the French instructors and special operations troops. The success could be achieved only when an adequate international financing and supply are provided.

In the context of the attacks claimed by Daesh, the French government is proceeding with a series of reforms which will considerably expand the powers of the police and the administration to the detriment of the judicial system. Given that these reforms have no bearing on the prevention of this type of attack, which primarily require political measures, it seems that France is moving towards the installation of an arbitrary regime.

On the 9th March 2016, by a large majority and almost without debate, the National Assembly adopted a new project for the reform of criminal law «… to reinforce the fight against terrorism and organised crime» [1]. The text still has to be reviewed by the Senate, but since it is an accelerated procedure, it only requires one reading per chamber.

The project introduces into common law certain dispositions which are usually considered «exceptional». Thus, in the text presented for the opinion of the State Council, the government confirms its intention to «… permanently reinforce the tools and means at the disposition of the administrative and judicial authorities, outside of the temporary legal framework implemented in the context of a state of emergency» [2].

A state of emergency without a state of emergency

Although the two texts are closely linked, this bill must not be confused with the law of the 20th November 2015, which prolongs the state of emergency for a new three-month period, while simultaneously increasing the restriction of private and public freedoms listed in the law of 1955 [3]. This new project is aimed not only at actions, but also intentions. Although the exceptional dispositions were once again prolonged, the government has not given up the idea of reforming criminal procedure. This is an attempt to introduce the liberticidal measures authorised by the state of emergency, but without a state of emergency being declared. The project thus aims at freeing the authorities from the principle of the separation of powers, at dissolving the judicial function, and concentrating all prerogatives in the hands of the Executive and the police. The project for criminal reform also has the same objective.

The text opens the way for the legal dispositions involved in the espionage of French citizens. As expressed in the the overview of the motives for the bill, «the arsenal of prevention» set up by the law concerning Intelligence [4], «must be completed by a judicial appendix» [5]. Thanks to this amendment, information obtained by false IMSI-catcher antennae, by video surveillance, image capture and the audio bugging of homes, can be used as a basis for criminal proceedings.

Formal reinforcement of the Public Prosecutor

The bill reinforces the prerogatives of the Public Prosecutor, a magistrate dependant on the Executive powers. It therefore plays its part in the continuing action of all governments – whatever the majority – which is the desire to minimise the role of the investigating magistrate, a function which is deemed too independent by the Executive. It is aimed at dispossessing the judge of the exclusivity of certain of his powers, such as the control of the procedure for intrusive enquiries, in order to hand them over to the Public Prosecutor of the Republic.

In the text voted by the National Assembly, the Prosecutor also becomes a «Director of Enquiries». He leads the «preliminary enquiries», and in this context, he is able to arraign the suspect before a court. Thereafter, he handles the prosecution during the trial which he has himself initiated. Working on all fronts, he will also bear the responsibility for verifying that the «enquiries carried out by the criminal investigation department have been carried out effectively both for the prosecution and the defence».

In enquiries placed under the direction of the Prosecutor, access to the case file is postponed until the end of the investigation. Thus, the suspect, at the moment of his accusation, has no possibility of contesting the legality or the necessity of an enquiry. Contrary to the procedure headed by the examining magistrate, access to the case file remains non-systematic. In order to «give new rights» to the suspect, and especially to perpetuate the Prosecutor’s hold over the criminal procedure, the bill introduces a reform which enables the suspect to intervene in the process of enquiry. But a reform that seems to be headed in the right direction in fact reveals itself as a perversion of the judicial system and the rights of the defence.

A perversion of the criminal justice system

Thus, the bill introduces a major modification of the criminal justice system – the passage from an inquisitorial procedure centred around the magistrate to a system which is closer to the accusatory procedure currently in vogue in the Anglo-Saxon countries. [6]. The lawyers will have the possibility to ask the Prosecutor for certain determinant proofs, such as auditions or forensic examinations. The introduction of these new procedures means that, as in the United States, only the wealthy will be able to defend themselves. Indeed, for everyone else, the bill has already planned to simplify the mode of passage before the judge of freedoms and detention, in order to be able to judge them even faster within the framework of an immediate trial.

Today, in the absence of any suspicious or illegal behaviour, the Prosecutor has the faculty to authorise a preventive control of identity and the search of vehicles found in a given area, and for a specific period. The bill extends this procedure to the inspection of luggage, while currently, this can only be ordered in the context of a legally authorised investigation. We should remember that these inspections are not necessarily aimed at suspects, but also anyone who may be present in a particular location. The extension planned by the bill increases the powers of the police in particular. Inspections can take place not because the police has any hint of an illegal action, but simply because they have the right to do so, on the pretext that they are present in order to prevent or look out for offences.

Eviction of the examining magistrate

The Prosecutor of the Republic thus has at his disposition an increasing number of prerogatives which until now had been reserved for the examining magistrate, who is once again isolated by the bill, although in France, his functions are already limited to a very small number of cases.

The examining magistrate is irremovable – he can not be displaced by the Minister of Justice and can not be divested of a case by his hierarchy. Concerning his nomination, the opinion of the Superior Council of the Judiciary is decisive, and this also guarantees his autonomy. The magistrate, whose independence is statutory, is now bereft of the specificity of his action – to be able to decide on the arraignment of the accused before the court, and carry out investigations for the prosecution and the defence, to the advantage of both the Prosecutor and the police, who, let’s remember, are under the authority not of the Minister for Justice, but the Minister for Internal Affairs. This clearly indicates the primacy of his function concerning the maintenance of law and order .

Video surveillance, image capture and audio bugging of a location or a home were also, until now, reserved for the judicial information handed to the examining magistrate. They can now be ordered from the beginning of the preliminary enquiry, after a simple authorisation by the judge for freedom and detention.

Let us note that the increase of the powers of the Prosecutor is being implemented without any modification of the status of the Prosecutor’s Office, which allowed him a minimum of autonomy from the Executive. Even the reform, previously planned by François Hollande, which guaranteed that the government would nominate the Prosecutors on the advice of the High Council of the Judiciary, has not been implemented [7].

An uncontrolled police force

In reality, the reinforcement of the function of the Prosecutor only exists in comparison to the function of the examining magistrate. As far as the police are concerned, control by the magistrate is little more than a formality. In Belgium, before the Parliamentary Commission relative to the implementation, in 1999, of the comprehensive police force, known as the «two-level structure» [8], the Prosecutors made it known that, once the authorisation for the investigation has been given, they no longer have effective control over the investigative procedure. This reality is even more obvious in France. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is presently loaded down with work, since, because they are so few, the Prosecutors have a quasi-jurisdictional function, and treat the great majority of the legal files. The new prerogatives given by this new bill can only increase their work-load and make any surveillance of police work impossible. The police are in fact the flat-out winners of these reforms, which confirm their central role in the present exercise of State power.

An omnipotent police force

The growth of police power is confirmed by the extension of the context of legitimate defence for the police. Policemen are considered legally «non-responsible» if they fire their weapons, in cases of «absolute necessity», at «a person who has killed or attempted to kill, and is about to try again». Since we know that there already exists jurisprudence which allows police the status of «legitimate defence» for having shot a fleeing suspect in the back [9], we understand that the object of this article is less to protect policemen from legal pursuit than to signify to citizens that they may be treated as enemies. There is an extreme example to illustrate this perspective. France was found guilty by the European Court of Human Rights in an affair where the judiciary had dismissed the case of a gendarme who had shot in the back a handcuffed suspect who was fleeing police custody [10].

The law enforcement agencies may therefore detain a person, even a minor, without access to a lawyer, even if they are in possession of an identity card, and on the vague and hypothetical condition that there are «serious reasons» to believe that they may have a «link» with terrorist activity .

A previous draft of the bill went even further, by creating an offence called «obstruction of search». Though the article was abandoned, it clearly demonstrated the will of the government to criminalise all resistance to the arbitrary will of the police. The disposition was intended to silence demonstrations, following abuses during the wave of inspections authorised by the state of emergency. Furthermore, the older version of the bill indicated that the police could seize any object or document, without having to ask for permission from the Prosecutor [11]. Thus, the police may be freed from the final element of judicial control, that of the Prosecutor, a magistrate who, all the same, is directly governed by the Executive.

The judge of freedom and detention – an alibi

The Executive can not control the work of the police via the Prosecutor. The judiciary is absolutely helpless in the face of the other figure, officially named by the bill, that of the judge of freedom and detention. Yet he is the official responsible for most of the authorisations for the implementation of the dispositions of law. The control of the legality and proportionality of these measures can be no more than a formality, since the judge is not familiar with the whole file, to which he only has access when it is handed to him, at which time he must make his decision. Once the autorisation has been agreed, he has no way of controlling the actions of the Prosecutor and the police.

From the statutory point of view, the position of the judge for freedom and detention is weakened. He does not enjoy the degree of independence of an investigating magistrate, since he is not nominated by decree but by the President of the judiciary, who may decide to relieve him of his functions at any time – if, for example, he should refuse to authorise wire-tapping [12].

As far as terrorism is concerned, and with the prior authorisation of the judge for freedom and detention, night searches will be authorised in private homes from the very beginning of the preliminary investigation. This procedure replaces the authorisation given by the examining magistrate in the primary phase of the enquiry. (In the context of a state of emergency, autorisation may be given by the Prefect). From now on, searches may also be carried out as a preventive measure, on the grounds of possible danger, when it may be used to «prevent the risk of a threat to life or physical integrity» [13].

Night searches in private homes are trivialised. The text speaks of «the risk of a threat», without qualifying it as either current or imminent. This may cover a great number of situations where there may be a threat to life and physical integrity. Vague suspicions could lead to such intrusions on privacy. They may become generalised, if their limitation to terrorist offences is only temporary.

Computer searches without judicial guarantee

The text also plans for the extension of surveillance possibilities in public places, including the use of IMSI-catchers, or false relay-antennae which spy on telephones and computers without the knowledge of the user. They can also pick up all the mobile phones within their range of action. This represents a massive and undifferentiated system for data-capture. Its use will not be limited exclusively to anti-terrorist investigations, and will be renewable, from month to month, for very long periods, which opens the door to a potentially massive capture of information from French citizens. It will be authorised by the judge for freedom and detention, or, «in emergencies», by the Public Prosecutor, given that it is generally the police themselves who qualify the situation as an emergency.

Until now, IMSI-catchers could only be authorised in the context of judiciary information, but have been used only rarely by the investigating judge, due to the confusion which reigns in the legal system. The law concerning Intelligence has legalised their use by the secret services.

Article 3 of the bill relative to the criminal procedure also provides for the extension of data capture to data archives, which means that all the information contained in computer archives may be taken. This system does not only concern targeted bugs, which collect only current or future conversations, but also an inspection of very old data. This last procedure usually presents certain guarantees, such as the presence of the suspect or of two witnesses, as well as the creation of a secure copy, which limits the risk of modification or exterior intervention on the data collected. This is obviously not the case as far as data capture is concerned [14].

The Prefect – an agent of the permanent state of exception

As in the state of emergency, the action of the Prefect has been reinforced. The bill for the reform of criminal procedure is in close correspondence with the law of the 20th November 2015, which prolongs the state of emergency and criminalises intentions, instead of real actions. Terrorist intentions, which are attributed to persons returning from Syria, are also at the centre of the «surveillance» system authorised by the Prefect.

Today, «returns from Syria», are now a legal matter. The suspects are indicted, imprisoned or placed under judicial review. From now on, for one month, Prefects may place them under house arrest, and for three months, demand their telephone and computer codes, oblige them to give prior notice of their travels and forbid them to speak to certain people. These measures certainly present the attributes of a criminal procedure, but in fact are a purely administrative act, without the control of a judge. They leave the door wide open for random judgement, and give the suspect no possibility of confronting the allegations brought against him. It is the intention attributed to the person which is under attack, without him being able to defend himself. Thus, as in the state of emergency, the Minister of the Interior, by the intermediary of the Prefect, replaces the examining magistrate. This new bill gives him the power to deprive someone of their freedom, in the absence of any criminal offence.

The criminalisation of these «returns from Syria» reveals the use of a double language by the power structure. In August 2012, ex-Minister Laurent Fabius declared in public that «Bachar el-Assad did not deserve to be on this earth». He went even further when he declared to the media, in December 2012 – without being arrested for «supporting terrorism» [15] – that «the al-Nusra Front is doing a good job». The jihadist group that he mentioned had just been listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States [16]. At the same time as this affirmation of his support for terrorist groups, the government was demonising and pursuing people who may have been influenced by his declarations.

The Administrative Judge – a trompe l’œil form of control

The bill gives the Administrative Judge the power to control the dispositions relative to the «returns from Syria». It is his job to «control the exactitude of the motives given by the administration, and back them up with his authority, or pronounce a dismissal when the motive invoked is based on materially inexact facts». Thus, in opposition to the principle of the separation of powers, the administration is tasked with controlling itself. Furthermore, the surveillance is purely formal. The Administrative Judge, contrary to the examining magistrate and the judge of freedom and detention, intervenes a posteriori, and his control is random. He only intervenes if the arrested person asks for his participation. Above all, he does not possess the concrete elements necessary for making his decision. He can only base his opinion on imprecise, non-sourced documents – notes produced by the Intelligence services, or unsigned, undated documents which lack official headings.

On the authorisation of the Prefect, and in the purely administrative context of the «prevention of terrorism», the police can therefore proceed with visual inspection, and the search of luggage and vehicles. It is therefore free from prior authorisation by the Prosecutor, in cases where establishments and installations have been declared «sensitive» by the Prefect, in facts named as such by the police themselves.

Thus, the text of the law consecrates «the entry of the Prefect into the code of criminal proceedings». But this is in fact a re-modelling of past status, since, before the reform of 1993 [17] which took it from him, the Prefect already enjoyed the powers of the criminal police. The old Article 10 of the code of criminal procedure allowed him, in case of an offence against national security or espionage, to play the part of a policeman, in other words, to order arrests and enquiries. This recurrent concentration of legal prerogatives in the hands of a Prefect shows that, in the country of Montesquieu, the separation of powers, claimed as part of the national heritage, has always been, at the least, erratic.

Translation: Pete Kimberley, Voltaire.net

Notes:

A Huge Leak

“This investigation identified a complete breakdown of safety at Enbridge. Their employees performed like Keystone Kops and failed to recognize that their pipeline had ruptured and continued to pump crude into the environment. Despite multiple alarms and a loss of pressure in the pipeline, for more than 17 hours and through three shifts, they failed to follow their own shutdown procedures. Enbridge restarted the pipeline twice in that 17-hour period, pumping oil that would account for 81 percent of the total spill.” — National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman

Enbridge’s Kalamazoo disaster

On July 25, 2010 Enbridge Energy’s Alberta tar sands pipeline burst near Marshall, Michigan, spilling an estimated 1.1 million gallons of toxic heavy crude oil (including various petroleum-based diluents) into the Kalamazoo River. (Note that, in order to easily flow through an oil pipeline, the extra-heavy sludgy oil peculiar to the Canadian tar sands needs to be diluted with a 25% – 50% mixture of dangerous petroleum solvents, including the known carcinogen, benzene).

As soon as Enbridge workers in Hazmat suits arrived on the scene the first day of the catastrophe, they tested for benzene fumes and other toxic volatile organic substances and ordered nearby residents to evacuate immediately. Some of the affected residents never came back to their homes for 60 days.

Enbridge’s Kalamazoo disaster was North America’s worst and most expensive inland oil spill disaster. To my knowledge, it was never reported in the Duluth News-Tribune or on the local nightly news. Nobody that I know ever saw or heard a single report about it on local or regional television or radio news. Sadly, the same could be said about most of the other environmental disasters mentioned below that involved corporations that have a presence in the upper Midwest.

The Enbridge pipeline that ruptured in Michigan delivered dirty tar sands oil from Ontario. That pipeline crossed northern Minnesota, (and both the Mississippi and St Louis Rivers); crossed the entire state of Wisconsin; and ended up at a terminal in Indiana.

Tragically for the Kalamazoo River and every fish and minnow and crawfish in it, a six-foot break in the pipeline sent hours of high pressure toxic petroleum products into the Tallmadge Creek, a tributary of the Lake Michigan-bound Kalamazoo River. The broken pipe polluted a 35 mile segment of the river, and the damage will likely be permanent.

The Enbridge pipeline rupture that contaminated the Kalamazoo River on July 25, 2010

Oil and Heavy Metal Pollution of Water and Soil is Forever

It is important to emphasize that the pollution of any water or soil resource from significant amounts of chemicals, especially oil and toxic metals, whether the resource is an aquifer, a river, a bog, a wild rice bed or a lake, CAN NEVER BE FULLY REMEDIATED, despite what is said in the propaganda campaigns that are cunningly generated from the guilty mining, energy or petroleum companies whose flawed technology is responsible.

Petroleum products and heavy metals are both capable of floating on, mixing with or sinking beneath the water (thus flowing far beyond the mouth of the stream, attaching to the shoreline and/or sinking into the sludge at the bottom.

“Clean-up” of an oil spill is thus a myth. “Clean-ups” can never completely suck out or dredge up or de-contaminate all the pollutants no matter what method is tried.

To make things worse, the co-opted mainstream media can be counted on to simply (and very lazily) repeat the propaganda that comes from Big Oil, Big Mining, Big Coal or Big Energy when their spokespersons hold the reassuring press conferences that follow every “accidental” spill. Corporations have their duty to their advertisers, investors and stock market analysts to not unduly stir up a lack of confidence in the stock price.

Mining “Accidents” are Inevitable and They Could Happen Here

The inevitable “accidents-just-waiting-to-happen” scenario applies to some well-known examples like the Exxon Valdez disaster, the British Petroleum/Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Enbridge’s Kalamazoo River disaster, and some of the mining industry tailings ponds “breaches” that occur so frequently or just slowly leak toxins forever.

Such “accidents” usually contaminate nearby lakes, river bottoms and aquifers, (rapidly or slowly) poisoning people, animals, fish and other wildlife into perpetuity. The corporation that says otherwise is lying.

Environmental damage from corporations (not “man”) can be anticipated wherever huge mining or energy corporations are extracting, processing or transporting the natural resources that usually have been stolen (as Woody Guthrie wrote, “by the six-gun or by the pen”) from the indigenous people that had occupied their sacred land for centuries before the corporations began to privatize everything and exploit the natural resources that were found on or under somebody else’s land.

The Worst Environmental Disaster in the History of Canada: the Mount Polley Tailings Pond Breach

I have previously written about a couple of the major tailings pond breach disasters around the world, including Canada’s worst environmental disaster in history. That catastrophe occurred on August 5, 2014 at the Mount Polley copper-nickel mine in British Columbia.

On that tragic day the previously very productive salmon and trout fishery – the once-pristine Quesnel Lake andportions of the 800 mile-long Fraser River – was polluted with massive amounts of sludge and sludge water that contained large amounts of the toxic metals lead, arsenic, nickel, zinc, cadmium, vanadium, antimony, manganese and mercury.

Below is a photo of the mouth of Hazeltine Creek as it enters into Quesnel Lake after it was transformed into a poisoned wasteland by the tailings pond breach upstream. One can only imagine how Minnesota’s Embarrass River or the St Louis River (or Lake Superior for that matter) might be similarly transformed at some time in the future if the PolyMet project goes forward and there is an accident of nature such as a simple deluge of rain that could easily dissolve the earthen walls of the tailings pond.

Above is the mouth of the tiny (normally about 5-6 feet wide) Hazeltine Creek (now 120-150 feet wide) as it enters into Quesnel Lake, the deepest, purest lake in British Columbia and a famous trout and salmon fishery, that is, until August 4, 2014, when 24,000,000 cubic meters of toxic water and mine slurry breached the Mt Polley tailings dam and exploded downstream. The tan material in the photo represents floating dead trees that were swept away in the massive sludge flood. The only useful thing that Imperial Metals (Vancouver) could do in the aftermath was to break up the floating logs so that they wouldn’t destroy downstream bridges as the toxic water flowed into the Quesnel River. For more before and after photos, click here.

The Worst Environmental disaster in the History of Brazil

The worst environmental disaster in the history of Brazil occurred on November 5, 2015 at the Samarco iron mine. Samarco’s tailings pond broke, and the massive amount of sludge and toxic water proceeded to contaminate – forever – the 300 mile-long Rio Doce river that emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. That river will never be the same and many of the indigenous people are now refugees from their land.

 A totally destroyed Rio Doce river village that was downstream from the Brazilian Samarco mining disaster – Nov. 5, 2015

The once pristine Rio Doce river after the Brazilian Samarco iron mine tailings breach The mining company responsible was BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company. It is an Australian-British mining, metals and petroleum company headquartered in Perth, Australia. It lost 7.8 billion dollars over the last two quarters.

The water, soil and air in the area where industrial spills occur can be expected to remain polluted forever, just as the toxic metals found in coal ash tailings ponds and coal-fired plants can destroy communities as their toxic sludge and smoke poison the downstream and downwind environment.

There are few places on earth that are not downwind or downstream from some toxic industry. Rural, non-agricultural, northern Minnesota is comparatively safe, but it may not be for long. It depends on whether or not polluting corporations are allowed to go ahead with risky mining projects without accepting fully independent regulatory and scientific oversight.

Coal-powered Electrical Energy Plants Don’t Just Pollute the Air

It needs to be emphasized that both coal smoke and the unburnable by-product (coal ash) that remains behind contain dangerous substances that include the carcinogenic and neurotoxic heavy metals arsenic, cadmium, uranium, lead, and mercury.

In his essay, “A Tale of Two Spills”, Jeff Danner writes:

“Every year in the United States we produce approximately 140 million tons of coal ash. Most of this ash accumulates on site and waits for the Gods of Entropy to conjure up a storm, an earthquake, a human error, or a rusty pipe to allow it to break out of its storage location. Since coal plants are nearly always located along waterways, this situation almost guarantees that more and more of our water ways will be contaminated in the coming years.”

Isn’t it interesting that neither Enbridge’s Kalamazoo River disaster nor Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley disaster nor BHP Billiton’s Samarco mine disaster nor the many coal mining tailings ponds disasters were effectively reported in the Duluth News-Tribune or other northern Minnesota media outlets that are invested in the mining industry?

Enbridge’s Sandpiper Pipeline, PolyMet and Twin Metals are Potential Environmental Catastrophes Waiting to Happen in Our Backyard

Potential environmental catastrophes like the ones mentioned in this article are waiting to happen at some point in the future, particularly in the cases of the projected copper-nickel mines in northern Minnesota that are owned and operated by foreign mega-corporations, including Switzerland’s Glencore (the largest commodities trading company in the world) that owns PolyMet and Chile’s Antofagasta corporation (owned by the wealthiest family in Chile) that owns Twin Metals.

It is increasingly apparent that one cannot trust the proclamations that emanate from most of our Two-Party system career politicians or even the governmental regulatory agencies. Far too many of members of those entities have serious conflicts of interest due to the money, influence or other favors they have received from large corporations.

Say Thanks to the Duluth 7, Environmental Activists in General and the Downstream Business Coalition

Duluth should be proud of its courageous environmental activist heroes like the members of the Duluth 7 group that has been blowing the whistle on each of the three projects that are intent on making huge profits by extracting our state’s natural resources while simultaneously risking the health of our water resources.

We need to honor the members of the Duluth 7 and all the environmental activists who were present but who chose to not get arrested on November 2, 2015, when they entered the Duluth office of Enbridge and challenged the legitimacy of their efforts to force Native Indian tribes and private landowners to grant it permission to despoil their land by building dangerous, easily sabotageable and potentially polluting pipelines on their property.

Courageous environmentally-conscious people like the Duluth 7 see clearly the immorality of extractive corporations – especially the threats they pose to northern Minnesota’s once-pristine fishable, drinkable and wild rice-compatible water.

The members of the group embody the ideals of such altruistic groups as the Native Lives Matter Coalition, MN350.org, Honor the Earth, MPIRG, Friends of the Earth, Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, EcoWatch, Isaak Walton League, National Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Club, Greenpeace USA National Wildlife Federation, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, etc, etc.  These groups deserve support.

We must also applaud the principled stance of the Duluth-area businesses that comprise the Downstream Business Coalition. It probably took a fair amount of courage for those 80 small businesses to do what they know is right. They have risked having their goods and services boycotted by pro-mining factions. I hope that my readers reward them by doing more business with them.

An After-thought

While I was doing the research for this article, I came to the realization that many of us in Northern Minnesota had been deprived of being exposed to the many teachable moments concerning the mining industry’s threats. I realized that we have been victimized by the very subtle press censorship and a lack of good investigative journalism into these subjects. It isn’t a total black-listing; perhaps it deserves to be called a grey-listing. But I get a little angry whenever I see otherwise good people fall for the industry’s propaganda about “jobs, jobs, jobs” while ignoring the many downsides. Powerful corporate entities in our society are benefiting from the secrecy of their boardrooms, from the support of professional politicians and from the exploitation of the earth and its inhabitants. It’s past time to wise up and speak out.

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

At the Democratic debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa on November 14, 2015, Hillary Clinton attempted to portray herself as the fierce enemy of hedge funds. She told the audience the following:

James Simons, Founder of Renaissance Technologies Hedge Fund

“You have two billionaire hedge fund managers who started a Super PAC and they’re advertising against me in Iowa as we speak. So they clearly think I’m going to do what I say I will do….”

But two hedge fund billionaires backing a Republican candidate pales in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars flooding into Hillary Clinton’s campaign from other hedge fund billionaires – including money flowing into a joint fundraising committee called the “Hillary Victory Fund” that is sluicing money to both Hillary’s main candidate committee, Hillary for America, as well as into the Democratic National Committee and 33 separate state Democratic committees, which has some observers crying foul.

A recent article at CounterPunch, which questioned the ethics of the arrangement, quotes Paul Blumenthal, campaign finance reporter for the Huffington Post, as follows:

“It is a highly unusual arraignment if only because presidential candidates do not normally enter into fundraising agreements with their party’s committees until after they actually win the nomination. And second, Clinton’s fundraising committee is the first since the Supreme Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v FEC decision eliminated aggregate contribution limits and congress increased party contribution limits in the 2014 omnibus budget bill.”

The Democratic National Committee has come under repeated fire for showing favoritism toward Hillary Clinton’s candidacy versus that of Bernie Sanders. Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show that the Hillary Victory Fund has given over $600,000 to the Democratic National Committee and tens of thousands of dollars each to the individual state committees that signed on to the joint fundraising plan.

To Read the complete article on Wall Street on Parade, click here

After 22 years, the shaky Armenian-Azeri ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh region fell apart overnight on April 2 with both sides of the front using mortars, artillery, armored vehicles, battle tanks and multiple rocket launchers. Azerbaijan also uses UAVs and helicopters.

Baku and Yerevan blame each other for triggering the hostilities in the mountainous area. However, the most intense fighting on April 2 and April 3 were observed in Martakert (регион) where the Azeri troops were advancing on forces of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, an unrecognized state which is de-facto a province of Armenia.

On April 4, clashes continued with the both sides reporting about successes. For example, Azerbaijan released a statement that it seized the village of Mataghis. The Nagorno-Karabakh military denied this and noted the depth of Azerbaijani advancement doesn’t exceed 300 meters anywhere.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry says Armenians have lost 170 troops and 12 armored vehicles, 3 battle tanks and an artillery battery. In turn, the Nagorno-Karabakh military reported that 18 Azeri battle tanks 3 IFV, 6 UAVs and 2 helicopters have been destroyed and 300 Azeri troops have been killed. Videos and photos from the battlefield confirm high intense clashes.

On April 4, Azerbaijan set conditions for ceasefire in the troubled region, saying that Armenia must withdraw from “occupied territories.” In turn, Armenia said it would recognize the region’s independence if the situation on the ground worsens.

The conflict complicates matters for all powers inching into the Caucasus, especially for Russia, Iran and Turkey that also involved in the Syrian war.

Russia has a military base in Armenia. Turkey immediately supported Azerbaijan’s stance and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated that the disputed region will ‘inevitably’ return to Azerbaijan. Iran shares borders with both sides of the front. If the peaceful solution isn’t found fast, the ongoing fighting could develop into a wider conflict destabilizing the Caucasus, dramatically.

SouthFront recommends this video entitled “Foreign Policy Diary – Nagorno-Karabakh Standoff: geopolitical struggle in the Caspian Sea region” (02.10.2015):

Hillary Clinton opposes fixing Social Security by taxing rich people more; she wants it to be done by cutting benefits to the recipients.

In 2008, Barack Obama said that he would consider eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes that blocks income above $97,000/year from being SS-taxed. The argument for that cap has been that above that income-level, the person is too rich to be included in either the benefits or the costs of the SS system.

However, because in recent decades all of the increase in benefits in the economy has been going to the few extremely rich, the proposal has been made that some of that increase in money should be rerouted, via the tax-system, to “the bottom 99%.” Hillary Clinton rejected this idea and proposed instead that the SS cost-of-living increases should gradually reduce so that in real-dollar terms, beneficiaries will have lower and lower incomes in their retirements, but it would be done so gradually that people wouldn’t much notice it.

During the 16 April 2008 Pennsylvania Democratic primary debate in Philadelphia broadcast on ABC, she said: “I’m certainly against one of Senator Obama’s ideas, which is to lift the cap on the payroll tax, because that would impose additional taxes on people who are educators, police officers, firefighters and the like.”

Obama replied:

“Well, Charlie [Gibson], I just have to respond real quickly to Senator Clinton’s last comment. What I have proposed is that we raise the cap on the payroll tax because millionaires and billionaires don’t have to pay beyond $97,000 a year. That is where it is capped.

Now, most firefighters, most teachers, you know, they’re not making over $100,000 a year. In fact, only 6 percent of the population does.

And I’ve also said that I’d be willing to look at exempting people who are making slightly above that.

But understand the alternative is that, because we’re going to have fewer workers to more retirees, if we don’t do anything on Social Security, then those benefits will effectively be cut because we’ll be running out of money.”

Gibson sided with Clinton on that, by saying, “But, Senator, but that’s a tax,” and Obama interjected with a lie:

“Well, no, no, look … Let me finish my point here, Charlie. Senator Clinton said she certainly wouldn’t do this, this was a bad idea. In Iowa, when she was outside of camera range, said to an individual there she’d certainly consider the idea and then that was recorded. And she apparently wasn’t aware that it was being recorded. So this is an option that I would strongly consider, because the alternatives, like raising the retirement age or cutting benefits or raising the payroll tax on everybody, including people who make less than $97,000 a year,”

And as President, Obama did try to get the Republicans under John Boehner to agree to raising the retirement age and to cutting benefits (via reducing the annual inflation-adjustment calculation) but he wasn’t able to get Republicans to agree to doing that, because they found more effective to simply block whatever he proposed, so as to convince their electoral base that they were authentic Republicans and should therefore be re-elected.

Obama’s response denied that applying the SS tax to income above $97,000 a year would be “a tax” as Gibson put it. However, it would be that — obviously. Then, Obama said that Hillary herself had privately told someone that she as President would consider the same thing that Obama had publicly said he would consider.

Both of them were liars, but Clinton did say, even publicly, “I’m certainly against one of Senator Obama’s ideas, which is to lift the cap on the payroll tax, because that would impose additional taxes on people who are educators, police officers, firefighters and the like.” Was she really concerned there about “educators, police officers, firefighters and the like”? Look at her career-donors:

Here are Obama’s:

Here are Sanders’s:

The real question should not be what a politician says, but what he/she has done — which is reflected in that top-donor list.

Clearly: Clinton opposes transferring government-costs more onto the rich than onto the poor.

Looking at the top-donor list shows the reality about a politician.

It’s a question, for example, of whether one views one’s own interests as coinciding more with those of the members of labor unions, and of students and faculty of universities, and employees of high tech firms; or, instead, a mix of universities and Wall Street along with lobbying firms; or, instead, a mix of Wall Street and lobbying firms and Emily’s List.

But then one can also consider the likelihood that the given politician will be more inclined to shift the costs of government more onto the rich, or instead more onto the poor. However: those top-donor lists don’t include any really poor people, but instead organized interest groups and corporations and (in the case of Sanders) labor unions. That too is real information, not fake.

The difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, based upon the top-donor lists, is vastly less than the difference between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

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.

When it comes to farming, global temperature increases spurred by anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are bad news. Higher temperatures mean more droughts, wildfires, soil depletion and seasonal changes that, in general, have deleterious impacts on growing food.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) worst-case prediction by 2100 is a 4 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures.

“When I look at what the models predicted for a [4 degree Celsius] world, I see very little rain over vast swaths of populations,” Dr. Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Truthout.

Leifer’s concerns are dire, not only in terms of the changing rainfall patterns predicted by the IPCC, but also regarding the rainfall patterns that are already occurring across the globe.

“If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the Spaniards get the water to survive?” he asked.

“We have parts of the world which have high populations, which have high rainfall and crops that exist there, and when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country starts looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people alive?”

The warning signs are already abundant.

A group affiliated with the UN recently released a report showing how without dramatic international intervention, the ongoing decline of pollinating species around the world poses a dire threat to the global food supply. This is because increasing numbers of pollinating species, including butterflies and bees, are going extinct.

Another recent study showed that lack of food production, again caused by ACD, will likely cause at least half a million deaths by 2050.

Truthout spoke with scientists and farmers alike about the subject, and their outlook for the future of farming on the scale necessary to continue apace with feeding an ever-increasing global population is not good.

(Photo: Nico Koch)

Disproportionate Impact

“The farm is a very small proportion of the economy in the US and other developed countries, but it has a disproportionate impact on global change,” Professor Michael Bomford, a Ph.D. in plant and soil sciences and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, told Truthout.

For years, Bomford has been worried about how our dependence upon oil to feed ourselves on a global scale has been causing soil degradation and depletion, as well as driving up food prices over the long run.

“Clearing land for farming releases carbon into the atmosphere and that contributes to climate change,” he explained.

“Then by farming it, using cultivation causes soil to be lost in wind and erosion, and that topsoil took thousands of years to form. One extreme weather event can cause us to lose thousands of years of soil.”

Industrial-scale farming, upon which the massive global population — already 7.3 billion and growing by a million people every four and half days — relies on and impacts soil through the use of nitrogen fertilizers, which are energy intensive to produce and which deplete carbon in the soil.

“This erodes the soil’s ability to hold nutrients, and starts a positive feedback loop,” added Professor Bomford. “A lot of our soils now rely on irrigation rather than rainfall, which depletes groundwater reserves.”

Studies already show that ACD will likely reduce crop yields, create a malnutrition crisis and make large portions of the globe inhospitable to core food crops like bananas and maize.

ACD impacts in Mongolia are already annihilating the pastures that nomadic herders rely upon for their survival, and millions of animals are likely to die from starvation in the coming months because of pasture depletion.

“The weather has become very unpredictable, and that’s the real problem,” Wendy Johnston with Oakwyn Farms in Athens, West Virginia, told Truthout.

For years, ACD has been causing farming to become far more challenging for her, and she is worried about how much worse things will likely become.

She, like many other farmers around the world, are also worried about lack of water.

More than 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa already lack access to clean drinking water. It is estimated that by 2020, that number could easily double.

In 2011, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned of “potentially catastrophic” impacts on food production from ACD impacts that are increasingly hitting the developing world.

The report warned that food production systems and the ecosystems they depend on are highly sensitive to climate variability and change, and also noted that poor people are particularly vulnerable in countries that rely on food imports, although ACD-fuelled extreme weather events are already driving up food costs around the globe, including in developed countries like the US.

“The Pattern We’re Already Seeing”

Dr. Leifer’s forecasts of once-fertile farmland going dry are, unfortunately, already coming to pass.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says it is high time to emphasize the link between extreme weather and the global climate in which it develops.

“The environment in which all storms form has changed owing to human activities,” Dr. Trenberth said. He noted that, in particular, conditions are more moist and warm than they were even three decades ago.

“We have this extra water vapor lurking around waiting for storms to develop, and then there is more moisture as well as heat that is available for these storms [to form]. The models suggest it is going to get drier in the subtropics, wetter in the monsoon trough and wetter at higher latitudes,”

Trenberth explained. “This is the pattern we’re already seeing.”

Beyond the problems caused by shifting weather patterns and extreme weather events, an over-reliance on non-renewable energy (both oil and gas, as well as petroleum product use in fertilizers) is also a factor contributing to the impending food crises.

William Ryerson, founder and president of the Population Media Center and Chair and CEO of the Population Institute, is also very concerned about fertilizers’ impact on soil. He has questioned how, in the long run, this will impact agriculture.

“The world’s agricultural systems rely substantially on increasing use of fertilizers,” Ryerson told Truthout. “But now, the world’s farmers are witnessing signs of a declining response curve, where the use of additional fertilizer yields little additional food product.”

According to Ryerson and many farmers Truthout has spoken with, fertilizers and intensive crop planting lower the quality of soil. These factors will increasingly limit the possibilities of raising food production substantially and will, at a minimum, boost relative food prices and cause hunger for increasing numbers of people around the world.

Carbon stored in soil allows the soil to hold nutrients and water, and losing soil contributes to climate change. Plus, Bomford is worried about other contributing factors to climate change borne from the use of chemical fertilizers.

“Agriculture produces methane and nitrous oxides, like with animal agriculture that contributes to climate change, and these have a much greater effect on climate change than CO2,” he said.

Shifting Weather Means Less Food

Farmers like Wendy Johnston are acutely in touch with the shifting weather patterns due to climate change.

“We really don’t have spring anymore,” she said of West Virginia where she lives. Johnston explained that abrupt temperature shifts that are becoming increasingly common across the US are extremely disruptive for agriculture, which cannot survive huge, sudden shifts.

“I remember as a child, there was a gradual change from winter to summer,” she said, “But I don’t think we’re seeing that now.”

The price we’re paying is already clear.

A recent report for the Montana Farmers Union showed that agricultural losses as a result of ACD in that state could total $736 million annually, and will likely worsen with time.

Ryerson emphasizes that these weather trends are already causing massive food shortages, and will continue to do so.

“Because of industrialization and sprawl leading to loss of agricultural land, population growth and the demand for more meat instead of grain as incomes rise, China is projected to need to import 240 million tons of food annually by the year 2030,”

he said.

Projections also indicate that India, which is currently a food exporter, will need to import at least an additional 30 million tons a year by 2030. However, where that food will come from is unclear.

“Yet, total world agricultural trade is currently just [approximately] 200 million tons of grain or grain equivalent, and that amount is decreasing as the exporting countries consume more and more of their own food products,”

said Ryerson.

Meanwhile, increasing demand for food imports by growing economies like China’s will almost certainly drive up the price of food in the coming decades, which, according to Ryerson, “virtually ensures that more people elsewhere will suffer from starvation.”

According to Ryerson, this predicament is then exacerbated by the fact there are 225,000 additional people at the world’s dinner table each day that were not there the day before.

“In just one year, the equivalent of an entire population of Egypt is added to the world’s population,” he said. “Driving up demand for food in the face of severe limitations on agricultural capacity.”

Shifting weather patterns mean less drinking water, as well as less irrigation for farming.

Additionally, as the world continues to heat up, glaciers and snow cover are continuing to decline. This reduces water availability in countries supplied by melt water from snowpack and glaciers, so lack of drinking water and irrigation will be a problem in parts of the globe such as South America and Asia, even though these regions may not technically be in a drought.

Some regions, of course, are already in drought, thanks to ACD. Australia is a prime example. That continent is already getting hotter and drier. By 2030, there are forecast to be 20 percent more droughts, and it’s estimated that by 2050, the annual flow into the Murray-Darling basin will fall by up to a quarter. This basin takes up much of southeastern Australia and provides 85 percent of the water that is used for irrigation nationally.

Meanwhile, counties like India, Bangladesh, Burma and other poor countries are going to be heavily impacted by increasing floods.

Yet, given that most of us in the so-called developed world do not grow our own food, most people remain unaware of this growing global crisis.

Johnston believes people who do not grow their own food can’t realize when certain crops should or should not be available.

“Things people expect at certain times are no longer there much of the time now,” she said,

“There isn’t squash available now like there used to be. Usually in June [there are] lots of lettuce, greens, peas and squashes, but because of changing weather patterns the squash will now be late, and the heat caused us to replant the greens and lettuces, which will now be late as well.”

Increasingly, farmers — and all of us who depend on them — will be facing the fact that food scarcity is becoming the new normal.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

In his recent article, “Just Say No to Another Failed State,” published by Foreign Policy, Lester Munson claims that the only solution to the long standing issue between Western Sahara and Morocco is autonomy for Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty. Problematically, however, the article lacks context and is overly simplistic, is strewn with inaccuracies and errors, and is heavily tinged with paternalistic overtones.

To begin, Munson, who served in the George W. Bush administration, is a former Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and current Vice President, International, at BGR Group, illustrates a poor grasp of basic economics within his introductory paragraphs discussing African economies. While Ethiopia does indeed have an impressive GDP growth rate (hovering at between 8% and 10%), the country can hardly be described as economically “thriving.” Recall that GDP growth rate denotes the change in GDP from one year to the next, as a percentage. Consequently, since the measure is presented as a percentage, countries with a relatively small GDP may post significant growth rates, even while their overall production remains miniscule. For example, in 2014/15, some of the world’s top projected GDP growth rates were by some of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, including South Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Laos, and Sierra Leone.

Further reflecting the tenuousness of Munson’s point is that Ethiopia remains one of most impoverished countries on the planet. In 2014, it ranked 185^th in the world in terms of GDP per capita (UN 2014), while according to the UN and Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), which measure multidimensional poverty, Ethiopia is the world’s second-poorest country. Ultimately, to be most effective and useful, reference to GDP growth rates requires proper contextualization. Solely focusing on GDP fails to account for the general welfare of a country, since things like environmental degradation, insecurity, inequality, and social cohesion are ignored (OECD n.d.).

Effectively, Munson’s lackadaisical approach to such details and nuances raises considerable doubt about his understanding of broader, more complex topics.

Subsequently, Munson argues against Western Sahara’s independence based on the reasoning that Eritrea and South Sudan, two countries that have recently gained independence, are failed states. Setting aside the vast dissimilarities amongst the individual cases – which calls into question their comparability – Munson’s argument is specious for several reasons.

For South Sudan, he conveniently glosses over the significant role of the US in attaining the country’s independence, while also neglecting to mention the toxic influence of regional and international meddling. In highlighting Eritrea, Munson also overlooks fundamental points.

Eritrea is a stable country located within one of the world’s most politically and environmentally challenging regions. Furthermore, it has made commendable progress within social, health, and education sectors, achieving several of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Notably, a number of regional and international organizations, including the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Health Organization (WHO) have noted that since Eritrea’s independence, life expectancy has increased, maternal, infant and child mortality rates have reduced dramatically, immunisation coverage has skyrocketed, malaria mortality and morbidity have plummeted, HIV prevalence has decreased considerably, and access to potable water and sanitation have significantly increased (Pose and Samuels 2011; UN 2015; WHO 2014). Importantly, the country also remains quite peaceful and free of sectarian violence or terrorism, and it is quite instructive that, as suggested by former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman J. Cohen, while many countries across the region are currently struggling (and generally failing) to feed their people, Eritrea remains food secure.

Of course, this is not to suggest that Eritrea is free of problems. The country is confronted by a myriad of significant issues and challenges. However, it seems ignorant, uninformed, unobjective, and hardly legitimate to traduce and pass judgment of Eritrea without adequately – or even minimally – exploring the country’s broader socio-political context. Specifically, Munson’s cursory labelling ignores how the country remains burdened by international sanctions – increasingly and widely recognized as illegitimate and unfounded – and an illegal military occupation by Ethiopia, which is politically, militarily, and economically supported by the US.

Rather than hasty claims, Munson would do well to divulge that many of Eritrea’s challenges are inextricably linked to these factors, as well as to the fact the country has been the target of an externally-driven strategy to isolate it, particularly through attempts at scuppering foreign agreements and economic deals. For example, according to a leaked US embassy cable in Addis Ababa sent by Chargé d’Affaires Vicki Huddleston (dated 1 November 2005), the strategy of the US-backed Ethiopian proxy was to “isolate Eritrea and wait for it to implode economically,” while a leaked 2009 cable sent by Chargé d’Affaires Roger Meece reveals that the “USG [US government] has worked to undercut support for Eritrea.” In essence, Munson evokes John Milton’s (1642) famous quote observing, “[t]hey who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness.”

While Munson pontificates about failed states, he steers well clear of mentioning states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia (amongst others), where misguided US interventions, invasions, and state-building projects have not only failed to deliver a modicum of security or develop functional states, but have often instead played a direct role in local or regional destabilization and the spread of terror.

In Afghanistan, America’s 14-year project to defeat the Taliban and build a stable Afghanistan has proven disastrous, with the Taliban now controlling more of the country than at any time since US troops invaded in 2001. Moreover, Iraq has witnessed the death of over 1 million people, the growth of sectarianism, and the rise of ISIS, while Libya cannot even be categorized as a failed state, but a collection of disparate territories “governed” by warring militias and fanatical extremists, including ISIS. Even Somalia’s troubles are partly attributable to the US, which has supported a range of vicious warlords across the country. In 2006, under the pretext of promoting “stability” and “combating terror,” the US, through its regional proxy Ethiopia, illegally invaded Somalia. However, the brutal intervention and subsequent occupation actually only served to increase and spread terror and instability throughout the region, particularly through strengthening Al-Shabaab.

Although these points expose glaring holes in Munson’s assertions, the article is particularly troubling because in completely neglecting to note the perspective of the people of Western Sahara, it reveals a residual attitude from 19^th century racism and hegemonic, colonial times. To borrow from Edward Said, it smacks of a bygone era, when the peoples of the empire were a subject race, dominated by the more powerful, the more developed, the more civilized, the higher, who know them and what is good for them, better than they could possibly know themselves. Munson paints the issue in Western Sahara as a relic of the Cold War, denying the agency of the region’s people, while completely failing to mention any of the current conditions which are vital to understanding the entire situation.

Independence may or may not be the best thing for Western Sahara; however, only the people of Western Sahara – and not Lester Munson – can be the ones to decide.

Dr. Fikrejesus Amahazion is an East African scholar and activist interested in human rights, development, and political economy. He can be reached at [email protected].

Thierry Meyssan analyses the political and electoral system of the United States. He believes that the only true issue of the Presidential election is the maintenance of power in the hands of the WASPs, which has never been contested since the Declaration of Independence. While Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton are the guarantors of this status, the candidacy of Donald Trump announces a profound upheaval of the system which will only occur once the Anglo-Saxons become the minority.

A large number of candidates play off against one another in the primaries. The media pay attention only to the Democrats and the Republicans, ignoring all the others, given that the system is devised so that they can never win.

The US primaries offer a depressing spectacle during which the main candidates do not seem to be aware that their reckless judgements and demagogic declarations will have consequences, both at home and abroad, if they should manage to become President.

Despite appearances, the Presidential function enjoys only limited power. Thus, it was obvious to everyone that President George W. Bush was incapable of governing, and that others did it for him. In just the same way, it is obvious that President Barack Obama is unable to inspire obedience in his own administration. For example, we can see men from the Pentagon waging a ferocious war against men from the CIA on the battlegrounds of Ukraine and Syria. In reality, the main power of the White House is not in commanding the armies, but in naming or confirming 14,000 senior civil servants – 6,000 of whom are nominated when the new President takes office. Beyond appearances, the Presidency is therefore the guarantee of the maintenance of power by the governing class – which is why it is the power structure, and not the People, who decide the election.

Let’s remember that, according to the Constitution (article 2, section 1), the President of the United States is not elected by universal suffrage, as the ignorant media pretend, but only by the 538 governing representatives. The Constitution states no obligation for these governors to nominate electors who correspond to the desires expressed by their citizens during the preceding ballot. Thus, in 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to invalidate the electors designated by the governor of Florida, even when there was doubt concerning the desires expressed by the electors of that state.

Let us also remember that the «primaries» are not organised by the political parties, as in Europe, but by the states – under the responsibility of the governors and each according to his own system. The primaries are designed so that, in fine, the major parties each present a candidate for the Presidential function who is compatible with the interests of the governors. They are therefore organised on the Soviet model of «democratic centralism» in order to eliminate any individual with an original thought, or simply anyone who may risk questioning the system, to the profit of a «consensual» personality. In the case where the participating citizens are unable to nominate a candidate, or particularly if they manage to nominate one who is incompatible with the system, the party Convention which follows will decide, if necessary, by overturning the citizens’ vote.

The US primaries are therefore not a «democratic moment», but on the contrary, a process which, on the one hand, allows the citizens to express themselves, while on the other, directs them to give up their own interests and line up behind a candidacy which conforms to the system.

In 2002, Robert A. Dahle, professor of Constitutional Law at Yale university, published a study of the way in which the Constitution had been written, in 1787, in order to ensure that the United States would never become a true democracy [1]. More recently, in 2014, two professors of Political Science, Martin Gilens at Princeton and Benjamin I. Page at Northwestern, demonstrated that the system has evolved in such a way that all laws are now voted at the demand and under the control of an economic elite, without ever taking into account the opinions of the population [2].

Barack Obama’s Presidency was marked by the financial crisis, followed by the economic crisis in 2008, whose main consequence was the end of the social contract. Until now, it was the «American Dream» which united US citizens, the idea that anyone could rise out of misery and become rich by the fruit of their own efforts. All sorts of injustice could be accepted, as long as there was always the hope of being able to «get clear». As from now, with the exception of the «super-rich» who continue to get richer, the best that can be hoped for is to avoid plummeting into oblivion.

The end of the «American Dream» first of all led to the creation of movements rooted in anger – to the right, the Tea Party in 2009, and to the left, Occupy Wall Street in 2011. The general idea was that the unegalitarian system was no longer acceptable, not because it had weakened, but because it had become fixed and permanent. The supporters of the Tea Party claimed that in order for the situation to improve, it was necessary to lower taxes and let people work their own way out, rather than waiting for social protection – while the people of Occupy Wall Street thought, on the contrary, that it was better to tax the super-rich and redistribute what had been taken from them. However, this stage was overtaken in 2015 by Donald Trump, a billionaire who has no argument with the system, but claims that he has profited by the «American Dream» and that he can relaunch it. In any case, that’s how the citizens seem to have understood his slogan « America great again ! » Trump’s supporters have no intention of tightening their belts a few more notches in order to finance the military-industrial complex and reboot imperialism, but hope, in their turn, to be empowered to become rich, just like several generation of US citizens before them.

While the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have legitimised respectively the candidacies of Ted Cruz for the Republicans and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats, the candidacy of Donald Trump endangers the positions acquired by those who protected themselves during the financial crisis in 2008 by blocking the system. It thus appears that he is not opposed to the super-rich, but to the senior civil servants and political professionals, all the «hidden profiteers», who enjoy huge salaries without ever taking personal risks. If we were to compare Trump to certain European personalities, we would not be looking at Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jörg Haider, but at Bernard Tapie and Silvio Berlusconi.

How will the gouvernors react? Who will they elect as President?

Until now, the «US aristocracy» – according to the expression of Alexander Hamilton – was composed exclusively of WASPs, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Originally, the «P» stood for «Puritans», but with time, the concept widened to include all «Protestants». However, a first exception was made in 1961, with Irish Catholic John Kennedy, whose election enabled a peaceful resolution of the problem of racial segregation, and a second, in 2008, with the Kenyan Barack Obama, which enabled the illusion of racial integration. In any case, in neither of these cases did the elected official use his power to to renovate the governing class. Furthermore, despite the promise of general disarmament by Kennedy and nuclear disarmament by Obama, neither of them was able to do make any headway at all against the military-industrial complex. It is true that in both cases, they had been obliged to accept a representative of the complex as their Vice-President – Lyndon B. Johnson and Joe Biden – a replacement measure which, in Kennedy’s case, was activated.

Donald Trump, with his straight-talking attitude, incarnates a form of populism which is opposed to the conventional manners of the «politically correct» so dear to the WASPs. The uneasy alliance between the President of the National Governors Association, the governor of Utah, Gary Herbert, and Donald Trump clearly demonstrates that an agreement between Trump and the ruling class will be very difficult to establish.

We are left with two other options – Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz. Cruz is a Hispanic who, on the intellectual level, became a WASP after his «conversion» to evangelical protestantism. His nomination enabled an operation comparable to that of the election of Obama, but this time by manifesting a desire to integrate the «Latinos» after having favoured the «blacks». Unfortunately, although he was launched by a company which works for both the CIA and the Pentagon, he is a totally artificial personage who will have a hard time fitting the costume. That leaves feminist lawyer Hillary Clinton, whose election will enable power to manifest a desire to integrate women. But her irrational behaviour and explosions of hysterical fury creates anxiety. Furthermore, she is currently the target of a serious legal enquiry which makes her easy to blackmail and therefore to control.

At no point in this analysis have I spoken of the candidates’ programmes. This is because, in the reality of the local political philosophy, they don’t count. Since Oliver Cromwell’s «Commonwealth», Anglo-Saxon political thought considers the notion of general interest as an imposture aimed at masking dictatorial intentions. So the candidates do not have a programme for their country, but «positions» on given subjects which enable them to collect «support». The elected officials – the President, parliamentary representatives, governors, prosecutors, sheriffs, etc. – do not pretend to serve the Common Good, but to satisfy the greatest majority of their electors. During an electoral meeting, a candidate will never present his «vision of the world», but will list the support that he has already won in order to invite other «communities» to trust him with their defence. This is why political treason in the United States does not mean changing parties, but acting against the supposed interests of his community.

The originality of this concept is that politicians are not expected to be coherent in their declarations, other than in terms of the interests that they are defending. For example, it is possible to affirm that a fœtus is a human being and thus condemn abortion in the name of the protection of human life, and then, in the next sentence, commend the exemplarity of the death penalty.

There would not be any great difference between the policies followed by the evangelist Ted Cruz, the feminist Hillary Clinton or the Marxist Bernie Sanders. All three would have to walk in the footsteps already left by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Ted Cruz quotes the Bible – in fact, the Jewish values of the Old Testament – and speaks to a religious electorate about the return to the fundamental values of the «founding fathers». The job of unclogging the system therefore calls for personal morality, where money is seen as a «gift from God to those who fear Him». From her side, Hillary Clinton is running a campaign directed at women, considering that she already has the vote of those people who got rich during her husband’s Presidency. For them, unclogging the system is a family affair. Bernie Sanders denounces the capture of wealth by 1% of the population and calls for redistribution. His supporters dream of a revolution from which they would benefit without having to fight for it.

Only the election of Donald Trump could mark a change in the system. Contrary to what his declarations might seem to indicate, he is the only rational candidate, because he is not a political man, but a business man, a dealmaker. However, he knows nothing about the subjects with which he would have to deal, and has no a priori. He would be quite content to make decisions according to the alliances he creates. For better or for worse.

Strangely enough, the states that Bernie Sanders has won are approximately the same as those won by Ted Cruz, while those won by Donald Trump include almost all those won by Hilllary Clinton. This is because, unconsciously, the citizens are viewing their future either in terms of morality, which enables redemption and then the acquisition of wealth (Sanders and Cruz), or in terms of hard work and the material success that it should bring (Trump and Clinton).

At this stage, it is impossible to predict who will be the next President, or even if that would have any importance. But for ineluctable demographic reasons, the present system will collapse in the next few years, when Anglo-Saxons become the minority.

Thierry Meyssan is the founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference.

Barack Obama pushed the trade deal with Panama which allowed the tax evasion revealed by the “Panama Papers” to flourish.  Huffington Post reported in 2011:

Obama is also urging Congress to approve a trade agreement that would cement a key tax avoidance tactic deployed by some of the richest Americans.

***

Obama urged Congress approve three trade deals, including one with Panama that would permit Americans to easily stash assets in the Central American country, a notorious tax haven for the wealthy and American corporations.

***

Panama does have some of the most stringent bank secrecy laws in the world, making it extremely easy and inexpensive for U.S. citizens to set up offshore corporations and bank accounts. Establishing the corporation and bank account costs less than $2,000, and any money that Americans stash in these entities is not taxed. Bank secrecy laws and extremely lax corporate registration standards make it very difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to track transactions transferring funds to these Panamanian destinations from the United States. Small surprise, then, that Panama is home to nearly 400,000 offshore corporations, more than any other nation except Hong Kong.

***

The trade agreement with Panama would effectively bar the U.S. from cracking down on this activity. The U.S. would not be allowed to treat Panamanian financial services transactions differently from transactions in nations that are not tax havens. It would also be unable to pursue some standard anti-money laundering techniques in Panama. Combating tax haven abuse in Panama would be a violation of the trade agreement, exposing the U.S. to fines from international authorities.

“It directly undermines Obama’s putative domestic agenda of job creation, cracking down on tax havens and collecting revenue from tax-dodging corporations,” said Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “The [free trade agreement] would forbid future use of existing policy tools to combat financial crime.”

Hillary Clinton did as well …

International Business Times reports:

Soon after taking office in 2009, Obama and his secretary of state [Hillary Clinton] — who is currently the Democratic presidential front-runner — began pushing for the passage of stalled free trade agreements (FTAs) with Panama, Colombia and South Korea that opponents said would make it more difficult to crack down on Panama’s very low income tax rate, banking secrecy laws and history of noncooperation with foreign partners.

***

Upon Congress ratifying the pact, Clinton issued a statement lauding the agreement, saying it … “will make it easier for American companies to sell their products.” She added: “The Obama administration is constantly working to deepen our economic engagement throughout the world, and these agreements are an example of that commitment.”

But Bernie Sanders opposed the tax evasion deal with Panama, and prophetically warned in 2011:

Panama’s entire annual economic output is only $26.7 billion a year, or about two-tenths of 1 percent of the U.S. economy. No one can legitimately make the claim that approving this free trade agreement will significantly increase American jobs. Then, why would we be considering a stand-alone free trade agreement with Panama, tiny little country?

Well, it turns out that Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade U.S. taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. And the Panama free trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in U.S. taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and in other countries. So, according to Citizens for Tax Justice—and I quote—”A tax haven … has one of three characteristics: It has no income tax or a very low-rate income tax; it has bank secrecy laws; and it has a history of non-cooperation with other countries on exchanging information about tax matters. Panama has all three of those. … They’re probably the worst.”

Postscript: One of the reasons that voters like Sanders (and Trump) is  because he opposes fake “free trade” deals, which help a handful of fatcats … but have almost nothing to do with “free trade”, and which hurt the American worker.

Review of Yves Engler’s book (image left)

Mainstream academics and journalists like to portray Canada as a positive force on the international stage, but Yves Engler’s new book, Canada in Africa, shows how frequently Canadian governments and corporations play a destructive role abroad.

In Africa, Canada’s government and mining companies have together or separately aided genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), been complicit in overthrowing and killing elected leaders, helped massively increase poverty, destroyed many communities and the environment, as well as spread corruption and abetted slavery. Engler’s well-researched text explains how the Canadian elite profited from the transatlantic trade in African slaves, and details Canada’s significant support for British colonialism in Africa, before presenting a damning portrait of Canadian neocolonialism on the continent today. This historical perspective is useful for discovering important facts about Canada-Africa relations, as well as for learning more about the true nature of the Canadian ruling class.

“Much of the capital used to establish the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce came from supplying the Caribbean slave colonies [during the 18th and 19th centuries],” writes Engler. Since then, Canada has behaved as a sub-imperialist power in Africa, playing a junior but important role first in British then U.S. imperial policy toward the continent.

Part of the significance of Canada’s role is its dominance in Africa’s mining sector. According to Engler, Canada is the leading international resource investor in the continent. Half of all foreign mining companies in Africa are Canadian, operating 700 mineral projects, worth over $31 billion, in 35 countries. Protection and expansion of these corporate investments is what primarily motivates Canadian policy toward Africa, says the author.

Contrary to Canadian government assurances, mineral development is not enriching those parts of Africa where it occurs. Dependence on selling raw minerals has deindustrialized parts of Africa, and low royalty rates and taxes ensure there is little capital returned to state finances, while corporate profits are returned to western banks. Ottawa has actually shaped the mining codes of eight African countries resulting in lower royalties.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed on African countries (with Canada’s strong backing) also emphasized increasing raw material exports, privatization, and cutting health and education budgets in exchange for international loans. Canadian “aid” to African countries is frequently conditional on carrying out SAPs, and sometimes linked to working with Canadian mining companies.

To insure against changes in national policy down the road, Ottawa has signed 15 Foreign Investment Protection Agreements (FIPAs) that grant mining firms the right to sue African countries for reduced profits. The space for democratic governance and non-resource-based forms of development is severely constrained by these investment treaties.

The looting of a continent’s resources requires not just economic muscle but military power as well, and here, too, Canada’s role is extensive if less well known. Canada’s military has trained hundreds of African soldiers, its naval vessels patrol Africa’s coast (as part of NATO), and Ottawa has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the military capacity of the African Union (made up of 54 countries) and “developing a regional military structure to police the continent.” Canada is also trying to get military bases in Kenya, Senegal and Tanzania.

Canadian military involvement in the last century proved useful for removing popular, progressive and nationalistic African leaders who wanted to use their country’s resources for the benefit of their people. Africa’s two most renowned examples of such leaders are Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, both removed with Canadian support.

Nkrumah, Ghana’s first elected president, was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup in 1966. The Ghanaian military at the time was being trained by Canadian Forces and Canada welcomed the dictators, lavishing aid on them. Nkrumah was hated by Washington for his independent streak and had called Canada “just another imperialist country.” The coup ensured that Canadian mining companies would be given open access to Ghana’s mineral wealth.

Similarly, Canada helped to eliminate Lumumba, elected prime minister of the mineral-rich Congo (now known as the DRC) in 1960. Lumumba’s killing was plotted by the U.S. and Belgium, which used the prime minister’s Congolese rivals to execute him in 1961 with the connivance of the Canadian-dominated United Nations Mission sent, ostensibly, to help Lumumba. Engler provides a chilling account of the critical role played by Colonel Jean Berthiaume (deceased), the top Canadian in the UN Mission, “in directly enabling” Lumumba’s murder.

Engler concludes that through activism, Canadians can be convinced to pay attention to their government’s sordid role in Africa as a first step towards changing things for the better.  However, a few pages on how such activism could be organized or spread would have been very useful.

Asad Ismi is the CCPA Monitor’s international affairs correspondent. He is author of the radio documentary “The Ravaging of Africa” which Black Agenda Report called “ground-breaking”.  The documentary is based on his award-winning article of the same title and has been aired on 28 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada reaching 30 million people. For his publications visit www.asadismi.ws.  

The Danish government is doing it – as are others. The Australian government, however, may count itself as one of the first ones to take the concerted step to repel potential asylum seekers who arrive to Australian shores by boat with threatening films.   There is nothing sophisticated about the script behind such messages. All insist on repulsion.  All, ultimately, insist on the hostile world that awaits those seeking to take to the sea.

The Journey is the most recent installment in this campaign to use celluloid as a means of dissuasion. Commissioned by the propaganda specialists of the Australian immigration department (the full title being the Department of Immigration and Border Protection) in the time of the Abbott government, it highlights the risks facing those who undertake to travel across the Indian Ocean.

Put It Out There Pictures, the agency commissioned in this task, advertises itself as having a “reputation for creating film and television for a new ‘frontier’.” Clichéd in the extreme, the company’s site sups from the cup of a propaganda directive, hoping to enable audiences “to see the world through a new looking glass.”[1]

Sounding like a dull, procedural version of Leni Riefenstahl (and a lite version at that), the outfit also notes its role in “making hundreds of hours of television for local audiences in post-Taliban Afghanistan.”  They work “with clients” to create pictures “within a framework of strong storytelling and high quality production values.”

Its production value is high; some of its acting is even deemed credible and suitable in character formation. Its contribution to the refugee debate is, however, minimal.  Overwhelmingly, it constitutes a retreat from international obligation on the part of Canberra, a crude confession that other places are more suitable than prosperous, and a heavily fortressed Down Under.

As the producers of the program say, “The film aimed to educate and inform audiences in source countries about the futility of investing in people smugglers, the perils of the trip, and the hard line policies that await them if they do reach Australian waters.”

Techniques of omission and distortion thrive in the production.  The dangerous environments for those leaving, in their political, military and social sense, is understated.  Discussion of war zones is virtually absent, a mere whisper behind the motivations.  Instead, there is a an auntie-like condescension that such individuals are purely driven by a desire to seek folly-filled adventure, brimming with New World aspirations to improve their bank balance.

Focus is shifted to matters more specific to Australia’s interests: a graphic insistence on drowning, for instance; shonky overcrowded boats as preludes to death at sea; poor safety and the elements.  Perversely, the human dimension of such beings is inadvertently emphasised (the cruelty of separation, for instance), suggesting that such beings, instead of being detained for lengthy periods of time on Nauru or Manus Island, should be seen as subjects of mercy rather than objects of cruelty.

Its effect, garnered through broadcasts across Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, has already been noted in some circles. “It was hard to watch,” claimed an 18-year-old tailor by the name of Ali Reza, as reported in The Guardian.  “It made me very upset. I know they were actors, but these things really happen to Afghans.”[2]  Whether the effect is to move such figures to not leave, is another matter.

The Immigration department is insistent that such filmography is vital in its quest to dissuade in order to save, while dumping on people smugglers with moral intensity.  But behind that message lingers some dirty laundry and an industry of deception.  It has enlisted, for instance, the services of Saad Mohseni, to market the film through his advertising arm, Lapis Communications.

Mohseni was himself a refugee who arrived in Australia with his parents in the 1980s a few years after the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.  Known as the “Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan”, this can hardly be an encouraging endorsement for veracity.  Mohseni’s links with the dark tycoon of manufactured news and make-believe is further hardened by 21^st Century Fox’s minority shareholding in the Moby Group, which he founded.

This pedigree does not bother Mohseni, who counts himself a friend of Murdoch’s.  Through a spokeswoman, Mohseni argued that the “idea and values around the film are grounded in addressing a very serious and tragic issue – with the ultimate objective of saving lives.”[3]

Craig Henderson, writing in The Illawarra Mercury (Mar 29) was suitably impressed, and disgusted, by the nature of the trailer, “meant to frighten the pants off people who already have the pants frightened off them every day when they wake up under a regime that enthusiastically embraces slaughtering civilians, violently oppressing women and torture.”[4]

The Australian satirical news program, The Weekly, even went so far as to suggest that a budget of $6 million ($4.35 million for production; $1.63 million for promotion) would go some way to reviving Australia’s film industry.[5]  At the very least, it might engender a boom, a rush of inspiration for Australian “product”.  After all, the combined budget of Wolf Creek, The Castle and Priscilla Queen of the Desert was actually exceeded in producing The Journey.  Murdoch will be ecstatic at the news.

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

Notes:

1. http://putitouttherepictures.com/
2. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/mar/28/hard-to-watch-afghans-react-to-6m-australian-film-aimed-at-asylum-seekers
3. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/former-refugee-paid-to-promote-duttons-antirefugee-telemovie-20160401-gnwfy6.html
4. http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/3816602/propaganda-oz-style/
5. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/weekly-with-charlie-pickering/ 

One of the BBC’s flagship news programmes has shown a “strong” bias towards Britain staying in the European Union (EU), a media monitoring group claimed last week. From the 13th of January to the 11th of March 2016, News-watch analysed 40 editions of the popular current affairs programme Newsnight. News-watchnoted that 25 of the guests who appeared on the programme were in favour of Britain staying in the EU, compared to only 14 who advocated the UK leaving the union. The monitoring group noted that: “The former President of the EU Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the former Swedish Prime Minister, Carl Bildt, have had the clear opportunity in main interviews to explain why leaving the EU would not be in the UK’s interest. There has been no balancing opinion from similarly weighty figures” who support Britain leaving the EU. 

The BBC has always been the propaganda mouthpiece of the British establishment, yet many Britons still cling to the deluded notion that the BBC is an impartial news organisation. It is clear that the British establishment is desperate to keep Britain in the union, and this is reflected in the BBC’s reporting of the issue. A Brexit may prove to be the catalyst which encourages other countries to leave, triggering the collapse of the EU entirely. Unless the Western elite manage to roll a collapsed EU into a more globally integrated system, this would be a disaster for the globalists. If European nations regain control over their own affairs and resort back to national sovereignty, the agenda of the shadow elite in the form of destroying nation-states and building a global empire will be severely impeded.  

The debate on whether Britain should leave or stay in the EU has been gathering pace in the UK for years, and the Prime Minister has finally set June 23rd as the date for the referendum. David Cameron is merely trying to appease some factions in Britain who are pro-national sovereignty and feel that too much power is concentrated in the bureaucratic, technocratic and largely undemocratic hands of the EU. One the most pivotal speeches that Cameron has made on the EU in recent months, was not given at the House of Commons, but at the shadow British government: the Royal Institute of International Affairs (or Chatham House). The executive body of the EU – the European Commission – is a corporate partner of Chatham House. The majority of the major political figures in the West support Britain staying in the EU, including Barack Obama, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. This is because the EU is far more than just a union in Europe; it’s a stepping stone towards global government.

The EU and Global Government

The EU has always been a key part of the grander strategy by the global elite to destroy national sovereignty and bring in a world government, through eventually amalgamating the EU with other trading blocs. As Alan Sked, a Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and the original founder of UKIP (who has since criticised the party), notes, the EU was created by a Western elite who have been surreptitiously working to build a global government. Herman Van Rompuy, the former President of the European Council, even boldly proclaimed that 2009 was “the first year of global governance” (according to the translation). Van Rompuy added that “the climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.”

The former President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, gave a speech in 2014 at the Yale School of Management, titled: ‘The European Union in the New World Order.’ Barroso said that the world is largely in a state of chaos, but “out of all this chaos some kind of order will eventually materialise.” He added that a gap is emerging “within the global sphere between an increasingly interdependent and interconnected world which lacks the global governance mechanisms to manage that interdependence and interconnectedness.” In essence, Barroso deceptively argued that the world is in such a state of chaos (the majority of which is created by the Western elite) that we are in desperate need of greater “global governance mechanisms” (i.e. order) – stronger global governance is practically synonymous with global government, but at bare minimum it’s the final stepping stone towards fully certified global government.

Peter Mandelson, a former European Commissioner for Trade and British politician, said during a meeting at Chatham House in 2007 that he “sees the EU as Europe’s most promising means of engaging with and shaping globalization.” George Soros, the investor, billionaire and regime change extraordinaire, called the EU an “experiment in international governance.” Soros did state that the EU had “failed,” and that the surge in populism was threatening the union. But if the EU does completely disintegrate, the major danger is that the elite will push for further global integration as the solution.

Bilderberg and the EU

Founded in 1954, the Bilderberg group is illustrative of a shadowy network of super-elites who often make decisions in secret meetings that come to impact the lives of millions. The annual conference is attended by between 120 and 150 elites who meet to discuss global issues with a focus on North American and European challenges. It encompasses a range of individuals: from the heads of multi-national corporations to the leaders of nations; banking executives to media titans.

In 2009, WikiLeaks released a document which was reportedly the meeting report from the 1955 Bilderberg conference in West Germany. The document shows that the idea of creating the Euro was being discussed within circles of the Western elite as far back as 1955, concealed from the general public of Europe:

 “A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority.”

Interestingly, one general point of agreement in the conference was the shared notion that atomic energy could be the most pivotal issue that would increase cooperation:

“Throughout the discussion there was considerable emphasis on atomic energy as forming, perhaps, the most hopeful area in which integration could proceed.”

Three years later, the European Atomic Energy Community was established in 1958. Another conclusion of the meeting was that the European project was designed to eviscerate national sovereignty and achieve the “highest degree of integration” as quickly as possible:

“It was generally recognized that it is our common responsibility to arrive in the shortest possible time at the highest degree of integration, beginning with a common European market.”

In more modern times, Étienne Davignon, a former European Commissioner and an influential architect of European integration, revealed that the Bilderberg group helped create the Euro in the 1990’s.

The Global Shift

In 2008, a book was published that is of critical importance in understanding some of the real forces that are driving the political and economic transitions in our world today. Written by David Rothkopf, a protégé of Henry Kissinger and an individual who belongs to numerous pre-eminent think tanks in the US (including the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)), it was titled, ‘Superclass: How the Rich Ruined Our World.’ Rothkopf argues that an infinitely small number of super-elites run the world, completely outside of any democratic process:

“A global elite has emerged over the past several decades that had vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members of this superclass has the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide… My researchers and I identified just over 6,000 people who qualify” (from the Preface).

Rothkopf continues, documenting the profound transition that has taken place in recent decades, from the nation-state towards a global state:

“But the center of gravity of elites has shifted. Today, the most powerful elites are global citizens tied more to international finance than national politics… If the richest and most powerful individuals in the world are now predominantly globally oriented, globally dependent, globally active, then an important shift has taken place in the world’s balance of power – away from national governments and away from national interests narrowly defined” (2009 edition: p.320).

This shift away from the nation-state and national governments towards a new global order is the defining one of our time. “We are living in a period of global change that is deeper, faster and broader than we have ever known,” was how Peter Mandelson articulated it in 2007. But this shift is not a coincidental one; it has been the objective of a cabal of international bankers who have been pushing for the creation of a “world system” for over a century. As the late Carroll Quigley – a historian and Professor at Georgetown University – wrote in his 1966 book, Tragedy and Hope:

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations” (1998 printing: p.324).

The push towards a new world order is going to continue to meet resistance however, as the Westphalian model of international relations – based on the principles of national sovereignty and the non-interference in the affairs of other states – has been the central model since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Furthermore, the fact that Russia is standing up for her national interests puts a significant spanner in the works of the Western elite.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

“Contrary to the rising-tide hypothesis, the rising tide has only lifted the large yachts, while many of the smaller boats have been dashed on the rocks.” -Joseph Stiglitz, economist

American plutocrats and their political lackeys in congress have implemented a plan that’s putting pressure on wages and further decimating the already-battered middle class. By sustaining high levels of unemployment over a long period of time, US elites have “restructured the labor force”, which is a pretentious-sounding expression that means they’ve created a permanent underclass that’s willing to slave-away at demeaning, part-time jobs for mere peanuts without uttering a peep of protest. This metamorphosis of the workforce has taken place mostly in the shadows, concealed behind a thick fog of state propaganda touting the fictitious “recovery”, a recovery in which long-term jobless workers have abandoned all hope of finding gainful full-time employment and resigned themselves to a lifetime of scrambling from one odious task to the next just keep a roof over their heads and the wolves away from the door.

After eight years of applying this coercive ‘starvation strategy’, the plutocrat’s ‘grand plan’ is finally coming into focus. According to economists Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger’s new paper titled “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015″:

“All of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.”

“Alternative work arrangements”? You mean there’s been zero growth in ordinary 9 to 5, 40-hour-per-week jobs in the last 10 freaking years???

Indeed, that’s exactly what it means. It also means that Obama’s relentless crowing about the phantom “recovery” is mostly bunkum. There is no recovery. It’s an invention built on the ruined lives of people who have been forced to take all-manner of servile, low-paying, part-time, service-sector jobs just to keep food on the table. That’s Obama’s glorious recovery in a nutshell. Here’s more from the World Socialist web Site:

“All US job growth for the last decade came in “alternative work arrangements”—people working as independent contractors, temps, through contract agencies or on-call—according to a study published Tuesday by Princeton University and the RAND Corporation…

The actual number of contingent full-time workers rose from 14.2 million in February 2005 to 23.6 million in November 2015, an increase of 9.4 million. Since total US employment rose by 9.1 million during this period, the number of workers in conventional, full-time positions actually dropped by nearly 400,000.” (Temps and contractors accounted for all US job growth since 2005, World Socialist Web Site)

Repeat: “The number of workers in conventional, full-time positions actually dropped by nearly 400,000.”

Great. So we’re actually going backwards, is that what they’re trying to say?

Yep. And if you look a little deeper into this topic, you’ll see that things are actually worse than the Princeton report suggests. For example, check this out clip from Bloomberg:

“The differences between Katz’s and Krueger’s 15.8 percent finding and the higher percentages reported in some other recent surveys mainly have to do with definitions. The Government Accountability Office’s April 2015 estimate that 40.4 percent of U.S. workers were in alternative work arrangements included part-time workers as well as some self-employed workers not covered under the BLS’s definition of alternative work. It was also based on a survey conducted in 2010, when the percentage of involuntary part-time workers was still quite elevated in the wake of the recession. The 2015 Freelancing in America survey that deemed 34 percent of U.S. workers to be freelancers included moonlighters who already had other jobs, as well as some small-business owners with employees.” (The Gig Economy Is Powered by Old People, Bloomberg)

Let’s skip the bullsh** about “freelancers” and “moonlighters” and any other cutesy sobriquet for part-time drudgery. What we’re interested in is the GAO’s damning April estimate that “40.4 percent of U.S. workers were in alternative work arrangements.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s where the rubber meets the road.

Bottom line: A large percentage of the working population can’t find ordinary, decent-paying jobs with benefits and retirement because the shithead oligarchs who own this country figured they could use the financial crisis to further dismantle whatever gains labor has made in last century while reducing workers wages to something on a par with a peasant stitching blue jeans in a windowless Hanoi sweatshop. That’s the objective, isn’t it, making sure that everyone everywhere is exploited equally?

You know it is. Obama was ordered to slash fiscal stimulus in 2009 while the corporate honchos curtailed business investment. But, why?

To reduce the amount of money flowing into the real economy while the double-dealing Fed pumped trillions into the financial system so asset-stripping investment banksters and corporate scalawags could net beaucoup profits while working people scraped by on next to nothing. You’ve heard the expression “Strangle the beast”? Well, this is how it works in real-time.

Keep in mind, that according to the nation’s number one economics blog, Calculated Risk, over 578,000 good-paying public sector jobs were lost under Obama, which is a situation that could have been easily avoided by targeting fiscal stimulus at the state and local level. Instead, Obama chose to shrink the size of the stimulus package (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), keep the economy on a ventilator, and shower the country with pink slips, just to prevent strong-enough growth to generate full employment and upward wage pressure. That was his assignment, and that’s what he did. Here’s a little background from an article at Huffington Post by Sam Stein:

“…members of the president’s economic team felt that if they were to properly fill the hole caused by the recession, they would need a bill that priced at $1.8 trillion — $600 billion more than was previously believed to be the high-water mark for the White House.

The $1.8 trillion figure was included in a December 2008 memo authored by Christina Romer (the incoming head of the Council of Economic Advisers) and obtained by Scheiber in the course of researching his book.

“When Romer showed [Larry] Summers her $1.8 trillion figure late in the week before the memo was due, he dismissed it as impractical. So Romer spent the next few days coming up with a reasonable compromise: roughly $1.2 trillion,” Scheiber writes.” (Huffington Post)

Clearly, what Obama and Summers wanted was exactly what they got, a sluggish, underperforming economy that kept unemployment needlessly-high while the Fed transferred trillions to their cockroach friends on Wall Street. (The ARRA was eventually whittled down to a paltry $800 billion, a miserable $100 billion more than the bank bailout fiasco called TARP) The plutocrats raked in record profits while working Americans saw their incomes drop, their wages freeze, and their prospects for upward mobility annihilated. Welcome to Obama’s Amerika. Here’s more from the WSWS:

“The proportion of contingent workers holding multiple jobs has more than quadrupled over the past 10 years, from 7.3 percent in 2005 to 32 percent in 2015. Nearly one-third of people working with no benefits or job security are holding down an additional part-time or full-time job just to make ends meet…

With spending on transportation and food also rising, 2014 became the first year studied by Pew in which median spending on these basic necessities surpassed median income. By 2014, median income had fallen by 13 percent from 2004 levels, while expenditures had increased by 14 percent.” (The social crisis and the US elections, World Socialist Web Site)

Hurrah, for Obama’s recovery! There’s so much work out there, people can work two, three, or even four jobs a day if they want! The only problem is they still can’t make ends meet because the shitty pay won’t even cover their expenses. “The more I work, the poorer I get.” Isn’t that what the PEW report is really saying?

Sure, it is. And yet we’re supposed to believe this is all just a big accident, that the weakest recovery in history is just an honest miscalculation by Ivy League-educated economists and government bean counters who just forgot how the economy works? Is that it; all the economic whizkids and Nobel Prize winning gurus are all just suffering from some odd strain of collective amnesia that prevents them from recommending solutions that actually generate growth, jobs, inflation and –dare I say it–economic recovery?

Baloney. The crappy recovery is all part of the plan, just like it is in Europe, just like it is in Japan, just like it is everywhere the western bank cartel and their globalist colleagues have extended their tentacles to expand their corporate extortionist empire. Let’s not dignify this phenom by calling it a “conspiracy”. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s plain-old shock therapy, the likes of which the neoliberal economists and their miscreant IMF friends have been using for decades. Create a bubble with easy money and low rates. Burst the bubble and precipitate a crisis. Impose excruciating belt-tightening measures that restructure the workforce, privatize public assets and transfers more of the national wealth to the parasites at the top of the foodchain, the mighty one percent. Wash, rinse, repeat. The current crisis in the US follows this exact same pattern. It just looks different this time-around because we’re the ones with the bull’s-eye on our backs.

Is it that different in Japan?

Heck, no. Here’s a clip from Reuters which shows how Japan’s ruling elites are not satisfied with slave wages alone. What they want is to shift more of the cost of government operations onto the backs of the people who can least afford it. Here’s an excerpt:

“part-time, temporary and other non-regular workers who typically make less than half the average pay has jumped 70 percent from 1997 to 19.7 million today — 38 percent of the labor force.”

Abenomics has made life considerably harder for these people due to the higher taxes, soaring prices, and reduced welfare benefits. The data show that Japan’s poverty rate is “the sixth-worst among the 34 OECD countries” while “child poverty in working, single-parent households is by far the worst at over 50 percent, making Japan the only country where having a job does not reduce the poverty rate for that group.” (Japan’s working poor left behind by Abenomics, Reuters)

Is this the next phase of America’s inexorable devolution into Third World poverty and immiseration? Are we about to see our bought-and-paid-for representatives levy more regressive VAT and sales taxes on the workerbees so the glorious “job creators” can continue to move more of their wealth offshore to the Caymans without adding even one lousy dime to the public coffers?

It wouldn’t surprise me at all. From my experience, the uber-rich don’t believe that they should have to contribute anything to a country they already own. It’s a matter of principle. Besides, how did Leona put it: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Here’s more from Japan Today:

“Casual and part-time employees number nearly 20 million, almost 40% of the current Japanese workforce…

Casualisation is contributing to a less egalitarian society,.. At the moment, millions of young casual workers still live at home, rent-free, with mum and dad, whose generation drove Japan’s post-war boom. Once that generation passes, she adds, underlying poverty will become more evident.” (Temp workers: Helping or hurting Japan’s future? Japan Today)

Sound familiar? A whole generation living in the basement of Pop’s house because they have no job, no future and are loaded to the eyeballs with student debt. The only difference I can see here is the quality of the propaganda. In Japan, they call this ‘alternative work arrangements-phenom’, “casual labor”, whereas in the United States, the media has airbrushed the concept into a cheery-sounding moniker called “the gig economy.”

Nice touch, eh?

In the gig economy, workers aren’t exploited by a ruthless corporate machine that deliberately slows growth to intensify unemployment and put pressure on wages. Oh, no. Workers merely dabble in various occupations like a freewheeling handyman or a carefree musician who makes his living strumming his guitar at the local honkytonk before trundling off to the nearest Best Western for a good night’s sleep.

What utter hogwash. There is no “gig” economy. The ruling elite and their political flunkey friends are waging a vicious class war against people whose only aim is to make a decent living so they can provide for themselves and their families and avoid spending their waning years in a makeshift tent under the freeway overpass.

Is that too much to ask?

If you think that the worst thing for the country is electing yet another establishment politician to the presidency, what is your best, most principled action?  By you I mean the millions of Americans who have supported the candidacy of either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.  They have enormous potential power.

Skip forward to the general election and imagine that both Sanders and Trump have not made it to the presidential ballot, a very likely scenario.  Clearly, both Trump and Sanders supporters strongly oppose the political establishment.  The status quo of what amounts to more of a plutocracy than a legitimate and effective democracy.  Now, what do these angry, disappointed Americans do in the general election?  Cave and vote for the lesser of two evils?  Or, is there a better solution?  There is.  It is to not vote for any presidential candidate.

Here is the logic.  For authentic anti-establishment, anti-status quo people who correctly see a corrupt political system their potential power is to remove the credibility of the current, broken system.  The true revolutionary action is to drive voter turnout to historically low levels.  Stop voting!  Create a national embarrassment.  Stop participating in the corrupt system and send a message to the world that the current delusional democracy is being rejected.  Tell both major parties that they are in existential trouble.

If you can not get a true radical outsider in the White House, then show the world that a huge number of American citizens no longer recognize the legitimacy of the political system.  Other than violent action, this is the proper form of civil disobedience in the name of rebellion.  If both Sanders and Trump do not get to the general election ballot, then the lesson learned should be that participation in the sham democracy is a waste of time and energy.  The game is so rigged, especially the primary nomination system, that the establishment can and does control the system.

See presidential elections as mostly a distraction, keeping most Americans from understanding that they live in a money-controlled delusional democracy.

This stop-voting strategy is also far better than voting for a third party candidate.  Face facts, the current corrupt two-party duopoly political system has made it fruitless to support third party presidential candidates.  Sure, in some sense, this is a protest vote.  But history shows us that having several million people vote for third party presidential candidates has had no positive impact on improving or, better yet, reforming the present system.  The two major parties have maintained their iron grip on the political system.  Withholding you vote and participation is a stronger protest and a greater rejection of the current system.  Moreover, every so often votes for a third party candidate help elect one of the lesser evils that you may think is the greater evil.

Now is the time for supporters of Trump and Sanders to send a clear message to the respective parties that if their preferred candidate is not selected for the general election at the party’s convention that they will not vote for anyone else selected by the convention.  Those who follow the current primary season should know that if the parties lose the votes of Trump and Sanders supporters they are in serious jeopardy of losing the November election.  All these supporters share a common belief that the status quo is far more threatening to the country than electing their respective preferences, either Sanders or Trump.  Put that belief into action by sending clear messages that they will not vote for any alternative chosen by the establishment at the two conventions.

The ugly but not unexpected truth is that both major parties are now willing to reject the millions of Americans who will have voted for Sanders and Trump.  The establishment in both of them fears both of these disruptive candidates and rightfully so.  All the special moneyed interests in both parties see an existential threat from these candidates.  Both parties no longer fairly represent the interests and needs of the vast majority of Americans.  Whether Trump or Sanders would or could actually greatly reform the political system is beside the point.  The highest priority is to reject the status quo and recognize that whoever the establishment accepts instead of Trump and Sanders, or even Cruz, will maintain a corrupt system serving the interests of a rich and powerful minority.

For people passionately against the establishment, they must resist what the Democrat and Republican parties out of fear tell them.  Do not accept their argument that if you do not vote for whoever has been put on the ballot by the party, then you will help elect the candidate from the other party.  The rock bottom principle must be to not contribute to electing an establishment candidate from your own party.  In the end, any establishment candidate, even from your preferred party, is not what the country needs.

And resist the temptation to feel good by writing in the name of someone.  It is a selfish action and has no significance.  Better to see a boycott of this year’s presidential election as having a better chance to force millions more people to demand fixing our broken democracy.

For the record, Ted Cruz should be seen as an establishment candidate, despite the fact that nearly all establishment politicians greatly dislike him, and many now support him.  Remember that he got to be a senator because he successfully navigated the Texas establishment.  Moreover, aside from ego-driven actions he never has shown any genuine interest in greatly reforming the whole political system.  He is driven by ambition, not a revolutionary spirit.

Now is the time for thinking Americans to withdraw their participation in an election where disruptive candidates are replaced with establishment ones.  Otherwise our delusional democracy prevails.  We the people need a political revolution.  Otherwise, with awful economic inequality condemning millions of Americans to economic prison, violent revolution should not be ruled out.  Not in a nation with widespread gun ownership.  After all, our corrupt political system presents a type of oppressive government for which the Second Amendment may offer the ultimate solution.  Time is running out.  This may be the year for seeing whether or not we can vote – or not vote – our way to a democracy we once thought we had.

Joel S. Hirschhorn was an official at the National Governors Association and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and is the author of Delusional Democracy.

Calling out around the world; time to put on your made in Ecuador Panama hat and frantically start dancing to the ultimate limited hangout leak.

And if you believe in the purity of intentions of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) at the center of the leak, I’ve got a made in Shenzhen Panama hat to sell you (disclosure: I never was, and never will be, a member of the ICIJ).

The Washington-based ICIJ gets its cash and its “organizational procedure” via the Exceptionalistan-based, Orwellian-named Center for Public Integrity. The funds flow mostly from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Kellogg Foundation and the George Soros-owned Open Society.

Then there is Eastern Europe-based partner organization OCCRP, an even more Orwellian outfit self-styled as playing some sort of progressive, alternative media role. OCCRP is funded by Soros and USAID.

And finally there’s this fictional land named Panama – a certified U.S. vassal. Absolutely nothing of real substance happens in Panama without a green light by the United States government. Or, as an international tax lawyer told me, “you have to be an idiot to stash money in Panama. You cannot flush a toilet there without the Americans knowing about it.”

This sets the scene for the Panama Papers leak – a massive hoard of 11.5 million documents allegedly leaked from someone inside offshore heavies Mossack Fonseca to the center-left, NATO-friendly Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in Munich and then shared by the ICIJ with selected mainstream media partners.

Even without a smoking gun, a case can be made this alleged most massive leak ever was obtained by – what else – U.S. intel. This is the kind of stuff the NSA excels at. The NSA is able to break into virtually any database and/or archives anywhere; they steal “secrets;” and then selectively destroy/blackmail/protect assets and “enemies,” according to USG interests.

That’s the essence of a limited hangout sold to public opinion as a serious corruption investigation. And that’s where Western corporate media enters the scene, protecting whatever 0.00000001 percent honcho is caught in the net, as well as sacrificing some disposable pawns.

So we have over 300 reporters pouring over hundreds of thousands of document/files for over an interminable year with, miraculously, no leaks whatsoever; just for a bunch of corporate mainstream media hacks meticulously cherry picked stories and decide what is “newsworthy.” Western alternative media would have investigated the data without sparing anyone; but it would be out of the question to grant them access.

What’s already certain is that the full extent of the Panama leak will never be known. Even the by now exceedingly pathetic The Guardian admitted, on the record, that “much of the leaked material will remain private”. Why? Because it may – inadvertently and directly – implicate a gaggle of Western 0.00000001 percent multibillionaires and corporations. All of them play the offshore casino game (although not necessarily in Panama.)

So the Panama Papers, stripped to the bone, may reveal themselves essentially as an infowar operation by the NSA – targeted mostly against “enemies” (as in the BRICS nations) and selected disposable pawns; a weaponized psyops posing as an ‘activist leak’, straight from the Hybrid War playbook.

Step on the Monster Truck

A who’s who of wealthy/powerful players has been directly targeted in the Panama Papers, from the – demented – King of Saudi Arabia to former Fiat/Ferrari stalwart Luca de Montezemolo, from Lionel Messi to (unnamed) Chinese Communist Party officials and the brother-in-law of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Extra-juicy element is provided by the presence of Alaa Mubarak – the son of the deposed Egyptian snake; Ayad Allawi, the butcher of Fallujah and former U.S. occupation prime minister; Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (a Saudi protégé, so he must get offshore advice as well); and Dov Weisglass, the butcher of Gaza and former advisor to Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert (this one already convicted of corruption.) These are all disposable.

We find in the list not only Middle Eastern racketeers but also the token “respectable” European – from Iceland’s Prime Minister (already forced to resign) to David Cameron’s father Ian. And some players that might be considered Exceptionalistan’s friends, such as vulture fund-friendly Argentina President Mauricio Macri and chocolate heavyweight cum Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has a lot of funds parked in the British Virgin Islands.

Predictably, particular emphasis is on BRICS members – from those mysterious Chinese to Indian companies. As far as Brazil is concerned, there may be a healthy counterpoint; the presence of notoriously corrupt leader of the lower house Eduardo Cunha; his Swiss accounts had surfaced after the HSBC leaks, now some more showed up on the Panama Leaks.

Still to be explained is a juicy Brazilian-related angle; whether the Panama Leaks are directly related to the fact that Ramon Fonseca, 50 percent of Mossack Fonseca, was dismissed as president of the Panameñista Party last month because of Operation Car Wash – which targets mostly the ruling Workers’ Party in Brazil. The Panama Papers are in fact a Monster Truck, global version of Car Wash.

Lula, predictably, is not on the Panama list – to the despair of the Exceptionalistan-supported regime changers in Brazil, many of them (media barons, bankers, businessmen) featured on the previous HSBC leaks. Regime-Changers-in-Chief, the Globo media empire, are also not on the Panama leaks, although they profit from a certified offshore racket.

Syria was always bound to be a key target. Much of Western corporate media “newsworthy” stories now focus on “Assad’s fixer” Rami Makhlouf, described in U.S. diplomatic cables as Syria’s “poster boy for corruption” and under U.S. sanctions since February 2008. Such a convenient target. Yet “poster boy” happened to be quite sheltered by HSBC as well.

Putin Did It

And so we finally get to the key target of Monster Truck (in Brazil’s Car Wash they are Lula and President Rousseff). It’s got the requisite BRICS angle and it’s a dream spin; cue to virtually every major Western corporate media headline blaring that Vladimir Putin has stashed US$2 billion offshore.

The problem is he didn’t. Putin is guilty by association because of his “close associates” Arkady and Boris Rotenberg’s alleged ties to money laundering. Yet three “incriminating” emails in the files happen not to “incriminate” them, or Putin.

And then there’s cellist Sergey Roldugin, a childhood friend of Putin’s. Here’s the – politically filtered – spin by the ICIJ:

“The records show Roldugin is a behind-the-scenes player in a clandestine network operated by Putin associates that has shuffled at least US$2 billion through banks and offshore companies. In the documents, Roldugin is listed as the owner of offshore companies that have obtained payments from other companies worth tens of millions of dollars. … It’s possible Roldugin, who has publicly claimed not to be a businessman, is not the true beneficiary of these riches. Instead, the evidence in the files suggests Roldugin is acting as a front man for a network of Putin loyalists – and perhaps for Putin himself.”

What about rephrasing it as, “the evidence in the files suggests Lionel Messi is acting as a frontman for a network of football loyalists trying to evade the rape of Argentina by U.S. hedge fund vultures friendly to new President and offshore account holder Mauricio Macri”?

The juiciest bit is that Moscow knew all along another Hybrid War offensive chapter was imminent, days if not weeks before Panama went viral.

Make America Great Again

Offshore bank accounts are not intrinsically illegal. Quite a few though involve dodgy money, or at least provide the euphemistic “low-tax environment” fundamental to the very wealthy.

It’s not an accident that the Panama Papers unveil connections to several dozen firms and individuals who are prominently featured in U.S. sanctions blacklists. That configures the Panama Papers as even more of a limited hangout; the real Papers would be the Cayman Papers or the Virgin Island Papers. That’s where most of the in-the-know park their money (not to mention Luxembourg). Adding to the hilarity factor, David Cameron suddenly woke up to the need to stop British overseas territories – and Crown dependencies – being used by the wealthy to park their untaxed fortune.

It’s never going to happen. The so-called international banking/financial system is a demented casino. It’s not only 8 percent; Hong Kong players tell me as much as 50 percent of global wealth may currently be parked, undisturbed, in untaxable offshore havens. If a fraction of these astonishing funds would be taxed, governments right and left would be paying their debts, investing in infrastructure, launching round after round of sustainable growth, and a productive spiral would be in motion.

And that leads us to the cherry in the corruption cake; how come there are no Americans in this limited hangout leak? Of course there are none. Panama is for suckers. Too obvious. Too rakish. Too crude. Ergo, forget about The Cayman Papers.

As for foreigners in-the-know, we just need to go back a mere three months ago to this Bloomberg piece, where Andrew Penney, Managing Director of Rothschild & Co., spells it all out; the U.S. “is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world.”

The circle is finally squared; Panama is revealed as the patsy – mere collateral damage in this limited hangout Monster Truck operation. Domestic tax haven providers, such as Rothschild, are the real deal. Make America great again? It already is – as the top tax shelter for hardcore dodgy money had to be…a monster Panama: Exceptionalistan itself. Now dance, suckers.

Pepe Escobar is a columnist for RT.

Gold is one of the most fascinating of all rare metals. Throughout all history it has been given a special, at times sacred or spiritual value, since six thousand years ago when the Egyptian Pharaohs’ tombs were filled with it to accompany the dead on their journey. In times of world financial crisis as in the 1930’s, gold is preferred by central banks and ordinary citizens as a store of value when paper money loses value. We are approaching another of those times when the accumulated paper debt of the dollar system is debasing the worth of paper dollars. What’s highly significant in this light is to see which central banks are buying all the gold they can get.

The dollar today is no longer backed by gold. That has been so since Nixon unilaterally abrogated the 1944 Bretton Woods Treaty and took the dollar off its statutory gold backing to float free in August, 1971. He did so at the insistence of then Under Treasury Secretary Paul Volcker and Volcker’s patron, David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank. Nixon took that desperate measure, simply said, because the Federal Reserve vaults of reserve gold were disappearing as France, Germany and other trading partners of the United States demanded gold in exchange for their accumulated trade dollars, as was allowed under the Bretton Woods rules.

Since 1971, with no gold backing it, other than the carefully-guarded fiction that the Fed still has the world’s largest stock of gold reserve in its deep vaults, alleged by the Fed to exceed 8,000 tons, the fiat dollars in world circulation have expanded without limit. This is the source of the Great Inflation the world economy has undergone over the past forty five years, as dollars in circulation have expanded exponentially by some 2,500% since 1970. The confidence in holding dollars, still the world’s leading reserve currency, has been maintained by Washington through various tricks and deceptions.

After the oil shock of October, 1973 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke of a “petrodollar.” The dollar value was backed not by gold but by oil, everyone’s oil. The price of oil had been manipulated by Kissinger and others in 1973, as I detail in my Gods of Money book, to increase by 400% in a matter of months, forcing Germany, France, Latin America and much of the world to buy dollars. Washington made certain as well in 1975, when Germany, Japan and other nations tried to buy OPEC oil in their own national currencies, that Saudi Arabia and OPEC countries would accept only dollars for their black gold, the oil.

Since September, 2014 the world dollar price of oil has collapsed. It has gone from levels of $103 a barrel down to close to $30 today. That’s a collapse of 70% in demand for dollars for the world’s largest commodity measured in dollars.

In this political and financial context, the central banks of Russia and China are buying gold for their central bank reserves at a fever pace. Not only that, the Peoples’ Bank of China recently announced it has abandoned its peg to the US dollar and diversify into a basket of currencies led by the Euro. However the moves of Russia and China central banks to gold are far more strategic.

Russia buys mucho gold

While all eyes are on the oil price and the ruble to dollar rate, the Central Bank of Russia has quietly been buying huge volumes of gold over the past year. In January, 2016, the latest data available, the Russian Central Bank again bought 22 tons of gold, around $800 million at current exchange rates, that, amidst US and EU financial sanctions and low oil prices. It was the eleventh month in a row they bought large gold volumes. For 2015 Russia added a record 208 tons of gold to her reserves compared with 172 tons for 2014. Russia now has 1,437 tonnes of gold in reserve, the sixth largest of any nation according to the World Gold Council in London. Only USA, Germany, Italy, France and China central banks hold a larger tonnage of gold reserves.

Notably also, the Russian central bank has been selling its holdings of US Treasury debt to buy the gold, de facto de-dollarizing, a sensible move as the dollar is waging de facto currency war against the ruble. As of December, 2015, Russia held $92 billion in US Treasury Bonds down from $132 billion in January 2014.

More significantly, after the Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina declared in May 2015 that she saw no need to buy all domestic gold production as the bank’s gold needs could easily be satisfied on the open market internationally, something that would drain ruble reserves, there has been an apparent about face. The Central Bank of Russia is now buying all domestic Russian gold output. Only after that is exhausted in terms of meeting their monthly targets does she import. Nabiullina stated recently, “We believe it is necessary in terms of creating additional financial cushion for the state in the face of such external uncertainties.”

That’s very significant as Russia, whose central bank gold reserves were robbed during the Yeltsin years in the early 1990, has grown to become the world’s second largest gold mining country after China. It’s a major support to her gold mining industry and to the ruble.

China and Kazakhstan too

Only slightly smaller volumes of gold are being bought in past months by China. And a significant monthly addition to its gold reserve is being made as well by Kazakhstan. For the past forty months, Kazakhstan, has been increasing its central bank gold reserves. Kazakhstan along with Russia is a member of the Eurasian Economic union along with Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Belarus ghas also been increasing its bullion reserves.

China bought another 17 tons of gold in January and will buy a total of another 215 tons this year, approximately equal to that of Russia. From August to January 2016 China added 101 tonnes of gold to its reserves. Annual purchases of more than 200 tons by the PBOC would exceed the entire gold holdings of all but about 20 countries, according to the World Gold Council. China’s central bank reserves of gold have risen 57% since 2009 acording to data the PBOC revealed in July, 2015. Market watchers believe even that amount of gold in China’s central bank vaults is being politically vastly understated so as not to cause alarm bells to ring too loud in Washington and London.

Kyrgyzsan, Russia and China are also members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These Eurasian countries are all of them part of China’s mammoth One Belt, One Road Great Project, sometimes called the New Economic Silk Road project to criss-cross all Eurasia with networks of high-speed rails and to develop major new ports in the region to change the economic map of Eurasia. Last year China announced it was mapping the rail lines of the Silk Road to enable the Central Asian and Russian gold reserves now lacking infrastructure for development to become economically attractive to those countries.

The currencies of Russia, China and other Eurasian countries are moving to become as “good as gold,” a term applied to the US dollar some six decades ago. The fact that Russia also has an extremely low debt-to-GDP ratio of some 18% compared to 103% for USA and that of the EU Eurozone countries of 94%, of Japan more than 200% of GDP, is a fact that Western rating agencies engaged in the US Treasury’s financial warfare against the Russian Federation conveniently ignore. Russia has a far more healthy economy than most of the West that is declaring her a failed state.

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”.

World media is now alight with reports surrounding the largest data leak in the history of journalism known as the Panama Papers. The 2.6 terabytes worth of information has apparently revealed dirty deals, money laundering operations, and tax avoidance schemes by some of the world’s most powerful people including celebrities, athletes, world leaders, politicians, and their relatives. In addition, over 200,000 companies, trusts, and foundations are mentioned and exposed in the leak coming from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian “law firm” that contains files with information such as “holdings of drug dealers, Mafia members, corrupt politicians and tax evaders – and wrongdoing galore.”

Mossack Fonseca is considered one of the world’s biggest creators of “shell companies,” corporate formations that can be used to hide the true owners of various assets. The data that was released by Mossack Fonseca includes contracts, emails, bank records, property deeds, passport copies and a host of other collections of sensitive information going as far back as 1977 to as recent as December, 2015.

As media outlet Zero Hedge describes the leak, “It allows a never-before-seen view inside the offshore world — providing a day-to-day, decade-by-decade look at how dark money flows through the global financial system, breeding crime and stripping national treasuries of tax revenues.”

As Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the outlet that received the leaks, summarized the new revelations:

Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell firms enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady. In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures. The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows. It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous: from politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, to celebrities and professional athletes.

Zero Hedge also described a number of high-profile revelations coming from the leaks. The website writes:

Mossack Fonseca’s fingers are in Africa’s diamond trade, the international art market and other businesses that thrive on secrecy. The firm has serviced enough Middle East royalty to fill a palace. It’s helped two kings, Mohammed VI of Morocco and King Salman of Saudi Arabia, take to the sea on luxury yachts.

In Iceland, the leaked files show how Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and his wife secretly owned an offshore firm that held millions of dollars in Icelandic bank bonds during that country’s financial crisis. In the video clip below, PM Gunnlaugsson walks out of an interview with Swedish television company SVT. Gunnlaugsson is asked about a company called Wintris, which he says has been fully declared to the Icelandic tax authority. Gunnlaugsson says he is not prepared to answer such questions and decides to discontinue the interview, saying: ‘What are you trying to make up here? This is totally inappropriate’

The ICIJ records show Sergey Roldugin, a long-time friend of Vladimir Putin, as a behind-the-scenes player in a clandestine network operated by Putin associates that has shuffled at least $2 billion through banks and offshore companies, German dailySüddeutsche Zeitung and other media partners has found. In the documents, Roldugin is listed as the owner of offshore companies that have obtained payments from other companies worth tens of millions of dollars.

The files include a convicted money launderer who claimed he’d arranged a $50,000 illegal campaign contribution used to pay the Watergate burglars, 29 billionaires featured in Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people and movie star Jackie Chan, who has at least six companies managed through the law firm. The files contain new details about major scandals ranging from England’s most infamous gold heist to the bribery allegations convulsing FIFA, the body that rules international soccer.

In the “Operation Car Wash” case in Brazil, prosecutors allege that Mossack Fonseca employees destroyed and hid documents to mask the law firm’s involvement in money laundering. A police document says that, in one instance, an employee of the firm’s Brazil branch sent an email instructing co-workers to hide records involving a client who may have been the target of a police investigation: “Do not leave anything. I will save them in my car or at my house.”

In Nevada, the leaked files show, Mossack Fonseca employees worked in late 2014 to obscure the links between the law firm’s Las Vegas branch and its headquarters in Panama in anticipation of a U.S. court order requiring it to turn over information on 123 companies incorporated by the law firm. Argentine prosecutors had linked those Nevada-based companies to a corruption scandal involving an associate of former presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Today, Mossack Fonseca is considered one of the world’s five biggest wholesalers of offshore secrecy. It has more than more than 500 employees and collaborators in more than 40 offices around the world, including three in Switzerland and eight in China, and in 2013 had billings of more than $42 million.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists also took part in the “investigation” of the leaked data and revealed a summary of its findings. ICIJ suggests the leaks expose:

Offshore companies linked to the family of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, as well as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has
positioned himself as a reformer in a country shaken by corruption scandals

29 billionaires featured in Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people

Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and his wife secretly owned an offshore firm that held millions of dollars in Icelandic bank bonds during the country’s financial crisis

Associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies

New details of offshore dealings by the late father of British Prime Minister David Cameron, a leader in the push for tax-haven reform

Offshore companies controlled by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the King of Saudi Arabia and the children of the President of Azerbaijan

33 people and companies blacklisted by the US Government because of evidence that they have done business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organisations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea

Customers including Ponzi schemers, drug kingpins, tax evaders and at least one jailed sex offender

Movie star Jackie Chan, who had at least six companies managed through the law firm

The Targets of the Release

Out of all this data, however, there are several curious aspects that no mainstream media outlet has yet to adequately explain – the apparent absence of any relevant American or Israeli names as well as any high-profile and realistically relevant European names, particularly those of the active NATO countries.

In fact, despite the fact that the Russians, Syrians, Chinese, and Icelandics have been revealed for the offshore dealers that they are – we are being led to believe that the oligarchs in the United States, England, Israel, and Germany are squeaky clean.

Three points must be made in this regard.

First, many of the targets of the Panama Papers leaks are being “exposed” only by means of guilt by association. For instance, a full on public relations assault has been launched against Russian President Vladmir Putin, suggesting that Putin himself is responsible for using offshore accounts for personal gain. However, Putin’s guilt is simply being associated with an individual who is holding money in offshore accounts. Putin himself has not been revealed as one of the individuals laundering money.

The Guardian video entitled “How To Hide A Billion Dollars: The Panama Papers,” is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of how “guilt by association” is used to implicate Putin himself in offshore accounts and tax evasion. Yet there is no evidence of Putin himself doing anything of the sort, only evidence of a “close friend” of Putin who has maintained offshore accounts. The reports out of Western mainstream media even go so far as to associate Putin with the accounts because the leaks revealed that his “childhood friends” were also engaged in offshore accounting.

Similarly, a character assassination attempt has been launched against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad despite no evidence that Assad has been maintaining offshore accounts. The only evidence provided that comes anywhere close to pointing at Assad is that which exposes his cousins who are maintaining the accounts.

Likewise, reports are pointing toward Chinese President Xi Jinping as a tax evader, despite the fact that only his brother-in-law was fingered in the leak.

Other heads of state targeted by the leaks (but not necessarily directly point to) are former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (overthrown by the Western-backed Arab Spring), Petro Poroshenko (President of Ukraine), and the current Prime Minister of Iceland. Palestinian leaders or, rather, a “confidant” to the Palestinian Authority President were also mentioned.

While there are many more individuals and countries listed in the leaks, the lists themselves are a curious representation of countries and world leaders whom the United States and the NATO powers view as targets and/or enemies. Putin, Assad, Mubarak, and Orban as well as their host countries of Hungary, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, Palestine, and China are all listed as violators of tax evasion, money laundering, and more but without sufficient evidence to prove most of the claims made against them.

The second point that must be made is the curious lack of high-profile American names as well as the lack of NATO leaders, leaders of major European countries, and Israelis. Being the most massive leak in journalistic history, to be sure, citizens of one of the largest economies on the face of the earth would turn up in an investigation of offshore accounts. Certainly, Western European oligarchs are as corrupt as any other nationality of oligarch. After all, American oligarchs often have a much higher tax rate (at least publicly) so it would stand to reason that they would be taking part in offshore accounting as much if not more than any other oligarch. Likewise, with the Israelis. Are we truly to believe that no Israelis are using offshore accounts?

Thus, it is curious indeed that such massive leaks seem directed at target nations and target individuals of the Anglo-American/NATO powers with little or no mention of nations or individuals belonging to the Anglo-American/NATO powers themselves.

For these reasons, the Panama Papers release has all the hallmarks of what might be considered a “limited hangout” operation. In other words, these leaks may very well be nothing more than an Anglo-American attack on geopolitical rivals and an exercise in a massive propaganda blitz against target nations and individuals.

Lastly, while some revelations do contain NATO allies like the Ukrainian President, the Saudis, United Arab Emirates, and Qataris, one must keep in mind the necessity of the “hangout” aspect of the “limited hangout,” i.e., the necessity to reveal something negative about the institution or nations actually releasing the “leaks” in order to provide authenticity of the documents and claims made therein but, at the same time, never revealing anything that would actually be practically damaging to the entity that originally provided the leak. A limited hangout is thus a type of data leak false flag, requiring a certain amount of incriminating data aimed back at the perpetrator so as to provide credibility but never enough to bring the heat back to the one who created and committed the leak to begin with.

There is also the possibility that the leaks implicating individuals and countries allied with the NATO powers are centered around a desire to weaken these allies who may have either outlived their usefulness or are, for whatever reason, refusing to comply fully with the NATO agenda.

Who Supports The Leaks?

With a leak of this magnitude containing such massive amounts of information, particularly when signs point to the possibility of the leak having been the product of a “limited hangout” operation, it is important to investigate those who produced, investigated, and reported the leak to begin with.

In addition to over 100 mainstream news organizations (themselves a questionable lot), an investigation into the leaks was undertaken by the International Consortium Of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). In regards to the Panama Papers, this may be all one really needs to know to understand the nature and purpose of the leak.

The ICIJ is a non-profit organization that describes itself by stating that it is a“global network ofmore than 190 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories.”

Yet the ICIJ is anything but independent. One need only take a look at the ICIJ’s sponsors and “funding supporters” to see a list of a number of powerful Foundations and color revolution organizations that have worked closely with the U.S. State Department in the past (and continue to do so today) for the purposes of overthrowing and destabilizing foreign governments for the geopolitical benefits of the United States government and those of the NATO bloc.

The ICIJ website itself lists the following organizations as “funding supporters:”

Recent ICIJ funders include: Adessium Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Fritt Ord Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Ford Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and Waterloo Foundation.

Even more telling, at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) website, the Panama Papers disclosure site, the OCCRP proudly displays “Who Supports Our Work” at the bottom of the page. Among the organizations supporting OCCRP are George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, a color revolution apparatus that works closely with the U.S. State Department as well as USAID, a wholly functioning arm of the U.S. State Department that has been involved in color revolutions across the world.

Thus, we have at least one direct connection between the Panama Papers leak and the U.S. State Department which is as strong as virtually any link made between the individuals exposed in the leaks and Putin or Assad. With this in mind, it is much easier to see what the true purpose of the leaks might be.

Conclusion

While many may have, at first, believed the Panama Papers leaks to be an instance of guerrilla hacking or some other form of grassroots activism against world oligarchs, all indications are that they are nothing more than an exercise in mass propaganda designed to paint certain “enemies” of the Western powers as corrupt and greedy, further demonizing them in the Western press and undermining their credibility and legitimacy in their own countries.

While this type of corruption may indeed be rampant in the overwhelming majority of cases across the world (including the United States, Israel, and the West), the Panama Papers appear to be nothing more than other propaganda assault conducted by the U.S. State Department and its host of interconnected color revolution agencies like the Ford Foundation, OSI, and USAID. Before activists rejoice, they should take a deeper look into the leaks and the source that produced them.

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.

With the support of the Obama administration, the Mexican government is operating a systematic operation to torture, beat, extort, kidnap, and kill migrants traveling through Mexico en route to find work in northern Mexico and the United States.

An April 4 report in the Guardian tells of several indigenous youngsters who were captured by officials with Mexico’s National Immigration Institute (INM), held in captivity, beaten, and deported to Guatemala. The young people, aged 15 to 24, had never been to Guatemala. They were residents of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and speakers of the Mayan language Tzeltal.

One 18-year-old was beaten by four Mexican agents who told him that he must sign documents admitting he was Guatemalan or be killed. “One pushed me, another was kicking my leg, and a third who was very fat gave me an electric shock here, on the back of my right hand,” the boy said. “I really thought I was going to die, so I signed lots of sheets of paper—but I can’t read or write so I didn’t know what I was signing.”

Mexican human rights groups accuse the Mexican government of rounding up Mexicans for deportation in order to fulfill quotas aimed at securing further weapons funding from the US government.

The Mexican government’s crackdown against migrants in Mexico is part of the “Southern Border Program” of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The program was announced in July 2014 and was praised by US President Barack Obama, who said in a January 2015 meeting with Peña Nieto:

“I very much appreciate Mexico’s efforts in addressing the unaccompanied children who we saw spiking during the summer. In part because of strong efforts by Mexico, including at its southern border, we’ve seen those numbers reduced back to much more manageable levels.”

Washington is directly implicated in the crimes carried out against migrants before they reach the United States. Between 2009 and 2013, the Obama administration provided $112 million in weapons and equipment through the Merida Initiative, a plan based on militarizing Mexican police and the INM. A February 2016 Congressional Research Service report showed that the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement also pledged over $86 million to Mexico for “mobile non-intrusive inspection equipment and related equipment and training for Mexico’s southern border strategy.”

Under the Obama administration, the US has given the Mexican government $3 billion to arm and militarize its security forces. In return, the Mexican police, military, and INM have assumed the role of US imperialism’s advance shock troops, terrorizing and deporting migrants in an effort to prevent their ultimate arrival in the US.

Children in particular have borne the brunt of the US-Mexican collusion against immigrants. As a result, a Georgetown Law report on Mexico’s migrant policy notes that “the United States has invested significant political and fiscal resources in the fortification of Mexico’s southern border” and that “the immigration system currently in place in Mexico operates more like a child-deportation machine.”

Since 2010 alone, the United States and Mexico have deported over 40,000 children back to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. With its Southern Border Program in full effect, Mexico, for the first time in 2015, has overtaken the United States in terms of the number of Central American child deportations. On top of those deported from the “Northern Triangle” countries listed above, the Obama administration has also deported tens of thousands of Mexican children and well over 2 million migrants in total.

Those that arrive in the United States are forced to live a life of fear and poverty. In January, the Obama administration launched a new round of raids aimed specifically at rounding up immigrant parents and their children. Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said that renewed family deportation raids “should come as no surprise. I have said publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed.”

In 2014, the Obama administration announced that it would reinstate mass detention of migrant families and began housing tens of thousands of migrants, including tens of thousands of orphan children, in cells for fast-tracked deportation. In August 2015, the Obama administration once again defended its family detention program in US District Court for the Central District of California.

The widespread government persecution migrant workers face once they arrive in the US has not deterred tens of thousands from seeking to escape the poverty and violence of Central America: from 2008 to 2014, the number of asylum applicants in the US has increased by 1,185 percent.

The poverty and violence that have devastated Central American society are not caused by unexplainable historical accidents. Rather, they are the product of the explicit policies of US imperialism, working in collusion with the corrupt national bourgeoisies to rob the working class and peasantry. The US has imposed the will of American banks and corporations on the masses of Latin America through dictatorship, death squads, and invasion.

Today, US imperialism can also count the bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist-inspired ex-guerrilla movements as its staunch supporters. These groups, once held-up as representatives of “socialism,” have fully integrated themselves into the bourgeois political establishment and are now primary conspirators in the ongoing attacks against the living standards of Latin American workers and peasants.

Spending on weapons and other military costs grew by more than one percent in 2015, marking the first year of growth in total military purchasing by governments worldwide since 2011, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found in a report published Tuesday.

Total military purchases reached $1,676 billion in 2015, or nearly $1.7 trillion, consuming some 2.3 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), SIPRI found.

The United States remained by far the leading financier of militarism worldwide, spending nearly $600 billion, according to SIPRI. The real figure rises as high as $1 trillion once the Pentagon’s “black budget,” “contingency” money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other hidden expenses are taken into account, according to the Center for International Policy.

The Chinese government continued to fund the second largest war machine, spending $215 billion last year. Military spending by states in Asia and Oceania in general surged by 5.4 percent in 2015, an increase driven by the intensifying US war drive against China, which has militarized the entire East Asia and Pacific region, boosting weapons purchases by a coalition of US-aligned regional states, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan.

“Heightening tensions between China and various countries in the region contributed to substantial increases in expenditure,” the SIPRI report notes.

“China continues to expand its military capabilities with imported and domestically produced weapons,” said SIPRI senior researcher Siemon Wezeman. “Neighbouring states such as India, Viet Nam and Japan are also significantly strengthening their military forces.”

A vastly outsized share of the growth in spending also came from Eastern European and Baltic governments aligned with the US-NATO strategic drive against Russia, including Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

Overall spending by Middle Eastern governments rose by at least 4 percent in 2015, the report found. Saudi Arabia rose to become the third largest spender in 2015, $87.2 billion in total and $5.3 billion on its year-old Yemen war alone.

The report noted the staggering rise in Iraq’s military budget, which grew by 536 percent from 2006 to 2015. Among the Middle Eastern powers, however, none came close to the US-backed Saudi monarchy, whose war budget surpassed that of Russia by more than $20 billion.

Russia, whose military is endlessly demonized in US and European media as the primary threat to world peace, spent only $66.4 billion in 2015, lagging well behind Washington’s favored semi-feudal client regime.

Governments worldwide are scrambling to beef up their forces in response to ongoing war scares and feverish geopolitical tensions. According to SIPRI, a subset of governments have implemented especially sharp upticks in their military spending in response to active or imminent regional conflicts, including Algeria, Azerbaijan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.

The overall growth of world war expediters came despite significant reductions by a handful of governments in response to plunging oil prices, including a 64 percent cut by Venezuela and a 42 percent cut by Angola.

In a supplementary report, “Military versus social expenditure: the opportunity cost of world military spending,” SIPRI examines the “military burden” imposed on economies and social infrastructure by the renewed arms bonanza.

The relentless siphoning of social resources into the global war industries is feeding conditions of mass deprivation in every region on the planet, and with special intensity in the ex-colonial and semi-colonial countries, where social spending is already minimal.

“In the past two to three years there have been particularly large increases in the military burden in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as in the subregion of North Africa,” SIPRI notes.

According to a 2015 assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the reallocation of a small fraction of yearly war spending towards socially valuable purposes would be sufficient to resolve a laundry list of problems plaguing world society.

The UN analysis found that only $265 billion annually would be required to end conditions of extreme poverty and hunger worldwide, a sum that amounts to less than 13 percent of annual worldwide war expenditures in 2015 prices.

An additional $240 billion, or 12 percent of annual military costs, would be sufficient to realize universal primary and early secondary education globally.

Four percent of annual military spending could guarantee universal agriculture and food security; three percent could insure universal water and sanitation; eleven percent for modern energy; and twelve percent could pay for universal telecommunications infrastructure, the UN found.

No governments or establishment political parties even pretend to pursue a program that would transfer arms funding to social spending along these lines.

Rational allocation of the immense wealth produced by the global economy is impossible within the historic framework of capitalism and imperialism, in which the various bourgeois governments are locked into a global struggle for markets, access to cheap labor and profits, in which the strength of their respective militaries plays a decisive role.

Far from slashing their expenditures in the name of social benefits and infrastructure, all states worldwide are striving to finance their militarist agendas through ever-greater levels of social cutbacks, exploitation and police repression against the working class.

Kansas was recently ravaged by the largest wildfire in its history. The Anderson Creek wildfire burned through roughly 400,000 acres of Kansas and Oklahoma over the course of four days last week, stymied only by an unseasonable snowfall on Easter morning.

Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a state of disaster emergency declaration for five counties last week. His state has been facing frequent abnormalweather, mostly in the form of unusually warm temperatures, which predispose it to record wildfires.

What we are seeing in Kansas is simply the micro of the macro, a symptom of a world that is increasingly susceptible to burning. We live on a planet that is approaching a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial average temperatures: a level not seen in the last 110,000 years.

Smoke rises along US Route 160, west of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, following a wildfire that ravaged the area, March 26, 2016. The blaze, which has scorched nearly 400,000 acres, is said to be the largest recorded wildfire in the state’s history and has prompted a vast mobilization of firefighters rarely seen in this state. (Photo: Craig Hacker / The New York Times)

Hotter, Longer, Larger

As Truthout reported this week, “NASA recently released data confirming that February was the warmest month ever measured globally, at 1.57 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline temperature average. The new record easily smashed the old global temperature record, which was set just one month before, in January.”

Hence, it should not come as a surprise that the record temperatures ushered in a record wildfire, and have us set up for what may well be yet another record wildfire season in the United States.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a group that describes itself as putting “rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet’s most pressing problems,” provides a sobering overview of how anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is contributing to wildfires. UCS research shows that wildfires in the Western United States are increasing in number, and wildfire season is becoming longer, due to ACD.

For example, the average number of annual wildfires larger than 1,000 acres was 140 per year between 1980 and 1989, but has increased dramatically to 250 per year between 2000 and 2012.

Additionally, the average length of the wildfire season was five months during the early 1970s, whereas now it is more than seven months long and increasing.

UCS research shows that another contributing factor to the escalation of wildfires across the Western United States is the fact that the winter snowpack is melting up to a full month earlier than it did in previous decades, and wildfires are now projected to burn more land than ever in the future.

Other prominent studies support what the UCS has found. Researchers from the University of Utah released a report showing that over the last three decades, wildfires across the Western United States have, indeed, been growing both larger and more frequent.

Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence from around the world continues to present itself in more dramatic fashion as time goes by.

“In Tasmania, bushfires have grown so severe that 1,000-year-old trees are burning to ash while dried-out peat bogs are rapidly catching fire,” Truthout reported this week. “Experts there are warning that what is happening in Tasmania is a human-caused calamity as severe as the razing of the temples in Palmyra by ISIS” (also known as Daesh).

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, 2015 was the worst wildfire season in the country’s history. By mid-October, the island nation saw more than 100,000 individual fires. Damages in that month alone reached more than $30 billion, and more than half a million people were reported sick from the smoke.

“In [the] next 30 years, we’re looking at pretty consistent disruption of current fire patterns for over half the planet — most of which involve increases” in severity, Max Moritz, a fire specialist based at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, warned back in 2012. His words are even more relevant today, as we head into what may be this planet’s worst wildfire season yet.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky

The following article by Prof. Valentin Katasonov, a distinguished Russian economist  was published three years ago by the Strategic Culture Foundation and Global Research.

The planning of the Panama Papers leaks on April 4, 2016 bears a canny resemblance, to a previous leak entitled Operation Offshore Leaks which was also implemented on April 4th (ie. exactly three years ago April 4, 2013) by the same consortium of international journalists (ICIJ). 

ICIJ website, dated April 3, 2013, released to media on April 4 

Why Did they Publish the Release on the same day, April 4th?

Valentin Katasonov describes the April 4, 2013 Offshore Leak as “a planned operation on a global scale”, with a simultaneous release by “the leading media companies of a variety of countries almost simultaneously issued a sensational news story claiming that an organisation called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has a rich database on offshore companies and their clients.” 

What was the Hidden Agenda?  

The overall volume of files at ICIJ’s disposal exceeds 260 gigabytes… That is 160 times more information than the embassy reports made public by Wikileaks in 2010… The ICIJ files consist of more than 2.5 million documents: the registration data of 122,000 offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands; lists of people who have made use of offshore companies; copies of personal documents including passports; correspondence; and information on banking transactions and other databases related to world-class politicians and businessmen, major companies and banks. The documents have a variety of dates, the very earliest of which came into existence 30 years ago. The names of 130,000 people from 170 countriesare also mentioned in the documents. (Katsanov, April 2013), 

Now compare that April 2013 quote to the recent SudDeutsche Zeitung writeup. The April 4, 2016 release is of a similar nature to that of April 4, 2013: 

The Panama Papers include approximately 11.5 million documents – more than the combined total of the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks. The data primarily comprises e-mails, pdf files, photo files, and excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database. It covers a period spanning from the 1970s to the spring of 2016. (Panama Papers, 4 July 2016)

Deja Vu?

The History of this project is carefully described in Katasonov’s article.  The same protagonists on April 4th 2013, the BBC, The Guardian, etc:

“Offshore Leaks a planned operation ….

 The bulk of the work was carried out in the field. It turns out that the project’s most prominent external participants were the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British newspaper The Guardian.” 

As pointed out by Katasonov, “the main targets are not the offshore companies” which have direct links to Citibank, HSBC, UBS, Deutsche Bank, et al, “but to individual oligarchs, politicians and government officials.” 

Katasanov confirms that:  

At the end of 2012, a tiny fragment from the database on offshore companies (DOC) was published which related to a dozen offshore companies and their management structures. It was an all-powerful delayed-action mine.

The third stage began early in April 2013. Separate fragments of the database were made public through the media of a variety of countries. In each country, there were several «authorised» media companies that were selected.

…

In connection with the offshore scandal, a number of people have had their cover blown in the press, including: the campaign treasurer for French President François Hollande, Jean-Jacques Augier; Mongolia’s former Finance minister, Bayartsogt Sangajav; Venezuela Army General José Eliécer Pinto Gutiérrez; two sons of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, Tomás and Geronimo; the daughter of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc; the Sheikh of Kuwait Sabah Jaber al-Ali al-Sabah; a leading art collector, Spanish Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza; the former wife of oil trader Marc Rich, Denise Rich; and British millionaire Scot Young, who has been convicted of fraud. The media also mentioned Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev along with members of his family, Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, Kazakh businessman Mukhtar Ablyazov, and co-owner of the company RosUkrEnergo, Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash.

For a historical review of the Offshore Leak and the Panama Papers, read the April 2013 article by Prof. Valentin Katasonov.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Editor, April 5, 2016

*      *      *

Tax Free Offshore Banking Havens: Hidden Agenda behind Operation “Offshore Leaks”?

by Valentin Katasonov

Strategic Culture Foundation and Global Research

April 17, 2013

From the beginning of April this year, the subject of «Offshore leaks» has become a favourite with the world’s media. Even the issue of Cyprus has paled in significance. Loosely speaking, «Offshore leaks» can be defined as the leakage of sensitive information about offshore companies and their clients.

Offshore leaks is a planned operation

We are talking about a planned operation on a global scale. On 4 April, the leading media companies of a variety of countries almost simultaneously issued a sensational news story claiming that an organisation called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has a rich database on offshore companies and their clients. The overall volume of files at ICIJ’s disposal exceeds 260 gigabytes… That is 160 times more information than the embassy reports made public by Wikileaks in 2010… The ICIJ files consist of more than 2.5 million documents: the registration data of 122,000 offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands; lists of people who have made use of offshore companies; copies of personal documents including passports; correspondence; and information on banking transactions and other databases related to world-class politicians and businessmen, major companies and banks. The documents have a variety of dates, the very earliest of which came into existence 30 years ago. The names of 130,000 people from 170 countriesare also mentioned in the documents.

The first phase of the operation involved an anonymous person collecting raw data on offshore companies. We do not know how long they collected the information for or which methods were used to obtain the information. It is possible that the ICIJ and individual journalists know the answers to these questions, but they are keeping silent. They give one answer: we cannot jeopardise our informant. It should be noted, however, that it would have been practically impossible for a single person to have obtained such a large amount of information. Incidentally, the idea that it was a lone person has already appeared in the press. It is exactly the same wild assumption as the idea that 11 September 2001 was the work of a group of terrorists under the command of Bin Laden.

The second phase began in January 2012, when the database on offshore companies was anonymously passed on to the organisation ICIJ. It was a huge array of weakly-structured and weakly-organised information. In fact, the ICIJ then had to set about reorganising this half-finished information. At this stage, the ICIJ used the media capabilities of a number of countries, as well as their own journalists. The bulk of the work was carried out in the field. It turns out that the project’s most prominent external participants were the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British newspaper The Guardian. During the course of the work, journalists involved in the project added new information to the data obtained from the anonymous source. Programmers and IT specialists from the US, Great Britain and Costa Rica were also involved. At this stage, the operation was given the official name: «Secrecy For Sale: Inside The Global Offshore Money Maze». At this point, the work was not only not hidden, it was even advertised in the media. At the end of 2012, a tiny fragment from the database on offshore companies (DOC) was published which related to a dozen offshore companies and their management structures. It was an all-powerful delayed-action mine.

The third stage began early in April 2013. Separate fragments of the database were made public through the media of a variety of countries. In each country, there were several «authorised» media companies that were selected. In Russia, for example, the «authorised» media companies were Vedomosti and Novaya Gazeta. It is remarkable that as the organisation holding the DOC, the ICIJ prohibited those national media companies that had use of the DOC from passing on any of the database’s documents to law-enforcement agencies or other authoritative bodies in their own countries. Apparently, there is a risk that their informants could be exposed. There has already been a report that the German media refused to provide information on local tax evaders mentioned in the documents released at the beginning of April to the appropriate authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The third stage, involving the measured release of information from the DOC, could last for many years. However, the first sections of this «explosive information» could already lead to a revolutionary upheaval of the current world order.

Offshore leaks: goals, aims and motives

Many people are asking a simple question: what are the operation’s goals?

There is the official goal referred to by the ICIJ, of course. This is the battle with offshore companies that have become a «black hole» in the economy, an insurmountable obstacle to social and economic development.

It is difficult to dispute the fact that the process of the «offshoreisation» of the global economy has gone too far. The most recent valuations of the assets hidden in the shadows of offshore companies are between 21 and 32 trillion dollars (almost double the global GDP). Measured on a global scale, annual losses to state budgets alone as a result of offshore company clients avoiding taxes amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. As of 2011, losses to the US budget from the non-payment of taxes are estimated at 345 billion dollars, including 100 billion dollars as a result of tax evaders using offshore companies. In the European Union, losses are reaching 1 trillion euros through the use of tax optimisation schemes and a flagrant refusal to pay taxes. It is not known how much of this can be put down to the use of offshore companies, however.  On the basis of America’s percentage ratio, we get 290 billion euros, or at least 350 billion dollars. Altogether, annual tax losses to the EU and the US as a result of offshore «loopholes» amount to nearly 450 billion dollars.

Many believe that the battle with offshore companies is just an excuse to cover up other aims. An overview of the world’s media shows that in many of the reports, the main targets are not the offshore companies as such, but individual oligarchs, politicians and government officials. Individual countries are also cited as «targets». World-renowned banks, transnational corporations and financial groups are also sometimes cited.

One theory behind the operation’s true motives is that it is specifically aimed at dealing a blow to certain offshore companies in order to outrun the money and clients in a small group of «select» and «untouchable» offshore companies. Note that almost all of the documents in the DOC relate to an offshore territory called the British Virgin Islands (BVI). Owing to a high level of confidentiality regarding information on company owners, this area is one of the most reliable and popular offshore territories. Since 1984, when the British overseas territory declared itself a «tax haven», the islands have sold more than one million companies, the true owners of which have never been revealed. As well as the BVI, other offshore territories are mentioned in the ICIJ press release, including Singapore, Hong Kong and the Cook Islands. However, it should be emphasised that they are mentioned only insofar as they serve as «offshoots» of the British Virgin Islands.

There are also other theories behind the operation’s true goals: not to «blitz» a particular offshore company, but to stabilise the global economy as a whole, to cause a political crisis in certain countries and, ultimately, to move the world into a state of controlled chaos. Moreover, the operation «Offshore leaks» is not regarded as self-contained, but as part of a much larger, global plan. In which case, operation «Offshore leaks» is a logical continuation of the operation to undermine the banking system of the offshore island of Cyprus.

Of course, one can only judge the aims of operation «Offshore leaks» hypothetically. The most important organisation involved in the project, ICIJ, itself raises a number of questions. There is little information about it. All that is known is that it was established in 1997, its headquarters are situated in Washington and it includes nearly 160 journalists from 60 countries (88 journalists from 46 countries were involved in operation «Offshore leaks»).ICIJ was created as a project of the large non-profit organisation Center for Public Integrity (CPI). The Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation act as sponsors of CPI. All of this inclines one to think that the operation really does have global aims.

The central characters of «Offshore leaks»

In the first batch of materials published in the media, we see all kinds of people. They are able to appear in the documents under a variety of titles: beneficiary, shareholder, proprietor, owner, recipient of «trust services», director, owner, co-owner, principal etc. They are all nevertheless united by the fact that they are «tax evaders». The list includes the names of politicians and government officials, businessmen and speculators, members of wealthy families and bankers from a variety of countries – the USA, Great Britain, France, Canada and Germany to Russia, the Ukraine, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Iran, Indonesia, India and the Philippines. The Guardian points out that according to the documentation, the largest number of offshore company owners are located in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Russian Federation and former Soviet republics. The list also includes the names of 4,000 US citizens.

In connection with the offshore scandal, a number of people have had their cover blown in the press, including: the campaign treasurer for French President François Hollande, Jean-Jacques Augier; Mongolia’s former Finance minister, Bayartsogt Sangajav; Venezuela Army General José Eliécer Pinto Gutiérrez; two sons of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, Tomás and Geronimo; the daughter of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc; the Sheikh of Kuwait Sabah Jaber al-Ali al-Sabah; a leading art collector, Spanish Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza; the former wife of oil trader Marc Rich, Denise Rich; and British millionaire Scot Young, who has been convicted of fraud. The media also mentioned Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev along with members of his family, Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, Kazakh businessman Mukhtar Ablyazov, and co-owner of the company RosUkrEnergo, Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash.

As well as offshore companies and individuals, the documents also mentioned various intermediaries who act like a kind of «pilot» for individuals and companies who find themselves in the intricate maze of tax havens. The different intermediaries include legal firms, trust funds, banks, «construction» companies and so on. The intermediaries sometimes act as beneficiaries, but only interim ones. These interim beneficiaries sometimes form complex chains in order to safely keep the real owner, the ultimate beneficiary, a secret. As for the role of banks in offshore schemes, the German banking giant Deutsche Bank, the American company JP Morgan and the Swiss companies UBS and Clariden are the most active, according to ICIJ.

Several days have passed since the first volley of gunfire from «Offshore leaks». Government and political figures in a number of countries have had time to respond. The internal revenue services and law-enforcement agencies in Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, India and Greece have declared that they will be looking into the issue of checking the published facts that relate to their own citizens. Luxembourg’s finance minister, meanwhile, has declared that he is ready to cooperate with other EU countries regarding the exchange of information on banks’ clients who are avoiding paying taxes.

This means that the main country for offshore banking in continental Europe has made it clear it is ready, on the heels of Switzerland, to begin dismantling its institution of banking secrecy. The Austrian government is the only one that has decided to go against the flow. It has appeased the clients of Austrian banks by announcing that it does not intend to hand them over to the tax authorities of other countries.

Professor Vladimir Katasonov is an Associate Member of the Russian Academy of Economic Science and Business

This article was first published by Global Research in August 2012

A new Tax Justice Network (TJN) USA report reveals an estimated $21 – $32 trillion of hidden and stolen wealth stashed largely tax-free secretly.

Titled “The Price of Offshore Revisited,” it explains what financial insiders know but won’t discuss. Many of them have their own hidden wealth.

TJN describes a “subterranean” systemic “economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole.” The higher estimate above exceeds US GDP twofold.

It’s mind-boggling. It’s hard imagining a tiny percent of privileged elites control this much wealth secretly. It’s worse knowing it’s largely tax free. It’s appalling that governments let them get away with it.

Wall Street and other major banks manage it. Their business is fraud and grand theft. Private banking operations yield huge profits. Keeping funds secreted tax free attracts rich clients. Private capital globally is attracted. It’s welcome from anyone, “no questions asked.”

Government policies protect them. Societal costs are huge. Tax justice is absent. Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley once said only little people pay taxes. TJN’s report bears her out.

A vast “global offshore industry” is explained. It’s largely tax-free. It’s controlled by the world’s richest, most powerful elites. Estimating amounts secreted takes tedious data mining.

Previous estimates relied more on rough judgments. TJN used several methods. They include available data sources, estimation methods, and core assumptions. They’re open to peer review and public scrutiny.

Four key approaches were used:

(1) A “sources-and-uses” country-by-country model.

(2) An “accumulated offshore wealth” model.

(3) An “offshore investor portfolio” model.

(4) Best-guess estimates of offshore assets held by the world’s top 50 private banks.

Familiar Wall Street, European, and other global financial institutions comprise them.

Current data gotten from global central banks, the World Bank, IMF, UN, and national accounts were used. Other evidence includes:

(1) “Transfer mispricing” data.

(2) Demand for cross-border liquid “mattress money” data.

(3) Current research data on the offshore private banking market’s size.

TJN believes its work comprises the “most rigorous and comprehensive” data ever produced. It challenges anyone to contest it.

In overall size through 2010, it estimates hidden global wealth at from $21 – $32 trillion. It’s invested “virtually tax-free” through a still-expanding black hole of more than 80 secret jurisdictions. It calls estimates conservative.

Developed countries don’t face debt problems. They’ve got huge offshore tax evasion ones. Repatriation would reduce debt substantially. Doing so would bring it well within tolerable levels.

Only financial wealth is included. Much else isn’t measured. It includes real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold, art, and other categories not easily quantified.

The offshore economy alone has an enormous negative impact on the domestic tax bases of affected countries. They’ve had significant private capital outflows for years, decades or longer.

TJN focused on 139 countries. They’re mainly “low-middle income” ones. The World Bank and IMF maintain data on them.

Since the 1970s, private bankers let rich elites accumulate trillions in hidden wealth. At the same time, these nations experienced structural adjustment harshness.

They became debt-entrapped. Some borrowed themselves into insolvency. They sold off public assets at fire sale prices. They impoverished their people. They colluded with big money interests at their expense.

Through 2010, they accumulated over $4 trillion in debt. Minus foreign reserves invested in First World securities, it’s $2.8 trillion. Including hidden wealth, they’re net lenders.

Key is that assets of these countries are held by wealthy elites. Ordinary people bear the burden of debts.

In the 1980s, an unnamed Fed official said:

“The problem is not that these countries don’t have any assets. The problem is they’re all in Miami” and other global cities. They’re home to private financial institutions.

Hidden offshore wealth correlates positively with loan amounts to indebted countries. Large amounts of borrowed capital were secreted lawlessly in global tax havens.

Local elites continue “vot(ing) with financial feet.” At the same time, their public sectors borrow heavily and ordinary people go begging.

Although First World countries borrow most, they and elites in them remain global financiers.

Wealth is concentrated in select private hands “in a handful of source countries.” Many are regarded as debtors.

Through 2010, 50 top private banks managed over $12 trillion in cross-border assets from individual clients,  trusts and foundations.

Smaller banks, investment firms, insurers, and non-bank intermediaries like hedge funds and independent money managers handle additional amounts up to an overall $32 trillion estimate.

TJN calls these enablers part of a global “tax injustice system.” Complicit governments let them operate at the expense of their own people.

“Since the late 1970s, investigative journalists, tax authorities, drug enforcement officials, terrorist trackers, national security experts,” and others became aware about vast amounts of money stashed in “offshore” tax havens.

Private banking “professional enablers” manage it. They make fortunes doing it. The term “offshore” refers less to physical locations than virtual ones anywhere. They’re often “networks of legal and quasi-legal entities and arrangements.” They operate in the interests of money managers.

Physical locations can be anywhere. Legal structures typically are assets owned by anonymous offshore companies in one jurisdiction. Trusts are in another. Trustees are in multiple places globally.

Clients are rich elites, companies, and criminals. They include real estate speculators, technology tycoons, oil sheiks, underworld millionaires, heads of state, despots, and drug lords, among others. Their common needs include:

(1) Anonymity and confidentiality.

(2) Minimizing or avoiding taxes.

(3) Skilled money management.

(4) Ability to access and manage their wealth anywhere.

(5) Secure places to reside, visit, or hide.

(6) Assured financial security no matter what’s happening in the real world.

Skilled professionals provide these services globally. Money management happens in a virtual world. They live under one set of rules. Another exists for all others. It’s gone on for decades. Global banks thrive on it. It’s one of their most profitable operations.

Physical locations operate from Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Nauru, St. Kitts, Antigua, Tortola, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, and elsewhere.

Over 3.5 million paper companies, thousands of shell banks and insurers, more than half the world’s registered commercial ships above 100 tons, and tens of thousands of shell subsidiaries of giant global banks, accounting firms, and various other companies operate there.

Nonetheless, conventional havens are misleading. Despite their vast financial infrastructure, most super-rich elites want more security. They also need easy access to First World capital markets, competent attorneys and accountants, independent judiciaries, and laws protecting them.

Professional “enablers” provide all needed services. Managing vast wealth is complex. Many skills are required. They include financial, economic, legal, accounting, and insurance. Super-rich elites demand and get the best.

Haven locations offer more than tax avoidance. Almost anything goes on. It includes fraud, bribery, illegal gambling, money laundering, human and sex trafficking, arms dealing, toxic waste dumping, conflict diamonds and endangered species trafficking, bootlegged software, and endless other lawless practices.

It’s impossible to estimate total lawful and illegal wealth from all sources. It’s vastly more than estimates within the parameters of TJN’s study. Credit Suisse tried.

Through mid-2011, it puts total financial and non-financial global wealth at $231 trillion. It’s a best guess. It’s tenfold TJN’s top figure. It’s mind-boggling. It’s roughly 3.5 times global GDP. In 2011, it was about $65 trillion.

Imagine the good a small percent of global wealth could do for billions of disadvantaged people. Imagine its ability to stabilize and recapitalize troubled countries. Imagine a world where everyone shares its wealth. Imagine one worth living in.

Global wealth represents low-hanging fruit out of reach. Instead of everyone benefitting, few do at the expense of all others. Injustice that great begs for transformational change. From the bottom up is the only way possible. Shedding light on what’s dark is a good way to start.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour