Global Research

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was signed into law as a federal holiday in 1983. I do not wish to trivialize this accomplishment: it took great persistence by civil society groups and it had to conquer serious opposition. Yet what it has established is an indigestible paradox in the nation’s list of saints and heroes.

Recall that the jury in the 1999 civil trial examining the assassination reached a startling conclusion on December 8, 1999: US government agencies had conspired successfully to kill Dr. King.

Mainstream media carried little about this trial and verdict in 1999 and they persist in ignoring it to this day.

See Global Research article: 

Court Decision: U.S. “Government Agencies” Found Guilty in Martin Luther King’s Assassination by Carl Herman, January 18, 2016

When challenged they tend to say that the claims were muddy and confused and vulnerable to easy refutation. Actually, the plaintiffs’ case was strong, and the jury, after sitting and listening to presentation of evidence and argument from November 15 to December 8, was quickly able to reach consensus on the verdict. The great variety of evidence presented by attorney William Pepper pointed to the impossibility of the lone assassin hypothesis (James Earl Ray) and to the conspiring of several bodies, including the local police (Memphis Police Department), the mafia (local representative Frank Liberto), and federal police, intelligence and military units. In other words, the combination of forces that carried out the murder was not very different from that which had killed President Kennedy. Such was the planning, the commitment, and the determination of the assassins that there was little chance Dr. King could have survived the day. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Reading the transcript of this trial takes some time (it’s about 2700 pages long), but having done so I am impressed by attorney Pepper’s persistence and skill in getting to the heart of this matter. Yet if the findings are to have political force, and if the mainstream media persist in pretending the trial never took place, it falls to active citizens to do their part to make the trial and the findings known. They should tell people about this trial, encourage people to read it, quote from it, and emphasize its importance. They should not let it be trivialized (as the current Wikipedia article on Martin King tries to do) by pretending the claims of government conspiracy were weak and have been refuted—they have not.

King was killed not just because he was a civil rights activist, but because he was planning the Poor People’s Campaign, which would have involved nonviolent disruption of business as usual in Washington on behalf of all of the nation’s poor, whatever their colour. This made the 1% uncomfortable. King was also killed because he had passionately criticized his country’s pursuance of the Vietnam War—his major denunciation of that war at Riverside Church in New York City had taken place one year to the day before he was killed. The eloquent and uncompromising talk had made everyone from President Johnson to the U.S. military and intelligence communities uncomfortable.

Far from being confused and muddy, I think the central arguments presented in 1999 have been quite well established. Moreover, there was little sophistication in the attempts to buy off and threaten James Earl Ray, to discourage and even kill eyewitnesses, and to pretend against all evidence that government investigations had been thorough and had found nothing to seriously question the case against Ray.

The truth is that the lone gunman theory bit the dust in 1999, and anyone who attempts to resurrect it had better be able to challenge chapter and verse of this civil trial.

For those who have not read the trial transcript, I shall end with an exemplifying segment—worth quoting to friends who might be unfamiliar with it.

This material is taken directly, with only minor omissions, from the court transcript of testimony given in mid-afternoon, November 30th, 1999.

A former Memphis Yellow Cab driver, Louis Ward, is on the stand answering questions put to him by attorney William Pepper. Ward describes what a fellow cab driver, Paul Butler, saw and reported as an eyewitness to the assassination and its aftermath. Why Butler himself was not on the stand will eventually become clear.

Some of these details were reported by Butler via car radio right after the assassination, while Ward heard other details face-to-face from Butler a bit later in the day.

 “…as I raised up and looked, that rifle 
popped — it didn’t sound like a rifle, it sounded like two boards clapped together. And he said, I seen his jaw and part of his neck blowed away. It was like he had a stick of dynamite in his mouth. He said, as I wheeled and looked, I seen a cluster of smoke coming up out of the bushes, and then I seen the guy come running up. He didn’t have no rifle. But he said, I know that he is the one that had to shoot him. And then he
headed towards the — headed north towards 
the squad car.
And, of course, we thought the
police had picked him up. Because it was a
 black and white squad car… 

Q. So he’s telling you that after the
 shot he saw a man come out of the bushes –


A. Yes, sir.


Q. — run up north on Mulberry Street –


A. Yes, sir.


Q. — and get into a squad car — a
traffic –


A. Traffic squad car, black and white,
mm-hum.


Q. Which was parked where?


A. He said about a half a block north of
the motel.


Q. And then what happened to that car?


A. Well, he said they headed north. We thought he picked — well, he come back on the radio and said the police has picked him up and they headed north with him. You could hear the tires were squealing. So we thought the police had already picked up the guy that done the shooting.


Q. I see. So both you and Mr. Butler
had thought that the police had apprehended the shooter.


A. Yes.


Q. What happened next? Did any police
come out to the airport?


A. Yes. While I’m standing there
talking, a squad car drove up with a
lieutenant and a patrolman…And the lieutenant wrote the report down that he [Butler] had and told him that they would be back in contact with him. So they got in the squad car and left after they got the report.


Q. So they took a report from Mr. Butler
and they — they left. Where were you standing when that report was being taken? 

A. Oh, probably — when they came up, I
was standing up next to him. When they came up, I backed away, probably 3 or 4 feet out of their way, where they would have plenty of clearance. But I was close enough that he gave them the same report that he gave me. 

Q. You overheard this report being given?


A. Yes, sir.


Q. All right. Then what happened next?


A. Well, they called — the dispatcher
called him to come in to the headquarters. We have a headquarters. Said he was wanted down there. Well, later on that night, not
too much later, I was in town and drove by
the cab company and there was several squad
cars down there. And I figured that they
were, you know, taking some more reports.
And then I found out later that he was
supposed to be at court at 9 o’clock the next
morning.


Q. He was supposed to give a
statement –


A. Yes, sir.


Q. — the next morning? And how many
squad cars were around Yellow’s offices that
night?


A. There were several. I would say
seven or eight. Might have been more, might
have been five or six. But I just noticed
there were several squad cars sitting there.
I didn’t count them.


Q. Seven or eight Memphis Police Department cars around Yellow’s headquarters that night?


A. Yes, sir.


[Two weeks then pass before Ward goes back to Yellow’s headquarters, when the following takes place.]

Q. When was the next time you actually
went into the offices and –

A. Oh, it was — well, I went into the
office when I first came back to work. I
went in then. That’s when I — I asked him
about Mr. Butler.


Q. Who did you ask about Mr. Butler?


A. There was four or five cab drivers
standing around talking. And I just asked
them. And that’s when they told me — I
don’t even remember which one told me. But he said he had been throwed out of a high- speed automobile between Memphis and West Memphis. And they found him about 10 o’clock the next day.
[April 5, 1968]

Q. They said he was thrown out of a
high-speed automobile. When was he thrown out of that automobile?


A. The next — the next morning. They
said they found his body about 10 o’clock or 10:30 the next morning. He was supposed to
have been in court at 9 o’clock that morning

and he wasn’t there. They found his car
there at the cab company. And — but he
wasn’t — he wasn’t — never made it to
court. But then about 10:30 they said they
found his body between Memphis and West
Memphis.

And so it is that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, finding its way into the nation’s calendar of saints and heroes, has the potential to shake this calendar of myths and fibs into pieces.

“Sanctions” Against Russia-Iran: Economic Aggression Revisited

By Christopher Black, January 15 2016

False hopes raised in some quarters that the American vassal states in Europe would act independently and favour more cooperation with Russia and Iran have once again been shown to be so much wishful thinking, based on a false assessment of the extent of the unhappiness in some business sectors with the effect of the “sanctions” on European economies.

Caught With Our Pants Down in the Persian Gulf. US Navy Personnel Arrested by Iran

By Justin Raimondo, January 16 2016

Your bullshit-ometer should be making an awful racket in response to the shifting explanations given for the twenty-four-hour Iranian hostage scare involving two US Navy boats intercepted in the Gulf.

Israeli and AIPAC Big Lies About Iran’s Intended Use of “Unfrozen Financial Assets”

By Stephen Lendman, January 17 2016

AIPAC devotes a section on its web site to malicious Big Lies about Iran intending use of its unfrozen assets to spread its nonexistent “malign global influence,” once international sanctions are lifted this weekend as expected.

US Imposes Sanctions on Iran for Ballistic Missile Program

By Press TV, January 18 2016

The US Department of the Treasury says it has imposed new sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program. The Treasury Department made the announcement in a statement issued on Sunday…

“The Day After” ….The Implementation of the Iran Nuclear Deal. The US Has Never Sought Peace

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, January 18 2016

Not the movie about a fictional war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact and a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, but the Day After the Implementation Deal of the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Although I said and wrote repeatedly in the past that the US stance toward Iran will not change, by now it should be obvious to all that this is the case. America “thanked” Iran by imposing further sanctions on Iran for its defense capabilities – the ballistic missiles.

If we all share a common dream of some balance in this world, which would hopefully lead to more security for all, here is what must happen.

With the nuclear-related UNSC sanctions against Iran lifted, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SC)) must IMMEDIATELY include Iran in the SCO as a full member. The alternate is not pretty.

While some Iranian ‘reformists’ have written that ‘America needs Iran’, the truth of the matter is a more just and balanced world needs Iran, foremost Russia and China. The United States has not abandoned its aspirations of becoming a global hegemon. The US has never sought peace. Peace and expansion/domination are incompatible.

In 1941, Isaiah Bowman, a key figure in the Council on Foreign Relations wrote: “The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory.”

True to this, after the Cold War, Prominent Americans such as Wolfowitz and Rustow opined that it was important to contain Russia (the Heartland – Defense Planning Guideline 1992, 1993). It was felt that the domination of the Heartland (Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia) would lead to the domination of the World. Events in the past several years confirm the implementation stages of the plan.

As recently as April, 2015, during a speech at the Army War College Strategy Conference, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work elaborated on how the Pentagon plans to counter the three types of wars supposedly being waged by Iran, Russia, and China. These goals have been facilitated with the Nuclear Deal. Let us consider.

The deal buys America time. Iran’s strength has been its ability to retaliate to any attack by closing down the Strait of Hormuz. Given that 17 million barrels of oil a day, or 35% of the world’s seaborne oil exports go through the Strait of Hormuz, incidents in the Strait would be fatal for the world economy. Enter Nigeria (West Africa) and Yemen.

In 1998, Clinton’s national security agenda made it clear that unhampered access to Nigerian oil and other vital resources was a key US policy. In early 2000s, Chatham House was one of the publications that determined African oil would be a good alternate to Persian Gulf oil IN CASE OF OIL DISRUPTION.This followed a strategy paper for US to move toward African oil. Push for African oil was on Dick Cheney’s desk on May 31, 2000. In 2002, the Israeli based IASPS suggested America push toward African oil. In the same year Boko Haram was ‘founded’.

In 2007, AFRICOM helped consolidate this push into the region. The 2011, a publication titled: “Globalizing West African Oil: US ‘energy security’ and the global economy” outlined ‘US positioning itself to use military force to ensure African oil continued to flow to the United States’. This was but one strategy to supply oil in addition to or as an alternate to the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

Enter Yemen. To understand the geopolitics of the Saudi war against Yemen, it is imperative to read “The Geopolitics Behind the War in Yemen: The Start of a New Front against Iran” written by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya. Nazemroaya correctly states: “[T] he US wants to make sure that it could control the Bab Al-Mandeb, the Gulf of Aden, and the Socotra Islands. The Bab Al-Mandeb it is an important strategic chokepoint for international maritime trade and energy shipments that connects the Persian Gulf via the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea via the Red Sea. It is just as important as the Suez Canal for the maritime shipping lanes and trade between Africa, Asia, and Europe.”

In 2012, several alternate routes to Strait of Hormuz were identified which at the time of the report were considered to be limited in capacity and more expensive. However, collectively, the West African oil and control of Bab Al-Mandeb would diminish the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz in case of war.

A very important consideration is the stark fact that the fallout from bombing an operating uranium enrichment facility with several hundred kilograms of enriched uranium would create an environmental catastrophe which would dwarf all nuclear accidents to date killing millions of people. The Iran Nuclear Deal greatly reduces the scope of the ensuing disaster should such steps be taken.

All this is of course speculation.

There is no doubt that the primary goal of the United States is to install a Washington friendly compliant regime in Iran. But what if it fails? Has Washington spent billions of dollars to undermine and destroy the Iranian revolution, decades in demonizing the people only to change its mind? Isn’t this the same scenario we hoped would be the outcome of the end of the Cold War only to learn that Washington continued a covert war against Russia?

What’s happening in China? Is it becoming the locus of the next financial crisis? Some well positioned capitalists are beginning to suggest so, including no less than that guru of global hedge fund and financial speculators, George Soros. The Bank of Central Banks, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Geneva, is saying the same; so too are a growing list of research departments of major global banks ,like UBS and Societe General in Europe.

China today is facing a convergence of several major forces that threaten not only to drive its economy and financial system into further and faster contraction and instability, but threaten as well to destabilize the rest of the global economy, especially emerging markets.

Instability #1: Imploding Stock Markets

In early January 2016, China’s main stock markets, the Shanghai and Schenzen, fell steeply to levels that required the government to suspend trading, i.e. to shut them down. Since December 22, 2015, in just two weeks, China stock markets have contracted by more than 20 percent, in what is a third ‘leg down’ since China’s markets began first imploding last June 12, 2015.

Initially having risen by 120 percent to bubble levels in 2014-2015, China’s markets contracted -32 percent by early July. Intervention by its central bank and government thereafter briefly stabilized prices. China then devalued its currency, the Yuan, in late August and the markets fell a second time, by -42 percent. After a short recovery last fall, a third and most recent collapse of 20 percent in early January 2016 has resulted in stock values falling about -50 percent from their previous May-June 2015 highs.

After three intervention efforts requiring US$500 billion by China’s central bank and government over the past six months to stabilize the stock implosion, it has become clear that China authorities cannot prevent the markets from imploding still further. Analysts predict China’s stock index will fall to 2000 from its current 2900, and its June 2015 highs of more than 5000. That’s about a -65 percent fall, which is roughly equivalent to the collapse of U.S. stocks in 2008-09.

That kind of stock market collapse suggests China may be beginning to experience a financial crisis roughly equivalent to the U.S. financial crash of 2008-09. Stock market crashes of such dimensions are signs of either actual, or impending, near-depression conditions.

Instability #2: Currency Decline & Capital Flight

With a stock market collapse underway, wealthy Chinese investors, speculators, and China’s more than 6,000 estimated shadow banks (there were no shadow banks in 2008), are all desperately selling stock. Stock sales in Yuan are then being converted to dollars and other global currencies. The money is then sent out of China to invest abroad. Estimates of capital flight from China last year in 2015 are estimated at around US$1 trillion.

To try to stem the outflow, China authorities have been intervening in global currency markets to try to keep currency values from falling precipitously. More than US$100 billion was used to prop up the currency in December 2015 alone. But like the US$500 billion spent the past six months to intervene to stop the stock price collapse, China central bank and government attempts to prop up China’s currency have proved equally ineffective at stemming the decline in its currency, which has already devalued since last summer by 6 percent to the dollar, as pressure continues to build for still more devaluation.

Unable to prevent both its stock market implosion and further devaluations, the impression globally is growing that China is progressively losing control of growing economic instability.
The stock selling and collapse is feeding the currency devaluation and vice-versa. Investors and speculators are selling stock converting Yuan to dollars and driving down the currency’s value; in turn the declining currency is encouraging investors to sell stocks in a currency that is falling in value. In other words, a mutual downward spiral is underway.

Instability #3: Slowing Real Economy

Behind the stock-currency spiral is China’s real economy that is slowing faster than China official statistics indicate. China’s real economy, measured in GDP, is slowing far more rapidly than the government’s estimated 6.9 percent. Independent sources looking at rail and freight traffic, electricity usage, manufacturing output, and other such indicators, suggest China’s growth rate may in fact average around 5 percent. Some estimates are suggesting as low as 3 percent annual growth today. Its manufacturing sector has contracted every month throughout 2015. Export growth is negative. Industrial production and real investment growth rates are half of what they were in 2014. Prices for industrial goods are deflating and for consumer goods and services rapidly disinflating.

China’s slowing real economy means corporate profit declines and even defaults, which encourages investors to dump and sell stocks; stock and currency translates by various channels into further corporate profits decline. The problem is particularly acute among state owned and old ‘industrial’ enterprises, which have become massively indebted since 2009 and increasingly unable to secure financing even to continue production operations.

Thus these three elements—slowing real economy, stock implosion, and currency devaluation—are now feeding back upon and exacerbating each other. The downward spiral is intensifying.

Overlaid on all the three elements are the slowing global economy and slowing demand for China exports, the global currency wars intensified by recent Europe and Japan QE programs which will expand still further in 2016, and spreading recessions in emerging markets, barely growing or stagnating economies in Europe and Japan, and the concurrent collapse of global oil prices, now at US$29 a barrel and in some places, like Canada, as low as US$15.

In other words, growing fragility in the global economy outside China makes the global economy today more sensitive to growing instability within China itself, and vice-versa. China and the global economy are feeding off each other negatively as well: China destabilizing the rest of the global economy and that destabilization negatively impacting China as well.

Instability #4: Corporate Debt and Non-Performing Loans

This China-global interaction is taking place, moreover, on a tinderbox of debt in China, as well as globally. Total global debt, mostly business debt, has increased by no less than US$50 trillion since 2009. China’s total debt represents no less than half of that US$50 trillion, having risen from US$7.4 trillion in 2007 to more than US$30 trillion today. Moreover, even more ominous, about US$2.5 trillion of its US$19 trillion corporate debt represents non-performing business loans in China today.

As stock markets and currency declines, as old industrial companies slide deeper into trouble and can’t raise money capital, and as revenue from exports slows for China, it means China corporations (and local governments) will face increasing difficulty making payments on the massive debt that has accumulated since 2007. Defaults are inevitable, which in turn will make both China’s real and financial economy even more unstable.

In short, a bust in coming in China and it will spill over to the rest of the global economy with serious consequences—first for emerging markets and thereafter inevitably as well for advanced economies like the US, Europe and Japan.

China government and state banks will have to bail out the over-indebted private sector. The government has massive reserves of US$3 trillion with which to do so. But it has already spent approximately US$1 trillion dollars thus far to support stocks and its currency. How much more will it commit to bail out its falling stock market, to halt the decline of its currency and capital flight, and eventually to bail out defaulting corporations and local governments as well? And what happens to China, and the global economy, should it even balk at doing so?

The next major global financial crisis will most likely not occur in the U.S. or other advanced economies of Europe and Japan. It will originate in emerging market economies, precipitated by instability events in China. China may be able to weather the crisis, given its huge reserves. But other emerging markets, many already in recession, will find it far more difficult to do so. As China and emerging market economies enter a deeper crisis in 2016-17, the U.S, Europe and Japan, already essentially stagnating, will not prove immune as well.

Jack Rasmus is author of the just published book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’, available from his blog, jackrasmus.com, and website,http://www.kyklosproductions.com, as well as from Amazon.

Glyphosate is the key ingredient in Monsanto’s branded Roundup line of herbicides, as well as hundreds of other products, but many scientific studies have raised questions about the health impacts of glyphosate and consumer and medical groups have expressed worries about glyphosate residues in food.

In October, Carey Gillam reported for Reuters that California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), has been accepting public comments about its intention to list glyphosate as a cause of cancer.

Roughly 8,000 comments were filed regarding the state action, according to officials, including those from Monsanto. Several farming, public health and environmental groups sent a letter to OEHHA supporting the listing, and said that rising use of glyphosate presents a danger to people and animals.

The OEHHA gave notice in September that it intended to list glyphosate under proposition 65, a state initiative enacted in 1986 to inform residents about cancer-causing chemicals. State officials said the action is required after the World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer research committee in March classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.

As we reported in March, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reported Monsanto’s call for the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency to retract a report published in the journal Lancet Oncology by researchers for WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

The WHO’s research unit, however, said it had reviewed many scientific studies, including two out of Sweden, one out of Canada and at least three in the United States before making its classification.

Since the WHO classification, the New York-based mass-tort firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, and other firms representing U.S. farm workers, have filed lawsuits against Monsanto, accusing the company of knowing of the dangers of glyphosate for decades. Monsanto has said the claims are without merit

Monsanto has now urged California not to list herbicide glyphosate as carcinogenic.

It added, in its formal comment, that California’s actions could be considered illegal because they are not considering valid scientific evidence.

China’s President Xi Jinping is heading to the Middle East, aiming at defusing the tensions in the volatile region of greatest importance for geopolitics and energy-security. China has also domestic security challenges which are closely linked to the Middle East and then there is business.

President Xi Jinping will be visiting a number of countries including Egypt as well as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members on one hand, and Iran and Shi’ite politicians and clerics in Iraq reached a boiling point after Saudi Arabia executed 47, including the controversial Shi’ite cleric Nimr Al-Nimr.

The Persian Gulf / Arab Gulf is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes through which much of the world’s hydrocarbons are shipped. A conflict in the region would lead to a global energy crisis that naturally also would have an impact on China’s energy security. China is Iran’s top oil client while it has close ties to the GCC member States and imports oil from GCC member States too.

[pictured right: President Sisi and President Xi Jinping during Al-Sisi’s 2015 visit to China – Courtesy YOUM7]

The crisis in the Gulf and the expansion of the Suez Canal in 2015 has led to increased focus on Egypt. Egypt, however, is itself feeling threatened due to the ongoing conflict in Yemen, an insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula and the easy with which militants from Libya can infiltrate the country. Egypt considers any potential threat to shipping via the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait south of the Suez Canal as an existential threat that also would impact global energy security.

Strait of Hormuz

It is within this context that a senior Chinese official, on Monday, commented on President Xi Jinping’s visit to the region, saying China is seeking a balanced stance as it always does. China’s State news agency Xinhua notes that Xi Jinping’s visit aims at reestablishing regional stability. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Ming stated:

“Regarding some of the region’s problems, China has always taken a balanced and just position. … If the Middle East is not stable, I’m afraid the world can’t be very peaceful. If a country or a region is not stable, it cannot realize development. … China firmly supports regional countries individually exploring a development path that suits their national conditions.”

It is noteworthy that China also considers Iran as a key part of its New Silk Road project that aims at developing transportation and other infrastructure and at developing trade throughout Asia, the Middle East as well as Europe.

Referring to the lifting of sanctions against Iran, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Ming also noted that Iran could expect a rapid development in the post-sanction era and an economic comeback. A prospect that is interesting for Chinese investment capital, provided that the region is relatively stable.

The Minister also signaled Chinese interests in investing in Iran, saying that Tehran would need foreign investment, technological support and infrastructure updates to put it on the course toward this development. Earlier this month the Chinese government published “China’s Arab Policy Paper for 2016″.  In the paper, the government states that:

“China firmly supports Arab national liberation movement, firmly supports Arab countries’ struggle to uphold sovereignty and territorial integrity, pursue and safeguard national interests, and combat external interference and aggression, and firmly supports Arab countries’ cause of developing the national economy and building up the countries.” …

Bab Al-Mandeb Strait

“The world is experiencing profound and complex changes. The trend toward a multipolar world and economic globalization is deepening, and cultural diversity and the information society continue to move forward. Changes in the international configuration and international order are accelerating. All countries in the world are seizing the opportunity to readjust their development strategies, promote reform and innovation, speed up economic transformation and open up new development horizons. At the same time, the world economy is still in a period of deep transformation, with geopolitical factors becoming more prominent, regional turbulences rising one after another, non-traditional security and global challenges increasing and the gap between the North and the South widening. It remains an arduous journey to advance mankind’s noble cause of peace and development.” ….

“China and Arab states are both developing countries with their combined territory, population and economic aggregate accounting for 1/6, 1/4 and 1/8 of the world’s total respectively. Different in natural endowment and development level, China and Arab countries are all in an important development stage and have a shared mission of rejuvenating the nation. We need to collaborate with each other more closely, and learn from each other along the road of development, strengthen cooperation in seeking common development and promoting regional peace, and echo each other in building a new type of international relations, so as to safeguard state sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, and to promote stability, economic development and well-being of our peoples. … China supports the Middle East peace process and the establishment of an independent state of Palestine with full sovereignty, based on the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports the Arab League and its member states’ efforts to this end. We adhere to political solution to regional hot spot issues, and support the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free and WMD-free zone in the Middle East.”  (read the full text here)

While the Middle East is locked in a crisis, China has its own problems with insurgents and terrorism; and some of these problems are closely related to the Middle East. While there are legitimate grievances among some of China’s ethic groups, Beijing also faces militant ethnic or religious insurrection.

One of these challenges arises from Turkish and US sponsored Uyghur / Turkmen in China’s Xinyang province. Other threats emerge from the presence of Islamist militants including the growing presence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) in northern Pakistan. Also this security threat is closely tied to the Middle East; That is, particularly Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the USA and “some” of its NATO partners, as well as elements within Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment.

A recent bombing in the Turkish city of Istanbul has left at least 10 dead and 15 injured. The government in Ankara was quick to blame the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh), claiming the bomber was “Syrian” and had crossed over from Syria into Turkey before carrying out the terrorist attack.

The Guardian would report in its article, “Deadly Istanbul blast ’caused by Isis suicide bomber’,” that:

“We have determined that the perpetrator of the attack is a foreigner who is a member of Daesh,” prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said, using an Arabic acronym for Isis. “Turkey won’t backtrack in its struggle against Daesh by even one step … This terror organisation, the assailants and all of their connections will be found and they will receive the punishments they deserve.”

However, an overabundance of evidence during the past several years indicates that ISIS is in fact both an intentional creation and continuous perpetuation of foreign state-sponsors of terrorism, including Turkey itself.

A high profile attack by gunmen at a four star hotel in Ouagadougou on Friday, Jan. 15 has highlighted the operations of various so-called “Islamist extremist” organizations in West Africa and the role of Burkina Faso and other states in the region as partners of French and United States counter-terrorism operations.

The attacks took place at the Splendid Hotel, a facility popular with foreign nationals, diplomats and military operatives from European and North American states. Also the Cappuccino Café located close by was sprayed with bullets leaving numerous casualties.

After a standoff for several hours involving over 100 hostages, eyewitnesses said that Burkinabe police and soldiers led by French and U.S. Special Forces stormed the hotel retaking the area.

Paris and Washington maintain military operatives inside this landlocked nation where they coordinate a task force ostensibly designed to track down members of Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and similar organizations. (BBC, Jan. 18)

Hostages who were released after the security operations in Burkina Faso said the gunmen targeted Westerners by killing those who looked to be of European ancestry many of whom laid wounded after being hit by bullets. One U.S. citizen and six Canadians, along with French, Dutch and Swiss nationals were among the 29 people from various countries who died as a result of the attacks.

Burkina Faso’s government declared three days of national mourning beginning on January 17 while announcing that the police and military forces stepped up security measures throughout the country in conjunction with neighboring states such as Mali which experienced similar incidents in recent months and years.

A new head-of-state was elected on November 29 in the aftermath of an attempted coup by the Regiment of Presidential Security (RSP) headed by Gen. Gilbert Diendere. The poll grew out of widespread opposition among the population and elements within the military in October 2014 when long-time former military leader turned politician, Blaise Compaore, sought to extend his term of office and was forced out of Burkina Faso taking refuge in neighboring Ivory Coast.

President Roch Marc Christian Kabore said in a statement in regard to the attacks that “These truly barbaric criminal acts carried out against innocent people, claimed by the criminal organization al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) seek to destabilize our country and its republican institutions, and to undermine efforts to build a democratic, quiet and prosperous nation.”

One group, the AQIM, has claimed responsibility although these are preliminary reports. During the course of the operations at the hotel and café, the online agency SITE, which monitors posts related to such actions internationally, reported that AQIM had taken responsibility.

Political Power Struggles Contributes to Instability  

The impoverished state of Burkina Faso underwent a national uprising in October 2014 that ousted longtime western-backed dictator Blaise Compaore. After the mass demonstrations that created the conditions for Compaore’s removal, another coup occurred illustrating the divisions within the military.

During 2015 in the months leading into the transition process and national elections, Gen. Diendere of the presidential regiment attempted to take power ostensibly in an effort to halt the voting and change the character of the constitutional model. Decisions related to the elections and the composition of the current government was the result of negotiations between various political interests, the military and envoys from the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

In an article written by Pascaline Compaore, a Junior Fellow at the Conflict Prevention and Risks Analysis Division at the Institute of Security Studies in Dakar, Senegal, it noted “Compaoré’s (the former military leader and president) regime depended heavily on the elite security service known as the Regiment of Presidential Security (Régiment de sécurité présidentielle, RSP). Despite the former president’s ousting, the RSP continued to interfere in the political transition process. Some of its members, under the leadership of General Gilbert Diendéré, were responsible for the 17 September 2015 coup attempt, which resulted in the disintegration of the corps. (Jan. 16)

This same report went on saying:

“The coup d’état pointed to a lack of concrete progress in neutralizing the RSP. During the first post-putsch cabinet meeting, it had been decided that the RSP should be disarmed and reintegrated into other army postings. That some of these soldiers could continue to threaten the country’s security and stability remains a cause for concern. The dismantling of the RSP created an important security gap, which must be addressed with urgency given the volatility in the region and the backdrop of instability in the country.”

The Role of AFRICOM and Operation Barkhane

This is not the first of such attacks as there have been two other incidents in the north and west of the country. Mali underwent a similar disturbance in November at a hotel there which houses foreign diplomats and western military personnel.

Prior to the attacks at the hotel and café, the Burkinabe Ministry of Defense released an advisory reporting that approximately 20 armed men killed a policeman and a civilian in an attack on the village of Tin Abao in the northern region of the country. It was not immediately clear who was behind this separate incident.

The French embassy in December warned its citizens not to travel to a national park in eastern Burkina Faso amid reports that Malian-based Islamist groups had pledged to abduct foreign nationals. One such organization which claimed responsibility for another attack in Mali late last year, Al-Mourabitoun, said in May 2015, it was holding a Romanian man abducted from a mine in northern Burkina Faso in April.

In other reports, 50 unidentified gunmen carried out an offensive operation against a Burkina Faso security brigade near the western border with Mali in October 2015. This attack resulted in three deaths as the then transitional government blamed the incident on disgruntled elements within the RSP who were involved in the attempted coup in September.

Burkina Faso and Mali have become centers in the U.S. and French “war on terrorism”. In addition Niger and Chad have also seen greater deployments of Pentagon and French military troops.

Operation Barkhane, a force based in Chad which is said to have been established to combat Islamist fighters throughout the Sahel region, is stationed in Burkina Faso at the Splendid Hotel. This French-led unit was created in 2014 as the successor to other military contingents in Mali known as Operation Serval and Operation Epervier in Chad.

Barkhane is said to consist of a 3,000-person French force permanently headquartered in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. The operation has representation from five countries, which are the former French colonies of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.

These states are described as the “G5 Sahel.” The military operations units are named after a crescent-shaped dune in the Sahara desert.

Burkina Faso until recent years was largely a producer of cotton and other agricultural commodities for export to western states. In the current period the country has emerged as a major center for gold mining becoming the fourth largest producer of the mineral on the African continent.

Neighboring Niger contains large deposits of uranium mined and controlled by the French-based Areva nuclear energy corporation. The U.S. has constructed drone stations and other offensive weaponry in Niger in cooperation with Paris.

Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire

Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran from January 19-23. Xi has delivered a series of important remarks on the relationship between China and the Middle East and Arab countries, which is of great significance in promoting the Middle East peace process and pushing forward China’s relations with these countries.

1. All nations in Middle East are equally entitled to life and development.

The Middle East is beset by war and undergoing social unrest by now. Peace, stability and development are the common aspirations of countries in the Middle East. Resolving disputes through political means is a strategic option that is in the interests of all sides concerned. All nations in Middle East, including Israel, are equally entitled to life and development. Only when the legitimate rights of all countries are ensured, and all countries respect each other’s concerns, can there be permanent peace and stability in the region.

Said Xi when meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Beijing on May 9, 2013.

2. China supports a nuclear-free Gulf.

The Gulf region and Middle East situation has a global impact and all members in the region share responsibility for safeguarding Gulf security and stability. China has always backed the just cause of the Palestinian people and will continue to facilitate peace talks. China supports a nuclear-free Gulf and will continue to promote a long-term, comprehensive and proper solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.

Said Xi when meeting with Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who is also the deputy premier and minister of defense, in Beijing on March 13, 2014.

3. China and Arab states should carry forward the Silk Road spirit.

For thousands of years, the Silk Road carried the spirit of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, learning from each other, mutual benefits and win-win results, which is passed on generation after generation. The people of China and the Arab world support each other in the battle of defending national dignity and sovereignty, help each other in realizing national rejuvenation, learn from each other in deepening cultural exchanges and promoting the prosperity of national cultures.

Carrying forward the Silk Road spirit is to facilitate mutual learning among civilizations. Carrying forward the Silk Road spirit is to adhere to win-win cooperation. Carrying forward the Silk Road spirit is to advocate dialogue and peace.

Said Xi when addressing the opening of the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Beijing on June 5, 2014.

4. China and Arab states should make joint efforts in building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road together.

China and Arab states learned about and made friends with each other through the Silk Road, which makes them natural partners in building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st century Maritime Silk Road together.

In building the “One Belt and One Road” together, China and the Arab states need to adhere to the principle of building jointly through consultation to meet the interests of all. China and the Arab states need to be both ambitious and down-to-earth. China and the Arab states need to rely on and promote their traditional friendship.

Said Xi at the opening ceremony of the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Beijing on June 5, 2014.

5. China opposes any discrimination and prejudice about specific ethnic group or religion.

No human civilization is superior to others. Equal exchanges make human civilization rich and colorful, just like the matching of different colors leads to greater beauty and the combination of different music instruments creates harmony and peace.

China will unswervingly support Arab countries in maintaining their national culture and tradition, and oppose any discrimination and prejudice toward specific ethnic group or religion. We should make joint efforts in calling for civilization and tolerance, and preventing extremist forces and thought from creating a fault line among different civilization.

Said Xi when addressing the opening ceremony of the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Beijing on June 5, 2014.

6. China insists on “four adherences”.

China values relations with the Arab states and has always viewed China-Arab relations from a long-term strategic perspective. For our Arab friends, we insist on “four adherences.” The first one is adhering to the support of Middle East peace process and safeguarding legitimate rights and interests of the Arab peoples. The second one is adhering to the direction of facilitating a political solution and promoting peace and stability in the region. The third one is adhering to the idea of supporting Arab nations to explore the development pattern independently and to helping them. The fourth one is adhering to the value pursuit of promoting dialogue among civilizations and advocating a civilized new order. We are willing to walking hand in hand with the Arab countries on the path to the respective national revitalization.

Said Xi when meeting with heads of Arab delegations to the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Beijing on June 5, 2014.

7. The Middle East peace process needs the wisdom and efforts of all sides.

Palestine-Israel, Syria and Iraq issues have intertwined and affected one another. “Violence against violence” cannot solve the Palestine-Israel issue. Promoting the Middle East peace process needs the wisdom and efforts of all sides. China will continue to support the conciliation efforts by the UN and Secretary-General to promote all parties in Syria to find a “middle way.”

Said Xi when meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on August 16, 2014.

8. China has, as always, viewed China-Arab relations from a long-term strategic perspective.

At present, China-Arab relations are lying in the middle and core and standing at a fresh start, featuring peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, learning from each other, mutual benefits and win-win results. I pay high attention to the development of China-Arab relations. China has, as always, viewed China-Arab relations from a long-term strategic perspective, and stands ready to work with Arab states to raise the China-Arab strategic cooperative relations featuring all-round cooperation and common development to a higher level.

Said Xi when sending a letter of congratulations to the year of China-Arab friendship and the 3rd Arabic Arts Festival on September 10, 2014.

9. The international community should support the people in the Middle East to seek the right path in accordance with their own national conditions.

There are many problems and complex contradictions in the Middle East. A political solution is the only realistic way to solve disputes in the region. No matter how difficult it is, we should keep maximum patience to provide maximum room for a political solution. It is the countries and peoples in the region that have the biggest say on what development path they should follow. The international community should support their efforts in seeking the right path in accordance with their own national conditions.

Said Xi when meeting with Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, Emir of Qatar in Beijing on November 3,2014.

10. China and the Arab states are friends with mutual trust and partners walking hand in hand.

China and the Arab states are friends with mutual trust and partners walking hand in hand on the path to realize mutual development.

China, adhering to the Silk Road Spirit of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, learning from each other, mutual benefits and win-win results, will work with all the countries in the world including the Arab countries to facilitate mutual development and improve the well-being of people in all the countries in the world.

Said Xi in a letter of congratulations to the China-Arab States Expo on September 10, 2015.

Note: This article by Electronic Frontier Foundation was originally posted in 2014.

The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read, because it demonstrates exactly what lengths the intelligence community is willing to go to—and what happens when they take the fruits of the surveillance they’ve done and unleash it on a target.

The anonymous letter was the result of the FBI’s comprehensive surveillance and harassment strategy against Dr. King, which included bugging his hotel rooms, photographic surveillance, and physical observation of King’s movements by FBI agents. The agency also attempted to break up his marriage by sending selectively edited “personal moments he shared with friends and women” to his wife.

Portions of the letter had been previously redacted. One of these portions contains a claim that the letter was written by another African-American: “King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all us Negroes.” It goes on to say “We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done.” This line is key, because part of the FBI’s strategy was to try to fracture movements and pit leaders against one another.

The entire letter could have been taken from a page of GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—though perhaps as an email or series of tweets. The British spying agency GCHQ is one of the NSA’s closest partners. The mission of JTRIG, a unit within GCHQ, is to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them.” And there’s little reason to believe the NSA and FBI aren’t using such tactics.

The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly.

The newly unredacted portions shed light on the government’s sordid scheme to harass and discredit Dr. King. One paragraph states:

No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record.

And of course, the letter ends with an ominous threat:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

There’s a lesson to learn here: history must play a central role in the debate around spying today. As Professor Gage states:

Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

Copyright Electronic Frontier Foundation 2014

The US Department of the Treasury says it has imposed new sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program.

The Treasury Department made the announcement in a statement issued on Sunday, only a day after sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear energy program were lifted.

The statement said five Iranian citizens and a network of companies based in the United Arab Emirates and China were added to a US blacklist.

The network “obfuscated the end user of sensitive goods for missile proliferation by using front companies in third countries to deceive foreign suppliers,” the statement said, adding that the five people had “worked to procure ballistic missile components for Iran.”

“Iran’s ballistic missile program poses a significant threat to regional and global security, and it will continue to be subject to international sanctions,” said Adam J. Szubin, acting under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

On October 11, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) successfully test-fired its first guided ballistic missile dubbed Emad.

Washington slammed the test, claiming the projectile is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. It vowed to respond with more sanctions.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said the Emad missile was a conventional weapon.

The Iranian media have aired footage of an underground missile facility of the IRGC packed with Emad missiles.

On Saturday, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order lifting US economic sanctions on Iran.

Obama’s move came after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified that Iran has implemented its commitments made in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and announced to remove international economic sanctions against the country.

Iran and the P5+1 – the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany – finalized the text of the JCPOA in Vienna, Austria, on July 14, 2015.

Under the agreement, limits are put on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for, among other things, the removal of all nuclear-related economic and financial bans against the Islamic Republic.

The petition by the “Academicians for Peace” in Turkey has resulted in an assault against the academic community of the country, which resembles the practices of the military junta of the September 12 1980, coup d’état. The petition itself and the reactions for/against it have gained a different momentum following the increasing pressure by the AKP (the governing political power) via various channels such as university administrations, legal bodies and partisan media organizations.

Each indictment such of “disloyalty,” “mandate support”[1] and “treason” directed at the academicians by the Turkish President Erdoğan, the Prime Minister Davutoğlu, several ministers and other officials, have brought new accusations and threats against the academicians that were put on the target. The names of the academicians were published by pro-government newspapers. This not only escalated the oppressive atmosphere in the country, but also increased the violence directed against the signatories. These state charges have acquired a life-threatening dimension. They crystallized with the chilling statement of an organized crime leader: “We will kill them and have a shower with their blood!” Various lynching campaigns have formed via social media.

Press Release of the petition of Academicians for Peace, Istanbul, 12 January.

Turkish university rectors, whose job it is to safeguard universal, scientific and critical knowledge and the academic staff, have sided with the political authorities. They have declared that: “This petition cannot be associated with academic freedom!” Following the investigations initiated by YÖK (the Turkish Higher Education Council) and some university rectors, several academicians have been dismissed from their universities.

Disciplinary and Criminal Proceedings

Disciplinary proceedings are being coupled with criminal proceedings and a warrant has been issued for the arrest and custody of some signatories. The head of the Turkish Bar Association, whose fundamental duty, is to protect freedom of thought and expression has also made an unfortunate statement against the academicians. In short, the reaction against the petition reflects the consolidation of the Turkish hard right, creating the space for them to take a hatchet to their political, and democratic, enemies.

The political and coercive oppression being leveled against the academicians has, in turn, increased the support and solidarity both in Turkey and abroad. Artists, authors, poets, intellectuals, students, civil servants and workers have begun to take side with the academicians. In addition to the “peace demand,” a new political demand has started to gain momentum. The draconian measures taken by the Turkish state is turning the case both into a defense of freedom of expression and thought and of the academy itself. Certainly, the ultimatums of Prime Minister Davutoğlu and President Erdoğan – “Choose your side!” and “We do not rule Turkey by consulting you!” respectively – have played a great role in these developments.

As a part of its grand strategy (the so-called new “greater Turkey” project), the Turkish political powers present the petitioners as the “black sheep” of the intellectual community. In recent years, the Erdoğan AKP governments have been quite successful in remaking the political agenda and discourse of the country by stigmatizing the opposition as “enablers” of domestic terrorism and as “domestic enemies” of the Turkish state. Such practices have helped the AKP to implement its policies by manipulating and disorienting active democratic consent and obscuring its own economic and political failures without paying a political price.

In fact, these same practices were deployed during the “Ergenekon trials,” the operations against the “Parallel/FETÖ” organization, as well as against the Gezi Square protests in 2013. The “1128s” has become an expression of treachery continually used in the pro-government media, and is the embodiment of this practice. In order to justify its security crackdown, the various branches of the Turkish state invoke the 1128 academicians in every possible occasion. The AKP partisan newspapers call for university students to start a boycott against their professors. In this oppressive and dangerous environment, only a single investigation has been conducted on the crime boss uttering violent threats; whereas a warrant for the arrest of numerous academicians has been issued. Some have already been taken into custody and their offices and houses have been searched and ransacked by police.

Turkey: A Fascist Turn?

There is no denying that the political conjuncture in Turkey is coming to represent some of the symptoms of classical fascism: the complex ensemble of the Turkish state and its diverse apparatuses are coming under the control of a single mass party; the political parties are turning into ‘mere parliamentary coteries’ cloaking the concrete ways the state is operating. Prime Minister Davutoğlu has not even criticized the crime boss, which begins to pose the indirect legitimization of a paramilitary structure. Occupational ethics and obligations have been pushed into the background to suit current political interests.

Police searching the houses of academicians in Bolu, 15 January.

In order to save its face in the diplomatic arena and to address its international image crisis, which has emerged from its foreign policy and the revelations about cooperation between the Turkish state and ISIS, the Turkish government is polarizing Turkish society through both its discourse and the authoritarian remaking of the state. By creating a “domestic enemy,” the AKP government hopes to justify its security policies; to obscure mounting social contradiction; to direct the anger of the Turkish masses to opposition of dissident citizens and organizations. As one measure, the AKP government has initiated a clean sweep of opposition in academic institutions through new organizational mandates, parallel to the ones it pushed through the political system (eventually culminating in the recent shift to a presidential system in Turkey). The French political theorist Jacques Rancière has commented: “Bad shepherds mislead only sheep and no one is forced to be a sheep.” But the AKP government desires everyone to be on its side without assessing and questioning the government’s program or operations.

Clearly, the initial task is to support the academicians, their legitimate rights to call for peace and for the autonomy of academic institutions from political oppression of the state. The assault against the academic community is an integral part of the AKP’s strategy to remake the Turkish state into its own version of authoritarianism and Islamic ideology. The opposition in Turkey must now also defend the trenches of freedoms in civil society or risk losing them all together. It is the duty of the progressive and democratic forces in Turkey to side with each of the academicians under attack by the legal and civil threats of the Turkish state. And now, it is also time to renew and further develop both national and international mechanisms of support and solidarity.

Kansu Yıldırım is an independent researcher based in Ankara and an editorial board member of Kampfplatz (Turkish journal of philosophy and social science).

Resources:

• Open Letter from Scholars in Canada in Solidarity with Academics in Turkey
• Urgent Call for Solidarity from Academicians for Peace

If aggression against another foreign country means that it strains its social structure, that it ruins its finances, that is has to give up its territory for sheltering refugees, what is the difference between that kind of aggression and the other type, the more classical type, when someone declares war, or something of that sort. — Sawer Sen, India’s Ambassador to the UN

In an EU press conference on September 3rd, 2015 Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban candidly referred to the current refugee crisis in Europe as “Germany’s problem”. Orban was referring to the fact that refugees amassing at the border of Hungary were heading, for the most part, to Germany. The Hungarian Prime Minister stressed that most of the refugees did not intend to stay in Hungary. Orban has come under criticism for his decision to erect a security fence on the Hungarian/Serbian border in order to stem the flow of migrants entering Hungarian territory illegally.

While most of the European media have portrayed Orban as a xenophobic, far right dictator, the decision to erect a fence was carried out in compliance with EU regulations, which require that all immigrants entering the Shengen zone be registered by the police at the border. Yet, paradoxically, Brussels is criticizing the Hungarian Prime Minister for attempting to comply with EU laws!

France’s daily Le Monde refers to the Hungarian Prime Minister as the man who is attempting to ‘criminalise‘ illegal immigrants. It is indeed a strange country that would criminalize those who break its laws!

So why is Orban coming under fire? Since coming to power in 2010 Victor Orban has implemented domestic, social and political policies that run counter to those dictated by the EU commission. In 2013 Hungary closed down the office of the International Monetary Fund, bringing the country’s finance under state control.

The International Monetary Fund is a key institution of US/Zionist global governance and there are few countries who have escaped its clutches of permanent debt. Therefore, the decision of the Hungarian government to show the IMF the door was nothing short than an act of bold insubordination to US imperialism.

Hungary has also come under criticism for media laws which ban foreign interference from US propaganda outlets such as Voice of America, which the Hungarian government deems to be contrary to the public interest. Consequently, the European Union, which is perfectly happy to ban Iranian television stations, has criticized Hungary for violations of ‘freedom of speech’.

Orban told an audience in Chatham House in 2013 that he believed there was a “leftist and green conspiracy” in Europe against “traditional values”. Orban is no doubt referring to the constant tirades made by war mongering ‘leftist’ zionists such as EU MP Daniel Cohen Bendit against Hungary. Bendit has ironically called Orban the “Chavez of Europe”. This example of ideological name-calling epitomises the meaninglessness of the left/right political paradigm in the post-Soviet era.

Orban’s ‘nationalism’ is not an imperial project. It is, rather, a national philosophy which goes against, and weakens, imperialism. It is nationalism in the sense of national liberation from neo-colonial oppression in the form of international financial institutions and the EU.

Orban’s defense of ‘traditional values’ has brought him ideologically closer to the foreign policy agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who visited the country in 2014. During Putin’s visit to Hungary, Orban praised the Russian leader’s role in attempting to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian war. In 2014 Orban told Hungarian media that the Ukrainian war was caused by the desire of the United States to gain control of Eastern Europe. He also pointed out that the United States wanted to draw Hungary into the crisis.

The Hungarian Prime Minister has made no secret of his desire to pursue an independent domestic and foreign policy. Hungary also has close ties to China and Iran. Therefore, to attempt, as some analysts have done, to portray Victor Orban as part of the reactionary, imperialist, xenophobic right is to oversimplify the complex interplay of ideological and geopolitical forces in the current global political arena and, in particular, the deep forces determining the generation and management of the refugee/migrant crisis. Therefore, to compare Orban’s opposition to immigration to that of British Prime Minister David Cameron is to oversimplify the matter.

British Prime Minister David Cameron plays up his opposition to immigration. But this has nothing to do with the real agenda of the British government. Cameron’s anti-immigration policies are simply the appeal to xenophobia which the Tories require to maintain their electoral votes. Cameron’s regime serves international finance capitalism in its most brutal form and finance capitalism needs constant immigration. Orban’s objections are based more on his conflict with finance capitalism and his criticisms of the liberal ideology driving globalisation.

Victor Orban has proposed that the refugees/migrants be sent back to Turkey until the end of the war in Syria. This is a sensible proposal. The ‘Refugees are Welcome’ slogan and the subsequent marches in favour of immigration served US/Israeli geostrategic objectives. Currently, few people seem to realise that and, as in the Arab Spring of 2011, the bandwagon of US imperialism has no shortage of passengers.

In this sense, Victor Orban of Hungary is, in a very limited way, worthy of the epithet ‘Hugo Chavez of Europe’. While many of Victor Orban’s political policies are far from left-wing, (for example, the banning of communist symbols) his embrace of a traditionalist, dirigiste form of capitalism with strong pro-family social policies and a multi-vectored foreign policy brings his country closer to countries such as Venezuela, Belarus, Eritrea and other nation-states attempting to maintain their sovereignty in the face of imperialism.

A deeply biased and hostile article on Le Monde nevertheless accurately describes Orban’s politics as ‘economically left wing while culturally right wing’. However, qualification is needed here. His policies are ‘left-wing’ from the point of view of global corporate finance but Orban’s economic policiesfavour the national, patriotic bourgeoisie and are therefore right-wing from the perspective of the working class.

Hungary’s multi-vectored foreign policy has had benefits for the country and especially for other Southern Hemisphere partner countries such as Venezuela. For example, a photo-voltaic energy technology product developed in Hungary and financed by China, was exported to Venezuela in 2013. It is believed that the new Hungarian technology could not only enable Venezuela to become self-sufficient in electricity, it could turn the country into a major exporter of electricity. Venezuela’s cooperation with Hungary is vital to the country’s industrialisation.

What all the countries mentioned above have in common is an attempt to construct a national voluntarism in order to stem the tide of ‘globalisation’ and all its concomitant social and economic ills. This involves a national, patriotic bourgeoisie in alliance with the working class against the ‘internationalist’ compradore bourgeoisie and the ‘New World Order’. It is, in many respects, a reversal of the class dynamics of the Second World War when the Soviet Union led an organised international working class in alliance with the remnants of the democratic bourgeoisie against international fascism.

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban came to power in a country that had been ravaged by the IMF and a deeply corrupt ‘socialist’ party that had emerged from decades of welfare state capitalism under Janos Kadar. Kadar, a liberal, replaced the communist Rakossi during the counter-revolution in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, when capitalism with ‘socialist ‘ characteristics replaced Cominform socialism. The process was euphemistically referred to as ‘de-Stalinisation’ but was, in fact, an attempt to restore capitalist modes of production.

Hungary’s ideological crisis culminated in the attempted coup of 1956, when the CIA, operating out of Vienna, attempted to overthrow the embattled regime with the help of former Nazi collaborators. The 1956 ‘Hungarian Revolution’ was, in many respects, an intelligence prototype for many US orchestrated regime change operations to follow decades later.

Although, Orban is said to have ‘fought against communism’ as a student, he was, like many others of his generation, a fighter against a particular type of capitalism which he perceived as a “leftist conspiracy” against the people. Marxist Leninists have always considered the triumph of Khrushchevite revisionism in the USSR in 1956 and the subsequent ‘de-stalinisation’ of the USSR and of the Popular Democracies of Eastern Europe to have constituted a counter-revolution against the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Khrushchev’s reforms involved abandoning state-centralised planning, the re-introduction of profit as the regulator of production, combined with a cynical and anti-Marxist foreign policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between capitalism and socialism. In order to justify these policies Khrushchev wrote a long mendacious speech slandering Stalin. Every claim against Stalin in Khrushchev’s speech has since been proven to have been a lie. Soviet revisionism killed not only socialism in the USSR but, with the notable exception of Albania, the hope of socialism throughout the world. This destruction of Marxism Leninism by the Soviet and later Chinese revisionists led to a revival of Trotskyism in Western imperial countries. And it is this ‘New Left’ that constitutes the vanguard of contemporary Western imperialism.

In this sense, Orban is correct in his analysis of a “leftist” conspiracy against civilization, for what we see today is the triumph of Trotskyist ideology in the form of Zionism and neo-conservativism, where proletarian internationalism has been subsumed by the ‘human rights’ international on the one hand and ‘islamist jihad’ on the other, a new ‘revolutionary’ alliance waging war against the working class.

One only has to observe the clenched fist of the US colour revolutions and the constant appeal to youthful rebellion to understand how capitalism is now deepening its grip on humanity through the appropriation of leftist, revolutionary symbology. Indeed, contemporary US capitalism is, to employ a phrase of Trotsky’s, ‘permanent revolution’. Or, in the words of US Grand Strategist General Thomas Barnett, “US-style globalisation is pure socio-economic revolution.”

But it is a revolution which wages war on the working class. One of the results of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt was the abrogation of labour laws requiring companies to pay workers during periods of factory closure due to lack of product demand. Many of the strikes that resulted in the overthrow of Mubarak’s regime were led by US funded ‘independent’ labour organisations.

Given Orban’s intransigence on the refugee issue, he is likely to face a US/Israeli backed ‘popular protest movement’ in an attempt to effect regime change. Colour revolutions often involve the transportation of thousands of foreigners to the place of protest by US intelligence agencies operating through NGOS. This happened in Belarus in 2010. Many of the youths attempting to get into Hungary could be used as a battering ram to destablize the Hungarian nation-state.

Since the fomentation of the ‘Arab Spring’ by the CIA and its numerous NGOS in 2011, NATO’s total destruction of Libya and its proxy war against Syria, millions of people have been turned into refugees. That is why they are fleeing to Europe. But it is not the principal reason for the ‘current crisis’, or rather the current phase of an ongoing and deepening crisis.

NATO’s invasion and destruction of Libya in 2011 has led to millions of desperate people attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea. This ongoing crisis has received varying levels of coverage from the mass media. For example, the sinking of a boat in the Mediterranean in July 2015 only received a four line report in the French Le Figaro newspaper, in spite of the fact that a hundred people were drowned!

However, since the publication of a drowned boy washed up on the shores of Turkey in 2015,the refugee crisis has entered a new phase, with the photo of the boy in question being used as an excuse to drum up public support for NATO air-strikes against Syria in order to “stop the massacres”

While no one seems to know just how many Syrians are among the migrants fleeing to Europe, there has been a media fixation on these particular migrants, in spite of the fact that they only represent a minority of the current migrants amassing at the Hungarian border.

The debate about what should be done to manage the refugee/migrant crisis turns on whether or not they should be welcomed into European countries. However, this pro or anti migrant debate masks a new and highly destructive phase in US/NATO geopolitical strategy. Many of the migrants at the Hungarian border are coming from refugee camps in Turkey. Austrian intelligence has reportedly revealed that US government agencies are funding the transfer of these refugees to Europe in an attempt to destabilize the continent. This new geostrategic initiative involves using desperate refugees as weapons for the purposes of US/Zionist divide and rule of the European continent.

France’s Radio Internationale has revealed that over 95 percent of migrants in the current flow into Europe are young males between 20 and 35 years old. Many are said to be fleeing conscription in the Syrian army, which has lost thousands of brave men and women since the start of the Zionist war on their country. The preponderance of young, fit males among the so-called ‘refugees’ has also been confirmed to this author personally by researchers of Russian state television RT. When asked about the refugee issue on France’s BMTV, Russian Ambassador to France Alexandre Orlov said “All I can see are young men fleeing the war instead of defending their country”. So, why are there so few vulnerable women and children among the refugees escaping the war in Syria?

The journey across the Mediterranean to Europe can normally cost up to 11,000 dollars, more money than most European workers manage to save from years of hard labour, yet we are told that millions of war-ravaged Iraqis and Syrians are suddenly able to pay this colossal sum to make the journey to Europe. How is this possible?

The glorification of the young men fleeing conscription in Syria, coupled with the demonisation of the heroic men and women in Syria fighting for their country’s freedom, is deeply indicative of the moral turpitude of our own ruling class for whom disloyalty and cowardice are the principal characteristics.

In September a Hungarian camera woman was filmed tripping a refugee carrying a child at the Hungarian border. The video soon went viral. The camera woman is now taking legal action against the man she tripped as he has changed his story to the police. Petra Laszlo has claimed that she panicked as refugees began to charge towards her. There was much indignation in the politically correct corporate media. But Syrian patriots did some research on the Laszlo’s ‘victim’. The man’s name is apparently Osama Abdel-Muhsen Alghadab and he is a member of Japhat Al-Nosra, the Al-Qaida affiliated terrorist group that has massacred thousands of innocents in Syria.

This is not to suggest by any means that all of the refugees attempting to enter Hungary are terrorists. But in the context of a global war involving complex international networks of terrorists operating under the aegis of American, Israeli and European intelligence agencies, this incident is another argument in favour of Orban’s policy of implementing normal immigration regulatory procedures.

In February 2011 Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi warned Europe about the danger of an invasion by migrants and, in particular, Al- Qaeda terrorists if he were to be overthrown. Syria’s President Assad has also warned Europe of the danger of thousands of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists coming to Europe, disguised as refugees. It is quite possible that a similar scenario is now coming to pass.

Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a journalist and political analyst based in Paris. His work focuses on globalization, geopolitics and class struggle. He is a regular contributor to Global Research, Russia Today International, Press TV, Sputnik Radio France, Sputnik English , Al Etijah TV , Sahar TV,and has also appeared on Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen. He writes in English, Gaelic, and French. Read other articles by Gearóid.

With Iran celebrating international sanctions lifted on its entirely peaceful nuclear program, the US Treasury imposed new ones unilaterally and illegally – again solely for political reasons.

A Treasury press release said Iran’s ballistic missile program was targeted, unrelated to its nuclear activities.

Eleven domestic and foreign entities as well as individuals are targeted. Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam Szubin lied, claiming “Iran’s ballistic missile program poses a significant threat to regional and global security, and it will continue to be subject to international sanctions.”

We have consistently made clear that the United States will vigorously press sanctions against Iranian activities outside of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – including those related to Iran’s support for terrorism, regional destabilization, human rights abuses, and ballistic missile program.

It bears repeating. Longstanding US sanctions imposed on Iran were and continue to be solely for political reasons, no others. Any without Security Council authorization are illegal.

Accusations against the Islamic Republic are fabricated. Its ballistic missile and other military activities are entirely legal – solely for national security and self-defense, never for waging war, polar opposite America’s sordid history of raping and destroying one country after another.

Newly imposed sanctions on Iran less than 24 hours after lifting international ones shows implacable US anti-Iranian hostility. What further shoe will drop next – what other outrage against the region’s leading force for peace and stability?

Washington should sanction itself. No country operates more ruthlessly, disdainful of rule of law principles, indifferent to human suffering.

Nowhere else is responsible change more urgently needed, the only way to save humanity from the scourge of endless wars, possible WW III with nuclear weapons, risking mass annihilation.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

CIA operatives, US special forces and their rogue state counterparts train ISIS recruits in the fine art of committing gruesome atrocities, including beheadings, use of chemical and other toxic agents, as well as mass slaughtering civilians.

US-led Western imperial ruthlessness bears full responsibility for the latest horrific incident.

Dier Ezzor is Syria’s seventh largest city, its largest eastern one, located 280 miles northeast of Damascus. Pre-war, its population exceeded 200,000. Syrian oil fields are located in the area. The province connects ISIS’ declared capital Raqqa with Iraqi territory it controls.

Reports indicate their fighters slaughtered around 280 people, including women, children and whole families loyal to Assad’s government.

Mass murder followed Russia initiating efforts to provide area residents with desperately needed humanitarian aid, conducting airdrop operations.

The incident is one of the largest atrocities since Obama launched proxy war in March 2011 – using ISIS and other takfiri terrorists as imperial foot soldiers.

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported 300 lives lost in Dier Ezzor’s al-Bghailiye village, mostly “women, children and the elderly.”

Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi condemned what he called a barbaric and cowardly massacre. America and other nations supporting this scourge bear full responsibility.

“The Premier said that terrorist organizations are committing massacres to make up for the recurring losses and defeats they suffer at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army, and that these terror organizations know that their days in Syria are numbered,” according to SANA.

Dozens of Syrian soldiers were killed along with civilians. Some were beheaded. Hundreds of survivors were taken hostage.

Dier Ezzor’s Governor Mohammad Qaddur Ainyyia said Syrian army troops freed al-Bghailiye after the massacre. ISIS fighters suffered significant casualties.

Western media are largely silent on what happened, instead featuring fake photos of starving Madaya residents, blaming Assad irresponsibly. So far no NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or US TV reports.

Reuters reported ISIS “kill(ing) at least 250 people…including pro-government fighters and their families.”

ISIS fighters have been holding area residents hostage under siege for over a year, enduring dire conditions, why Moscow initiated humanitarian airdrops, hoping supplies will reach people in need, risking them falling into ISIS hands.

Russia called on all sides to deliver humanitarian aid to Syrians in areas besieged by ISIS and other terrorist groups.

A Foreign Ministry statement said “we continue to make active efforts, including during our contacts with the official Syrian authorities, in the interests of improving the living conditions for civilians.”

We urge (other nations) to constructively cooperate with UN humanitarian structures which will allow to secure humanitarian access to aforementioned and other settlements that found themselves in a difficult situation.

January 25 peace talks will do nothing to halt fighting and horrific atrocities committed by terrorist groups – not as long as Washington and rogue partners support them.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

The Defense Ministry said that these results did not always correspond to the stated objectives

The Russian Defense Ministry may begin publishing data on the results of airstrikes of the international coalition in the Middle East, in order to disprove the accusations alleging that the Russian military aim at civilian targets, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Friday.

General Konashenkov recalled that at the end of last year the ministry said that it had the sufficient amount of information on the results of the work of the countries of the anti-Islamic State coalition in Syria. The Defense Ministry said that these results did not always correspond to the stated objectives.

“Frankly speaking, we expected our colleagues not only to pay attention to this, but also to draw certain conclusions. Therefore, to disprove further rumours and accusations against us and if our colleagues keep silent on the results of their bombings in Syria, we will ourselves have to inform the public of these facts,” said the Russian official.

Igor Konashenkov © Anton Novoderezhkin/TASS

According to Konashenkov, in the area of Aleppo where a school was allegedly destroyed by an airstrike more than 10 aircraft of the coalition, as well as attack drones were fulfilling various combat tasks on that day. In addition, since December 20 last year to this day the coalition planes have been making sorties and hitting targets in the area of Aleppo practically every day.

“Thus, the question is: which facilities were targeted in that area by the coalition aircraft? Our colleagues continue to stubbornly keep silent,” the Russian defense official said.

Last week, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights published a report, which accused Russian warplanes of delivering an air strike at a school in the Al-Adzhar populated locality.

The number of casualties, according to the Observatory, varied from 8 to 20 people.

“As usual, the report lacked the victims’ names and addresses and did not give the name of the school or its location,” Konashenkov went on to say.

“The professional analysis of photos distributed in social networks revealed, judging from the nature of destruction, that the school had been hit by an ‘air -to-surface’ missile, which are used in Syria and Iraq exclusively by the warplanes and assault UAV of the anti-ISIS coalition,” General Konashenkov said.

Russian Defense Ministry learns who is behind Syrian Observatory for Human Rights

Konashenkov also said the ministry has found out who is behind the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which distributes information blackmailing the Russian Aerospace Force grouping in Syria. According to the official, the man moved to the United Kingdom after serving three terms in Syria.

“The first throwing-in of false information about claimed victims in the Russian air strikes appeared in social networks and some western media well before our mission in the Syrian Arab Republic began,” he said. “Most information was distributed on behalf of so-called ‘Syrian human rights activists’.”

In “distribution” of the statements made by those “human rights activists” participate, as a rule, some foreign media, which use most often the organisation called the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” with headquarters in the United Kingdom, he said.

The defense ministry’s representative said over recent five years the organization’s head and sole employee was the man called Ossama Suleiman, who moved to the UK in 2000 after having served three prison terms in Syria and who took the nickname of Rami Abdurrahman.

“In his many interviews with the western media this mister every time stresses all the information he publishes comes to him personally on the phone from trusted sources,” the defence ministry’s spokesman said in conclusion. “Thus, that network of the so-called reporting human activists is active right under the nose of Islamic State and other extremists. At the same time, for some reason, they would not see the atrocities of those terrorists.”

West considers 49 civilian deaths insignificant in Syria operation planning

The spokesman also pointed out that the Western coalition considers the death of 49 civilians as insignificant in Syria operation planning while the Russian military excludes such risks in its plans.

“Our aviation does not even plan air strikes on such targets in the event of a threat of civilian deaths. However, the Western coalition can just allow itself to consider the death of 49 civilians as insignificant,” Konashenkov said.

According to the Russian general, CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr said that the US military had told her that the American command made decisions on delivering such air strikes on condition that the number of civilian deaths would not exceed 50 people.

Iran has currently met its obligations to the IAEA under the 2015 US-­led agreement with the UN and now IT is the time for Israel to submit its nuclear program to UNSC inspection or face international sanctions. The imperative is for:

1. The Negev Nuclear Research Center at Dimona to be fully opened to inspection by the IAEA and its estimated undeclared stockpile of up to 400 nuclear warheads be put under UN supervision for eventual destruction other than those required for legitimate defence purposes, estimated not to exceed five warheads (5) in total.

2. Israel’s capacity for uranium enrichment to be severely limited for a minimum of 15 years and that all its centrifuges in excess of 5000 to be dismantled under IAEA supervision

3. That all supplies of heavy water be shipped to the US or other approved recipient, apart from the minimum required for legitimate medical isotopes

4. That inspections teams from the IAEA continuously monitor all Israeli nuclear sites and to verify all fissile materials thereupon.

5. That the state of Israel to become a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with immediate effect.

The timescale for all such specified actions to be approved by the United Nations Assembly in General Session.

Note

1. http://fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/farr.htm

Recientemente algunos intelectuales que se autodefinen de izquierda o centro-izquierda, anunciaron que estábamos a las puertas del fin del ciclo de los gobiernos progresistas, caracterizado por el agotamiento de sus programas neodesarrollistas –que incluyen el extractivismo‑, y su “ineficiente” capacidad de gestión.  Es de esperar entonces, según ellos, una avanzada de la derecha en la región, situación que configuraría un nuevo mapa político en Latinoamérica.  Con este discurso “visionario”, apuntalado por el conocimiento de los planes geopolíticos del imperio para la región, tales intelectuales contribuyeron a instalar y “naturalizar” en la opinión pública el advenimiento del fin de los gobiernos populares y su reemplazo “inevitable” por gobiernos de derecha, presentándolos incluso como una “saludable alternancia”.  Vale entonces compartir reflexiones acerca de este diagnóstico y su sentencia.

El recuento crítico de los acontecimientos políticos de los últimos años revela que las propuestas políticas que caracterizaron el quehacer de los gobiernos populares en tiempos de proyección posneoliberal, están cumplidas.  Y ello anuncia la apertura de un nuevo tiempo, con nuevas problemáticas, tareas, sujetos y desafíos.  Pero además de tareas y agendas, los primeros años de los gobiernos populares significaron también para los pueblos transitar por un conjunto de aprendizajes.

• Quedó al descubierto –en los hechos‑ que gobierno y poder no son sinónimos, que no es posible, enfrentarlos al mismo tiempo ni del mismo modo.  Las revoluciones democráticas no son sinónimos de la otrora “vía pacífica”, suponen la profundización del conflicto político como vehículo de la lucha de clases, anudada fuertemente con una profunda batalla político-cultural de ideas.

• Se evidenció que no basta con poner “buenos gobernantes” a ocupar puestos institucionales que responden al sistema que se busca cambiar.

• El crecimiento económico es importante, pero insuficiente.  La educación política, la batalla ideológica es central.  Y está anudada a la participación política, al empoderamiento.  Nadie puede empoderar a otro/s y mucho menos desde arriba.  El empoderamiento germina con la participación consciente y protagónica de los sujetos en los procesos sociotransformadores.

• Se agotó la concepción de la política desde arriba y a “dedo”, propia del siglo XX; la “bobería”, el romanticismo anodino acerca de la democracia, la subestimación de la política, y las viejas modalidades de la representación política que suplantan el protagonismo popular y fragmentan lo político de lo social.

• Fin del maximalismo teórico y el minimalismo práctico propio de sectores (ultra)izquierdistas.

• Fin del vanguardismo, del pensamiento liberal de izquierda y de las prácticas que, en virtud de ello, aíslan a la militancia izquierdista de los procesos concretos de los pueblos, sus actores y sus dinámicas, posicionándolas fuera de los escenarios concretos de las contiendas políticas.

Desafíos centrales del nuevo tiempo politico

Marcados por los procesos políticos que sacudieron el continente en los últimos veinte años, pueblos, organizaciones sociales y políticas, y gobiernos populares, revolucionarios y progresistas necesitan hacer un alto en el camino, dar cuenta de los logros, las limitaciones y las nuevas tareas del presente.  Esto es: replantearse tanto las preguntas iniciales como las respuestas que guiaron los pasos del quehacer político, económico, social y cultural por más de una década, preparándose para enfrentar nuevos desafíos.  Entre ellos destacaré aquí los siguientes:

Conservar lo logrado implica profundizar el proceso de cambios

La consolidación de actores de oposición política de signo neoliberal colocó a algunos gobiernos a la defensiva.  Conservar los logros se convirtió entonces en una prioridad del accionar político en la actual coyuntura.  Pero lo que no estuvo ‑ni está‑ claro es que para conservar lo conquistado y sostener los procesos de cambios es necesario profundizarlos, radicalizarlos.  Y esto no se logra con acuerdos de cúpulas ni buscando alianzas con sectores del poder opuestos a los cambios; el ejemplo de Brasil es muy elocuente al respecto.

La clave radica en anclar los procesos a la participación protagónica de los pueblos.  Se ha construido un nuevo tiempo social, político, cultural.  Y este trae consigo nuevas tareas cuya realización está anudada al protagonismo popular.  Esto implica también fortalecer los procesos de concientización y organización colectiva que vigoricen la determinación de los pueblos para sostener los logros alcanzados y traccionar el proceso hacia mayores transformaciones.  Y esto no puede ser espontáneo; librados los acontecimientos a la “espontaneidad” no hay que sorprenderse ante el advenimiento de sucesiones políticas de derecha.

La actual coyuntura política continental coloca a los gobiernos populares, las fuerzas progresistas o revolucionarias de la región en la disyuntiva de profundizar las transformaciones o sucumbir ante ellas, si optan por conservarlas solo “desde arriba”.

La participación protagónica del/los pueblo/s es neurálgica para que los gobiernos populares sean también un camino de construcción de poder popular

La profundización de la democracia en este nuevo tiempo reclama asumir el decisivo imperativo político del protagonismo del pueblo para profundizar las transformaciones, entendiendo que ellas anudan, simultáneamente, los derroteros políticos de los gobiernos populares con los diversos procesos de construcción y afianzamiento de poder popular desde abajo que los pueblos desarrollan en cada país.  En esto radica, centralmente, la profundización de los procesos sociotransformadores iniciados.  Pensarla como un simple aggiornamento de la agenda pública deja a los gobiernos populares a merced de la voracidad política de los opositores.

Las realidades objetivas y subjetivas han cambiado; las subjetividades políticas de los sujetos participantes de los procesos de cambio se han radicalizado, hay un pueblo que reclama nuevos y mayores protagonismos.  Ese protagonismo necesita hoy reorganizarse y rearticularse, conformando nuevas confluencias de los quehaceres de la militancia social y política, dentro y fuera de lo institucional, actualizando el horizonte estratégico de los cambios.

En este sentido, apostar a la construcción del protagonismo colectivo de los pueblos para su constitución en la fuerza político-social de liberación es el factor neurálgico que marcará el rumbo y las dinámicas políticas del presente y el futuro inmediato en los procesos populares en curso en cada país y en la región.  Ello es vehículo también para la construcción de la unidad de los pueblos.

Reconocer a la participación popular orgánica como un factor clave para el afianzamiento y la profundización de los procesos de cambio en curso, no está reñido con el reconocimiento al papel de los liderazgos individuales.  Pero esto no significa aceptar que la continuidad de los líderes a la cabeza de los gobiernos populares, es el factor que da estabilidad y solidez a los procesos.  Al contrario, cuando hay líderes que sustituyen el protagonismo político de los pueblos, en realidad, lejos de garantizar continuidades, anuncian el cortoplacismo del camino emprendido.

Pueblos sin autonomía y auto-convencimiento poco pueden hacer para sostener y/o profundizar procesos que en realidad no sienten como propios.  Por ese camino, el extrañamiento de los mismos anidará silenciosamente entre las filas populares y abrirá cauces a previsibles derrotas.  Esto no es: “sí o no”; hay muchos matices.  En no pocas coyunturas se ha visto que los pueblos y sus organizaciones concentran mayor madurez y responsabilidad que sus dirigentes y si bien no logran a veces evitar el desenlace negativo, con su presencia protagónica en las calles lo aminoran bastante.  Los líderes son importantes y en algunas coyunturas decisivos, pero nunca para sustituir la participación protagónica de los pueblos, sino para desencadenarla y potenciarla.

Hugo Chávez, ejemplo de líder carismático y gran creador y conductor del proceso revolucionario boliviariano de Venezuela, no centró el proceso revolucionario en su persona.  Tenía claro que el pueblo autoconstituido en sujeto revolucionario es el protagonista creador, constructor y sostén del poder popular de nuevo tipo que germina desde abajo en los consejos comunales y comunas.  En ellos la revolución bolivariana abre cauces hacia la creación de una nueva civilización, al orientarse ‑vía empoderamiento colectivo‑ hacia la construcción del Estado comunal.  Tan claro lo tenía que su lema fue (y es) “comuna o nada”.

Construir un nuevo modo de producción y reproducción (sociedad-naturaleza)

Una de las mayores limitaciones de lo que podría definirse sin grandes rigores, como “modelo económico neodesarrollista” es que se ajusta a los marcos del modo de producción capitalista, sosteniendo el circuito de la muerte.  Esto marca como una tarea importante de este nuevo tiempo: crear y articular procesos productivos alternativos existentes y promover la búsqueda de nuevas bases económicas que hagan posible la coherencia social entre el ciclo de producción y la reproducción.

Se trata de avanzar hacia la conformación de un sistema productivo que sea socialmente responsable del ciclo reproductivo que genera.  Esto es: aportar a la creación de un nuevo modo de producción‑reproducción sociales con lógica circular, que abra cauces a una nueva economía, que además de enfrentar con éxito la lucha contra el hambre, la pobreza, el analfabetismo y las enfermedades curables, sea el sustrato de un nuevo modo de vida y una nueva civilización, la del buen vivir y convivir.

Salir del cerco ideológico, político, cultural y mediático del poder hegemónico

• Desplegar la batalla político cultural en todos los terrenos y dimensiones, en particular las redes sociales.

• Atender al desarrollo de la subjetividad y espiritualidad de los pueblos poteciando sus identidades, culturas, cosmovisiones…

• Desarrollar sostenidamente procesos interactivos de formación política.

• Abrir cauces a un nuevo pensamiento crítico latinoamericano, descolonizado, intercultural y multicosmovisivo, plurívoco, anclado a las prácticas de los pueblos.

• Promover procesos articulados de descolonización, interculturalidad y despatriarcalización en la construcción del poder popular desde abajo.

• Desarrollar un nuevo tipo de intelectual orgánico, que descubra, promueva y potencie el pensamiento de los pueblos en toda su diversidad, amplitud y riqueza.

Trabajar por el fortalecimiento y desarrollo de las articulaciones regionales y continentales de los movimientos y organizaciones sociales populares, particularmente ampliar y profundizar el espacio ALBA de los movimientos.  Y también impulsar la creación de espacios de encuentro, intercambio y coordinación de organizaciones sociales y políticas continentales, regionales y en el ámbito de cada país.

Apostar a la creación y construcción de una nueva izquierda política, social y cultural

Es vital comprender las nuevas dimensiones de lo político, de la acción y organización políticas; dar cuenta de las nuevas realidades y sus nuevos sujetos/as: los/as desplazados/as de diversos orígenes, los/as precarizados/as permanentes, los movimientos indígenas, las mujeres, los/las jóvenes, los niños y las niñas, los y las adultos/as mayores, los LGTB… abrir espacio a las diversas identidades, cosmovisiones, saberes, sabidurías y corrientes de pensamiento: los saberes ecológicos, la biopolítica, la bioética, el feminismo político y la despatriarcalización como crítica raizal del poder del capital…

Construir la ofensiva estratégica popular revolucionaria

Una de las resultantes más recurrentes de la división del campo popular, y particularmente entre la izquierda latinoamericana, es que las protestas y luchas sociales terminan siendo funcionales a los intereses de los poderosos.  Marcado el campo popular por disputas internas de “poder”, por divisiones multicolores de todo signo entre las fuerzas políticas y su correlato en los movimientos sociales populares, los conflictos sociales terminan subordinados a los intereses intestinos del poder, fortaleciéndolo como recambio, en vez de lograr –colectivamente- subordinar a los poderosos a los intereses del pueblo y proponer una agenda política para concretar los objetivos populares (ofensiva).  El caso de Argentina es muy elocuente al respecto, visible tanto en los acontecimientos recientes como en la trayectoria histórica de las izquierdas.

A esta gran debilidad política y cultural hay que sumar la instalación de un pensamiento binario (lo uno o lo otro, blanco o negro…), el desarrollo de la guerra mediática para conquistar y anestesiar las mentes del “gran público”, sin que las organizaciones políticas y sociales –ocupadas en sus peleas internas‑, asuman las tareas de la batalla de ideas como una de las disputas centrales de las luchas políticas de nuestro tiempo.

La falta de convergencia y unidad de los diversos actores sociales y políticos, aunada con la escasa formación política, las sectorialización y el corporativismo… coloca a las organizaciones sociales y políticas de los pueblos en situación de subordinación a los intereses de los poderosos.  En función de ello, estos pueden manipularlos para alcanzar sus propósitos, debilitando y resquebrajando la base social de los gobiernos populares para reagruparse como bloque de poder opositor con capacidad de recuperar su hegemonía.  Esta recuperación es en realidad una nueva toma de posiciones de los poderosos quienes ‑haciéndose cargo de las nuevas realidades políticas recientemente vividas con los gobiernos populares‑, una vez en los gobiernos, buscarán destruir las bases democráticas de las sociedades para impedir cualquier intento futuro de reeditar gobiernos progresistas, populares o revolucionarios en el continente.  Y para ello no están solos, cuentan con el apoyo imperial del Norte, de las instituciones del poder global del capital y de sus cañoneras mediáticas locales y globales.

El arribo de gobiernos de derecha en la región no es una simple “vuelta al pasado”, tampoco responde a una “enriquecedora alternancia” de gobiernos y gobernantes.  Se trata de una vuelta de hoja, un giro raizal en la orientación de los procesos emprendidos, que se produce para articular los procesos locales con las necesidades hegemónicas y lógicas del poder global del capital: saqueo, dominación y muerte… Es importante no subestimarlo.  Y preparar las nuevas resistencias anclándolas en la coordinación y unidad a partir de la participación articulada social y política de los sectores populares en su diversidad.  A ello debe encaminarse el fortalecimiento de la formación política y de los procesos orgánicos de convergencia colectiva de organizaciones sociales y políticas hacia objetivos comunes, enmarcados en la creación y construcción colectivas de un nuevo horizonte civilizatorio.

Isabel Rauber 

– Isabel Rauber es Doctora en Filosofía; educadora popular; militante social; estudiosa de los movimientos sociales latinoamericanos empeñados en procesos participativos de construcción de poder popular desde abajo.

– See more at: http://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/174409#sthash.ugKO9Nfc.dpuf

«Le più piccole bombe Usa alimentano la paura nucleare»: così titolava ieri in prima pagina  The New York Times, riferendosi alle B61-12, le nuove bombe nucleari che gli Stati uniti stanno per installare anche in Italia al posto delle B-61 schierate ad Aviano e Ghedi-Torre. Le caratteristiche di questa nuova arma nucleare sono state descritte negli ultimi due anni in vari articoli sul manifesto: non è una semplice versione ammodernata della B61, ma una nuova arma nucleare polivalente, che sostituisce le bombe B61-3, -4, -7, -10 nell’attuale arsenale nucleare Usa. La B61-12, con una potenza media di 50 kiloton (circa il quadruplo della bomba di Hiroshima), svolge quindi la funzione di più bombe, comprese quelle penetranti progettate per «decapitare» il paese nemico, distruggendo i bunker dei centri di comando e altre strutture sotterranee in un first strike nucleare. A differenza delle B61 sganciate in verticale sull’obiettivo, le B61-12 vengono lanciate a grande distanza (circa 100 km) e si dirigono verso l’obiettivo guidate da un sistema satellitare. Si cancella così, in gran parte, la differenza tra armi nucleari strategiche a lungo raggio e armi tattiche a corto raggio.

L’articolo del New York Times aggiunge a tali caratteristiche un dettaglio di grande importanza: la B61-12 ha «una testata con quattro opzioni di potenza selezionabili». Al momento del lancio, viene selezionata la potenza dell’esplosione nucleare a seconda dell’obiettivo da colpire: ad esempio, quella massima per distruggere una intera città, rendendo radioattiva una vasta area; quella minima per distruggere una singola zona, provocando minore radioattività.

Le implicazioni di questa «modernizzazione» sono gravissime. Oltre che sulle bombe, gli Usa hanno in programma di installare testate nucleari a potenza variabile anche su missili da crociera. Ancora più pericoloso è che gli stessi missili sono armabili sia con testate convenzionali (non-nucleari), sia con testate nucleari. Chi è attaccato con tali missili non può dunque sapere se si tratta di un attacco nucleare o no e, per evitare il peggio, prima che i missili arrivino sugli obiettivi può lanciare per ritorsione un attacco nucleare.

Ma c’è un pericolo ancora maggiore, evidenziato perfino dal generale James Cartwright, già capo del Comando strategico degli Stati uniti, responsabile delle armi nucleari: «La modernizzazione potrebbe cambiare il modo in cui i comandanti militari valutano i rischi derivanti dall’uso di armi nucleari». In altre parole, avvertono Cartwright e altri critici, «armi nucleari di minore potenza e più precise aumentano la tentazione di usarle, perfino di usarle per primi invece che per rappresaglia». Lo conferma la Federazione degli scienziati americani (Fas): «L’alta precisione e la possibilità di usare testate meno distruttive possono portare i comandanti militari a premere perché, in un attacco, si usi  la bomba nucleare, sapendo che la ricaduta radioattiva e il danno collaterale sarebbero limitati».

Queste sono le nuove bombe nucleari Usa che, già testate nel poligono di Tonopah in Nevada, stanno per arrivare in Italia. Lo conferma da Washington, con prove documentate, la Federazione degli scienziati americani. Una foto satellitare mostra che, a tale scopo, è stato effettuato l’upgrade della base della U.S. Air Force ad Aviano e di quella di Ghedi-Torre. Analoghi lavori sono stati effettuati nella base aerea tedesca di Buchel, in altre due basi in Belgio e Olanda, e in quella turca di Incirlic dove stanno per essere installate le B61-12.

Non si sa quante B61-12 sarannno schierate in Europa e Turchia. Secondo le ultime stime della Fas, gli Usa mantengono oggi 70 bombe nucleari B61 in Italia (50 ad Aviano e 20 a Ghedi), 50 in Turchia, 20 rispettivamente in Germania, Belgio e Olanda, per un totale di 180. Nessuno sa però con esattezza quante effettivamente siano. Si sa però una cosa: quelle che verranno tra poco installate in Italia dagli Usa sono armi che abbassano la soglia nucleare, ossia rendono più probabile il lancio di un attacco nucleare dal nostro paese e lo espongono quindi a una rappresaglia nucleare. All’uso di tali armi nucleari vengono addestrati anche i piloti italiani, nonostante che l’Italia abbia ratificato il Trattato di non-proliferazione che la «impegna a non ricevere da chicchessia armi nucleari, né il controllo su tali armi, direttamente o indirettamente».

Manlio Dinucci

Há vinte e cinco anos, nas primeiras horas do dia 17 de janeiro de 1991, começava no Golfo Pérsico a operação “Tempestade do deserto”, a guerra contra o Iraque que abriu a fase histórica que estamos vivendo. Esta guerra foi desencadeada no momento em que, após a queda do Muro de Berlim, serão dissolvidos o Pacto de Varsóvia e a própria União Soviética. Isto criou, na região europeia e centro-asiática, uma situação geopolítica inteiramente nova. E, em escala mundial, desaparecia a superpotência capaz de fazer face aos Estados Unidos.

“O presidente Bush aproveitou esta mudança histórica”, conta Colin Powell. Washington traça imediatamente “uma nova estratégia de segurança nacional e uma estratégia militar para sustentá-la”. O ataque iraquiano contra o Kuweit, ordenado por Saddam Hussein em agosto de 1990, “fez com que os Estados Unidos pudessem pôr em prática a nova estratégia exatamente no momento em que começavam a torna-la pública”.

Saddam Hussein, que se torna o “inimigo número um”, é o mesmo que os Estados Unidos apoiaram nos anos 1980 na guerra contra o Irã de Komeiny, então o “inimigo número um” para os interesses estadunidenses no Oriente Médio. Mas quando em 1988 termina a guerra contra o Irã, os Estados Unidos  temem que o Iraque, graças também à ajuda soviética, conquistasse um papel dominante na região. Então, recorreram à tradicional política de “dividir para reinar”. Sob a direção de Washington, muda também a atitude do Kuait: este exige o pagamento imediato da dívida contraída pelo Iraque e, explorando a jazida de Rumaila que se estende pelos dois territórios, eleva sua produção petrolífera para além da cota estabelecida pela Opep. Assim, acarreta prejuízo ao Iraque, que saiu da guerra com uma dívida externa de mais de 70 bilhões de dólares, dos quais 40 com o Kuwait e a Arábia Saudita.  Saddam Hussein pensa sair do impasse “reanexando” o território kuwaitiano que, com base nas fronteiras traçadas em 1922 pelo procônsul britânico Sir Percy Cox, impede o acesso do Iraque ao Golfo.

Washington dá a entender a Bagdá que vai ficar fora da disputa. Em 25 de julho de 1990, enquanto os satélites do Pentágono mostram que a invasão é iminente, a embaixadora estadunidense em Bagdá, April Glaspie, assegura a Saddam Hussein que os Estados Unidos desejam ter as melhores relações com o Iraque e não pensam em interferir nos conflitos interárabes. Saddam Hussein cai na armadilha: uma semana depois, no dia 1º de agosto de 1990, as forças iraquianas invadem o Kuwait.

Washington, tendo formado uma coalizão internacional, envia então para o Golfo uma força de 750 mil homens, dos quais 70% são estadunidenses, sob as ordens do general Schwarzkopf. Durante 43 dias, a aviação estadunidense e aliada efetua, com 2.800 aviões, mais de 110 mil incursões, lançando 250 mil bombas, inclusive de fragmentação que espalham 10 milhões de munições. Participam nos bombardeios, com os EUA, forças aéreas e navais britânicas, francesas, italianas, gregas, espanholas, portuguesas, belgas, holandesas, dinamarquesas, norueguesas e canadenses. Em 23 de fevereiro de 1991, as tropas da coalizão, compreendendo mais de meio milhão de soldados, lançam a ofensiva terrestre. Esta termina em 28 de fevereiro com um “cessar-fogo temporário” proclamado pelo presidente Bush. A guerra é sucedida pelo bloqueio, que provoca na população iraquiana mais vítimas do que a guerra: mais de um milhão, das quais cerca da metade são crianças.

Imediatamente após a guerra do Golfo, Washington lança aos adversários e aos aliados uma mensagem inequívoca: “Os Estados Unidos são o único Estado com uma força, uma envergadura e uma influência em todas as dimensões – política, econômica e militar – realmente mundiais. Não existe nenhum substituto à liderança norte-americana”. (Estratégia de segurança nacional dos Estados Unidos, agosto de 1991).

A guerra do Golfo é a primeira guerra em que a República Italiana participa sob comando estadunidense, violando assim o artigo 11 da Constituição. A Otan, sem participar oficialmente como tal na guerra, põe à disposição suas forças e estruturas para operações militares. Alguns meses mais tarde, em novembro de 1991, o Conselho Atlântico promulga, na esteira da nova estratégia dos EUA, o “novo conceito estratégico da Aliança”. No mesmo ano é promulgado na Itália o “novo modelo de defesa” que, derrubando a Constituição, indica como missão das forças armadas “a tutela dos interesses nacionais em toda parte que seja necessário”.

Assim nasceu com a guerra do Golfo a estratégia que conduziu a guerras sucessivas sob o comando estadunidense, apresentadas como “operações humanitárias de manutenção da paz”: Iugoslávia  1999, Afeganistão 2001, Iraque 2003, Líbia 2011, Síria desde 2013, acompanhadas no mesmo quadro estratégico, pelas guerras de Israel contra o Líbano e  Gaza, da Turquia contra os Curdos do PKK (Partido dos Trabalhadores do Curdistão), da Arábia Saudita contra o Iêmen, a formação do chamado estado Islâmico e outros grupos terroristas funcionais à estratégia da dupla EUA/Otan, a utilização de forças  neonazistas para o golpe de Estado na Ucrânia servindo à nova guerra fria contra a Rússia.

Proféticas, mas no sentido trágico, as palavras do presidente Bush em agosto de 1991: “A crise do Golfo passará à história como a incubadora da nova ordem mundial”.

Manlio Dinucci

Fonte: Il Manifesto –
http://ilmanifesto.info/la-tempesta-nel-deserto-apriva-la-fase-che-viviamo/

Tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho para o Blog da Resistência

Manlio Dinucci é jornalista e geógrafo italiano.

Venticinque anni fa, nelle prime ore del 17 gennaio 1991, inizia nel Golfo Persico l’operazione «Tempesta del deserto», la guerra contro l’Iraq che apre la fase storica che stiamo vivendo. Questa guerra viene lanciata nel momento in cui, dopo il crollo del Muro di Berlino, stanno per dissolversi il Patto di Varsavia e la stessa Unione Sovietica. Ciò crea, nella regione europea e centro-asiatica, una situazione geopolitica interamente nuova. E, su scala mondiale, scompare la superpotenza in grado di fronteggiare quella statunitense.

«Il presidente Bush coglie questo cambiamento storico»,  racconta Colin Powell. Washington traccia subito «una nuova strategia della sicurezza nazionale e una strategia militare per sostenerla». L’attacco iracheno al Kuwait, ordinato da Saddam Hussein nell’agosto 1990, «fa sì che gli Stati uniti possano mettere in pratica la nuova strategia esattamente nel momento in cui cominciano a pubblicizzarla».

Il Saddam Hussein, che diventa «nemico numero uno», è lo stesso che gli Stati uniti hanno sostenuto negli anni Ottanta nella guerra contro l’Iran di Khomeini, allora «nemico numero uno» per gli interessi Usa in Medioriente. Ma quando nel 1988 termina la guerra con l’Iran, gli Usa temono che l’Iraq, grazie anche all’assistenza sovietica, acquisti un ruolo dominante nella regione. Ricorrono quindi alla tradizionale politica del «divide et impera». Sotto regia di Washington, cambia anche l’atteggiamento del Kuwait: esso esige l’immediato rimborso del debito contratto dall’Iraq e, sfruttando il giacimento di Rumaila che si estende sotto ambedue i territori, porta la propria produzione petrolifera oltre la quota stabilita dall’Opec. Danneggia così l’Iraq, uscito dalla guerra con un debito estero di oltre 70 miliardi di dollari, 40 dei quali dovuti a Kuwait e Arabia Saudita. A questo punto Saddam Hussein pensa di uscire dall’impasse «riannettendosi» il territorio kuwaitiano che, in base ai confini tracciati nel 1922 dal proconsole britannico Sir Percy Cox,  sbarra l’accesso dell’Iraq al Golfo.

Washington lascia credere a Baghdad di voler restare fuori dal contenzioso. Il 25 luglio 1990, mentre i satelliti del Pentagono mostrano che l’invasione è ormai imminente, l’ambasciatrice Usa a Baghdad, April Glaspie,  assicura Saddam Hussein che gli Stati uniti desiderano avere le migliori relazioni con l’Iraq e non intendono interferire nei conflitti inter-arabi. Saddam Hussein cade nella trappola: una settimana dopo, il 1° agosto 1990, le forze irachene invadono il Kuwait.

A questo punto Washington, formata una coalizione internazionale, invia nel Golfo una forza di 750 mila uomini, di cui il 70 per cento statunitensi, agli ordini del generale Schwarzkopf. Per 43 giorni, l’aviazione Usa e alleata effettua, con 2800 aerei, oltre 110 mila sortite, sganciando 250 mila bombe, tra cui quelle a grappolo che rilasciano oltre 10 milioni di submunizioni. Partecipano ai bombardamenti, insieme a quelle statunitensi, forze aeree e navali britanniche, francesi, italiane, greche, spagnole, portoghesi, belghe, olandesi, danesi, norvegesi e canadesi. Il 23 febbraio le truppe della coalizione, comprendenti oltre mezzo milione di soldati, lanciano l’offensiva terrestre. Essa termina il 28 febbraio con un «cessate-il-fuoco temporaneo» proclamato dal presidente Bush. Alla guerra segue l’embargo, che provoca nella popolazione irachena più vittime della guerra: oltre un milione, tra cui circa la metà bambini.

Subito dopo la guerra del Golfo, Washington lancia ad avversari e alleati un inequivocabile messaggio: «Gli Stati uniti rimangono il solo Stato con una forza, una portata e un’influenza in ogni dimensione – politica, economica e militare – realmente globali. Non esiste alcun sostituto alla leadership americana» (Strategia della sicurezza nazionale degli Stati Uniti, agosto 1991).

La guerra del Golfo è la prima guerra a cui partecipa sotto comando Usa la Repubblica italiana, violando l’articolo 11 della Costituzione. La Nato, pur non partecipando ufficialmente in quanto tale alla guerra, mette a disposizione sue forze e strutture per le operazioni militari. Pochi mesi dopo, nel novembre 1991, il Consiglio Atlantico vara, sulla scia della nuova strategia Usa, il «nuovo concetto strategico dell’Alleanza». Nello stesso anno in Italia viene varato il «nuovo modello di difesa» che, stravolgendo la Costituzione, indica quale missione delle forze armate «la tutela degli interessi nazionali ovunque sia necessario».

Nasce così con la guerra del Golfo la strategia che guida le successive guerre sotto comando Usa, presentate come «operazioni umanitarie di peacekeeping»: Jugoslavia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libia 2011, Siria dal 2013, accompagnate nello stesso quadro strategico dalle guerre di Israele contro il Libano e Gaza, della Turchia contro i curdi del Pkk, dell’Arabia Saudita contro lo Yemen, dalla formazione dell’Isis e altri gruppi terroristi funzionali alla strategia Usa/Nato, dall’uso di forze neonaziste per il colpo di stato in Ucraina funzionale alla nuova guerra fredda contro la Russia. Profetiche, ma in senso tragico, le parole del presidente Bush nell’agosto 1991: «La crisi del Golfo passerà alla storia come il crogiolo del nuovo ordine mondiale».

Manlio Dinucci

Roger Godsiff MP for Birmingham Hall Green, has tabled a Parliamentary Question asking whether government will reconsider support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership trade deal, following the announcement that a tar sands company is suing the American Government under existing trade law after it decided against a massive new tar sands pipeline. He said “I hope that the Prime Minister will reconsider his support for TTIP in the light of this lawsuit” adding that – for instance – TTIP could leave UK taxpayers liable to being sued for billions by fracking companies.

The charge by John Hilary, head of War on Want, and many others is that ‘TTIP elevates transnational capital to a legal status equivalent to that of the nation state’

Two powerful international legal mechanisms are already seen as damaging public health and one, ICSID, appears predominantly to oppress small and relatively poor countries:

• Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is an instrument of public international law, that grants an investor the right to use dispute settlement proceedings against a foreign government

• and the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, ICSID.
  

Disputes between government and corporations are dealt with in secret in front of a tribunal. Over 500 known cases have now been filed against over 95 countries:

• Philip Morris sued the Australian government over its plain packaging rules.
• The Swedish corporation Battenfall sued the German government over its decision to phase out nuclear power
• a French firm is suing the government of Egypt over its increase in minimum wage.
• The government of Uruguay amended its legislation on health warnings on cigarette packets and ban on the sale of “light” brands,after Philip Morris filed for ICSID arbitration, claiming the restrictions hurt its business.

ICSID appears to act predominantly on behalf of corporations against small, poorer countries – but has deactivated the following link to this information.

Fifty of the 128 pending cases reveal that multinationals – mainly in the sectors of in the tobacco, finance, insurance, debt instruments, petroleum exploration, exploitation, quarrying, mining, electricity generation, hydrocarbon, oil, gas, nuclear power, food, gold, copper, tourism development and water – are taking cases against the Republic of Chile, Republic of Burundi, Arab Republic of Egypt, Republic of the Philippines, Republic of Peru, Republic of Tunisia, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Grenada, Georgia, Romania, Republic of Slovenia, Plurinational Republic of Bolivia, Republic of Togo, Republic of Ecuador, Ukraine, Republic of Panama, Republic of South Africa, Central African Republic, Republic of Paraguay and a huge twentyfour cases against the Argentine Republic.

Roger Godsiff ends:

“This appalling lawsuit shows exactly why the UK must stay out of trade deals which prioritise the rights of greedy multinationals to make a profit over the rights of citizens to breathe clean air and make their own decisions about how their country is run. The UK Government must be accountable to the citizens they were elected to serve, not to unfair trade law which puts profits before people”.

Bipartisan congressional hardliners continue opposing last year’s nuclear deal. House Speaker Paul Ryan said “(a) bipartisan majority in the House voted to reject this deal in the first place, and we will continue to do everything possible to prevent a nuclear Iran.”

He along with numerous other Republican and Democrat congressional members strongly oppose lifting international sanctions.

Republican presidential aspirants railed against changing longstanding policy. Senator Marco Rubio said he’ll “cancel this ridiculous (nuclear) deal with Iran” straightaway in office if elected. “As president, I’ll reimpose sanctions…on day one.”

Jeb Bush accused Tehran of “remain(ing) a major (regional) destabilizing force…working against American interests.”

“Nothing in the (nuclear deal) justif(ies) lifting US and international sanctions…I cannot stand behind a flawed agreement.” He called for imposing new sanctions.

Donald Trump criticized unfreezing Iranian assets, saying withholding them was meant to prevent nuclear weapons development.

Earlier, Ben Carson called the nuclear deal a “recipe for disaster.” Hillary Clinton should scare everyone – arguably the most dangerous of all US presidential aspirants, a reckless war goddess.

Earlier, she said “(i)f I’m president, we will attack Iran.” She outrageously considers the Islamic Republic an “existential threat to Israel,” calling it the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, wanting steps taken to contain its nonexistent “aggressiveness.”

She lied, claiming Tehran “still violat(es) UN Security Council resolutions with its ballistic missile program, which should be met with new sanctions designations and firm resolve.”

If elected president, her policy will be “distrust and verify.” As Secretary of State, she approved large weapons deals for Middle East rogue states, notorious for horrific human rights abuses.

At the time, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Algeria, the UAE and Oman donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Washington remains implacably hostile to Iran. Bipartisan bashing continues unabated.

New efforts to isolate the Islamic Republic may subvert what’s been accomplished – especially with a Republican hardliner or Clinton as president.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Islamic State jihadists have reportedly slaughtered up to 280 people in the Deir ez-Zor province, killing “whole families” for alleged cooperation with the Syrian troops. The killings are said to have taken place a day after Russian humanitarian aid was airdropped in the region.

Local residents told Sputnik news agency the massacre happened in al-Bagilya settlement, an area which received Russian airlifted aid earlier.

“The horrific massacre carried out today by ISIL militants in al-Bagilya in Deir ez-Zor. 280 victims, including women, children and old people. Reason – cooperation with the Syrian army,” a Sputnik source said.

Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS/ISIL) militants reportedly carried out executions of “whole families.”

Previously, reports indicated that IS fighters were moving their way up to the northern part of the Deir ez-Zor province.

The massacre appears to be one of the worst daily mass killings that took place over the five years of the Syrian conflict.

Syrian state media reports that all the people killed were civilians. But local monitoring groups say dozens of government troops were killed as well.

Syrian state news agency SANA initially reported that IS fighters murdered dozens of civilians, without providing any further details. Meanwhile, the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV said that 280 people were killed, including children and women. The TV channel added that the dead bodies were dumped in the Euphrates River, while 400 survivors were taken hostage.

Reuters also reported at least 250 people dead in Bagilya settlement, citing a source close to the government. Some of the victims were beheaded, according to the source.

Hours after the attack was reported, the governor of Deir ez-Zor province, Mohammad Qaddur Ajnyyja, told Sputnik that Syrian army has successfully freed the settlement from Islamic State control.

“ISIL militants entered in the village of al-Bagilya… last night and perpetrated a massacre of whole families. For this reason the army headed to this region to save the population. There were clashes with ISIL militants, they suffered significant casualties, the rest succeeded to flee to the neighboring areas controlled by ISIL,” Ajnyyja said.

RT has requested information on the atrocity from several organizations on the ground, including the Red Cross, and is following the developments.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) top Midwest official knew about the Flint, Michigan drinking water crisis of 2015 months before telling the public, according to a Tuesday report by the The Detroit News.

EPA official Susan Hedman did not publicize the EPA’s concern over Flint’s water quality or the water’s dangerous health concerns. The federal agency instead quietly fought with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality for at least six months about what should be done.

Anthony Fordham picks up water at the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan to deliver to a school after elevated levels of lead were found in the city’s water in Flint, Michigan December 16 2015 REUTTERS/Rebecca Cook

EPA water expert, Miguel Del Toral, identified potential contamination problems with Flint’s drinking water last February and confirmed the suspicions in April. He authored an internal memo about the problem in June, according to documents obtained by Virginia Tech.

Meanwhile, Hedman became aware of the contamination issue in April. She sought legal advice, but didn’t receive the guidance until November 2014. The American Civil Liberties Union accused Hedman in October of attempting to keep Miguel Del Toral’s memo in-house, downplaying its significance.

The corrosive nature of Flint’s drinking water is causing lead from pipes and pathogens to get into the town’s water supply, according to a study by Virginia Tech. Flint is currently dealing with an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a dangerous  infection that usually spreads through a tainted water source.

Nearly two years ago, the state of Michigan decided to save money by switching Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to a local river. The state of Michigan, however, applied the wrong standards for governing drinking water, resulting in a system that did not properly control corrosion. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder activated the National Guard Tuesday to help distribute bottled water and filters to the 100,000 residents of Flint.

A class-action lawsuit against Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality alleges that the state wasn’t treating Flint’s water with an anti-corrosive agent, a violation of federal law.

“At that point, you do not just have smoke, you have a three-alarm fire and should respond immediately,” Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher whose analysis helped uncover the lead contamination, told The Detroit News. “There was no sense of urgency at any of the relevant agencies, with the obvious exception of Miguel Del Toral, and he was silenced and discredited.”

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This important address to the EU parliament was first published in November 2009

Dear Friends,

Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg earlier this month[November 2009]. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world.

For better days,
Professor Avraham Oz , Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature University of Haifa 

*      *      *

Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).

However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my country are  Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R’aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.

When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.

I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.

It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.

This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.

Great France of “la liberte égalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.

Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.

I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour, I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.

But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children.

Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names–such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland–are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.

We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.`

All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.

And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.

I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.

Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.

Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.

I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova–another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children–asked:

Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Judge Napolitano (click for full article below) explains the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. There are two aspects of the investigation. The original source of her trouble is the charge that she failed to safeguard national security secrets.

As Judge Napolitano explains, this crime does not require intent and can result from negligence or simply from a lack of awareness that a secret is being revealed, as in the case that Judge Napolitano provides of the US Navy sailor who was prosecuted for espionage because a “selfie” he sent to his girlfriend revealed a sonar screen in the background. An even more egregious case is that of the US Marine who was prosecuted for using email to alert superiors to the presence of an al-Quada operative inside a US military compound. The email is considered unsecure and thus the Marine was prosecuted for revealing a secret known only to himself.

In view of these unjustified prosecutions of US military personnel, the FBI has no alternative to recommending that Hillary be indicted.

Whether Hillary will be indicted ostensibly depends on the Justice (sic) Department and the White House. In fact, it is unlikely that either Wall Street or the military/security complex wants Hillary indicted as both have invested too many millions of dollars in her presidential candidacy, and both interest groups are more powerful than the Justice (sic) Department and the White House.

I do not think that Hillary was a good US senator and Secretary of State, and I do not think she is qualified to be President of the US. Nevertheless, I do wonder how important are the secrets about which she is accused of negligance. Even the one possibly serious disclosure that Judge Napolitano provides of Hillary forwarding a photo from a satellite of a North Korean nuclear facility doesn’t strike me as important. The North Koreans, along with the entirety of the world, know that the US has satellites and communication intercepts operating against them 24/7.

Many things with secret classifications are not secrets. In my career I had many security clearances. As staff associate, Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, House Committee on Appropriations, I had top secret clearances because secret weapon systems were at stake. It was a joke among the staff that many of the “secrets” were available in the public defense literature.

As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury I received the CIA’s daily briefing of the President. It was boring reading. I came to the conclusion that the CIA was not going to report anything of consequence that possibly could turn out to be wrong.

Later, as a member of a secret Presidential committee to investigate the CIA’s view of the Soviet Union’s ability to withstand an arms race, I had very high clearances as the committee had subpoena power over the CIA. If the Kremlin had had access to the top secret documents, all the Kremlin would have learned is that the CIA had a much higher opinion of the capability of the Soviet economy than did the Kremlin.

Distinguished law professors have concluded that the US government classifies documents primarily in order to hide its own mistakes and crimes. We see this over and over. The US government can escape accountability for the most incredible mistakes and the worse crimes against the US Constitution and humanity simply by saying “national security.”

In my opinion, it is the second FBI investigation of Hillary that should be pursued. This is a much more serious possible offense. There is suspicion that Bill and Hillary privatized their public offices and turned them into a money faucet for themselves.

This is a serious problem everywhere in the West. A few years out of office and Bill and Hillary can drop $3 million on their daughter’s wedding. A year or so out of office and Tony Blair was worth $50 million. As an Assistant Secretary of Defense once told me, “European governments report to us. We pay them, and we own them.”

In Anglo-American legal history, one foundation of liberty is the requirement that crime requires intent. I do not believe that Hillary intentionally revealed secrets. If she was negligent, that should be made public and should be sufficient to disqualify her from occupying the White House. What is clear to me is that the legal principle that crime requires intent is far more important than “getting Hillary.” This foundational principle of liberty should be protected even if it means letting Hillary go.

And certainly Obama should pardon the sailor and marine.

Two Smoking Guns, Espionage and corruption: The FBI’s Criminal Inestigation on Hillary Clinton by Andrew P. Napolitano

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

The federal criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to secure state secrets was ratcheted up earlier this week, and at the same time, the existence of a parallel criminal investigation of another aspect of her behavior was made known. This is the second publicly revealed expansion of the FBI’s investigations in two months.

I have argued for two months that Clinton’s legal woes are either grave or worse than grave. That argument has been based on the hard, now public evidence of her failure to safeguard national security secrets and the known manner in which the Department of Justice addresses these failures.

The failure to safeguard state secrets is an area of the law in which the federal government has been aggressive to the point of being merciless. State secrets are the product of members of the intelligence community’s risking their lives to obtain information.

Before she was entrusted with any state secrets – indeed, on her first full day as secretary of state – Clinton received instruction from FBI agents on how to safeguard them; and she signed an oath swearing to comply with the laws commanding the safekeeping of these secrets. She was warned that the failure to safeguard secrets – known as espionage – would most likely result in aggressive prosecution.

In the cases of others, those threats have been carried out. The Obama Department of Justice prosecuted a young sailor for espionage for sending a selfie to his girlfriend, because in the background of the photo was a view of a sonar screen on a submarine. It prosecuted a heroic Marine for espionage for warning his superiors of the presence of an al-Qaida operative in police garb inside an American encampment in Afghanistan, because he used a Gmail account to send the warning.

It also prosecuted Gen. David Petraeus for espionage for keeping secret and top-secret documents in an unlocked drawer in his desk inside his guarded home. It alleged that he shared those secrets with a friend who also had a security clearance, but it dropped those charges.

The obligation of those to whom state secrets have been entrusted to safeguard them is a rare area in which federal criminal prosecutions can be based on the defendant’s negligence. Stated differently, to prosecute Clinton for espionage, the government need not prove that she intended to expose the secrets.

The evidence of Clinton’s negligence is overwhelming. The FBI now has more than 1,300 protected emails that she received on her insecure server and sent to others – some to their insecure servers. These emails contained confidential, secret or top-secret information, the negligent exposure of which is a criminal act.

One of the top-secret emails she received and forwarded contained a photo taken from an American satellite of the North Korean nuclear facility that detonated a device just last week. Because Clinton failed to safeguard that email, she exposed to hackers and thus to the North Koreans the time, place and manner of American surveillance of them. This type of data is in the highest category of protected secrets.

Last weekend, the State Department released two smoking guns – each an email from Clinton to a State Department subordinate. One instructed a subordinate who was having difficulty getting a document to Clinton that she had not seen by using a secure State Department fax machine to use an insecure fax machine. The other instructed another subordinate to remove the “confidential” or “secret” designation from a document Clinton had not seen before sending it to her. These two emails show a pattern of behavior utterly heedless of the profound responsibilities of the secretary of state, repugnant to her sworn agreement to safeguard state secrets, and criminal at their essence.

Also this past weekend, my Fox News colleagues Katherine Herridge and Pamela Browne learned from government sources that the FBI is investigating whether Clinton made any decisions as secretary of state to benefit her family foundation or her husband’s speaking engagements. If so, this would be profound public corruption.

This investigation was probably provoked by several teams of independent researchers – some of whom are financial experts and have published their work – who have been investigating the Clinton Foundation for a few years. They have amassed a treasure-trove of documents demonstrating fraud and irregularities in fundraising and expenditures, and they have shown a pattern of favorable State Department treatment of foreign entities coinciding with donations by those entities to the Clinton Foundation and their engaging former President Bill Clinton to give speeches.

There are now more than 100 FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton. Her denial that she is at the core of their work is political claptrap with no connection to reality. It is inconceivable that the FBI would send such vast resources in the present dangerous era on a wild-goose chase.

It is the consensus of many of us who monitor government behavior that the FBI will recommend indictment. That recommendation will go to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who, given Clinton’s former status in the government and current status in the Democratic Party, will no doubt consult the White House.

If a federal grand jury were to indict Clinton for espionage or corruption, that would be fatal to her political career.

If the FBI recommends indictment and the attorney general declines to do so, expect Saturday Night Massacre-like leaks of draft indictments, whistleblower revelations and litigation, and FBI resignations, led by the fiercely independent and intellectually honest FBI Director James Comey himself.

That would be fatal to Clinton’s political career, as well.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

We watched in dismay how the beautiful country that many generations of Iraqis had worked so hard to build and develop was being destroyed. We watched with horror how the American and British ‘boys’ cheered whenever their bombs hit some ‘target’, killing Iraqis. No doubt that George Bush was enjoying it too, ‘bringing Iraq back to pre-industrial era’.

USAF F-117 : vampire in the Iraqi sky

Many Americans thought it was right to attack Iraq, they had no qualms that the country’s civil infrastructure was being purposely destroyed and that many thousands of Iraqis were dying. They believed the coalition troops were attacking Iraq to ‘liberate’ Kuwait* and to prevent an Iraqi attack on the zionist entity.

Some westerners who had never met an Iraqi and who could not even locate Iraq on the map, were filled with hatred towards the Iraqi people, because they had been told ‘how Iraqi soldiers were taking premature babies out of incubators in Kuwait’ !!! (1) and some other terrible stories fabricated by the western media,. Others were so gullible that they really believed there was such a thing as the ‘Iraqi Super canon’!!!

The western media were the accomplices of the warmongers, continuously diffusing their lies and propaganda. According to Fair,the US media allowed less than 1% of their space to those who were opposed the war. Day after day they repeated George Bush’s mantra: ‘about establishing a New World Order’ and many people in the west believed that the destruction of Iraq was worthwhile to establish this so-called ‘New World Order’.

Seventeen years have passed, but the pain and outrage I felt that night have not diminished, neither has my resentment towards all those who participated in this criminal aggression on Iraq.

George Bush, Dan Quayle, James Baker, Dick Cheney, William Webster, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and many others who share responsibility in attacking and destroying Iraq still remain to be judged for crimes against peace, for war crimes, for crimes against humanity and for other criminal acts committed in violation of the Charter of the United Nations, in violation of the international law, in violation of the Conventions of Geneva and The Hague, in violation of the Charter of Nürenberg and in violation of the laws regulating armed conflicts. By waging this illegal war on Iraq George Bush also violated the Constitution of the United States.

Bush’s imperialist ‘New World Order’ was based on the capitulation and submission of the people in the Middle East, principally on the surrender of oil-rich Iraq.

On this sad seventeenth anniversary of the launching of the criminal aggression on Iraq my thoughts are with all Iraqi patriots who are fighting to free their country from the foreign occupiers.

On this day, one of the beautiful Irish patriotic song comes into my mind (I have substituted the name Ireland with Iraq)

Come the day and come the hour

Come the power and the glory

We have come to answer

Our Country’s call

From all the provinces of Iraq

Iraq, Iraq,

Together standing tall

Shoulder to shoulder

We’ll answer Iraq’s call

Hearts of steel

And heads unbowing

Vowing never to be broken

We will fight, until

We can fight no more

From all the provinces of Iraq

(1) It was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador in the US who made these false accusations in front of the cameras, pretending to be a Kuwaiti nurse who had witnessed these barbaric acts!!!

*Kuwait: an invention of the British Foreign Office ‘around an oil well ‘ to deny Iraq access to the sea and so limit its influence in the Gulf and maintain it under British dependence.

“Nothing Is Moving,” Baltic Dry Index Crashes as Insiders Warn International “Commerce Has Come To a Halt”

By Tyler Durden, January 16 2016

Black Friday may be signaling big trouble ahead. What can’t go on forever won’t and never will. Eventually day of reckoning time arrives. Whether now is the moment of truth remains to be seen.

Paul Craig Roberts calls the US economy “a house of cards.” Phony government data created “the illusion of recovery.”

Monied interests never had it better for years, profiting hugely from Wall Street-orchestrated casino capitalism and manipulated markets, creating an unprecedented, unsustainable wealth effect, an open-ended near zero-interest rate climate money grab – doing nothing to create jobs and economic growth.

Wealth transference from ordinary people to super-rich elites and corporate interests was never greater in world history – reflecting government-sanctioned unprecedented greed and grand theft.

The vast majority endures protracted Main Street Depression conditions – getting worse, not better. Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, hunger, overall deprivation and human suffering are growth industries – in America and developed economies.

America spends unlimited trillions of dollars for militarism and endless imperial wars. Vital popular needs increasingly go begging. The world’s richest country was thirdworldized, transformed into Guatemala, control maintained by police state harshness.

The misnamed Federal Reserve isn’t federal and has no reserves. It’s wholly owned, controlled and operated by major Wall Street banks, solely for their own self-interest, public welfare be damned.

Money printing madness substituted for stimulative growth policies. Unprecedented, unsustainable, unrepayable debt levels were created.

The greatest ever ill-conceived experiment in monetary policy may produce global economic collapse. Systemic crisis can happen any time.

US equities posted sharp losses Friday, posting the worst 10-day start in US market history, greater than during the depths of the Great Depression – signaling economic weakness at best, looming crisis at worst.

The late Bob Chapman predicted an eventual economic train wreck, only its timing and duration unknown. “Untenable political and financial decisions put US and European economies on a collision course with disaster,” he said.

“Bailouts and market manipulation delay(ed) the inevitable.” A tipping point approaches. Unprecedented debt accumulated is “unrepayable,” he explained.

“How can anyone have confidence in a broken system? Unsustainable is the operative world.” Political courage to change things responsibly is nonexistent. Corrupt Republicans and Democrats are in bed with Wall Street crooks and other corporate favorites.

An astonishing $15 trillion in global wealth was lost since the Dow closed at 18,312 last May. Whether it’s just the beginning of looming crisis remains to be seen.

Plunging oil and other commodity prices along with China’s equity market collapse signal financial and economic trouble.

The Baltic Dry Index reflecting global trade is lower than during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

On Friday, Zero Hedge headlined “Welcome To The Recession – Industrial Production Crashes Most in 8 Years…the fastest pace of collapse since May 2008 and a level that has never not produced a recession.”

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) advised clients to “sell everything,” saying 2016 will be “cataclysmic…Investors should be afraid.”

The average US equity is down over 20%, reflecting bear market conditions. TV talking head touts downplay things, claiming buying opportunities to get nonexistent bargains, urging mom and pop investors to buy what they want to sell – one of the oldest, dirtiest games in the book.

Investment strategist John Canally explained “(m)arkets rely on confidence and certainty. Right now there is neither.”

Economist Tim Quinlan calls “(t)he probability of going back into recession…higher than at any point” since 2009.

IMF head Christine Lagarde highlighted world economies “entering a dangerous phase.” No credible plans exist to get unsustainable debt levels under control.

Hedge fund manager Uri Landesman said “(c)ounting on the Fed to get us out of this (mess) is a mistake.”

The year’s brutal, chaotic start may signal much worse ahead. The fullness of time will tell.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Nov 13: Paris is attacked Dec 2: Britain bombs Syria Jan 14: Guns cleared for 600 PCs

A survivor of the Paris shootings was left high and dry yesterday after Westminster suits told her she’d have to wait for compensation — because they still haven’t officially declared the murderous rampage a “terror attack.”

Christine Tudhope, from Fife, and her friend Mariesha Payne were enjoying the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan, Paris, on November 13 last year when Isis-affiliated gunmen stormed the hall and killed 89 people.

When they realised shots were being fired, the pair ran and hid in the cellar for three hours. They heard the sounds of shooting, screaming and the crash of dead bodies hitting the floor. At one point gunmen walked close by the room — the hideaways could hear them on walkie-talkies telling French police that they had hostages.

Ms Tudhope, a PR officer at Heriot-Watt University, made a claim for compensation with the Victims of Overseas Terrorism Compensation Scheme, which was set up by the Tory-led coalition in 2012.

But she received a letter last week stating: “The scheme only applies to an incident which the Foreign Secretary has determined a ‘designated act [of terrorism]’. The incident in which you sustained injury has not been designated.”

The government lists terrorist acts that can be claimed for on its website.

These include the hostage crisis in Algeria (2013), the kidnap of Setraco employees in Nigeria (2013), the attack at Westgate shopping centre in Kenya (2013), the attack at the Bardo National Museum in Tunisia (2015) and the attack at Port El Kantaoui in Tunisia (2015).

But more than two months after becoming the most infamous European attack for a decade, Paris is yet to make the list.

Labour MP Paul Flynn told the Star that he was “bowled over by the depths of government imbecility” in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office dragging its feet even though it only took hours last month for MPs to vote for Syria air strikes.

The motion was passed in the Commons with a huge majority of 174 six weeks ago.

Mr Flynn, a vocal opponent of war who represents Newport West, added: “This was an act of terrorism and there is no room for debate. What else could it be?

This is typical of the moronic state of government. They declare war in a couple of hours and take a decade to deal with the implications after tying themselves up in gobbledegook regulations.

This case sounds like another piece of bureaucratic unnecessary complication which is clogging up the system and the swift administration of compensation.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman told the Star: “The Foreign Secretary’s approval of the designation process was a formality required under the legal process. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority will now take this forward.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said the letter sent to Ms Tudhope was “clumsily worded.”

Out of all the political prostitutes in the Western world, one man stands out as the perfect illustration of a politician who works solely to serve his puppet masters.  Even though the majority of politicians are controlled by economic and corporate elites, the current US President, Barack Obama, is the epitome of a man who is bought and paid for by special interests. 

Obama was elected President in November 2008, and inaugurated in January 2009. From the very beginning of his Presidency, it was clear who the “lord and saviour” was beholden to. According to OpenSecrets.org, Obama’s top campaign donors in 2008 included: Goldman Sachs; JPMorgan Chase; Citigroup; Morgan Stanley; Microsoft; Google; and IBM. Considering Obama’s donors, it’s no wonder that (unlike Iceland) the US has not prosecuted the plethora of bankers and financial institutions that have engaged infraud for years, and subsequently played a pivotal role in causing the financial crisis of 2007/08.

“I’ve now been in 57 states; I think one left to go”

In a bizarre speech in 2008, Obama said: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve travelled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states; I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to, even though I really wanted to visit.” Did he simply make a mistake? Was he joking? Or was this just another slip from a person who is really just hypnotically going through the motions anytime he speaks, with no real interest in what he is saying. This bizarre statement is not an isolated one from the US President, as just a few months ago, Obama tried to argue that Russia bombing ISIL is only “strengthening ISIL.”

The Narcissist

 In Greek mythology, Narcissus, the son of a river god, fell in love with his own reflection. Judging from his actions in office, Obama also appears to care more about himself than anything else. In a recent 33-minute speech, Obama referred to himself a whopping 76 times; a true mark of a narcissistic, arrogant and egocentric person. Perhaps he was trying to challenge Julius Caesar’s record, as the former Roman general penned the majority of the ‘Commentaries on the Gallic War,’ in which the word “Caesar” is used 775 times, according to the historian Robin Lane Fox.

Tears of Deceit

 Emotive propaganda 101; cry and weep during a highly controversial and political speech on gun control, pulling at the heartstrings of the American public to push a political agenda. In this piece, I’m not trying to underplay the death of innocent people, but merely point out the way in which Obama is emotively trying to manipulate the opinions of the American public in order to push through legislation. Whatever your personal views are on gun control in the US, Obama’s tactics should be denounced as deceitful and staged.

Remember, the man who stood up and gave an Oscar winning performance recently, is the same man who is the head of the country that is carrying out more drone strikes around the world than ever before; has been funding and arming terrorists to overthrow the secular Syrian government; bombed a hospital in Afghanistan which killed at least three children; destroyed and destabilized the nation of Libya (which previously had the highest standard of living in Africa); supports Saudi Arabia in its war crime in Yemen; tortures and interrogates people across the world; and countless other crimes that kill and maim innocent people, yet no tears are shed by the US President.

Was San Bernardino a Black Op?

 There are also some anomalies in many of the mainstream narratives regarding mass shootings in the US. The tragic shooting in San Bernardino for instance, which the mainstream media claimed was carried out by husband and wife, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, appears to conflict with some eyewitness accounts of the attack. Two reported eyewitnesses claim that the shooters were three tall white men wearing military gear.

Was San Bernardino a black op carried out by military personnel or mercenaries to further legitimize the push for gun control? It is difficult to conclusively say what actually happened, but the official narrative is a shaky one.  It should also be noted that some investigative journalists have argued that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of mass shootings under Obama, one of the most pro-gun control President’s in recent decades.

Obama is one of the most disconnected and detached politicians in the world today, and has to go down as one of the biggest puppets in modern history.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

India and the BRICS are giving the US dollar the boot? Is it really so?

The last time a country decided to dump the dollar in the oil business, the US destroyed it. Now India, the world’s third largest economy, and Iran have agreed to settle their outstanding oil dues in rupees. What’s more, the two countries may conduct all future trade in their national currencies.

This follows an agreement between Iran and India in mid-2011 in which both sides decided to settle 45 per cent of India’s oil import bill in rupees and the remaining 55 per cent in euros. In March 2012 the two countries inked the Rupee Payment Mechanism that allowed India to buy crude oil in its national currency. Iran then used the funds to buy products from Indian manufacturers.

Ironically, it is the US itself which is responsible for the dollar’s elimination from India-Iran trade. The Rupee Payment Mechanism was set up to skirt American economic sanctions on Tehran. Iranian oil forms a significant portion of India’s energy requirements. Similarly, the Iranians rely upon India for steel, medicines, food and chemicals.

Replacing the dollar

India and the US may have come closer in recent years, but that hasn’t blinded New Delhi to the toxic nature of America’s currency as well as manipulation by Britain.

The US is literally writing its own cheque with its unrestrained printing of the dollar, the bedrock of America’s post-war hegemony. It is the reserve currency status of the dollar that allows the US to fund its endless wars and topple governments with impunity.

Across the Atlantic, the Bank of England is involved in interest rate fixing of an order of magnitude that makes corruption in developing countries look puny by comparison.

Such financial manipulations and currency debasements are negatively and cyclically impacting the global economy. In fact, it suits the West to have periodic booms and busts because it keeps the emergent economies in turmoil. It keeps poor countries poor and the emergent ones stuck in what’s known as the “middle income trap”.

In hi luminary piece, Geopolitics of Technology, prof. Anis Bajrektarevic very accurately diagnoses:

“the hydrocarbons and its scarcity phychologization, its monetization (and related weaponization) is serving rather a coercive and restrictive status quo than a developmental incentive. That essentially calls not for an engagement but compliance. It finally reads that the fossil fuels’ consumption (along with the policy of currency-choice and prizing it) does not only trigger one CC – Climate Change, but it also perpetuates another global CC – planetary Competition and Confrontation (over finite resources) – to which the MENA calamities are only a tip of an iceberg. Therefore, this highly addictive petrol – USD construct logically permits only a (technological) modernization which is defensive, restrictive and reactive. No wonder that democracy is falling short.”

India’s central bank has invested a significant proportion of its approximately $500 billion reserves in dollar denominated assets. Any sharp depreciation in the value of the dollar entails significant losses to this massive holding. In this backdrop, the idea of de-dollarisation has resonated with the country’s leadership in recent times.

In 2010, the Reserve Bank of India proposed floating the rupee as an alternative global currency. In a study titled ‘Internationalisation of Currency: The Case of the Indian Rupee and the Chinese Renminbi’, the bank said the dollar was likely to lose its predominance as the global reserve currency in the foreseeable future.

“The Indian rupee is rarely being used for invoicing of international trade,” the study pointed out. It argued that India needs to proactively take steps to increase the role of the rupee in the region. Also, the strength of the growing Indian economy has raised the issue of greater internationalisation of the Indian rupee.

Group remedy

Indian negotiators have actively pushed dollar-free trade at the annual meetings of the BRICS group. This group of five major economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is actively engaged in speeding up the process of increasing mutual trade in national currencies.

The $100 billion BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and a reserve currency pool worth over another $100 billion are both aimed at weakening the western chokehold on global financial flows.

According to India’s K.V. Kamath, the first president of NDB, exchange rate differences increased the cost of hard-currency loans to emerging and developing countries by 15-20 per cent. In his view, using local currencies would eliminate that risk and ease the burden.

The BRICS have already launched a Contingency Reserve Arrangement to enable the five member states to swap currencies. Another key advantage of using national currencies in trade and investment is that businesses do not have to hedge against two different currencies. Transition to trade in national currencies will also protect countries from the volatility of a particular currency.

China’s action plan

Meanwhile, the Chinese have surprised everyone with the speed with which the renminbi has acquired global acceptance. In a paper titled ‘The Renminbi Bloc is Here’, Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler of the US-based Peterson Institute for International Economics provide a dramatic picture of how the renminbi is growing in strength while the US dollar weakens.

Firstly, they say the renminbi is already the dominant reference currency in India and South Africa. Secondly, since mid-2010 the renminbi has made dramatic strides as a reference currency compared with the dollar and euro.

The renminbi has now become the dominant reference currency in East Asia, eclipsing the dollar and the euro….The currencies of South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand now more closely track the RMB than the dollar. The dollar’s dominance as reference currency in East Asia is now limited to Hong Kong (by virtue of the peg), Vietnam and Mongolia.

And they provide this chilling assessment:

“The dollar and the euro still play a greater role beyond their natural spheres of influence than does the renminbi but that is changing in favour of the renminbi.”

Why chilling? The India-Iran rupee trade, Russia-Iran rouble trade and the worldwide acceptance of the renminbi will slowly erode the prestige of the US dollar, which will have dire consequences for American prosperity.

As a country that greatly benefits from – and exploits – the dollar’s reserve currency status, the end of dollar dominance will mean a sharp decline in American incomes and the ability to project power overseas.

Rakesh Krishan Simha is New Zealand-based journalist and foreign affairs analyst, focussing on issues  which the media distorts, misses or ignores. Rakesh started his career in 1995 with New Delhi-based Business World magazine, and later worked in a string of positions at other leading media houses such as India Today, Hindustan Times, Business Standard and the Financial Express, where he was the news editor.

In a landmark infrastructure bill passed in December, Congress finally penetrated the Fed’s “independence” by tapping its reserves and bank dividends for infrastructure funding.

The bill was a start. But some experts, including Congressional candidate Tim Canova, say Congress should go further and authorize funds to be issued for infrastructure directly.

For at least a decade, think tanks, commissions and other stakeholders have fought to get Congress to address the staggering backlog of maintenance, upkeep and improvements required to bring the nation’s infrastructure into the 21^st century. Countries with less in the way of assets have overtaken the US in innovation and efficiency, while our dysfunctional Congress has battled endlessly over the fiscal cliff, tax reform, entitlement reform, and deficit reduction.

Both houses and both political parties agree that something must be done, but they have been unable to agree on where to find the funds. Republicans aren’t willing to raise taxes on the rich, and Democrats aren’t willing to cut social services for the poor.

In December 2015, however, a compromise was finally reached. On December 4, the last day the Department of Transportation was authorized to cut checks for highway and transit projects, President Obama signed a 1,300-page $305-billion transportation infrastructure bill that renewed existing highway and transit programs. According to America’s civil engineers, the sum was not nearly enough for all the work that needs to be done. But the bill was nevertheless considered a landmark achievement, because Congress has not been able to agree on how to fund a long-term highway and transit bill since 2005.

That was one of its landmark achievements. Less publicized was where Congress would get the money: largely from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street megabanks. The deal was summarized in a December 1^st Bloomberg article titled “Highway Bill Compromise Would Take Money from US Banks”:

The highway measure would be financed in part by a one-time use of Federal Reserve surplus funds and by a reduction in the 6 percent dividend that national banks receive from the Fed. . . . Banks with $10 billion or less in assets would be exempt from the cut.

The Fed’s surplus capital comes from the 12 reserve banks. The highway bill would allow for a one-time draw of $19 billion from the surplus, which totaled $29.3 billion as of Nov. 25. . . .

Banks vigorously fought the dividend cut, which was estimated to generate about $17 billion over 10 years for the highway trust fund.

According to Zachary Warmbrodt, writing in Politico in November, the Fed registered “strong concerns about using the resources of the Federal Reserve to finance fiscal spending.” But former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who is now at the Brookings Institute, acknowledged in a blog post that the Fed could operate with little or no capital. His objection was that it is “not good optics or good precedent” to raid an independent central bank. It doesn’t look good.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), ranking member on the House Transportation Committee, retorted, “For the Federal Reserve to be saying this impinges upon their integrity, etc., etc. — you know, it’s absurd. This is a body that creates money out of nothing.”

DeFazio also said, “[I]f the Fed can bail out the banks and give them preferred interest rates, they can do something for the greater economy and for average Americans. So it was their time to help out a little bit.”

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

It may be their time indeed. For over a century, populists and money reformers have petitioned Congress to solve its funding problems by exercising the sovereign power of government to issue money directly, through either the Federal Reserve or the Treasury.

In the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln issued debt-free US Notes or “greenbacks” to finance much of the Civil War, as well as the transcontinental railroad and the land-grant college system. In the 1890s, populists attempted unsuccessfully to revive this form of infrastructure funding. In the Great Depression, Congress authorized the issuance of several billion dollars of US Notes in the Thomas Amendment to the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act. In 1999, Illinois Rep. Ray LaHood introduced the State and Local Government Economic Empowerment Act (H. R. 1452), which would have authorized the US Treasury to issue interest-free loans of US Notes to state and local governments for infrastructure investment.

Law professor Timothy Canova plans to reintroduce this funding model if elected to represent Florida’s 23^rd Congressional district, where he is now running against the controversial Debbie Wasserman Schultz, current chair of the Democratic National Convention. Prof. Canova wrote in a December 2012 article:

. . . Wall Street bankers and mainstream economists will argue that greenbacks and other such proposals would be inflationary, depreciate the dollar, tank the bond market, and bring an end to Western civilization. Yet, we’ve seen four years of the Federal Reserve—now on its third quantitative-easing program—experimenting with its own type of greenback program, creating new money out of thin air in the form of credits in Federal Reserve Notes to purchase trillions of dollars of bonds from big banks and hedge funds. While the value of the dollar has not collapsed and the bond market remains strong, neither have those newly created trillions trickled down to Main Street and the struggling middle classes. The most significant effect of the Fed’s programs has been to prop up banks, bond prices, and the stock market, with hardly any benefit to Main Street.

In a January 2015 op-ed in the UK Guardian titled “European Central Bank’s QE Is a Missed Opportunity,” Tony Pugh concurred, stating of the US and European QE programs:

Quantitative easing, as practised by the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve, merely flooded the financial sector with money to the benefit of bondholders. This did not create a so-called wealth affect, with a trickle-down to the real producing economy.

. . . If the EU were bold enough, it could fund infrastructure or renewables projects directly through the electronic creation of money, without having to borrow. Our government has that authority, but lacks the political will. The [Confederation of British Industry] has calculated that every £1 of such expenditure would increase GDP by £2.80 through the money multiplier. The Bank of England’s QE programme of £375bn was a wasted opportunity.

According to IMF director Christine Lagarde, writing in The Economist in November 2015:

IMF research shows that, in advanced economies, an increase in investment spending worth one percentage point of GDP raises the overall level of output by about 0.4% in the same year and by 1.5% four years after the spending increase.

In a December 2015 paper titled “Recovery in the Eurozone: Using Money Creation to Stimulate the Real Economy”, Frank van Lerven expanded on this research, writing:

For the Eurozone, statistical analysis of income and consumption patterns suggests that €100 billion of newly created money distributed to citizens would lead to an increase in GDP of around €232 billion. Using IMF fiscal multipliers, our empirical analysis further suggests that using the money to fund a €100 billion increase in public investment would reduce unemployment by approximately one million, and could be between 2.5 to 12 times more effective at stimulating GDP than current QE.

The Hyperinflation Myth

The invariable objection to exercising the government’s sovereign money-creating power is that it would lead to hyperinflation, but these figures belie that assumption. If adding €100 billion for infrastructure increases GDP by €232 billion, prices should actually go down rather than up, since the supply of goods and services (GDP) would have increased more than twice as fast as demand (money). Conventional theory says that prices go up when too much money is chasing too few goods, and in this case the reverse would be true.

In a November 2015 editorial, the Washington Post admonished Congress for blurring the line between fiscal and monetary policy, warning, “Many a banana republic . . . has come to grief using its central bank to facilitate government deficit spending.” But according to Prof. Michael Hudson, who has studied hyperinflations extensively, that is not why banana republics have gotten into trouble for “printing money.” He observes:

The reality is that nearly all hyperinflations stem from a collapse of foreign exchange as a result of having to pay debt service. That was what caused Germany’s hyperinflation in the 1920s, not domestic German spending. It is what caused the Argentinean and other Latin American hyperinflations in the 1980s, and Chile’s hyperinflation earlier.

Promising Possibilities

Any encroachment on the Fed’s turf is viewed by Wall Street and the mainstream media with alarm. But to people struggling with mounting bills and crumbling infrastructure, the development has promising potential. The portal to the central bank’s stream of riches has been forced open, if just a crack. The trickle could one day become a flow, a mighty river of liquidity powering the engines of productivity of a vibrant economy.

For that to happen, however, we need an enlightened citizenry and congressional leaders willing to take up the charge; and that is what makes Prof. Tim Canova’s run for Congress an exciting development.

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

AIPAC devotes a section on its web site to malicious Big Lies about Iran intending use of its unfrozen assets to spread its nonexistent “malign global influence,” once international sanctions are lifted this weekend as expected.

An unnamed Israeli source claims Tehran will invest heavily in military, not civilian projects, citing no credible evidence.

Another unnamed Israeli source was quoted, saying “(t)he world powers are mistaken if they see Iran as a solution to regional stability, and not the source of the problem.”

Fact: Iran prioritizes regional peace and stability, free from nuclear weapons.

Fact: Israel and Saudi Arabia complicit with Washington are the region’s leading proliferators of endless wars, violence and chaos.

Netanyahu and other Israeli hardliners duplicitously call Iran an existential threat – not according to departing Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, saying:

“Everyone knows that Israel is a very strong nation. This is no longer a time when (it) is forced to deal with existential threats.” It faces none.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini met with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to “finalize” last year’s nuclear deal. IAEA confirmation of Tehran observing agreed on terms is expected Saturday.

Netanyahu continues spreading Big Lies, claims about Iran’s road to the bomb along with fostering terrorism and instability.

Zarif and John Kerry met on Saturday, Tehran’s foreign minister, saying “(w)e’re trying. We’re working on” lifting international sanctions today or this weekend.

Nuclear talks “proved we can solve important problems through diplomacy, not threats and pressure, and thus today is definitely an important day. (N)aysayers are always wrong.”

Separately on Saturday, Iran freed jailed Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former FBI agent Robert Levinson, Christian pastor Saeed Abedini and former US marine Amir Hekmati, accused of spying – ahead of imminent lifting of international sanctions.

They were freed “within the framework of exchanging prisoners,” according to Iran’s ISNA news agency.

In exchange, Washington will release seven Iranian-Americans lawlessly held, “languishing (in) US jails,” according to Tehran’s IRNA news service.

The exchange includes Washington agreeing to stop seeking extradition of 14 Iranians for alleged involvement in purchasing US weapons.

Dubai-based Iranian-American businessman Siamak Namazi’s case remains unresolved. Iran hasn’t publicly commented on his imprisonment.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

This story has been out for a few years now, but it’s hardly made a blip in the mainstream media landscape. While Republicans have had a non-stop stream of rants about how President Obama doesn’t care about the troops, a dirty little secret is haunting the era known as the George W. Bush administration.

We’ve known since the start of the two Bush wars that there was a media blackout. Unlike Vietnam before it, the media was not allowed to show the hundreds and thousands of body bags being flown from the Middle East. That blackout could be why it went unnoticed for several years that they were regularly incinerating and throwing the bodies of our troops into a Virginia landfill.

The Washington Post picked up the story in 2011, but odds are that most still aren’t aware that at least 274 troops were treated like last night’s chicken bones. Naturally, the families did not know about the dumping. Instead, they were under the impression that their loved ones would be disposed of in a “respectful and dignified manner.”

This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.

An additional group of 1,762 unidentified remains were collected from the battlefield and disposed of in the same manner, the Air Force said. Those fragments could not undergo DNA testing because they had been badly burned or damaged in explosions. The total number of incinerated fragments dumped in the landfill exceeded 2,700.

Here’s the video:

There’s no evidence that the President was aware of the practice, but it was done between 2003 and 2008, right-smack in the middle of Bush’s wars and during the Bush administration.

The travesty was discovered by three whistle blowers who worked for the mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base. One whistle blower was allegedly fired and the other two faced what they said was retaliation.

The Air Force chain of command has taken responsibility, sort of. They were shy of calling the actions “wrongdoing.”

To this day, we don’t know how many troops were involved. The Air Force complained that they would have to comb through the records of more than 6,300 troops, to which one Congressman, Rep. Rush Hold (D-NJ) said:

“What the hell?” he told the Post. “We spent millions, tens of millions, to find any trace of soldiers killed, and they’re concerned about a ‘massive’ effort to go back and pull out the files and find out how many soldiers were disrespected this way?”

“They just don’t want to ask questions or look very hard,” he added, according to the newspaper.

Source: US News

The three whistle blowers did say, though, that today, things are better than ever and that the troops are being taken care of. Fortunately, in 2009, then newly-elected President Barack Obama lifted the media blackout for military casualties. Now that things are in the open, military heroes are getting the respect they deserve.

Why is the economy barely growing after seven years of zero rates and easy money? Why are wages and incomes sagging when stock and bond prices have gone through the roof? Why are stocks experiencing such extreme volatility when the Fed increased rates by a mere quarter of a percent?

It’s the policy, stupid. And here’s the chart that explains exactly what the policy is.

What the chart shows is that the vast increase in the monetary base didn’t impact lending or trigger the credit expansion the Fed had predicted. In other words, the Fed’s madcap pump-priming experiment (aka– QE) failed to stimulate growth or put the economy back on the path to recovery. For all practical purposes, the policy was a flop.

(Richard Koo: The ‘struggle between markets and central banks has only just begun’, Business Insider)

QE did, however, touch off an unprecedented 6-year bull market rally that pushed stocks into the stratosphere while the real economy continued to languish in a long-term slump. And the numbers are pretty impressive too. For example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which bottomed at 6,507 on March 9, 2009, soared to an eye-popping 18,312 points by May 19, 2015, an 11,805 point-surge in just five years. And the S&P did even better. From its March 9, 2009 bottom of 676 points, the index skyrocketed to a record-high 2,130 points on May 21, 2015, tripling its value at the fastest pace in history.

What the chart shows is that the Fed knew from 2010-on that stuffing the banks with excess reserves was neither lowering unemployment or revving up the economy. The liquidity was merely driving stocks higher.

It’s worth noting, that the Fed knows that credit does not flow into the economy without a transmission mechanism, that is, unless creditworthy borrowers are willing to to take out loans. Absent additional lending, the liquidity remains stuck in the financial system where it eventually creates asset bubbles. And that’s exactly what’s happened. Instead of trickling down into the economy where it would do some good, the Fed’s monetary stimulus has cleared the way for another catastrophic meltdown.

The chart suggests that the Fed’s primary objective was to reflate stock and bond prices to help the banks grow their way out of insolvency and avoid government takeover. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner alluded to this in an interview with CNBC in 2009 when he said: “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’re going to do our best to preserve that system.” Unfortunately, the banking system was insolvent at that point in time, a fact that was confirmed in sworn testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. Here’s what he said:

“As a scholar of the Great Depression, I honestly believe that September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression. If you look at the firms that came under pressure in that period. . . only one . . . was not at serious risk of failure. So out of maybe the 13 of the most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”

Think about that for a minute. Not only was the US banking system hopelessly underwater, but also the world’s most lucrative and powerful industry was about to be removed from private hands and “nationalized”. Shareholders would be wiped out, bondholders would take severe haircuts, management would be replaced, and credit production would be returned to the representatives of the American people, US government officials.

Do you think the prospect of nationalization might have scared the hell out of Wall Street? Do you think the banksters might have concocted some crazy plan along with Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to precipitate a crisis by euthanizing Lehman Brothers so they could extort $700 billion from Congress (TARP) before launching round after round of money printing under the deliberately-opaque moniker, Quantitative Easing?

Of course, they would. These are the same guys who had already stolen trillions of dollars from credulous investors in a fraudulent mortgage laundering scam that crashed the economy and brought the financial system to the brink of ruin. Does anyone seriously think that they’d wince at the prospect of dinging the public a second time by shifting their toxic assets onto the Fed’s balance sheet or by accessing free liquidity to fuel their illicit derivatives trades or their other pernicious high-risk activities?

Keep in mind, the Fed never could have carried off this massive looting operation without the help of both the Congress and the president. This simple fact seems to escape even the most vehement critic of the Fed, that is, that the Fed needed policymakers to strangle the economy while it implemented its plan or it would have had to abandon its reflation strategy.

Why??

Well, because if the economy was allowed to rebound, then higher employment would push up wages and raw material costs which in turn would boost inflation. Higher inflation would force the Fed to raise short-term interest rates which would put the kibosh on the cheap money Wall Street needed to buy-back its own shares or engage in other risky speculation. So the real economy had to be sacrificed for Wall Street. Hence, “austerity”.

The fact that Obama’s economics team, led by Lawrence Summers, was trying to lift the economy out of recession without creating conditions for a strong recovery was evident from the very beginning. We know now that chief White House economist Christy Romer wanted a much bigger fiscal stimulus package than the $800 bil that was eventually approved. Here’s the story from the New Republic:

Romer calculated that it would take an eye-popping $1.7-to-$1.8 trillion to fill the entire hole in the economy—the “output gap,” in economist-speak. “An ambitious goal would be to eliminate the output gap by 2011–Q1 [the first quarter of 2011], returning the economy to full employment by that date,” she wrote. “To achieve that magnitude of effective stimulus using a feasible combination of spending, taxes and transfers to states and localities would require package costing about $1.8 trillion over two years.
(EXCLUSIVE: The Memo that Larry Summers Didn’t Want Obama to See, New Republic)

Regrettably, Romer’s recommendations “never made it into the memo the president saw.” Obama was not given the option of providing the stimulus the economy needed for a strong recovery because Summers didn’t want a strong recovery. Summers wanted the economy to sputter-along at an abysmal 2 percent GDP like it is today. That would keep a lid on inflation and allow the Fed to pump as much money into the financial markets as it pleased.

Obama has played a big role in this austerity fiasco too. For example, did you know that more government workers lost their jobs under Obama than any other president in history?

It’s true. Since Obama took office in 2008, nearly 500,000 public sector workers have gotten their pink slips. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, if the economy had experienced a normal expansion, “there would have two million more.”

Of course, Obama never made any attempt to rehire these workers because rehiring them would have put more money in the pockets of people who would spend it which would boost GDP. Typically, economists think that’s a good thing. It’s only a bad thing when the Fed is working at cross-purposes and trying to keep a damper on inflation so it can bail out its crooked Wall Street buddies.

For more on Obama’s belt-tightening crusade, just look at his efforts to cut the budget deficits. Here’s a clip from MSNBC:

Strong growth in individual tax collection drove the U.S. budget deficit to a fresh Obama-era low in fiscal 2015, the Treasury Department said Thursday…. The deficit is the smallest of Barack Obama’s presidency and the lowest since 2007 in both dollar terms and as a percentage of gross domestic product. (During) the Obama era, the deficit has shrunk by $1 trillion. That’s ‘trillion,’ with a ‘t.’ (MSNBC)

Why would Obama want to cut government spending when the economy was already in distress, capital investment was flagging, and households were still trying to pay down their debts?

Basic economic theory suggests that when private sector can’t spend, then the government must spend to offset deflationary pressures and prevent a major slump. Cutting the deficits removes vital fiscal stimulus from the economy. It’s like applying leeches to a patient with flu symptoms thinking that the blood-loss will hasten his recovery. It’s madness, and yet this is what Obama and the Congress have been doing for the last six years. They’ve kept their hands wrapped firmly around the economy’s neck trying to make sure the patient stays in a permanent state of narcosis.

That’s the goal, to suffocate the economy in order to reward the thieving vipers on Wall Street. And Obama and the Congress are every bit as guilty as the Fed.

ISIS terrorists committed a massacre in al-Bghailiye village in Deir Ezzor’s western countryside, claiming the lives of around 300 civilians, most of them women, children, and elderly people, Local sources told SANA.

The Cabinet condemned the heinous crime, with Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi saying that the legal and moral responsibility for this barbaric and cowardly massacre committed by ISIS hordes lies on the shoulders of all the states that support terrorism and that fund and armor Takfiri organizations which harbor hatred for all humanity.

The Premier said that terrorist organizations are committing massacres to make up for the recurring losses and defeats they suffer at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army, and that these terror organizations know that their days in Syria are numbered.

He said that such massacres will not dissuade Syrians from pursuing reconciliations and working to liberate the entirety of Syrian territories, offering condolences to the families of the victims.

From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the oil industry. The story of oil is the story of the modern world.

And this is the story of those who helped shape that world, and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of monopolizing life itself.

TRANSCRIPT

Oil. From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the petrochemical industry. The story of oil is the story of the modern world.

Parts of that story are well-known: Rockefeller and Standard Oil; the internal combustion engine and the transformation of global transport; the House of Saud and the oil wars in the Middle East.

Other parts are more obscure: the quest for oil and the outbreak of World War I; the petrochemical interests behind modern medicine; the Big Oil money behind the “Green Revolution” and the “Gene Revolution.”

But that story, properly told, begins somewhere unexpected. Not in Pennsylvania with the first commercial drilling operation and the first oil boom, but in the rural backwoods of early 19^thcentury New York state. And it doesn’t start with crude oil or its derivatives, but a different product altogether: snake oil.

“Dr. Bill Livingston, Celebrated Cancer Specialist” was the very image of the traveling snake oil salesman. He was neither a doctor, nor a cancer specialist; his real name was not even Livingston. More to the point, the “Rock Oil” tonic he pawned was a useless mixture of laxative and petroleum and had no effect whatsoever on the cancer of the poor townsfolk he conned into buying it.

He lived the life of a vagabond, always on the run from the last group of people he had fooled, engaged in ever more outrageous deceptions to make sure that the past wouldn’t catch up with him. He abandoned his first wife and their six children to start a bigamous marriage in Canada at the same time as he fathered two more children by a third woman. He adopted the name “Livingston” after he was indicted for raping a girl in Cayuga in 1849.

When he wasn’t running away from them or disappearing for years at a time, he would teach his children the tricks of his treacherous trade. He once bragged of his parenting technique: “I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make ’em sharp.”

A towering man of over six feet and with natural good looks that he used to his advantage, he went by “Big Bill.” Others, less generously, called him “Devil Bill.” But his real name was William Avery Rockefeller, and it was his son, John D. Rockefeller, who would go on to found the Standard Oil monopoly and become the world’s first billionaire.

The world we live in today is the world created in “Devil” Bill’s image. It’s a world founded on treachery, deceit, and the naivety of a public that has never wised up to the parlor tricks that the Rockefellers and their ilk have been using to shape the world for the past century and a half.

This is the story of the oiligarchy.

PART ONE: BIRTH OF THE OIL-IGARCHY

Titusville, 1857. A most unlikely man alights from a railway car into the midst of this sleepy Western Pennsylvania town on the shores of Oil Creek: “Colonel” Edwin Drake. He’s from the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, and he’s here on a mission: to collect oil.

Like “Dr.” Bill, Drake isn’t really a Colonel. The title is bestowed on him by George Bissell and James Townsend, a lawyer and a banker who started the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company after they discovered they could distill the region’s naturally occurring Seneca oil into lamp oil, or kerosene. Drake is actually an unemployed railroad conductor who talked himself into a job after staying at the same hotel as Bissel the year before. Calling him a Colonel, it is hoped, will help win the respect of the locals.

The locals think he’s crazy anyway. Seneca oil is indeed plentiful, bubbling out of seeps and collecting in the creek, but other than as a cure-all medicine or grease for the local sawmill’s machinery, it’s hardly seen as something valuable. In fact, it can be a downright nuisance, contaminating brine wells that supply Pittsburgh’s booming salt industry.

Still, Drake has a task to complete: finding a way to collect enough oil to make the distillation of Seneca oil into lamp oil profitable. He tries everything he can think of. The Native Americans had historically collected the oil by damming the creek near a seep and skimming the oil off the top. But Drake can only collect six to ten gallons of oil a day this way, even when he opens up extra seeps. He tries digging a shaft, but the groundwater floods in too quickly.

By the summer of 1859 he’s desperate. Drake’s running out of ideas, Bissell and Townsend are running out of patience and, most importantly, the company is running out of funds. He turns to “Uncle” Billy Smith, a Pittsburgh blacksmith who had experience drilling brine wells with steam-powered equipment. They get to work drilling down through the shale bedrock to reach the oil. It’s maddeningly slow work, with the crude equipment struggling to get through three feet of bedrock a day. By August 27th they’ve drilled down 69 and a half feet, Drake has used the last of his funds, and Bissell and his partners have decided to close up the operation. On August 28th, they strike oil.

Narrator: Then on Sunday, August 28th, 1859, oil bubbled up the drive pipe. Uncle Billy and his son Sam bailed out several buckets of oil. On Monday, the very day that Colonel Drake received his final payment and an order to close down the operation, they hitched the walking beam to a water pump and the oil began to flow. The first oil was to sell for $40 a barrel. Years later a local newspaper interviewed Uncle Billy about the day they struck oil:

“I commenced drilling and at 4:00 I struck the oil. I says to Mr. Drake, ‘Look there! What do you think of this?’ He looked down the pipe and said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘That is your fortune!’”

Drake’s well proved that by drilling for it, oil could be found in abundance and produced cheaply. Overnight a whole new industry was born. Before long in millions of homes, farms and factories around the world, lamps would be lit with kerosene refined from West Pennsylvania crude.

Daniel Yergin: When the word came out that Drake had struck oil, the cry went up throughout the narrow valleys of Western Pennsylvania: ‘The crazy Yankee has struck oil! The crazy Yankee has struck oil!’ And it was the first great boom. It was like a gold rush.

SOURCE: The Prize (Part 1)

Overnight the quiet farming backwoods of rural Pennsylvania was transformed into a bustling oil region, with prospectors leasing up flats, towns springing up from nowhere, and a forest of percussion rigs covering the land. The first oil boom had arrived.

Already poised to make the most of this boom was a young up-and-coming bookkeeper in Cleveland with a head for numbers: John Davison Rockefeller. He had two ambitions in life: to make $100,000 and to live to 100 years old. John D. set off to make his fortune in the late 1850s, armed with a $1000 loan from his father, “Devil” Bill.

David Rockefeller: Grandfather never finished high school and went to Cleveland having borrowed $1000 from his father to start a business — paid 9% interest on it incidentally. And he read about the oil business just beginning and got interested, and came to realize it was a very volatile business at the time.

SOURCE: The Prize Part 1

In 1863, seeing the oil boom and sensing the profits to be made in the fledgling business, Rockefeller formed a partnership with fellow businessman Maurice B. Clark and Samuel Andrews, a chemist who had built an oil refinery but knew little about the business of getting his product to market. In 1865 the shrewd John D. bought out his partners for $72,500 and, with Andrews as partner, launched Rockefeller & Andrews. By 1870, after five years of strategic partnerships and mergers, Rockefeller had incorporated Standard Oil.

The story of the rise of Standard Oil is an oft-told one.

Narrator: In a move that would transform the American economy, Rockefeller set out to replace a world of independent oilmen with a giant company controlled by him. In 1870, begging bankers for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio. The next year, he quietly put what he called “our plan” — his campaign to dominate the volatile oil industry — into devastating effect. Rockefeller knew that the refiner with the lowest transportation cost could bring rivals to their knees. He entered into a secret alliance with the railroads called the South Improvement Company. In exchange for large, regular shipments, Rockefeller and his allies secured transport rates far lower than those of their bewildered competitors.

Ida Tarbell, the daughter of an oil man, later remembered how men like her father struggled to make sense of events: “An uneasy rumor began running up and down the Oil Regions,” she wrote. “Freight rates were going up. … Moreover … all members of the South Improvement Company — a company unheard of until now — were exempt. … Nobody waited to find out his neighbor’s opinion. On every lip there was but one word and that was ‘conspiracy.’”

Ron Chernow, Biographer: By 1879, when Rockefeller is 40, he controls 90 percent of the oil refining in the world. Within a few years, he will control 90 percent of the marketing of oil and a third of all of the oil wells. So this very young man controls what is not only a national but an international monopoly in a commodity that is about to become the most important strategic commodity in the world economy.

SOURCE: The Rockefellers

By the 1880s, the American oil industry was the Standard Oil Company. And Standard Oil was John D. Rockefeller.

But it wasn’t long until a handful of similarly ambitious (and well-connected) families began to emulate the Standard Oil success story in other parts of the globe.

One such competitor emerged from the Caucasus in the 1870s, where Imperial Russia hadopened up the vast Caspian Sea oil deposits to private development. Two families quickly combined forces to take advantage of the opportunity: the Nobels, led by Ludwig Nobel and including his dynamite-inventing prize-creating brother Alfred, and the French branch of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty, led by Alphonse Rothschild.

In 1891, the Rothschilds contracted with M. Samuel & Co., a Far East shipping company headquartered in London and run by Marcus Samuel, to do what had never been done before: ship their Nobel-supplied Caspian oil through the Suez Canal to East Asian markets. The project was immense; it involved not only sophisticated engineering to construct the first oil tankers to be approved by the Suez Canal Company, but the strictest secrecy. If word of the endeavour was to get back to Rockefeller through his international intelligence network it would risk bringing the wrath of Standard Oil, which could afford to cut rates and squeeze them out of the market. In the end they succeeded, and the first bulk tanker, the Murex, sailed through the Suez Canal in 1892 en route to Thailand.

In 1897 “M. Samuel & Co.” became The Shell Transport and Trading Company. Realizing that reliance on the Rothschild/Nobel Caspian oil left the company vulnerable to supply shocks, Shell began to look to the Far East for other sources of oil. In Borneo they ran up against Royal Dutch Petroleum, established in The Hague in 1890 with the support of King William III of the Netherlands to develop oil deposits in the Dutch East Indies. The two companies, fearing competition from Standard Oil, merged in 1903 into the Asiatic Petroleum Company, jointly owned with the French Rothschilds, and in 1907 become Royal Dutch Shell.

Another global competitor to the Standard Oil throne emerged in Iran at the turn of the 20th century. In 1901 millionaire socialite William Knox D’arcy negotiated an incredible concessionwith the king of Persia: exclusive rights to prospect for oil throughout most of the country for 60 years. After 7 years of fruitless search, D’Arcy and his Glasgow based partner, Burmah Oil, were ready to abandon the country altogether. In early May of 1908 they sent a telegram to their geologist telling him to dismiss his staff, dismantle his equipment and come back home. He defied the order and weeks later struck oil.

Burmah Oil promptly spun off the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to oversee production of Persian oil. The British government took 51% majority control of the company’s shares in 1914 at the behest of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and survives today as BP.

The Rothschilds and Nobels. The Dutch royal family. The Rockefellers. These early titans of the oil industry and their corporate shells pioneered a new model for amassing and expanding fortunes hitherto unheard of. They were the scions of a new oligarchy, one built around oil and its control, from wellhead to pump.

But it was not just about money. The monopolization of this, the key energy resource of the 20th century, helped secure the oiligarchs not just wealth but power over the lives of billions. Billions who came to depend on black gold for the provision of just about every aspect of their daily lives.

In the late 19th century, however, it was by no means certain that oil would become the key resource of the 20th century. As cheap illumination from the newly-commercialized light bulb began to destroy the market for lamp oil, the oiligarchs were on the verge of losing the value from their monopoly. But a series of “lucky strikes” was about to catapult their fortunes even further.

The very next year after the commercial introduction of the light bulb, another invention came along to save the oil industry: German engineer Karl Benz patented a reliable, two-stroke internal combustion engine. The engine ran on gasoline, another petroleum byproduct, and became the basis for the Benz Motorwagen that, in 1888, became the first commercially available automobile in history. And with that stroke of luck, the business that Rockefeller and the other oiligarchs had spent decades consolidating was saved.

But more luck was needed to ensure the market for this new engine. In the early days of the automobile era it was by no means certain that gas-powered cars would come to dominate the market. Working models of electric vehicles had been around since the 1830s, and the first electric car was built in 1884. By 1897 there was a fleet of all-electric taxis shuttling passengers around London. The world land speed record was set by an electric car in 1898. By the dawn of the 20th century electric cars accounted for 28% of the automobiles in the United States. The electrics had advantages over the internal combustion engine: they required no gear shifting or hand cranking, and had none of the vibration, smell, or noise associated with gasoline-powered cars.

Lady Luck intervened again on January 10, 1901, when prospectors struck oil at Spindletop in East Texas. The gusher blew 100,000 barrels a day and set off the next great oil boom, providing cheap, plentiful oil to the American market and driving down gas prices. It wasn’t long before the expensive, low range electric engines were abandoned altogether and big, loud, gas-guzzling engines came to dominate the road, all fueled by the black gold that Standard Oil, Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Anglo-Persian and the other oil majors of the time were drilling, refining and selling.

Perhaps John D.’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was not supposed to be luck at all. Rockefeller had come under increasing scrutiny by a public outraged by the unprecedented wealth he had amassed through Standard Oil. Muckraking reporters like Ida Tarbell began digging up the dirt on his rise to power through railroad conspiracies, secret deals with competitors and other shady practices. The press pictured him as a colossus with bribed politicians literally in the palm of his hand; Standard Oil was a menacing octopus with its tentacles strangling the lifeblood of the nation. Hearings began, investigations were launched, lawsuits were brought against him. And then, finally, in 1911 the Supreme Court made a monumental decision.

Narrator: On May 15th, 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that Standard Oil was a monopoly in restraint of trade and should be dissolved. Rockefeller heard of the decision while golfing at Kykuit with a priest from the local Catholic church, Father J.P. Lennon.

Ron Chernow, Biographer: And Rockefeller reacted with amazing aplomb. He turned to the Catholic priest and said, “Father Lennon, have you some money?” And the priest was very startled by the question and said, “No.” And then he said, “Why?” And Rockefeller replied, “Buy Standard Oil.”

Narrator: As Rockefeller foresaw, the individual Standard Oil companies were worth more than the single corporation. In the next few years, their shares doubled and tripled in value. By the time the rain of cash was over, Rockefeller had the greatest personal fortune in history — nearly two percent of the American economy.

Ron Chernow, Biographer: And it was really losing the antitrust case that converted John D. Rockefeller into history’s first billionaire. So that Standard Oil was punished in the federal antitrust case, but John D. Rockefeller, Sr. most assuredly was not.

SOURCE: The Rockefellers

To the amazement of the world, Rockefeller’s punishment had in fact been his reward. Rather than being taken down a peg, the splitting up of the Standard Oil monopoly had launched him as the world’s only acknowledged billionaire at a time when the average annual income in America was $520.

Rockefeller’s story was perfectly mirrored by the story of Colonel Edwin Drake. Having struck oil in Titusville and given rise to a billion dollar global industry, Drake had not had the foresight to patent his drilling technique or even to buy up the land around his own well. He ended up in poverty, relying on an annuity from the state of Pennsylvania to scrape together a living and dying in 1880.

For the oiligarchy, the lesson of the rise and rise of Rockefeller was obvious: the more ruthlessly that monopoly was pursued, the tighter that control was grasped, the greater the lust for power and money, the greater the reward would be in the end.

From now on, no invention would derail the oil majors from their quest for total control. No competition would be tolerated. No threat to the oiligarchs would be allowed to rise.

PART TWO: COMPETITION IS A SIN

When asked how he could justify the treachery and deceit with which he pursued the creation of the Standard Oil monopoly, John D. Rockefeller is reputed to have said: “Competition is a sin.” This is the mentality of the monopolist, and it is this justification, framed as religious conviction, that drove the oiligarchs to so ruthlessly eliminate anyone who would dare rise up as a pretender to their throne.

Ironically, it was the competition between the oiligarchs in the early 20th century that helped give rise to an early external threat to their empire: alcohol fuel.

As historian Lyle Cummins has noted of the period: “The oil trust battles between Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, the Nobels and Marcus Samuel’s Shell kept prices in a state of flux, and engines often had to be adaptable to the fuel that was available.”

In many areas where oil wasn’t available, the alternative was alcohol. Ethyl alcohol had been used as a fuel for lamps and engines since the early 19th century. Although it was generally more expensive, alcohol fuel offered a stability of supply that was alluring, especially in areas like London or Paris that did not have predictable access to oil supplies.

Alcohol has a lower heat value, or BTU, than gasoline, but a series of tests by the US Geological Survey and the US Navy in 1907 and 1908 proved that the higher compression ratio of alcohol engines could perfectly offset the lower heat value, thus making alcohol and gasoline engines fuel economy equivalent.

One early supporter of alcohol fuel was Henry Ford, who designed his Model T to run on either alcohol or gasoline. Sensing an opportunity for new markets to boost the independent American farms that he felt were vital to the nation, Henry Ford told the New York Times:

“The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust – almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented.”

Farmers, looking to capitalize on this, lobbied for the repeal of a $2.08 per gallon alcohol tax that had been imposed to help pay for the Civil War. They were aided by those who saw fuel alcohol as a way to break the oiligarchs’ monopoly. In support of a bill to repeal the alcohol tax, President Teddy Roosevelt told the US Congress in 1906:

“The Standard Oil Company has, largely by unfair or unlawful methods, crushed out home competition. It is highly desirable that an element of competition should be introduced by the passage of some such law as that which has already passed the House, putting alcohol used in the arts and manufactures upon the free list.”

The alcohol tax was repealed in 1906 and for a time corn ethanol at 14 cents a gallon was cheaper than gasoline at 22 cents a gallon. The promise of cheap, unpatentable, unmonopolizable fuel production, production open to anyone with raw vegetable matter and a still, swept the nation.

But cheap, plentiful fuel that can be grown and produced locally and independently is not what the oiligarchs had in mind.

A 1909 USGS report comparing gas and alcohol engines had noted that a significant point in alcohol fuel’s favour was that there were fewer restrictions on alcohol engines. For the oiligarchs, the answer was simple: find a way to place greater restrictions on alcohol engines. Thankfully for them, the answer to their problem was already gaining popular support.

In the 19th century, America had a drinking problem. By 1830, the average American over 15 years old drank seven gallons of pure alcohol per year, three times higher than today’s average. This led to the first anti-alcohol movements in the 1830s and 1840s, and the formation of the Prohibition Party in 1869 and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s. The movement enjoyed widespread and growing support but had few political successes; Maine flirted with prohibition by outlawing the sale and manufacture of liquor in 1851, but the ban only lasted five years.

This changed with the formation of the Anti-Saloon League in Standard Oil’s birth state of Ohio in 1893. The ASL was started by John D. Rockefeller’s long-time personal friend Howard Hyde Russell and was bankrolled in part by generous annual donations from Rockefeller himself. The ASL, with Rockefeller’s backing, quickly became the driving force behind a national movement to outlaw the production and sale of alcohol.

Rockefeller was a teetotaler himself, not from moral concern but because he was afraid that “good cheer among friends” would lead to his downfall in business. Stephen Harkness, one of the silent partner investors in Standard Oil and a director in the company until his death, had caught Rockefeller’s eye when he made a fortune buying up whiskey in advance of a new excise tax that he had been tipped about and selling it at a huge profit after the tax kicked in.

No, Rockefeller and Standard Oil were not concerned about the moral state of the nation…except as far as it impacted their bottom line. But when prohibition did come in 1920, it had an interesting side effect: although it didn’t ban the use of ethanol as a fuel directly, it did lead toincreasingly burdensome restrictions requiring producers to add petroleum products to their ethanol to make it poisonous before it could be sold. Alcohol fuel, now completely unable to compete with gasoline, was abandoned altogether by the automobile industry.

Another existential threat to the vast fortunes of the early oiligarchs was to require an even greater effort at social engineering: public transportation.

By the end of World War I, private car ownership was still a relative rarity; only one in 10 Americans owned a car. Rail was still the transportation of choice for the vast majority of the public, and city-dwellers in most major cities relied on electric trolley networks to transport them around town. In 1936, General Motors formed a front company, “National City Lines,” along with Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California, to implement a process of “bustitution”: scrapping streetcars and tearing up railways to replace them with GM’s own buses running on Standard Oil supplied diesel. The plan was remarkably successful.

As historian and researcher F. William Engdahl notes in “Myths, Lies and Oil Wars”

“By the end of the 1940s, GM had bought and scrapped over one hundred municipal electric transit systems in 45 cities and put gas-burning GM buses on the streets in their place. By 1955 almost 90% of the electric streetcar lines in the United States had been ripped out or otherwise eliminated.”

The cartel had been careful to hide their involvement in National City Lines, but it was revealed to the public in 1946 by an enterprising retired naval lieutenant commander, Edwin J. Quinby. He wrote a manifesto exposing what he called “a careful, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities–your Electric Railway System.” He uncovered the oiligarchs’ stock ownership of National City Lines and its subsidiaries and detailed how they had step by step bought up and destroyed the public transportation lines in Baltimore, Los Angeles, St. Louis and other major urban centres.

Quinby’s warning caught the attention of federal prosecutors and in 1947 National City Lines was indicted for conspiring to form a transportation monopoly and conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies. In 1949, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil of California and their officers and corporate associates were convicted on the second count of conspiracy. The punishment for buying up and dismantling America’s public transportation infrastructure? A $5,000 fine. H. C. Grossman, who had been the director of Pacific City Lines when it oversaw the scrapping of LA’s $100 million Pacific Electric system, was fined exactly $1.

Unsurprisingly, GM and its associates did not remain in the doghouse for long. In 1953 President Eisenhower appointed Charles Wilson, then the President of General Motors, as Secretary of Defense. Wilson, with Francis DuPont of the Rockefeller-connected DuPont family as Chief Administrator of Federal Highways, oversaw one of the largest public works projects in American history: the creation of the interstate highway system. With a war-era excise tax on train tickets still in place and federally funded highways and airports providing cheaper alternatives, rail travel declined a startling 84% between 1945 and 1964.

This social engineering paid off well for Standard Oil and its growing list of petrochemical associates. In the two and a half decades after the outbreak of World War II, vehicle production in Detroit almost tripled, from 4.5 million cars a year in 1940 to over 11 million in 1965. As a result, sales of refined gasoline over the same period rose 300%.

But Rockefeller was not the only oiligarch working to crush all opposition to his monopoly. Across the pond, the European oiligarchs were working to protect their own oil investments from upstart competitors.

In 1889, a consortium of German investors led by Siemens’ Deutsche Bank obtained a concession from the Turkish government for extension of a railway line connecting Berlin to Basra on the Persian Gulf via Baghdad in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway concession was for ninety-nine years and came with mineral rights for twenty kilometers on either side of the line…an especially lucrative deal since the rail cut right through the heart of the still untapped Mesopotamian oil regions south of Mosul along the Tigris River.

For the powers behind the British empire, concerned with the military rise of Germany, this deal was unacceptable.

William Engdahl: Well Germany in the end of the 19th century was looking for outlets for its exports — its industrial exports — as the German economy was growing like China’s has grown in the last 30 years. And they decided that Turkey would be an ideal strategic trade partner for Germany. And Georg von Siemens, one of the directors of Deutsche Bank, came up with a strategy to extend a railway from Berlin all the way down to Baghdad — which was then part of the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad and Iraq today, near the Persian Gulf. German military began training the Turkish military. German industry began investing in Turkey. They saw a huge potential market to begin bringing Turkey into the 20th century economically. Deutsche Bank also negotiated mineral rights — I think it was 20 kilometres either side of the railway — and it was already known in 1914 that Mosul and these other areas contained huge petroleum deposits.

Well, why is that significant? At the end of the 19th century, Jack Fisher–the head of the Admiralty and the head of the Royal Navy–advocated the conversion of the British Navy from coal-fired to oil-fired. That it would have a qualitative strategic improvement in every aspect of warship design. And since Britain didn’t know that they had any oil back then they went to Persia and swindled the Shah out of oil rights in Persia. They went to Kuwait and backed a coup d’etat of the Al-Sabah family to be a British pawn, and they literally wrote a contract with him that nothing that Kuwait does will be done without approval of the British Governor. And Kuwait was known to have oil lying right on the Persian Gulf.

The British looked at this railway plan of the Germans going right down to Baghdad and said ‘My God! You can put soldiers on rail cars and bring them down and threaten the oil lifeline of the British Navy.’ This is a strategic move by the Germans. It also would make Germany independent of the British control of the seas. They would have a landline much like the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure for high speed rails going throughout Eurasia into Russia, on into Belarus and Western Europe that removes the United States’ Navy ability to control China and control Central Asia to a great extent.

The British oiligarchs, including the British crown with its hidden controlling stake in Anglo-Persian Oil and the Rothschild’s merchant Marcus Samuel at Royal Dutch Shell, sought to counter this German threat to their commercial and strategic interests. They used Armenian-born naturalized British citizen Calouste Gulbenkian–the architect of the Royal Dutch / Shell merger–in order, as he later recalled “to see British influence get the upper hand in Turkey” against the Germans. If that was his task, it was a remarkable success.

In 1909 the British set up the Turkish National Bank, which was “Turkish” in name only. Founded by London banker Sir Edward Cassel and with directors like Hugo Baring of the Barings banking family, Cassel himself, and Gulbenkian, the Bank set up the Turkish Petroleum Company in 1912. Formed explicitly to exploit the petroleum-rich oil fields of Iraq, then part of the Ottoman Empire, Gulbenkian brokered a deal that forced Deutsche Bank, with its 40 kilometre concessions along the oil-rich Baghdad railway line, into a junior partnership in the company. The stock was split so the British government’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company owned half the shares, with Royal Dutch Shell and Deutsche Bank splitting the other half.

Their plan to take over Germany’s Turkish oil interests had been successful, but in an amazing irony, it didn’t even matter. Gulbenkian finished negotiations for the Iraqi oil concession on June 28, 1914, the same day Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. An alliance the British had been brokering for years to constrain the rising German threat, an alliance involving France and Russia, kicked into motion and the world was engulfed in war. By the end of World War I, the British and their allies had taken over Iraq and its oil deposits anyway, Germany had been completely cut out, and Gulbenkian, their scheming servant, received 5% of all oil field proceeds in the newly minted country.

As the century wore on, the oil industry grew beyond the control of the handful of families that had dominated it since its inception. Oil deposits were located around the globe and the resources of entire nation states were marshaled to control them. Now, threats to the oiligarchs and their interests required multi-lateral, multi-national responses and the consequences of those deals were felt worldwide.

The story of the Oil Shock of 1973 as it has been delivered to us by the history books is well known.

Narrator: By the late 1960s the nation relied on imported oil to keep the economy strong. Then in the early 1970s oil-dependent America’s nightmares came true: 13 oil-producing countries in the Middle East and South America formed OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In 1973 OPEC placed an oil embargo on the US and other nations that had supported Israel against the Arab states in the Yom Kippur war. The American economy went into a tailspin as gas shortages gripped the nation.

SOURCE: History of Oil

Few, however, know that the crisis and its ensuing response was in fact prepared months ahead of time at a secret meeting in Sweden in 1973. The meeting was the annual gathering of the Bilderberg Group, a secretive cabal formed by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1954.

The Dutch royal family not only gave its royal imprint to Royal Dutch Petroleum, they are stillrumoured to be, along with the Rothschilds, one of the largest shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell, from the days when Queen Wilhelmina’s Anglo-Dutch Petroleum holdings and other investments made her the world’s first female billionaire right through to today. Bernhard’s guest list at the Bilderberg Group reflected his position in the oiligarchy; alongside him at the Swedish conference were David Rockefeller of the Standard Oil dynasty and his protege Henry Kissinger, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, E.G. Collado, the Vice President of Exxon, Sir Denis Greenhill, director of British Petroleum, and Gerrit A. Wagner, president of Bernhard’s own Royal Dutch Shell.

At the meeting in Sweden, held five months before the oil crisis began, the oil-igarchs and their political and business allies were planning their response to a monetary crisis that threatened the world dominance of the US dollar. Under the Bretton Woods system, negotiated in the final days of World War II, the US dollar would be the backbone of the world monetary system, convertible to gold at $35 per ounce with all other currencies pegged to it. Increasing US expenditures in Vietnam and decreasing exports caused Germany, France, and other nations to start demanding gold for their dollars.

With the Federal Reserve’s official gold holdings plunging and unable to stem the tide of demand, Nixon abandoned Bretton Woods in August 1971, threatening the dollar’s position as the world reserve currency.

Richard Nixon: Accordingly, I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I have directed SecretaryConnally to suspend temporarily the convertability of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interest of the United States.

SOURCE: Nixon Ends Bretton Woods

As leaked documents from the 1973 Bilderberg meeting show, the oiligarchs decided to use their control over the flow of oil to save the American hegemon. Acknowleding that OPEC “could completely disorganize and undermine the world monetary system,” the Bilderberg attendees prepared for “an energy crisis or an increase in energy costs,” which, they predicted, could mean an oil price between $10 and $12, a staggering 400% increase from the current price of $3.01 per barrel.

Five months later, Bilderberg attendee and Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger, acting as Nixon’s Secretary of State, engineered the Yom Kippur War and provoked OPEC’s response: an oil embargo of the US and other nations that had supported Israel. On October 16, 1973, OPEC raised oil prices by 70%. At their December meeting, the Shah of Iran demanded and received a further price raise to $11.65 a barrel, or 400% of oil’s pre-crisis price. When asked by Saudi King Faisal’s personal emissary why he had demanded such a bold price increase, he replied: “Tell your King, if he wants the answer to this question, he should go to Washington and ask Henry Kissinger.”

In the second move of the operation, Kissinger helped negotiate a deal with Saudi Arabia: in exchange for US arms and military protection, the Saudis would price all their future oil sales in dollars and recycle those dollars through treasury purchases via Wall Street banks. The deal was a bonanza for the oiligarchs; not only did they get to pass the price increases on to the consumers, but they benefited from the huge flows of money into their own banks. The Shah of Iran parked the National Iranian Oil Company’s revenues in Rockefeller’s own Chase Bank, revenues that reached $14 billion per year in the wake of the oil crisis.

With the creation of this new system, the “petrodollar“, the oiligarchs had reached unprecedented levels of control over the economy. Not only that, they had backed the world monetary system with their commodity, oil, and brought potential competition from upstart producer nations under their control all in one step.

But for the insatiable appetites of these monopolist titans, mere control over the world’s monetary system was not enough…

PART THREE: THE WORLD IN THEIR IMAGE

In the nineteenth century, railroad conspiracies and predatory pricing had been enough to assure the oiligarchs’ monopoly. But by the time that the British crown, the Dutch royal family, the Rothschilds and the other European oiligarchs began opening up the Middle East and the Far East to oil exploration in the early twentieth century, the goal was no longer to maximize profits or control the oil industry. It was not even to control international diplomacy. It was to control and shape the world itself. Its resources. Its environment. And its people.

In order to achieve this goal, the oiligarchy would need a facelift.

In the current age, with the Rockefeller name now more likely to be associated with Rockefeller Plaza or Rockefeller University than Standard Oil, it is difficult to understand just how hated John D. was in his own day. He was the head of the Standard Oil Hydra, an octopus strangling the world in his tentacles, a cutthroat gardener pruning the competitors from the flower of his oil monopoly. As one of the richest men the world had ever known, he was an easy target for the average working man’s frustrations and a magnet for the poor seeking help.

Judith Sealander, Historian: He received on average 50 to 60,000 letters a month, asking for help. Dozens of people followed him in the street. Literally, crowds stood around the Standard Oil offices waiting for him to come out. Little children, painfully thin, crying in the street and so on. Rockefeller felt overwhelmed.

SOURCE: The Rockefellers

Besieged by the downtrodden, despised by the working man, hounded by Ida Tarbell and the muckraking press, John D. had the mother of all PR problems. The answer was simple: invent the PR industry. He hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a journalist-turned-communications expert who invented the modern public relations industry to burnish the Rockefellers’ tarnished image. It was Lee that suggested giving the family name to Rockefeller Center and filming John D. handing out dimes in public.

Narrator: An early master of public relations, Lee used the media which the muckrakers had used to disgrace Rockefeller to turn him into a sympathetic figure. Ivy Lee recognized early the power of the new moving picture and used newsreels to show a remarkably benevolent Rockefeller.

John D. Rockefeller: I am very grateful to you and to a host of people who are so kind and good to me all the time.

Second Man: Why, because you’re so good to everybody.

John D. Rockefeller: Yes, you are.

As Ivy Lee began to control his public image he became oddly a kind of American character, and people kind of warmed to him in a bizarre sort of way. It was like having Frankenstein on the loose walking around New York City or something like that, with a cane and a long hat.

Narrator: Although this plane never takes off, this photo opportunity was presented as Senior’s first flight. Perhaps Ivy Lee’s most brilliant public relations move was the casting of Rockefeller as ‘The Man Who Gave out Dimes.’

Man off camera: Don’t you give dimes, Mr. Rockefeller? Please, go ahead.

Woman: Thank you, sir.

Man: Thank you very much.

John D. Rockefeller: Thank you for the ride!

Man: I consider myself more than amply paid.

John D. Rockefeller: Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!

SOURCE: John D. Rockefeller – Standard Oil

These PR stunts seem obvious and ham-handed by today’s standards, but they were effective enough: to this day people leave dimes on the stone marker at the base of the 70 foot Egyptian obelisk that towers over John D.’s final resting place in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. But it was not stage-managed photo opportunities like these that transformed Rockefeller into a public hero.

In order to win the public over, he was going to have to give them what they wanted. And what they wanted wasn’t difficult to understand: money. But just as his father, Devil Bill, had taught him to do in all his business dealings, Rockefeller made sure to get the better end of the bargain. He would “donate” his great wealth to the creation of public institutions, but those institutions would be used to bend society to his will.

As every would-be ruler throughout history has realized, society has to be transformed from the ground up. Americans in the 19th century still prized education and intellectual pursuits, with the 1840 census finding unsurprisingly that the United States–a nation that had been mobilized by tracts like Thomas Paine’s remarkably popular Common Sense–was a nation of readers, with a remarkable 93% to 100% literacy rate. Before the first compulsory schooling laws in Massachusetts in 1852, education was private and decentralized, and as a result classical education, including study of Greek and Latin and a solid grounding in history and science, was widespread.

But a nation of individuals who could think for themselves was anathema to the monopolists. The oiligarchs needed a mass of obedient workers, an entire class of people whose intellect was developed just enough to prepare them for lives of drudgery in a factory. Into the midst stepped John D. Rockefeller with his first great act of public charity: the establishment of the University of Chicago.

He was aided in this task by Frederick Taylor Gates, a Baptist minister that Rockefeller befriended in 1889 and who would go on to be John D.’s most trusted philanthropic adviser. Gates would go on to write a short tract, “The Country School of Tomorrow,” that laid out the Rockefeller plan for education:

“In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”

Although Rockefeller’s resources weren’t exactly limitless, they might as well have been. In 1902 he established the General Education Board to help implement Gates’ vision for the country school of tomorrow with a staggering $180 million endowment.

The Rockefeller influence on education was felt almost immediately, and it was amplified by help from fellow monopolists of the era who were approaching the topic of philanthropy from the same angle.

Although best known as a steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie’s fortune started on the railroads transporting Rockefeller’s Standard Oil around the country, and was greatly magnified by a lucrative investment in property near Oil Creek that provided steady, profitable oil sales. In 1905 he established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a tax-free foundation through which Carnegie and his appointees could direct the development of the education system in the the United States, and, eventually, worldwide. In 1910, Rockefeller followed suit by establishing the Rockefeller Foundation, which became the tax-free umbrella organization for his philanthropic ambitions.

As the Reece Committee–a Congressional investigation into the activities of these tax-free foundations in the 1950s–discovered, it wasn’t long before Carnegie’s Endowment approached Rockefeller’s Foundation with a proposal: to cooperate on their shared desire to transform the American education system in their own image. Norman Dodd, the director of research for the Congressional committee who was granted access to the Carnegie Endowment’s board minutes, explains:

So they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with a suggestion: that portion of education which could be considered domestic should be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation, and that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment.

They then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American History. So, they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American History in the country — people like Charles and Mary Byrd. Their suggestion to them is this, “Will they alter the manner in which they present their subject”” And, they get turned down, flatly.

So, they then decide that it is necessary for them to do as they say, i.e. “build our own stable of historians.” Then, they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which specializes in fellowships, and say” “When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American History, and we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so? And the answer is, “Yes.”

So, under that condition, eventually they assemble twenty (20), and they take these twenty potential teachers of American History to London. There, they are briefed in what is expected of them — when, as, and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned.

That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association. And then, toward the end of the 1920’s, the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association four hundred thousand dollars ($400,000) for a study of our history in a manner which points to what this country look forward to, in the future.

That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is, of course, in essence, a summary of the contents of the other six. The essence of the last volume is this: the future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with characteristic American efficiency.

SOURCE: Norman Dodd interview

With this base for transformation firmly established, the Rockefeller Foundation and like-minded organization embarked on a program so ambitious that it almost defies comprehension.

They transformed the practice of medicine.

As usual, the oiligarchs that funded this change were also there to profit from it, and once again John D. took his queue from “Devil” Bill’s example. William Rockefeller had called his brand of snake oil “Nujol,” for “new oil,” and Standard Oil spun off “Nujol” as a laxative under their Stanco subsidiary. Manufactured on the same premises as “Flit,” an insecticide also derived from Standard Oil’s byproducts, “Nujol” sold at the druggist for 28 cents per six ounce bottle; it cost Standard Oil less than one-fifth of a cent to manufacture. Pharmaceuticals provided a lucrative new opportunity for the oiligarchs, but in a turn-of-the-century America that was still largely based on naturopathic, herbal remedies, it was a tough sell. The oiligarchy went to work changing that.

In 1901 John D. established the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. The Institute recruited Simon Flexner, a pathology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to serve as its director. His brother, Abraham, was an educator who was contracted by the Carnegie Foundation to write a report on the state of the American medical education system. His study,The Flexner Report, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations were to shower on medical research in the coming years, resulted in a sweeping overhaul of the American medical system. Naturopathic and homeopathic medicine, medical care focused on un-patentable, uncontrollable natural remedies and cures was now dismissed as quackery; only drug-based allopathic medicine requiring expensive medical procedures and lengthy hospital stays was to be taken seriously.

Narrator: The fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller financed surgery, radiation and synthetic drugs. They were to become the economic foundations of the new medical economy.

G. Edward Griffin: The takeover of the medical industry was accomplished by the takeover of the medical schools. Well, the people that we’re talking about, Rockefeller and Carnegie in particular, came to the picture and said ‘We will put up money.’ They offered tremendous amounts of money to the schools that would agree to cooperate with them. The donors said to the schools: ‘We’re giving you all this money, now would it be too much to ask if we could put some of our people on your Board of Directors to see that our money is being spent wisely?’ Almost overnight all of the major universities received large grants from these sources and also accepted one, two or three of these people that I mentioned on their Board of Directors and the schools literally were taken over by the financial interests that put up the money.

Now what happened as a result of that is the schools did receive an infusion of money, they were able to build new buildings, they were able to add expensive equipment to their laboratories, they were able to hire top-notch teachers, but at the same time as doing that they schewed the whole thing in the direction of pharmaceutical drugs. That was the efficiency in philanthropy.

The doctors from that point forward in history would be taught pharmaceutical drugs. All of the great teaching institutions in America were captured by the pharmaceutical interests in this fashion, and it’s amazing how little money it really took to do it.

SOURCE: The Money Takeover Of Medicine

The oiligarchy birthed entire medical industries from their own research centers and then sold their own products from their own petrochemical companies as the “cure.” It was Frank Howard, a Standard Oil of New Jersey executive, who would go on to persuade Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering to donate their fortunes to the cancer center that would then bear their name. As director of research at Sloan-Kettering, Howard appointed Cornelius Rhoads, a Rockefeller Institute pathologist, to develop his wartime research on mustard gas for the US Army into a new cancer therapy. Under Rhoads’ leadership, nearly the entire program and staff of the Chemical Warfare Service were reformed into the SKI drug development program, where they worked on converting mustard gas into chemotherapy. And once again, the Rockefeller’s own snake oil was being sold as a cancer cure-all.

The oiligarchs’ interest in the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry converged in companies like I.G. Farben, a drug and chemical cartel formed in Germany in the early 20th century. Royal Dutch’s Prince Bernhard served on an I.G. Farben subsidiary’s board in the 1930s and the cartel’s American operation, set up in cooperation with Standard Oil, included on its board Standard Oil president Walter Teagle as well as Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., itself headed by Jacob Schiff of the Rothschild broker family. At its height, I.G. Farben was the largest chemical company in the world and the fourth largest industrial concern in the world, right behind Standard Oil of New Jersey.

The company was broken up after World War II, but like Standard Oil, its various pieces remained intact and today BASF, one of its chemical offshoots, remains the largest chemical company in the world, while Bayer and Sanofi, two of its pharmaceutical offshoots are among the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Not content merely to monopolize the fields of education and medicine, the same oiligarchical interests banded together to take control of America’s finances. In 1910 John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s own father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip of the National City Bank, and Paul Warburg, as well as various agents of J.P. Morgan, met in complete secrecy on Jekyll Island to hammer out the details of what would go on to become the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank. The Fed, established in 1913, would be run by hand-picked appointees of the oiligarchy and their banking associates, including, perhaps inevitably, Standard Oil president and American I.G. director Walter Teagle.

The Rockefeller family would go on to formally enter the banking field in the 1950s when James Stillman Rockefeller, the grandson of John D.’s brother, was appointed director of National City Bank. Meanwhile John D.’s own grandson, David Rockefeller, would go on to take over Chase Manhattan Bank, the long-time banking partner of the Standard Oil empire.

In this move the Rockefellers’ story perfectly mirrored that of their fellow oiligarchs the Rothschilds. Whereas the Rothschilds had supplemented their banking fortune with their oil interests, the Rockefellers supplemented their oil fortune with banking interests.

Springboarding from success to success as they consolidated monopolies across every field of human activity, the oiligarchs’ ambitions became even larger. This time, their goal was to consolidate control over the very food supply of the world itself, and once again they would use philanthropy as the cover for their business takeover.

Narrator: The Green Revolution began in 1943 when plant geneticist Norman Borlaug and a team of researchers arrived on Mexican soil. His goal was to improve agricultural techniques and biotechnological methodologies which in turn would help alleviate starvation and improve the living quality of developing nations. Creating new genetically modified strains of wheat, rich, maize and other crops, Borlaug planned to win the battle against world hunger. The hope was that these new crops and farming techniques would rescue third world countries from the brink of starvation.

That’s exactly what happened. The agricultural innovations brought to the poverty-stricken countries gave the farmers the skills and resources necessary to sustain themselves. This triggered a chain of events that would allow these once-struggling nations to survive. Agricultural exports soared in quantity and diversity and allowed the countries to become self-sufficient.

As the genetically modified crops thrived, farmers were able to use their increased income to purchase newer and superior farming machinery. This increase in revenue made farming easier, more reliable and more efficient. The Green Revolution led to the modernization of agriculture and has had a profound social, economic and political impact on the world.

The Mexican government turned to the Rockefeller Foundation in their endeavour to nourish Mexico through agriculture.

SOURCE: Green Revolution Waging War Against Hunger

Norman Borlaug, needless to say, was a researcher for the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Green Revolution, for whatever increase in yields it brought about, also created markets for the oiligarchs’ own interest in the petrochemical fertilizer industry and gave rise to the “ABCD” seed cartel of Archer Daniels Midand, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus. These companies, along with their associated interests in the food packaging and processing industry, formed the core of American “agribusiness,” a concept developed at Harvard Business School in the 1950s with the help of research conducted by Wassily Leontief for the Rockefeller Foundation.

The American agribusiness giants shared a common goal: the transformation of third world agriculture into a captive market for their goods. From this perspective, the project was a runaway success. By the 1970s the Rockefeller Standard Oil network and its cronies in the nitrogen fertilizer industry (including DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Hercules Powder) had broken into markets around the world, markets conveniently forced open for them by the US government itself under President Johnson’s “Food for Peace” program, which mandated the use of petrochemical-dependent agricultural technologies (fertilizers, tractors, irrigation, etc.) by aid recipients.

Unable to afford these new technologies themselves, the impoverished third-world “beneficiaries” of this “revolution” relied on loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank handled by Rockefeller’s own Chase Manhattan Bank and guaranteed by the US government.

The real costs of the Green Revolution, economic, agricultural and environmental are seldom tallied. Access to these debt-financed petrochemical-dependent technologies exacerbated the difference between the rich landowning class and the landless peasants in countries like India, where land reform and abolition of usury were dropped from the political agenda after the Green Revolution took over.

Even then, the revolution’s main success, its increase in agricultural yields, has been oversold. Yield growth across India actually slowed after the introduction of agribusiness. The environmental destruction is even more devastating. An overview in the December 2000 edition of Current Science notes: “The gree n revolution has not only increased productivity, but it has also [produced] several negative ecological consequences such as depletion of lands, decline in soil fertility, soil salinization, soil erosion, deterioration of environment, health hazards, poor sustainability of agricultural lands and degradation of  biodiversity. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, irrigation and imbalanced fertilization has threatened sustainability.”

The Rockefeller Foundation even acknowledges the critiques of the Green Revolution it funded into existence, insisting that “current initiatives take into account lessons learned.” Even so, the Foundation continues to fund research and write reports on how to improve prospects for agribusiness investment in its target markets.

As egregious as the Green Revolution was and continues to be, however, in many ways it was just the prelude to an even more ambitious project: the Gene Revolution. Now the project is not merely to monopolize the technologies, supplies and chemical inputs for agriculture worldwide, but to monopolize the food supply itself through the replacement of the world’s natural seeds with patentable genetically modified crops.

The players involved in this “Gene Revolution” are almost identical to the players in the Green Revolution, with I.G. Farben offshoots Bayer CropScience and BASF PlantScience mingling with traditional oiligarch associate companies like Dow AgroScience, DuPont Biotechnology, and, of course, Monsanto, all funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and fellow “philanthropists” at the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and like-minded organizations.

The convergence of corporate, “philanthropic,” governmental and inter-governmental interests in promoting GM crops around the world can be seen in the bewildering array of research institutes, industry associations, and “consultative groups” devoted to the case. The Rockefeller-funded International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Rockefeller/Monsanto/USAID brainchildInternational Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), theRockefeller/Ford/World Bank created Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and dozens of other bland, benign-sounding organizations research and promote GM crops in target markets around the globe, with the profits ending up in the oiligarchs’ coffers.

A representative example of this story is the agribusiness neocolonization of Argentina, where Monsanto ran an elaborate “bait-and-switch” to get the country hooked on its genetically modified Roundup Ready soybeans before demanding royalties on the crops that were by then already growing.  DuPont then took over, magnanimously beginning a “Protein for Life” programme to foist their own GM soybeans on the country’s poor.

The same scene has played itself out in country after country, where cartel-developed GM crops are foisted on emerging economies through “food aid,” usually during times of famine when those countries are especially vulnerable. Only a handful of countries like Zambia or Angola have outright rejected this GMO takeover of their food supply, generously subsidized by the US government to the benefit of the agribusiness cartel.

Conclusion: Monopolizing Life

From cutthroat pioneers of the early oil industry to Machiavellian social engineers and geopolitics schemers, the oiligarchs have come a long way since the days of Devil Bill’s snake oil cure-alls. But his use of every form of deception and trickery to swindle the public informed how John D. and the rest of the oiligarchs built up their business interests.

As the 20th century drew to a close, it was obvious that for the powerful cartel that built the oil industry–the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the British and Dutch royal families–it was no longer about oil, if it ever really was. The takeover of education, of medicine, of the monetary system, of the food supply itself, showed that the aim was much greater than a mere oil monopoly: it was the quest to monopolize all aspects of life. To erect the perfect system of control over every aspect of society, every sector from which any threat of competition to their power could emerge.

They had been remarkably, almost unbelievably, successful. From oil well to gas pump, farm to fork, hospital to pharmaceutical, drill rig to dollar bill, there was almost no aspect of society that was not under control.

But the oiligarchs are not done yet. Their next project, launched in the late 20th century, is almost too ambitious to be comprehended. It is not about oil. It is not about money. It is about the monopolization of life itself. They have spent decades preparing the path for this takeover and marshaled their mind-boggling resources in service of the task.

And the vast majority of the world’s population, still playing the shell game that the oiligarchs perfected and abandoned long ago, are about to fall right into their hands yet again.

“The bottom has fallen out of the market in the last two weeks. Investors have lost confidence after two weeks of meddling by government officials.”

-Franic Lun, Chief Executive Officer at GEO Securities Ltd in Hong Kong [1]

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Length (59:15)

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As the Asian Stock market comes to the end of its second week of trading in 2016, Chinese Stocks continue their massive sell-off. China’s Benchmark index, the Shanghai composite ended its January 15^th trading day down over 20% from their most recent high on December 22. This technically places the market in BEAR territory. The January 15^th close was its worst in two years. [2][3]

Alarm bells have been set off in the international community after automatic circuit-breakers were triggered in Chinese stock trading which were designed to prevent precipitous collapses. On January 7^th, China’s stocks tumbled 7% in just 29 minutes, resulting in the shortest day of trading in the Chinese market’s 25 year history. [4]

The Peoples Bank of China has been allowing China’s currency, the Yuan to drop while intervening to bring it back up to prevent a precipitous decline. [5]

China’s previous bear market occurred in August when $5 trillion were wiped off of global stock prices.[6]

On this week’s Global Research News Hour we look at the fundamentals of the Chinese economy and the recent stock market activity and try to determine what they portend for the global economy going into the future.

In the first half hour, we hear from Radhika Desai, Professor at the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at that same institution. Professor Desai dismisses the Western Press’s descriptions of the stock turmoil as a calamity and points to the fundamental strengths of the Chinese economy, as well as the roles of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the One Belt One Road strategies in posing a challenge to the dominance of the Neo-Liberal model.

In the second half hour we hear from Jack Rasmus. He is a professor of economics and politics at St. Mary’s College in California. He has a new book out – Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy. Rasmus explains the roots of the turmoil in Chinese Markets, factoring in the liquidity generated by central banks, massive debts, currency devaluations and financial asset versus real asset investments in recent years. Professor Rasmus views the current crises facing emerging markets as merely a new form of the crisis that struck the US and North Atlantic countries in the wake of the Sub-Prime Mortgage meltdown in 2008-2009.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

The  show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CFUV 101. 9 FM in Victoria. Airing Sundays from 7-8am PT.

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

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

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

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the  North Shore to the US Border. It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.

Notes:

1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-15/china-stocks-head-for-third-week-of-losses-before-economic-data
2. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-stocks-still-close-to-bear-market-territory-2016-01-14
3. http://www.ibtimes.com/china-stock-market-turns-bearish-other-asian-stocks-track-decline-2266725
4. Shen Hong (January 7, 2016), “China Stocks: Trading Called Off for Second Time This Week”, The Wall Street Journal; http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-stocks-trading-called-off-for-second-time-this-week-1452133928  et al (January 8, 2016),
5. “Markets stabilise after China strengthens currency and circuit breaker is axed”;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/12086208/China-stock-market-shares-plunge-ftse-100-europe-live.html
6. http://www.ibtimes.com/black-monday-global-stocks-have-lost-5-trillion-chinas-yuan-devaluation-2065343

First published in September 2015.

Racism, Hatred and Islamophobia depicting children as terrorists. This article is of particular relevance in relation to the followup January 15, 2016 Charlie Hebdo caricature of the death of Aylan Kurdi. 

WARNING: This report contains some images readers may find distressing.

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has reportedly published its own controversial take on the refugee and migration crisis.

A cartoon attributed to the publication and circulating on social media features drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a beach with the words “So close to his goal…” written above him.

In the background a McDonald’s-style Happy Meal Board states: “Two children’s menus for the price of one.”

Three-year-old Aylan drowned along with his brother and mother when the boat they were travelling from the Greek island of Kos to the Turkish town of Bodrum capsized.

The family fled after Islamic State militants advanced upon their home town of Kobane.

A Turkish gendarmerie soldier moves the body of Aylan Kurdi

Aylan (left) and his older brother Galip (right), who also perished in the sea

Aylan (left) and his older brother Galip (right), who also perished in the sea

Another cartoon said to be from the same edition of the magazine is entitled The Proof that Europe is Christian and features a man believed to be Jesus standing on the surface of the ocean while a child’s legs’s (presumably meant to be Aylan’s) protrude from the water.

It says: “Christians walk on water… Muslim kids sink.”

The cartoons have been met with a mixed response.

Turkish newspaper The Daily Sabah claimed the images mock the drowned toddler.

Morocco World News concurred, accusing the publication of “hiding behind the freedom of speech.”

Indian channel Scoop Whoop wrote: “This isn’t the Charlie Hebdo we identified and stood in solidarity with earlier this year. Je ne suis pas Charlie (I’m not Charlie).”

Barrister Peter Herbert, who is Chair of the Society of Black Lawyers and former vice chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, tweeted: “Charlie Hebdo is a purely racist, xenophobic and ideologically bankrupt publication that represents the moral decay of France.

The Society of Black Lawyers will consider reporting this as incitement to hate crime and persecution before the International Criminal Court.

Complaints are being left on the magazine’s Facebook page and Twitter users have criticised the images, describing them as “tasteless” and “disgusting.”

But some commenters say the cartoons are not mocking the dead child and are instead using the tragedy to ridicule Europe for not doing enough to prevent it.

The core of Charlie Hebdo’s staff were murdered in January when a gunman stormed its offices, igniting three days of bloodshed around Paris that left 17 victims dead.

The attacks ended when security forces killed both Charlie Hebdo gunmen —brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi — and an accomplice — Amedy Coulibaly — who killed a policewoman and later four hostages at a kosher grocery.

After the massacre the slogan Je Suis Charlie was adopted by supporters of freedom of speech and freedom of the press and trended worldwide in a gesture of support for the magazine.

The weekly publication has a history of drawing outrage across the Muslim world with crude cartoons of Islam’s holiest figure, resulting in the firebombing of its offices in 2011.

A year later, the magazine published more Muhammad drawings amid an uproar over an anti-Muslim film. The cartoons depicted Muhammad naked and in demeaning or pornographic poses. As outrage grew, the French government defended free speech even as it rebuked Charlie Hebdo for fanning tensions.

Coordinated bombings and mass shootings struck Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta on Thursday leaving several dead and many more wounded. The pattern matched that of attacks carried out last year in Paris, France, where known terrorists Western intelligence agencies were tracking, some for years, were somehow allowed to mobilize large caches of weapons in Belgium and execute their coordinated mass murder with virtually no effort to stop them ahead of the attacks.

The so-called “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” quickly claimed responsibility for the attack and the Western media has begun stoking fears that the terrorist organization has now spread to Southeast Asia.

G.I. Jihadis: Wherever US Foreign Policy is in Trouble, ISIS is There… 

A pattern is beginning to develop. Wherever the US wants to put its military, ISIS shows up and conveniently justifies it. And whenever the US is having a problem persuading a foreign government to do what Washington desires, ISIS shows up. In fact, pretty much everywhere US foreign policy is in trouble, ISIS and similarly state-sponsored terrorism seems to show up and save the day.

ISIS itself is a creation of the US and its European and Middle Eastern allies. The US’ own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted as much in a leaked 2012 report (.pdf) which stated:

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

To clarify just who these “supporting powers” were that sought the creation of a “Salafist” (Islamic) principality” (State), the DIA report explains:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

When the US’ own Defense Intelligence Agency says the US sought the creation of a “Salafist principality,” the verbatim definition of the so-called “Islamic State,” in eastern Syria precisely where ISIS is now established, it is clear that ISIS is an enemy of the West in name only, and only to distract from the fact that this abhorrent terrorist organizations is in reality one of the West’s most potent and far reaching foreign policy tools. ISIS is a reboot of sorts of Al Qaeda which the US and its Saudi allies first created – intentionally – to wage proxy war against the Soviet Union with in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Instead of waging war against the Soviet Union with Al Qaeda, the US is now waging an increasingly global war against Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and now clearly much of East and Southeast Asia with either ISIS or a similarly state-sponsored terrorist organization with.

What Other Explanation Could there Be? 

What the world is expected to believe is that the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” so named because of where it is supposedly based and primarily operates, is currently fighting both the Syrian and Iraqi governments, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran, and Russian airpower, apparently funded, armed, and backed by no one.

Additionally, we are expected to believe ISIS is also fighting thousands of “moderate rebels” the US and its allies claim to have armed, funded, and trained to the tune of several billion dollars. Not only are they fighting these moderates backed by a multi-billion dollar multinational coalition, but are fighting and have been winning. But it doesn’t end there. We are also expected to believe that ISIS is also weathering the combined military might of the US, France, Germany, the UK, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan.

Image: If the US and its allies are arming, funding, and training “moderate rebels” to the tune of billions of dollars, who is arming, funding, and training ISIS on a greater scale that has allowed them to dominate the fighting in Syria and Iraq? The answer of course is there were never any moderates to begin with, and the rise of ISIS was very much intentional.

.And finally, we are expected to believe not only all of this, and that ISIS is independently supporting expanding operations in Afghanistan and Libya, but that ISIS now has the extra time, money, resources, and inclination to attack Indonesia all the way in Southeast Asia.Few nations-states on Earth possess the ability to do what it is claimed ISIS is doing, everywhere it is doing it, and to the degree of success it is allegedly doing it with. Among those few nations, there is only one that benefits from ISIS’ activities. The United States.What’s the US Using ISIS and other Terror Groups in Asia for and Why? 

It was just in August of last year that the joint US-Turkish terrorist group, the “Grey Wolves,” were implicated in a bombing in Southeast Asia’s Thailand. The bomb blast killed 20 and maimed many more in an attack that killed mostly Chinese tourists.

The attack was part of a wider terror campaign backed by the US and Turkey in China’s western Xinjiang region where Turkic Uyghur terrorists have been carrying out attacks for years. The US-Turkish backed Grey Wolves have been behind training and arming terrorists in China for years, and more recently have played a role in smuggling Uyghur fighters from China, through Southeast Asia – including through Thailand – and onward to Syria to fight the West’s proxy war there.

Image: Thailand and China conducted their first ever joint-air military exercises last year, amid ongoing efforts by Thailand to modernize its military through the purchase of Chinese weapon systems including armored vehicles and even submarines. .

.

Killing Chinese tourists in Thailand was aimed at straining recent and growing ties between Bangkok and Beijing. Thailand has recently sought closer military and economic cooperation with China while slowly moving away from an increasingly meddlesome West. Bangkok had sought to purchase Chinese weapons, including several submarines. It already possesses Chinese-made warships and armored vehicles, and late last year conducted its first ever joint Thai-Chinese air military exercises.Economically, Thailand has been working with China toward a deal to construct additional rail infrastructure both in Thailand, and connecting the nation beyond, including to China itself.When the US has repeatedly placed pressure on Bangkok to join its provocations in the South China Sea aimed at Beijing, Bangkok has repeatedly insisted that the conflict is none of their business, and that they will play no part in it.

The bombing in August by a terrorist organization which at one point was run out of the US embassy in Ankara during the Cold War, was a warning to Bangkok that if it hinders rather than aids US “primacy” in Asia, it will suffer destabilization.

ISIS Punishes Indonesia for its “Sins” 

And Indonesia is likewise “guilty” of many of the same “sins.” Jakarta while occasionally challenging China rhetorically, has repeatedly avoided getting too deeply involved in America’s provocations in the South China Sea. Additionally, Jakarta, like Bangkok, has sought to build greater economic ties with Beijing. This includes a deal that will see China construct a high-speed rail network throughout the country.

Bloomberg Business’ article, “China to Build $5 Billion High-Speed Rail Line in Indonesia,” would state:

China won the rights to build a $5.5 billion railway line in Indonesia as the Southeast Asian nation tries to upgrade its infrastructure to drive economic growth. 

The massive infrastructure project will boost both China and Indonesia for decades to come. With the economic opportunities mass transportation brings a nation, opportunities for Washington to use socioeconomic disparity as a tool to divide and gain leverage over nations like Indonesia internally as it and other Western powers have done in the past will dwindle. Additionally, that China is building such projects in both Thailand and Indonesia, will only lead to greater ties between Beijing and a rising Southeast Asia – a Southeast Asia rising on the back of expanding and improving infrastructure.

With few attractive alternatives to offer Southeast Asia, the United States appears to have departed from offering “carrots” it does not have, and has instead resorted increasingly to the “stick.” But instead of wielding that stick itself, it has handed it to the “Salafist principality” it admittedly conspired to create with its allies in eastern Syria in 2012.

For the crime of wanting to move further out from under what the US itself calls its “primacy over Asia,” Indonesia has been attacked, and now has the menace of ISIS being further still dangled over its head if it continues forging stronger ties with Beijing.

Thailand and Indonesia are not alone. The US has openly declared in signed and dated policy papers that it believes controlling a unified Southeast Asian front, and arraying it against China, is the only way to encircle, contain, and eventually undermine and destroy the current political order in Beijing.

To that end, the United States has formulated an array of options ranging from supporting internal political subversion through US State Department-funded political fronts and nongovernmental organizations, to an increasing dependency on terrorism, to coerce Southeast Asia away from Beijing while dividing and disrupting Southeast Asia’s own geopolitical future.

The US and its allies could at any day expose and cut ISIS’ supply lines leading from their various subsidiaries and fronts around the world, back to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and its other state-sponsors. Instead, the US protects and cover up this extensive, global state-sponsorship of terrorism. As such, when “ISIS attacks,” it is really an extension of US foreign policy, and not merely ISIS alone that is committing this violence, nor for ISIS and its own agenda alone that it is being carried out.

Most ironic of all, perhaps, is the possibility that because of America’s dwindling credibility worldwide, and its waning influence in Asia, its complicity in the violence being carried out against the governments and peoples of Southeast Asia may – instead of creating a unified front against China – end up creating a unified front displacing Washington’s influence form the region. In many ways this is already underway, and Thursday’s attack in Jakarta may only stand to accelerate this process.

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

Satirical magazine sparks fresh controversy after cartoon appears to link drowned Syrian toddler with Germany sex attacks

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is facing fresh international criticism after a cartoon in its latest edition appeared to link Syrian Kurdish toddler Aylan Kurdi with those who committed sex attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. 

The response of Queen Rania of Jordan:

The magazine’s current publishing director, Laurent Sourisseau, nicknamed Riss, is the author of the cartoon.

On Jan. 7 last year, two brothers — Said and Cherif Kouachi — targeted the offices of Charlie Hebdo, murdering 12 people.

Among the murdered were the magazine’s editor Stephane Charbonnier, AKA ‘Charb’, a number of prominent cartoonists and journalists, a building maintenance worker and two police officers.

Images of the body of Aylan Kurdi – a Syrian child washed ashore on a Turkish beach last September – prompted an international outcry about the refugee crisis in Europe.

Right-wing opposition elements winning National Assembly control for the first time in 16 years initiated war on Bolivarian fairness.

Right-left confrontation along with plunging oil prices got President Nicolas Maduro to declare a 60-day economic state of emergency.

His announced decree came hours ahead of his annual state of the union address, intending a package of proposed reforms.

According to the government’s official gazette, he declared “a state of emergency in the entirety of the national territory, in compliance with the constitution…for a period of 60 days.”

Days earlier, he said new measures would be implemented to increase production, distribution, commercialization and price controls.

Soaring inflation, shortages of basic goods, and black market exploitation of conditions caused enormous financial and economic hardships for millions.

Maduro’s announcement came two days after Venezuela’s oil price fell to $24 a barrel, its lowest level in 12 years. Up to 96% of the government’s budget depends on oil revenues. Plunging prices created disastrous socio-economic conditions.

Economic war rages. Emergency measures are needed to try restoring order and stability, at best requiring many painful months ahead.

Resources from last fiscal year’s budget will be used for health, education, food subsidies and housing. Tax evasion will be targeted.

Venezuela’s Constitution grants the president “authorization to address the cause of the current situation” and institute corrective measures.

Chavista legislator Hector Rodriguez cited a “new stage of the revolution. We invite all the people of Venezuela to join our president.”

Maduro’s annual address will be his first since right-wing legislators won National Assembly control, intending destabilization policies and repeal of popular social programs to undermine his presidency.

They want him ousted within six months – by recall election, requiring hard-to-get 20% of registered voter signatures (validated for accuracy) or other means.

They want opposition figures imprisoned for plotting overthrow of the government freed.

Last month, they published their anti-Bolivarian agenda – intending to reverse 16 years of social justice, including privatization of key state enterprises and services, ending land reform, revoking price controls keeping basic goods affordable, eliminating public media, and other regressive policies.

They want Venezuela returned to its bad old days, benefitting monied interests exclusively. They intend legislation serving their interests.

A measure to privatize vital public housing was introduced, affecting over a million homes built by the Great Venezuelan Housing Mission, residents retaining ownership rights.

Right-wing lawmakers’ so-called “democratization of property” threatens them, rights under the current Law of Property at risk of becoming null and void.

Housing now the property of family residents may be lost to corporate greed. Free healthcare, education, subsidized food for the needy and other vital social benefits may be on the chopping block for elimination.

Venezuelans suffering under hard times erred hugely in electing majority right-wing legislators, threatening years of social progress. Bolivarianism faces its stiffest challenge ahead.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Following the Venezuelan opposition’s recent electoral victory in the Dec. 6 parliamentary elections, the opposition seems to be more determined than ever to steer towards an outright confrontation with the president. The goal is to destabilize the government as much as possible, with the aim of achieving his ouster before the end of the year.

The new National Assembly president said that his aim is to have a plan in place for president Maduro’s ouster within the first six months of 2016. Ramos Allup furthered this confrontation Jan. 6, when he swore in three opposition members as representatives, whose election the Supreme Court had previously put on hold due to electoral irregularities. On Monday, January 11, the Supreme Court thus declared that the National Assembly president had acted in defiance of the Court and that from now on all laws that the National Assembly passes are null and void, since the assembly had incorporated members into its body that should not be there.

Grassroots activists prepare for what Greg Wilpert terms a “double-confrontation.”
This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
“http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Venezuelas-Upcoming-Double-Confrontation-20160113-0002.html”. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

The political confrontation between the legislature and the executive is thus programmed. The next conflict will be about the amnesty law, by which the opposition intends to free all so-called political prisoners, that is, all opposition figures who have been involved in violent protest of one kind or another, many of whom have been held responsible for deaths of innocent bystanders. Ramos Allup already warned Maduro that if he and the Supreme Court do not implement the amnesty law, he will begin removing ministers from Maduro’s cabinet: “Whether or not he accepts [the amnesty law] will not matter, to which we will say, ‘We do not accept his naming of ministers.’”

The options for the new opposition-dominated National Assembly to get rid of Maduro are several. As mentioned above, it can remove not only the ministers and the vice-president (though this could lead to new National Assembly elections if the vice president is removed three times in a row), remove the heads of other branches of government, such as the Supreme Court, the attorney general, or the National Electoral Council (with prior approval from either the Supreme Court or the attorney general), amend or reform the constitution (which then has to be submitted to a referendum), or call for a constitutional assembly (followed by a referendum).

Also, there is a lot of speculation that the opposition might try to organize a recall referendum against Maduro, but doing so would require the collection of 20 percent of registered voters’ signatures, which amounts over 3.8 million signatures. This latter course is a difficult undertaking. In comparison, when the opposition organized the recall referendum against president Chávez in 2004, it had to collect only 2.5 million signatures because the electorate was substantially smaller.

Aside from the project to remove Maduro and to give amnesty to its law-breaking supporters, the oppositional National Assembly also plans to introduce a number of laws that could undermine the Maduro presidency. A populist measure that the opposition has wanted to pass for a long time is to give ownership titles to the beneficiaries of the housing mission. Over the past five years the government has constructed one million public homes, which it has essentially leased to families in perpetuity, but without giving them a title that can be bought and sold. The reasoning behind this is to avoid the development of a speculative housing market of homes built with public funds. The opposition is betting that most public housing beneficiaries would prefer a saleable ownership title, so that they can sell the home and thereby possibly make a profit from it.

Another law that would probably get the president into trouble is a rumored project to dollarize the economy. It is obvious to everyone in Venezuela that the current economic situation of high inflation, frequent shortages of basic goods, long lines at supermarkets, and a massive black market for price-controlled products, is not sustainable. One “solution” to these problems that some opposition leaders have favored it to simply get rid of the local currency, the bolivar, and base the entire economy on dollars, just as Ecuador did in 2001. Aside from undermining the country’s economic sovereignty, such a move would also almost definitely mean major painful displacements for economy, leading to increased inequality and unemployment. No doubt the opposition would then try to blame Maduro for this, but it is possible of course that they themselves would end up carrying a large part of the blame, which is why the opposition will enter into this project neither unambiguously nor unanimously.

Other major projects on the opposition docket include the repeal of a wide variety of progressive laws that were passed during the Chavez and Maduro presidencies, beginning with the land reform, re-privatization of key industries, and the dismantling of price controls, among other things.

Finally, the opposition has also announced that it will convoke special investigation commissions. Among these are commissions to investigate corruption within the executive and another to investigate the credentials of newly appointed Supreme Court judges. The investigation of the judges could lead to the removal of several of these because the Supreme Court law allows for the removal of judges who do not meet the fairly tough requirements for appointment.

On the Chavista side of the confrontation the options for maneuvering are even tougher. Here the foremost issue for the government is how to deal with the on-going economic crisis, which is bound to get worse especially since the price of oil is tumbling. While the price of an average Venezuelan barrel of oil reached a high of US$55 per barrel in early 2015, the most recent figures point to half that amount, at US$27 per barrel. Unless this price recovers, this could be devastating for Venezuela, especially since 95 percent of the country’s export earnings and 50 percent of its fiscal budget come from the sale of oil.

The 50 percent collapse in the price of oil over the past eight months, however, means a far larger collapse in revenues because a large proportion of Venezuela’s oil is extra-heavy oil that is expensive to extract, reaching a high of around US$20-$25 per barrel, leaving relatively little to no profit at such low prices. In other words, a 50 percent  drop in the price of oil represents a far larger than 50 percent drop in revenues for the state.

Maduro recently named a new cabinet, reshuffling many positions, but in the key position of vice president for the economic area, Luis Salas, Maduro appointed someone considered to be a proponent of the same policies as before, who says that price controls and the currency control must be maintained and that the government’s main weakness has been in the area of enforcement of existing policies. In other words, even though the country is now waiting for the announcement of a promised “economic emergency plan,” it seems doubtful that this plan will signal a significant departure from the economic policies so far.

The drop in revenues, combined with an inflationary spiral that the economic war of smuggling, hoarding, and speculation and that the black market for dollars have inflicted on Venezuela, signal a very difficult near-term future for Venezuela’s economy and everyone in it. Some economists warn of possible hyperinflation and of an inability to pay its foreign bills (balance of payments crisis).

In short, Venezuela is heading towards two confrontations simultaneously, where each threatens to exacerbate the other: one economic and the other political. What the prospects are for overcoming these confrontations is impossible to predict at this moment. Within the chavista social movements and the governing party, the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), more and more voices are calling on the government to organize a massive consultation process with the grassroots, which is something that Maduro has endorsed, but it remains an open question whether these will happen in time and if it does, whether it will be able to provide solutions that will allow the Bolivarian Revolution to move forwards, despite the reinvigorated opposition in parliament.

In a 2013 review of Israel’s child rights record, the UN Committee on the Rights of Children (CRC) said it has deep concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police

Following a November 2015 report by the Independent, in which it quoted NGO rights organization the Palestinian Prisoners Club (PPC) that at least 600 Palestinian children have been arrested in Jerusalem alone in the first half of 2015 and that roughly 40% were sexually abused, a new January 2016 report was also issued by the Independent, this time saying that the Israeli government is torturing children and keeping them in outdoor cages during winter time.

The Independent cited a report published by The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) saying that “children accused of minor crimes were subject to public caging, threats and acts of sexual violence and military trials without representation.”

Upon a visit by Israel’s Public Defender’s Office (PDO) lawyers, shocking details of happenings in the detention facility was uncovered.

“During our visit, held during a fierce storm that hit the state, attorneys met detainees who described to them a shocking picture: in the middle of the night dozens of detainees were transferred to the external iron cages built outside the IPS transition facility in Ramla,” the PDO described the scene on its website.

It turns out that this procedure, under which prisoners waited outside in cages, lasted for several months, and was verified by other officials.

The report said the incident in Ramla was just one example of a broad range of abuses being suffered.

As for the charges upon which the children are detained, the PCATI quoted figures from the campaign group, noting that “The majority of Palestinian child detainees are charged with throwing stones.”

74 per cent of these children experience physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation, the reported added, underscoring that Israel was the only government to systematically prosecute children in its military courts, and added that “no Israeli children come into contact with the military court system”.

In the first three weeks of November 2014 alone, Israel kidnapped at least 380 Palestinians from across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In a 2013 review of child rights record, the UN Committee on the Rights of Children (CRC) said it has deep concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police, and about the State party’s failure to end these practices in spite of repeated concerns expressed by treaty bodies.

It further added that there is “continuous use of physical and verbal violence, humiliation, painful restraints, hooding of the head and face in a sack, death threats, physical violence, sexual assault against them or members of their family, and restricted access to toilet, food and water.”

The CRC report also explained that the Israeli army used Palestinian children as human shields multiple times.

More than 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly held in 17 Israeli prisons and detention camps. Several human rights organizations have repeatedly called on the United Nation to stop Israel from arresting and torturing Palestinian children, to stop prosecution them under military law and release all children detained unlawfully.

The continued collapse of The Baltic Dry Index remains ignored by most – besides we still have Netflix, right? But, as Dollar Vigilante’s Jeff Berwick details, it appears the worldwide ‘real’ economy has ground to a halt!!

Last week, I received news from a contact who is friends with one of the biggest billionaire shipping families in the world.  He told me they had no ships at sea right now, because operating them meant running at a loss.

This weekend, reports are circulating saying much the same thing: The North Atlantic has little or no cargo ships traveling in its waters. Instead, they are anchored. Unmoving. Empty.

You can see one such report here.  According to it,

Commerce between Europe and North America has literally come to a halt. For the first time in known history, not one cargo ship is in-transit in the North Atlantic between Europe and North America. All of them (hundreds) are either anchored offshore or in-port. NOTHING is moving.

This has never happened before. It is a horrific economic sign; proof that commerce is literally stopped.

We checked VesselFinder.com and it appears to show no ships in transit anywhere in the world.  We aren’t experts on shipping, however, so if you have a better site or source to track this apparent phenomenon, please let us know.

We also checked MarineTraffic.com, and it seemed to show the same thing.  Not a ship in transit…

If true, this would be catastrophic for world trade. Even if it’s not true, shipping is still nearly dead in the water according to other indices.  The Baltic Dry Index, an assessment of the price of moving major raw materials by sea, was already at record all-time lows a month ago… and in the last month it has dropped even more, especially in the last week. Today BDIY hit 415…

Factories aren’t buying and retailers aren’t stocking.  The ratio of inventory to sales in the US is an indicator of this. The last time that ratio was this high was during the “great recession” in 2008.

Hey, Ms. Yellen, what recovery? The economy is taking on water at a rapid rate.

The storm has been building for some time, actually. Not so long ago, there was a spate of reports that the world’s automobile manufacturers were in trouble because cars were not selling and shipments were backing up around the world.

ZeroHedge reported on it this way:

In the past several years, one of the topics covered in detail on these pages has been the surge in such gimmicks designed to disguise lack of demand and end customer sales, used extensively by US automotive manufacturers, better known as “channel stuffing”, of which General Motors is particularly guilty and whose inventory at dealer lots just hit a new record high.

Here is a photo of unsold cars in the United Kingdom from that article.

The world’s economy seems in serious trouble. You can’t print your way to prosperity. All you are doing is hollowing out your economy. Draining it. And sooner or later it’s empty and you have to start over after a good deal of crisis and chaos.

It’s no coincidence that China is struggling desperately to contain a stock implosion.  Reportedly, banks have been told they are forbidden to buy US dollars and numerous Chinese billionaires have gone missing.  And the markets have just opened on Monday and are again deeply in the red.

Here at The Dollar Vigilante we’ve specialized in explaining the reality of the global faux-economy and why it’s important that you not believe mainstream media lies.

In the meantime, keep your eye on this shipping story!  If it is true and worldwide shipping is disastrously foundering, it’ll only be a matter of days before grocery store shelves will reflect that with increasingly bare shelves.

Are people upset now? Just wait. Interruptions in goods and services, most critically food, almost happened in 2008 during the Great Financial Crisis.  For three days worldwide shipping was stranded due to shipping companies not knowing whether or not the receiver’s bank credit was good.

That crisis was staved off due to a massive amount of money printing.  It was a temporary stay of execution, like bailing out the Titanic with coffee cups, however, and one that may reach much larger proportions in 2016.

Sailors watch the weather to see if it is safe to set sail.  Investors should be watching the economic climate with the same intensity.

We are already sailing through very stormy waters.

Russia uses state-of-the-art precision-guided weapons in its Syrian aerial campaign, accurately striking targets aimed at.

Painstaking efforts are taken to hit ISIS and other terrorist elements only, scrupulously avoiding civilian casualties. Photographic evidence proves it. Claims otherwise are Big Lies.

Washington (like Israel) considers civilians legitimate targets, deliberately massacring them in all its wars, indifferent to rule of law principles and human suffering, reflecting rogue state viciousness.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius [pictured left] showed his government’s opposition to Russia’s war on ISIS – calling on it to cease its military operations,  accusing it of killing civilians.

After meeting with Syrian defector Riad Hihab, he said:

“(w)e discussed the absolute necessity that Syria and Russia end their military operations against civilians and in particular the ordeal in Madaya and other cities besieged by the regime.”

Fact: Syrian military forces continue fighting to liberate cities, towns and villages held captive by ISIS and other terrorist elements.

Fact: Russia’s effective aerial campaign is crucial to their success.

Fact: France is part of the problem, not the solution, supporting the scourge it claims to oppose.

Fact: Fabius willfully lied, claiming Russian aerial operations kill civilians, without citing a shred of corroborating evidence. 

Another round of so-called peace talks are scheduled to begin on January 25 – with virtually zero chance for success. Washington, France and other rogue partners want war, not peace.

They want Syrians disenfranchised, arrogating to themselves authority to decide who’ll govern the country, wanting its sovereignty destroyed.

Hihab is a traitor, bribed to betray his nation and people – chosen as opposition coordinator in upcoming talks, irresponsibly demanding Assad must go.

French President Francois Hollande is in lockstep with Washington, insisting he “has no role in the Syria of tomorrow.”

According to Fabius, UN-mediated peace talks have “two elements. On the one hand, the immediate end of bombardments and on the other hand that the agenda of these negotiations are sufficiently precise and there is no doubt in particular over who will govern” – demands assuring failure.

Putin insists Syrians alone must decide who’ll lead them, free from outside interference. “We do not want (the country) to end (up) like Iraq or Libya,” he said, wanting peace and stability restored.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted Fabius’ willful lie about Russia’s aerial campaign killing civilians – calling his claim totally “unfounded.”

“Russia’s aims in Syria are transparent,” she stressed,  “call(ing) on all countries to unite efforts in the fight against terrorism” 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

On December 28, 2015, the United Nation’s OCHA made its first express Twitter mention of two northern Syrian villages, al-Foua and Kafarya (also transliterated as Kafraya).

The belated December mention is in spite of the fact that the two villages of around 30,000 people have been locked under siege by terrorist factions Jebhat al-Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), Jaysh al-Fattah (the so-called “Army of Conquest”), and Ahrar al-Sham (Liberation of the Levant Movement), among other terrorist factions, since March 2015. The siege has meant that the isolated villages have had limited to no access to food and medical supplies since then. Additionally, terrorists have been daily firing rockets, mortars and hell cannons at the villages, killing and maiming residents, destroying homes and infrastructure.

In October, 2015, the ICRC reported that al-Foua and Kafarya were among several areas to receive humanitarian assistance.

OCHA’s tweets around that time made no specific mention of al-Foua and Kafarya, instead simple tweeting: “UN and partners deliver critical relief supplies to besieged areas of Syria.”

The tweet-linked UN report, however, does mention at least mention the two villages by name, although it does not at all mention the terrorists’ bombings of the villages, nor the immensely dire situation there.

This in spite of the fact that the UN did acknowledge, back in March 2015, that al-Foua and Kafarya had just been besieged. Yacoub el-Hillo, the UN Resident Coordinator for Syria, himself in a March 30, 2015 statement, declared:

I am gravely concerned by the ongoing fighting taking place in Idleb governorate and its possible impact on hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Hillo apparently did not sustain his concern.

In fact, since that March 30 statement of concern, OCHA’s twitter feed did not once mention al-Foua and Kafarya by name, although it heavily and specifically mentioned various terrorist-occupied areas, like Yarmouk, al-Waer, al-Zabadani, and of late, al-Madaya–the new Yarmouk. Frequently, when tweeting about Yarmouk, OCHA made vague reference to “fighting in Idleb” or simply tweeted the latest “Idleb Humanitarian Report.” You’d think that after the UN Resident Coordinator’s “grave concern” OCHA might have taken a stronger interest in al-Foua and Kafarya.

Then again, reporting on the suffering of civilians locked-down and bombed by western-backed terrorists doesn’t serve the NATO-agenda, which the UN dances along to.

Consider that the areas that the UN’s OCHA did tweet about–Yarmouk, al-Waer, Zabadani, Madaya, to name but some–are occupied by terrorists as criminal as Da’esh which the west purports to fight. All these factions are terrorists, none of them moderates.

Somehow, the UN is able to visit Madaya, al-Waer… but cannot get to al-Foua and Kafarya. Defies logic. If the UN representatives are able to enter into terrorist hotbeds, they can exert pressure on the western-backed mercenaries to allow them into civilian areas surrounded by the terrorists. IF they wanted to. Which they don’t.

Consider a January 7, 2016, UN statement in which the UN adds eastern Ghouta, another hotbed of terrorism, to the list of areas to protect. Take note of this excerpt from the last two paragaphs of the statement:

The UN welcomes today’s approval from the Government of Syria to access Madaya, Foah and Kefraya and is preparing to deliver humanitarian assistance in the coming days.

International humanitarian law prohibits the targeting of civilians. It also prohibits the starvation of civilians as a tactic of war.

Regarding the first cleverly-crafted sentence, I refer to the Syrian Ambassador the UN (in NYC), Dr. Bashar al-Ja’afari, who stated on January 11, 2016:

The Syrian government has already requested, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from the office of resident coordinator of the United Nations in Syria, by its note #3746, dated 27th December, 27 December, 2015, to URGENTLY deliver humanitarian assistance, including medical assistance and fuel, to al-‪#‎Foua‬ and ‪#‎Kafraya‬, in the governorate of Idlib, and to ‪#‎Madaya‬, in the governorate of Damascus countryside.

We would like to highlight that the humanitarian assistance sent to Madaya in mid-October was sufficient for two months. And this testimony was corroborated by the representative of the ICRC in Syria a few days ago.

…The Syrian government aproved the requests of the resident coordinator of Unicef, WFP and ICRC to deliver humanitarian and relief assistance, including medical assistance, to Madaya, al-Foua and Kafraya, on 8 January, 2016.

…The Syrian government previously approved the requests of the United Nations and ICRC to deliver humanitarian assistance to ‪#‎Zabadani‬, Madaya, al-Foua and Kafraya on 18 October, 2015. We would like to add here that some of the humanitarian assistance sent to restive areas has been looted by the armed terrorist groups on several occassions. And this is exactly what happened in Madaya and al-Zabadani.

Furthermore, the Turkish authorities hindered the delivery of humanitarian assistance through the borders to other restive areas.

…On October the 18th, we sent enough humanitarian assistance for more than 2 months, and the representative of the ICRC corroborated this 2 days ago on Syrian TV saying that there is no starvation problem in Madaya.

December 27th, we asked the resident coordinator to send immediately convoys of humanitarian assistance again to Madaya, and to Kafraya and al-Foua. The UN did not send. When we asked them why you didn’t, they said ‘we were facing logistical problems. We are not responsible of this.’

…There is a problem, yes. But the problem is this. The terorrists are stealing the humanitarian assistance from the Syrian Red Crescent as well as from the United Nations, and they are keeping this assistance in their warehouse, and then they use it as a leverage of political and financial gain for them to survive.”

The UN intention with their statement of welcoming the Syrian government’s approval to access Madaya, Foua and Kafarya is to imply that the Syrian government was the cause of aid not getting in, when clearly it has been the case of terrorists preventing and/or stealing aid. This has been corroborated by testminonies of Madaya residents to Russia Today reporter Murad Gazdiev, who was on the ground in Madaya talking to residents. Some of his tweets include:

-“More on #madaya: #syria military sent 42 tons of food there on 27 november. All of it was seized by Islamist rebels; the are reselling aid”

-“#madaya civilians say rebels charged 100,000 SP ($250) for kilogram of rice”

-“Many #madaya civilians weeping for joy at finally leaving this place. Say #ISIS in town, fight together with rebels”

-“Fleeing #madaya civilians blame rebels for cruelty, theft..”

Regarding the UN’s January 7 statement which includes “International humanitarian law prohibits the targeting of civilians. It also prohibits the starvation of civilians as a tactic of war,” it is thus baffling that since the March 2015 full-siege on al-Foua and Kafarya, the UN’s OCHA neglected to tweet about the near-daily terrorist bombings of those villages’ citizens, nor the starvation-by-siege of Kafarya and al-Foua residents.

Loaded Narrative, and the Tweets That Weren’t:

The narrative the UN and like agencies, and corporate media, put forth regarding Madaya, and the Yarmouks before Madaya, is one which obfuscates on the suffering caused by western-backed terrorism, and inflates stories of civilians’ suffering in terrorist-hotbeds. It is a false narrative that pulls heartstrings of well-intentioned but less-informed readers who believe in the (long-aog-shot) credibility of the UN. Although there is indeed suffering in places like Madaya, the civilians themself have said what the cause is: the terrorist factions within stealing aid and goods and selling at extortionist rates.

From December 28, 2015, when OCHA first tweet-uttered Foua and Kafarya’s names until today, January 14, statistics regarding the number of times OCHA tweeted the names of Madaya, Foua/Kafarya and others are as follows:

-Madaya: 17 times

-Foua/Kafarya: 6 times

-Nubl, Zahraa: 0 times

Noteworthy are the points already mentioned:

-Foua/Kafarya are besieged by al-Qaeda and other western-backed terrorists.  Madaya is infested with them

-Foua/Kafarya residents are lacking food and medicines due to the siege of western-backed terrorists; any shortage of goods in Madaya is due to the theft and mafia-esque extortions of terrorists infesting Madaya.

Of course, there are areas other than al-Foua, Kafarya, Nubl, Zahraa which are suffering immensely due to terrorist attacks and siege, and which get little or no UN tweetage…But given the current media campaign regarding Madaya, I am looking here just at the discrepencies in the UN’s focus on the two areas.

The UN and so-called “humanitarian” groups/agencies will not tweet or speak the truth of the massive suffering in al-Foua and Kafayra, much less of the long-suffering of the people of Nubl and Zahraa and everywhere else terrorized by NATO’s mercenaries. Therefore we must, and we must continue to reveal the deceptions and not-even-slick propaganda at play, as well as to recognize that the timing is not coincidental.

Ambassador al-Ja’afari pointed this out, on January 11, 2016, to the annoyance of the corporate journalists on the vilification bandwagon:

…whenever there is a step forward towards a political solution in Syria, certain incidents are fabricated to de-fame the Syrian government and to negatively impact the political process….

The examples of such incidents are many and happened before certain United Nations Security Council meetings, as well as before Geneva 2 meeting, and Moscow 1 and Moscow 2 consultative meetings.

Now, and when the Syrians are going to meet in Geneva, end of this month, certain regional and international parties supporting terrorism in Syria are not satisfied that the Syrian government is engaging positively in the political process. And thus are trying to demonize it…torpedoing the meeting in Geneva.

In his recent article on Madaya and the media manipulation of facts, Finian Cunningham noted:

The Western news media are the propaganda arm of the state-sponsored terrorist assault on Syria….The plain truth is that people in Syria are being held siege by Western-orchestrated terrorists. …A siege of another kind is also being forced on the minds of the Western public by the Western media; it involves starving them of the truth.

Cunningham is absolutely correct. And the UN is just as complicit in the lies, the manipulation of facts, the whitewashing of terrorists in Syria, and in the obfuscation of true suffering at the hands of said-terrorists.

RELATED:

-Propaganda alert: Madaya media fabrications; recycled photos, Jan 10, 2016, In Gaza

-Untold Suffering in Foua and Kafarya: Two Northwestern Syrian Villages Under Siege and Assault by NATO’s Terrorists, Aug 18, 2015, Counter Punch

-Part 2, Aug 20, 2015, Counter Punch

-Fact Check on Madaya Reporting, Jan 9, 2016, IraqEnglish Youtube Channel

-Vanessa Beeley interview on Madaya with UK Column

-Syrians Besieged by Terrorists Risk Death, Jan 12, 2016, Stephen Lendman

–A Tale of Two Villages: a Facebook page dedicated to sharing insights from the villagers of Kafarya and al-Foua

-YARMOUK: understanding the situation: the same sort of media lies and HR campaign that is being employed now wrt Madaya was used priorly wrt Yarmouk, posted on In Gaza

-“Those who are besieged are all the 23 million Syrians”: Syria’s Ambassador to the UN, Dr. Bashar al-Ja’afari on Madaya, Kafarya, Foua, Zabadani, Syria, posted on In Gaza-West Media Starves Truth in Syria, Jan 11, 2016, Finian Cunningham, Sputnik News

-Scoundrels & gangsters at UN: Silencing the Syrian narrative, Feb 4, 2015, Eva Bartlett, Russia Today

Moscow continues the military reinforcement of the Russian Kuril Islands as well as the de facto annexation of the occupied Japanese islands Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai Archipelago under the guise of cultural and economic development of what Russia describes as its “South Kuril Islands”.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday that Moscow plans to complete the development of military facilities in the arctic islands as well as “infrastructure developments” in the Kuril Islands in 2016. Shoigu said:

“Basically, it is necessary to complete everything on the islands. Then we proceed to the second stage of the construction and creation of our bases in the Arctic. … This year we should complete the formation of the whole infrastructure on the Kuril Islands.”

Russia is, along with the United States, Canada, Norway and others scrambling for resources in the Arctic as a warmer climate has made both shipping routes and resources in the region accessible. Russia has, as have others, legal territorial claims in the increasingly attractive, although harsh Arctic region.

Moscow’s “cultural development” of what Russian diplomats like to designate as Russia’s “South Kuril Islands“ is, however, legally questionable and disputed by Japan. The so-called South Kuril Islands consist of three islands located in the North of Japan, or the southwestern extremity of the Kuril Islands, as Moscow designated the disputed territory. They include the islands of Kunashir, Iturup, Shikotan as well as the Habomai archipelago.

In August 2015 the otherwise skillful Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov displayed what was widely perceived as an unusual display of arrogance and victor’s justice when he commented on the Japanese government’s objections about Russia’s “social and cultural development” of the occupied territories, saying:

“Unacceptable comments from Japan on the trips by Russian government officials to the Southern Kuril Islands have come again recently. … We would like to recall we do not plan taking account of the Japanese government members’ opinions as we arrange the itineraries for members of the government. These trips, including the one that government officials make as part of a federal program for social and economic development of the Kuril Islands (the Sakhalin region), will continue. … We are compelled to state that the Japanese side is again demonstrating overtly its negligence of the commonly recognized results of World War II as it multiplies publicly its ungrounded claims to the Southern Kuril Islands. … Such actions look particularly deplorable on the background of the forthcoming 70th anniversary since the end of World War II.”

It is noteworthy that Russia, 70 years after the end of WW II still has not signed a peace treaty with Japan and that Moscow continues dragging its feet in that regard. Several independent analysts noted that Moscow uses the prospect of a peace treaty – or lack thereof – to blackmail Japan rather than settling the dispute legally and in accordance with intentional and human rights law.

Japan does not recognize the Russian occupation or annexation of what Tokyo describes as Japan’s northern territories. Tokyo considers Moscow’s so-called program for social and economic development as an attempt to change the demographics and to lay the foundations for a permanent, arguably illegal annexation.

Dr. Christof Lehmann is the founder and editor of nsnbc. He is a psychologist and independent political consultant on conflict and conflict resolution and a wide range of other political issues. His work with traumatized victims of conflict has led him to also pursue the work as political consultant. He is a lifelong activist for peace and justice, human rights, Palestinians rights to self-determination in Palestine, and he is working on the establishment of international institutions for the prosecution of all war crimes, also those committed by privileged nations. On 28 August 2011 he started his blog nsnbc, appalled by misrepresentations of the aggression against Libya and Syria. In March 2013 he turned nsnbc into a daily, independent, international on-line newspaper. He can be contacted at nsnbc international at [email protected]

Moscow continues the military reinforcement of the Russian Kuril Islands as well as the de facto annexation of the occupied Japanese islands Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai Archipelago under the guise of cultural and economic development of what Russia describes as its “South Kuril Islands”.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday that Moscow plans to complete the development of military facilities in the arctic islands as well as “infrastructure developments” in the Kuril Islands in 2016. Shoigu said:

“Basically, it is necessary to complete everything on the islands. Then we proceed to the second stage of the construction and creation of our bases in the Arctic. … This year we should complete the formation of the whole infrastructure on the Kuril Islands.”

Russia is, along with the United States, Canada, Norway and others scrambling for resources in the Arctic as a warmer climate has made both shipping routes and resources in the region accessible. Russia has, as have others, legal territorial claims in the increasingly attractive, although harsh Arctic region.

Moscow’s “cultural development” of what Russian diplomats like to designate as Russia’s “South Kuril Islands“ is, however, legally questionable and disputed by Japan. The so-called South Kuril Islands consist of three islands located in the North of Japan, or the southwestern extremity of the Kuril Islands, as Moscow designated the disputed territory. They include the islands of Kunashir, Iturup, Shikotan as well as the Habomai archipelago.

In August 2015 the otherwise skillful Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov displayed what was widely perceived as an unusual display of arrogance and victor’s justice when he commented on the Japanese government’s objections about Russia’s “social and cultural development” of the occupied territories, saying:

“Unacceptable comments from Japan on the trips by Russian government officials to the Southern Kuril Islands have come again recently. … We would like to recall we do not plan taking account of the Japanese government members’ opinions as we arrange the itineraries for members of the government. These trips, including the one that government officials make as part of a federal program for social and economic development of the Kuril Islands (the Sakhalin region), will continue. … We are compelled to state that the Japanese side is again demonstrating overtly its negligence of the commonly recognized results of World War II as it multiplies publicly its ungrounded claims to the Southern Kuril Islands. … Such actions look particularly deplorable on the background of the forthcoming 70th anniversary since the end of World War II.”

It is noteworthy that Russia, 70 years after the end of WW II still has not signed a peace treaty with Japan and that Moscow continues dragging its feet in that regard. Several independent analysts noted that Moscow uses the prospect of a peace treaty – or lack thereof – to blackmail Japan rather than settling the dispute legally and in accordance with intentional and human rights law.

Japan does not recognize the Russian occupation or annexation of what Tokyo describes as Japan’s northern territories. Tokyo considers Moscow’s so-called program for social and economic development as an attempt to change the demographics and to lay the foundations for a permanent, arguably illegal annexation.

Dr. Christof Lehmann is the founder and editor of nsnbc. He is a psychologist and independent political consultant on conflict and conflict resolution and a wide range of other political issues. His work with traumatized victims of conflict has led him to also pursue the work as political consultant. He is a lifelong activist for peace and justice, human rights, Palestinians rights to self-determination in Palestine, and he is working on the establishment of international institutions for the prosecution of all war crimes, also those committed by privileged nations. On 28 August 2011 he started his blog nsnbc, appalled by misrepresentations of the aggression against Libya and Syria. In March 2013 he turned nsnbc into a daily, independent, international on-line newspaper. He can be contacted at nsnbc international at [email protected]

Your bullshit-ometer should be making an awful racket in response to the shifting explanations given for the twenty-four-hour Iranian hostage scare involving two US Navy boats intercepted in the Gulf.

First they told us “at least one of the boats” had experienced a “mechanical failure.” Then they said the boats had run out of fuel, although it wasn’t clear if they meant both boats. Then they said “there was no mechanical problem.” Then they claimed that the two crews had somehow not communicated with the military command, although “they could not explain how the military had lost contact with not one but both of the boats.” As the New York Times reported:

“Even as Mr. Kerry was describing the release on Wednesday morning, American military officials were offering new explanations about how the two 49-foot patrol boats, formally called riverine command boats, had ended up in Iranian territorial waters while cruising from Kuwait to Bahrain.”

And they still haven’t explained it – or any of the other distinctly odd circumstances surrounding this incident.

The best they could do was have an anonymous Navy officer aver “When you’re navigating in those waters, the space around it gets pretty tight.” However, as the Times put it:

“But that is hardly a new problem, and the boats’ crews would almost surely have mapped out their course in advance, paying close attention to the Iranian boundary waters. And each boat has radio equipment on board, so it was unclear how the crews suddenly lost communication with their base unless they were surrounded by Iranian vessels before they could alert their superiors.”

We are told they were on a “training mission” – but what kind of mission? The Washington Post adds a helpful detail by telling us that “The vessels, known as riverine command boats, are agile and often carry Special Operations forces into smaller bodies of water.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

Amid all the faux outrage coming from the neocons and their enablers in the media over the alleged “humiliation” of the US – Iran “paraded” the sailors in their media! They made one of the sailors apologize! The Geneva Conventions were violated! – hardly anyone in this country is asking the hard questions, first and foremost: what in heck were those two boats doing in Iranian waters?

And if you believe they somehow “drifted” within a few miles of Farsi Island, where a highly sensitive Iranian military base is located, then you probably think there’s a lot of money just waiting for you in a Nigerian bank account.

Anyone who thinks the adversarial relationship between Washington and Tehran has turned into “détente” due to the nuclear deal is living in Never-Never Land. Our close ally, Saudi Arabia, has all but declared war on the Iranians and that means we are being dragged into the rapidly escalating conflict. In this context, two US military boats coming a mile and a half away from a major Iranian base in the Gulf isn’t an accident. This ‘training mission” was a military incursion, and although we have no way of knowing what mission the US hoped to accomplish, suffice to say that it wasn’t meant to be a kumbaya moment.

Rachel Maddow is also raising questions about this: after a load of nonsense about how showing the sailors on Iranian media violated the Geneva Conventions – they didn’t: we aren’t at war with Iran yet – she pointed out the suspicious nature of the Pentagon’s shifting story during her January 13 broadcast.

To add another layer to the mystery, the Iranian government released the sailors after holding them for less than twenty-four hours – which isn’t the sort of behavior one might expect if those sailors were on a spy mission. And the Iranians issued an Emily Litella-ish statement, as reported by the Los Angeles Times:

“’After explanations the U.S. gave and the assurances they made, we determined that [the] violation of Iranian territorial waters was not deliberate, so we guided the boats out of Iranian waters,’ said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.”

So if those two boats were “snooping,” as the Fars News Agency originally claimed, why  would Tehran come out with this all-is-forgiven statement?

None of it makes any sense, at least not until one realizes that the Iranian government is hardly a monolith: power is divided up between various agencies and factions, with only the loosest sort of unity being enforced by the Supreme Leader. Farsi Island is controlled by the hard-line Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the hard-line faction of the ruling elite, which wields enormous political and economic power within the multi-polar Iranian state apparatus. It was the hard-liners who released the video and photos of the American sailors with their hands in the air, and their spokesmen demanded an apology from the US. It was the diplomats, however – the moderates, who negotiated the Iran deal – whose contacts with the US facilitated the sailors’ quick release.

But it isn’t just the Iranians who are riven with factions and conflicting lines of authority: the American empire is overseen by a vast national security bureaucracy involving both military and civilians, and it isn’t monolithic, either. Although, in theory, civilians are in the drivers’ seat and the military just follows orders, in reality the Pentagon is an independent power that can obstruct or even effectively veto whatever diplomatic or military plans the White House has in mind. And while opposition to the nuke deal was centered in Congress, the Pentagon insisted at the last moment that sanctions on conventional arms and particularly those related to ballistic missiles remain in place. Iran’s recent testing of medium range ballistic missiles must have the generals in an uproar, and it could well be that this “training mission” in the Gulf was related – as either a spying mission, or an outright provocation designed to imperil relations. Or perhaps both.

We’ll probably never know for sure: but what we certainly can know is that the official explanation for this latest incident stinks to high heaven. There’s no denying we were caught by the Iranians with our pants down. The only question is – how were we trying to f—k them over?

I warned after the signing of the Iran deal that we are in for a long series of provocations in the Gulf, and this is only the beginning. In order to keep all this in perspective, just remember that the long dance between Washington and Tehran involves at least four partners, including their hard-liners and ours.

You can check out Justin Raimondo‘s Twitter feed by going here.

Raimondo has written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of his 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), his biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.

The central banks of the United States, England, and German – as well as 2 Nobel-prize winning economists – have all shown that banks create money out of thin air … even if they have no deposits on hand.

The failure of most governments and most mainstream economists to understand this fact – they instead believe the myth that people make deposits at their bank, and these deposits are then lent out to new borrowers – is the main cause of our rampant inequality and economic problems.

But how do banks actually make loans before they have sufficient deposits on hand?

Economics professor Richard Werner – the creator of quantitative easing – noted in September that the field of economics has been lost in the woods for an entire century because it has failed to understand how banks actually create money.

Professor wrote an academic paper in 2014 concluding:

What banks do is to simply reclassify their accounts payable items arising from the act of lending as ‘customer deposits’, and the general public, when receiving payment in the form of a transfer of bank deposits, believes that a form of money had been paid into the bank.

***

The ‘lending’ bank records a new ‘customer deposit’ and informs the ‘borrower’ that funds have been‘deposited’ in the borrower’s account.  Since neither the borrower nor the bank actually made a deposit at the bank—nor, in connection with this transaction, anyone else for that matter, it remains necessary to analyse the legal aspects of bank operations. In particular, the legality of the act of reclassifying bank liabilities (accounts payable) as fictitious customer deposits requires further, separate analysis. This is all the more so, since no law, statute or bank regulation actually grants banks the right (usually considered a sovereign prerogative) to create and allocate the money supply. Further, the regulation that allows only banks to conduct such creative accounting (namely the exemption from the Client Money Rules) is potentially being abused through the act of‘renaming’ the bank’s own accounts payable liabilities as ‘customer deposits’ when no deposits had been made, since this is also not explicitly referred to in the banks’ exemption from the Client Money Rules, or in any other statutes, laws or regulations, for that matter.

Professor Werner explained:

Although the implementation of banking services relies heavily on accounting, hardly any scholarly literature exists that explains in detail the accounting mechanics of bank credit creation and precisely how bank accounting differs from corporate accounting of non-bank firms.

***

It can be deduced that this ability of banks is likely derived from the operational, that is, accounting conventions and regulations of banking. These either differ from those of non-banks, so that only banks are able to create money, or else non-banks have missed out on the significant opportunities money creation may afford.

In order to identify the difference in accounting treatment of the lending operation by banks, we adopt a comparative accounting analysis perspective.

***

When the non-financial corporation, such as a manufacturer, grants a loan to another firm, the loan contract is shown as an increase in assets: the firm now has an additional claim on debtors — this is the borrower’s promise to repay the loan. The lender purchases the loan contract, treated as a promissory note. Meanwhile, when the firm disburses the loan (and hence discharges its obligation to make the money available to the borrower), it is drawing down its cash reserves or monetary deposits with its banks. As a result, one gross asset increase is matched by an equally-sized gross asset decrease, leaving net total assets unchanged.

In the second case, of a non-bank financial institution, such as a stock broker engaging in margin lending, the loan contract is the claim on the borrower that is added as an asset to the balance sheet, while the disbursement of the loan – for instance by transferring it to the client or the stock exchange to settle the margin trade conducted by its client – reduces the firm’s monetary balances (likely held with a bank). As a result, total assets and total liabilities remain unchanged.

While the balance sheet total is not affected by the granting and disbursement of the loan in the case of firms other than banks, the picture looks very different in the case of a bank. While the loan contract shows up as an increase in assets with all types of corporations, in the case of a bank the disbursement of the loan …  appears as a positive entry on the liability side of the balance sheet, as opposed to being a negative entry on the asset side, as in the case of non-banks. As a result, it does not counter-balance the increased gross assets. Instead, both assets and liabilities expand. The bank’s balance sheet lengthens on both sides by the amount of the loan (see the empirical evidence in Werner, 2014a and Werner, 2014c). Thus it is clear that banks conduct their accounting operations differently from others, even differently from their near-relatives, the non-bank financial institutions.

***

Surprisingly, we find that unlike the other firms whose balance sheets shrank back in Step 2, the bank’s accounts seem in standstill, unchanged from Step 1. The total balance sheet remains lengthened. No balance is drawn down to make a payment to the borrower.

So how is it that the borrower feels that the bank’s obligation to make funds available are being met? (If indeed they are being met). This is done through the one, small but crucial accounting change that does take place on the liability side of the bank balance sheet in Step 2: the bank reduces its ‘account payable’ item by the loan amount, acting as if the money had been disbursed to the customer, and at the same time it presents the customer with a statement that identifies this same obligation of the bank to the borrower, but now simply re-classified as a ‘customer deposit’ of the borrower with the bank.

The bank, having ‘disbursed’ the loan, remains in a position where it still owes the money. In other words, the bank does not actually make any money available to the borrower: No transfer of funds from anywhere to the customer or indeed the customer’s account takes place. There is no equal reduction in the balance of another account to defray the borrower. Instead, the bank simply re-classified its liabilities, changing the ‘accounts payable’ obligation arising from the bank loan contract to another liability category called ‘customer deposits’.

While the borrower is given the impression that the bank had transferred money from its capital, reserves or other accounts to the borrower’s account (as indeed major theories of banking, the financial intermediation and fractional reserve theories, erroneously claim), in reality this is not the case. Neither the bank nor the customer deposited any money, nor were any funds from anywhere outside the bank utilised to make the deposit in the borrower’s account. Indeed, there was no depositing of any funds.

In Step 1 the bank had a liability — an obligation to pay someone. How can it discharge this liability? A law dictionary states:

“The most common way to be discharged from liability … is through payment.” ¹

And yet, no payment takes place in Step 2 (and hence in the entire ‘lending’ process), which is why the bank’s balance sheet in total remains stuck in Step 1, when all lenders still owe the money to their respective borrowers. The bank’s liability is simply re-named a ‘bank deposit’. However, bank deposits are defined by central banks as being part of the official money supply (as measured in such official ‘money supply’ aggregates as M1, M2, M3 or M4). This confirms that banks create money when they grant a loan: they invent a fictitious customer deposit, which the central bank and all users of our monetary system, consider to be ‘money’, indistinguishable from ‘real’ deposits not newly invented by the banks. Thus banks do not just grant credit, they create credit, and simultaneously they create money.

***

Instead of discharging their liability to pay out loans, the banks merely reclassify their liabilities originating from loan contracts from what should be an ‘accounts payable’ item to ‘customer deposit’ (in practise of course skipping Step 1 entirely and thus neglecting to record the accounts payable item). The bank issues a statement of its liability to the borrower, which records its liability as a ‘deposit’ of the borrower at the bank.

***

What enables banks to create credit and hence money is their exemption from the Client Money Rules. Thanks to this exemption they are allowed to keep customer deposits on their own balance sheet. This means that depositors who deposit their money with a bank are no longer the legal owners of this money. Instead, they are just one of the general creditors of the bank whom it owes money to. It also means that the bank is able to access the records of the customer deposits held with it and invent a new ‘customer deposit’ that had not actually been paid in, but instead is a re-classified accounts payable liability of the bank arising from a loan contract.

***

What makes banks unique and explains the combination of lending and deposit-taking under one roof is the more fundamental fact that they do not have to segregate client accounts, and thus are able to engage in an exercise of ‘re-labelling’ and mixing different liabilities, specifically by re-assigning their accounts payable liabilities incurred when entering into loan agreements, to another category of liability called ‘customer deposits’.

What distinguishes banks from non-banks is their ability to create credit and money through lending, which is accomplished by booking what actually are accounts payable liabilities as imaginary customer deposits, and this is in turn made possible by a particular regulation that renders banks unique: their exemption from the Client Money Rules. [Werner gives a concrete example on British law for banking and non-banking institutions.]

***

It would appear that those who argue that bank regulations should be liberalised in order to create a level playing field with non-banks have neglected to demand that the banks’ unique exemption from the Client Money Rules – a regulation benefitting only banks – needs to be deregulated as well, so that banks must also conform to the Client Money Rules.

***

Alternatively, one could argue that it would level the playing field, if the banks’ current exemption from the Client Money Rules was also granted to all other firms — in other words, if the Client Money Rules themselves were abolished. This would allow all firms to also engage in the kind of creative accounting that has become an established practise among banks. It would certainly ensure that competition between banks and non-bank financial institutions would become more meaningful, since the exemption from the Client Money Rules, together with the banks’ deployment of this exemption for the purpose of re-labelling their liabilities, has given significant competitive advantages to banks over all other types of firms: banks have been able to create and allocate money – virtually the entire money supply in the economy – while no other firm is able to do the same.

***

Basel rules were doomed to failure, since they consider banks as financial intermediaries, when in actual fact they are the creators of the money supply. Since banks invent money as fictitious deposits, it can be readily shown that capital adequacy based bank regulation does not have to restrict bank activity: banks can create money and hence can arrange for money to be made available to purchase newly issued shares that increase their bank capital. In other words, banks could simply invent the money that is then used to increase their capital. This is what Barclays Bank did in 2008, in order to avoid the use of tax money to shore up the bank’s capital: Barclays ‘raised’ £5.8 bn in new equity from Gulf sovereign wealth investors — by, it has transpired, lending them the money! As is explained in Werner (2014a), Barclays implemented a standard loan operation, thus inventing the £5.8 bn deposit ‘lent’ to the investor. This deposit was then used to ‘purchase’ the newly issued Barclays shares. Thus in this case the bank liability originating from the bank loan to the Gulf investor transmuted from (1) an accounts payable liability to (2) a customer deposit liability, to finally end up as (3) equity — another category on the liability side of the bank’s balance sheet. Effectively, Barclays invented its own capital. This certainly was cheaper for the UK tax payer than using tax money. As publicly listed companies in general are not allowed to lend money to firms for the purpose of buying their stocks, it was not in conformity with the Companies Act 2006 (Section 678, Prohibition of assistance for acquisition of shares in public company). But regulators were willing to overlook this. As Werner (2014b) argues, using central bank or bank credit creation is in principle the most cost-effective way to clean up the banking system and ensure that bank credit growth recovers quickly. The Barclays case is however evidence that stricter capital requirements do not necessary prevent banks from expanding credit and money creation, since their creation of deposits generates more purchasing power with which increased bank capital can also be funded.

In other words, banks have been granted a loophole – not available to other businesses – to use a fiction that the banks’ liabilities are really assets -which has given them a huge competitive advantage over everyone else.

No wonder banks now literally own the country … including the entire political system.

But why don’t mainstream economists understand how banks actually create money?

Economics professor Steve Keen explained last week in Forbes:

In any genuine science, empirical data like this would have forced the orthodoxy to rethink its position. But in economics, the profession has sailed on, blithely unaware of how their model of “banks as intermediaries between savers and investors” is seriously wrong, and now blinds them to the remedy for the crisis as it previously blinded them to the possibility of a crisis occurring.

A wit once defined an economist as someone who, when shown that something works in practice, replies “Ah! But does it work in theory?”

Mainstream economic models are fundamentally wrong.  The theories taught in economics programs are riddled with errors.  For example, they don’t take into account such basic factors as private debt.

That’s why the 2008 crash happened … and that’s why the economy is heading south now.

So things are going to get worse and worse until they’re fixed to account for how banks actually create money.

Venezuela is plunging deeper into a constitutional crisis as the Supreme Court of Justice declared that the National Assembly, where the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) holds a super-majority as “void”. The country is locked in a stalemate between the three branches of government. The National Assembly session on Tuesday was suspended “pending further action” – amid claims that MUD legislators planned to declare an “economic state of emergency”.

The political crisis following the sweeping election victory of the Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition in December 2015 is deepening and threatening to render the country ungovernable and plunge it into a recurrence of political violence.

After more than a decade with a PSUV dominated National Assembly, Venezuelans gave the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable a clear and unequivocal mandate. The MUD won 112 seats, including three indigenous seats, of the 167-seat legislative body.

The Supreme Court of Justice explained its ruling, saying that the National Assembly is “void” because the legislative body violated a previous court order by swearing-in legislators who have been temporarily suspended pending an ongoing investigation.

Following elections on December 6, 2015, the Supreme Court temporarily barred four legislators from Amazonas State due to alleged irregularities including alleged vote-buying.

The new National Assembly President Ramos Allup, however, decided to ignore that the court had suspended the legislators and swore them in. The development has led to a constitutional crisis with a stalemate between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government.

The barring of the four legislators temporarily removed the MUD’s super-majority in the National Assembly. A development that is vehemently disputed by the MUD as an attempt to prevent the Assembly from making use of the mandate that the super-majority and the electoral mandate imply.

The PSUV, Venezuela’s Communist Party, Unions and associated grassroots organizations fear that a National Assembly dominated by an MUD that can pass legislation virtually unopposed could endanger what is described as the progress made by the Bolivarian revolution.

The Deputy leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and former president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello denounced the MUD legislators at the National Assembly of being in contempt of court. Cabello claimed that “the sane and democratic step” for the leadership of the National Assembly is to revoke the swearing-in of the suspended legislators.

President Maduro (middle) with Vicepresident Arreaza (left of Maduro) and Minister of Defense Padrino Lopez (right to Maduro) during the presidential act with the FANB (VTV)

Tuesday’s session of the National Assembly was suspended “pending further action”. MUD legislators allegedly planned to present a motion that would declare the Latin American country as being in an “economic state of emergency”. The country has been strongly affected by the plummeting oil price.

President Maduro (middle) with Vicepresident Arreaza (left of Maduro) and Minister of Defense Padrino Lopez (right to Maduro) during the presidential act with the FANB (VTV)

The PSUV responded to its crushing electoral defeat in December by calling for the establishment of “Street Parliaments” to defend the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution.

In mid-December 2015 President Nicolas Maduro revealed that members of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) who are currently working in public administration positions will be required to leave their posts and return to their military units.

Venezuela’s influential Catholic Church, for is part, declared that it supports the amnesty law that has been proposed by Borges and the MUD. The position of the Catholic Church in that regard was made public by Cardinal Urosa Sabino in mid-December 2015.

It is noteworthy that the Catholic Church and its clergy has supported numerous Latin American right-wing, including dictatorial regimes. This includes the present Pope Francis whom most Argentinians remember as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio who hobnobbed with Argentina’s Junta, the USA and the CIA during Argentina’s so-called “Dirty War” as documented in an article entitled “Washington’s Pope”? Who is Pope Francis I? Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Argentina’s “Dirty War” by Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Also in mid-December Venezuela’s Communist Party (PCV) and Venezuelan Unions asked President Nicolas Maduro to sign a Worker’s Council Law before the new legislators begin working in their offices on January 6, 2016. Also in mid-December the outgoing National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello and PSUV legislators created what they described as a “National Communal Parliament“.

Maduro’s deadline decrees have been praised by many PSUV supporters  and criticized by the MUD as attempt to establish a parallel government. Many independent observers warned about the possible abuse of popular councils, street parliaments and other attempts by Venezuela’s PSUV to entrench itself after the electoral defeat in a way that could lead to rendering the economically stressed country ungovernable and plunge it into a serious crisis. The most recent development and the stalemate between the three branches of government substantiate such concerns.

The purpose of this essay is to explain, not describe, the frantically belligerent behavior of the Saudi regime. The goal is not to delve into what the regime and its imperialist enablers have done, or are doing; that unsavory record of atrocities, both at home and abroad, is abundantly exposed by other writers/commentators [1]. It is, rather, to focus on why they have done or are doing what they do.

In the Throes of the Agony of Death

The Saudi rulers find themselves in a losing race against time, or history. Although in denial, they cannot but realize the historical reality that the days of ruling by birthright are long past, and that the House of Saud as the ruler of the kingdom by inheritance is obsolete.

This is the main reason for the Saudi’s frantically belligerent behavior. The hysteria is tantamount to the frenzy of the proverbial agony of a prolonged death. It explains why they react so harshly to any social or geopolitical development at home or in the region that they perceive as a threat to their rule.

It explains why, for example, they have been so intensely hostile to the Iranian revolution that terminated the rule of their dictatorial counterpart, the Shah of Iran, in that country. In the demise of the Shah they saw their own downfall.

It also explains their hostility to the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia that ended the perpetual rule of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo and that of Ben Ali in Tunis. Panicked by the specter of the spread of those revolutionary upheavals to other countries in the region, especially the kingdoms and sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf area, the Saudi rules and their well-known patrons abroad promptly embarked on “damage control.” (The not-so-secret patrons of the House of Saud include mainly the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex, Neocon forces and the Israel lobby.)

The ensuing agenda of containment, derailment and preemption of similar revolutionary upheavals has been comprehensive and multi-prong. Among other schemes, the agenda has included the following:

 (1) brutally cracking down on peaceful opposition at home, including summary executions and ferocious beheadings;

(2) pursuing destabilizing policies in places such as Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen by funding and/or arming rabidly violent Wahhabi/Salafi jihadists and other mercenaries;

(3) trying to sabotage genuine international efforts to reduce tensions and bloodshed in Syria, Yemen and other places;

(4) trying to sabotage the nuclear agreement and other tension-reducing efforts between Iran and Western powers;

(5) pursuing policies that would promote tensions and divisions along ethnic, nationalist and religious lines in the region, such as the provocative beheading of the prominent and peaceful Shi’a critic Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr ; and

(6) seeking “chaos to cover terror tracks,” as the well-known expert in international affairs Finian Cunningham put it [2].

To the dismay of the Saudi regime, while these depraved policies have succeeded in causing enormous amounts of death and destruction in the region, they have failed in achieving their objectives: stability in the Saudi kingdom and security for its regime. On the contrary, the reckless policies of trying to eliminate its perceived opponents have backfired: the regime is now more vulnerable than four or five years ago when it embarked (in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions) on the vainly aggressive policy of trying to eliminate the supposed dangers to its rule.

The illegal war on Yemen, carried out with the support of the United States, has turned from what was supposed to be a cakewalk into a stalemate. Not only has it solidified and emboldened the sovereignty-aspiring Houthis resistance to the Saudi-led aggression, it has also considerably benefited al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Likewise, the War on Syria, largely funded by the Saudi regime, has fallen way short of its goal of unseating President Assad. Here too the aggression has handsomely benefited a motley array of mercenary and jihadi groups, especially those affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra, known as al-Qaeda in Syria, and the so-called Islamic State.

In both of these countries the power and influence of the Saudi regime and its partners in crime is in decline while the resistance is gradually gaining the upper hand, especially in Syria—thanks largely to the support from Russia and Iran.

Perhaps more tragically for the Saudi regime, has been the failure of its “oil war” against Russia and Iran. Recklessly saturating global markets with unlimited supply of oil in the face of dwindling demand and increased production in the U.S. has reduced the price of oil by more than 60 percent. This has led to an officially-declared budget deficit of $98 billion for the current fiscal year, which has forced the regime to curb social spending and/or economic safety net programs. There are indications that the unprecedented belt-tightening economic policies are creating public discontent, which is bound to make the regime even more vulnerable.

A bigger blowback from the regime’s “oil war,” however, goes beyond economic problems at home. More importantly, it has led to an unintended consequence that tends to make the regime less secure by reducing its economic and geopolitical worth to its imperialist benefactors. Cheap and abundant energy in global markets is bound to undermine the indispensability of the House of Saud to its imperial patrons. In using oil as a weapon against their rivals, the spoiled big babies of Western powers in the Arabian Peninsula may have pushed their luck too far.

Combined, these blowbacks and ominous consequences of the Saudi regime’s belligerent policies have made the regime and its allies in the region more vulnerable while giving strength and credibility to the resisting forces in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, supported by Iran and Russia. These unintended consequences of the Saudi rulers’ aggressions explain why they are panic-stricken and behave hysterically.

References

[1] See, for example, Finian Cunningham, “Saudis Seek Chaos to Cover Terror Tracks”; Jim Lobe, “Neocons Defend Saudi Arabia”; and Pepe Escobar, “Fear And Loathing in the House of Saud.”

[2] Ibid.

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

Netanyahu government agrees to first new Palestinian community in 68 years – exclusively for the Druze – on refugees’ land

An Israeli government plan to build hundreds of homes for the country’s Druze population faces stiff opposition after it was revealed that the new community would be located on the lands of Palestinian refugees.

The town, due to be built west of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, would be the first new community for members of Israel’s Palestinian minority since the state’s founding 68 years ago.

The country’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens are a fifth of the population.

Leaders of the Palestinian minority expressed outrage that officials had selected a site where two Palestinian villages were located until their destruction following the 1948 war that established Israel.

Archival evidence shows that the Israeli military razed more than 500 Palestinian villages after the war to ensure their residents could not return.

“The decision to build a Druze town on these destroyed villages is designed to light a fuse under the relations between the Druze and other members of Palestinian minority,” Samer Swaid, a Druze political activist, told Middle East Eye.

“This is all about Israel reinforcing its divide-and-rule policies over us.”

The choice of location is particularly sensitive because one of the destroyed villages, Hittin, has great historical and symbolic importance to Palestinian Muslims.

The village was established on the orders of Saladin to commemorate his victory in a famous battle against the Crusaders in 1187. The Crusaders’ defeat, at the Horns of Hittin, led to their exodus from the Holy Land.

After 1948, Israel razed all of Hittin apart from its ancient mosque.

‘Detached from reality’

Sheikh Muwaffik Tarif, the Druzes’ spiritual leader in Israel, was reported to be “taken aback” by the plan, sources close to him told the Israeli daily Haaretz.

A former Druze government minister, Salah Tarif, also objected, telling the newspaper the idea was “detached from reality”. He added that it was “a band-aid that’s meant to cover up the real problem – the condition of the existing [Druze] towns.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan for the town last week as part of “extensive activity” to promote the Druze population. The town would “facilitate the reduction of [economic] gaps between Druze towns and other towns” in Israel, his office said.

Some 400 houses are to be built in an initial phase, but eventually the town is expected to comprise 2,500 homes.

Israel has 115,000 Druze citizens inside its recognised borders, and a further 25,000 in the Golan, Syrian territory occupied by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in violation of international law.

The Druze are a secretive religious sect, an off-shoot of Islam, that emerged in Egypt in the 11th century. Today, most Druze communities are located in the mountainous areas of Lebanon, Syria and what is now northern Israel.

Unlike other Palestinian citizens and the Druze in the Golan, the Druze community in Israel are required to serve for three years in the Israeli military.

In return, the Druze were given the status of a separate national group. Israel categorises other Palestinian citizens simply as “Arabs”.

That has entitled the Druze to a separate school system, with its own curriculum. Traditionally, the chief benefits of military service for the Druze have been access to security-related jobs after the draft, including in the police and as prison guards.

Confiscated lands

But critics, including from within the Druze, say the community has otherwise faced the same, or worse, discrimination in land allocations and budgets as other Palestinian citizens.

“The Druze have not benefited as a community from the draft,” said Hana Swaid, a former member of the Israeli parliament who now heads the Arab Centre for Alternative Planning. “On the contrary, their loyalty and deference to the Israeli leadership were exploited to their disadvantage.”

Swaid told MEE that research by his centre showed three-quarters of Druze land had been confiscated and many of their 14 existing towns and villages in Israel lacked master-plans, making it impossible for new development.

“Many Druze families cannot get building permits for their homes, meaning they can be demolished, or they cannot connect legally to basic services like water and electricity,” he said.

Swaid noted that, after sweeping land confiscations from the Palestinian minority, the Israeli state had nationalised 93 per cent of Israeli territory, reserving most of it for the Jewish population. Only 3 percent was left in the hands of the Palestinian minority, resulting in severe overcrowding and unlicensed building.

“Of that 3 percent, only about a fifth of the land is authorised for development. That is why Palestinian communities are suffocating.”

This week the Israeli media reported that Netanyahu’s office was beefing up the enforcement of house demolitions in a move that it is feared will target 50,000 unlicensed Palestinian homes in Israel.

Close to Tiberias

The National Planning Council is reported to have considered 10 different locations for the Druze town before settling on the area by the Sea of Galilee.

Netanyahu said the new town’s proximity to the city of Tiberias and major highways would help to “advance the Druze population economically and socially”.

Samer Swaid, who is not related to Hana Swaid, said most of the Druze rejected a town built on refugee land and wanted their confiscated lands to be returned so they could expand existing communities.

“There is, for example, a lot of confiscated land near Daliyat and Isifiya [two Druze villages south of Haifa] that could be given back to us so we could build there.”

Swaid, a leading official in the Druze Initiative Committee, which rejects military service for the Druze, noted that hundreds of Druze protesters from Daliyat clashed violently with police in 2010 when the government took more land to lay a gas pipeline between the centre of the country and Haifa.

“The government always finds Druze land available for its own projects, just not when we need to expand.”

A press release from Netanyahu’s office claimed that the 14 existing communities could not be further developed because they were located in hilly terrain or next to nature reserves.

Hana Swaid said these were “just pretexts” for inaction. “Israel has built many rural Jewish settlements on lands confiscated from the Druze villages. It seems these restrictions apply only when the Druze want to build.”

Refugees’ rights violated

A 1965 planning law recognises some 120 communities as Arab. It is all but impossible for most Palestinian citizens to live outside these communities or a handful of cities where Palestinian neighbourhoods exist.

But while Israel has built hundreds of rural communities exclusively for Jewish citizens since Israel’s creation 68 years ago, Hana Swaid pointed out that no new communities for Palestinians had been established.

The decision to build the town was approved by Netanyahu’s government in late 2012, but the location – over the two destroyed villages of Hittin and Nimrin – came to light only this month.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer specialising in land issues for Adalah, a legal centre for Palestinian citizens, told MEE the development of the new town would violate the rights of the refugees to their land guaranteed in international law.

As part of Israel’s international obligations, she said, refugee land was supposed to be held in trust by an official, known as the custodian, until the issue of the refugees had been settled.

“Building on this land means the refugees cannot receive restitution in the future,” she said. “It complicates the picture of any future peace agreement.”

‘Present absentees’

In addition to the millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside Israel’s borders, one in four of the Palestinian population inside Israel are reported to be refugees. The internally displaced are officially classified as “present absentees” – present in Israel but absent from their homes.

All of the residents of Nimrin, a small village in 1948, were forced outside Israel’s borders. But some of Hittin’s families managed to remain close by their village.

Makbula Nassar, a Palestinian journalist whose mother’s family was from Hittin, said the internal refugees lived nearby in communities such as Eilaboun, Nazareth and Deir Hana.

“They have been actively struggling to get access to their lands, and especially the mosque, since the 1980s,” she said. “The authorities immediately declared the mosque off-limits and an antiquity site.”

The mosque, which was built on Saladin’s orders, has been fenced off since 2000. “Why If the mosque is an antiquity, is the state allowing it to fall into ruin? No one is caring for it.”

Jewish groups have also opposed the decision to build the town. Late last month a protest was staged outside Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem by a historical society that recreates the Battle of Hittin, as well as by archeologists and members of neighbouring Jewish communities.

They argue that, given the area’s historical significance, Israel ought to be pressing the United Nations to declare it a World Heritage Site and ban development.

Site of pilgrimage

Despite the opposition of many Druze leaders, government officials have highlighted the support of Ayoub Kara, a hawkish Druze member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and the deputy minister for the development of the Druze.

“These lands belong to the state,” Kara wrote recently in the Makor Rishon newspaper. “The place doesn’t disturb anyone. It’s desolate.”

A spokesman for Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the criticisms.

Raneen Geries, an activist with Zochrot, a Jewish-Palestinian organisation seeking to educate Israeli Jews about the Nakba, Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948, said she believed the government was hoping to win wider Druze support by exploiting their religious attachment to the area.

The new town will be located next to an ancient shrine to Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law and the foremost prophet of the Druze. In Arabic he is known as Nabi Shuayb. The shrine has long been a major site of Druze pilgrimage.

In recent years Israel has massively developed the site, building a major road to the shrine and a large car park, further damaging the remains of Hittin and encroaching on its surviving mosque.

Nassar, who serves on the board of ADRID, a Palestinian organisation defending the rights of the internal refugees, said in the past there had been fears that highlighting Hittin’s problems would stir conflict with Druze religious leaders.

That view strikes me as wrong. For centuries Muslims, Christians and Druze shared the land. Now is the time to make an alliance with the Druze to support the cause of Hittin and Nimrin.

Food systems have been reduced to a model of industrialised agriculture controlled by a few transnational food corporations together with a small group of huge retailers. It is a model designed to generate profits… Instead of being dedicated to the production of food … it focuses increasingly on the production of raw materials such as agrofuels, animal feeds or commodity plantations… it has caused the enormous loss of agricultural holdings and the people who make their living from those holdings… it promotes a diet which is harmful to health and which contains insufficient fruit, vegetables and cereals.

The above quote comes from the final declaration of the Nyeleni Europe food sovereignty forum in 2011. Nyeleni Europe represents community-supported agriculture collectives, organic farmer unions, local food cooperatives, seed swapping organisations, food activists, farmers’ markets and community gardens. The organisation forms part of the global resistance to the corporate hijack of food and agriculture that has resulted in bad food, poor health, environmental degradation and the marginalisation and displacement of small farmers along with the destruction of local (and global) food sovereignty and security.

The global agritech/agribusiness sector is poisoning people and the environment with its pesticides, herbicides, GMOs and various other chemical inputs. The Rockefeller clan exported the petrochemical intensive ‘green revolution’ around the world with the aim of ripping up indigenous agriculture to cement its hegemony over global agriculture and to help the US create food deficit regions and thus use agriculture as a tool of foreign policy.

Last year, 31 pesticides with a value running into billions of pounds could have been banned in the EU because of potential health risks if a blocked EU paper on hormone-mimicking chemicals had been acted upon. The global agrichemicals lobby is responsible for preventing public protection from chronic diseases and environmental damage. Certain industries are raking in massive profits to the detriment of the public’s health and the environment.

Also last year, a study by the University of Koblenz-Landau explained that no field data-based evaluation of the regulatory acceptable concentrations (RACs) and therefore of the overall protectiveness of EU pesticide regulations exists. The researchers found that 44.7 percent of the 1,566 cases of measured insecticide concentrations in EU surface waters exceeded their respective RACs. The findings challenged the efficacy of the regulatory environmental risk assessment conducted for pesticide authorisation and concluded that effective mitigation measures are urgently needed to reduce the risks arising from agricultural insecticide use.

In the US, some 34,000 pesticides are currently registered for use. Drinking water it is often contaminated by pesticides, more babies are being born with preventable birth defects due to pesticide exposure and chemicals are so prevalent that they show up in breast milk. Many illnesses are on the rise too, such as asthma, autism and learning disabilities, birth defects and reproductive dysfunction, diabetes and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases along with several types of cancer. The connection to pesticide exposure is clear.

Moreover, pollinating insects have been impacted by chemical herbicides and pesticides, which are also stripping the soil of nutrients. As a result, for example, there has been a 41.1 to 100 percent decrease in vitamin A in 6 foods: apple, banana, broccoli, onion, potato and tomato. Both onion and potato saw a 100 percent loss of vitamin A between 1951 and 1999.

In India, the impacts of depleted soils, water-guzzling cash crops and loss of food diversity and biodiversity due to green revolution practices have been condemned by campaigner and farmer Bhaskar Save and by botanist Stuart Newton. The fact that, according to Newton, mineral-depleted soils lead to undernourishment speaks volumes.

The unnecessary transportation of food over long distances also does not help, not least in terms of energy consumption and pollution and chemical treatment and processing.

The modern corporate-controlled food system is not only bad for our health and the environment but farmers’ incomes are also being forced downwards. Take the case of the India farmer, for instance.

According to the Navdanya website, a customer pays 10 rupees for a 50-gram packet of Pepsico’s Lays chips. A potato farmer in West Bengal gets only 50 paise (half a rupee) to one rupee for a kg of potato, which is only 0.02 percent of what the customers pays for the processed food packet.

While the customer pays 50 rupees for a kg of branded atta (wheat flour), the farmer only gets 14 rupees out of which he has spent a large share on buying chemicals and earns only 1,645 rupees per month per acre. This amounts to a mere 51.15 rupees per day. The daily legal wage for a skilled worker is 423 rupees. Even an unskilled worker’s minimum wage is 348 rupees per day. The farmer therefore earns only 1/10th of the minimum legal wage. According to Vandana Shiva,

Farming is one of the most skilled vocations because a farmer is a soil scientist and soil conserver, a seed breeder, manager of water, weeds and pests. Industry produces the chemicals that are destroying the planet and our health. Only small farmers can take care of the soil and the health of the soil is linked to our health.

The small-scale farmer, the backbone of global food production, especially in the Global South, is being discriminated against through various policies (see this, this and this), marginalised and forced from the land. At the same time, however, the urban consumer across the world seems ever more disconnected from agriculture. The consumer has often become what Vandana Shiva describes as an “ignorant link” in the food chain.

Ultimately, the crisis affecting food and agriculture results from the capture of governments and international policy-making bodies by corporate interests (see this, this and this) and the relations of profit-driven global capitalism that, for example, fuel distorted trade, food commodity and land speculation, poverty and food deficit areas, etc.

Restoring the link between producer and consumer

While we should rightly expose and campaign against this system and the international and national bodies and public officials that have been co-opted by global agribusiness and agri-chemical companies, there are many grass-root initiatives throughout the world that are challenging the corporate dominance of the food system by bringing small-scale farmers and consumers together. By raising consumer awareness and rebuilding what has become a broken link between the urban dweller and the farmer, the aim is to create a better food system from the bottom up: in other words, ‘food smart’ environments whereby citizens actually know what they are eating and where their food comes from.

In Kerala, India, for example, Thanal supports a sustainable form of agriculture that enhances incomes for local farmers and their families as well as food safety and security for consumers by promoting organic farming and linking farmers to consumers through its ‘organic bazaar’.

The bazaar provides a wide range of organic products produced by organic farmers across the state. It was launched in 2003 to bring organic farmers and consumers together and was made possible through consistent outreach and sensitisation among marginal farmers in different pockets of Kerala to enlarge the supply base. Consumer sensitisation and awareness programmes also played an important role in getting more consumers to support the initiative.

In Europe too, there is an increasing awareness that local farmers need to secure a decent price for their produce, that organic food is healthier and that locally sourced food eradicates many of the environmental and health-related problems associated with transporting food over long distances. Copenhagen Food Cooperative is a city-wide initiative that offers an alternative to the profit-driven supermarket chains, it focuses on offering fresh, organic seasonal fruits and vegetables at fair but affordable prices. Founded in 2008, the initiative now has 3,000 and 10 local outlets supplying five tons of vegetables each week sourced from local farms.

All members are expected to put in three hours of work each month on a voluntary basis. This could be packing vegetables in the shop, ordering vegetables, arranging debates, fixing the website, etc. Any profit is used to reduce the price of the vegetables or to develop the co-op or socially responsible projects in the city. By buying from local farmers the costs are lowered, the produce is fresh and the impact on the environment is kept to a minimum. The co-operative supports local farmers who produce organic or biodynamic produce, which in turn supports sustainable agriculture that is good for the soil, the farmer and the health of the consumer

Throughout Europe there are similar community-supported agriculture initiatives that are bringing farmers and urban consumers together to support local farmers who produce healthy food that both respects the environment and keeps rural communities alive. From farmers’ markets to food co-ops, many consumers are no longer ‘ignorant links’ in a globalised corporate-controlled chain.

The Nyeleni Europe website contains some valuable information and serves as a resource for the food sovereignty movement in Europe. As a global movement, Nyeleni has a radical agenda that is committed to challenging, among other things:

Imperialism, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy, and all systems that impoverish life, resources and eco-systems, and the agents that promote the above such as international financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation, free trade agreements, transnational corporations, and governments that are antagonistic to their peoples.

Less overtly political in scope, perhaps, is the concept of ‘food smart cities’. Some key principles underlying this concept include decentralized co-operation on food security and on sustainable development. In Europe, the initiative ‘Food Smart Cities for Development’ aims at creating a network of smart cities to guide European local authorities and civil society organizations in drafting, developing and implementing local food related policies. The initiative aims to maximise the contributions of local food policies to sustainable urban development and to increase understanding of the relation between local and global food systems. One aim is to enhance knowledge on how local food systems can contribute to sustainable cities worldwide and what role cities can take in the global challenge to optimise food sovereignty and sustainability.

While governments, trade agreements and regulatory agencies remain tethered to the interests of the powerful corporations that have come to define global food and agriculture in their own profit-driven image, local communities are fighting back with grass-root initiatives and city authorities are at least placing pertinent issues on the agenda for action and debate.

Remember when the Obama Administration told the world how it hoped to identify 5,000 reliable non-jihadist ‘moderate’ rebels hanging out in Turkey and Jordan, who might want to fight for Washington in Syria? After all the drama over its infamous ‘train and equip’ program to create their own Arab army in Syria, they want to give it another try.

This week, Pentagon officials announced their new plan to train up to 7,000 more ‘moderate’ fighters, but this time the project would take place inside Syria (and to hell with international law).

We’re told that this was requested by Ankara, and with all NATO allies singing the same hymn – claiming that this new effort will help in securing Turkey’s porous border with Syria, or so the story goes. Washington’s political cover for this is fashioned from the popular post-Paris theme: to protect civilized Europe from invading hordes and the terrorists who hide among them, as stated in the Wall Street Journal:

The program would address part of the tense and long-running dialogue between Washington and Ankara over sealing the border, which Western governments have long complained is an avenue for extremists to leave Syria and travel internationally,

The timing of this announcement seemed uncanny against the backdrop of an unlikely ISIS ‘suicide bomb’ terrorist attack, in Turkey, of all places, where the victims just happened to be 14 German tourists, feeding perfectly into Europe’s new binary fear set of terrorism and immigration. Shades of GLADIO, undoubtedly (but you won’t see western journalists entertaining suchconspiracy theories).

Our friends at Nation Builders Inc are banking on the global public suffering from Syria fatigue, but now is the time to really pay attention. The west’s real agenda for the region is starting to unfold…

Despite all of US-led Coalition’s scandals, lies, epic failures, false flags and official conspiracy theories, the mainstream narrative on Syria persists. It’s on our TV screens and in our newspapers constantly – from Los Angeles to London, from Paris to Riyadh, every politician and pundit seems to have an opinion about, “what to do with Syria?” Everyone, except the Syria people  themselves, who like the people of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen and ever other country that’s found itself under the cleaver of western interests – are never afforded any say in their own destiny. As is tradition in Washington, London and Paris, the only Syrian voices which count are the ones who have been hand-picked by western technocrats and approved by the Saudi royal family to form their ever-changing ‘recognized’ government-in-exile, the Syrian National Council. Currently, that could be Riad Hijab,  George Sabra or Khaled Khoja. Next week, it could be three others, depending on who has fallen in, or out of favor with Washington or Riyadh.

To anyone who was listening close enough early on in the conflict, you would have heard determined members of the western-backed ‘Syrian Opposition’ admitting how they would, ‘make a deal with the devil if that’s what it takes to win power.’ Four years later, we now see that is exactly what happened, but whether you believe that this  devil is US-led Coalition, or terrorist armies fighting groups (or both) might be cause for debate. Others will argue over which is thebigger devil – is it the Wahabist-Salafist terrorist brigades like al Nusra Front and Islamic State, or is it the West and its GCC partners?

The unfortunate reality is that these two devils are not mutually exclusive. The West and its partners not only created this ‘terror’ crisis, but did so with the intent of unveiling a grand ‘solution’ to the problem.

Plans A-Z

The terrorist enclave in Syria is designed for purpose – to implant a hostile metastasis right in the middle of the very territory which neocolonial powers plan to tear away from the barely sovereign nations of Iraq and Syria.

Since 2011, the western-led cartel has deployed various levels of international subterfuge in Syria, starting with Plan A: the Arab Spring method – igniting a popular street uprising that might capture the world’s attention for 15 minutes – enough to generate some high-quality evocative imagery and a social media storm to carry memes of liberty around the globe, inspiring the people on the streets (and on Twitter) to demand “change”. Their cries for freedom would then be backed up by the US State Department, along with its functionaries at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International America, and other Open Society Institute-funded NGOs and ‘human rights’ organizations. Obviously, this did not work. Next, Plan B: the political opposition suddenly transcended into an armed, paramilitary opposition, followed by brutal violence and killing on both sides. The US and its allies wasted no time, pledging weapons, training, cash and logistical support to the armed opposition. The west set up its own parallel government for Syria abroad, but it failed to gain any traction with the Syria people. Then came Plan C: this ‘opposition’ would be quickly overrun and absorbed into a massive array of mostly foreign jihadi and mercenary soldiers of misfortune and other assorted terrorists. This fed into an already established ‘War on Terror’ western narrative. Now the west had a familiar entry point into the fight. The Washington-London-Paris-Tel-Aviv-Riyadh-Doha-Ankara Axis hoped that these terrorists would do the job of overthrowing the government of Bashar al Assad in Damascus, and collapse the country into a spirally pit of sectarian and tribal chaos. Who could blame them? After all, it worked in Libya in late 2011.

Fast forward to 2016, having failed to overthrow Assad and implode the nation-state of Syria, the men and women of Nation Builders Inc and their muscles in Brussels (NATO), are quickly moving to Plan D: take territory. That’s not to say plans A through D weren’t always in the schematics – they certainly were, and further back than many people would dare to speculate.

We now know from Wikileaks cables that this operation goes back to at least 2006, but in reality, it’s probably much earlier than that. Taking the long view of history and the audacious building, and rebuilding, of a Euro-centric empire in the Middle East, one could say the process began the day the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed in 1916. Concealed between those post-colonial lines drawn exactly 100 years ago, was the latent potential for the very conflicts and uncivil wars we are seeing today. If those borders are redrawn once again, you can be certain that they will be drawn by the very same powers involved a century ago. Whatever the arrangement, it will be to weaken, not strengthen the region, and certainly not strengthen any of the present nation states in the region, especially Syria. Proprietary powers will want any new states to be stuck in a perpetual state of neocolonial dependency, with an emphasis on financial and security dependency.

Mice and Men

21WIRE was one of the first news sources to warn about Washington’s initial impulse back in 2014 when it began calling for a ‘No Fly Zone’ in Northern Syria. It was clear that a problem, reaction, solution dialectic was in play, with ISIS being the object of the public’s reaction. That plan might have come to fruition in the fall of 2015, but a funny thing happened on the way to the UN General Assembly in New York City. Later that week, Russia announced that it would be inserting itself, and its Air Force, into the Syrian quagmire, and with that, thwarted any master plan for a US-Turkey (NATO) controlled No Fly Zone along the Turkish-Syrian border. Suffice to say, that Russia already knew NATO’s next move and acted accordingly, and with purpose.

When asked two days ago about the prospect of the Washington DC latest brainchild, Train and Equip 2.0, this time inside Syria, here were my initial thoughts:

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Many political commentators were confounded by the mad dash of nations to make their bones against ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq. France and Britain were chomping at the bit to get in on the bombing, and at the time this might have seemed illogical to observers, what with the Team America and the world’s largest military force – more powerful than all coalition members combined – running point on the operation. Why bother, with America and Turkey in the air, and the Kurdish Peshmerga on the ground? Why would any nation in its right mind want to volunteer to enter that quagmire?

We now know why, and it has more to do with what’s beneath the sand than what’s on top.

As any good pirate will tell you – if you want to claim your share of the booty, you have to do your share of the killing.

The Truth About ‘Train and Equip’

The previous ‘train and equip’ program ended with Washington’s military brass paraded in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before being roundly lambasted for failing to train even a handful of ‘moderate rebels’, this after being awarded $500 million by the US taxpayer to get’er done.

When originally announced amid much fanfare, the public were told that the US government, in conjunction with the CIA, would be arming and training ‘moderate’ militants in Turkey, Jordan or at a base in Saudi Arabia – before sending them to fight inside Syria. Washington claims that these new trainees were meant to fight ISIS, and not the Syrian government forces, but judging by the unwavering ‘regime change’ rhetoric from the west, it would be highly naive to think that all this was strictly for ISIS.

Nine months into the train and equip project, US Army Gen. Lloyd Austin III, acknowledged in Sept. 2015 that they had only managed to get “four or five” on the battlefield by then. Not one member of the media challenged this statement, probably because most were happy with the answer given – one which gave any hawkish critics of the Obama administration the pound of flesh they wanted and served to only intensify more calls before the new year for US ‘boots on the ground’ in Syria. Doves loved it because it seemed to prove that backing proxies doesn’t work, and that the best solution was to call it quits. For the sanguine mainstream media, it served-up that all-too familiar government narrative, of a “cock-up, not a cover-up.” This is the media’s natural default position. In other words, “Well, it didn’t work out, but that’s nothing new with our incompetent government. Nothing to see here, move along.”  To ask how the money disappeared, or really inquire into how it costs $500 million to train only five men – apparently was way too much work for the media. Not one ‘journalist’ stopped to ask, if only 5 fighters were trained and dispatched, then what happened to the half a billion dollars?

The real answer to that question should be self-evident to anyone studying reports on the ground in Syria, and is way too uncomfortable for the US media to stomach – that the US ‘train and equip’ program provided the necessary official cover to allow the prosecution of a dirty war under the table. It wasn’t a failure like fall guy Gen. Lloyd Austin will have you believe, it was a success.

Judging by the proliferation of heavy weaponry and other lethal arms that have made it into the hands of al Qaeda in Syria (al Nusra Front), ISIS, Jaysh al–Islam and others – it’s clear that Uncle Sam’s generous donation of $500 million has definitely been used to equip, if not train, those‘rebels’ in Syria.

Middle East commentator and analyst Sharmine Narwani explains the West’s perennial dilemma when trying to identify who their ‘moderates’ are in Syria:

For years, Washington has insisted there are armed ‘moderate’ groups in Syria, but have gone to great lengths to avoid naming these ‘moderates.’ Why? Because if moderates were named and identified, the US would have to be very, very certain that no past, present or future ‘atrocity video’ would surface to prove otherwise. And the US could not guarantee this with any of the groups they have armed, trained or financed in Syria over the past five years.

The next ‘train and equip’ round will be more focused, and will be used to secure the following…

The map above is from July 2015, but still represents the current military chessboard in Syria.

Safe Zone = ‘Sunnistan’

Somehow it feels like 1998 all over again, with bad memories of the KLA in Kosovo, imported jihadist fighters in Bosnia, and NATO lording over a newly balkanized region.

When you hear US officials like John McCain or clueless Republican presidential candidates like Marco Rubio or Carly Fiorina, all crowing for a “Safe Zone” in northern Syria, this is what they are referring to (see map above). Their ‘safe zone’ just so happens to be in the exact same area where ISIS is currently holding court. It’s a ‘safe zone’ alright, but not for refugees and “Syrians fleeing the evil Bashar al Assad” – rather, the ‘safe zone’ will be for an array of ‘rebel’ and terrorist fighters, part of a defacto Sunni state-lette in waiting.

So the US-led Coalition’s ‘safe zone’ is the very Caliphate that Americans are decrying.

For anyone requiring proof that such a grand chessboard is in play in Syria, they need look no further than a set of US airstrikes that took place before Christmas. On December 6, 2015,  US fighter bombers struck a Syrian military base located in the village of Ayyash in Deir Ezzor Province, east of Raqqa, which killed 3 Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers and wounded additional others. Naturally, the Pentagon swiftly denied that any such attack took place. What happened after this incident was extremely telling, as explained by global affairs analyst Mike Whitney fromCounterpunch Magazine:

It’s also worth noting, that according to South Front military analysis, the US bombing raid coincided with a “a full-scale ISIS offensive on the villages of Ayyash and Bgelia.” In other words, the US attack provided sufficient air-cover for ISIS terrorists to carry out their ground operations. Was that part of the plan or was it merely a coincidence?

So the US air force was coordinating with ISIS boots on the ground, to achieve a common military objective. But it didn’t end there.

Less than 24 hours after the attack, US warplanes bombed the village of Al-Khan in north-eastern Syria killing 26 Syrian civilians including at least four women and seven children and four women. The message the US military is sending with these lethal attacks is that it wants to control the air-space over east Syria where it plans to remove ISIS and establish a de facto Sunni state consistent with its scheme to break Syria and Iraq into smaller cantons governed by local warlords, Islamic fanatics, and US puppets.

Also taking place at the same moment on Dec 6th, was Turkey’s quiet little invasion into northern Iraq, sending hundreds of troops and at least 20 tanks into territory north of Mosul, right between the Kurds and ISIS. It should be noted that this illegal incursion by NATO member Turkey was not approved by the Iraqi government in Baghdad, and Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi called for Turkey to “immediately withdraw its troops.” Judging by Washington’s silence on the matter, it’s obvious that the US gave Turkey its full blessing. Here, Zero Hedge astutely points out the obvious:

Most importantly of all, right on what Al-Araby al-Jadeed claims is the smuggling route for illegal ISIS crude into Turkey from Iraq.

Not surprisingly, Turkey’s sudden move also came at the same time that Russia began to publicly expose Turkey’s clandestine role in facilitating the ISIS oil trade, as well as launching airstrikes to destroy ISIS oil convoys moving from Syria into Turkey. And then Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (photo, left) places his military assets at the very location where stolen ISIS oil makes its way from Iraq into Turkey? Hardly a coincidence.

Make no mistake, both ends of NATO’s military axle, the United States and Turkey, along with their Saudi-backed boots on the ground in ISIS and al Nusra – have each made critical strategic moves in unison, and with a specific military purpose each time, nudging towards securing territory. Once each key piece is finally in position, all that is required is a new “crisis”, either in the region, or in Europe, or in America – to allow the Axis powers to move in quickly and take what is needed to implement the next phase of the game, whether that’s creating a Kurdish canton, or a Sunni state-lette. Such moves will rarely be covered by the western international media.

What’s the ‘safe zone’ for? As the US-led Coalition steps up its 18 month-long Punch ‘n Judy air operation to supplant ISIS from Raqqa, those western-backed jihadis will later require a safe corridor to flee but still remain connected to their Turkish supply lines. Washington’s ‘safe zone’ would also provide a much-needed safe haven for ‘rebels’ who have been sent packing by the Syrian government from towns like Homs and others, as part of a painstaking disarming and reconciliation process between the Assad government and ‘opposition’ rebels who are willing to participate in the program. Once the NATO-GCC Axis has established a mini protectorate inside of Syria, this will provide everything ISIS, al Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Turkmens et all will need; a secure launching pad for incursions further inside Syria – which will certainly guarantee a longer, protracted conflict in Syria – and beyond.

This little Sunni wedge is also conveniently located next to a large rebel-terrorist contingent in Syria’s northwestern Idlib governorate (province). Syria’s border with Turkey has been porous from the beginning of the conflict, so the proposed ‘safe zone’ will allow Turkey to maintain this status quo – where it has been continuously allowing the free-flow of weapons, rebels and terrorist fighters alike, along with oil, narcotics and human trafficking – to move freely through its southern border with Syria.

If ‘regime  change’ rhetoric is anything to go by, along with turning a blind eye to NATO member Turkey’s role in facilitating supply lines and safe passage for al Qaeda and ISIS, then Washington’s agenda is fairly transparent here. If they can establish a “internationally recognized” safe zone and a No-Fly Zone on top of it, central planners believe they will have the platform they need to eventually destroy Damascus, install their own western puppet, and then carve up Syria and northern Iraq accordingly.

ISIS RAT-LINES: Black market oil has been a key component to carrying on both conflicts in Syria, and Iraq.

For the architects of instability in Washington, one crucial benefit of carving out Sunni territory in both northern and eastern Syria is that available oil will help fund all of their paramilitary and terrorist needs – making it sustainable. To guarantee this uninterrupted income stream from black market oil which is presently making its way out of Syria and into Turkey and via Kurdistan, help is required from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) and other stakeholders, including the British-Turkish firm Genel Energy, just one firm who is providing the end-run to market for illicit ISIS oil. Ditto for a key mover and shaker in Raqqa’s new Rockefeller class, Bilal Erdogan, the son of Turkish president, who according to numerous recent reports has already amassed a small fortune from the lucrative oil-for-terror trade.

This is a problem, but one which Washington, London and Paris are not overly concerned with, much less upset about. Iraqi, Kurdish and Turkish opposition officials have accused Turkish governments and the KRG of deliberately allowing some of these smuggling operations to take place.

Even as provisional state-lettes and cantons are conjured around it, there is no guarantee thatGreater Kurdistan will ever see the light of day if Nation Builders Inc having anything to say bout it. The promise of Greater Kurdistan is as important to neocolonialists, than the reality of a Greater Kurdistan. Turkey also has its own interests and ambitions, and a Greater Kurdistan is not compatible with them. Iraq is not crazy about the idea either, because of obvious financial and energy resource reasons. So they remain in limb indefinitely, even as smaller quasi-Kurdish entities sprout up around the KRG. Turkey has its own ongoing ‘Kurdish problem’ within Turkish borders, so Ankara will naturally view any expressions of Kurdish autonomy around it as a threat and potential inspiration for international Kurdish solidarity. Ruling over the Kurds means keeping them divided, and playing them off against their neighbors.

There are those within the Turkish establishment who believe there are old scores still unsettled – in reclaiming Turk territory in both Syria and Iraq.

Here is where Sunnistan proper can emerge, coming into its own once set pieces are in place in Iraq and across Kurdistan, as Mike Whitney explained:

So it looks like an agreement has been struck between Turkey, the KRG and the United States to seize parts of northern Iraq and eastern Syria to create a de facto Sunni state that will be jointly-controlled by Ankara and Washington.  It also looks like Obama has agreed to use dodgy jihadi-proxies (aka–Terrorists) to work alongside US Special Forces to carry out future military operations.  So while the effort to remove Assad has been temporarily put on the backburner, the determination to destroy Syria is as strong as ever.

Another dismembered part of old Syria and Iraq which central planners are hoping to hack-off is an area called Rojava (see map above), or ‘Western Kurdistan’. This region in northern Syria, formerly known as Syrian Kurdistan, gained its autonomy in November 2013 as part of the ongoing Rojava Revolution. The Kurdish defense forces here are known as the YPG (People’s Defense Units) and are not on friendly footing with neighboring Turkey, for a number of reasons, not least of all because YPG defense forces present resistance to both al Nusra and ISIS encroachments into all three Rojava cantons. For Turkey, this is bad for business. How Rojava will factor into Washington’s plans is not clear yet, but it occupies the most strategic squares on the chessboard.

Make no mistake, the history’s actors are all in for this plan. Do not be fooled by talk of ‘peace and stability’ or humanitarian platitudes from western leaders, the UN, or the fair weather international community.

Another indication that these plans have the full backing of the neoconservative illiterati, and Israel too, was PNAC walrus and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s recent article in the establishment’s daily journal of political posterity, the New York Times, where he states:

“Today’s reality is that Iraq and Syria as we have known them are gone. The Islamic State has carved out a new entity from the post-Ottoman Empire settlement, mobilizing Sunni opposition to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Iran-dominated government of Iraq. Also emerging, after years of effort, is a de facto independent Kurdistan.”

Central planners will happily frame this geopolitical scenario within the preferred theme of Sunni vs Shia ‘sectarian strife’ in the region, which just happens to suit the interests and desires of both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Bolton confirms this:

If, in this context, defeating the Islamic State means restoring to power Mr. Assad in Syria and Iran’s puppets in Iraq, that outcome is neither feasible nor desirable. Rather than striving to recreate the post-World War I map, Washington should recognize the new geopolitics. The best alternative to the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq is a new, independent Sunni state.

Not so fast Mr. Ambassador. The Islamic State is the Sunni State.

So for all intents and purposes, he’s calling for the establishment of the Caliphate (funny how this goes right over the heads of ‘conservatives’).

This is just one of many geostrategic moves which will guarantee instability and military conflict in the region for another 100 years, as well as provide a timely entrée through to Azerbaijan and intoIran, and later towards the Eurasian heartland of Dagestan (Russia’s emerging energy center and geographic underbelly).

In the meantime, expect to be pelted with endless propaganda about starving children in one town or another, changing week to week – with the usual slogans like, “we must act now!”, and blaming Bashar al Assad for the suffering of his people. It’s already wearing thin.

Until the US and its NATO-GCC Axis stops flooding Syria and the region with weapons and terrorist fighters, and continues its policy of toppling secular nation-states – then any attempt at holding peace talks will end up back at square one, and stand as another exercise in futility.

If Syria has been good for one thing, it’s that the western narrative, and all of its variations, has finally hit the wall of truth.