It is a heritage of colonialism that its predatory economic systems outlast its victims’ independence declarations. And so today, paradoxically, slavery remains the top export of Haiti, the country that first broke its shackles.

The sale of unskilled Haitian labor from sweatshops and sugarcane fields to traditional colonial powers is well documented. Less well known is the current dissipation of Haiti’s middle class toward the emerging powers in the United Nations’ so-called peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH), especially Brazil. Any sovereign republic would regard its middle class as being an investment not to be trifled with: a wealth to which one clings until the last battle. But Haiti is no longer a sovereign nation, and there are many reasons for this. One of these is that the Haitian ruling class is so lacking in creativity that it will cheerfully squander the little that is left of the country’s middle class to increase the government’s take of foreign remittances and taxes on international phone calls. The advantage to the foreign invaders is that the population that would be most incensed by their presence becomes disenfranchised, scattered and disempowered, to be replaced by a group of settlers from non-governmental organizations (NGO).

Overwhelmingly young, male, and educated

About 76,000 Haitians have migrated to Brazil since 2010. This exodus has reached a rate of about 75 Haitians per day and continues to accelerate. Ninety-three percent of the Haitian migrants are between 19 and 45 years old; seventy-seven percent are male. The demographics of this group alone should give one pause. Historically, young male migrants have been brutally exploited, especially for dangerous construction work, and treated as being expendable. For example, the Chinese workers who built the United States railroads between 1864 and 1869 were, in some cases, lowered from ropes against the steep slopes of mountains and canyons, to chisel holes and place dynamite in them to prepare areas for drilling and blasting. Many were killed by the crude explosives of the times, which were mixed on site to drill the tunnels, sometimes through granite; others perished from blizzards and avalanches as they worked through the winters. Like the Chinese in 19th-century US, most Haitians who migrate to Brazil today wind up in the most dangerous jobs in Brazil’s construction of mines, buildings, stadiums, highways, bridges, and hydroelectric dams.

A survey of 340 Haitians in May 2014 by Puc Mines, in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and at the request of the National Immigration Council (CNIg), revealed that nearly all of the immigrants are literate, with most having some primary education and the rest being highly educated. “We are winning the presence of teachers, judges and entrepreneurs here,” boasted the survey’s research coordinator, Duval Fernandes.

Humanitarian trafficking

In the Brazilian news, the migration of Haitians is always attributed to homelessness from the January 12, 2010 earthquake. A corollary of this notion is that the acceptance of Haitians by Brazil is a humanitarian gesture. This does not hold up to a close examination. In 2010, when Haitians were most desperate for housing, Brazil granted only 475 humanitarian visas to Haitian immigrants. The issuance of humanitarian visas to Haitians began in earnest two years later. This was occasioned mainly by a Brazilian workers’ revolt that started in March 2011. It began when a worker at Jirau Hydroelectric dam, being built by the French company GDF Suez in an isolated jungle, was not allowed to visit a sick relative 80 miles away in the city of Porto Velho. Workers burned 60 buses and several buildings, including the lodgings for 16,000, and then they undertook a prolonged strike for better wages, better transportation and permissions to visit home. In April 2012, the Jirau workers met and decided to end their 25-day strike when they got a 7 percent raise and other benefits, but a group of still dissatisfied workers torched one third of the housing that was left, including the lodgings for 3,200 workers. Importantly, these actions led to sympathy strikes that put a halt to construction projects throughout all of Brazil, include the Belo Monte hydropower complex and the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERI). Furthermore, thousands of Brazilian workers quit their jobs and returned home, leaving the plants hugely understaffed. Elsewhere in Brazil, in some cases similar settlements were reached and work was resumed; in others massive construction projects had to be postponed.

A brisk business of trafficking Haitians to Brazil began almost immediately after the workers’ revolts, with the rate in 2011 for a trip organized by a coyote being $5,000: a cost that was well beyond the means of the many Haitians who were sheltered in tents after the earthquake. The 3,700-mile trek would begin with travel to the Dominican Republic; from there, the Haitians would be put on a flight to Ecuador, where a visa was not required. After this, they were taken by bus into Peru, where a visa was also not needed before 2012. From Peru, they would enter Brazil, in the northwestern state of Acre. Since a visa was required in Brazil, they would then travel by bus or taxi to the nearest office of the Brazilian Federal Police, usually in the city of Brasileia, and apply there for a visa. Over 40,000 Haitians have been trafficked in this way, starting with only 37 individuals in 2010; increasing rapidly to 1,175 during 2011; and continuing to accelerate to more than 9,000 for the first half of 2015.

Simultaneously with the start of the illegal traffic of Haitians, powerful Brazilian interests began to clamor for a legal admission of large numbers of Haitians, with support from human rights groups. At a senate hearing in late December 2011, several powerful senators with interests in construction lobbied vigorously for a liberalization of Haitian immigration. Among them was Senator Jorge Viana, whose brother, Tião Viana, was the governor of Acre. Senator Viana proposed that Brazil should legally admit 10,000 to 30,000 Haitians. Within about a month, President Dilma Rousseff visited Haiti to announce that 1,200 visas would be granted from the Brazilian Embassy in Port-au-Prince every year for the next five years “to Haitian families.” This limit was discarded in 2013, when Brazil issued more than 5,000 visas to Haitian immigrants. In 2014, the number of visas increased to 6,000. By October 2015, Brazil was issuing more than 2,200 visas per month, all presumably for humanitarian reasons! Furthermore, by pressuring Peru to require visas from Haitians, and Ecuador and Bolivia to prosecute their human traffickers, the Brazilian government managed to outcompete the illegal traffic of Haitians with its own legal traffic of about 36,000 Haitians between 2010 and 2015. Mr. Tião Viana is now alleged to have been involved in the Petrobras scandal, a convoluted scheme to launder about $3.8 billion that had been embezzled over a decade, from inflated construction contracts, for bribes and kickbacks. Ms. Rousseff is under threat of impeachment for her failure to stem the corruption.

Slave labor

Along with the immigration of Haitians as scabs and low-wage workers into Brazil, there has been an increase in the country of cases of slave labor and debt bondage, most of which have not become public. In November 2013, however, an inspection by the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment resulted in the rescue of  100 enslaved Haitians from the mining company Anglo American and its subcontractor, the construction company Diedro. The workers had been living in lodgings that were under construction, in the city of Conceicao do Mato Dentro, in the state of Minas Gerais. According to inspector Marcelo Gonçalves Campos, “one of the houses was like a slave quarters from the colonial period. It was absolutely awful. Basically, there was a large space with wood stoves. The construction was not even masonry.” According to an investigative report by Stefano Wrobleski of Reporter Brasil, the food was of such poor quality that some of the workers had stomach bleeding. When questioned, the Haitians said they had been banned from leaving work for three months, because they had to pay their transportation (about $100) from Acre to their work site.

In another scandal, also described by Wrobleski, 21 Haitians were rescued in June 2013 from a site where they had been living without enough beds for all of them, and they often had no water. They had been building a residential complex financed with funds from the federal housing program, Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life) for a third-party contractor, Sisan Engineering, which, until the inspectors showed up, had apparently fired them without paying their salary after two weeks of work. Such scandals about the finance of slave labor with public money have become legion in Brazil. Most of the victims are poor black Brazilians, but more and more cases of similar exploitation of Haitians in other cities, like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, by contractors financed by Minha Casa, Minha Vida projects are being uncovered. The difference between the Haitians and the Brazilians who are rescued from such slavery is that the Brazilians get bus fares homes. The Haitians are not so lucky.

What future for Haitians in Brazil?

According to a 2010 census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), people who are black or of mixed race recently became 51 percent of the Brazilian population. This majority is certainly not reflected in the political power of these groups, who earn half as much as white and Asian Brazilians. Blacks and mixed-race Brazilians are also underserved by their government. For example, sanitation is available in 87 percent of southeast Brazil but 30 percent of the north, which has the highest black population. None of these numbers, however, reflect the reality of a country where even middle-class whites universally barricade themselves in buildings with security guards and nine-foot high walls lined with barbed wire, and blacks are relegated to slums (favelas) in which whites are afraid even to drive. On November 11, 2015, the Brazilian government announced, with great fanfare, that it would grant permanent residence to 43,781 Haitian applicants. In the current recession that has seen the loss of more than 385,000 construction jobs in 2015 alone, and the atmosphere of racism that pervades Brazil, this is unlikely to do much to improve the lot of the 70 percent of Haitian workers who toil in Brazil without a work contract. Most such workers earn so little that they can barely send money home and eat enough calories to stay alive. Furthermore this decision by the Brazilian government will leave some 32,000 Haitians without permanent residence to the continued ruthless exploitation of Brazilian subcontractors.

Syrian Arab Army and Hezbollah conduct an encirclement operation on the north of Latakia Governorate against Turkestan Islamic Party and al-Nusra Front forces. Encircling of the enemy forces is executed simultaneously with the raining down destruction of the encircled groups by Syrian and Russian aviation.

On Thursday evening the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) supported by the National Defense Forces (NDF) captured Jabal Al-Sayyid. This already forced the militants to withdraw towards the northern mountainside of Jabal Al-Turkmen. This morning clashes were observed in Jabal Al-Turkmen, Jabal Al-Akrad and Jabal Al-Zahiyah where the pro-government forces are continuing offensive actions.

SouthFront: Analysis&Intelligence supposes that the task of the final operational encirclement on the north of Latakia Governorate will be accomplished by Syrian governmental forces within 6-7 days.

The SAA and its allies advanced on the terrorists’ positions in the city of Aleppo on Thursday. The loyalists’ forces destroyed terrorists in the neighborhoods of al-Lairamoun, al-Firdous and Bani Zaid. Also clashes were observed in the districts of al-Maasaraniyeh, al-Sheikh Lutfi and Bustan al-Basha.

Separately, the SAA has destroyed the ISIS strongholds and fortifications in the villages of Najjara and al-Jaberiyeh in the Eastern part of Aleppo province. 10 militants were killed in the attacks. Militants’ weapons and machine gun-equipped vehicles were also destroyed.

Twelve US F-15 fighter jets deployed temporarily in Turkey’s Incirlik air base last month returned to their Lakenheath airbase in the UK on Wednesday. The US European Command (EUCOM) said that the temporary deployment strengthened interoperability of the US and Turkish air forces in defending Turkish airspace and conducting alleged operations against ISIS. The EUCOM stated that the end of F-15 deployments does not indicate a reduction in operations against ISIS. However, it is a remarkable move amid the cooling of the US-Turkish relations.

Weapon Used in November 13 Paris Attacks Came From CIA-linked Arms Dealer

By Alex Lantier, December 18 2015

At least one of the guns used in the November 13 terror attacks in Paris was purchased by Century International Arms and then re-exported to Europe. One of the largest arms dealers in the United States, Century Arms has close ties to the CIA and has faced charges in America and Europe of involvement in illegal arms deals.

Venezuela: A Revolution That Will Not Die

By Eric Draitser, December 18 2015

A few weeks after shooting down a Sukhoi Su-24M tactical bomber jet operating in Syrian airspace, Turkey sent a heavily armed battalion into the Zilkan military base in Iraq. The move can be seen as a compensation for the weakening of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS/IS/DAESH) and the ISIL’s oil smuggling infrastructure. It can also be viewed as a Turkish preparation for the aftermath of the future defeat of the ISIL in Iraq.

Ominous Timing: Turkish Dispatch to Mosul

Amidst the Russo-Turkish row, the Turkish government dispatched a Turkish battalion of twenty-five M-60 Patton tanks to the Mosul District of Iraq’s Ninawa Governorate. The Turkish press even announced that Ankara had declared that it was establishing a permanent military base inside Iraq’s Mosul District. The Iraqi federal government reacted immediately by calling the Turkish move a hostile act that violated international law and Iraqi sovereignty.

Ankara tried to justify its military deployment to the Iraqi town of Bashiqa, in the close proximity of 30 kilometers to the northeastern outskirts of the ISIL-controlled city of Mosul, by claiming that it was a routine rotation of military personnel. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu claimed that the Turkish military had been dispatched to the area to train and reorganize Iraqi locals to fight the ISIL at the request of Baghdad. The Turkish deployment was presented as part of an ongoing process of security cooperation between Iraq and Turkey by Davutoglu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

At first the Turkish government claimed that the deployment was approved by the Iraqi federal government and military, but this was quickly rejected as untrue in Baghdad by President Mohammed Fouad Masum, Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, Foreign Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, and Defence Minister Khaled Al-Obeidi. Not only was the Turkish deployment rejected by the Iraqi government, it was also described as much too big for a training mission and Erdogan was derided as an outright liar by Iraqi authorities and parliamentarians. Then Ankara tried to defend its actions by absurdly claiming that it was approved by Iraqi Kurdistan’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government.

The Turkish-Kurdistan Regional Government Alliance: Dividing Iraq?

It turned out that the senior diplomat Feridun Sinirlioglu, who was Turkey’s foreign minister at the time, in violation of international law had made an illegally agreement with the corrupt Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani for establishing the base in the Mosul District on November 4, 2015. As a regional government, the Kurdistan Regional Government has no constitutional authority to make defensive agreements without the Iraqi federal government in Baghdad. Nor does it have legal jurisdiction over the area that the Turkish military deployed to. Bashiqa is in disputed territory in the Nineveh Governorate that the Kurdistan Regional Government claims. Other territorial claims include Diyala Governorate, Kirkuk Governorate, and Saladin Governorate. In June 2014, Massoud Barzani took advantage of the ISIL offensive on Mosul to send his forces to take control over these territories while the Iraqi military was busy fighting. Thus, in parallel to the ISIL offensive against Iraq from Syria, the Kurdistan Regional Government opportunistically used the ISIL attacks to send its Peshmerga troops into the energy-rich Kirkuk Governorate, to gain control over part of the Mosul District, and unilaterally take control of the territory that the Iraqi federal government administrated.

The excuses from the Turkish government continued as tensions with Iraq increased. Instead of removing the Turkish military unit that was sent to Bashiqa, Ankara pledged not to send anymore military reinforcements until Baghdad’s concerns were placated. Indirectly meaning Iran and Russia, Davutoglu would write in a letter to Baghdad saying the governments «who are disturbed by the cooperation of Turkey and Iraq and who want to end it should not be allowed to attain their goal» on December 6, 2015.

Dragging his feet, Erdogan would add that it was «out of the question» and «impossible» to remove the Turkish military units and that the Turkish unit had been sent to Iraq to protect Turkish military trainers and advisors who he argued were posted 15 to 20 kilometers from the ISIL’s positions. Interestingly, there has been no record of the Turkish forces ever facing a serious attack by the ISIL, during the zenith of the terrorist organization’s full strength, before the Russian strikes in Syria commenced on September 30. Speaking on Turkish television, President Erdogan would blame Iran and Russia for engineering the crisis between Turkey and Iraq, and then ingenuously argue that his government’s soldiers had entered Iraq to defend Turkish security interests and that Ankara did not have the luxury of waiting for the invitation of the central Iraqi government while Turkey was under threat from the ISIL. Mohammed Ali Al-Hakim, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, would eventually deliver a letter from Baghdad to the UN Security Council on December 11 asking the UN to get Turkey to withdraw its military from Iraq.

Ankara’s deployment to the outskirts of Mosul is a reaction to the successful campaigns by Iran, Russia, Syria, Iraq, and Hezbollah – the security alliance also referred to as the «4+1» – in weakening the ISIL. For the first time ever, the Turkish military had entered Iraq’s northern region without the justification of fighting Kurds. Calculating that the Iraqi federal government will be able to refocus its attention on the territorial dispute with the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Turkish deployments are meant to help the Kurdistan Regional Government consolidate the territory and energy reserves it opportunistically annexed from the Iraqi federal government in 2014; it was also revealed by Ankara that it intended to dispatch Turkish soldiers and military equipment to Soran and Qala Cholan near the Iranian border.

Iraqi parliamentarians, like Awatif Nima, have accused Turkey of entering Iraq to help the ISIL in Mosul and working to partition Iraq. Turkey has been cultivating ties with the clans of Mosul, particularly the Nujaifis. Turkish support for Iraqi Kurdistan’s separate oil export capacity has also weakened the unity of Iraq and the finances of both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Speaking to Al Jazeera in Orwellian language on December 9, Erdogan claimed that the governments in Iraq, Iran, and Syria were executing sectarian policies and then himself justified the Turkish deployment to the Mosul District in sectarian language. He told Al Jazeera that Turkey had elevated its military presence to protect Iraq’s Arabs, Turkomans, and Kurds that are Sunni Muslims. He then added that the Sunni Muslims all need to be armed and trained to fight, which is the objective of Turkey’s mission. In this regard, not only has Turkey been planning to train and arm the Kurdistan Regional Government’s security forces, but also planning on doing the same with local volunteers in Zilkan that the Kurdistan Regional Government and Peshmerga Major-General Noorudeen Herki supportively claim are part of the Hashad Al-Watani in the Mosul District. Regardless of any affiliation to the Hashad Al-Watani, the «volunteers» in Mosul may end up being like the so-called «moderates» that that the US and its allies trained and supported that later joined the ISIL in Syria.

Preparing for the Aftermath of the Future ISIL Defeat in Iraq?

Despite Erdogan’s assertions that the Turkish forces in the Mosul District could not leave, they were redeployed northward inside Iraq into territory administered by the Kurdistan Regional Government on December 14. Prime Minister Davutoglu’s office commented that this was a part of a «new arrangement» where ten to twelve of the tanks were being relocated northwards. While Turkey attempted to get some legal backing from the Kurdistan Regional Government for its military presence, the redeployment from Bashiqa is an admission that both Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government understand that the latter has no jurisdiction to okay Ankara’s deployment into the Mosul District.

The Turkish redeployment is the result of coordination between Ankara and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani went to Turkey on December 9 for meetings with Erdogan and Davutoglu. Subliminal messages were being sent: very tellingly the Iraqi flag was absent and only the flag of Iraqi Kurdistan was put alongside the Turkish flag during the meetings. Ankara and Barzani are trying to salvage the situation and sidestep the Iraqi government in Baghdad. A few days earlier, in this context, Erdogan announced that a trilateral meeting between the Turkish government, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the US would take place on December 21.

The Turkish military movements inside Iraq are additionally tied to petro-politics and the protection of energy supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turkish deployment to Bashiqa took place right after Russian airstrikes weakened the ISIL’s oil smuggling infrastructure. Undoubtedly, the subject of oil was mentioned between Barzani and Turkish leaders, because of Bazani’s involvement in Turkey’s illegal oil exporting business.

Click image to order Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya’s international bestseller: The Globalization of NATO  

Click here to read part one of this article.

Click here to read part three of this article.

(to be continued)

This article was originally published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on December 18, 2015.

Turkey is a valued NATO member, a close US ally. Last month, the EU bribed Turkey with 3 billion euros and promised help to join the bloc in return for accepting refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries its member states don’t want.

EU leaders called the deal a key way to stem the tide of asylum-seekers. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said it marked a new beginning in Ankara/Brussels relations.

Given Turkey’s horrific human rights record and unsavory history, especially under Erdogan, distrust remains high.

Agreement terms call for Ankara to increase Aegean Sea patrols in areas bordering Greece and Bulgaria, crack down on human smuggling gangs, and accept refugees turned away by EU countries.

European Council President Donald Tusk said EU officials will closely monitor Turkey’s implementation of terms reached. Davutoglu wouldn’t guarantee a slowdown in the human flood seeking safe havens in Europe, Germany the most favored destination.

Turkey is the main crossing point for Syrian and other regional refugees. It’s a short distance by sea to Greece. This year, well over 700,000 asylum seekers arrived in EU countries from Turkey, according to the International Organization of Migration.

A new Amnesty International (AI) report titled “Europe’s Gatekeeper” accuses Turkey of arresting, beating, painfully shackling and otherwise abusing refugees in isolated detention centers, many then deported back to war-torn Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, their homeland countries.

AI said EU nations are “in danger of being complicit in serious human rights violations against refugees and asylum-seekers.”

They’re rounded up in large numbers, bused over 1,000km to desolate locations best described as concentration camps, grossly mistreated and held incommunicado – many then forcibly deported back from where they came.

According to AI’s Europe and Central Asia director John Dalhuisen:

“(w)e have documented the arbitrary detention of some of the most vulnerable people on Turkish soil.”

“Pressuring refugees and asylum-seekers to return to countries like Syria and Iraq is not only unconscionable, but it’s also in direct breach of international law.”

“By engaging Turkey as a gatekeeper for Europe in the refugee crisis, the EU is in danger of ignoring and now encouraging serious human rights violations. EU-Turkey migration-related cooperation should cease until such violations are investigated and ended.”

Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee population, including about 2.2 million Syrians and 230,000 desperate people from other regional countries.

Until last September, treatment didn’t include brutalizing lawless detentions and forced deportations. Terms of the EU deal require Turkey to treat refugees humanely.

Instead, its funds are used to brutalize and expel vulnerable people deserving much better. All refugees AI representatives interviewed said they were forcibly detained, taken to Turkey’s western provinces, including Edirne and Mugla, before transported to desolate southern or eastern outposts.

They’re forcibly detained for weeks and denied outside contacts, including with lawyers and family members. Their only means of communication is through concealed cell phones.

Cases of horrific treatment included a 40-year-old Syrian man, isolated for seven days, his hands and feet painfully shackled.

“When they put a chain over your hands and legs, you feel like a slave, like you are not a human being,” he said.

For many, this type horrific treatment is followed by pressure to sign a document in Turkish refugees don’t understand, then forced deportation.

Detainees said the only way they can leave detention is agreeing to return home. A three-year-old child’s fingerprints were used as evidence of his consent.

AI said it’s unknown how many refugees are being forcibly deported, but it believes it’s many, including to Afghanistan.

According to Dalhuisen, “(t)here is a total lack of transparency surrounding these cases and the real number of arbitrary detentions and unlawful deportations carried out by the Turkish authorities is unknown.”

“This new practice must be investigated immediately to protect all refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey.”

So far, EU officials have done nothing to intervene responsibly. They’re complicit with Turkey and Washington – their wars causing the human flood in the first place.

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.

[Featured image: An Islamic State fighter uses a mobile to film his fellow fighters taking part in a military parade along the streets of Syria’s northern Raqqa province June 30, 2014. © Stringer / Reuter]

US intelligence services have mapped Islamic State’s media installations producing terrorist propaganda for the internet, yet none of them have been bombed out for fear of collateral damage and the need for intelligence to monitor the jihadists’ operations.

The terrorists’ media centers, which edit and compile video and written material for propaganda over the web are located in residential areas in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The whereabouts of such installations are well known and thoroughly mapped out after a months-long clandestine intelligence program, The Washington Times reports, citing anonymous sources.

US-led coalition pounds #ISIS-stronghold of Raqqa with leaflets http://t.co/8kn1PaQVlX pic.twitter.com/qecOrmGzxS

— RT (@RT_com) July 20, 2015

“Obviously, if we know where they’re producing the propaganda, we should be doing everything we can to destroy their facilities,” William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar and former State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism, told The Washington Times.

But the Obama administration has not rushed to target these facilities with airstrikes or Hellfire missiles fired from drones. The explanation offered is not hard to plumb: innocent civilians in neighboring buildings might die as a result of an airstrike. Yet The Washington Times also mentions another declared reason for keeping the terrorists’ “propaganda bullhorn” in operation.

The White House expects US intelligence to keep Islamic State (IS, former ISIS/ISIL) public relations operations under scrutiny “to learn how the Islamic State and its media enterprises operate,” The Washington Times said.

So ISIS’s “digital warriors” continue to disseminate radical Islam around the world, recruiting new jihadists and radicalizing young Muslims. In the meantime, America’s counter-terrorist media efforts have little to show.

The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications inside the State Department created in 2011 has 69 employees busy disseminating anti-Islamic State messages in multiple languages.

A State Department official told The Times that the majority of those employees are focused on “crafting messaging that exposes ‘weakness’ and ‘lies’ in Islamic State propaganda.”

The same official revealed that with an annual budget of $5.5 million the center is “grossly underfunded,” claiming the critics of the interagency misunderstand the importance of the unit’s operations in the long-term perspective of fighting Islamic extremism.

In early December, The Washington Times reported that the US State Department might scale back its direct involvement in online Islamic State defamation campaigns after outside experts “cast new doubt on the US government’s ability to serve as a credible voice against the terrorist group’s propaganda.”

#Daesh Aka #IslamicState/#ISIS/#ISIL Terror Group’s A’maq Agency Propaganda Android App Still Available In Internet. pic.twitter.com/nT24d7vdBB

— Terrormonitor.org (@Terror_Monitor) December 7, 2015

While US social media companies are in defensive posture, simply blocking extremist content and deleting jihadi links from their area of responsibility, the Islamists assume the offensive, learning to wage media campaigns, producing influential HD-quality video with special effects and making into page professionally designed multilingual agitprop.

The jihadists are mastering the art of trolling, too. The latest extremist video issued a month ago boasts the terror acts staged in Paris and promises the US the same approach, noting parenthetically about American war veterans that returned from “victorious” campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, suffering from the PTSD and committing suicides by thousands.

ISIS “editing suites” producing extremist videos are scattered about the Middle East countries and beyond, be it in Northern Africa or the North Caucasus.

UK-based counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation reported in October that there at least 35 media centers producing Jihadist propaganda material from “all corners of the Islamic State ‘caliphate.’”

As The Washington Post reported in late November, one such media center was spotted near the Syrian city of Aleppo. A two-story building in a residential neighborhood was reportedly stuffed with high-end equipment, used Internet access through a Turkish wireless service and served as an “editorial office” for Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine and al-Furqan media channel.

But the Pentagon declined to comment on The Post’s findings.

The Quilliam Foundation notes that Islamic State’s “exceptionally sophisticated” information operation campaign is based on “quantity and quality” principles.

“Given this scale and dedication, negative measures like censorship are bound to fail,” the report concluded.

Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has told the BBC she believes her party has won a parliamentary majority, in her first interview since the historic elections.

Early results point to a sweeping victory for her National League for Democracy (NLD), but final official results will not be known for days.

The election was seen as the most democratic in Myanmar for 25 years.

In an nterview with the BBC’s Fergal Keane, Ms Suu Kyi said the polls were not fair but “largely free”.

She said there had been “areas of intimidation”.

Suu Kyi’s comments regarding “areas of intimidation” are particularly ironic, with the BBC itself reporting  before the elections that Suu Kyi’s own followers had protested the sitting government’s attempts to grant Myanmar’s Rohingya minority identification cards and the right to vote in these very polls.

In the BBC’s February article titled, “Myanmar revokes Rohingya voting rights after protests,” it stated:

Rohingya Muslims will not be able to vote in Myanmar’s referendum after President Thein Sein withdrew temporary voting rights following protests.

Hundreds of Buddhists took to the streets following the passage of a law that would allow temporary residents who hold “white papers” to vote.

These “Buddhists” cited by the BBC are of course Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD’s “Saffron” foot soldiers who led the pro-NLD riots during the “Saffron Revolution” in 2007. Their support for Suu Kyi’s political party explains Suu Kyi’s own hypocritical silence over the unjust treatment the Rohingya have suffered at their hands – the same sort of injustice Suu Kyi has claimed to be standing up against as part of her “pro-democracy” platform.

So compromised is Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Suu Kyi, that even the Western press has noted it in recent months. The same BBC who now claims recent elections are “historic” despite the fact that the winning NLD benefited from its supporters’ campaign to disenfranchise over a million Rohingya from casting their votes, had previously noted her silence.

In its article, “Aung San Suu Kyi: Where are you?,” the BBC reports:

In parliament, where she sits as an opposition MP, the 69-year-old frequently criticises the government for the slow pace of reform, and restates her increasingly forlorn demands for constitutional change.

But on the persecution of Myanmar’s most famously forgotten minority Ms Suu Kyi is silent.

The report continues by claiming:

…there are currently about 800,000 people in western Myanmar, denied the most basic of rights and discriminated against due to the circumstances of their birth. They’ve been fleeing into the hands of cruel trafficking rings because they’re poor and desperate.

From a simple human rights perspective it’s a continuing outrage that should shame us all.

So why, despite the calls from around the world is Ms Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, reluctant to raise her voice?

The report goes on to admit Suu Kyi’s self-serving agenda, and that her image as a “human rights activist” is merely an illusion:

The simplest explanation, voiced repeatedly over the last few weeks, is that she’s always been a pragmatic politician not a human rights activist.

By defending the Rohingya, Ms Suu Kyi would immediately put herself at odds with powerful Buddhist nationalist groups, potentially changing the dynamics of this year’s all important general election.  

If Not for Human Rights, Why Does the West Love Suu Kyi So? 

It is quite clear that Suu Kyi’s image as a “pro-democracy” “human rights activist” is a facade. Her largest bloc of supporters, these “powerful Buddhist nationalists” represent the darkest elements of Myanmar society, responsible for decades of violence, discrimination, genocide, racism, and bigotry. Besides “human right” and “democracy,” Suu Kyi’s only other notable campaign promise is to bring in “foreign investment.”

It is with this foreign investment that we find precisely why the West has actively supported Suu Kyi, her opposition party, a growing network of US and British funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and intentionally perpetuated the myth of Suu Kyi’s clearly nonexistent “humanitarianism.”

The London Telegraph, in its article, “Aung San Suu Kyi calls for foreign investment in Burma,” reported:

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s democratic opposition leader, called for foreign investment to solve the malaise of youth unemployment in her troubled homeland in her first speech in decades on European soil.

It would also report that:

Her speech was dedicated to the cause of eradicating forced labour in Burma. “The international community is trying very hard to bring my country into it and it’s up to our country to respond the right way,” she said.

Within the same article, Suu Kyi’s troubling statements over her eagerness to see Myanmar, which she and the Western press still call by its British colonial nomenclature of “Burma,” folded into the Western “international community” through “foreign investment,” is softened by various references to her “activism” and the various awards she picked up during her trip to Europe.

It is clear that Suu Kyi’s “activism” is serving as cover for her true role in Myanmar’s upcoming future, which entails the incremental transfer of Myanmar’s nationalized resources, industries, and infrastructure to foreign corporations. Just as Suu Kyi and her NLD’s abuse of the Rohyingya have been spun and covered up for as long as it suited the Western media, her role in disenfranchising the rest of Myanmar’s population with her and her party’s growing influence will likewise be obfuscated, spun, or otherwise completely buried.

And Suu Kyi’s silence over the Rohyinya, and the horrific injustice they have been subjected to by her most stalwart followers serves another, more sinister purpose. At any time Suu Kyi and her NLD attempt to pursue policy inconsistent with those foreign interests who helped them into power, the Western media who has so far remained silent and complicit can just as easily begin reporting the truth, including the fact that Suu Kyi’s recent victory at the polls was predicated on the disenfranchisement of over a million victimized Rohingya.

Suu Kyi’s Entire Movement is a US-UK Enterprise 

All empires throughout history have ruled not only directly, but indirectly through various agents. Building up movements, leaders, and power blocs that are entirely dependent on foreign cash and political support, ensures enduring loyalty. In the days of the Roman Empire, the children of foreign leaders would be held hostage in Rome as an insurance policy for continued loyalty. These children would be educated, and more importantly, indoctrinated in all ways Roman, before being sent back home where they would bring that indoctrination with them.

Today, it is one’s fictional image and legacy that is held hostage, with disobedience met with uncharacteristically honest news coverage of unsavory realities that usually go unreported. Instead of a leader’s children being indoctrinated and sent back to plant the seeds of greater foreign influence, entire multi-million dollar education programs seek to train and send back by the hundreds “activists” and “youth leaders” to infect a targeted nation’s body politic.

Suu Kyi, her NLD, and their various allies across “civil society” are no different.

Far from the mere accusations of her opponents, Suu Kyi and her network’s extensive foreign backing is revealed by the backers themselves. In the 2006 Burma Campaign UK report, “Failing the People of Burma?”, the vast scale of this support is revealed. It states:

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED – see Appendix 1, page 27) has been at the forefront of our program efforts to promote democracy and improved human rights in Burma since 1996. We are providing $2,500,000 in FY 2003 funding from the Burma earmark in the Foreign Operations legislation. The NED will use these funds to support Burmese and ethnic minority democracy-promoting organizations through a sub-grant program. The projects funded are designed to disseminate information inside Burma supportive of Burma’s democratic development, to create democratic infrastructures and institutions, to improve the collection of information on human rights abuses by the Burmese military and to build capacity to support the restoration of democracy when the appropriate political openings occur and the exiles/refugees return.

How democratic institutions representing the people of Myanmar can be created by foreign interests who refuse to even call Myanmar by its official name is no mystery. The NED has absolutely no intention of creating anything resembling democracy in Myanmar. Instead, it is seizing Myanmar’s political institutions under the guise of democracy, creating and controlling everything they can within the country, while gradually wearing down existing institutions that remain beyond their reach.

The report provides further details regarding foreign backing among Myanmar’s “opposition” and NGOs revealing that everyone from the New Era Journal and the Irrawaddy, to the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) radio, were all created by and continuously funded to this day by the US State Department.

The report also reveals a scholarship program set up to train Suu Kyi’s supporters abroad before having them return home, not entirely unlike what was done during the days of the Roman Empire:

The State Department provided $150,000 in FY 2001/02 funds to provide scholarships to young Burmese through Prospect Burma, a partner organization with close ties to Aung San Suu Kyi. With FY 2003/04 funds, we plan to support Prospect Burma’s work given the organization’s proven competence in managing scholarships for individuals denied educational opportunities by the continued repression of the military junta, but committed to a return to democracy in Burma.

What is clear is that Suu Kyi’s movement represents decades of funding and backing by the West, with entire institutions created from scratch by foreign interests to assist Suu Kyi and her NLD into power. Her movement would likely not even exist without the endless millions poured into it annually by the United States and British governments. The West’s “human rights” organizations have meticulously documented, then intentional spun or buried evidence regarding her movement’s role in the continued attempted genocide against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.

Likely, this documented evidence serves as an insurance policy in the unlikely event Suu Kyi’s movement transcends the need of the many millions poured into it from abroad. Thus, Suu Kyi, her NLD, all of its partners across the growing myriad of US and British-funded NGOs, and the “Saffron” mobs themselves represent not only a betrayal of Mynamar’s hard-earned independence from the British Empire, but traitors who are compromised on multiple levels, serving as multiple vectors through which foreign interests can re-enter and re-conquer Myanmar.

“Democracy” and “Foreign Investment” Aren’t Policies… 

Suu Kyi’s campaign was based on much rhetoric and very little substance. Democracy is but a means, not an end, so her “pro-democracy” stance has very little meaning now that elections are over and she finds herself in power. Seeking vast foreign investment  is also not a policy. It is the deferral of leading the development of one’s own country to foreign interests.

The fact that Suu Kyi’s entire movement is a foreign-backed creation, extorted regarding its own despicable treatment of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority, and lacking any semblance of an independent national policy, makes Myanmar’s recent elections “historic” indeed. It is an unprecedented moment of weakness that now exposes the country to a multitude of threats it is unable to protect itself against.

Those who supported Suu Kyi in good faith will be quickly disillusioned when the inept leader fails to materialize the fantastical “democratic” utopia she has promised for decades. They will be quickly disillusioned as her followers’ insatiable barbarism transforms from street violence into nationally sanctioned genocide. They will be disillusioned as Exxon, Chevron, BP, Monsanto, and other hated corporations who have circled above like vultures waiting for this moment of weakness, finally land and prepare to bury their heads in this vulnerability.

Suu Kyi and her NDL, however compromised they are, also present an unprecedented opportunity to Myanmar’s ruling establishment. For decades Suu Kyi has been able to protest, complain, and rhetorically pelt Myanmar’s current political order for its failures and the state of impoverishment and repression the people of Myanmar allegedly face. Now it will be her turn to take full responsibility for Myanmar’s plight.

Poverty, injustice, violence, and real national progress cannot be dealt with through “democracy” and “foreign investment.” No matter what Western headlines say to the rest of the world, the people in Myanmar will see for themselves the shortcomings, failures, and incompetence of Suu Kyi and her NLD. Myanmar will become well-acquainted with Suu Kyi’s true colors, and may decide the devil they knew was tame in comparison. Upon that realization, Suu Kyi, her NLD, and any possible successor to the aging foreign-proxy will be permanently swept from any prospect of ever leading the country again.

For Myanmar’s neighbors, caution in dealing with any government led by Suu Kyi’s NLD would be wise. The foreign interests that have created this “historic” moment of weakness in Myanmar, seek to do so across all of Southeast Asia, and in many instances, have already done so. The Shinawatra clique in Thailand represented foreign interests and their failed attempts to overwrite Thailand historically, culturally, politically, and socioeconomically. Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim, now incarcerated, also sought to herald Malaysia’s re-conquering by Western interests.

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

Lebanese people received on Tuesday the news about the Republic of Lebanon joining the Islamic Military Alliance. The announcement was made by Saudi Arabia the midnight before, and is aimed at fighting terrorism.

The Saudi kingdom holds the anti-terrorism flag, at a time it plays a prominent role in nurturing and sponsoring terrorist organizations ranging from Afghanistan through to Iraq and Syria, and all the way to Yemen … not to forget declaring the death of ISIL* emir of the province of ‘Aden and Taiz’ in Yemen, Abu Obeida Al-Kazmi, along with 62 of his operatives, which will not be the last evidence of such involvement.

Al-Kazmi was killed in the attack carried out by the Yemeni army and Popular Committees against the headquarters of leadership of the Saudi-US-led aggression forces in Bab al-Mandab area, which also killed the commander of the Saudi special forces in Yemen, Colonel Abdullah Al-Sahyan.

Riyadh announced that 34 countries, including Lebanon, are joining the alliance. Among its members are the State of Palestine which has no army to use in confronting the terrorism of the Zionist occupation over its territory, and Libya whose factions are still disputing over undefined power. In addition to the “Republic of Yemen” which the Saudi Arabia abbreviates in a President who is fugitive from his homeland, unable to do anything but to praise the Kingdom’s crimes against his own people, and its destruction of Yemen’s infrastructure, at the forefront the national army.

In Lebanon, the State Pillars have been carrying the banner of self-distancing for a long time, a pretext that they formed to escape from expressing a position towards the Syrian crisis, which cast a shadow on the Lebanese domestic politics. “Self-distancing” was the magic word which has long been echoed by those pillars to face the voices calling for the liberation of occupied Lebanese parts from the terrorist organizations, particularly Arsal eastern region and its barrens.

In a statement on Tuesday, Lebanese Prime Minister Tammam Salam stressed that he welcomes Lebanon joining the alliance, “since Lebanon lies on the front line against terrorism, where army and security forces are engaged in daily battles with terrorist groups, one of which is still holding nine of the Lebanese military personnel,” according to the statement.

In a new rhetoric which is far from self-distancing policy, Prime Minister stressed that Lebanon should “not hesitate to welcome any move that aims to mobilize all energies and to close the ranks to confront this scourge, which constitute the most significant challenge to the security and stability of our region.”

Prior to Salam’s statement, Al-Manar TV Website had a phone call with the Lebanese Minister of Labor, Sajaan Qazzi, who strongly denied being aware of the news, stating that, “I have communicated with the Secretary General of the Council of Ministers, and he told me that he had no knowledge of the subject.”

“We do not accept to join any religious alliances,” said Qazzi, but soon the statement of the prime minister was issued to declare that Lebanon has joined the alliance via a “phone call,” without turning to the constitutional frameworks!

Upon forming the alliance, the Saudi defense minister, and the deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef, said the coalition will not target the ISIL takfiri group alone, but will also target “any terrorist organization that appears in front of us.”

So what terrorism bin Salman is speaking about? How effective such an alliance will be? And what are the Saudi classifications for terrorism?

According to the Lebanese constitution, Lebanon joining a military alliance requires the approval of the Council of Ministers of a treaty to be presented later before the Parliament to be duly approved.

The Minister of Labor’s statements confirm that the ministers themselves were unaware of the accession of the “Republic” to an alliance that drags Lebanon to battles set and drawn by the Saudi Arabia.

Translated into English by E. al-Rihani

To read the original article in Arabic, click here

*ISIL is the common acronym used to refer to the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ takfiri group operating in the region, mainly in Syria and Iraq.

Historically and intuitively, Russia has fought for the survival of humanity. Of course, things are not always pronounced or defined in such terms. However, already on several occasions, this enormous country has stood up against the most mighty and evil forces that have threatened the very survival of our Planet.

During the Second World War, the Soviet people, mainly Russians, sacrificed at least 25 million men, women and children, in the end defeating Nazism. No other country in modern history has undergone more.

Right after that victory, Russia, alongside China and later Cuba, embarked on the most awesome and noble project of all times: the systematic dismantling of Western colonialism. All over the world oppressed masses stood up against European and North American imperialist barbarity, and it was the Soviet Union that was ready to give them a beacon of hope, as well as substantial financial, ideological and military support.

As one oppressed and ruined nation after another was gaining independence, hatred against the Soviet Union and the Russian people was growing in virtually all the capitals of the Western world. After all, the looting of non-white continents was considered a natural right of the “civilized world”.

In the USA and Europe, such words as “colonialism” and “imperialism” were rapidly gaining extremely negative connotations, or at least on the surface. It would have been counter-productive to attack, to demonize the Soviet Union for supporting liberation struggles in all those continents. Instead, elaborate theories about the “Evil Empire” were erected.

Russia has always been “ in the way”; a colossal country spoiling the brutal plans of Washington, Berlin, London and Paris – plans to control and plunder the entire planet.

But the nobler were its deeds; the more insulting the attacks against it.

Russia always possessed tremendous capacity to mobilize itself, to throw all its resources at achieving one single, humanistic, and deeply moral goal. There has been something sacred in its struggles, something “higher”, and totally essential.

“Stand up, enormous country, stand up to a deadly fight!” This is how one of the greatest patriotic songs of the Second World War begins. When Russia fights, then all that matters is victory. No price is too high.

Fate selected Russia to struggle for the entire world. If you don’t believe in “fate”, you will never understand the “Russian soul”. It is not about religion – Russia is mainly anarchic and “atheist”. But it believes in and accepts fate.

Moreover, most of the time Russia has really no choice. It has been faced either with the victory or the end of humanity. And when the world and its survival have been threatened, Russia has always stood up: outraged, frightening but also extremely beautiful in its wrath and determination. It has fought with each pore, each speck of its land, and each heart of its people. It has almost always won, but at a horrific price, burying millions of its sons and daughters, stricken afterwards by indescribable sorrow and pain.

And there was never anyone standing by, to console it. As the fires were still raging, as tears were still covering the faces of mothers and wives who lost their loved ones, the country was spat at, ridiculed and humiliated by the Western Machiavellian regimes and their propaganda.

Its heroism was belittled, its sacrifice mocked. It was repeated that its millions who died for humankind, actually died in vain.

In return for its heroic struggles, Russia never asked for anything, except for two essential things: recognition and respect. It never received either!

*

Now once again, Russia stands up, launching its epic fight against ISIS; that horrendous parody in the Muslim religion – created and armed by the West and its vicious regional lackeys.

Russia had to act. Because if it didn’t, who would? After centuries of Western crusades and the most appalling colonialist practices, there is hardly anything left of the Middle East, this marvelous part of the world, which can only be described as one of the cradles of our civilization. Plundered and humiliated, the Middle East has been reduced to a pathetic mosaic of client states, serving the West. Tens of millions have been murdered. Everything has been plundered. Socialist and secular governments have been cornered and overthrown.

I have worked intensively in this part of the world, and I can testify that save Africa, there is no other area of the world that is so scarred and brutalized by Western greed and barbarism.

Hopeless, mortally injured and desperate, two ancient countries that have been lately suffering the most –Syria and Iraq – approached Russia, asking for its help.

And Russia agreed to help them.

Yes, of course, I can already hear that cacophony of noises coming from Europe and North America about: “Russian interests” and its “sphere of influence”. Because in the West, nothing is, and nothing can be, sacred. Because everything has to be tinted with dark sarcasm and nihilism… If the West is acting like a thug, then the rest of the world has to be portrayed in the same colors and shades. After all, the West does not have allies, it doesn’t have feelings; only interests. I did not invent this; I was told this, again and again, when I lived and worked in destroyed parts of Africa.

But I don’t give a damn what they say in Paris or Washington. What matters is what is said in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. And I will tell you how it is there: if you go to a barber shop there, and you say that you are Russian, people get up, and they embrace you, and some cry!

*

Russia will never attack other countries, but if attacked, its wrath can be horrendous, especially when it is in the middle of fighting a war. “Whoever will come to us with a sword, from a sward they will perish,” proclaimed Alexander Nevsky, the 13th Century Prince of Novgorod.

The recent downing of a Russian bomber over Syria by Turkish Air Forces has increased the danger of a much wider regional war.

Turkey, a NATO member nation, is spreading terror all over the region: from Libya and Somalia, to Iraq, Syria and its own Kurdish territory. It is torturing people, murdering many including journalists, robbing millions of their natural resources, and spreading the most extremist, mainly Qatari-backed, jihadi teachings.

I met Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, many years ago in the early 1990s in Istanbul, when he was the then mayor of the city, and when I was “licking my wounds” in between my writing on how the West was systematically destroying Yugoslavia.

“Do you speak Turkish?” he asked me during one of our meetings.

“Not well”, I replied. “Just a little.”

“But you know perfectly well how to pronounce the name of our party! That shows how important we are.”

From our first meeting, I knew that he was a megalomaniac, a man full of inferiority complexes, and an aggressive scum. I had no idea he would ‘go so far’. He did. Because of him, millions are suffering, all over the region.

Now he has shot down a Russian bomber and invaded Iraq.

Turkey has fought Russia on several occasions, and almost always lost. Then, in between two world wars, it managed to survive only because of the help provided to it by the Soviet Union. Turkey should think twice about its next steps.

Russia does not just ‘fight wars’. Its fights for the survival of mankind are nothing short of an enormous work of art, of poetry or a symphony. It is hard to explain but it is so. Everything is intertwined.

To shoot the Russian SU-24 from behind is like shaking those 25 million who died during the Second World War. It is horrendous, as it is unwise. In Russia, this is not how things are done. You want to fight, then come out and fight, face to face.

But if you kill like a coward, and if you invade neighboring and already devastated countries, you may, one day, find yourself facing not just some SU-24’s, but a bunch of heavy strategic bombers.

*

Russia cannot be defeated. There are many reasons for it. One is pragmatic: it is a nuclear superpower. Another is, because it usually fights for just causes. And it does so with all its might and with its whole heart.

If it were not for Russia, there would be no Planet Earth, at least as we know it. The West and its fascist Christian states would be fully in control of the world. The “un-people”, the “non-whites” would be treated like animals (even worse than they are treated now): there would be no control left, and no boundaries to the theft and destruction.

The so-called “civilized world” (the one that builds its theatres and schools from the rivers of blood and corpses of others) would be marching, unopposed, towards absolute control over the Planet.

Fortunately, Russia exists. And it cannot be defeated. And it will never be defeated. However, it can also never be forgiven by the West, for standing on the side of the wretched of the earth.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

At least one of the guns used in the November 13 terror attacks in Paris was purchased by Century International Arms and then re-exported to Europe. One of the largest arms dealers in the United States, Century Arms has close ties to the CIA and has faced charges in America and Europe of involvement in illegal arms deals.

The weapon, an M92 semiautomatic pistol, was produced at the Zastava arms factory in Kragujevac, Serbia. Last week, factory manager Milojko Brzakovic told AP he had checked its records on seven weapons that it manufactured that were used in the Paris attacks. It delivered several of the weapons inside Yugoslavia before that country dissolved amid capitalist restoration and civil war in the 1990s, but it delivered the pistol in May 2013 to Century Arms, based in Delray Beach, Florida.

Century Arms officials refused Palm Beach Post reporters’ requests for comment, and it remains unclear how the M92 pistol was re-exported to Europe. Century Arms required US government approval to legally import the firearm into the United States, however, and whoever re-exported it to Europe would have had to submit a request to the US State Department in order to do so legally.

These reports further undermine the official presentation of the Paris attacks by governments, media, and pro-imperialist “left” parties. They insisted that the attacks were an act of Islamist terror in which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) alone was involved and bore full responsibility.

This presentation was always a political fraud, insofar as the NATO powers were undoubtedly politically implicated. The attacks were led by Islamist fighters trained in Syria—where the CIA, European intelligence and Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have given financial and military backing to such Islamist forces to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Though placed on watch lists and monitored by intelligence services, these fighters were somehow allowed to prepare highly complex, coordinated attacks in Paris.

Revelations of a concrete link between Century Arms and the Paris attacks, however, raise specifically whether elements in the intelligence services aided the attackers—either inadvertently, due to their reckless war policy, or deliberately, to shift the political atmosphere far to the right.

The ruling elite reacted to the November 13 attacks, predictably, by aligning policy on war and democratic rights with the views of the most aggressive sections of the military-intelligence complex. France is now preparing to impose a permanent state of emergency, effectively abrogating key democratic rights and boosting the political fortunes of the neo-fascist National Front (FN). NATO is ramping up support to its proxies in Syria, though this threatens to trigger an all-out military clash with nuclear-armed Russia.

While it remains unclear how the Paris attacks were organized, the link to Century Arms strongly suggests that elements acting for the intelligence agencies, in an official capacity or otherwise, were involved. Century Arms has had close ties to US foreign policy for decades.

In 1987, John Rugg, a former police officer and Century Arms employee, testified to the US Senate that the firm had run weapons to the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This illegal operation, led by the CIA in defiance of the Boland Amendment passed by the US Congress cutting off aid to the Contras, had exploded in the Iran-Contra scandal.

In 2004, according to the Palm Beach Post, Italian authorities halted shipment of 7,500 AK-47 rifles to Century Arms from Romania, where the firm had developed commercial ties since before the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe.

In 2007, according to a US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, Century Arms worked with Israeli arms dealer Ori Zeller to illegally recover and sell off American M-1 rifles shipped by Washington to the bloody Guatemalan regime during that country’s civil war. The cable also states that Zeller’s associates were convicted of money laundering in Belgium in 2003, and suspected of laundering $20 million in Al Qaeda funds via West African diamonds.

Nonetheless, the cable called Zeller a “valuable source for the USG [US government] in Guatemala.” It added that the US government used him to obtain information on Guatemala, Israel, Russian arms sales, and Mexican drug cartels.

Century Arms’ relationship with Mexican narco-traffickers apparently goes beyond providing information. The US Center for Public Integrity reported in 2011 that Romanian WASR-10 rifles sold by Century Arms had “become a favorite of the Mexican drug cartels, and in recent years hundreds of them have been traced to crimes in Mexico.”

This is not the first indication that connections existed between state forces and Islamist groups that carried out terror attacks in France.

On Wednesday, French police detained Claude Hermant, a former member of the FN’s security detail who is active in far-right circles in northern France and serves as an informant for police and customs officials, for questioning over the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher. Officials confirmed that he was being held for questioning as to whether he had trafficked weapons to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman at the Hyper Cacher.

This confirmed earlier reports that Lille prosecutors were investigating a linkbetween Hermant and the January attacks. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve subsequently invoked the state secrets privilege in an attempt toblock the investigation. However, this decision and more details of the investigation of Hermant were leaked to the press.

The Lille investigation is now apparently considering the possibility that Hermant himself was simply playing the role of middleman in a larger network involved in arming the gunmen. Officials close to the investigating team told La Voix du Nord, “In such trafficking, there is always one intermediary, or more. Claude Hermant did not necessarily know the final destination of the weapons. It would show, in any case, the links between certain Islamist circles and organized crime.”

The paper also reported that a customs official had been placed under investigation in the Hermant affair.

Over 2015, the losses in the stock markets added up to hundreds of billions of dollars. The business world began to tremble when at the beginnings of August the Shanghai stock market fell during several consecutive days. It was only then evident that the vulnerabilities of the global economy are not limited to the United States and the European Union.

Although seven years have gone by since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, everything indicates that the global crisis has not touched bottom, since as the weeks pass there are more victims from one sector to another, from one geographical region to another. As a consequence of the growing deceleration of the Asia Pacific region, the emerging countries whose incomes depend on the export of commodities are now facing a serious predicament.

The channel of the crisis of the industrialized countries towards the emerging ones is not only through commercial connections – although it is important to note that the Baltic Dry Index (BDI), one of the principal indicators of marine transport and a fundamental datum to measure commercial activity in real terms, has registered its worst performance of the last three decades –, but above all through finances.

According to an investigation published in October by the Institute of International Finance (IIF), which analyses data from 30 countries, this year the flow of capital from residents of emerging countries reached over one billion dollars. This is the most dramatic rise since the Asian crisis of 1998. There is no doubt that the stock market euphoria of the global South will not last.

The investors were buying sovereign debt bonds from the countries of Latin America and Pacific-Asia. As well as securities backed up by commodities, are at the present time full of fear and uncertainty. They do not now believe in the security of obtaining high dividends betting on high risk financial assets.

Right now nothing seems more secure than to put their investments in US Treasury bonds. In spite of their enormous public debt, no one believes that Washington will declare itself bankrupt in the short term, which would result in the dollar weakening its status as a reserve currency, and with that, the hegemony of the United States would be seriously wounded. This would leave a contradiction that even with the serious problems of the US economy, the confidence in the dollar has hardly lessened since the crisis of 2008, even if it be true that there are other currencies, such as the yuan, that have increased their influence considerably.

In these moments money is returning home, to its real masters, the pockets of the magnates of Wall Street. This explains the fall of exchange rates and stock markets of emerging countries. Nevertheless, this money will either be amassed, or utilised to bring about mergers and acquisitions of enterprises, but it will not be placed massively in productive activities, and because of this, the labour market of the United States will still be far from overcoming its structural degradation.

In the face of an increasingly global panic, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insists that the monetary authorities of the United States should act with caution. In the face of high levels of debt on a world scale, which are denominated fundamentally in dollars, the Executive Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, has suggested on various occasions that the United States should put off any increase in the federal funds rate until 2016 at least [Editor’s note: the Fed raised its benchmark federal funds rate, locked near zero since the financial crisis, by a quarter point to 0.25-0.50 percent on December 16].

Even though the most recent data on the United States’ labour market appears better than before, this does not imply in any way that the economy of that country enjoys a sustained recovery. Private debt is maintained at a very high level in the United States, both that of businesses and that of families. Thousands of US residents and citizens cannot find full time employment, but must settle for part time work, the majority badly paid and without social benefits of any quality. The less fortunate survive on unemployment insurance and food stamps.

In contrast, thanks to government policy, US banks have managed to increase their levels of capitalization. At the same time, they have increased their financial leverage (this is the relation between credit and their own capital invested in a financial operation), with which, it is clear that rather than providing credit to small and medium enterprises, they have dedicated themselves to speculative ventures in the stock market. Over all, as I noted in my last comment, this increase has been exhausted at great speed. According to data from the US banks, their profit levels are moving down.

Seen from this global perspective, the great risk is that any hasty decision can shore up recessive (depressive) tendencies in other countries. Paul Mason, commentator with the British daily The Guardian, cites the economists of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), for whom “a world in which debt levels are too high, productivity growth too weak and financial risks too threatening”.

In the case of the European Continent, for example, given the extreme debility of growth and negative inflation, that is deflation that has struck various nations on the periphery, the central bank of the monetary union has indicated that it is disposed to bring about extraordinary measures if the economic situation continues to deteriorate.

The same thing is happening in Japan, and the Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, has put in march an ambitious program of recuperation, which has included both monetary and fiscal stimuli, and a basket of “structural reforms” in order to increase productivity, as the second most important economy of the Asian region fell into a technical recession in the third quarter of this year.

Thus three of the strongest central banks of the world diverge in their plans of monetary policy. On the one hand the United States are preparing to raise the cost of credit, and on the other Europe and Japan are preparing to launch programs of more aggressive injection of liquidity. With this, it is obvious that the volatility of the financial markets will not lessen, but will tend to increase in the months to come.

In a word, there is no consensus among the big powers on the monetary policies that should be employed to combat the world recession. This was manifest in the summit of the Group of 20 (G-20, made up of the 20 most powerful economies of the world), in mid-November in the city of Antalya, Turkey.

Nevertheless, there is agreement among the principal world leaders to sharpen the conditions of exploitation of the working classes through new “structural reforms”. On the other hand, the reforms oriented to regulate global financial activities lack sharp teeth and their execution progresses very slowly. The funds deposited in the fiscal paradises are still untouchable. This is the reflex that shows the same image from Paris, Berlin, London, Brussels, Washington, Tokyo and the greater part of emerging economies: the masters of money impose their law.

Translation: Jordan Bishop.

Source in Spanish: Contralínea.

*Ariel Noyola Rodriguez is an economist who graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Twitter: @noyola_ariel.

Sir Richard John Roberts [pictured left] is a biochemist and molecular biologist and currently works at New England Biolabs in the US. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society in the UK and has recently been in India promoting GM crops and food.

While in Mysore, he delivered a talk on ‘A Crime Against Humanity’ organised by the University of Mysore. He said that when people were hungry, they needed food but rich European countries are opposing introduction of GM crops because they have sufficient food.

Roberts went on to say that their propaganda against GM crops is affecting hungry people in the developing nations. He added that to help people in need, we need “more science in politics and less politics in science” and also asked why should not the denial of food to people in developing nations by developed nations be considered a crime against humanity.

According to Roberts, plants have been modified gradually to meet the needs of the people ever since the inception of agriculture and could do wonders to the food supply chain. He argued that the present engineering of GM crops is precise, is little different from what conventional breeding has done over the years and the results are evident. He also claimed that since the introduction of GM cotton to India, pesticide use had decreased for cotton crops.

During a talk in Hyderabad he stated:

“Environmental organisations such as Greenpeace oppose GMO for political ends. There is no truth in their claim as there is no scientific proof that GM crops are harmful.”

He said that “millions of people in the third world” would die of starvation unless GM crops were introduced and added that Greenpeace is in the business of scaring people when it comes to GM crops.

The Royal Society

As a Fellow of the Royal Society (RS), Roberts should be aware of the Society’s failure to acknowledge and correct the misleading and exaggerated statements that it has used to actively promote GMOs since the mid-1990s and in effect convey false impressions. Roberts himself appears to be reading from a similar script.

In an open letter to the RS, author of the well-researched and fully-referenced book ‘Altered Genes, Twisted Truth’ Steven Druker argued that the prestigious scientific institution has misrepresented the case for GMOs and has effectively engaged in a campaign of disinformation and the smearing of credible research that showed firm evidence pointing to health dangers of GM. He notes that the RS has been a partisan defender of GM foods and embraced a proactive policy on their behalf. Druker argues that several individuals holding prominent positions within the RS – and even the Society itself – have issued misleading statements in regard to GM foods that have created significant confusion and illegitimately downplayed their risks.

During his visit to India, Roberts tried to convey the impression that there was an overwhelming consensus on the efficacy and safety of GMOs. Druker has however called on the RS to acknowledge that there is not now nor never has been a consensus within the scientific community that GM foods are safe, that many well-credentialed experts do not regard their safety as having been established and that a substantial number think that there is sufficient research that casts their safety in doubt. In addition to Druker’s evidence, Food & Water Watch has produced this informative, fully-referenced brief on the general lack of consensus within science on GM.

Druker has also called on the RS to acknowledge that the process of creating new varieties of food crops via genetic engineering is not more precise and predictable than conventional breeding in regard to food safety and instead entails a greater likelihood of unintended effects that could directly impact consumer health. Aside from the case stated by Druker in his book, readers may wish to consult some of the articles that are in agreement, not least this by geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, which addresses the “central dogma” of molecular biology, which provides a “simplistic picture” of the precision involved in GM.

According to Druker, it is time the RS confronted the facts about GM foods and set the record straight.

There appears to have been no (public) response from The Royal Society.

The myths and the truths about GM

Roberts asserts that there should be more science in politics and less politics in science. And that is a laudable aim. He is however implying that Greenpeace and critics of GM are driven by political ideology; an ideology of affluent, scare-mongering people in Western countries who are denying the poor and hungry access to much-needed food and are thus guilty of crimes against humanity.

It is unfortunate that Roberts, a distinguished scientist, has to resort to emotional blackmail and the well-worn public relations script so often churned out by the pro-GMO lobby in an attempt to smear critics and devalue their concerns. I have outlined this approach here.

If people really do want to address hunger, they should bear in mind what Viva Kermani (see here – supported by data) says when talking about the situation in India:

“… the statements that they [supporters of GMOs] use such as “thousands die of hunger daily in India” are irresponsible and baseless scare-mongering with a view to projecting GM as the only answer. When our people go hungry, or suffer from malnutrition, it is not for lack of food, it is because their right to safe and nutritious food that is culturally connected has been blocked. That is why it is not a technological fix problem and GM has no place in it.”

The Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) last year released a fully referenced report that concluded hunger is caused by poverty and inequality. Current global food production provides enough to feed over ten billion people.

Despite the rhetoric about GM ‘feeding the world’, the report also noted that the GM crops that are on the market today are not designed to address hunger. Four GM crops account for almost 100 percent of worldwide GM crop acreage, and all four have been developed for large-scale industrial farming systems and are used as cash crops for export, to produce fuel or for processed food and animal feed.

The report also stated that GM crops have not necessarily increased yields and do not increase farmers’ incomes. Despite Roberts’ claims, GM crops as a whole have led to an increase in pesticide use. As far as his specific claim about pesticide reduction regarding Bt cotton in India, overall pesticide use has not decreased in any state that grows Bt cotton, with the exception of Andhra Pradesh: read about this and the other issues outlined here in the full CBAN report that contains over 100 references in support of its conclusions.

It should at this point also be noted that GM cotton in India is not the resounding success that supporters of the technology try to portray: see this by Glenn Stone and this report highlighting the futility of GM cotton, which again challenges the claim by Roberts that it has led to a decrease in pesticide use.

The Open Earth Source report GMOs Myths and Truths provides evidence (and credible references) to indicate that GM crops do not increase yield, nor are there any GM crops that are better than non-GM crops at tolerating poor soils or challenging climate conditions. As in the CBAN report, a similar case is put forward that the major GM crops, such as soy and maize, mostly go into animal feed for intensive livestock operations, biofuels to power cars, and processed human food: products for wealthy nations that have nothing to do with meeting the basic food needs of the poor and hungry.

Numerous official reports have argued that to feed the hungry in poorer regions we need to support diverse, sustainable agro-ecological methods of farming (not GM) and strengthen local food economies: for example, see this UN report, this report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and this report by 400 experts which was twice peer reviewed. See also see this report that indicates GMOs are not necessary to feed the world.

In fact, small farms and peasant farmers (not using GM) are the backbone of global food production. These farms actually produce most of the world’s food and are especially vital for food production within the Global South itself (see this report by GRAIN). The experience with GM crops shows that the application of GM technology is more likely to actually undermine food security and entrench the social, economic and environmental problems created by industrial agriculture and corporate control (see this second report by GRAIN).

More science in politics, less politics in science

The GM issue conveniently diverts attention away from the real political agenda that Roberts tries to turns on its head: it is not the politics of a bunch of green-oriented elitist ideologues that is contributing to world hunger but the power, influence and ambitions of a very wealthy and politically well-connected cartel of agribusiness concerns (fully backed by the US State Department) that is promoting a highly profitable GM technology and exploiting the situation of the hungry.

Roberts says that GM does not have to be the prevail of big agribusiness concerns, but the reality is that it is, whether in the US or, as is increasingly the case, India. Indeed. Monsanto is so deeply entrenched in India that has been described as the modern-day EastIndia Company.

If people really are concerned about feeding the world, they should follow the advice of the IAASTD report and the others linked to earlier and lobby for governments to invest in agroecology instead of prioritising and facilitating chemicial-intensive, corporate-controlled agriculture. It is for good reason that the Oakland Institute recently reported on the “tremendous success” of agroecology Africa and that this article describes the positive impact of the model in India, after farmers and local people had for many years experienced the deleterious impacts of green revolution agriculture.  Unfortunately, many seek to marginalise agroecological approaches and prefer to focus on external input-intensive ‘solutions’ and proprietary technologies and seeds, such as GMOs.

Agroecology prioritises local communities, smallholder farmers, local economies and markets. It is much more than just a credible model of agriculture; it’s also a social movement that challenges the politics and the very fabric of corporate-controlled farming.

“Agroecology is more than just a science, it’s also a social movement for justice that recognises and respects the right of communities of farmers to decide what they grow and how they grow it.” Mindi Schneider, assistant professor of Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague.

And it’s a system that the Rockefeller-backed green revolution is at odds with. The green revolution and the GM model now being promoted is in crisis and is causing massive damage to the environment and to farmers’ livelihoods to the point where ecocide and genocide is occurring and the cynical destruction of agrarian economies has taken place.

In India, the impacts of depleted soils, water-guzzling cash crops and loss of food diversity and biodiversity due to green revolution thought and practices have been described 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. This is an unsustainable model that is not going to feed people with nutritious, healthy food; if anything, it is making people ill.

Furthermore, subjecting India and its farmers to the vagaries of international markets bucked by huge subsidies given to Western agriculture has had a major negative impact on agriculture and farmers who still manage to produce bumper harvests without GM, despite a concerted effort to run down the agriculture sector and replace it with a model controlled by global food and agribusiness concerns.

GM crops represent an extension of green revolution thinking with a reliance on herbicide tolerant crops, corporate-controlled external inputs and a global system of food and agriculture dominated by US interests and those of its agribusiness corporations.

It may appear ironic to many that scientists (see this also in response to Anthony Trewavas) resort to populism, emotional blackmail and unfounded claims. But any talk about ‘sound science’ and dispassionate reason informing the debate on GMOs contradicts how many supporters of GM, including scientists, and the industry act in reality (see this description of how science has been pressed into the service of corporate interests).

From the issue of labelling GM food to ‘substantial equivalence’, as Steven Druker has shown and as also described in this piece in the last link, science has been distorted, debased and bypassed to serve commercial interests. The result is that not a single long-term epidemiological study has been conducted with GMOs.

The current issue surrounding GM mustard in India and the petition to issue a contempt of court case against the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee, gives rise for further concern that proper scientific procedure has been ditched in a rush to get GM food crops onto the commercial market.

Yes, it would be a very good idea to get more science into politics and the politics out of science. Unfortunately, by focussing on and smearing green activists and critics of GM, Roberts and people like him are in fact ignoring and thus attempting to depoliticise and disguise the genuine underlying power structures that are determining the GM agenda and global agriculture per se. If effect, they are serve as apologists for aneoliberal agenda and attempt to give the impression that they alone have some kind of monopoly on compassion for humanity.

Despite what Roberts likes to imply about having more science in politics, the GM industry often side-lines science in favour of the dirtiest of politics, not least by tightening its grip on countries on the back of coups and conflict (see this to understand how big agritech concerns benefit from and fuel the situation in Ukraine).

Powerful interests in the West (mainly in the US), acting through bodies such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank, have enslaved nations with debt and have used agriculture and the green revolution to create food deficit areas, dependence and subservience (see here).  The neoliberal ‘globalisation’ agenda of ‘free’ trade, privatisation and deregulation has further fuelled hunger, inequality and poverty (see this analysis of food commodity speculation, this description of the global food system and this report on the appropriation of agricultural land, which have all conspired to uproot the very bedrock of global food production, the smallholder – see this).

The current global system of chemical-industrial agriculture and World Trade Organisation rules that agritech companies helped draw up for their benefit to force their products into countries (see  here) are a major cause of structural hunger, poverty, illness and environmental destruction (see this analysis of the situation in Ethiopia by Michel Chossudovsky). By its very design, the system is meant to exploit people, nations and the planet for profit and control (see here). Blaming critics of this system for the problems of the system is highly convenient. And forwarding some bogus technical quick-fix will not put things right. It represents more of the same.

In India, agritech corporations are being allowed to shape government policy by being granted a strategic role in trade negotiations, not least the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (see this). They are increasingly setting the policy framework by capturing strategic decision-making bodies and are being allowed to fund and determine the nature of research carried out in public universities and institutes (see this). This is where the real politics lie.

The implication of Roberts’ stance is that critics of GM are denying choice to farmers and consumers. The debasement of choice, democracy and freedom does not lie with critics of the technology that Roberts advocates; as William Engdahl has shown and as discussed throughout this article, it lies with powerful agribusiness interests which have captured international institutions, governments and regulatory agencies to force through a politically and commercially motivated agenda.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer – here is his website

Speaking to the media during a visit to the giant Incirlik Air Base in Turkey Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter praised the Saudi monarchy for proclaiming a new “Islamic alliance” against terrorism.

“We are happy with the alliance formed by Saudi Arabia and looking forward for the steps being taken by them against terrorism,” Carter declared.

No sooner was the Saudi announcement made, however, than a number of countries raised questions about their inclusion, without their knowledge, in the so-called alliance. Three predominantly Muslim countries—Iraq, Syria and Iran—were excluded, leading to charges that the Saudi monarchy is really only patching together a Sunni Muslim alliance to prosecute its sectarian crusade against the region’s Shia population.

A more fundamental question is what does the Saudi regime mean by “terrorism”? Clearly, it is not referring to the various Al Qaeda-linked groups fighting in Syria, all of which get substantial funding as well as large numbers of fighters and their religious-ideological inspiration from the Wahhabist Saudi kingdom.

This fact was confirmed by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a classified 2009 cable declaring that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

This was further acknowledged by Vice President Joe Biden in a speech delivered at Harvard last year. He admitted that the Saudi regime, along with other US client despots in the Middle East, had

“poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Of course what both Clinton and Biden sought to conceal was that this operation was fully coordinated by the CIA out of a station in southern Turkey. Washington had armed and funded similar groups in the US-NATO war for regime change in Libya, and well before that had worked closely with the Saudis in fomenting the Islamist war against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, which gave rise to Al Qaeda.

So what does the Saudi monarchy view as terrorism? The answer can be found in its prison cells, where three young men, all arrested when they were minors, are awaiting death by beheading for the “crime” of participating in peaceful protests against the relentless repression of the US-backed regime in Riyadh.

They are among 52 similar “terrorists” whose mass execution is expected at any time. Two of them—Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was 17 at the time of his arrest, and Abdullah al-Zaher, who was 15—in addition to being sentenced to die by decapitation with a sword, are to be crucified, their headless bodies mounted on crosses in a public space as an example to anyone thinking of defying the House of Saud.

What the Saudi monarchy considers “terrorism,” moreover, was codified into a new law last year. It establishes that terrorism includes “any act” intended to, among other things, “insult the reputation of the state,” “harm public order,” or “shake the security of society.”

Other acts defined as “terrorism” include: “Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based,” as well as “Contact or correspondence with any groups, currents [of thought], or individuals hostile to the kingdom.”

The parents of Abdullah al-Zaher, now 19, have come forward to plead for his life. They describe how he was tortured and beaten with iron rods after his arrest until he signed a false confession that he was not even allowed to read.

The Saudi regime has already executed at least 151 people this year, the highest per capita rate of capital punishment of any country in the world.

Within the Obama administration and the corporate media, appeals for the lives of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, Abdullah al-Zaher and the dozens of others who face imminent beheading have fallen on deaf ears.

Washington continues to count Saudi Arabia as its closest ally in the Arab world, selling it more US weaponry than any other country on the planet. Last year alone, the oil kingdom purchased $1.2 billion in US armaments. A new $1 billion deal was recently announced, as the Pentagon continues to resupply the Saudi military in its vicious war in Yemen that has already claimed more than 7,000 lives, while reducing tens of millions to the brink of starvation.

The media in the US has largely ignored the plight of the youth sentenced to beheading and crucifixion. Instead, it has lavished praise on recent elections to municipal councils on the grounds that women were for the first time allowed to vote and run for office, though they remain deprived of virtually every other right.

Most of the coverage dutifully ignored the fact that less than 10 percent of the population—and barely 1 percent of Saudi women—bothered to vote for the municipal bodies, which are utterly powerless advisory panels in a country where the royal family appoints all those who wield any real power.

Nor in the media’s celebration of a handful of rich Saudi women running for meaningless posts was any attention paid to a Sri Lankan woman, one of the many thousands of foreign domestic workers treated like slaves, who is awaiting death by stoning after being charged with adultery. Two Indonesian maids were executed by beheading earlier this year.

That US imperialism counts the Saudi regime as its closest ally in the Arab world debunks all the pretexts it has used to justify its continuous wars in the region. The alliance with a state that finances, arms and provides religious-ideological inspiration to Al Qaeda-linked groups gives the lie to the supposed “war on terror,” just as US support for an absolute monarchy that beheads and crucifies youth exposes the fraud of Washington’s promotion of “democracy” and “human rights.”

Washington’s real objectives are purely predatory, directed at utilizing military might to offset the economic decline of American capitalism by asserting hegemony over the world’s markets and resources.

That it relies on the ultra-reactionary and bankrupt Saudi regime as a key pillar of this policy only demonstrates that US imperialism is headed for a catastrophe. It is destined to reap all that it has sown in the massive crimes carried out against the peoples of the region, even as the immense contradictions building up within US society create the conditions for a revolutionary explosion.

“Cómo hay gente pendeja en este mundo, confunden a los “yihadistas” con musulmanes y por más que les pinches expliques te dicen que te vayas a vivir a un país árabe, cada país tiene su cultura, y practican lo que les enseña su religión, los yihadistas son gente loca, entrenada y pagada por el gobierno gringo para matar personas a los pendejos (infieles) bajo una gran farsa como lo es hacerlos pasar por musulmanes, el musulmán no está a favor de la muerte, Alá no pide que mates a un semejante, el gobierno yankee sí”.

Quizá para algunos que no leen muchos diarios, o que solo leen y ven lo que el país, México; produce tendrán la misma mentalidad de los que critica esta amiga, me tomé la libertad de compartir este post, así como está y sin corregir las faltas ortográficas, porque un indicativo de que el sentido común y las personas informadas no son siempre los que salen de universidades o tiene “chingomil” diplomas en la pared de su “egoteca”.

La realidad que sacude a un mundo es muchos más compleja de lo que quieren hacernos ver en apariencia. Buscar con afán y  tener pretexto de un enfrentamiento entre religiones es algo que no es arma nueva en esta guerra bastante “creativa y diferente”…  Apenas en días pasados un programa de radio hacía hincapié en  lo que, desde el punto de  vista de un estudioso del tema realmente ocurre en Medio Oriente.

Este programa de la querida amiga y periodista Celeste Sáenz de Miera es una bocanada de aire fresco, de verdad y ética dentro de este putrefacto mundillo donde  nos tocó estar en nuestro paso por eso que llamamos vida. Ella tuvo como entrevistado  al profesor y escritor Michel Chossudovsky profesor emérito de economía  de la universidad de Ottawa Canadá, premio internacional de periodismo, su obra literaria ha sido  traducida a más de 20 idiomas, Fundador y director  en el Centro Sobre la Globalización, Presidente internacional del jurado calificador del certamen  nacional e internacional de periodismo.

El tener un personaje tan especial y versado en el tema nos hace preguntarnos cómo es que muchos no toman la importancia a su explicación y cómo no hay quién puede interesarse e ir  a fondo, al menos aquí en México no he visto a los analistas de siempre hablar tan clara y llanamente como el profesor lo hizo en esta entrevista, y esta es la razón fundamental por la que hoy se las  comparto aquí:

“Teniendo como telón de fondo al denominado ejército  islámico…

“-La situación es tremendamente grave, ya sabemos que desde el comienzo de la guerra  en Siria no era una guerra civil, era una agresión, Los Estados Unidos han apoyado a los grupos terroristas desde Al-Qaeda… había una operación encubierta  con los aliados de estados unidos incluso Israel… los medios dicen medias mentiras, dicen que sí, pero no dicen que es Estados Unidos… en realidad esa alianza está muy bien estructurada… ahora Turquía ha cometido una agresión en contra de Rusia… “.

Mientras Estados Unidos dice: “Estamos haciendo la guerra al islamismo”…  no es cierto; estaban bombardeando escuela,  hospitales…  después de los ataques de París,  Francia decide bombardear  a los autores de los ataques, bombardearon Raqqa, el estadio, clínicas de salud y un museo… ¡en realidad bombardean la infraestructura civil social cultural…! Son mentiras y bajo la fachada la alianza militar occidental está llevando una guerra en contra de los “terroristas”, en contra del pueblo sirio… la opinión pública quiere la verdad pero en realidad…  pero en cierta forma no la acepta… la realidad es que un gobierno elegido como Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña y Francia apoyan a los terroristas y por otro lado dicen que los terroristas están atacando… es una contradicción grande, es doble mentira…”.

“La CIA dice estos son nuestros instrumentos de inteligencia los utilizamos para desestabilizar a países… esta es la situación que estamos viviendo en estos momentos…”.

“Según documentos proporcionados por Rusia el Estado Islámico está  robando el petróleo y después transportado a Turquía… y dice a gran escala… una frontera militarizada, la complicidad de las autoridades turcas es evidente… Altos oficiales de Turquía habrían sido despedidos por haber hecho su trabajo al parar a uno de los camiones en la frontera… lo que el estado turco quiere es facilitar tanto el movimiento de los terroristas,  de las armas como la exportación  del petróleo desde las zonas ocupadas… YO QUIERO DECIR QUE TODAS ESTAS FORMACIONES TERRORISTAS TIENEN SUS ASESORES OCCIDENTALES PAGADOS POR EMPRESAS PRIVADAS, DE MERCENARIOS, CON VINVULOS EN TELEFONOS SATELITALES Y ESTÁN EN COMUNICACIÓN CON LA OTAN… ellos no actúan de manera independiente, de tal forma que es una guerra de la OTAN en contra de un país soberano… lo presentan a la opinión pública como una guerra humanitaria , como una fachada contra el terrorismo, esos son mentiras”.

“Hay varias empresas metidas en la formación (de mercenarios) en diferentes países… en realidad Qatar, en particular es un país con territorio con bases militar y riquezas en petróleo… Ahora tanto Rusia como Irán están apoyando al gobierno de Siria… los dos lados dicen que están combatiendo al terrorismo , pero hay un lado que lo está haciendo de verdad, el Gobierno Sirio y sus aliados Rusia e Irán… por otro lado la injerencia tanto de Estados unidos OTAN, pero también ISRAEL… hay que también mencionar que Israel y Turquía tienen un acuerdo militar muy contundente  de más de 20 años… tiene acuerdos  en el campo de producción militar, intercambio de personal , inteligencia ,de logística …” .

“ES UNA GUERRA DE CONQUISTA…”

“La historia de las empresas privadas ligadas al Pentágono, a terroristas,  ocurrió durante la guerra de la OTAN en contra de Yugoslavia, en el caso de Bosnia, de Croacia, Kosovo igualmente…  juegan un papel muy importante en esta GUERRA NO CONVENCIONAL… para ponerlo en términos de mercado viene a ser un sector muy  dinámico, son las empresas de seguridad, pero también de producción de armas…” .

“El Bósforo o también conocido como estrecho de Estambul, entre el mar negro y el mediterráneo  fue cerrado por Turquía, está bajo su mando y en sus aguas territoriales…  si ellos lo cierran es casi un bloqueo marítimo…  hay un tratado dice que el único momento que Turquía puede cerrar esa vía marítima es en caso de guerra, si lo cierran  hay dos posibilidades…  ellos están violando  un acuerdo internacional…”

Michel  Chossudovsky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIRkpZf7l98&feature=youtu.be

 Como podemos darnos cuenta queridos Divagantes, las cosas vistas desde otra perspectiva y desde los ojos que llevan años analizando este tipo de conflictos en  diferentes países, las cosas no se miran en malos y buenos o blanco y negro como quieren hacernos creer algunos medios, esto está más enredado y más truculento que las películas famosas del súper agente 007, con la diferencia que la realidad supera  por mucho a la ficción, aunado a las preguntas certeras y concretas de Celeste Sáenz de Miera  redondean y nos  aclaran  el panorama lamentablemente desalentador de lo que sucede en Oriente Medio. La entrevista es amplia y toca a todos los países incluida China…

Con respecto a lo que sucede en México, una guerra “diferente” el profesor Michel Chossudovsky responde:

“En el contexto de México vemos una serie de circunstancias que no hemos aprendido a entender porque son incongruentes, vemos muchos focos rojos… lo que sucede en México no son solo agentes internos…” Celeste Sáenz de Miera.

“En este momento la complejidad de estos acontecimientos están graves… hay que reflexionar y hay que cuestionar la propaganda mediática, hay que apoyar a los medios independientes… Puedo decir con certeza que lo que está pasando en el  Medio Oriente o en África también está ligado a América Latina, el motivo, el imperio no tiene fronteras… pero los mecanismos posiblemente en América Latina son de otro tipo, lo que sí es cierto es que la política neoliberal, la medicina del FMI, la privatización, todas las políticas llamadas de comercio son en realidad POLITICAS QUE FACILITAN LA CONQUISTA… Los políticos en realidad están ligados al Cártel de New York… Si hablamos de México la familia Bush estaba ligada desde hace muchos años a la familia Salinas de Gortari…”: Michel Chossudovsky.

Como siempre les invito a escuchar el vídeo con atención y a que saque cada uno sus conclusiones, los comentarios los intercambiamos en las redes sociales, gracias y buena noche.

Cerca de dos años después de la caída del gobierno de Yanukóvich, el FMI se ha convertido en el guía de una política económica marcada por la crisis.

Parece que no importara que la política del FMI que se disemina por el mundo provoque caos social como en Grecia o en cualquier otro país, puesto que el objetivo es siempre el mismo: reforzar el capital privado a expensas de los bienes y servicios sociales. Y el FMI, cuya sede está en Washington, sigue en Ucrania a pesar de ser una institución tan despreciada por su fuerte implicación en la ola de las desastrosas privatizaciones en Europa del Este, durante la transición postcomunista a comienzos de los 90. Desde el inicio de la crisis, en noviembre de 2008, Ucrania figura entre los primeros países europeos que cayó en la ratonera del FMI, después de Islandia, Georgia y Hungría.

Debido a un poderoso movimiento insurreccional que llevó a la destitución del presidente ucraniano Víktor Yanukóvich, el nuevo Gobierno transitorio, establecido el 27 de febrero de 2014, ofreció al FMI la oportunidad de administrar una severa cura de austeridad al pueblo ucraniano. Sin siquiera esperar a las elecciones, se desarrollaron unas opacas negociaciones con ese Gobierno no elegido, que desembocaron en la adopción de políticas ultraliberales a cambio de un préstamo del FMI.

Unas opacas negociaciones desembocaron en la adopción de políticas ultraliberales a cambio de un préstamo del FMI

Para el actual primer ministro Arseni Iatseniuk, no existiría ninguna alternativa a las órdenes del FMI. Ya en octubre de 2008, cuando era presidente del Parlamento, Iatseniuk declaraba respecto al programa del FMI: “No tenemos otra elección. No es una cuestión política, es una cuestión vital para la actividad del país”. Cinco años y medio más tarde, en marzo de 2014, Arseni Iatseniuk, convertido en primer ministro del Gobierno transitorio, afirmó con respecto a un inminente programa de austeridad del FMI: “El Gobierno aceptará todas las condiciones fijadas por el FMI, porque no tenemos otra elección”.

Con el nuevo Gobierno del oligarca y multimillonario Petro Poroshenko, investido presidente de Ucrania en junio de 2014 con la promesa de poner fin a la guerra en tres meses, pocos cambios se pueden esperar, ya que mantiene a Arseni Iatseniuk en las funciones de primer ministro. Ucrania continúa su ruta dentro del monorraíl liberal de las políticas de austeridad dictadas por el FMI. A los ojos del poder establecido y cualquiera que sea el precio a pagar, no hay ninguna otra opción válida. Reinando, por lo tanto, el famoso dogma de Margaret Thatcher, “There is no alternative”.

Sin embargo, todos los indicadores económicos del país, que está bajo el yugo de la institución acreedora, se vuelven rojos. La deuda pública del Estado aumentó más de dos veces en menos de dos años, y pasó de 480.000 de grivnas (UAH) el 31 de diciembre de 2013 a 1.185 millones el 30 de abril de 2015. El producto interior bruto (PIB) sufrió una caída del 6,8% en 2014 (pasó de 180.000 millones de dólares en 2013 a 130.000 millones en 2014).

En 2015, el PIB por habitante alcanzó al de Sudán, cerca de 2.100 dólares. El país vio cómo sus reservas en divisas se hundieron a menos de la mitad (-63%) en 2014 –estaban bajo el umbral de 10.000 millones de dólares por primera vez en diez años– con el fin de mantener la moneda nacional, la grivna, que tuvo una fuerte caída con respecto al dólar, y financiar así ocho meses de campaña contra los rebeldes prorrusos en el este del país –conflicto que ya produjo más de 8.000 muertos en 18 meses–.

Reestructuración de la deuda y sumisión

Después de cinco meses de negociaciones, los principales acreedores privados de Ucrania, reunidos en un comité liderado por el fondo de inversiones Franklin Templeton, obtuvieron un acuerdo con Kiev para reestructurar la deuda. El acuerdo conseguido a fines de agosto de 2015 prevé una disminución del 20% de la deuda pública en manos del sector privado (que alcanza los 18.000 millones de dólares), o sea cerca de 3.600 millones de dólares, y un alargamiento de cuatro años del plazo de reembolso de 11.500 millones de dólares.

Franklin Templeton, que posee cerca de 6.500 millones de dólares en títulos (un tercio de las euro-obligaciones ucranianas), firmó un contrato con el fondo de inversiones Blackstone que aconsejará a ese grupo de acreedores privados durante esas negociaciones.

Franklin Templeton, que posee un tercio de las euro-obligaciones ucranianas firmó un contrato con el fondo de inversiones Blackstone

Blackstone, responsable en España de especulaciones inmobiliarias y de expulsiones de viviendas por falta de pago, también es bien conocido en Grecia, ya que aconsejaba a acreedores privados en 2012.

Este fondo de inversiones difunde sus consejos a los mismos acreedores privados frente a otros países deudores como Ucrania. Por otro lado, Ucrania, como Grecia hace unos años, está representada por el banco Lazard durante esas negociaciones de la deuda. En otras palabras, Ucrania se encuentra arrinconada entre los mismos actores ávidos de beneficios que hundieron a Grecia en una crisis sin precedentes: por un lado, Lazard que aconsejó –indudablemente muy mal– a Grecia y por el otro, el fondo de inversión Blackstone, que representó tan bien a los acreedores en Grecia. ¿Con los mismos, comenzamos de nuevo?

El secretario del Tesoro estadounidense, Jack Lew, dio la bienvenida al acuerdo que “ayudará a mejorar las finanzas públicas ucranianas y proveer a las autoridades de un margen de maniobra para ejecutar su ambicioso programa de reformas (…) apoyado de todo corazón por Estados Unidos”. No se puede ser más claro en cuanto a la voluntad del FMI y de su accionista mayoritario, Estados Unidos: el alivio de la deuda, ridículo con respecto a los futuros nuevos préstamos, sólo permite proseguir los reembolsos con intereses y la aplicación de medidas capitalistas. Si a los oligarcas les va bien, por el contrario, el pueblo ucraniano no ha conseguido salir de la crisis.

La deuda con Rusia

Por otra parte, Rusia, que rechazó participar en la reestructuración de la deuda privada liderada por Franklin Templeton, exige el pago de 3.000 millones de dólares –que constituye el primer tramo desembolsado en 2013, de un acuerdo de préstamos de 15.000 millones de dólares concedido por Putin al expresidente Yanukóvich) que vencen el 20 de diciembre de 2015. Pero Rusia, que no tiene derecho a veto en el FMI –solamente tiene el 2,39% de derechos de voto en el FMI– no lo tendrá fácil para que se la escuche por sobre esas euro–obligaciones sometidas a la ley británica.

El FMI desea urgentemente modificar sus propias reglas con el fin de poder proseguir con su plan de ayuda a Ucrania aunque ésta no reembolse su deuda con Moscú. En efecto, según sus propios estatutos, la institución no está autorizada a prestar a un país miembro que se encuentre en cesación de pagos de su deuda (default). El FMI controlado desde su creación por Estados Unidos, exige una liberalización desmesurada de Ucrania, incluso si tal cosa se parezca más a un descenso a los infiernos.

Jérôme Duval

En España ha habido 416.332 órdenes de desahucio desde 2008 hasta el segundo trimestre de 2015, según el informe “Efectos de la crisis en los órganos judiciales” del Consejo General del Poder Judicial. Los desahucios son una de las consecuencias de esta crisis, pero la ley que los permite es anterior, muy anterior. Hablamos de la Ley Hipotecaria, impuesta por Decreto bajo la dictadura de Franco en el año 1946 y que sigue en vigor a día de hoy.

La metafísica de los desahucios

Se trata de un “texto refundido según Decreto de 8 de febrero de 1946”, según nos recuerda en su web la Asociación Hipotecaria Española (AHE), que engloba a las entidades financieras con mayor presencia en el mercado hipotecario español. En su tranquilizadora guía “En caso de impago” se dice que “si el prestatario no paga un préstamo o crédito ―ya sea personal o hipotecario― responde con todos sus bienes, no sólo con los presentes en el momento del incumplimiento, sino también con los que adquiera en el futuro, mientras que la deuda no esté totalmente satisfecha”. Fue precisamente un expresidente de la AHE, Gregorio Mayayo, quien llegó a afirmar que era “metafísicamente imposible que el precio de la vivienda baje”. Por mentiras como ésta, miles de familias han sido expulsadas de sus casas.

Otra gran reflexión metafísica que venimos padeciendo es la de que “hemos vivido por encima de nuestras posibilidades”. Quienes sí se han endeudado por encima de sus posibilidades han sido las grandes empresas (inmobiliarias, constructoras y otras) y las entidades financieras, que además pretenden que seamos los contribuyentes los que les paguemos las facturas. En 2008, la deuda financiera neta de las cinco principales inmobiliarias de la bolsa (Colonial, Metrovacesa, Realia, Reyal Urbis y Martinsa Fadesa) se situó en 26.483 millones de euros, según el portal inmobiliario idealista.com.

Pero es que encima son ellas las malas pagadoras. Una nota del Banco de España asegura que “el comportamiento de las hipotecas minoristas [hogares] es mucho mejor que otro tipo de exposiciones”. Efectivamente, según datos de la Asociación Hipotecaria Española (AHE), la dudosidad (retraso en el pago de más de 90 días) de los créditos concedidos a los hogares para la adquisición de vivienda era del 5,8% en el primer trimestre de 2015, frente al 32,9% del crédito destinado a la construcción y al 34,6% del destinado a las actividades inmobiliarias.

La ética de los desahucios

La Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) defiende que muchos de los préstamos que las familias no han podido afrontar “se encontraban plagados de cláusulas abusivas y con una vivienda absolutamente sobrevalorada como garantía, pudiendo ser denominados como productos financieros tóxicos”. En efecto, las prácticas hipotecarias en el Estado español han sido tan salvajes que han obligado a pronunciarse incluso al Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea (TJUE), que ha declarado que las ejecuciones hipotecarias españolas son contrarias a la normativa de la UE y que la ley del PP sobre desahucios, de 2013, viola los derechos humanos.

Distintos juzgados han dado la razón a los hipotecados señalando como abusivas las cláusulas suelo y de intereses de demora del 20%. Algunos jueces también han contradicho una Ley Hipotecaria que permite que los bancos se queden con las viviendas subastadas por la mitad de su precio y todavía exijan el pago de la deuda. Incluso hay sentencias que han ordenado la devolución de viviendas ya subastadas, como la de la Audiencia de Girona en enero de 2015.La PAH recuerda que diversos organismos de Derechos Humanos rechazan los desalojos forzosos sin alternativa habitacional y la condena a deudas perpetuas tras ejecuciones hipotecarias como violaciones graves del Artículo 25 de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos o el Pacto Internacional de Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales de las Naciones Unidas, entre otros.

Bajo esta Ley Hipotecaria a las cientos de miles de familias desahuciadas se les ha negado una dación en pago de la que sí se han beneficiado grandes inmobiliarias, muchas de ellas vinculadas en origen con las propias entidades financieras locales reiteradamente rescatadas (como Bankia) y de las que han sido acreedores (y luego accionistas) multitud de bancos y fondos extranjeros, tal que Commerzbank, Eurohypo, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Crédit Agricole, o Goldman Sachs.

La Sociedad de Gestión de Activos Procedentes de la Reestructuración Bancaria (SAREB), también conocida como banco malo, ha recibido activos inmobiliarios por valor de 50.781 millones de euros públicos avalados por el Estado. Como la transparencia en la SAREB brilla por su ausencia, se desconoce cuántos de dichos activos proceden de daciones en pago de inmobiliarias o de desahucios a familias. Cabe recordar que la creación de este banco malo es una imposición de los “socios europeos” incluida en el Memorando de Entendimiento (MoU) que el Gobierno español firmó en julio de 2012 a cambio del rescate a la banca.

Es decir, que el banco malo, bajo estricta supervisión de la Troika, ha socializado los excesos privados de inmobiliarias y entidades financieras españolas e internacionales. El rescate público no ha servido para garantizar los depósitos de los ahorradores, como se nos vende, sino para aumentar deuda y déficit, servir de excusa a una austeridad brutal y que los buitres y sus intermediarios se enriquezcan. Hasta la fecha, 41.200 millones de euros de los 50.000 de la SAREB son gestionados por tres fondos estadounidenses (Cerberus, Apollo y TPG).

La deuda no es metafísica, es política

Visto lo visto, el precio de la deuda inmobiliaria es muy alto. Y lo seguimos pagando. En 2007, año de inicio de la crisis, la deuda privada española superaba los cuatro billones de euros, el 77% de la cual correspondía a bancos y empresas y el 23% a las familias, según el análisis de la deuda del Estado español de la Plataforma Auditoría Ciudadana de la Deuda (PACD) en 2015.

Es a partir del estallido de la crisis cuando la deuda pública comienza a dispararse. En aquel año 2007, la deuda pública española era del 36% del PIB, muy por debajo de la media de la eurozona (66%) y en 2015 alcanza casi el 100% del PIB, más de un billón de euros. Organismos como el Banco de España achacan ese espectacular aumento a las ayudas al sector financiero, entre otros factores.

Es decir, que el gran problema de la deuda española no ha sido ni la deuda pública ni siquiera la deuda hipotecaria de los hogares, sino la estratosférica deuda de las empresas (inmobiliarias, y constructoras, entre otras), y de las entidades financieras. Deuda privada que llevan años intentando socializar con la complicidad necesaria de los gobiernos de turno bajo estricta supervisión de la Unión Europea.

Desde la Plataforma Auditoría Ciudadana de la Deuda (PACD) trabajamos para que la ciudadanía audite la deuda que nos esclaviza y se actúe en consecuencia. Son muchas las cosas que queremos cambiar, entre ellas esta Ley Hipotecaria herederada, como este régimen, de la dictadura de Franco.

Desde el 1 de octubre de 2014, Público incorpora un nuevo sistema de gestión y moderación de comentarios: Disqus. Puedes leer todos los detalles aquí.

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Jérôme Duval
Miembro del CATDM
Fátima Martín
Miembro de la PACD Madrid

Apesar da forte oposição do Tesouro dos Estados Unidos, o FMI finalmente aprovou em 30 de novembro a inclusão do yuan nos Direitos Especiais de Saque, uma cesta de moedas criada em 1969 para suplementar as reservas oficiais existentes dos membros do organismo multilateral. Assim, a moeda chinesa se tornará a partir do próximo 1 de outubro de 2016 o quinto integrante da cesta do FMI. E a influência financeira da China a nível mundial continuará crescendo rapidamente: o peso do yuan nos Direitos Especiais de Saque será maior em comparação com o iene japonês e a libra britânica.

Poucos meses atrás, houve muito ceticismo sobre se o Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) iria incorporar ou não a “moeda do povo” da China (“renminbi”) em sua cesta de divisas[1]. Finalmente, as dúvidas acabaram: apesar da forte oposição do Tesouro dos Estados Unidos, muito em breve o yuan se tornará o quinto membro da cesta de moedas do FMI[2].

Como chegamos até aqui? Em meio à crise do sistema de taxas de câmbio fixas, que foi estabelecido no ano 1944, em 1969 o FMI criou um ativo de reserva, que chamados de Direitos Especiais de Saque (SDR, ‘Special Drawing Rights’, em inglês). Como o sistema da Reserva Federal (Fed) dos Estados Unidos estava cada vez mais impossibilitado de trocar por ouro uma quantidade excessiva de dólares que os bancos centrais de todo o mundo tinham acumulado, o propósito do SDR foi o de complementar as reservas oficiais existentes dos países que compunham o FMI.

Em um primeiro momento, o valor do SDR foi definido como equivalente a 0,888671 gramas de ouro fino. E numa segunda fase, após o colapso dos acordos de Bretton Woods, o valor do SDR foi estabelecido por referência a uma cesta de moedas das principais economias da época: Estados Unidos, Alemanha, Japão, Reino Unido e França. No fim dos anos 90, a cesta do FMI era composta pelo dólar, euro, iene japonês e libra britânica.

E, a partir de então, não houve mais alterações. Apesar das enormes mudanças no quadro político e econômico mundial ao longo das últimas décadas, a composição da cesta do FMI manteve-se inalterada.

A deterioração da economia dos EUA não impediu que o dólar mantivesse a sua posição dominante: em 2011, ele ficava com quase 42% da carteira do SDR; seguido pelo euro, com 37,4%; a libra esterlina, com 11,3%; e o iene, com 9,4%. No entanto, após o Conselho Executivo do FMI decidir acrescentar a moeda chinesa em 30 de novembro, a composição da cesta finalmente vai mudar[3].

Assim, o yuan será a terceira divisa com maior peso nos SDR, com 10,92% do total, acima do iene japonês (8,33%), e da libra esterlina (8,09%), embora ainda atrás do dólar (41,73%) e do euro (30,93%). Esta decisão entrará em vigor em 11 meses, no próximo 01 de outubro de 2016.

“A inclusão do yuan vai aumentar a representação e o atrativo do SDR e ajudará a melhorar o sistema monetário internacional vigente, uma circunstância que beneficiará tanto a China como o resto do mundo”, declarou o Banco Popular da China em um comunicado[4].

Em 2009, Pequim já tinha deixado claro que aspirava que o yuan se tornasse uma moeda de reserva global. Como observei em meus artigos anteriores, a internacionalização do yuan tem sido baseada no “gradualismo” e apoiada especialmente na força comercial da China.

Nos últimos anos, o Banco Popular da China assinou swaps cambiais com mais de 40 bancos centrais, desde os localizados na Ásia-Pacífico, África e Europa aos do Chile e Canadá, aliados fervorosos dos Estados Unidos. Também não podemos esquecer a instalação de bancos de compensação no exterior para facilitar o uso do renminbi (‘RMB clearing banks’) e concessão de quotas de investimento para participar do programa chinês de Investidores Institucionais Estrangeiros Qualificados em Renminbi (RQFII, ‘Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor Program’).

No entanto, essas medidas foram insuficientes para o yuan entrar na ‘primeira divisão’. Era preciso ganhar o reconhecimento de uma instituição decisiva na gestão das finanças, como o FMI. A China começou a ganhar a batalha em agosto, quando o yuan foi desvalorizado. Imediatamente, Pequim insistiu em que esta foi uma ação temporária; isto é, que não haveria desvalorizações prolongadas[5].

Foi então que a diretora-gerente do FMI, Christine Lagarde, saiu para acalmar os investidores, neutralizando a propaganda dos EUA que responsabilizava a China pela turbulência econômica global[6].

Enquanto isso, Pequim não voltou atrás em seu programa de “reformas estruturais”; pelo contrário, pretende acelerar a abertura do seu setor financeiro. Tudo aponta no sentido da liberalização da taxa de câmbio e das taxas de juros, assim como do mercado de capitais. Depois de conectar as bolsas de valores de Xangai e Hong Kong em meados de novembro de 2014[7], agora a China contempla o estabelecimento uma ligação com a bolsa de Londres[8].

Em conclusão, embora seja verdade que o yuan ainda tem um longo caminho a percorrer para ser capaz de competir de igual para igual com o dólar, não há dúvida de que a sua próxima inclusão na cesta de moedas do FMI é um marco histórico[9]. O mundo financeiro está mudando…

Ariel Noyola Rodriguez

Artigo em espanhol :

El yuan será la tercera divisa más poderosa dentro de la canasta del FMI

Fonte em espanhol : Russia Today (Rússia). 1 de Dezembro de 2015

A lo largo de 2015, las pérdidas de los mercados bursátiles sumaron cientos de miles de millones de dólares. El mundo de los negocios se puso a temblar cuando a inicios de agosto la bolsa de valores de Shanghái cayó durante varias jornadas consecutivas. Solamente entonces se puso en evidencia que las vulnerabilidades de la economía mundial no se restringían a Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea.

Aunque ya pasaron más de 7 años desde la quiebra de Lehman Brothers, todo apunta a que la crisis global todavía no toca fondo, pues conforme pasan las semanas cobra nuevas víctimas, de un sector a otro, de una región geográfica a otra. Como consecuencia de la creciente desaceleración de Asia-Pacífico, los países emergentes cuyos ingresos dependen de la exportación de materias primas (commodities) se encuentran hoy en un serio predicamento.

El canal de contagio (de la crisis) de los países industrializados hacia los emergentes ya no es únicamente por la vía comercial –si bien cabe destacar que el Baltic Dry Index (BDI), uno de los principales indicadores del transporte marítimo y un dato fundamental para medir la actividad comercial en términos reales, registra su peor desempeño de las últimas 3 décadas–, sino sobre todo a través de las finanzas.

De acuerdo con una investigación publicada en octubre por el Instituto de Finanzas Internacionales (IIF, por su sigla en inglés), que analiza los datos de 30 países, este año las salidas de capitales de los residentes en los países emergentes alcanzarán más de 1 billón de dólares. Es el monto más dramático desde la crisis asiática de 1998. No hay duda de que la euforia bursátil del Sur global no será más.

Es que los inversionistas que venían comprando bonos de deuda soberana de los países de América Latina y Asia-Pacífico, así como títulos respaldados en commodities, en la actualidad están llenos de miedo e incertidumbre. Ya no consideran seguro obtener elevados dividendos apostando en activos financieros de alto riesgo.

Ahora nada les resulta más seguro que volcar sus inversiones hacia los bonos del Tesoro de Estados Unidos. A pesar de su enorme deuda pública, nadie cree que Washington vaya a declararse en bancarrota en el corto plazo, eso llevaría a que el dólar viera debilitado su estatus de moneda de reserva, y con ello, la hegemonía de Estados Unidos sería herida de muerte. Resulta una contradicción que aún con los graves problemas de la economía estadounidense, la confianza en el dólar apenas se haya visto mermada desde la crisis de 2008, si bien es cierto que hay otras monedas, como el yuan, que han visto incrementada su influencia de modo considerable.

En estos momentos el dinero nuevamente está regresando a casa, a sus verdaderos dueños, a los bolsillos de los magnates de Wall Street. Eso explica la caída de los tipos de cambio y los mercados de valores de los países emergentes. Sin embargo, ese dinero o bien se va a atesorar, o bien se va a utilizar para llevar a cabo fusiones y adquisiciones (mergers & acquisitions) de empresas, mas no se invertirá de forma masiva en las actividades productivas y, por lo tanto, el mercado laboral de Estados Unidos estará aún muy lejos de superar su degradación estructural.

Ante el pánico cada vez más generalizado, el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) insiste en que las autoridades monetarias de Estados Unidos deben actuar con cautela. Ante los altos niveles de deuda en escala mundial, que está denominada fundamentalmente en dólares, la directora ejecutiva del FMI, Christine Lagarde, ha sugerido en varias ocasiones que Estados Unidos debe postergar hasta por lo menos 2016 el incremento de la tasa de interés de los fondos federales (federal funds rate)[1].

Si bien los datos más recientes del mercado laboral de Estados Unidos parecen mejores que antes, eso no implica de ningún modo que la economía de aquel país goce de una recuperación sostenida. La deuda privada se mantiene muy elevada en Estados Unidos, lo mismo la de las empresas que la de las familias. Miles de estadounidenses no encuentran empleos de tiempo completo, únicamente a tiempo parcial, la mayoría de las ocasiones muy mal pagados y sin prestaciones sociales de calidad. Los más desafortunados sobreviven a expensas de los seguros de desempleo y los cupones de alimentos.

En contraste, gracias a las políticas del gobierno, los bancos estadounidenses han logrado incrementar sus niveles de capitalización. Asimismo, aumentaron su apalancamiento financiero (es la relación entre crédito y capital propio invertido en una operación financiera), con lo cual, está claro que más que proveer recursos crediticios a las pequeñas y medianas empresas, se han dedicado a realizar apuestas especulativas en el mercado bursátil. Con todo, tal como lo apunté en mi entrega anterior, ese auge también se ha venido agotando a gran velocidad. Según los datos de los propios bancos de Estados Unidos, sus niveles de ganancias apuntan a la baja.

Visto desde una perspectiva global, el gran riesgo está en que cualquier decisión precipitada puede apuntalar las tendencias recesivas (depresivas) en otros países. Paul Mason, editorialista del diario británico de The Guardian, cita a los economistas del Banco de Pagos Internacionales (BIS, por su sigla en inglés), para quienes es este “un mundo en el que los niveles de deuda son demasiado elevados, el crecimiento de la productividad es demasiado débil y los riesgos financieros son demasiado amenazadores”.

En el caso del Continente Europeo, por ejemplo, ante la extrema debilidad del crecimiento y la inflación negativa (deflación) que ha golpeado a varias naciones de la periferia, el banco central de la unión monetaria se ha declarado dispuesto a llevar a cabo medidas extraordinarias si la situación económica continúa su deterioro.

Lo mismo sucede con Japón, después de que el primer ministro, Shinzo Abe, puso en marcha un ambicioso programa de recuperación, que incluyó tanto estímulos monetarios como fiscales, y un conjunto de “reformas estructurales” a fin de incrementar la productividad, la segunda economía más importante de la región asiática cayó en recesión técnica el tercer trimestre de este año.

Es así como tres de los bancos centrales más poderosos del mundo divergen en sus planes de política monetaria, mientras que por un lado en Estados Unidos se están preparando para elevar el costo del crédito, por otro lado en Europa y Japón se alistan a lanzar programas de inyección de liquidez mucho más agresivos. Con ello, es evidente que la volatilidad de los mercados financieros no disminuirá, sino que tenderá a aumentar durante los próximos meses.

En definitiva, no existe consenso entre las grandes potencias sobre el tipo de políticas monetarias que deben ponerse en marcha para combatir la recesión mundial. Así se puso de manifiesto en la cumbre del Grupo de los 20 (G20, integrado por las 20 economías más poderosas del mundo) llevada a cabo a mediados de noviembre en la ciudad de Antalya, Turquía.

No obstante, en lo que sí hay acuerdo entre los principales líderes mundiales es en seguir agudizando las condiciones de explotación de la clase trabajadora mediante nuevas “reformas estructurales”. En cambio, las reformas orientadas a regular las actividades financieras globales carecen de dientes afilados y su ejecución progresa muy lentamente. Los fondos depositados en los paraísos fiscales siempre son intocables. Es el reflejo que muestra la misma imagen desde París, Berlín, Londres, Bruselas, Washington, Tokio y el grueso de los países emergentes: los amos del dinero imponen su ley.

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez

 Ariel Noyola Rodríguez: Economista egresado de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Note from the editor of Asia-Pacific Journal: This is the second article in a three-part special issue titled “Pacific Islands, Extreme Environments.” Edited by Andrea E. Murray. Niazi provides an in-depth case study of the Philippines’ ongoing devastation following Superstorm Haiyan in 2013. Building on Kelman’s discussion of shifting post-disaster scales of governance (national, subnational, and regional), Niazi expands the conversation to include geologic scales of violence wrought by volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis. The author demonstrates how coastal and island nations in the Asia-Pacific, including Bangladesh, Maldives, Philippines and Sri Lanka, have contributed among the least to climate change, but are already suffering the worst of its global consequences. (End)

Superstorm Haiyan made a devastating landfall in the east-central Philippines on November 8, 2013, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction that draped the whole country in a pall of grief. The Philippines has since been reeling from this disaster. The typhoon buffeted the most vulnerable of Filipinos, 40% of whom live below the poverty line (i.e., $1.25 a day). Many of them fished for a living. Their livelihood compelled them to live dangerously close to the shoreline of western Pacific. The highest ground on which some of them found their perch was just one meter above sea level. When the storm swelled, with waves as high as six meters, its poor victims were defenseless. The crashing walls of water swept away all that they possessed. The cumulative losses in lives and livelihoods, homes and hearths, businesses and infrastructure have no parallel in recent Philippines history, just as Haiyan stands out in the annals of meteorology. Two years on, 13 million Filipinos, of whom 5 million are children, are still scarred by the destructive fury of Haiyan, while 600,000 remain homeless. The number of deaths from the superstorm surpassed 6,000.

The staggering scale of humanitarian crisis that followed Haiyan’s landfall was well beyond the capacity to respond of the under-resourced and overstretched Philippine government. Oxfam found it even overwhelming for the global humanitarian assistance system. The largest brunt of recovery efforts fell on the Philippines itself, which Haiyan had already bled of precious resources. Its economic losses alone were valued at a whopping $15 billion, which constitutes 5% of the Philippines’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of around $300 billion. In the face of a slow-down in global and regional economies, it will take the country many years of hard work before it recovers its bearing. As a nation of 7,100 islands, the Philippines sits on the front line of global climate change. This tragically means typhoon Haiyan is not the last of nature’s bites that Filipinos will have to endure. As climate change begins to impose dire costs, more such disasters loom ever larger on the horizon. The Philippines has already borne the brunt of worsening climate change in economic losses of $1.6 billion per year–from increasingly frequent and intense typhoons.

Yes, Typhoon Haiyan Was Caused by Climate Change (The Nation and Foreign Policy In Focus) Ground Zero of Climate Change

The Philippines is among the Asian and particularly insular nations that have become ground zero for climate change. Many coastal and island nations in Asia are already among its fellow sufferers. In the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh has become the most exposed country to worsening climatic events. Year after year, as global temperatures continue to rise, it is battered by cyclones of ever-higher intensity and ever-greater frequency. Two Super-cyclones – Cyclone Sidr and Cyclone Aila — respectively tore through the country in 2007 and 2009, just 18 months apart. Storms of this intensity, which historically have been spaced from 20 to 30 years, have become alarmingly frequent, upending the lives of millions of Bangladeshis. In a single event of extreme weather, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, lose their lives. Besides, economic and social dislocation visits millions, leaving them stranded for months, and even years, wiping out or impoverishing entire communities. If global mean warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius, the largest chunk of coastal Bangladesh may begin to teem with “climate refugees.”

According to the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, more than 30 million Bangladeshis are set to lose everything in the next 30 to 50 years. By Bangladesh’s official reckoning, 20 million of its citizens may face climate migration over the next 40 years, for whom it proposes their “managed migration” to western countries. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lends his voice to Dacca’s call. He asks western governments to give the “managed migration” a serious consideration. Given mounting anti-immigrant sentiment across the globe, such calls are hardly a fantasy. Nevertheless such migration has already begun within the region. Two favorite destinations of climate refugees are India and Pakistan – in that order. Also included is Myanmar that received quite a number of Bangladeshi refugees, but is now pushing back into Bangladesh. Their exodus to these countries is fueling tensions, and even violent eruptions, especially in the Indian states of Assam and Myanmar, while the city of Karachi in Pakistan, which houses the largest number of Bangladeshis in the country brims with interethnic conflicts between Bangladeshi immigrants and the city’s major ethnic Urdu-speaking community, some of whose members assert to be called ‘Muhajirs’ (refugees) themselves, and embrace “Muhajir nationalism.”

Bangladesh’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dipu Moni reckons that 1 degree Celsius increase in world temperatures will be enough to spell economic disaster for her country, as it will shave off 10% of its GDP in economic losses. Destruction from Super-cyclones such as Sidr, she reasons, takes 10 to 20 years to recover, and costs billions of dollars. There are projections that temperatures in South Asia could rise from two to five degree Celsius above preindustrial levels by the turn of the century. At 5 degrees Celsius, the temperature rise will be 250% higher than the expected global mean warming of 2 degrees Celsius. Rising temperatures are the motive force that powers tropical cyclones and superstorms of which Bangladesh has been the world’s worst victim. Future is thus fraught with predictable hazards for Bangladesh, whose vulnerability to deadliest storms is only to worsen in the years and decades to come. Of the world’s ten deadliest superstorms on record, six have visited upon Bangladesh: Bhola Cyclone, Hooghly River Cyclone, Backerganj Cyclone, Chittagong Cyclone and Cyclone 02B. Bhola Cyclone (1970) is believed to be the world’s deadliest to date with a death toll of more than half a million. If climate change continues to worsen, Bangladesh’s troubles will continue to multiply.

Even worse, the island nation of Maldives, which is barely 1.5 meters above sea level, will vanish from the face of the earth in the next 50 years, as the global average temperature continues to rise. A nation of 1,200 islands, 30 of its islands were swept away in the tsunami in 2004. Five years later, in 2009, Maldives’s President Mohamed Nasheed struck the world with a blunt call for ending fossil fuel consumption to save his country of 328,000 people: “If the world can’t save the Maldives today, it might be too late to save London, New York or Hong Kong tomorrow.” He pledged to make his nation carbon-neutral, running it on 100% renewable energy. Anticipating challenges that could forestall passage to a carbon-free Maldives, he reasoned: “Going green might cost a lot but refusing to act now will cost us the Earth.” He was deposed in a coup in 2012. He again lost a presidential bid in November 2013 as beneficiaries of the status quo managed to keep him out of power. Nobody knows “who” won the Maldives’s election, but everybody knows who lost it and why. President Nasheed nonetheless, retains his role as a climate crusader, whom many revere. The Hollywood Director Jon Shenk honored his work for climate justice in a memorable documentary, The Island President (cf. Murray’s review of “There Once Was an Island” in this issue).

In May 2008, Super-cyclone Nargis flatted part of Myanmar (Burma). The delta region of Irrawaddy was the prime site that absorbed the devastating blow of the deadly cyclone. The loss of human life ran into the tens of thousands although the correct number remains unknown to this day due to the ruling military government’s absolute control of information. The Guardian newspaper had put the number of dead in Cyclone Nargis at 140,000. According to the government’s own reckoning, 84, 500 were killed and 53,800 went missing in the country’s worst cyclone. It may be noted that in disaster after disaster, it has been confirmed that those who go missing remain unaccounted for and are seldom found alive. In parallel, the numbers of those affected by the destructive cyclone were in the millions. The United Nations estimated that the Cyclone had affected 2.4 million people across the country.

More importantly, the political economy of Myanmar further worsened the impact of the cyclone as the military junta in power put the entire country in lockdown, and refused to let in international relief agencies for fear of ‘spying.’ On the other hand, the Myanmar government, battered by decades of international sanctions and worldwide shunning, lacked resources of its own to undertake a massive relief operation. Cyclone Nargis thus revealed the soft belly of the government to the country’s suffering people. They challenged the government’s inability and incompetence to help its people in the most desperate hour of need. Rattled, the government rushed to strike a deal with its world’s most famous opposition leader, Nobel-laureate Aung San Su and her National Defense League (NDL). Three years later a quasi-civilian government took the reins of government. But the cyclone-fueled and monsoon-swelled disasters have since continued to strike. As recently as August 2015, all but one of the country’s 14 provinces were swept by flash floods from lashing monsoons, while rescuers struggled to reach disaster-stricken areas. At least 27 people were killed in these floods and more than 150,000 affected. More importantly, monsoon fury was not limited to Myanmar, but extended to the entire region from India, Nepal, and Pakistan to Vietnam.

Like the Maldives, Sri Lanka also is precariously perched in the heart of the Indian Ocean. Known for its stunning scenic beauty, this island nation has long been convulsed in a self-destructive war. It has just staunched its bleeding, but it still has a long way to go to bind up the deep wounds. At the same time, Sri Lanka has many bright spots. It leads south Asia in economic development (measured in per capita income), social progress (measured in adult literacy), gender equity, and climate-readiness. It is a Kerala — the beauty spot of south Asian social democracy — on the national scale. Yet climate-induced disruptions stare at it as the greatest threat to its survival over the next half century. “Its agriculture, fisheries, and tourism are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and weather-related disasters,” reports The Guardian.

Likewise, the coastal communities of India and Pakistan – in that order – run the same risk of being deluged as sea levels rise. In 2010, Pakistan experienced the worst flooding of its history in human dislocation, and economic losses. The flooding was described as a once-in-100-years event that forced 20 million of its residents from their homes, and cost the country $20 billion (one-tenth of Pakistan’s GDP of $200 billion in 2010) in economic losses. Pakistan pressed all of its military assets – army, navy and air force – into service to help ease the suffering of millions of Pakistanis living along the shoreline of the mighty Indus River. Yet help could reach only a fraction of 20 million displaced people, as one-fifth of the country (160,000 square kilometers) was under water. A year after, in 2011, Pakistan again witnessed monsoon-swollen flooding wreak havoc, dislodging another 6 million of its citizens. The floods have since been a regular occurrence that leaves the rural hinterland of the country, along the Indus shore, ravaged year after year. In 2015 the impact of floods was worsened by a heat wave that killed around 2,000 people in the mega city of Karachi. The floods and heat waves have been a regular feature of the Indian landscape as well. The floods in Uttarkhand and the state of Jammu and Kashmir were devastating, which dominated the news for days and weeks. The 2015 heat wave also added fuel to the fire, killing a number of people in urban areas.

Coastal India and Pakistan are especially vulnerable to superstorms. In 2014, both countries witnessed Super-cyclone Nilofar, which died down before it could reach its destructive worst. It brushed past India’s coastal state of Gujarat and the Pakistani province of Sindh. Both Gujarat and Sindh are coastal regions, which each host naval bases, naval installations and naval assets. By the time Nilofar bent around Karachi, the capital city of Sindh, it packed wind gusts of 250km (155 miles) an hour, a wind velocity that was common in all the deadly superstorms in the region, including the world’s most lethal cyclone of all time, the Bhola Cyclone, that flattened then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Un-evolved Superstorm Nilofar bore all the marks of Typhoon Haiyan that tore through the eastern and central Philippines a year earlier. The same year the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir saw one of the severest floods that hit 1 million Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control in India and Pakistan, and left hundreds of residents dead. A year earlier, in 2013, the Indian state of Uttarkhand experienced one of the most devastating floods that killed 10,000 people. Early and severe monsoon rains breached a mountain glacier, sending ice, rock, mud and water down the mountain causing widespread death and destruction. Officials described the disaster as a ‘Himalayan tsunami.’

Climate Change stalks the African Continent

Fragility of the African continent is no less sobering. Drought, desertification, livestock fatalities, infectious diseases, food shortages and water scarcities already stalk the length and breadth of the region. Climate change is sharpening the lethality of these murderous challenges, and exacerbating the conditions of environmental decline in general. The giant nations of Africa, such as Congo, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan, are already in the throes of ecological depletion. Their political conflicts are deeply anchored in their fragile ecologies. However, African sufferings may go unnoticed, as they are less likely to take the form of visually spectacular disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy or Typhoon Haiyan. Climate-induced disasters may yet trigger epidemics, large-scale human fatalities, or mass migration that would thrust the continent on to the world’s retina. It will likely occur because of sudden overheating of the continent. It must be remembered that Africa is already the warmest continent on the planet. Libya is the continent’s thermal powerhouse, whose citizens are known to have endured the world’s peak temperature. Just as a few degrees warmer water in the Atlantic or the Pacific can spell disasters, so can a few degrees warmer atmosphere. For all these reasons, Africa is as much in the eye of superstorms as are Asian nations. Africa stands threatened by the warming of the atmosphere that can set off a trajectory of destructive events. It is particularly fraught with climatic threats of epidemics, human fatalities, or mass migration, compounded by political conflicts that sear the entire continent.

The Science of Typhoons A section of meteorologists are still dismissive of causal links between climate change and the production of cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes or superstorms like Haiyan. Such dismissals, however, only feed into climate skepticism. The science of typhoons and climate change is quite clear. When the IPCC released its fifth assessment report on September 27, it confirmed warming of the atmosphere and overheating of the oceans — the latter is responsible for the production of cyclones. When sea surface temperature hits 26 degrees Celsius, a cyclone is formed. When oceans are a few degrees warmer than normal, superstorms begin to brew. Superstorm Sandy burst out of the Atlantic coastal water that was about 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. Similarly, surface temperature of the western Pacific was 1 to 5 degrees Celsius warmer in 2013 than its average range in 1980-2000. Warmer oceans evaporate faster to power the storm, and warmer atmosphere holds more moisture to cause rainstorms.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel, who also serves on the IPCC, sees clear connections between the warming of the oceans and the production of high velocity winds and storm surges as witnessed in Haiyan. He went so far as to suggest that developing nations such as the Philippines are suffering for the sins of developed countries that followed the path of carbon-heavy development. He stopped short of suggesting compensation for climate mitigation to developing nations.

Financing Climate Adaptation

But financing of climate adaptation has been an important part of climate change talks since the Copenhagen Conference in 2009. Haiyan’s landfall only added to the urgency of this need, which happened to time its landing with climate talks (COP 19) in Warsaw, Poland (November 11-22, 2013). These talks are held each year in the run up to crafting a binding climate treaty in 2015 to replace the Kyoto Protocol. One important outcome of the Copenhagen Conference was the financial commitments by developed nations to help less affluent nations in adapting to climate-induced disruptions. Initially, developed countries committed $30 billion for 2010-12, and pledged to increase this commitment to $100 billion a year by 2020. Oxfam, however, deflated such hopes in an analysis, which showed that developed nations had begun to wriggle out of even a modest commitment of $30 billion spread over multiple years. It further dampened any prospect for redeeming the grand pledge of $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020.

Disaster Capitalism

These public commitments are likely to be relegated to transnational financial capital. Some saw the first sign of it in choosing Poland, notable for its pro-business, climate-skeptic, coal-fired development trajectory, as the site of climate talks. It is no wonder that, at the United Nations’ climate talks in Warsaw, discussions were focused on “mobilizing private finance such as loans and equity investments.” Private finance hotly pursues profits even in the midst of people’s sufferings. It is no coincidence that risk management companies that specialize in “catastrophe modeling” are proliferating. The chief research officer of one such company gloomily noted meager financial prospects in rebuilding the Philippines: “The economic activity of reconstruction itself is much lower [in the Philippines] than it would be in a rich country where everybody’s using insurance and claims assessors and getting quotes from builders. A lot of people [in the Philippines] will end up mending their own houses.” Naomi Klein famously described this profit-riven approach to human tragedies as “disaster capitalism.”

‘End this Madness’

The IPCC in its fifth assessment report (2008) concluded with 95% certainty that humans are at the root of climate change. This conclusion seems an official inauguration of Anthropocene, the age of human extravagance, in which humans have evolved or (more appropriately) devolved into a geological force on the scale of volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis to have altered the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. In the process, this hubris has hung a huge question mark over the very survival of the human race on this planet. Yet all humans are not equally destructive; nor are they equally vulnerable. Many, as in the Philippines, are victims of the actions of the few who are driving climate change and planning to profit from it at the same time. Among them, the fossil fuel industry and its beneficiaries, who are accumulating $1.9 trillion a year in subsidies, in addition to immense profits, sit atop. Climate change is the sin of their profiteering, for which the global poor are atoning with their lives. As the Philippine delegate to the United Nations’ climate talks in Warsaw tearfully pleaded, this madness must end. It doesn’t make sense to sacrifice the primary Earth economy for the illusory secondary human economy that is measured in the piles of worthless paper money built by “quantitative easing” (printing money).

Map of Asia-Pacific Region UK Trade & Investment Asia Task Force

Conclusion

The Asia-Pacific is the region most vulnerable to global climate change. It is the world’s most populous region with the highest population density, settled along the long coastlines of the Indian and the Pacific oceans. Its sub-regions have varying levels of vulnerabilities. South Asia, which is the world’s most populous sub-region with 1.7 billion people, houses half of the world’s poor, and is home to 17 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. All this readily translates into human disaster and economic destruction if meteorological events become uncontrollable with supercyclones and superstorms such as Typhoon Haiyan or disastrous floods that have been stalking the region since 2008. The African Indian Ocean also is lethal for Africa’s coastal nations, such as Somalia and Ethiopia, which are vulnerable to calamitous monsoons rising from the Indian Ocean, creating unbearable human and economic costs in droughts and deluges.

Coastal and Island nations in the Asia-Pacific, such as Bangladesh, Maldives, Philippines and Sri Lanka, have contributed the least to global climate change, but will suffer the most from climate breakdown. Climate justice demands that nations that contributed the most to global climate change make comparable contributions to the United Nations Green Climate Fund to reverse the tide of climatic and meteorological disasters that have grown to become a permanent feature of the planet. Ironically, the Green Climate Fund is one of the main obstacles to reincarnating and strengthening the Kyoto Protocol in Paris by the end of this year. If the Paris summit on climate change ends without a meaningful climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol, human suffering will continue to grow. It however bears reminding that human misery does not stay in one place; it reappears in the unlikeliest of places. It is therefore imperative that the world invests in climate mitigation and climate adaptation to reduce the human and economic cost of climate change.

Tarique Niazi, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Related Articles:

-Tarique Niazi, “The Asia-Pacific in the Eye of Superstorms”

-Edward B. Barbier, “Overcoming Environmental Degradation and Wealth Inequality in the Asia-Pacific Region”

-Andrew DeWit, “Hiroshima’s Disaster, Climate Crisis, and the Future of the Resilient City”

Theoretically, it would be a great story for the American press: an autocrat so obsessed with overthrowing the leader of a neighboring country that he authorizes his intelligence services to collaborate with terrorists in staging a lethal sarin attack to be blamed on his enemy and thus trick major powers to launch punishing bombing raids against the enemy’s military.

And, after that scheme failed to achieve the desired intervention, the autocrat continues to have his intelligence services aid terrorists inside the neighboring country by providing weapons and safe transit for truck convoys carrying the terrorists’ oil to market. The story gets juicier because the autocrat’s son allegedly shares in the oil profits.

To make the story even more compelling, an opposition leader braves the wrath of the autocrat by seeking to expose these intelligence schemes, including the cover-up of key evidence. The autocrat’s government then seeks to prosecute the critic for “treason.”

But the problem with this story, as far as the American government and press are concerned, is that the autocratic leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in charge of Turkey, a NATO ally and his hated neighbor is the much demonized Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Major U.S. news outlets and political leaders also bought into the sarin deception and simply can’t afford to admit that they once again misled the American people on a matter of war.

Image: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Official Story of the sarin attack – as presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, Human Rights Watch and other “respectable” sources – firmly laid the blame for the Aug. 21, 2013 atrocity killing hundreds of civilians outside Damascus on Assad. That became a powerful “group think” across Official Washington.

Though a few independent media outlets, including Consortiumnews.com, challenged the rush to judgment and noted the lack of evidence regarding Assad’s guilt, those doubts were brushed aside. (In an article on Aug. 30, 2013, I described the administration’s “Government Assessment” blaming Assad as a “dodgy dossier,” which offered not a single piece of verifiable proof.)

However, as with the “certainty” about Iraq’s WMD a decade earlier, Every Important Person shared the Assad-did-it “group think.” That meant — as far as Official Washington was concerned — that Assad had crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons. A massive U.S. retaliatory bombing strike was considered just days away.

But Obama – at the last minute – veered away from launching those military attacks, with Official Washington concluding that Obama had shown “weakness” by not following through. What was virtually unreported was that U.S. intelligence analysts had doubts about Assad’s guilt and suspected a trap being laid by extremists.

Despite those internal questions, the U.S. government and the compliant mainstream media publicly continued to push the Assad-did-it propaganda line. In a formal address to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, Obama declared, “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack.”

Later, a senior State Department official tried to steer me toward the Assad-is-guilty assessment of a British blogger then known as Moses Brown, a pseudonym for Eliot Higgins, who now runs an outfit called Bellingcat which follows an effective business model by reinforcing whatever the U.S. propaganda machine is churning out on a topic, except having greater credibility by posing as a “citizen blogger.” [For more on Higgins, see Consortiumnews.com’s “‘MH-17 Case: ‘Old Journalism’ vs. ‘New’.”]

The supposedly conclusive proof against Assad came in a “vector analysis” developed by Human Rights Watch and The New York Times – tracing the flight paths of two rockets back to a Syrian military base northwest of Damascus. But that analysis collapsed when it became clear that only one of the rockets carried sarin and its range was less than one-third the distance between the army base and the point of impact. That meant the rocket carrying the sarin appeared to have originated in rebel territory.

But the “group think” was resistant to all empirical evidence. It was so powerful that even when the Turkish plot was uncovered by legendary investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, his usual publication, The New Yorker, refused to print it. Rebuffed in the United States – the land of freedom of the press – Hersh had to take the story to the London Review of Books to get it out in April 2014. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?”]

The Easier Route

It remained easier for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other premier news outlets to simply ignore the compelling tale of possible Turkish complicity in a serious war crime. After all, what would the American people think if – after the mainstream media had failed to protect the country against the lies that led to the disastrous Iraq War – the same star news sources had done something similar on Syria by failing to ask tough questions?

It’s also now obvious that if Obama had ordered a retaliatory bombing campaign against Assad in 2013, the likely winners would have been the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which would have had the path cleared for their conquest of Damascus, creating a humanitarian catastrophe even worse than the current one.

To confess to such incompetence or dishonesty clearly had a big down-side. So, the “smart” play was to simply let the old Assad-did-it narrative sit there as something that could still be cited obliquely from time to time under the phrase “Assad gassed his own people” and thus continue to justify the slogan: “Assad must go!”

But that imperative – not to admit another major mistake – means that the major U.S. news media also must ignore the courageous statements from Eren Erdem, a deputy of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who has publicly accused the Erdogan government of blocking an investigation into Turkey’s role in procuring the sarin allegedly delivered to Al Qaeda-connected terrorists for use inside Syria.

In statements before parliament and to journalists, Erdem cited a derailed indictment that was begun by the General Prosecutor’s Office in the southern Turkish city of Adana, with the criminal case number 2013/120.

Erdem said the prosecutor’s office, using technical surveillance, discovered that an Al Qaeda jihadist named Hayyam Kasap acquired the sarin.

At the press conference, Erdem said,

“Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism.”

Erdem said the released operatives were allowed to cross the border into Syria and the criminal investigation was halted.

Another CHP deputy, Ali Şeker, added that the Turkish government misled the public by claiming Russia provided the sarin and that “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a U.S. military intervention in Syria.”

Erdem’s disclosures, which he repeated in a recent interview with RT, the Russian network,prompted the Ankara Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation into Erdem for treason. Erdem defended himself, saying the government’s actions regarding the sarin case besmirched Turkey’s international reputation. He added that he also has been receiving death threats.

“The paramilitary organization Ottoman Hearths is sharing my address [on Twitter] and plans a raid [on my house]. I am being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to something that tramples on my country’s prestige,”

Erdem said.

ISIS Oil Smuggling

Meanwhile, President Erdogan faces growing allegations that he tolerated the Islamic State’s lucrative smuggling of oil from wells in Syria through border crossings in Turkey. Those oil convoys were bombed only last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin essentially shamed President Obama into taking action against this important source of Islamic State revenues.

Though Obama began his bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria in summer 2014, the illicit oil smuggling was spared interdiction for over a year as the U.S. government sought cooperation from Erdogan, who recently acknowledged that the Islamic State and other jihadist groups are using nearly 100 kilometers of Turkey’s border to bring in recruits and supplies.

Earlier this month, Obama said he has had

“repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the border between Turkey and Syria,” adding that “there’s about 98 kilometers that are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL [Islamic State] shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities.”

Russian officials expressed shock that the Islamic State was allowed to continue operating an industrial-style delivery system involving hundreds of trucks carrying oil into Turkey. Moscow also accused Erdogan’s 34-year-old son, Bilal Erdogan, of profiting off the Islamic State’s oil trade, an allegation that he denied.

The Russians say Bilal Erdogan is one of three partners in the BMZ Group, a Turkish oil and shipping company that has purchased oil from the Islamic State. The Malta Independentreported that BMZ purchased two oil tanker ships from the Malta-based Oil Transportation & Shipping Services Co Ltd, which is owned by Azerbaijani billionaire Mubariz Mansimov.

Another three oil tankers purchased by BMZ were acquired from Palmali Shipping and Transportation Agency, which is also owned by Mansimov and which shares the same Istanbul address with Oil Transportation & Shipping Services, which is owned by Mansimov’s Palmali Group, along with dozens of other companies set up in Malta.

The Russians further assert that Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian Su-24 bomber along the Syrian-Turkish border on Nov. 24 – which led to the murder of the pilot, by Turkish-backed rebels, as he parachuted to the ground and to the death of a Russian marine on a rescue operation – was motivated by Erdogan’s fury over the destruction of his son’s Islamic State oil operation.

Erdogan has denied that charge, claiming the shoot-down was simply a case of defending Turkish territory, although, according to the Turkish account, the Russian plane strayed over a slice of Turkish territory for only 17 seconds. The Russians dispute even that, calling the attack a premeditated ambush.

President Obama and the mainstream U.S. press sided with Turkey, displaying almost relish at the deaths of Russians in Syria and also showing no sympathy for the Russian victims of an earlier terrorist bombing of a tourist flight over Sinai in Egypt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama Ignores Russian Terror Victims.”]

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman expressed the prevailing attitude of Official Washington by ridiculing anyone who had praised Putin’s military intervention in Syria or who thought the Russian president was “crazy like a fox,” Friedman wrote: “Some of us thought he was just crazy.

“Well, two months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.”

Taking Sides

The smug contempt that the mainstream U.S. media routinely shows toward anything involving Russia or Putin may help explain the cavalier disinterest in NATO member Turkey’s reckless behavior. Though Turkey’s willful shoot-down of a Russian plane that was not threatening Turkey could have precipitated a nuclear showdown between Russia and NATO, criticism of Erdogan was muted at most.

Similarly, neither the Obama administration nor the mainstream media wants to address the overwhelming evidence that Turkey – along with other U.S. “allies” such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have been aiding and abetting Sunni jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State, for years. Instead, Official Washington plays along with the fiction that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others are getting serious about combating terrorism.

The contrary reality is occasionally blurted out by a U.S. official or revealed when a U.S. intelligence report gets leaked or declassified. For instance, in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted in a confidential diplomatic memo, disclosed by Wikileaks, that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

According to a Defense Intelligence Agency report from August 2012,

“AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into the Islamic State] supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media. … AQI declared its opposition of Assad’s government because it considered it a sectarian regime targeting Sunnis.”

The DIA report added, “The salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria. … The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition.”

The DIA analysts already understood the risks that AQI presented both to Syria and Iraq. The report included a stark warning about the expansion of AQI, which was changing into the Islamic State. The brutal armed movement was seeing its ranks swelled by the arrival of global jihadists rallying to the black banner of Sunni militancy, intolerant of both Westerners and “heretics” from Shiite and other non-Sunni branches of Islam.

The goal was to establish a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” where Islamic State’s caliphate is now located, and that this is “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition” – i.e. the West, Gulf states, and Turkey – “want in order to isolate the Syrian regime,” the DIA report said.

In October 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at Harvard’s Kennedy School that

“the Saudis, the emirates, etc. … were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda.”

Despite these occasional bursts of honesty, the U.S. government and the mainstream media have put their goal of having another “regime change” – this time in Syria – and their contempt for Putin ahead of any meaningful cooperation toward defeating the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

This ordering of priorities further means there is no practical reason to revisit who was responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack. If Assad’s government was innocent and Ergogan’s government shared in the guilt, that would present a problem for NATO, which would have to decide if Turkey had crossed a “red line” and deserved being expelled from the military alliance.

But perhaps even more so, an admission that the U.S. government and the U.S. news media had rushed to another incorrect judgment in the Middle East – and that another war policy was driven by propaganda rather than facts – could destroy what trust the American people have left in those institutions. On a personal level, it might mean that the pundits and the politicians who were wrong about Iraq’s WMD would have to acknowledge that they had learned nothing from that disaster.

It might even renew calls for some of them – the likes of The New York Times’ Friedman and The Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt – to finally be held accountable for consistently misinforming and misleading the American people.

So, at least for now — from a perspective of self-interest — it makes more sense for the Obama administration and major news outlets to ignore the developing story of a NATO ally’s ties to terrorism, including an alleged connection to a grave war crime, the sarin attack outside Damascus.

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

The Washington Post, a proud member of the main-stream media propaganda machine published an article by Jennifer Rubin titled ‘It’s time for a tough Iran policy’ where she declares that Iran might need “new sanctions” to curtail its growing influence in the Middle East. Senators Robert Menendez (D-N.J) and his partner in crime (literally) Mark Kirk (R-Ill) wrote a statement on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) recent report on Iran’s “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program:

I don’t accept that the IAEA report competently or fully addresses the true nature of Iran’s past weapons of mass destruction program. The report was a whitewash. And it certainly doesn’t give us any more insight into Iran’s past activities or future intentions. The U.S. should not have agreed to shut the door on further investigating the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear weapon programs based on a diluted, inconclusive investigation

Menendez is a friend of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who will do whatever the Israeli lobby wants him to do especially against Iran’s so-called “nuclear threat”. Menendez made it clear in 2013 Policy Conference sponsored by AIPAC:

Whatever challenges lay ahead, whatever new threats we face, whether in the form of rockets from Gaza, a nuclear threat from Iran, the spillover of violence from Syria, or the rise of Islamist extremists anywhere in the region, the strength of Israel’s democracy will remain a beacon of hope for good governance, economic progress, and the power of an enlightened society to foster democratic ideals

Menendez said that Israel is a “beacon of Hope” that will “foster democratic ideals” is absurd (just ask the Palestinians). Melendez and Kirk claimed that the report was a whitewash, but according to the IAEA’s (www.iaea.org) analysis:

“The Agency has no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009,” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said. “Nor has the Agency found any credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions (PMD) to Iran’s nuclear program.”

The report was the IAEA’s final step under the Road-map for the clarification of past and present outstanding issues regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, concluded between the IAEA and Iran last July. The Road-map set out a process, under the November 2013 Framework for Cooperation between Iran and the IAEA, to enable the IAEA, with the cooperation of Iran, to make an assessment of issues relating to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme by the end of 2015.

“As is the case with all my reports, the assessment is factual, technically sound and balanced,” Mr Amano said. “The methodology and information on which my assessments are based have been set out.”

Rubin also said that “speaking of Iran’s other violations, its missile test, also according to the United Nations, violated its Security Council resolution.” The Hill, an online Washington-based news source reported what U.S. officials thought about Iran’s missile test:

However, the launch would not be in violation of the landmark international agreement struck between the U.S., Iran and other world powers to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, officials insisted. That agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “is about one issue and one issue only: Iran’s nuclear program,” the official added

Rubin agrees with the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a neoconservative think tank who wrote an article titled ‘Time to Get Tough on Tehran’ by Eliot A. Cohen, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Ray Takeyh, senior fellow and Iranian national at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and Eric Edelman, Director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the same think tank where Victoria Nuland’s (architect of the Ukrainian quagmire) husband Robert Kagan who is on the board of directors at the FPI “are critics of the deal, explain that any effective Iran policy is incompatible with the JCPOA.” According to Rubin:

The authors suggest, “In addition to revising the nuclear agreement, the United States should punish Iran for its regional aggression, sponsorship of terrorism, or human rights abuses. To do so, it should segregate Iran from the global economy by restoring as much of the sanctions architecture as possible. . . . And it should launch a campaign of political warfare to intensify the Iranian public’s disenchantment with the regime and deepen dissension within the ruling circle.”

Rubin says that Cohen, Takeyh and Edelman do “emphasize the need to construct an anti-Iran coalition to roll back Iran’s moves toward regional domination.” Washington wants to dominate the Middle East as they do with the rest of the world. Iran has not invaded a sovereign nation for more than 200 years. They also suggest removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power and set-up a no-fly zone and allowing Turkey back into the conflict. Cohen, Takeyh and Edelman also suggest rebuilding alliances with Sunni states and tribes with a small contingency of U.S. forces (advisors) on the ground. “Rather than pretend that Assad is our ally or that Russia is fighting the Islamic State, the next president will need to reassert U.S. leadership to combat Iran’s influence as it destroys the Islamic State”Rubin said. Washington’s support of the Islamic State to remove Assad is obvious and to say that Russia is not fighting terrorism is typical neo-conservative propaganda 101.

We know Russia’s success against the Islamic State has been problematic for Washington’s regime change operation against the Assad government since they are following the pentagon’s plan to take out “7 countries in 5 years”admitted by former Army General Wesley Clark. If Syria were to fall then Hezbollah and Iran would be next in line and that would lead to an all-out war in the region. But with Russia and Syria reclaiming cities and towns overrun by the Islamic State and other terror groups, it looks less likely to happen regardless what the lunatic neocons in Washington would like to see. The neocons would like to reapply the same foreign policy strategy that destabilized Iraq under the Bush administration and now they want the same for Syria and Iran. The neocons still have influence in Washington’s circle, so the question is; will the next president of the United States follow the neocon strategy in an attempt to “roll back” Iran’s influence in the Middle East? Will AIPAC, Menendez, Kirk and think tanks such as the FPI or the CFR influence the next president’s foreign policy decisions regarding Iran’s nuclear program? I expect tensions in the Middle East to escalate, leaving an open opportunity for neocon strategists to assist Washington in its crusade against Syria, Hezbollah and Iran which will fail because there is one major problem that stands in their way, and that is Russia.

Much has been written about the outcome of Venezuela’s Dec. 6 legislative elections, with many of the analyses justifiably focusing on the shortcomings of the Socialist Party (PSUV) and the difficulty of the current state of affairs in the country. Indeed, even before the political body was cold, post-mortem examinations abounded in the corporate and alternative media, with dissections of seemingly every aspect of the Bolivarian Republic’s political, economic, and social life.

These elections … still saw more than 5 million Venezuelans cast votes for the PSUV and the Revolution, for socialism and anti-imperialism.

But what these journalists and political analysts often overlook is the determination of the core of the Bolivarian Revolution, the radical base that is committed to preserving what Hugo Chavez began building more than 17 years ago. This is not a revolution that can be undone with one election, nor can it be simply legislated out of existence. This Revolution will not, as some cynics have argued, be brought down by the weight of its own contradictions, or by internal rot and corruption, or by external forces such as assassinations and economic destabilization.

Instead, the Revolution will survive. It will be resurgent. It will be reborn thanks to the commitment of millions of dedicated Chavistas.

While one may take this as an article of faith, it is instead a conclusion born of experience in Venezuela, one that is informed by dozens of conversations with activists and organizers whose words of love and dedication to the revolution are matched only by their actions to build it.

In building the Revolution, these men, women, and children are pledged to defend it.

The Revolution’s Flesh Wounds

The election results, and the social problems from which they sprang, are undeniably a comment on the level of discontent that many Venezuelans feel, both toward their government and the general state of affairs in the country. To read the corporate media, one would think this is the end for the Bolivarian Revolution, that the defeat at the polls is a repudiation of the entire program of the PSUV and its allied political parties. But such a reading belies the reality and resilience of the revolutionary process, one that has seen and overcome great challenges before.

In April 2002, the U.S.-backed opposition in Venezuela staged a coup against then President Chavez in a desperate attempt to reassert their control over the country and extinguish the Bolivarian Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans poured into the streets of Caracas, with millions more in other parts of the country, calling for Chavez to be restored to his rightful office, and for the coup leaders to be arrested. There was really no doubt that the U.S. was responsible for this attempt at forced regime change, with many mainstream news outlets reporting within days that high-ranking officials in the Bush administration were intimately involved in orchestrating the coup.

Although it may seem like a mere historical footnote 13 years later, the failed coup was a watershed moment in Venezuela – a proving ground for the Revolution – when the people for whom Chavez and the Bolivarian process meant a better future dared to challenge U.S. hegemony and the attempted reestablishment of political power by the capitalist ruling class.

These coordinated attempts have increased exponentially since the death of Chavez in 2013 and the election of current President Nicolas Maduro. Such subversion has taken many forms, including the use of highly effective and well-planned forms of psychological warfare through the manipulation of media and public opinion. In 2007, author and investigative journalist Eva Golinger revealed that Washington was funding a program to provide financial support to Venezuelan journalists hostile to Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Indeed, the effort was aimed at influencing public opinion through the right-wing media, shaping the views of Venezuelans against their government. A battle-tested method of destabilization by the CIA, such tactics of psychological warfare were documented in the CIA’s Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare, a manual distributed to the contras in Nicaragua as Washington attempted to bring down the Sandinista government in the 1980s. As noted here, the CIA wanted to determine “the needs and frustration of the target groups … [and create a] generalized anti-government hostility.”

The objective was to create the false impression in the minds of the population that the government was “the cause of their frustration.” This has been done to great effect in Venezuela. The right-wing media in the country has done everything in its power to undermine the government, and heap all blame onto the PSUV, including for the effects of the economic war waged against it. According to the right wing media, it is President Maduro and the entire government, along with the movement they represent, that has created and exacerbated all these problems with ineptitude and failed policies. While undoubtedly mistakes have been made, it is equally true that many of the major problems in the country were compounded by economic sabotage. The salient point here though is that an economic war is transformed into a psychological war, one that figured prominently in the recent elections. Indeed, the economic war is critical to understanding the current state of the country. In the wake of the opposition’s victory at the polls, basic goods started magically reappearing on store shelves in Venezuela, yet another indication that much of the scarcity can be attributed not to failed economic policies, but rather to a coordinated campaign of economic subversion.  Similarly, some of the problems of inflation and sale of contraband can be directly attributed to the U.S.-backed opposition and its patrons in Miami and Washington. This is certainly not to absolve the government of all blame, but rather to point out that Venezuela and its Revolution have been directly targeted by the forces of the Empire.

The destabilization of the country is also very much overt, with assassinations playing a key role. Perhaps no targeted killing has had a greater impact on the country and the Revolution than the 2014 assassination of Robert Serra, a young, up-and-coming legislator from the PSUV who was murdered by individuals connected to former Colombian President and self-declared enemy of the Bolivarian Revolution, Alvaro Uribe.  A young, photogenic, and deeply committed activist and legislator, Serra was seen by many as the future of the PSUV and of the Chavista movement in the country.  His murder was interpreted by millions as a direct assault on the Revolution and the future of the country.

Walking through the radical, working class neighborhoods of 23 January and El Valle, one is likely to find posters and/or graffiti scrawled on walls with the simple phrase “Robert Vive” (Robert Lives), and the iconic image of the young Serra – the future of the Revolution, gunned down before he even had a chance to lead.

And this is the reality of the Revolution: the U.S. and its proxies have done everything in their power to destroy the Bolivarian process.

These elections, which took place amid deteriorating economic conditions and an intense psychological and economic war, still saw more than 5 million Venezuelans cast votes for the PSUV and the Revolution, for socialism and anti-imperialism.

Rumors of Chavismo’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. This dream, this revolution, will not die.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. He is the editor of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. You can reach him at [email protected].

“It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century. You just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.” -John Kerry, “Meet the Press”, 2nd March 2014.

There has been a searing irony to Christmas since August 1990 and the decimating embargo on Iraq. It marked the beginning of the destruction of the region where the three Abrahamic religions were born at Ur in southern Iraq, where the Garden of Eden is believed to have flourished at Al-Qurnah, translation “connection” or “joint”, since it is where the Biblical Tigris and Euphrates rivers join.

In Al-Qurnah an ancient jujube tree – a fruit species (image right), cultivation of which is believed to go back to 900 BCE – was celebrated as the actual Biblical Tree of Knowledge.

Nearby is Babylon, found in the Books of Genesis, Peter and Revelations.

Neighbouring Syria, is also part of the “Cradle of Civilization”, integral to Biblical narrative.

Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Mount Hermon) which according to the Book of Matthew included:

“Syria, you are the cradle of the prophets and apostles and the center that spreads the gospel from Antioch in Syria to the world, and paved the way of the Forefathers of the Church to continue.”

St Paul of course converted on the road to Damascus – where he was actually headed to persecute Christians not to become one of them.

Geographically next door to Syria is what remains of Israeli occupied Palestine, Christ’s birthplace in Bethlehem, where, at what is now the Church of the Nativity (image left), He was believed born.

Above are just a few of the jewels of a region now decimated by that created by George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s “Crusade,” not to mention Obama and Cameron’s “humanitarian bombings” of the Land of two Rivers.

Ur was vandalized by the US army, who arrived with Bibles in vast stocks, missionaries and plans for proselytizing those who had nurtured and stewarded the region’s wonders of all religions for centuries.

Al-Qurna was stormed and devastatingly damaged by British, Lithuanian and Danish troops, the Tree of Knowledge whose legend and life seemingly spanned the mists of time, died, near certainly from the poisonous pollution of battle, more poisonous even than that which destroyed over half all fauna and flora after the Desert Storm 1991 onslaught, leaving the soil dead and infertile for years afterwards.

Syria’s tragedy in the ongoing Crusade, determination to redraw the map of the Middle East and steal all natural resources rather than purchase them, is outside the scope of this article.

However, Mount Hermon is now part of the buffer zone between Syria and Israeli occupied territory and the highest permanently manned United Nations position on earth. “Jesus wept” comes to mind.

As for Bethlehem’s “Little Town” so central during the Christmas period, it is prisoner to a wall eight meters high, which:

“snakes through and around Bethlehem, disrupting social, religious, cultural and economic life.” (1)

The brilliant political artist Banksy’s Christmas card show’s Joseph, with Mary on a donkey, on their way to Bethlehem for Christ’s birth – only to be blocked by the wall. (image below)

At Al Quds University last week, the most poignant of Christmas trees was unveiled to “Absent Friends”, attended by the Mufti of Bethlehem, Sheikh Abdul Majid Amarna, University’s President, Imad Abu Kishk and Greek Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna. The tree was decorated with photographs of those killed by Israeli settlers and Israeli security forces (demonstrating) unity between Christian and Muslim students. It received predictable criticism from Israeli media. (2)

The tree is a microcosm of the unity to be found across the region and the world between all faiths and none. So where did this rabid Islamophobia, as demonstrated in swathes of mainstream Western media and by politicians suddenly come from?

It came primarily from a forty-two million dollar fund from seven foundations (3) read and all will become crystal clear. Some excellent links also to be found at (4) and the CIA’s input (5.)

However, it was the Orthodox Church of the Holy Land which first spotted the dangers of a creeping hate campaign, responding on 31^st March 2003, as the bombs fell on Iraq, by excommunicating Tony Blair, his then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, George W. Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, from the Church of the Nativity, for life. (6)

Blair, Straw and Bush all declare passionate Christian faith, with Bush and Blair stating they “prayed together” prior to illegally decimating Abraham’s birth country.

“A spokesman of the Orthodox Church in the Holy Land, Archimandrite Attallah Hanna declared that U.S. President George Bush, his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw have all been banned from visiting the traditional birth place of Christ in Bethlehem.”

Hanna described both Bush and Blair as “excommunicates.” (7)

David Cameron has also expressed an “evangelical passion” for Christianity as he plots to further destroy Syria. With any luck he’ll be the next to be banned.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently said: “The world is over-armed and peace is under funded.”

If you are yearning for peace this Christmas, seeking peaceful ammunition to argue for change and appreciate Global Research giving the facts behind the headlines, please consider donating any amount, however small to Global Research so this valuable resource can continue.

Global Research is committed to Reversing the Tide of War and Restoring the “Real Spirit of Christmas”, which lest we forget is “Peace on Earth and Good Will to all  Humanity”.

Obama, Cameron, Hollande et al are war criminals. They have violated the Spirit of Christmas.

Your support will enable us to continue our endeavors  (Click Image below to donate to Global Research)

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Seasons Greetings – and may we pray and work that never again may a Christmas tree have to be decorated with victims killed in our name …

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Notes:

1.    http://old.quaker.org.uk/bethlehem-and-wall

2.    https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/22839-martyrs-christmas-tree-at-al-quds-university-angers-israelis

3.    http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/26/304306/islamophobia-network/

4.    http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/who-are-millionaires-behind-islamophobic-industry-america-1487378765

5.http://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-beheadings-of-journalists-cia-admitted-to-staging-fake-jihadist-videos-in-2010/5399345

6.    http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NAT304A.html

7.    http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_2003_04_bush_blair_ban.shtml

Vladimir Putin:       What is the most important thing for us? I want you to understand this. I want our people to hear this and I want Turkey to hear this as well.

Apart from the tragedy, the fact that our people were killed, what has upset us so much, do you know? After all, we have not abandoned cooperation. When I was last in Antalya I had contact with Turkey’s entire leadership. Our Turkish colleagues raised very sensitive issues and asked for support. Even though our relations have soured now (I will not say what the issue was – this is not my style), but believe me, they raised issues with us that are very sensitive and that do not fit into the context of international law when we consider the decisions proposed by the Turkish side.  You will be surprised, but we said, “Yes, we understand, and we are willing to help.”

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50971

Prometieron villas y castillos a una población cansada por una terrible guerra económica, pero pasaron en silencio su deseo de derrumbar la legislación que permitió a la industria petrolera ser el motor económico del proceso de cambio revolucionario.

Las elecciones parlamentarias del pasado 6 de diciembre otorgaron una victoria indiscutible a los enemigos del proceso político iniciado por el comandante Hugo Chávez y el pueblo de Venezuela hace 17 años. La conquista de la Asamblea Nacional por parte de la derecha neoliberal no es poca cosa. Si bien Venezuela como muchas otras democracias en el mundo goza de un régimen presidencialista, en un Estado federal pero centralizado, el poder legislativo es enorme. De allí, durante 16 años se sancionaron las leyes que sustentaron la inmensa mayoría de los cambios revolucionarios, incluyendo los decretos-leyes que fueron posibles gracias a la Ley Habilitante votada en la Asamblea. Los logros de la Revolución Bolivariana han sido posibles gracias al trabajo conjunto del poder legislativo y del Ejecutivo para cambiar la vida de los ciudadanos de la República.

Los voceros políticos del Capital se han distinguido a lo largo de la reciente historia política del hemiciclo por oponerse a todo lo que proponía el chavismo. No por capricho, sino porque los representantes del pueblo bolivariano se dedicaban a construir un andamio legal para fortalecer el bienestar común, y eso afectaba los intereses capitalistas de los cuales se hacen representantes los políticos de derecha. Mientras la Revolución se dedicaba a construir la base legal en beneficio del interés general, la derecha abogaba por la primicia de los intereses particulares de una minoría.

Después de este domingo, el juego político legislativo se ha volteado. De ahora en adelante, lo que cimentaba las políticas de la derecha neoliberal —oponerse a todo— se derrumbó. Están obligados a develar al país cuáles son sus verdaderas opciones políticas y en función de qué intereses van a legislar desde ahora. Como consecuencia, se opera un deslizamiento semántico: la oposición al nuevo proyecto de país, hoy hegemónico en la Asamblea Nacional, ¡somos nosotros, los revolucionarios!

Lo único en lo cual coincidimos con la propuesta de la contrarrevolución es que va a haber un cambio. Para saber realmente en qué consiste, basta con revisar el programa de Gobierno que todos los partidos que componen la autodenominada Mesa de Unidad democrática (MUD) sellaron de común acuerdo el 23 de enero de 2012. En este programa, compuesto de 1.237 artículos, se encuentra gran parte del futuro accionar de la MUD en la Asamblea, ya que numerosos diputados de la nueva mayoría parlamentaria participaron en la redacción de este programa neoliberal. Por lo tanto, deducimos que aplicarán conscientemente los lineamientos que concibieron. Veamos cuáles son las propuestas que ahora van a intentar implementar desde el hemiciclo legislativo.

Aunque durante la campaña electoral no informaron al pueblo de sus verdaderas intenciones, la MUD hace énfasis en su programa sobre la necesidad de revisar “todo el cúmulo de leyes para ajustarlas a una visión integral de un nuevo marco jurídico que restituya la naturaleza democrática de la República” (art. 162 del programa de la MUD)[1]. Es decir, demoler todo el aparato legal que ha permitido la elaboración de políticas a favor del pueblo.

En cuanto a lo económico, los diputados de la MUD prometieron a sus electores acabar con la crisis. ¿Cómo sabemos que la MUD no podrá hacer subir los precios del petróleo a nivel internacional?, cabe preguntarse quiénes pagarán las consecuencias del desplome del precio del crudo: ¿el pueblo o las clases privilegiadas? Otra vez, el programa de la derecha venezolana nos esboza la repuesta: acabar con el control de precios de los productos de la cesta básica para “estimular la actividad privada” (art. 420), Ley de Tierras y de Pesca; la Ley de Soberanía Alimentaria, con el fin de “garantizar las libertades económicas”(art. 547); la Ley de Economía Popular (art. 125), y la Ley para la Defensa de las Personas en el Acceso a los Bienes y Servicios (art. 147).  En otros términos, pretenden retocar todas las leyes que protegen al pueblo de la dictadura del mercado. Asimismo, eliminar el control de cambio, como lo proponen en el artículo 406, provocaría una fuerte devaluación que terminará de destruir drásticamente el poder adquisitivo de las clases populares y las capas medias de la sociedad.

Como lo ha mencionado José Guerra, uno de los redactores del programa económico de la MUD y recién electo diputado por Caracas, la nueva Asamblea reformará la Ley del Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV). Una medida muy abstracta para los electores que lo llevaron al poder pero cuyas consecuencias podrían sentirse a mediano plazo. A lo largo de esos 16 años, la derecha siempre gimoteó ante el hecho de que las políticas monetarias estén atadas a las decisiones del gobierno electo y que sirvan de manera coordinada al desarrollo de la Nación. Los cánones liberales de las políticas financieras van a poder imponerse a través de la reforma de esta ley. Para eso, la MUD preconiza reforzar la autonomía del BCV y prohibir a esta entidad “financiar el gasto público y convalidar políticas deficitarias”(art. 408). Eso podría, quizás, tener un impacto sobre la inflación pero ¿a qué costo social?, ¿De dónde se sacaría dinero para fortalecer los sistemas de educación, de salud, sin hablar de los programas sociales que ha mantenido el Gobierno Bolivariano a pesar de la crisis?

Estas intenciones de los nuevos diputados de la derecha venezolana no fueron objeto de debate en la campaña electoral. Cuando los políticos de la MUD hablaban de libertad de expresión a sus electores, omitieron precisar que quieren retocar la Ley Resorte (art. 124) y la Ley de Telecomunicaciones (art. 1.147) para erradicar las voces críticas, criminalizar a los medios comunitarios y volver a ofrecer el espectro radioeléctrico a las empresas de comunicación privadas. Cuando gritaban enfurecidos por la democracia plena, no mencionaron su voluntad de reformar en la Asamblea Nacional la Ley del Consejo Federal de Gobierno (art. 276), la Ley de Consejos Comunales (art. 289), la Ley de Comunas y la Ley Orgánica del Poder Popular (art. 125).

Prometieron villas y castillos a una población cansada por una terrible guerra económica, pero pasaron en silencio su deseo de derrumbar la legislación que permitió a la industria petrolera ser el motor económico del proceso de cambio revolucionario (art. 512 y 275). Se agitaron durante años llamando infructuosamente a las Fuerzas Armadas a la rebelión, sin decir que van a revisar la Ley Orgánica de las Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana y la Ley Orgánica de Seguridad de la Nación (art. 100), con el fin de “reorganizar y reformular la institución castrense”(art. 99); eliminar la Milicia Bolivariana (art. 101) y, de forma general, desvincular al soldado y a la colectividad militar del porvenir de la Nación. En suma, volver a un Ejército de pantalla cuyo único papel sería desfilar el 5 de julio y reprimir en caso de rebelión popular.

La ofensiva legislativa contra la Revolución Bolivariana que se está gestando desde la nueva Asamblea Nacional buscará volver a supeditar el interés general y el bienestar de las mayorías a los intereses particulares de las élites. En la batalla política y comunicacional que se avecina, el chavismo debe asumir en el hemiciclo el rol que ahora le toca: informar de las estrategias de la mayoría parlamentaria y oponerse a la destrucción del aparato legislativo construido durante 16 años de Revolución. En otras palabras, ¡una oposición política para el bien del pueblo!

Romain Migus

[1] Ver este programa en la página web oficial de la MUD: “Lineamientos para el programa de gobierno de unidad nacional” disponible en http://www.unidadvenezuela.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/MUD.-Lineamientos-para-el-Programa-de-Gobierno-de-Unidad-Nacional-23-Enero-2012.-Final-1.pdf (última consulta, 10/12/2015).

Ver también Romain Migus, El programa de la MUD, Caracas: ed. Barrio Alerta, 2012. Disponible en http://albaciudad.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/libro_el_programa_de_la_mud.pdf  

Este contenido ha sido publicado originalmente por teleSUR bajo la siguiente dirección:
http://www.telesurtv.net/opinion/La-oposicion-es-la-unica-esperanza-para-el-pueblo-20151211-0038.html. Si piensa hacer uso del mismo, por favor, cite la fuente y coloque un enlace hacia la nota original de donde usted ha tomado este contenido. www.teleSURtv.net

As widely anticipated, the US Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday announced a quarter percentage point increase in the federal funds rate, the interest banks charge one another for overnight loans of reserves kept at the central bank. It was the Fed’s first increase since June 2006 and it lifted the benchmark rate from a range of zero to 0.25 percent, where it had remained since the height of the financial crisis in December 2008, to a range of 0.25 percent to 0.50 percent.

The Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its chairwoman, Janet Yellen, took great pains to characterize the increase as small and stress that further increases would be gradual and incremental, and that the Fed would hold rates below normal for an indefinite period and continue to pursue an “accommodative” monetary policy.

That this was what the financial markets wanted to hear was obvious from the response of US stock indexes. The long-signaled shift to what is being called “dovish tightening,” with the emphasis on “dovish,” triggered a run-up of prices on all three major indexes.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had risen by 76 points before the FOMC released its statement at 2 PM, spurted upward and continued to climb during Yellen’s press conference, ending the trading day with a gain of 224 points (1.28 percent). The Standard & Poor’s 500 index and the Nasdaq had similar trajectories, ending the day with gains of 29 points (1.45 percent) and 75 points (1.52 percent), respectively.

Ever since the previous Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, had signaled his intention to move toward a normalization of monetary policy by hinting in December of 2013 that the central bank would begin to “taper” its massive bond-purchasing and money-printing program, known as “quantitative easing,” the banks and hedge funds had exerted pressure against any increase in interest rates.

That they were generally prepared, after two years, to accept small and gradual increases was bound up with mounting signs that the regime of virtually free credit, which had generated windfall profits and a further shift of wealth from the bottom to the very top, had produced a new debt and credit crisis that threatened once again to bring down the financial system.

Since December 16, 2008, when the Fed slashed the federal funds rate to near-zero, the Dow has risen by 96 percent, the S&P 500 by 124 percent, and the Nasdaq by 214 percent. Over this period, the Fed has pumped $3.5 trillion into the banking system. The wealth of the 400 richest Americans has doubled. Meanwhile, the destruction of decent-paying jobs and wage cutting across the economy have decimated working-class living standards.

But the ongoing slowdown in the real economy globally, reflected in collapsing prices for oil, gas, metals and other basic committees, declining trade, and slumping demand for manufactured goods, is now destabilizing the US bond market and threatening to collapse the financial house of cards that has been built up by the policies of the Fed, the Obama administration and central banks and governments in Europe and Asia.

Over the past week, a mounting crisis in the US high-risk, high-yield junk bond market came to a head with the closure of three energy-based junk bond funds. Their collapse was triggered by the decline in oil prices to well below $40 a barrel and a wave of client redemption orders that the highly leveraged firms could not fulfill.

Funds managed by Third Avenue, Lucidus Capital Partners and Stone Lion Capital barred redemptions, triggering a selloff on the $1.3 trillion junk bond market. This high-risk market, based on bonds issued by firms with low credit ratings and high levels of debt, has expanded prodigiously since the Fed lowered rates to near zero and took other measures to force down long-term interest rates.

These policies, far from reining in speculative and parasitic financial activities, subsidized their expansion. Hedge funds and similar financial operations, such as exchange-traded funds that track bond markets, seeking new ways to realize high returns after the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble, turned to junk bonds. According to Dealogic, US junk bond issuance hit a record $361 billion in 2013, more than double the volume in the years before the financial crisis.

Last week, junk bond funds were hit with $3.5 billion of withdrawals, the most for 70 weeks. And the crisis is spreading beyond junk bonds. Prices of bonds issued by firms in the pharmaceuticals, media, telecommunications, semiconductor and retail industries have fallen in recent months.

The Financial Times on Wednesday cited Bonnie Baha, head of global developed credit at DoubleLine Capital, as saying:

“It brings back memories of 2008 all over again and that’s what has been fueling this. Defaults are ticking up. Energy is leading the way but it’s starting to spread to other sectors. It’s not just an energy or metals and mining issue.”

In a report Tuesday, the US Office of Financial Research found “elevated and rising credit risks” among nonfinancial companies and emerging market borrowers. The agency warned that a significant shock that impacted credit quality “could potentially threaten US financial stability.”

That the widening crisis in corporate bonds played a role in the Fed’s decision, after multiple delays, to begin hiking rates was indicated in the language of the FOMC statement. Discussing future rate increases, the statement included among the factors the Fed would consider “financial and international developments.” The reference to financial developments, in particular, was a departure from previous FOMC statements.

The FOMC statement gave a generally upbeat appraisal of the US economy, and Yellen, in her press conference, was, if anything, even more sanguine. She began by declaring that the move to begin hiking rates was a vote of confidence in the strength of the US economy and its recovery from the Great Recession.

Yellen and the FOMC all but ignored the sharp slowdown in US manufacturing and industrial production in recent months, which has been exacerbated by the rise in the exchange rate of the dollar resulting from expectations of monetary tightening by the Fed. The higher dollar has further depressed US exports. The actual launch of rate hikes will likely cause a further increase in the dollar and heighten the impact on US exports.

Earlier this month, the Institute for Supply Management reported that manufacturing in the US contracted in November, falling to its lowest level since June 2009. Industrial production contracted in three of the last six months, and data released Tuesday showed that factory activity in New York State declined for the fifth straight month in December.

Yellen was asked at her press conference about the rout in junk bonds and the closure of Third Avenue’s Focused Credit Fund last Thursday. She noted the pressure on junk bonds while brushing off the Third Avenue collapse as a one-off event.

Another reporter challenged the Fed’s claim, reiterated in Wednesday’s FOMC statement and Yellen’s opening remarks to the press, that the drastic fall in oil prices and low inflation rate were “transitory” phenomena that would dissipate in the coming months, bringing the inflation rate close to the Fed’s goal of 2 percent. The reporter noted that the Fed has been making this assessment for some two years, and it has never materialized.

Yellen seemed flustered and largely dodged the question. She could not provide a convincing answer because the collapse in oil and commodity prices and the persistence of ultralow inflation reflect the reality of economic slump and the failure of the Fed and the other major central banks to engineer a genuine recovery in the real economy, despite the funneling of trillions of dollars into the banking system.

The continuing threat of deflation, more than seven years after the Wall Street crash, is an expression of the systemic crisis and breakdown of the capitalist system itself, something Yellen can neither address nor acknowledge.

 Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia All Accuse Turkey of Smuggling Oil

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, December 17 2015

Because of the Turkish government’s role in the multi-spectrum US-led war against the Syrian Arab Republic, a war of words has ignited between Ankara and Moscow. Russia, however, is not alone in accusing Turkey of being involved in the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil.

Global Banking: What Does the Fed’s “Rate Hike” Mean?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, December 17 2015

The Federal Reserve raised the interbank borrowing rate today by one quarter of one percent or 25 basis points. Readers are asking, “what does that mean?”

The European Commission presented a proposal Tuesday for the sweeping expansion of Frontex, the EU border patrol agency. The proposal would give the agency the power to act as an autonomous border police that can operate contrary to the wishes of member states on whose borders it has been deployed.

“We must strengthen Frontex considerably,” EU Commission President Jean-Claude Junker told the German radio station Deutschlandfunk . “Frontex must begin to operate as Europe’s coast and border protection force.” In a report to the European Parliament and the European Council, Junker laid out concrete plans for erecting a European Border and Coast Protection Agency (EBCG).

Up to this point, Frontex has depended on border police and supplies from the EU member states. The new border protection troops will constitute a corps of 1,500 men who could be deployed in a matter of days. They will be designated “rapid intervention troops” and will have their own ships and helicopters.

The Frontex headquarters in Warsaw will also be expanded and its staff increased from 400 employees to 1,000. Its budget will be nearly doubled to €280 million. When Frontex first began its work in 2005, the border protection agency had a budget of €19 million. This year the budget had already been expanded to €150 million.

According to the commission’s plans, the EBCG will continually evaluate whether member states are in a position to secure EU external borders against refugees. If it comes to the conclusion that this is not the case, rapid intervention troops will be deployed at the relevant border.

The decision on this issue is incumbent on the EU Commission, which the border protection agency entrusts “with the task of carrying out appropriate operational measures,” the commission recommendation states. “This will allow the Agency to intervene immediately in crisis situations by deploying European Border and Coast Guard Teams at the external border,” it continues.

While previously, Frontex could only act on the request of the EU member states, the new agency will be deployed even against the will of member state governments. “In urgent situations, the Agency must be able to step in to ensure that action is taken on the ground even where there is no request for assistance from the Member State concerned or where that Member State considers that there is no need for additional intervention,” the proposal says.

On the recommendation of the EU Commission, the ministerial council will come to a decision on the basis of a “reverse qualified majority.” This means that the recommendation will be accepted if three-quarters of the Member States do not explicitly oppose it.

The proposal to expand the EU border guard is the result of pressure from the German and French governments. Frontex troops will be deployed mostly in Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Malta, Greece and Spain, as well as Eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary.

Ten days ago, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and his French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve demanded the expansion of Frontex in a letter to the EU commission. “In exceptional cases, Frontex should also be able to take the initiative for the deployment of immediate response teams,” they said.

De Maizière told Deutschlandfunk that if a national state did not effectively fulfil its external border protection responsibilities, these should be taken over by Frontex.

Volker Kauder, president of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union parliamentary fraction, demanded in the die Zeit newspaper that national states entirely or partially give up their sovereign rights with regard to the movement of refugees. For example, “Greece is not in a position, either logistically or financially, to secure its borders,” he said. This situation will have to be fundamentally changed, he insisted.

Several EU members affected by the proposal have voiced opposition to it. “The Italian interior ministry is very unhappy about having outsiders on Italy’s borders,” a senior diplomat in Brussels told the British Guardian newspaper. “There are too many sovereign sensitivities.”

Protests from Warsaw and Budapest were even more explicit. Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszcykowski rejected the commission’s plans on the radio station RMF, saying they would create an organisation that could arbitrarily make decisions about member states without giving them any voice in the process. The border troops have no democratic legitimacy, he insisted. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto made similar complaints and insisted that border control must remain a component of national sovereignty.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras also said that his government would not accept the stationing of EU border troops without the agreement of Athens, since border protection is a national affair. At the same time, he made it clear he would comply with the EU. “We must all understand that our international obligation regarding the Schengen treaty is to effectively contribute to the battle against terrorism,” he said.

In order to accelerate deportation procedings, the proposal calls for the creation of a unified “European travel document.” The EU wants to push for the negotiation of a reacceptance agreement with countries of origin, so that the document will be recognised and asylum seekers can be deported with a minimum of fuss.

In addition, the “hot spot approach” will be strengthened and expanded. The goal is to register all refugees in the “reception centres” on EU external borders and to intern them as long as possible during security checks. “All migrants who arrive in Italy and Greece must go through these registration centres,” de Maizière and Cazeneuve told the EU Commission in their letter. “This means that these centres must be equipped to take in a large number of people and to hold them for the time needed to check them.”

The internment centres are already purposely in violation of international laws spelled out in the Geneva conventions, according to which every asylum seeker has the right to have his reason for flight considered and may not simply be rejected at the border. Refugees who do not come from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan are already being denied this right in hot spots and on the Balkan route, on the grounds that they are supposedly economic migrants.

The latest Monmouth University poll has him way out in front with 41% support – besting his closest rival, Senator Ted Cruz, at 14%, by nearly three-to-one margin.

Most other Republican candidates scored in the low single digits, including party favorite Jeb Bush at 3%. According to Monmouth director Patrick Murray, “(i)t has become abundantly clear that Trump is giving his supporters exactly what they want, even if what he says causes the GOP leadership and many Republican voters to cringe” – including his Islamophobic rants, wanting Muslim immigrants banned from entering America.

Hillary Clinton remains virtually uncontested so far for the Democrat party nomination – besting Bernie Sanders by a 59% – 26% margin, better than two to one.

Demagogic self-promotion, bombast, bravado and arrogance apparently work to Trump’s advantage. Why ordinary Americans would support a billionaire unconcerned about their welfare is hard to explain.

Hillary Clinton is a war goddess, Trump a US warlord. More on this below. He dismisses Ronald Reagan’s so-called 11th Commandment about “not speak(ing) ill of any fellow Republican.”

Last August on ABC’s This Week, he blasted Jeb Bush, saying: “We need a person (in the White House) with a lot of smarts, a lot of cunning, and a lot of energy. And Jeb doesn’t have that.”

On the same program, he denigrated Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (now out of the race), calling his state “really in trouble.”

On December 13, he attacked Ted Cruz, saying he acts like “a little bit of a maniac” in the Senate. He doesn’t have “the right temperament (or) right judgment” to be president.

During Tuesday’s Republican debate, he bashed Bush again, saying “(w)ith (his) attitude, we will never be great again, that I can tell you.”

He may hyperventilate his way to the White House, complete with an endless war agenda. He’s unabashedly pro-war, pro-monied interests, anti-populist and against what matters most to ordinary Americans.

Dirty business as usual will continue on his watch. He favors expanding America’s bloated military budget. He wants US boots on the ground in Middle East war theaters and all-out support for Israel’s killing machine.

On Fox News days earlier, he said Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy as Secretary of State caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

“You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt, what happened with Egypt, a total mess,” Trump ranted.

“We don’t back any of our allies…She was truly, if not the, one of the worst Secretaries of State in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

“She was secretary of state. Obama was president…Look at what happened. The Middle East is a total disaster under her. She traveled back and forth, but look at all the problems.”

“Look at, as an example, Iraq. Total disaster. They didn’t get us in, but they got us out badly. We spend $2 trillion, thousands of lives, wounded warriors all over…”

He ignored America’s bipartisan responsibility for millions of lost lives post-9/11 alone – through endless wars, related violence, diseases, starvation and overall deprivation.

Trump supports more of the same – all-out Middle East war on the pretext of combating ISIS. Last month, he said he’d

“bomb those suckers. That’s right. I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the refineries, every single inch. There would be nothing left.”

Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. All US administrations support endless imperial wars for unchallenged global dominance.

Each one in recent decades exceeded the worst of their predecessors, notably post-9/11.

No Jack Kennedy exists when most needed – a warrior turned peacemaker in office, assassinated for wanting US troops out of Vietnam, abolishing nuclear weapons and rapprochement with Soviet Russia, among other reasons.

Whoever succeeds Obama may exceed his dubious record as America’s most reckless warrior 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.

During the last days, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has been clashed with the Islamist Jaysh Al-Islam militants for control of the Marj Al-Sultan Military Airport in the East Ghouta region in Damascus province. On Sunday, the Syrian forces captured the strategic Helicopter Airfields and Helicopter Airbase that is situated at the southern part of Marj Al-Sultan. On Monday, the SAA and the National Defense Forces (NDF) took control of the village of Marj Al-Sultan where the militants’ command and control center was located. On Tuesday, the pro-government troops captured the main Helicopter Military Base and the P-35 Radar Base that is situated to the north of Marj Al-Sultan and liberated the whole area of the airport.

SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence remembers on December 15, the Syrian Arab Air Force helicopter landed at the Kuweires Military Airport for the first time in nearly three years. More flights should be conducted to the Airport in the nearest future.

The recent developments have shown that the Assad government is continuing to take control of the crucial infrastructure and logistical centers pushing terrorists to the country’s desert regions.

For the last four days, the SAA, Hezbollah and the Iraqi paramilitary group “Harakat Al-Nujaba” have been on the defensive against a joint advance of the Al-Nusra, Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham, and Harakat Nouriddeen Al-Zinki terrorist groups’ avance in in South Aleppo.

This changed on Wednesday when Hezbollah and Harakat Al-Nujaba launched a counter-offensive from their positions at Burnah, Al-Zeitan, and Al-Qal’ajiyah to target the towns of Al-Zorba, Khan Touman, and Al-Baraoum which are located along the Aleppo-Damascus Highway. The Hezbollah and Harakat Al-Nujaba advanced in the southern axis of Khan Touman, while the SAA and the NDF advanced on the towns of Al-Zorba and Al-Barqoum.

The main aim of the offensive is to cut-off the terrorists’ supply route along the Aleppo-Damascus Highway. Preliminary reports confirm a large number of dead on both sides. The clashes are continuing.

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Because of the Turkish government’s role in the multi-spectrum US-led war against the Syrian Arab Republic, a war of words has ignited between Ankara and Moscow. Russia, however, is not alone in accusing Turkey of being involved in the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil. Turkish opposition politicians, Turkish media, and various governments in the Middle East have also raised their voices about the role of Turkish officials in smuggling from the conflict zones in Syria and Iraq.

Russo-Turkish Tensions

A Russian Sukhoi Su-24M tactical bomber jet operating in Syrian airspace at the request of Damascus was shot down by two Turkish F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets at 9:30 a.m. Moscow Standard Time (or, according to local time in the war theatre, 8:30 a.m. Eastern European Time) on November 24, 2015. The Kremlin reacted by asking for an explanation and apology. The Russian military quickly summoned the Turkish military attaché in Moscow and called the Su-24M’s downing an unfriendly act by Ankara while Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking from Sochi during a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, described it as a «stab in the back, carried out against us by accomplices of terrorists.» Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechen Republic, would later describe the Turkish attack as an assault on the opponents of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS/IS/DAESH) by the Turkish government on behalf of the US.

On the day of the Russian jet’s downing, Turkey would immediately call for consultations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to be held at 4:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. It would get NATO’s backing against Russia. In 2012, however, both the NATO and Turkish positions were the opposite. When a Turkish F-4 Phantom reconnaissance jet was shot down by the Syrians on June 22, the Turkish government and NATO said that such a short-term violation did not merit a military response by the Syrians.

The analysis of the Kremlin quickly concluded that the Turkish attack on the Su-24M was intentional. Russo-Turkish tensions began to mount. «We have serious doubts this was an unintended incident and believe this is a planned provocation,» Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced two days later, on November 26, after meeting Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

When Ankara refused to apologize, the Kremlin reacted by banning Turkish food imports and barring citizens of the Russian Federation from travelling to Turkey as tourists. Moscow also announced that it suspended negotiations for the construction of the Turk Stream pipeline crossing the Black Sea, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan counter-claimed that the Turkish government had already decided to end consultations on Turk Stream due to Russian non-compliance with Turkish demands. In an announcement that pleased Washington, Erdogan also threatened to turn away from Russia as an energy trading partner by finding and switching to new energy suppliers – a point that should be kept in mind when Ankara’s ties to the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Turkish military deployment to the Mosul District in Iraq are analyzed.

Despite Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s claims that an open line of communication was needed between Ankara and Moscow, the flight plans of the Russian bomber jet had been given to the Pentagon as a means of reducing the risk of collisions and accidents in the air between the Russian Federation and Washington’s military cohort. The Turkish government, however, claimed that the Su-24M was shot down over its territory, but this was sharply rejected by the data provided by Russia and Syria. Even Turkish statements that the Su-24M was flying away from Turkey create doubts about the Turkish government’s claims. By Ankara’s own account the Russian bomber was only in Turkish airspace for a few seconds, but this is mathematically inconsistent with Turkish claims that ten warning were issued to the Su-24M in a period of five minutes. It is also universally recognized that the Russian pilots parachuted inside Syrian territory. The only way the Turkish argument, which has been supported by the US envoy at the North Atlantic Council, could even make sense is if Ankara’s argument was deceptively formulated on an illegal assessment by Ankara under which the Turkish military operates as though the Turkish border has been extended by eight kilometers southward into Syrian territory.

The day after the Su-24M’s downing, on November 25, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that the S-400 mobile air defense system was being deployed to Russia’s Khmeimim (Hmeymim) Airbase in Latakia; the S-400s were then airlifted from Russia to Syria by means of the Antonov An-124 Ruslan strategic cargo jumbo jet on November 26. In an indirect message to Turkey and the US, the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces announced that Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bombers equipped with air-to-air missiles – used for air combat – were operating in Syria. The Russian Navy would also deploy the Moskva guided missile cruiser off the Levantine coast in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. Putin took a vow a few weeks later, on December 11, during a meeting with Chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff Valery Gerasimov that the Russian military will «immediately destroy» any hostile player threatening Russian operations in Syria.

Black Gold Rush: Looting Syrian and Iraqi Oil

Even more damning to Turkish officials, respectively on November 24 and December 2, Putin and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov publicly revealed that Turkey was buying oil from the ISIL terrorists and that President Erdogan and his family were personally profiting from the theft of oil from Syria. Russia had already presented evidence a few weeks earlier at the G-20 meeting in Antalya that some members of the forum were helping finance the ISIL. While Erdogan’s government and Washington rejected this, the hard evidence, from witness statements and videos to oil shipment data from Turkey’s own port of Ceyhan incriminate Turkey as the transit point for the oil that the ISIL has been stealing.

As early as June 2014, Turkish parliamentarian Ali Ediboglu, the Meclis representative of the Turkish border province of Hatay on the Syrian border, revealed that 800 million US dollars worth of stolen Syrian oil was being sold to Turkey by the insurgents and terrorists in Syria. His statements were followed by similar accusations by the Turkish newspaper Taraf Gazetesi. The Wall Street Journal even casually revealed that the major political parties in Turkey had long accused Erdogan’s government of being in bed with the terrorists by writing that «Moscow has resurrected accusations by rivals of Turkey’s most powerful leaders that Ankara has covertly fueled the rise of Islamic State [IS/ISIL], deepening the diplomatic rift over last week’s shootdown of a Russian bomber».

Mowaffak Al-Rubaie, who the US had appointed as the national security advisor of Iraq in July 2003, would corroborate that Ankara was involved with the ISIL oil stealing operations on November 28, 2015. A few weeks later, on December 7, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi would add his voice to the accusations by saying during a meeting with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that most the oil that the ISIL was stealing from Iraq and Syria was being smuggled and sold via Turkey.

Referring to the theft of oil from his own country, Syrian Information Minister Omran Al-Zoubi told RIA Novosti that Erdogan had personally ordered the Turkish military to shot down the Sukhoi Su-24M as a reprisal for the Russian airstrikes against the ISIL oil smuggling business that was managed by his son, Necmettin Bilal Erdogan. A short time later, various reports surfaced about Bilal Erdogan’s ownerships of a BMZ Group-affiliated Maltese shipping business named the Oil Transportation and Shipping Company. It was also reported that over a hundred oil tankers belonged to the Turkish Bayrak Company owned by Berat Albayrak, who is Erdogan’s son-in-law that was appointed Turkey’s energy and natural resource minister by Prime Minister Davutoglu after the Turkish general elections on November 1, 2015.

In a similar context, Turkey has been accused of stealing industrial equipment from Aleppo and Syrian historical artifacts. Speaking to Reuters, the director-general of antiquities and museums in Syria, Maamoun Abdulkarim, has testified that over two thousand stolen Syrian artifacts are being kept in Turkey and that the Turkish government refused to document or return the historical artifacts that have been looted. These antiquities from places like the Roman ruins of Palmyra are being resold through Turkey in the international black market. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), historic sites in Syria have been looted «on an industrial scale» by the ISIL and other insurgent groups supported by Turkey.

The evidence provided by Russia was corroborated by Tehran. Iran had been complaining about Turkey’s illegal oil smuggling operations in Syria and Iraq before the Kremlin even made its revelations. Laleh Eftekhari, an Iranian parliamentarian sent an open letter on December 2 to President Erdogan’s wife, Emine Erdogan, asking her how she could remain silent about Bilal’s criminal activities.

Erdogan reacted to the Iranian position by claiming in front of the Turkish public that he had demanded to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to halt criticism from the Iranian media and that Tehran stops supporting Russian revelations about his family’s involvement in the illegal oil trade. On December 4, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hussein Jaber Ansari diplomatically responded by saying that the Turkish government should instead reverse its disastrous regional policies and support for terrorism, whereas other Iranian officials said that Erdogan was blatantly lying about his exchange with Rouhani. Mohsen Rezaie, the Iranian Expediency Discernment Council’s secretary, responded by saying that «Iranian military advisors in Syria have taken photos and filmed all the routes used by ISIL’s oil tankers to Turkey; these documents can be published».

Iran is unequivocally supportive of the Russian position in Syria. Despite the analyses arguing that the Russian military presence in Syria is marginalizing the Iranians in Syria, Moscow and Tehran are working closely together. Russian airstrikes in Syria have been coordinated with Iranian ground operations. Russian operations in Syria are believed to have been discussed when Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander fighting the ISIL in Syria and Iraq, visited Moscow in August 2015. Russia military jets have been using Iranian military bases to enter Syria, Iranian military jets are escorting Russian bombers to Syria through Iranian airspace, and Tehran has allowed the Russian Navy’s Caspian Flotilla to use its waters and airspace. Even US Secretary of State John Kerry has complained that the two powers operate in tandem in regards to the conflict in Syria.

Russia is not alone, militarily or in its charges against Turkish officials. While NATO has backed Turkey, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Syria, Iraq, and Iran have backed the Russian position against Turkey. Like the Russian Federation, the major countries bordering Turkey, as well as politicians within Turkey, also accuse Erdogan’s government of working with the ISIL and stealing oil from Iraq and Syria.

Click here to read part two of this article.

(to be continued)

This article was originally published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on December 17, 2015.

 Anti-ISIS lip service has been around a long time. Until Russia intervened in Syria against its forces and other terrorist groups on September 30, these elements made steady gains. 

Rhetorical Western and regional opposition did nothing to stop their advances. Resolutions declaring UN Member States’ unity in combating ISIS are one thing – commitment entirely another.

Russia alone among major powers is combating its scourge. America, Britain, France, Germany, Turkey, Israel, Canada, Australia, Gulf States and other so-called US coalition partners support what they pretend to oppose.

Security Council resolutions changed nothing on the ground in Syria and Iraq. In August 2014, SC members unanimously adopted Res. 2170 – binding under the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, permitting members to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and to take military and nonmilitary action to “restore international peace and security.”

The resolution targeted ISIS, Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups.

In February 2015, SC members unanimously adopted Res. 2199 (binding under Chapter VII) to prevent ISIS and other terrorist groups from profiting from trade in oil, antiquities, hostages and other illicit sources of income.

In November 2015, SC members unanimously passed Res. 2249, calling on all Member States “to take all necessary measures” to defeat ISIS and other terrorist groups – “to redouble and coordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by ISIL also known as Da’esh as well as ANF, and all other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated with al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups, as designated by the United Nations Security Council.”

On Thursday, Security Council members are scheduled to adopt the first joint US/Russian drafted resolution on combating ISIS. Its purpose is “to circle (the organization as a separate, most vital terrorist threat.”

It stresses cutting off its funding sources. America heads the SC in December. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew will chair the meeting – to be attended by finance ministers of some of the other SC members. Vitaly Churkin will represent Russia.

He said the resolution is binding under Chapter VII, as well as including “several brand new aspects.” Earlier SC resolutions “referred to (ISIS) as one of Al Qaeda’s divisions.”

“Now, the sanctions list is rebranded. The document offers expanded criteria of listing, which makes it possible to impose limitations on any individuals or corporates smudged by relations with” ISIS.

A key objective is “enforcement of the regime to reveal and stop illegal financing of (ISIS) and groups related to it by means of trade of oil, artifacts and other illegal sources.”

“The countries did have respective obligations well before this, but, unfortunately, those obligations have been observed not by all and not always.”

Henceforth, UN monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms “will be focused clearly on eradication of those developments.”

What’s occurring on the ground and legally binding are world’s apart. Washington, rogue NATO partners, Israel, regional and other allies say one thing and do another.

SC resolutions and other legally binding measures change nothing on the ground. As long as Washington and partnered nations support ISIS and other terrorist groups, Russia alone with Syria, Iraq, Iran and Hezbollah forces will continue combating this scourge alone.

Moscow is under no illusion otherwise, hard as it keeps trying to enlist other nations to unite responsibly against a universal threat – unable to exist without outside support.

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.

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[Featured image: Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Vitaly Churkin (Photo by AFP)]

Russia says both the US and Turkey failed to inform the UN Security Council (UNSC) about the illegal smuggling of oil from the territories held by Takfiri Daesh terrorists in Syria and Iraq although they were obliged to do so under international law.

Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Vitaly Churkin made the remark in an interview with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, which was published on Monday.

“Under Resolution 2199, which was adopted in February at our initiative, countries must provide information [about financing for terrorists] to the Security Council if they have such information,” Churkin said.

“That means the Americans had to provide such information, and of course Turkey, which should have reported any illegal [oil] trade going on there. They didn’t do it,” he added.

“Together with the Americans, we’re drafting a new resolution tightening regulations on that kind of reporting. Possibly we could oblige the [UN] secretary general to deliver regular reports on the issue, or it would be some sort of counter-terrorist agencies. We hope to adopt this resolution on December 17,” the Russian envoy said.

Russia, which has been carrying out an aerial campaign against Daesh and other terrorist groups within Syria since September 30, has on several occasions accused Turkey of buying illegal oil from Daesh. The terrorist group is smuggling oil from the areas that it has overrun in Iraq and Syria and is selling it to middlemen in the region.

Russian military planes have repeatedly targeted trucks used by Daesh to smuggle oil, including a convoy of some 500 trucks, which they destroyed last month.

Russia has repeatedly said that Washington is aware of the smuggling of illicit oil into Turkey from Daesh-occupied territories in Syria and Iraq, blaming the US for attempts to cover up the illegal trade.

Turkey has rejected oil trade with Daesh, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying that he will step down if the accusation is proven to be true.

Earlier this month, the Russian Defense Ministry presented evidence of oil being smuggled by Daesh to Turkey. In reaction, the US special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, Amos Hochstein, claimed that the quantity of oil trafficked into Turkey from Syria is “of no significance from a volume perspective – both volume of oil and volume of revenue.”

The UNSC adopted Resolution 2199 in a bid to cut funding for Daesh, the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front based in Syria and other al-Qaeda-linked groups. The resolution urges countries not to buy oil or antiquities from the terrorists and refrain from paying them ransoms. It also stipulates that if any individual or state is involved in such activities with the terrorists, they must be charged as accomplices of Daesh.

Daesh terrorists, who have seized swathes of land in Iraq and Syria, have also extended their terror activities to other countries, including Libya. They are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.

Universally, governments have condemned the attacks that took place in the French capital’s northern suburb of Saint-Denis on November 13, 2015. Unquestionably, the murder and mayhem that happened in Paris was despicable and tragic. Questions need to be asked, however, as part of an important discussion about the narrative that is emerging.

Putting up French flags and showing solidarity for the people of Paris has immersed vast stretches of the international public. Memes and symbols of support are appearing everywhere. Showing support for Paris has become a major trend on social media and in Euro-Atlantic capitals.

A tale of two cities and two standards

The Saint-Denis attacks come a day after the attacks on Beirut’s southern Dahiyeh area on November 12, 2014. The murder and mayhem in Beirut virtually went unnoticed in North America and the European Union. This is important to note, because it means that two different standards are being applied.

The role of the media and the messages it is sending to audiences cannot be overlooked whatsoever. If the terrorist attacks in Beirut were even mentioned, the mainstream media casually only did so. On the other hand, the mainstream media reports about the tragedy in Paris have shown concern and emotion for the attacks there. Victims in places like Baghdad, Mogadishu, Damascus, Donetsk, Tripoli, Gaza, and Sanaa do not even register as newsworthy. News channels have continuously broadcast images and reports about the violence in Paris while politicians and officials across the US Empire have begun their epithets, in the process stoking fear and saturating public opinion and emotions. Facebook even began asking users who were in Paris if they were safe by checking in, but did not provide the same service for Beirut users. Has this service even been provided once for the Baghdadis that have been plagued with consistent terrorist bombings since the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003?

As an example of how people’s emotions can be engaged and influenced, the Lebanese-Canadian singer Sari Abboud, known by the stage name of Massari, who was in Paris at the time, was engrossed in the misfortune of Saint-Denis to the point where he made a statement on social media saying that he was praying for Paris. He overlooked his own ancestral land and said nothing about Lebanon. One of his fans quickly responded by asking him why he did not pray for the people of Beirut. The revealing comments were removed quickly. Massari was clearly swept up by the current of the day.

Political interests define terrorism and atrocities in conjunction to who it is perpetrated against. They try to define who merits our concerns and sympathy, and which peoples do not deserve our sympathy. There is a message when US, British, Australian, French, Canadian, and German politicians and leaders make statements in solidarity with the Parisian people, but virtually ignore Beirutis and the peoples of Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Nigeria, East Ukraine, and Palestine.

Differential politics

Audiences are being inundated by mass media about the tragedy in Paris whereas the terrorism in Beirut is being ignored or sanitized. This is happening for a reason. It is a matter of the differentials that power interests are projecting. As a part of this, a subtle discourse is tacitly implying that what happened in Beirut is not a tragedy and that the Lebanese people are less deserving of global sympathy than the French people.

This discourse is part of the illusive discursive process of the «Global War on Terror» that aims to justify conquest and domination in humanitarian and righteous terms. The victims of the terrorism in Beirut are disregarded and go unseen, because the people that were murdered in Beirut were an accumulation of Lebanese citizenry, Arab identity, Muslim faith, Shiite confession, the working class, and people that lived in a spatial entity known to back Hezbollah. The civilian victims in Beirut are essentially condemned to being lower on the hierarchical totem pole of humanity than their counterparts in Paris. Their crimes are the accumulation of things mentioned above that they are.

In the US, a Pennsylvanian candidate running for the US Senate, Everett Stern, wrote multiple times how he supported the terrorist attacks on Beirut. On Twitter, he declared: «Good news!!! I hope Hezbollah terrorists were killed.» When confronted, Stern categorized the attack in Beirut as an attack on Hezbollah.

Hezbollah fights ISIL death squads, but the French government supports ISIL

Moreover, the historical patterns of how these events are manipulated cannot be overlooked either. Whenever these attacks take place and governments and mass media go into overdrive to inundate society, they opportunistically promote certain interests. These interests can take the form of curbing civil liberties or justifications for wars. This is what the US government did after the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

France quickly closed it borders when the tragedy in Paris occurred and before the dust has settled the opportunistic and unpopular French Francois Hollande has begun talking of a «merciless» war. This does not auger well. Migrants and immigrants are being blamed while Islamophobia and xenophobia in the European Union will be fuelled. Undoubtedly, the tragedy in Paris will be used to justify and promote the dirty wars in the Middle East that the French government has partnered itself up to wage with the United States. Already reports about Syrian and Egyptian passports found at the Stade de France are being widely circulated, especially with emphasis on Syria. Although the decision to send the French warship was taken earlier, it was soon reported after the attack that the Charles De Gaulle French Aircraft Carrier was being sent from Toulon to the Middle East to help the US-led military operations.

At the end of the day it cannot be ignored that the ilk behind the attack in Paris are the same breed of people that France has directly or indirectly supported in Syria, Libya, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East. The French government and President Hollande have been supporters of Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, and the ISIL/ISIS/DAESH/IS in one form or another. These are the groups that the French government and its allies, such as the US and Saudi Arabia, have supported with weapons, trained, and provided diplomatic and political cover for as proxies in regime change operations in the Middle East. When the same criminals and offenders act the same way in Damascus or Aleppo, their crimes are excused or overlooked. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad quickly made this point about what took place in Paris on November 13, 2015.

President Hollande has described the attacks on Paris as a war conducted from abroad. The truth is the opposite. The source of the attack is not abroad as the French government claims. There is a connection between this violence and French foreign policy. France’s government is one of the authors of the terror that has trained, supported, and encouraged these types of activities. «Now they call them terrorists because today they are killing French people, but when they used to kill Syrian people they were considered jihadists,» Bashar Al-Jaafari, the Syrian envoy to the United Nations, has commented.

Less than a year ago, an attack on the French publication Charlie Hebdo was conducted by individuals that were supported and encouraged by the French government to go fight in Syria and topple the government in Damascus. Ultimately, the people in France should be angry at the French government for supporting these individuals and groups when they went to fight in Syria and other countries. In one way or another, these attacks in Paris are the results of the regime change policies of the US and its allies, including France. If you encourage people to murder and fight overseas, or to support that type of conduct, what do you think they will do inside your country or when they get back?

This article was originally published by the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), November 17, 2015.

U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was also a favorite of the arms producing giants during her 2006 senate campaign.

Hillary Clinton has received more money from arms and military service companies than any other candidate during the 2016 presidential campaign, data from Open Secrets shows.

All but one of the world’s 10 biggest arms producers have contributed to Clinton’s previous campaigns, giving her — along with the top Republican receiver Ted Cruz — a significant margin over the other candidates.

The numbers, collected by the Federal Election Commission and compiled by Open Secrets, also reveal that Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders make the list of top 20 senators and top six presidential candidates to receive money from arms and defense companies.

Most of the funding is channeled through Political Action Committees, which have no limits to how much they donate. About 18 percent comes from individual contributions, totaling almost US$10 million between all of the companies.

The biggest donors — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing — devote about a third of their funds to Democrat candidates. In the last presidential elections, Barack Obama won more funding than his contender John McCain, though McCain is the top-earning senator this year.

A report released Sunday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute showed that while U.S. arms sales have slowed, U.S.-based Lockheed Martin’s profits soared in 2014. Overall sales rose steadily until the financial crisis of 2008, when they mostly stabilized.

Sunday’s report also indicates that the U.S. accounts for a staggering 54 percent market share of the global arms market. The United Kingdom has the second largest market share, with 10.4 percent. Russia has a market share of 10.2 percent, while France has a market share of 5.6 percent.

The world’s top 10 arms companies are based in the U.S. and Western Europe, according to the report. Among these are Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems, who make up the top three companies in terms of global market share.

(Please read Part I prior to this article)

The TPP Strikes Back

The greatest threat to the multipolar world’s economic relations with ASEAN comes directly from the TPP. The US is pushing this exclusionary trade arrangement in order to obstruct the existing trade partnerships that non-allied countries (Russia and China) plan on enhancing with each of the bloc’s members. In a sense, it can be thought of as a preemptive declaration of economic war because the US is taking proactive steps in carving out a restricted market that will fall under its primary control. Washington is keenly aware of Moscow’s envisioned Pivot to Asia and understands that it must be diversified past China in order to achieve its full economic potential, and regarding Beijing, the US recognizes how obstructive a disturbance in bilateral Chinese-ASEAN economic relations could be for the New Silk Road plans that it hopes to complete in the coming years. The US would like to use the economic hegemony that it would acquire over each of the TPP’s ASEAN members in order to bully them away from these multipolar centers and firmly entrench them in the unipolar camp, and there are concrete reasons that this strategic threat should be taken seriously.

The AEC:

ASEAN reached an historic milestone during its 27^th summit at the end of November 2015 in Kuala Lumpur, agreeing to form the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in order to coordinate the bloc’s economic relations with the outside world and strengthen social, cultural, and security cooperation among its members. It’s expected that the AEC will seek to enact bloc-wide trade agreements from this point on, striving to eventually expand the TPP to include the rest of the organization with time. The reasoning for this is quite simple, and it’s that ASEAN would like to standardize the trade deals that its members have with outside countries and blocs so as not to create an internal structural imbalance between its economies. If Malaysia is in the TPP but Vietnam has a FTA with the Eurasian Union, the thinking goes, then that creates a disadvantage for the Philippines which doesn’t have institutionalized ties with either, for example, and the mishmash of various external actors interacting with ASEAN on a member-to-member basis instead of dealing with the entire group creates an unnecessarily complex intra-bloc situation that makes it all the more difficult for the AEC’s diverse members to economically integrate with one another.

Although it’s not the most accurate comparison in general, in this case it’s somewhat fitting to pair the AEC with the EU since both blocs want to control their members’ institutionalized economic relations with other states and organizations. Even though this objective hasn’t been formally proclaimed by the AEC as of yet, it’s functionally inevitable that it will move in this direction sooner or later once its members get more serious about their shared integration goal. This means that the AEC will one day have to make the decision over which non-bloc-including bilateral agreements it wants to expand to cover the entire organization and which ones its respective members must be forced to abandon. It’s significant to note at this point that most of the AEC seems to be moving in the direction of the TPP, judging at least by the statements coming out of the group’s top two economies, Indonesia and Thailand. President Joko Widodo told Obama during a White House meeting in late October that “Indonesia intends to join the TPP”, while one of Thailand’s deputy prime ministers proclaimed at the end of November that his country “is highly interested in joining TPP…chances are high that Thailand will seek to join TPP.”

Thailand And Indonesia:

Thailand might be trying to publicly defer to the US for as long as possible in order to deflect some of the hostility that many in Washington harbor towards it ever since the multipolar coup ousted the pro-American leadership and the country largely reoriented towards China. It’s probable that Bangkok doesn’t sincerely intend to join the TPP, or at least at this point, because it would endanger the strategic partnership that it’s rapidly developed with Beijing over the past year and a half (and which will be addressed more in the research later), but the situation with Indonesia is a lot more straightforward. Unbeknownst to most observers, the West has been engaging in a mini-containment of sorts against the country in order to further pressure its leadership into making pro-unipolar decisions when the appropriate time comes. Widodo is already recognized as being Western-friendly as it is, but he’s still the steward of one of the largest economies in the world and has a tricky role to play in strategically hedging against China (as the Indonesian leadership sees it) while simultaneously preventing itself from falling under the US’ full supremacy as its latest proxy state.

Rewriting The Rules

Regretfully, however, it looks as though Indonesia is about to use its economic leadership role over the AEC to misguide the rest of the organization into moving along the path of unipolar servitude. If Jakarta commits to the TPP, then it’s foreseeable that this will be the deciding factor in whether the rest of the AEC accepts the US’ disadvantageous trade offer at the expense of upgrading its ties with the Eurasian Union. In fact, the implementation of the TPP might even result in the eventual nullification of ASEAN’s FTA with China, thereby dealing a double-whammy to the multipolar world’s institutional influence in Southeast Asia.

While scarcely any details are known about the TPP (the published text is around two million words in length and nearly impossible for a single individual to read through and totally comprehend on their own), it’s already been well-established that the “preferential” legal adjustments that it mandates each party abide by are nothing more than a smokescreen for major corporations to acquire decisive political rights. One of the controversies herein is that companies could sue national governments if the respective state enacts or enforces any “environmental, health or other regulatory objectives” that inhibit the said organization’s legally enshrined trade advantages or endanger its profits (it doesn’t even have to result in any actual decline, just the possible threat thereof).

Recalling that Vietnam is already in a FTA with the Eurasian Union and all of ASEAN has a similar arrangement with China, it’s definitely possible that the US would find a pretext within each of these existing agreements to argue that they violate the TPP and must be rewritten or outright abandoned. If they fail to rectify the problem within the given period of time, then the US’ supportive companies will take each of the ‘violating’ states to court on Washington’s behalf to squeeze a punitive settlement out of them and/or force them to make the dictated changes. US-ally Japan may also direct some of its major companies to do the same as part of a coordinated push to maximize the ‘legal’-economic pain being inflicted on the targeted state.

How It Could Be Stopped

As extreme as such a scenario may sound at the moment, if perfectly correlates to the US’ strategic objectives of pushing multipolar Great Power influences out of Southeast Asia and hoarding the region’s economic potential all to itself. Doing so also has very specific geostrategic underpinnings that will be described in the next chapter, thus adding another layer of motivation for the US to move forward in this direction. As much as Washington wants to carry out this strategy, however, it doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed to be successful, and there’s still the very real possibility that its plan could be stopped in its tracks before it ever has the chance to come to full fruition.

The greatest obstacle to the US’ TPP-dominating dream for Southeast Asia is China’s ASEAN Silk Road, the high-speed rail line that’s expected to run from Kunming to Singapore and traverse through Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The first two transit states have the most to gain from this proposal and are thus anticipated to remain the most ‘loyal’ in safeguarding China’s FTA with ASEAN in the event that the AEC ever tries to revise it (perhaps under a TPP-influenced Indonesian initiative). There’s also the China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor that was launched in early 2015 to transfer Mideast oil and gas to Yunnan Province via a more thought-to-be geostrategically secure route than the Strait of Malacca (which is questionable and will be explained later in the work), with the envisioned potential of evolving into a full-scale trade corridor with time. This theoretically gives Naypyidaw a stake in preserving the institutional FTA status quo with China, although this could (and probably will) change with Suu Kyi’s increased role over the state. Cambodia is also a close Chinese ally nowadays, but it’s not institutionally tied to any major infrastructure projects, thereby meaning that it’s capable of being ‘bought off’ by the ‘highest bidder’ and isn’t fundamentally dependable. Therefore, the most reliable partners that China has to defend its economic interests in the AEC are Laos and Thailand.

It’s predicted that these two states have already made the conscientious choice among their top leaderships to economically tie themselves closer with China through their participation in the ASEAN Silk Road project. For this reason, they have vested interests in making sure that their TPP-adhering AEC counterparts don’t enforce their unipolar trade terms on the rest of the bloc and/or compel the others to restrict their established economic ties with China (at the behest of the US, of course). An intra-organizational split could easily occur under these conditions, with the TPP-affiliated states facing off against the non-TPP ones as the AEC struggles to streamline its institutional economic engagements in its quest for greater coordination and integration among its members. The anticipated friction that this will produce would lead to a likely deadlock in implementing any institutionally revisionist (or expansionist, as per the TPP) policies within the AEC and prevent the US from achieving its full unipolar objectives in the theater. Consequently, due to Laos, Thailand, and to an extent, Myanmar’s highly strategic economic relations with China (the first two being party to the ASEAN Silk Road and the latter being host to the China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor) that are standing in the way of the US’ full-spectrum unipolar dominance over ASEAN, all three of these states are ‘valid’ targets for a Hybrid War sometime in the future.

The Global Perspective

The economic proxy war going on between the unipolar and multipolar camps over ASEAN is of immense significance in terms of its global impact, but in order to truly appreciate how it relates to the rest of the world, it’s essential for the reader to be reminded of certain elements of contemporary American grand strategy.

The US capitalized off of the end of the Cold War by exporting its neo-liberal economic practices all across the world, with the ultimate intent being to entrap Russia, China, and to an extent that’s ever more relevant nowadays, Iran, in an institutional net of Washington-dominated control from which there’d be no escape. It’s taken some time to advance, but right now the US is steadily moving forward with great speed in tying the four corners of Eurasia into its matrix of control, de-facto encircling these three Great Powers and making them disproportionately dependent on a shared center of economic-strategic gravity.

The TTIP, should it enter into force, would place the EU’s external economic relations under the control the US, thereby meaning that Brussels would be powerless to enter into any FTA or similarly privileged trading accord with other countries without the US’ explicit blessing. Moving along in a counterclockwise direction, the US and the GCC are working on intensifying their economic relations to the point of an eventual FTA. This isn’t too important right now because of the lopsided dependence that the Gulf economies have on energy sales, but eventually they’ll have to transition to a more ‘normal’ economy based on material trade, and at that point, their hefty financial reserves that they’ve been saving will go towards purchasing products from the US and any other country that it’s likely to be in a FTA with by that time. The next object of American focus is ASEAN, which has just been comprehensively described, and the final part of the supercontinental strategy is South Korea and Japan. The US already has a FTA with the former, and it’s planning to use TPP to enter into the same arrangement with the latter.

Altogether, one can clearly see that most of the cardinal directions in Eurasia are covered by America’s FTA plans. To reexamine the US’ plans from this perspective, the EU represents Western Eurasia, the GCC is Southwest Eurasia, ASEAN is Southeast Eurasia, and South Korea and Japan are Northeast Eurasia. The only missing link is South Eurasia, mostly India, which is being wooed by the US anyhow as it is, although it’s still a far time away from entering into a FTA with the US. Nonetheless, if TTIP and TPP are allowed to enter into practice, then it’s only a matter of time before an irresistible offer is made to New Delhi in coaxing India into this unipolar economic web. Even without India’s formal incorporation into the US’ global neo-liberal scheme, it’s already been argued that it’ll most likely remain outside of GEFTA because of concerns for its strategic sovereignty vis-à-vis neighboring rival China. In that case, Russia, China, and Iran would then share the same economic-strategic space in Central Asia, one of the last parts of the supercontinent to remain outside of the US’ formal institutionalized control. This would make Central Asia the unquestionable center of multipolar gravity between these three Great Powers, but conversely, it would also make them disproportionately vulnerable to American-engineered Hybrid Wars there.

In order to avoid a three-for-one ultra-dependency on Central Asia, it’s urgently imperative for the multipolar world to maintain and defend its inroads in the AEC, ergo the importance that goes into China’s counter-TPP efforts via the ASEAN Silk Road and the China-Myanmar Pipeline Corridor. A retreat from these fronts and the cession of Southeast Asia to America’s unipolar clutches will create a strategically dangerous situation for China, and by extension, the rest of the multipolar Great Powers, and resultantly push up the US’ timetable for corralling their shared economic interests into Central Asia. China also has very clearly defined geostrategic interests in sustaining its influence in ASEAN (or at least in part of its mainland component) in order to halt the advancement of the US’ ‘Chinese Containment Coalition’ (CCC) and maintain non-American-controlled outlets to the Indian Ocean that allow it to safely access the burgeoning African markets on which its future growth depends.

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentaror currently working for the Sputnik agency, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW. This article is a select chapter from his second book that will focus on the geopolitical application of Hybrid Wars.

The ongoing push to lift the ban on exports of U.S.-produced crude oil appears to be coming to a close, with Congress agreeing to a budget deal with a provision to end the decades-old embargo. 

Just as the turn from 2014 to 2015 saw the Obama Administration allow oil condensate exports, it appears that history may repeat itself this year for crude oil. Industry lobbyists, a review of lobbying disclosure records by DeSmog reveals, have worked overtime to pressure Washington to end the 40-year export ban — which will create a global warming pollution spree.

Image Credit: U.S. House of Representatives

Congress has introduced four oil export-promoting bills in the past year, all of which received heavy lobbying support from the industry. Language from those bills, as with a bill that opened up expedited hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) permitting on public lands in the defense appropriations bill last year, is inserted into the broader budget bill.

So without further ado, meet some of the lobbying and big money interests that propelled these bills forward.

“Changing Crude Oil Market Conditions”

The push to repeal the oil export ban gained momentum throughout 2014 and culminated with the Obama Administration partially lifting the ban oil condensate. Before that partial repeal, a wholesale ban lift attempt ensued in Congress via H.R.5814, clunkily named “To adapt to changing crude oil market conditions.”

H.R. 5814 mandated that the “United States should remove all restrictions on the export of crude oil, which will provide domestic economic benefits, enhanced energy security, and flexibility in foreign diplomacy.”

Companies such as Anadarko Petroleum, Marathon Oil and HollyFrontier Corporation all put their best foot forward in lobbying for the bill. Anadarko paid Robert Hickmott and W. Timothy Locke — both of whom passed through thegovernment-industry revolving door — to do the job.

Take Two

Failing to pass in 2014, climate change denying U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) re-introduced a bill by the same namesake as H.R.5814 again in February 2015, now with a new bill number: H.R. 702.

From an oil and gas industry point of view, Barton was a fitting sponsor of the bills as someone who has taken close to $2 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry throughout his political career. Barton also has $50,000-$100,000 in investments in fracking industry giant EOG Resources.

H.R. 702 passed with a 261-159 vote count in the U.S. House of Representatives in October but has yet to move through theU.S. Senate.

Far more companies lobbied for the bill this time around the block.

Image Credit: OpenSecrets.org

Among them is ExxonMobil, the news these days mostly for the “Exxon Knew” climate change denial scandal and the ongoing New York Attorney General’s Office investigation.

Exxon’s oil exports lobbyist armada includes former U.S. Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) and Majority Leader and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’s former chief of staff Michael Solon.

The fracking lobby, America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), also brought its lobbying clout to the forefront for the bill. ANGAlobbied for H.R. 702 in both quarters two and three. National Industrial Sand Association, the frac sand industry’s lobbying group, also lobbied for the bill.

Koch Industries front group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) also deployed a trio of lobbyists to advocate on behalf ofH.R. 702.

Crude Oil Export Act

Before Barton re-introduced “changing crude oil market conditions” in February, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) used his first day on the job in 2015 on January 6 to introduce another related oil export ban repeal bill, Crude Oil Export Act (H.R.156).

ExxonMobil again had a seat at the lobbying table pushing for this bill’s passage, as did Nickles and his lobbying group Nickles Group on the company’s behalf. Koch Industries also tossed its hat in the ring to lobby for the bill, as didConocoPhillips, Chesapeake Energy, Shell Oil, BP and others.

The industry-funded and lobbyist-run think tank and advocacy apparatus Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) also lobbied for the bill during quarter three via its lobbying and advocacy 501(c)(4) wing, the Bipartisan Policy Center Advocacy Network.

All of the lobbyists BPC deployed to push lifting the export ban, a DeSmog review has revealed, passed through the revolving door and formerly worked as congressional staffers.

Financial disclosure records show that the sponsor of H.R. 156, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) has millions of dollars invested in oil and gas companies ranging from ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon Oil, EOG Resources, Schlumberger, Halliburton, Shell Oil, Dominion and others. Throughout his decade-long political career, McCaul has taken nearly $400,000 in campaign money from the oil and gas industry.

American Crude Oil Export Equality Act

On the Senate side, in May U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp introduced the latest iteration of an oil export ban repeal bill called the American Crude Oil Export Equality Act (S.1372). Though the bill has not gained much traction, it has not been without a valiant effort by the oil and gas industry, with the same familiar company names rearing their heads once again.

Image Credit: OpenSecrets.org

The lobbying list for S.1372 includes Koch Industries, the Bipartisan Policy Center, Marathon Oil, Devon Energy, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell Oil, BP, ANGA, the American Petroleum Institute and others.

Heitkamp bears similarities to other oil export ban lifting bill sponsors in that she also has taken large amounts of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry throughout her political career. In her nascent two-year long political career as aU.S. Senator, Heitkamp has taken over $186,000 from the industry, her third biggest campaign contributor by category.

Refining Industry Big Money Flip

To date, the refining industry has situated itself as one of the most ardent opponents of oil exports besides the environmental community. That state of play changed, though, during the drafting stages of the budget bill.

Early on, news broke that a drafted proposed budget provision introduced by U.S. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) called for a trade-off between oil exports and subsidies going to oil refineries, otherwise known as a win-win for the oil and gas industry.

Carper, who devotes a portion of his website to the environment and climate change, is up for re-election in 2016 and one of his biggest donors so far is private equity firm giant Blackstone Group. Among many other oil and gas industry assets itfinances, Blackstone serves as the financier of PBF Energy, the company that owns a massive Delaware City-based oil refinery.

Image Credit: OpenSecrets.org

An examination of Carper’s financial disclosure records shows he has upwards of $30,000 invested in refining giant Valero Energy — from whom PBF Energy bought a New Jersey-based refinery in 2010 — and upwards of $15,000 invested in BP(owner of the massive BP Whiting tar sands refinery in Whiting, Indiana).

“There are negotiations to make sure that the unintended consequences to dozens of refineries across the country are avoided,” Carper told The Hill on December 10. “The idea is that if the oil export ban is going to be lifted, we want to be sure there’s no collateral damage to refiners in this country.”

Environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth took umbrage with Carper’s statement.

“Big Oil is already awash in billions worth of subsidies every year and Sen. Carper wants to send them even more,” Lukas Ross of FOE told Delaware’s News Journal. “Instead of pushing for extra goodies for his refining industry pals, Sen. Carper should oppose any climate-denying deal that would lift the crude oil export ban.”

Carper did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment, but it appears his provision did not make it into the proposed budget bill. Instead, another pro-petroleum refinery provision made it into the budget, buried at the very end on pages 2008 and 2009.

Titled “Treatment of Transportation Costs of Independent Refiners,” the section offers a tax incentives for the transportation costs of getting petrochemical products to and from independent refineries in the U.S.

McKibben: “Hypocrisy”

In an opinion piece published by The Hill, 350.org founder and author Bill McKibben decried what he called the “hypocrisy” of the possibility of the signing of this bill, pointing out the post-Paris timing of it.

“If you were wondering how seriously world leaders took the obligations they imposed on themselves in Paris over the weekend, the early returns would indicate: not very,” wrote McKibben. “Barely 48 hours after all the back-patting at the climate conference had ended, word leaked out in Washington that the administration and Congress were preparing to lift the 40-year ban on oil exports, a major gift to the oil industry.”

Utilizing the #KeepTheBan hashtag on Twitter, groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity and Food and Water Watch are pushing for citizens to call the White House and congressional members and tell them not to lift the ban.

In October of 1930, Thomas Mann made “An Appeal to Reason” in The Berliner Tageblatt:

“This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy . . . and reason veils her face.”

The appeal failed. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and shortly after the Reichstag fire, he passed the “Enabling Act,” suspending personal freedoms, freedom of opinion, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Though subject to house searches, restrictions on property and confiscations, Germans felt free so long as they behaved like “good Germans” and obeyed the law.

It seems to be the 1930s all over again in Europe, though “ideologies” were supposed to have died with the overthrow of the Soviet Union. Thankfully, Marine LePen’s radical right party, National Front, has just been defeated in France’s regional elections, but not before the media went “epileptic” over her projected victory. Still, France remains in a “state of emergency,” decreed by a socialist government after the attacks on Paris.

Today’s Europe reminds me of the city in Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague (1947). The novel’s Oran in the early 1940s, then in colonial French Algeria, was depicted as a merchant city, without trees, gardens, or pigeons, where flowers imported from elsewhere announced the coming of spring. An artificial city with an artificial life and inert consciousness. At first, the industrious colonials of Oran refused to notice the plague-carrying rats scurrying about or piling up dead in peripheral sections of the city. “They fancied themselves free, [but] no one [is] ever free so long as there are pestilences.” For a metaphor of lurking, studiously ignored evil, you can’t top The Plague.

Today, pestilence-carrying rats are back infesting Europe. Ukraine writhes in a delirium of historical topsy-turvy. On 14 October, it celebrated the first Defenders’ Day, a national holiday legally decreed by the Ukrainian Parliament. The date is significant, for on this day, seventy-three years ago, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was founded. In WW II, UPA cooperated with the Nazis, supplying a Ukrainian voluntary SS division– the SS Freiwillingen-Schutzen-Division “Galizien,” the infamous Galitian Division.

What if one of our worthy NATO allies in Europe—say, Germany—declared a national holiday, say, The Day of Defenders of the Fatherland, in honor of the Schutzstaffel (the Nazi SS), the paramilitary “protection squadron” or “defense corps” of Heinrich Himmler’s industrial death army, indicted at Nuremberg as a criminal organization along with the Nazi party and its elite? Would Israel pause in its latest killing spree to justifiably raise the wrath of the ghosts of the Shoah? Would the Holocaust-conscious United States raise the voice of indignation against this opprobrium to the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation? Would the members of the European Union, laureled with the Nobel Prize for Peace, stop the frantic building of walls against the tidal waves of refugees and cry, “not again?”

Perhaps not. Judging by the silence in the media and among officials over the grotesquerie in Ukraine, the return of fascism hardly raises an eyebrow. And after all, hasn’t “Russia invaded Ukraine”? How, then, could Neo-Nazis be roving about, when, instead, the place is alleged to be crawling with Russian troops, in pursuit of restoring “Putin’s Soviet Empire”?

The nostalgia for anti-communism adds a surreal element to the acquiescence to fascist revivals. Thus, one simply cannot get over-excited about Nazis when the imaginary Soviet threat looms again so large on the borders of NATO. Like shifting sands, these borders move ever more inexorably east, to encircle Russia, so that the map of NATO Europe today looks exactly like Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941, when Hitler launched his doomed Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union in June.

The parade in Kiev on Defenders’ Day consisted of only 3,500 participants, members of the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the infamous Azov battalion. The most prominent politician at the event was far-right Oleh Tyahnybok, who in April 2005, wrote to President Yushchenko, calling for a parliamentary investigation of “the criminal activities of organized Jewry in Ukraine.” Of the UPA Nazi collaborators he’s on record as saying,

They were not afraid and we should not be afraid. They took their automatic guns on their necks and went into the woods, and fought against the Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.

That is the truth. The UPA and their Nazi overlords did clear Ukraine of a considerable amount of “scum”: three million non-Jewish Ukrainians and other nationalities; a million Jews; 2.3 million Ukrainians deported for slave labor to Germany. Had it not been for the Red Army’s victory, the Nazis had planned for the extermination of 65% of 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the remaining 35% scheduled for Germanization or enslavement.

Elsewhere in Europe, the official boogey-man —an essential component of fascist faith–has been updated from “Jew” or “communist” to “Muslim.”

Poland’s former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, eminence griseof the Law and Justice Party, echoed Nazi propaganda when he said that Muslim refugees were bringing “cholera to the Greek islands, dysentery to Vienna, various types of parasites” to the rest of Europe. Russophobic, pugilistically nationalist, Law and Justice Party won elections and are now at the helm in Poland. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has been in power since 2010 and will remain until 2018. His only opposition is the Neo-Nazi Jobbik movement, yet his xenophobia is exemplarily fascist. He has said openly that Hungary has no place for Muslims and that he, as a Christian, defends the borders of Europe from a Muslim invasion. Orban has a huge electoral mandate—two-thirds support. In Germany, from Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA), a speaker issued a veiled appeal for reactivating the policy of concentration camps.

As in Mann’s novella, Mario and the Magician (1929), there is, once again in Europe, a concentration of hypnotic, seductively perverse “evilness” in the air. It is carried by a reactionary western wind that blows from centers on both sides of the Atlantic.

It induces opiated stupor and passive complicity with the performance of demagogic magicians, harnessing and twisting the fears, the desires, and the frustrations of masses of people. The greatest, most deceptive magician of them all—Mann’s hunchbacked mesmerizer, Cavaliere Cipolla—is the Western media.

Adding to CNN’s Sizeable Dossier of Misreporting on the TWA Flight 800 Crash With stunning regularity, CNN’s reporters and producers have, for the last twenty years, egregiously misreported on the evidence and eyewitness accounts pertaining to TWA Flight 800.

More recent crashes, this time Metrojet’s demise, are regularly seized upon to craft news packages in which the TWA Flight 800 crash is mentioned at length. These mentions consist of repeating the same “official source” false narrative that CNN and other major news outlets have been promulgating for years, even though the public is now well aware that at least half a dozen key members of the official Flight 800 crash investigation have presented evidence showing that the official probable cause of the crash is untenable and that the physical evidence indicates that explosive ordnance caused Flight 800’s demise.

In case you missed last night’s two hour steelcage GOP extravaganza, here’s the 26-second food fight between frontrunner Donald Trump and Jeb Bush that everyone is talking about.

Not surprisingly, the topic was one that dominated the discussion all night: What candidate is best qualified to savage civil liberties at home while bombing the rest of the planet into oblivion?

Judging by his ability to disembowel Bush in front of  hand-picked audience of red-meat party loyalists, Trump appears to be the hands-down winner.

It should be pretty clear by now, that “ratings machine” Trump is more than a passing phenomenon that will suddenly vanish when voters see that he doesn’t really have a party, a platform or a good grasp of the issues.

That’s not going to happen. The imperious real estate tycoon is an explosive and charismatic character whose shoot-from-the-hip candor and rapier-like sarcasm have transformed him into a right wing Huey Long. That’s right, Trump has become a populist icon who thrives on biased attacks of a media that is justifiably reviled by nearly everyone.

Just imagine a mercurial megalomaniac like Trump in the oval office just inches away from the Big Red Switch that ignites the Pentagon’s prodigious arsenal of nuclear weapons.

It’s worth thinking about at least…

Syria affirmed that the US-led coalition’s warplanes have launched tens of raids on the Syrian economic facilities instead of raiding the Islamic State (ISIS) organization and its tanks that transport the stolen Syrian oil into Turkey.

“The US-led coalition’s shelling of the economic facilities and infrastructure, and the unilateral coercive measures adopted by some countries on the Syrian people are the reason behind the mounting difficult conditions Syria is passing through,” Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said in two identical letters sent Wednesday to the UN Secretary General and President of Security Council.

It added that in light of this deliberate destruction of the oil and economic establishments, the Syrian Arab Republic reserves its right in demanding the US-led coalition’s countries to pay compensations to Syria in return for this destruction as it is a right guaranteed by the international law.

On December 8^th and 13^th, the international coalition shelled a number of oil and gas stations in Deir Ezzor under the pretext of hunting the ISIS, causing losses estimated at hundreds of millions USD.

“The US-led coalition has launched scores of raids on the Syrian economic installations instead of bombarding the ISIS tanks which transport the stolen Syrian petroleum and it didn’t present any information about the shelling to the UN according to the UN charter,” the two letters reiterated.

The letters added “In this regard, the armed terrorist organizations don’t loot the Syrian oil directly from the stations, but they steal the oil from places neighboring the oil wells which spread in the Syrian oil fields, then they sell the petroleum through Turkish channels.

Abby Martin interviews retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former national security advisor to the Reagan administration, who spent years as an assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell during both Bush administrations.

Today, he is honest about the unfixable corruption inside the establishment and the corporate interests driving foreign policy.

Hear a rare insider’s view of what interests are behind U.S. wars:

The manipulation of intelligence, the intertwining of the military and corporate world, and why the U.S. Empire is doomed

http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/v/the…

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A Turkish MP has been charged with treason today after alleging in an exclusive interview with RT that ISIS terrorists had smuggled deadly sarin nerve gas into Syria from Turkey.

Ankara’s Chief Prosecutor’s Office opened a case against Istanbul MP Eren Erdem, a member of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) after a TV interview which aired on RT on Monday.

This comes on the heals of massive international pressure on Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has already been indirectly implicated for the role his government and military have played in facilitating terrorist operations in Syria and Northern Iraq.

TURKEY’S DIRTY WAR: MP Erdem (left) exposed the Turkish regime led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in running NATO’s dirty war in Syria..

What’s most important about this story – which is all but guaranteed to be entirely blacked-out by the British, European and North American mainstream media – is that this deadly Sarin compound appears to be the very same chemical payload that was used in a false flag attack in Ghouta, Damascus in August 2013.

This is absolutely relevant now because nearly every US Presidential candidate keeps referring to this attack as “Assad crossing the red line” in reference to President Barack Obama’s famous ‘red line’ speech in 2013 – and using this and other fabricated claims to justify NATO’s geopolitical objective of over-throwing the legal government in Damascus, and collapsing the Syrian nation-state, just as NATO did 4 years ago in Libya.

Despite the truth already being known on this issue, including proof detailed in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study proving the false flag nature of the clandestine operation, and evidence presented to the United Nations, as well as in a report filed by lead UN chemical weapons inspector Carla Del Ponte – a number of US-based, somewhat high-profile disinformation news outlets like the Washington Times (another dubious news organization linked to the CIA by way of its owner, the Moonies) still push this old Pentagon/CIA propaganda line in order to somehow justify yet another illegal war based on a false pretext – nearly identical to the fraud perpetrated by Washington and London to wage their highly illegal war in Iraq in 2003.

In response to NATO’s PR meltdown following recent revelations and also after Turkey’s aggressive move in shooting down a Russian fighter jet in Syrian airspace (not Turkish airspace as Turkey tried to claim initially), the Turkish regime has unleashed a brutal Chinese-stylecrackdown on against Turkish journalists and MPs who dare speak about their own government’s involvement in the arming, money laundering, oil smuggling and trafficking militants to fight for various Jihadi militant groups, including ISIS, from Turkey into Syria. The Erdogan regime’s response has been a brutal crackdown on journalists and government whistleblowers.

Earlier this week, 21WIRE released a brief report on NATO’s Operation GLADIO and its widespread use of Pseudo Gangs, and how this same clandestine structural overlay appears to be in operation presently in Syria and Turkey, as well as many other locations around the globe.

This scandal is now out in the open, so the world now waits for the rest of NATO to either condemn or endorse Turkey’s role in fomenting the Syrian conflict which the rest of NATO – led by the US, UK, and France – claims it wants to stop by illegally bombing the country of Syria.

What will Washington, London and Paris do now? Deny, ignore, or act?

A treason investigation has been launched against a Turkish MP who alleged in an exclusive interview with RT that Islamic State jihadists delivered deadly sarin gas to Syria through Turkey. Watch RT video.

Four Israelis who work for leading human rights organizations woke up to a new, frightening reality after a video accused each one of them of being a foreign agent working to defend Palestinian terrorists.

A new video entitled “Foreign Agents – Revealed!” was released on Tuesday by Im Tirtzu, a neo-Mccarthyite, extreme right-wing group notorious for its public attacks against left-wing academics and organizations. In 2013 an Israeli court ruled that the group bears similarities to a fascist movement. Its leadership enjoys ties with Likud and Yisrael Beitenu politicians.

The video plasters the faces of the heads of four Israeli human rights organizations — The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem and Hamoked: The Center for the Defense of the Individual — directly accusing them of being “planted” by different European entities (Holland, Germany, Norway and the European Union, respectively) to aid and abet terrorists. I wonder whether any of these European entities has a problem with being accused of planting operatives in an “enemy” country.

In response to the video, B’Tselem head Hagai El-Ad, who was targeted in the video, told +972:

“The government has no idea what it is doing, so its emissaries are busy dealing in incitement. We will continue to document and expose the occupation and its injustices, and resist Israel’s half century-long military control over millions of Palestinians.”

Meretz MK Michal Rozin has already demanded the attorney general investigate it. According to attorney Michael Sfard, the legal definition of incitement is very narrow, and therefore it probably won’t apply here. It requires a call to commit an offense against someone, the reasonable likelihood that someone can and will commit that act, and that the distributor of the material is interested in that happening or at least doesn’t mind.

However, Sfard says it definitely is incitement in the social, political and ethical sense of the term. “Soviet-style incitement, talking about people as if they are foreign agents working for the enemy.” According to Sfard, there is a legal definition of incitement to racism that does not include the call to harm someone – like what Netanyahu did on Election Day (even though the Attorney General acquitted him). Such incitement creates an atmosphere of hatred for a person based on their being attributed to a specific group.

“If there was a parallel to the law on incitement for racism that included incitement against political groups, this would qualify,” Sfard told +972.

The past few months have been a scary time for human rights activists in Israel. The recent incitement against activists from Breaking the Silence — which came from right-wing and centrist leaders alike — has created an environment in which Israelis working for organizations that deal with Palestinian human rights are endangering themselves. They are being silenced, they are the target of slander and lies, and their actual physical safety may be in danger.

The war in Vietnam resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and more than 3 million Vietnamese. Twenty years ago, the United States and Vietnam normalized diplomatic relations in an effort to put the terrible legacy of the war behind them. But for the survivors—both Vietnamese and American—the war continues. About 5 million Vietnamese and many U.S. and allied soldiers were exposed to the toxic chemical dioxin from the spraying of Agent Orange. Many of them and their progeny continue to suffer its poisonous effects.

Agent Orange was a chemical, herbicidal weapon sprayed over 12 percent of Vietnam by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971. The dioxin present in Agent Orange is one of the most toxic chemicals known to humanity.

Tran Thi Le Huyen, 23, in a wheelchair at her family home in Danang, Vietnam, in 2007. Her family once lived near the highly contaminated Danang Airbase; her father was a driver for the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government during the war. (David Guttenfelder / AP)

Those exposed to Agent Orange during the war often have children and grandchildren with serious illnesses and disabilities. The international scientific community has identified an association between exposure to Agent Orange and some forms of cancers, reproductive abnormalities, immune and endocrine deficiencies and nervous system damage. Second- and third-generation victims continue to be born in Vietnam as well as to U.S. veterans and Vietnamese-Americans in this country.

There are 28 “hot spots” in Vietnam still contaminated by dioxin. These hot spots still affect the people who live there and eat the crops, land animals and fish.

On April 29, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee introduced HR 2114, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015. This bill would go a long way toward remedying the humanitarian crisis among both the Vietnamese and U.S. victims of Agent Orange.

Representatives of the Vietnam Association for the Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) have arrived in the U.S. to mark the official launch of HR 2114 on Thursday. VAVA is an organization of more than 365,000 Agent Orange victims and activists that works to achieve justice for the victims throughout the world.

One member of the VAVA delegation is Tran Thi Hoàn. Her mother was exposed to Agent Orange from a barrel of the chemical buried in her land during the war. Born without legs and with a seriously atrophied hand, Hoàn grew up in Peace Village II, the Agent Orange center at Tu Du Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City. Hoàn is a college graduate and currently works as a computer science professional at the hospital.

In the U.S., VAVA’s sister organization, the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC), is educating the public about the ongoing problems caused by spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam and working to pass legislation to remedy these problems. VAORRC believes that the U.S. and chemical manufacturers such as Dow and Monsanto must take responsibility for the use of these chemicals to redress the harm they have caused and to heal the wounds of war. VAVA advocates for and provides assistance to victims in Vietnam, but Agent Orange victims need even more help. Through the work of activists in the U.S., Vietnam and internationally, the U.S. government has allocated some money for the cleanup of one hot spot, but has done little to alleviate the suffering of Agent Orange victims in Vietnam or to clean up the remaining 27 hot spots.

The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam constituted prohibited chemical warfare, amounting to a war crime. Yet the U.S. is still using chemical weapons, including white phosphorus gas, in its wars abroad. In addition to taking responsibility for and rendering assistance to Agent Orange victims, the U.S. government must also provide compensation to victims of recent and current wars who suffer from exposure to chemicals used by its military.

HR 2114, which has 14 co-sponsors, would:

● Provide health care and social services for affected Vietnamese, including medical and chronic care services, nursing services, vocational employment training, medicines and medical equipment, custodial and home care, daycare programs, training programs for caregivers, physical and vocational rehabilitation and counseling and reconstructive surgery.

● Provide medical assistance and disability benefits to affected children of U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War. The veterans fought for and won benefits for their Agent-Orange-related health conditions, but only the children of female veterans were covered for most conditions. This bill will equalize benefits to the children of both male and female American veterans.

● Provide health assessment, counseling and treatment for affected Vietnamese-Americans and their offspring through the establishment of health and treatment centers in Vietnamese-American communities.

● Clean up the lands and restore ecosystems contaminated by Agent Orange/dioxin in Vietnam.

● Conduct research into the health effects of Agent Orange/dioxin in the U.S. and Vietnam.

HR 2114 should be enacted into law. The refusal of the U.S. government to compensate the Vietnamese and U.S. victims of its chemical warfare would set a negative precedent for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who need similar help.

The Federal Reserve raised the interbank borrowing rate today by one quarter of one percent or 25 basis points. Readers are asking, “what does that mean?”

It means that the Fed has had time to figure out that the effect of the small “rate hike” would essentially be zero. In other words, the small increase in the target rate from a range of 0 to 0.25% to 0.25 to 0.50% is insufficient to set off problems in the interest-rate derivatives market or to send stock and bond prices into decline.

Prior to today’s Fed announcement, the interbank borrowing rate was averaging 0.13% over the period since the beginning of Quantitative Easing. In other words, there has not been enough demand from banks for the available liquidity to push the rate up to the 0.25% limit. Similarly, after today’s announced “rate hike,” the rate might settle at 0.25%, the max of the previous rate and the bottom range of the new rate.

However, the fact of the matter is that the available liquidity exceeded demand in the old rate range. The purpose of raising interest rates is to choke off credit demand, but there was no need to choke off credit demand when the demand for credit was only sufficient to keep the average rate in the midpoint of the old range. This “rate hike” is a fraud. It is only for the idiots in the financial media who have been going on about a rate hike forever and the need for the Fed to protect its credibility by raising interest rates.

Look at it this way. The banking system as a whole does not need to borrow as it is sitting on $2.42 trillion in excess reserves. The negative impact of the “rate hike” affects only smaller banks that are lending to businesses and consumers. If these banks find themselves fully loaned up and in need of overnight reserves to meet their reserve requirements, they will need to borrow from a bank with excess reserves. Thus, the rate hike has the effect of making smaller banks pay higher interest expense to the mega-banks favored by the Federal Reserve.

A different way of putting it is that the “rate hike” favors banks sitting on excess reserves over banks who are lending to businesses and consumers in their community.

In other words, the rate hike just facilitates more looting by the One Percent.

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron and his Cabinet Ministers are rigidly consistent in one thing – their inconsistency.

On 20^th July this year, Defence Minister Michael Fallon was adamant when he told Parliament that Britain would not send ground forces to Iraq or Syria as their deployment would be used by ISIS as anti Western propaganda. (1)

Fallon was stressed that:

“ … putting ground troops into Iraq or Syria would help the ISIL narrative.

“It would help further radicalise its potential supporters by showing it was foreign armies being sent to deal with ISIL.”

David Cameron weighed in with the need for “boots on the ground” – but he was adamant, assuring that these would NOT be British or American boots these would be “Iraqi boots, Syrian boots.”

The arrogance of dictating the security arrangements of other sovereign nations defies comment.

Michael Fallon revealed that in spite of the British public having been assured that there would also be no British bombing in Syria he: “confirmed to MPs that five pilots serving with British forces had been embedded with coalition forces carrying out air strikes in Syria in the past year”, specifically with US and Canadian forces. Moreover, Britain had seemingly sent illegal insurgents in to Syria. According to the Daily Mail: “Some seventy five other UK personnel have worked with coalition forces on attacks in Syria, Mr Fallon said.”

Under a month later, on 18^th August, speaking about Iraq, David Cameron told the BBC “Breakfast” programme:

 “Britain is not going to get involved in another war in Iraq. We are not going to be putting boots on the ground. We are not going to be sending in the British Army.” (2)

Fast forward to 13^th December and just in time for Christmas the Daily Mail announces:

“UK boots on the ground in Iraq:

“100 Paras deployed in battles against ISIS… the first fighting troops in the region since 2009 … The Paras’ job will be to protect around 350 British military instructors who are being sent out in January to train the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces.” (3)

They will be authorized to shoot and kill should they come under attack.

Given the woeful, murderous, human rights abusing record of the British and US troops in Iraq many Iraqis with nothing to do with ISIS will have records to settle on behalf of dead, maimed and tortured family and friends. The New Year’s enforced, unwelcome guests will not be welcome and more Iraqis will pay with their lives.

Incidentally, US and UK troops professed to be “training Iraqi troops” for all the years of the invasion, further both countries had “trainers” stay on after the main bodies of their armies had crept out under cover of darkness. The “training” claim simply does not hold water. Further, the Peshmerga are some of the most inventive, fearless and ruthless fighters on earth, they need no training from anyone.

A “Spring offensive” against ISIS has been penciled in for April with Defence sources confirming:  “that the British deployment to Iraq would include a ‘force protection’ element with soldiers being sent there for up to six months.”

Former British military intelligence expert Frank Ledwidge, unlike Cameron and Fallon is a realist and told the Mail:

“This is definitely “mission creep” and if or when UK casualties are taken next year I’d expect to see the size of the British deployment to Iraq increase.

“Post-Afghanistan the British Army is looking for a new role in order to maintain its sense of purpose and its troop numbers because the Ministry of Defence will not be protected from the sharp cuts in public spending that are on the horizon. So the generals will be thrilled by this deployment.”

Iraqis are to die to fill the Ministry of Defence coffers.

British troops “will be backed by air strikes and also drone attacks, which are playing an increasingly critical role in the campaign.” Is there anything left in Iraq to bomb and drone as Cameron and his cabal gear up for Christmas festivities in the season of “goodwill to all men”?

David Cameron has stated that he is “evangelical” about his Christian faith, criticising non-believers for failing to grasp religion’s role in  “helping people to have a moral code.”

During Easter last year he released a videoed Easter message in which he talked about the “countless acts of kindness carried out by those who believe in and follow Christ.” Tell that to the Iraqis who have faced the brunt of the gun carrying, Bible carrying, church going British and American troops who kicked in their doors, wrecked their homes, stole their valuables and killed those they loved.

Cameron’s Easter message via the Church Times was that faith could be a “guide or a helpful prod in the right direction” towards morality. As he heads his country in the direction of even more extra-judicial murders in two countries on a grand scale and who enjoined in the destruction of Libya, he has certainly taken the wrong fork on the moral highway.

It is impossible not be reminded of the words of the man he regards as his friend and guru, another professed Christian – false prophet comes to mind – Tony Blair, who, as Christmas approached, on the 16^th December 1998 announced that Britain was bombing Iraq, an Iraq, as Syria now, crippled by sanctions, an Iraq also with no means of self defence. Blair stated:

“There is no realistic alternative to military force. We are taking military action with real regret but also with real determination. We have exhausted all other avenues. We act because we must.”

What lies, what criminality.

David Cameron has morphed in to a Tony Blair who has been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against the peace in a number of international legal tribunals. One can only speculate that they might be sharing some seasonal festivities as others huddle and die under British bombs – and if they are, what else will they be plotting?

Notes 

1.    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3168417/British-army-NOT-boots-ground-Iraq-Syria-used-ISIS-propaganda.html

2.    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iraq-crisis-david-cameron-will-not-put-boots-on-ground-but-britains-involvement-expected-to-last-for-9675609.html

3.    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2872885/UK-boots-ground-Iraq-100-Paras-deployed-battles-against-ISIS-fighting-troops-region-2009.html

ISIS’ ideological source code can be found among America’s allies in Riyadh.  A recent confab of so-called “Syrian rebels” took place recently in Saudi Arabia. Those attending included a collection of dysfunctional expatriate “opposition” leaders as well as commanders from various militant groups operating in Syria including Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam – both affiliates of Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front – a US State Department designated foreign terrorist organization since 2012.

In the past three days Russian warplanes have destroyed six illegal oil production facilities and seven truck convoys with oil and oil products in Syria. On the whole, Russian aircraft have destroyed more than 1,200 tanker trucks of militants transporting crude oil and oil products since the start of the operation in Syria.

Last few days the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Hezbollah have conducted military operations in the area of the strategic town of Al-Zorba fighting against Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham, Al-Nusra, Liwaa Suqour Al-Sham and Harakat Nouriddeen Al-Zinki. On Tuesday, pro-government forces made gains at the western flank of the town. Thus, the loyalists are spreading militants too thin in order to expose the most vulnerable parts of their positions. The same approach was used in the town of Al-Hadher last month.

In North Latakia, the SAA supported by the NDF, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) and Muqawama Souri took control of the Al-Nuba Mountains after week long clashes with Al-Nusra and its allies. This allows the pro-government forces to cut the terrorists-controlled areas which border Turkey.

Russia has supplied a large cargo of military and arms aid to Iraq as part of the growing anti-terrorism cooperation between Moscow and Baghdad. According to the reports, a large number of the Russian-made armored vehicles have arrived in the Iraqi port of Basra.

Turkey has withdrawn some troops from Mosul. On December 10, Turkish President Recep Erdogan refused to withdraw the Turkish troops from Mount Bashiqa. However, Ankara withdrew forces and armored vehicles from the camp on December 14, but Turkish PM Davutoglu noted some trainers would remain at Bashiqa because of a “new arrangement.”

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The largest Dutch newspaper – De Telegraaf – noted yesterday (English translation):

The reliability of evidence in the MH17 research is in question by the sinister role of the Ukrainian secret service SBU in corruption and crime scandals.

Criminal Experts predict problems for the future criminal proceedings against the mass murderers of the MH17 passengers, it now appears that the intelligence which resulted in all kinds of evidence of all is false.

***

“There is a lot of noise and that soon plays guaranteed to bring in the criminal case,” said law professor Theo de Roos. “That goes for the defense, but also for the judges who will look to prove extremely critical. The Public Prosecutor should not wait for that, but to make all additional investigation into the integrity of the evidence. ”

***

Several informants in the scandal of the road looted paintings from the West Frisian Museum in Hoorn indicate the SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko fired in June as mastermind of the stolen art trade. The name of the former SBU chief was last year linked to large-scale smuggling antiques discovered by the Finnish police.

Also in the investigation against the Limburg politiemol Mark M. walk there lines to the SBU. Justice East Brabant recently did rogatory to Kiev. According to investigative sources M. held in Ukraine on a network of gangsters and members of the secret service. ” This summer alone disappeared in Ukraine for 22 SBU spies behind bars because of corruption and criminal practices.

The CDA calls the SBU scandals a great risk for the criminal investigation into the MH17 case and wants explanation of responsible minister Van der Steur.

“There’s been little evidence,” said parliamentarian Omtzigt. “What there is, is light to heavy compromised. The evidence was widely picked up late in the area and also shows still collected by people who are not good. ”

The CDA wants to know why satellite and radar data of Ukrainians, Russians and Americans in the study lack. “It also appears still not to be discussed with the Ukrainian air traffic control.”

And see this.

Similarly, the Council of Europe slammed Ukraine’s failure to investigate the deaths of scores of Pro-Russian protesters. As Bloomberg reported last month:

Ukrainian authorities are failing to adequately investigate 48 deaths, including of 42 pro-Russian protesters, in the Black Sea port of Odessa in May 2014, according to an international panel set up by the Council of Europe.

The demonstrators clashed with football fans and participants in a pro-government rally as the military conflict in Ukraine’s easternmost regions erupted following Russia’s annexation of nearby Crimea. Most of the deaths occurred after a building in which the protesters had barricaded themselves was set on fire.

“Despite the lapse of some 18 months after the events, not a single charge has been brought in respect of the deaths,” the panel said Wednesday in an e-mailed report. The body is tracking the investigation to check it meets the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights.

The report is another blow to President Petro Poroshenko and his government as the U.S, the European Union and Ukraine’s own citizens demand more progress on promises of reform and a crackdown on corruption. Ukraine’s rulers have also failed to convict those responsible for more than 100 killings in the Kiev street protests that swept them to power a year and a half ago.

There’s evidence “revealing a comparable lack of confidence in the adequacy of the investigations and in the ability of the authorities to bring to justice those responsible for causing or contributing to the many deaths and injuries” in Odessa, said the panel. The investigation in Odessa, like the probe in Kiev, has “serious deficiencies in independence and effectiveness,” it said.

Background.

Par Thierry Meyssan, 16 décembre 2015

La France maçonnique : la mystérieuse influence de la franc-maçonnerie dans la politique française

Par Julie Lévesque, 14 décembre 2015

Avec ses origines obscures, ses rituels initiatiques et ses poignées de mains secrètes, la franc-maçonnerie intrigue. Nombreux sont ceux qui se questionnent sur les véritables intentions de ce cercle fermé auquel on ne peut appartenir que si l’on est recruté. La franc-maçonnerie est-elle une sorte d’éminence grise du pouvoir de la République française? Influence-t-elle clandestinement les élus ou ses membres sont-ils eux-mêmes des élus au cœur des décisions? La franc-maçonnerie est-elle la religion de l’État français?

Chute boursière sur fond de craintes de récession mondiale et d’effondrement du crédit

Par Barry Grey, 14 décembre 2015

Les marchés boursiers mondiaux ont chuté vendredi 11 décembre, alors que les prix du pétrole atteignaient de nouveaux planchers, menaçant de crash le marché des obligations de pacotille et de déclencher une nouvelle crise financière. La nervosité des investisseurs fut accrue par la perspective d’une augmentation prochaine des taux d’intérêts par la Réserve fédérale américaine pour la première fois en près d’une décennie.

L’Observatoire syrien des droits de l’homme: un outil de propagande de la presse occidentale.

Par Steven MacMillan, 14 décembre 2015

Depuis que la Russie a débuté ses opérations militaires en Syrie contre les forces terroristes travaillant pour le compte de l’Otan et des pays du Golfe, de douteux comptes rendus sont apparus dans les médias occidentaux prétendant que la Russie a ciblé et tué des civils. Pourtant la majorité de ces organes de presse qui sont apparemment le must du journalisme en Occident publient des articles qui ne sont basés que sur une ou deux sources assez discutables.

La Guerre des gazoducs. Par son geste fatal contre la Russie, la Turquie a fait gagner l’Allemagne

Par Valentin Vasilescu, 15 décembre 2015

Pendant la Guerre froide, les Soviétiques avaient créé un réseau pour l’approvisionnement énergétique de l’Europe, épousant trois des quatre orientations stratégiques du « Théâtre d’action militaire » (TAM) du continent européen. Un TAM représente un espace géographique de la taille d’une partie d’un continent dans lequel sont menées les opérations militaires proprement dites. Les « orientations stratégiques » sont des bandes de terres imaginaires, en profondeur, qui permettent d’effectuer les opérations militaires.

The “news” that Israel and Turkey are systematically violating international law is hardly news at all. After all, we all know that Turkey has been regularly bombing the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, that Turkey still illegally occupies northern Cyprus just like the Israelis have been bombing Syria and Lebanon for decades and that they are still illegally occupying Palestine.

The interesting development this week is that France, the UK and Germany have all officially decided to join these rogue states and act just like the Turks and Israelis by illegally intervening in Syria – in direct violation of international law – supposedly to fight Daesh.

And even though Daesh is the official enemy, it “just so happens” that Syrian army positions were bombed by the USAF while the Israelis bombed Hezbollah missile depots. Apparently, the “Assad must go” policy is still the order of the day. In a way, one could argue that the West has now (re-)affirmed the principle that “might makes right” and that threats and violence are still the only “policy” of the Empire in lieu of a legal, negotiated, policy. The problem with that is that the “other side” strongly feels that surrendering to the Empire’s demands is simply not an option.

The Russian warning:

In reality this has been going on for years. From the decision to bomb Serbia to the recent decision by the IMF to bail out the Ukraine in direct violation of IMF rules (which, apparently, shall now be re-written), the Anglo-American Empire has now been violating its own so-called “rules” and “principles” for decades against the background of a quasi-general indifference to the end of the international world order agreed upon after WWII.

The big difference today is that the Empire’s reckless arrogance has now brought it in direct contact with the Russian Armed Forces which, apparently, are not willing to accept that kind of thuggery and who will fight back if attacked: in his annual address to expanded meeting of the Russian Federation Defense Ministry Board Putin has clearly indicated that the fact that Russia chose not to strike back at Turkey was a one time exception saying:

I want to warn those who might again try to organize any kind of provocation against our troops: we have taken additional measures to ensure the security of Russian troops and air base. It is reinforced by new air force squadrons and air defenses. All our strike aircraft are now flying with fighter cover. I order you to act with very extreme resolve. Any targets that threaten Russia’s group or our terrestrial infrastructure are to be immediately destroyed.

What Putin is doing here is warning Turkey and, really all of NATO and the Empire that next time Russia will shoot back, immediately. This also shows that the authority shoot back has now been given to the Russian forces in Syria and that no top-level decision will have to be requested to return fire. It is true that this is not a first. The RAF was also given similar order in October already, but since the notion of antiquated Tornados shooting down a SU-30SM is rather far fetched (even if the British press insist that their 1970s-era aircraft “are capable of blasting any aircraft out of the sky”), the capability of the SU-30SMs and even the SU-34s to shoot down Western 4^th generation aircraft is not in doubt. The Russians have the resolve and the means.

But will the West take the Russian warnings seriously?

The Israeli counter example:

The contrast between the NATO countries and Israel could, in this case, not be bigger. Bibi Netanyahu, by far the most intelligent actor in the AngloZionist Empire, immediately traveled to Moscow to sit down with his Russian counterparts to hammer out some kind of deal which would allow the Russians and Israelis to pursue their objectives without risking a shootout. When the first Russian Air Force incursion into the Israeli airspace occurred the Israelis handled it as a completely harmless event. Israeli Defense Minister Ya’alon declared:

“There was a slight intrusion a mile (1.6 kilometers) deep by a Russian plane from Syria into our airspace, but it was immediately resolved and the Russian plane returned towards Syria. It was apparently an error by the pilot who was flying near the Golan. Russian planes do not intend to attack us, which is why we must not automatically react and shoot them down when an error occurs”.

Later, an Ya’alon aide, General (res.) Amos Gilad, stated at a weekly event in Tel Aviv that Russian planes have occasionally crossed into Israeli airspace – but that the “very close cooperation between Russia and Israel” vis-a-vis operations in and around Syria had prevented any misunderstandings.

The counterpart on Russia side was just as obvious, if not officially admitted: when the Israelis bombed a Hezbollah weapons depot near Damascus the Russians “looked the other way”. Considering that almost at the same time Hezbollah operatives were risking their lives to rescue a downed Russian airman, this kind of deal is of less than exemplary morality, but Hezbollah people are also realists: just look at the way they put up with Assad even while he was torturing people for the CIA (the infamous “rendition” program) or when Imad Mughniyeh was murdered with obvious complicity of high-ranking members of the Assad regime). The leaders of Hezbollah understand what is happening here: like it or not, but Russia and Israel do have a “special relationship” which, while hardly a love fest, does include a unique combination of hard realism, often bordering on cynicism, and a mutual recognition that neither side wants an overt conflict. In this case, the Israelis were told in no uncertain terms that the Russian intervention to save the Syria from Daesh was not negotiable, but that Russia does not intend to protect Hezbollah from Israeli actions as long as these actions do not threaten the Russian objectives in Syria. Being a realist, Netanyahu took the deal.

Though there was some confusion about this, it is my understanding that while the Russians have deployed the S-400 in Syria, there is also some evidence that the Syrians were finally given at least some S-300 batteries and that they might have used them against the Israelis on at least one occasion.

What is absolutely certain is that under international law the Syrians will have the right to shoot at any US, French, German, Turkish or other aircraft flying in Syrian airspace and that if that happens the countries in violation of international law will not have a legitimate self-defense argument to make. By extension, this also means that Russia does also have the right to shoot down any aircraft or land or sea based weapons system targeting Russian aircraft. Unfortunately, western politicians and propagandists (aka “journalists”) are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid ever even mentioning these facts. And if somebody dares to actually ask the right question, western officials have a fit. This is exactly what happened recently between RT reporter Gayane Chichakyan and State Department spokesman John Kirby. See for yourself:

The Iranian warning:

Russia is not the only country which has been repeatedly warning the West about the dangers of remaining stuck in a “Assad must go” policy: Iran has also repeated such warnings. The latest one came directly from the foreign policy advisor to the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ali Akbar Velayati, who openly stated that Bashar al-Assad is Syria’s lawful president and that “Iran considers him as its redline”. Velayati also said that “only Syrian people, who elected Assad, are entitled to decide the future of their country (…) and no foreign country will be allowed to interfere in Syria’s internal affairs”. Furthermore, another senior Iranian official, Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani, said that “Russia does not need prior agreement to use Iranian airspace to bomb sites in Syria” – in other words, such an agreement has already been negotiated. Considering that Larijani and Velayati are amongst the most influential and authoritative officials in Iran, one can only conclude that the Iranians are openly declaring that they are fully backing the Russian efforts in Syria. And that, in turn, means that Iran will send as many “boots on the ground” as needed to prevent Daesh from taking Damascus. This is the other crucial factor which the West is desperately trying not to think about.

The western narrative currently tries to show that it is Russia (and only Russia) which is keeping Assad in power. But this is completely false. The reality is that both Hezbollah and Iran are fully committed to preventing Daesh from overthrowing the Syrian government and their commitment has gone way further than words: Hezbollah has send hundreds of its best fighters to Syria and Iran has committed thousands of soldiers, mostly of the al-Quds Brigade, to the war in Syria. What this level of determination shows is that, just like Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have concluded that their vital, existential, interests are at risk and that they have no choice than to take the fight to Daesh. I believe that this assessment is absolutely correct.

So this is the key question here: do the deep state elites which run the US Empire understand that neither Russia, nor Iran or Hezbollah believe that they can back down and accept a Daesh victory in Syria? Do the western leader realize that Russia, Iran and Hezbollah cannot let the Empire overthrow Assad? Is there anybody out there who does not realize that the “Assad must go policy” implies a war against Russia, Iran and Hezbollah? The only way to avoid a war is to finally give up, even if that is initially denied publicly, on the “Assad must go” policy.

The strategy is to unite all anti-government death squads, including the Islamic State group, in an all-out war of destruction against the Syrian state.

On Dec. 2 the British House of Commons voted to launch airstrikes on Syria; within an hour of the vote being taken, British fighter jets were on the way to Syria. According to the government’s motion, the strikes were to be “exclusively against” the Islamic State group, the leading force within the anti-government insurgency in Syria.

And yet, in August 2013, David Cameron had proposed sending the Royal Air Force to Syria to support that insurgency. The proposal was defeated when it became clear that Syria’s key allies, Russia and Iran, were not going to back down; but the British government has been one of the most vocal and belligerent supporters of the insurgency since it began in 2011. Indeed, Cameron has arguably become its leading international spokesman and lobbyist. So is it really credible that he has suddenly switched sides, and is now committed to wiping out the vanguard of the struggle he has done so much to promote?

Amena sent me this picture of her home in Syria, destroyed by secular, moderate airstrikes: https://t.co/PyO6tAiqPp pic.twitter.com/5BJP8Q5vgb

— Charles Davis (@charliearchy) November 5, 2015

Well, no. And to be fair to Cameron, he made it clear within minutes of his opening speech to that it is the destruction of the Syrian state, not the Islamic State group, that remains the ultimate goal of British policy in Syria. Of course, he didn’t put it quite like that. But after what is now 16 years of British government dedication to the creation of one failed state after another – from Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya – the euphemisms have become all too familiar. “The real plan,” Cameron noted, is to “get a transitional Government in Syria.” We have seen “transitional governments” before: they are generally comprised of people who have spent more time in London, Paris or Washington than in the countries they are supposed to be governing, with no real support base in the country, airlifted in by NATO in order to sign contracts with the West, and in no position whatsoever to actually govern. The “transition” in question, then, is from independent regional power, to dysfunctional failed state. “The first step,” he concludes, “is going after these terrorists today.”

Exactly how bombing the Islamic State group is supposed to be the “first step” toward overthrowing the Syrian government was left to the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Sir Crispin Blunt, to explain. “The crucial issue,” he said, is “how would we, the United Kingdom, exercise the greatest influence? Everything that I have heard in the last month of taking evidence on this issue suggests that our role as a compromised and limited member of the coalition against ISIL, operating only in Iraq, weakens that influence.”

This is very revealing. The “crucial issue” is nothing to do with the Islamic State group, national security, or terrorism; but rather how to gain “greatest influence” in order to push the “real plan” of destroying the Syrian state. Blunt is arguing that Britain should bomb Syria in order to ensure that the coalition maintains its focus on regime change. The airstrikes have, it seems, been conceived primarily as a means of degrading not the Islamic State group, but Russian influence on the U.S. and France, lest the focus shifts to actually defeating terrorism. Militarily, the latest phase of the British involvement in Syria has one key aim: to co-ordinate the various death squads – including the Islamic State group – into a more effective fighting force for the destruction of the Syrian state. One group is to be given overt support – to be funded, trained, equipped and given air cover by the Royal Air Force. This is the 70,000 so-called “moderates” that Cameron argued in Parliament are to be the “ground force” of Britain’s campaign.

The definition of a moderate, here, was outlined by the government as anyone fulfilling two criteria: not being a member of al-Qaida or the Islamic State group and be “committed to a pluralistic Syria” – that is, willing to sign up to any old guff that guarantees Western support. Presumably (and no one in the government was willing to deny this), this group includes extremist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham, along with all the other groups participating in the al-Qaida-led Army of Conquest, and thus effectively acting as extensions of al-Qaida without officially being al-Qaida themselves.

These forces cannot possibly serve as effective ground troops against ISIS; firstly because, whenever they have taken on the Islamic State group in the past, they have lost (handing over all their Western-supplied weapons in the process); secondly, because, as U.K. Member of Parliament Imran Hussein pointed out, they are now concentrated mainly “in the south-west of Syria while Daesh (Islamic State group) is in the northeast.” And as Scottish National Party parliamentary leader Angus Robertson noted, “There is no evidence whatsoever that they would definitely deploy from other parts of the country to counter Daesh.” Michael Stephens of the Royal United Services Institute has also argued that they “are not powerful enough to take on al-Qaida or IS (Islamic State group) by themselves, or in many cases break their current alliances/cease-fires with them.”

The raison d’etre of Cameron’s 70,000 fighters is to overthrow the Syrian government, not the Islamic State group, and in many cases they are in formal alliances with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group to achieve this. Clearly, then, if they are indeed to be the ground forces of Britain’s air war, this can only be a war against the Syrian government, not against the Islamic State group.

The second group is the Nusra Front, the official al-Qaida affiliate in Syria (out of which the Islamic State group emerged in January 2014). According to Cameron’s definition, they are not going to be provided with open and direct support from the British government. But the terms of the government’s motion, which vows airstrikes “exclusively against” the Islamic State group means they will not actually be targeted either. They will be given a free hand, while their allies in the Army of Conquest will be openly supplied and supported.

Finally, how do airstrikes against the Islamic State group help facilitate regime change? Labour Member of Parliament Frank Field shed some light on this when he asked Cameron: “Is the prime minister aware of press reports that in the recent past 60,000 Syrian troops have been murdered by ISIL and our allies have waited until after those murderous acts have taken place to attack? … If ISIL is involved in attacking Syrian Government troops, will we be bombing ISIL in defense of those troops, or will we wait idly by, as our allies have done up to now, for ISIL to kill those troops, and then bomb?”

Cameron’s answer – which was no answer at all – suggested that Britain will indeed continue the existing coalition policy of allowing the Islamic State group to slaughter Syrian government troops at will.

Putting all this together, the strategy becomes clear: increase support and air cover to non-Islamic State group (and increasingly al-Qaida led) anti-government fighters, while employing a carrot-and-stick policy toward the Islamic State group itself: bombing them if they threaten other anti-government forces, but giving them a free hand when it comes to massacring Syrian soldiers – and in so doing, encouraging them to turn all their fire on the Syrian government.

In this sense, the strategy is to unite all the anti-government death squads, including the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, in an all-out war of destruction against the Syrian state. Despite appearances, this is the same war Cameron wanted in 2013; but it is now being conducted under the name of fighting the very terrorism it aims to facilitate.

Dan Glazebrook is a political writer who has written for RT, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, among others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published in October 2013. He is currently researching a book on U.S.-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.

On the instructions of the Syriza government, Greek riot police forcibly removed 2,300 migrants from the camp they had set up in the village of Idomeni on the Greek-Macedonian border. The squad of 350 police stormed the camp on December 9.

The migrants had been occupying the area around the railway line in the neutral zone between the two countries for 25 days, protesting the decision of the Macedonian authorities to refuse them entry.

Since November, Macedonia has only allowed people fleeing from the conflict zones in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to cross its border, resulting in around 10 percent of the total number of migrants being stranded in Idomeni. A large number are from Pakistan, Iran and Morocco.

The decision, pitting refugees and migrants from different countries against each other, increased tensions at the border, with clashes breaking out between police and different groups of migrants. On December 2, Greek riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at a group of migrants trying to cross the border.

The following day a group of stranded migrants set up a barricade made up of empty barrels and pieces of wood to prevent Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans from crossing the border. This led to scuffles between various groups of migrants and refugees. The worsening crisis was used to justify the deployment of Greek riot police.

Amid the chaos, a 22-year-old Moroccan man died after being electrocuted trying to cross the border on top of a train stuck at the border. “The young man touched high voltage cables at the spot where OSE trains have been immobilised for days,” said Antonis Rigas, an official with Doctors Without Borders.

Dimitris Tsoukalas, Deputy General Secretary at the Ministry of Interior in the Syriza government and a former leader of the pro-austerity PASOK party, described the tragedy in grotesque terms. “Things are not easy. … On the other side they’ve put up electrified cables … and a guy was burnt. We had a roasted Moroccan.”

Such callous comments would normally be associated with members of the fascist Golden Dawn or Syriza’s coalition partners, the xenophobic Independent Greeks.

Prior to the raid, Greek police moved all journalists, photographers and aid workers to an area three kilometres from the railway line and the camp. A statement justified this extraordinary move on safety grounds, against “possible provocations and tensions or threatening and hostile behaviour.”

Speaking to Sto Kokkino, a radio station owned by Syriza, journalist Kostas Kantouris recounted how he and two photographers were briefly detained at the local police station after being stopped 300 meters from the camp. Asked whether he thought the measures were taken to prevent the coverage of the operation, Kantouris said, “Of course! We’ve been completely gagged.”

According to the police, the operation took place “without any disorderly incidents or especially violent behaviour.” This was echoed by Syriza’s Deputy Minister for Immigration Policy Yiannis Mouzalas, who stated, “The police’s intervention took place with dignity, respect for human rights and with minimal, if no, use of violence.”

Given the record of state brutality against migrants in Greece, as well as the widespread support for Golden Dawn among riot police, such statements cannot be taken at face value—not least since the operation took place under a media blackout. According to a report on France2, the first to be allowed back into the camp were doctors and nurses with Doctors Without Borders, while journalists were reportedly asked by police to delete photos from their cameras.

At least one instance of police brutality was recorded by Telegraph and VICE journalist Oscar Webb. He posted a picture on his twitter feed of an Iranian man being treated by a paramedic. According to Webb, the man was “batoned by Greek police after he refused to leave his tent.”

The attack on the migrants followed the European Union’s threat to expel Greece from the Schengen area of passport-free travel. It is part of the wider clampdown on migrants, underscored by the recent calls from European Council President Donald Tusk for the long-term internment of refugees and for sealing off Europe’s borders.

Anxious to reassure the EU that the pseudo-left Syriza government is in alignment with these reactionary anti-refugee and migrant policies, Immigration Policy Minister Yiannis Mouzalas warned that migrants now have 30 days to either lodge an asylum claim or leave voluntarily, otherwise, “they will have to be compulsorily repatriated to their countries.”

Praising the actions of the police, the pro-business daily Kathimerini highlighted the commercial considerations behind the operation. An article headlined “Riot Police liberated the train lines in Idomeni” stated,

“The country’s prestige has been damaged irreparably after the lengthy closing of its borders … while losses suffered by [railway operator] TRAINOSE currently exceed €1.5 million, after customers changed their travel routes. The biggest damage is to TRAINOSE’s credibility after it worked so hard to secure contracts with technological giants such as HP and Sony, the fate of which remain uncertain.”

According to the article, the border closure prompted HP to use a Slovenian port instead of the Greek port of Piraeus in order to transport its goods to Central Europe.

After being forced to leave the camp at Idomeni, all migrants were transported to former Olympic stadiums in Athens, which have been converted into refugee shelters. The biggest of these is at the former Taekwondo stadium, which has a capacity of 1,700 people but is currently overflowing with over 2,000 people. The conditions are so bad that many are desperate to leave the facility. Speaking to Deutsche Welle, Payman Qasimian, an Iranian asylum seeker, said, “I would rather sleep outside … it smells so bad in there and it’s so cold that people are sleeping in air ducts and shower rooms just because they are a little bit warmer.”

Mahdi, a 20-year-old Moroccan, told Al Jazeera “The stadium isn’t even fit for animals” and people are sleeping on concrete floors with no mattresses. He added, “[T]here are no showers and the bathrooms are filthy,” while, “At night, people cannot sleep because everyone is stepping on one another to move around.”

On Sunday, a sit-down demonstration was staged by migrants protesting against the conditions.

Scuffles broke out between migrants at the weekend. This led to 120 Moroccans being moved to the notorious Corinth detention centre, 83 kilometres west of Athens. The Corinth site has a record of brutality against inmates and was the scene of a riot in April 2013.

Mouzalas said that the Taekwondo facility was only a temporary measure and that those at the stadium would be moved by December 17. Asked where they would go, he replied, “I don’t know where the migrants will go, you will find out in due course.”

Such comments underscore the complete lack of social infrastructure in Greece following five years of austerity dictated by the EU and International Monetary Fund, with NGOs and charities increasingly called upon to fill the vacuum.

Syriza’s unleashing of the riot police against the migrants amid a media blackout must serve as a warning to the Greek working class. A year ago, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pledged to disband the riot police after coming to power. Following his election in January, he immediately reneged on the promise. Having betrayed its mandate to end austerity and signed the most severe austerity memorandum yet with the EU in the summer, Syriza relies on repressive measures to force through brutal cuts in living standards.

On most days Yazan, a new graduate, manages the emergency department at one of Baghdad’s most crowded hospital wards in the sprawling Sadr City neighbourhood. However, Yazan has spent the past few weeks behind closed doors fearing for his life. After months of abuse and humiliation, it was a physical assault, accompanied with death threats by the family of a patient, that forced Yazan’s exit from his rotating internship in general medicine.

Nearly a month since the incident, Yazan is still awaiting news on whether he will be transferred to a different hospital where he can safely pursue his career in medicine. He didn’t appear worried as we exchanged words through a videophone call, but rather bemused rather by his own predicament: a junior doctor who could be hunted down, gunned and killed, simply for doing his job.

The problem of violence against doctors

“Humiliated, beaten, insulted, and threatened — for what? — for things so trivial that they defy logic; demands for supplements, injections, or drugs that patients are not in need of,” Yazan exclaimed. Patients, as he explained, seek to impress their authority on doctors, and if that fails, they flaunt their phones threatening to end their life with a single call to powerful militias. This reversal of roles has played out for several years now, sustained by an underworld of militia gangs and tribal networks that are armed and well connected and lamentably respected, in the absence of a functioning state.

Death threats, grievous harm, aggression and kidnappings depict a daily reality lived by medical staff in today’s Iraq. Thirteen blood-drenched years have rolled by since America’s occupation, following almost a decade of sanctions. Yet healthcare inside Iraq remains incapacitated, and physicians are bearing the brunt of a toxic situation defined by rising respiratory illnesses, contaminated water, dwindling drug supplies, eroding equipment, and a general lawlessness. The crisis remains difficult to quell, exacerbating the issue of violence against doctors.

“In today’s Iraq, it isn’t the doctor that’s calling the shots,” Yazan joked, “it’s the patient who determines their treatment or condition, using violence if he doesn’t get his way.” The many tales Yazan quietly narrated from his Baghdad home suggested a complete breakdown in the relationship between doctors and patients, reflecting a wanton disregard for the important role doctors occupy in any society.

The culture of killing ushered in by the war in 2003 infected all aspects of life until the present moment. After American-led coalition forces destroyed the country’s water and electricity supplies, Iraq has still not recovered from the wholesale decimation of its medical services. Decades of war and occupation sealed the fate of the country’s primary health care system, having morphed into an anarchic jungle with marauding gun-wielding militiamen and sectarian actors whose sense of justice is void of moral responsibility.

“We can’t work miracles, we don’t have supernatural powers, nor are we here to be ordered as servants by patients and hypochondriacs,” Yazan defended wryly. “The worst instances are when corpses are brought in, accompanied by a chorus of relatives screaming: ‘Doctor, help, he’s not breathing, or his temperature is cold, or, he’s not moving.’ We cannot announce their death on arrival, out of fear of being attacked, so we put on a performance for the families so they can witness with their own eyes us trying to resuscitate and use everything else within our means to save the patient, even though they’re already dead,” added Yazen.

Operating on a financial shoestring, hospital staff are left picking up the pieces of their country’s faltering hospitals and clinics. They are vilified, scapegoated and abused by displeased patients and their families. A little less than a decade ago the Iraqi cabinet passed a bill purposely intended to remedy the problem by offering physicians legal protection. But, like all other political initiatives in the country, this has failed. Medical working environments are becoming increasingly dangerous as more bullet-riddled bodies are discovered. With nowhere to turn or to lodge complaints, a sense of despair is settling among physicians, many of whom fear any one of them could be next to die at the hands of angry mobs.

“They [the Americans] and those who violently climbed their way up to the top of the Iraqi state were more interested in securing a slice of the cake to care about the safety and wellbeing of medical staff,” said another doctor who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

After decades of dictatorship, war and sanctions, the situation in Iraq is untenable. Even the adviser to Iraq’s ministry of defence, Abbas Al-Abadi accused militia gangs of fuelling the problem by imposing their will on the capital: “they fill the streets of Baghdad, spreading instability and carrying out assassinations.”

Armed militias are extensions of political parties and come with different allegiances, most of which are sectarian and some even tied to forces operating outside Iraq. Their growing power has disfigured the political landscape, both challenging and trumping the federal legal system. The state’s inability to curb their power has inadvertently given credence to the false claims and demands voiced by tribes against physicians.

Revenge is sought by some. Others are hungry to amass fortunes by capitalising on death, demanding ‘blood money’, otherwise known as fassel. It is a form of compensation extracted from physicians irrespective of what resulted in the person’s death. The complaints of doctors against escalating violence are heard but unheeded by the state, whose frailties have paved the ground for the re-consolidation of tribal self-governance — placing the welfare of doctors at grave risk.

Dr. Karim Salman Al-Gharboui, consultant in general medicine, Dr. Waseem Khatheer Abbas, orthodontist, Dr. Hassan Ashour Hussein Al-Shuwayli, hematologist, Dr. Mohammad Hazem and Dr. Jaffar Hussein, consultant anaesthetists, are the latest victims to have fallen in this surge of violence in the last three months. The real death toll is believed to be much higher, as the details of some fatalities are not always known or released.

Fearing for their lives, many more doctors choose life in exile. This was the path taken by Iraqi plastic surgeon Dr. Abdul-Fatah Al-Ani in 2005, fleeing his native Iraq after an attempted assassination on his life. Al-Ani, who now resides and practices in Sweden, was stabbed twice by black-clad masked men on the doorstep of his surgery in Baghdad. He was immediately admitted into hospital where he underwent a lobotomy of the stomach.

The saga didn’t end there. After returning home, a heavy brown envelope was slipped beneath the front door of his home. It contained two used Kalashnikov bullets and a death note – die or leave Iraq in the space of 24 hours – was the presented ultimatum. While Al-Ani successfully escaped, some 50 of his colleagues and friends were less fortunate, murdered by criminal gangs during the initial phase of America’s occupation.

There are so many tales related to attacks on medical personnel in Iraq. Hundreds have been killed in the last decade. Despite their abundance, they offer but a small window into a much larger problem. Every day, more and more young doctors leave Iraq to seek a better future. Highly-skilled and self-made doctors like Yazan long to migrate to Europe or America to escape, as those before them have done.

For coming generations, the ongoing exodus of Iraq’s doctors could be the greatest tragedy of all.

Nazli Tarzi is London based freelance British Iraqi writer, videographer and translator. Her works dedicate special focus to developments in Iraq, its lost civilisations and mosaic population. She holds a Masters degree in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and works in the field of film production. She dreams to one day fly back to Iraq and peacefully dwell in her motherland. Follow her on Twitter: @nazlitarzi

Check out this documentary by the same author:

Most Americans are too uninformed, out-of-touch and indifferent to real threats they face, not phony headlined ones happening with increased frequency.

The LA Times reported it this way, headlining “Unprecedented school closures leave LA inconvenienced, annoyed but undaunted,” saying:

An alleged bomb threat “turned out to be false, fear and confusion inevitably followed.” Parents had their “workday routines thrown into turmoil…Some teachers made long commutes” for nothing.

Schools reopened Wednesday. City officials said the threat was “not credible.” Why it was issued in the first place matters most.

It has all the earmarks of false flag pretense – selling fear, part of a national strategy to enlist public support for escalated imperial wars, along with harsher crackdowns on fast disappearing fundamental freedoms.

The only terrorist threat Americans need fear is state-sponsored. Post-9/11, no other ones occurred on US soil. Official claims otherwise were Big Lies .

Innocent Muslim victims were falsely charged, prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged offenses they never committed or planned.

Unverified email threats were sent to public school officials on both coasts, arriving Monday night, claiming jihadists intended attacks with guns, bombs and nerve gas. Los Angeles alone shut down.

LA schools chancellor Ramon Cortiones told reporters at a 7:00AM Tuesday news conference he wasn’t “going to take a chance with the life of a student.”

New York school authorities dismissed the threat as a hoax. One major US city dominating Tuesday headlines was enough, likely ratcheting up public fear more than already, people wondering nationwide when the next shoe would drop, maybe near them.

Later on Tuesday, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said

“(w)e can now announce the FBI has concluded this is not a credible threat. It will be safe for our children to return to schools tomorrow.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said

“(w)e’ve come to the conclusion that we must continue to keep our school system open. (It’s) very important not to overreact in situations like this.”

The damage was done, hyped irresponsibly by media scoundrels, instead of urging readers and viewers to go on with their daily lives normally, stressing no credible threat exists.

Anyone viewing US cable television reports yesterday got virtually nonstop fear-mongering, scaring the public to believe in a nonexistent threat.

Actual incidents when occurring are false flags or ones unrelated to terrorism. Gun violence claims about 100,000 US lives annually, double that number of people injured. Cop killings this year exceeded 1,000.

The latest headline incident occurred in Los Angeles County last Saturday. Sheriff deputies lethally shot a defenseless Black man, based on fabricated reports about him acting erratically.

Video evidence indicated no threatening behavior. It showed a man, later identified as 28-year-old Nicholas Robertson, walking calmly away from police, murdered in cold blood from behind, more shots fired at his helpless body on the ground.

A loaded 45-caliber handgun found at the scene was likely planted by police – standard procedure nationwide to avoid culpability. Dead victims can’t contest.

These type incidents happen multiple times daily across America, nearly always unaccountably. Black and Latino communities are victimized by state-sponsored violence – much like how Israel brutalizes the entire Palestinian population, including multiple daily cold-blooded executions since October 1.

Americans are being manipulated…

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 increase in the level of terrorist activities of ISIL in Afghanistan has recently been the topic of various reports being published in the international media. Along with the massacre of the local population which seems to be a trademark of this Islamist group it has recently entered in a direct confrontation with the Taliban. It’s now safe to assume that there’s well over two thousand ISIL militants operating in Afghanistan.

A significant number of reports suggests that ISIL militants that infiltrated Afghanistan are engaged in recruiting locals, spreading radical propaganda, and establishing training camps. Additionally, some articles suggest that former members of the Taliban are pledging their allegiance to ISIL in the southern provinces of the country.

Thus, The Independent quotes the statement of the Afghan army General Qadam Shah Shahima that said that ISIL managed to overshadow ISIL in the Afghan province of Helmand.

In turn, The Times states that the ISIL has launched a major offensives to the south of Jalalabad – the capital of the Afghan province of Nangarhar. Around 1,600 ISIL militants established control over four districts, while using particularly ruthless methods of demanding obedience, like the do in Iraq and Syria, which led to a massive exodus of the local population. The Afghan army units are engaging them daily to prevent ISIL from advancing any further. According to this newspaper, Afghan security forces are losing up to 500 soldiers monthly in different parts of the country due to terrorist activities.

Western experts are convinced that ISIL is pursuing the goal of creating a new province of the “caliphate” on the border with Pakistan, and that their success is the direct result of the departure of US and British troops from Afghanistan and the split within the Taliban ranks. It is often noted that former supporters of the Taliban and other groups are deflecting to ISIL.

The West is using such reports to present the situation in Afghanistan in the grimmest colors one could imagine to persuade the general public to support the expansion of the US military presence in the country. We are being told that Washington, which is allegedly the ardent fighter of ISIL, won’t be able to do anything once the US military forces leave the country. Western media sources argue that Afghan troops are not strong enough, so should the US get through the door, we are going to witness a sharp aggravation of the internal political situation.

However, back in November NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that the members states are generally satisfied with the situation in Afghanistan. What’s even more curious is that a senior Italian diplomat at the recent meeting of NATO has even labeled Afghanistan a “NATO’s success story”.

To properly assess the situation on the ground in Afghanistan we must recall what has been happening there all along.

Back in 2014 one could start noticing initial reports on ISIL making attempts to extend its activities to Afghanistan, when the so-called “masked men” started appearing in the province of Kunar. At that time nobody could have thought those were actual supporters of ISIL, since they were mistaken for Pakistani secret service officers that used to train the Taliban fighters.

But it didn’t take long before the the activities of armed men under the black flag to become more vicious and apparent. In 2015 a spokesman for ISIL’s leader Abu Muhammad Al Adnani released a video message that was announcing the creation of the province of Khorasan of the Islamic State, that should have absorbed Afghanistan, Pakistan and certain areas of India, Iran, and China. It has also been announced in the video that Hafiz Saeed Khan has been appointed the governor of this province to be, and his deputy – Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadem, a former Guantanamo prisoner.

Experts argue that the Taliban project, which essentially is nothing more than Washington’s brainchild, just like al-Qaeda, has outlived its days and will be brought down. It will be replaced by a new project – the so-called Islamic State, that is a US creation too. Taliban’s ideology is pretty close to the one pursued by ISIL, and those two groups have similar goals and methods they would use to achieve them. The Taliban has been demolishing historical monuments just like ISIL, they harbored jihadi supporters and carried out public executions. The Taliban has forced thousands of people from their homes and massacred those who would show any form of resistance. This tactics, designed to spread panics and fear, has now been adopted by ISIL. It’s not a coincidence that Afghan experts are calling the Taliban and ISIL “two sides of the same coin.”

One shouldn’t downplay the fact that the current leader of ISIL Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi received training in the Mujahideen camps in Afghanistan back in the eighties. A former Pakistani intelligence chief Hamid Gul claimed in an interview with the news agency Antalya that he personally saw al-Baghdadi in those camps in 1988. It’s also noteworthy that Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al-Baghdadi himself maintained close, friendly relations with the leaders of the Mujahideen, and worked closely with them. According to reports in the Afghan media, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at one time was entrusted with the mission of maintaining the security of Herat province, and in a short while he was running a Taliban training camp near the town of Islam Qala that could simultaneously prepare up to two thousand fighters.

Under these conditions, instead of saying that ISIL is expanding its influence in Afghanistan, as the Western media tries to convince us, we can speak about the United States using its creation to destabilize Afghanistan once again, which will allow it to get closer to its geopolitical rivals – Russia and China, by using the methods that have already been tested in Iraq, Syria and across the Middle East.

Martin Berger is a Czech-based freelance journalist and analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.