Global Research

The U.S. is Saving the Financial Sector, not the Economy

Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the corona virus’s economic effects, I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in “the market,” meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers.

At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom? This age-old confrontation over how to deal with the unpaid rents, mortgages and other debt service is at the heart of today’s virus pandemic as large and small businesses, farms, restaurants and neighborhood stores have fallen into arrears, leaving businesses and households – along with their employees who have no wage income – to pay these carrying charges that accrue each month.

This is an age-old problem. It was solved in the ancient Near East simply by annulling these debt and rent charges. But the West, shaped as it still is by the legacy of the Roman Empire, has left itself prone to the massive unemployment, business closedowns and resulting arrears for these basic costs of living and doing business.

Western civilization distinguishes itself from its Near Eastern predecessors in the way it has responded to “acts of God” that disrupt the means of support and leave debts in their wake. The United States has taken the lead in rejecting the path by which China, and even social democratic European nations have prevented the corona virus from causing widespread insolvency and polarizing their economies. The U.S. corona virus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its income to creditors.

There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative.

But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above.”

Individualistic economies cannot do that. To the extent that they have a strong state, they are not democratic but oligarchic, controlled by the financial sector in its own interest, in tandem with its symbiotic real estate sector and monopolized infrastructure. That is why every successful society since the Bronze Age has been a mixed economy. The determining factor in whether or not an economic disruption leaves a crippled economy in its wake turns out to be whether its financial sector is a public utility or is privatized from the debt-strapped public domain as a means to enrich bankers and money-lenders at the expense of debtors and overall economic balance.

China is using an age-old policy used ever since Hammurabi and other Bronze Age rulers promoted economic resilience in the face of “acts of God.” Unless personal debts, rents and taxes that cannot be paid are annulled, the result will be widespread bankruptcy, impoverishment and homelessness. In contrast to America’s financialized economy, China has shown how natural it is for society simply to acknowledge that debts, rents, taxes and other carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume until economic normalcy is able to resume.

Near Eastern protection of economic resilience in the face of Acts of God

Ancient societies had a different logic from those of modern capitalist economies. Their logic – and the Jewish Mosaic Law of Leviticus 25, as well as classical Greek and Roman advocates of democratic reform – was similar to modern socialism. The basic principle at work was to subordinate market relations to the needs of society at large, not to enrich a financial rentier class of creditors and absentee landowners. More specifically, the basic principle was to cancel debts that could not normally be paid, and prevent creditors from foreclosing on the land of debtors.

All economies operate on credit. In modern economies, bills for basic expenses are paid monthly or quarterly. Ancient economies operated on credit during the crop year, with payment falling due when the harvest was in – typically on the threshing floor. This cycle normally provided a flow of crops and corvée labor to the palace, and covered the cultivator’s spending during the crop year. Interest typically was owed only when payment was late.

But bad harvests, military conflict or simply the normal hardships of life frequently prevented this buildup of debt from being paid. Mesopotamian palaces had to decide who would bear the loss when drought, flooding, infestation, disease or military attack prevented the payment of debts, rents and taxes. Seeing that this was an unavoidable fact of life, rulers proclaimed amnesties for taxes and these various obligations incurred during the crop year. That saved smallholders from having to work off their debts in personal bondage to their creditors and ultimately to lose their land.

For these palatial economies, resilience meant stabilization of fiscal revenue. Letting private creditors (often officials in the palace’s own bureaucracy) demand payment out of future production threatened to deprive rulers of crop surpluses and other taxes, and corvée labor or even service in the military. But for thousands of years, Near Eastern rulers restored fiscal viability for their economies by writing down debts, not only in emergencies but more or less regularly to relieve the normal creeping backlog of debts.

These Clean Slates extended from Sumer and Babylonia in the 3rd millennium BC to classical antiquity, including the neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires. They restored normal economic relations by rolling back the consequences of personal and agrarian debts – bondage to creditors, and loss of land and its crop yield. From the palace’s point of view as tax collector and seller of many key goods and services, the alternative would have been for debtors to owe their crops, labor and even liberty to their creditors, not to the palace. So cancelling debts to restore normalcy was simply pragmatic, not utopian idealism as was once thought.

The pedigree for “act-of-God” rules specifying what obligations need not be paid when serious disruptions occur goes back to the laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC. Their aim was to restore economic normalcy after major disruptions. §48 of Hammurabi’s laws proclaim a debt and tax amnesty for cultivators if Adad the Storm God had flooded their fields, or if their crops failed as a result of pests or drought. Crops owed as rent or fiscal payments were freed from having to be paid. So were consumer debts run up during the crop year, including tabs at the local ale house and advances or loans from individual creditors. The ale woman likewise was freed from having to pay for the ale she had received from palace or temples for sale during the crop year.

Whoever leased an animal that died by an act of god was freed from liability to its owner (§266). A typical such amnesty occurred if the lamb, ox or ass was eaten by a lion, or if an epidemic broke out. Likewise, traveling merchants who were robbed while on commercial business were cleared of liability if they swore an oath that they were not responsible for the loss (§103).

It was realized that hardship was so inevitable that debts tended to accrue even under normal conditions. Every ruler of Hammurabi’s dynasty proclaimed a Clean Slate cancelling personal agrarian debts (but left normal commercial business loans intact) upon taking the throne, and when military or other disruptions occurred during their reign. Hammurabi did this on four occasions.

Bronze Age rulers could not afford to let such bondage and concentration of property and wealth to become chronic. Labor was the scarcest resource, so a precondition for survival was to prevent creditors from using debt leverage to obtain the labor of debtors and appropriate their land. Rulers therefore acted to prevent creditors from becoming a wealthy class seeking gains by impoverishing debtors and taking crop yields and land for themselves.

By rejecting such alleviations of debts resulting from economic disruption, the U.S. economy is subjecting itself to depression, homelessness and economic polarization. It is saving stockholders and bondholders instead of the economy at large. That is because today’s rentier interests take the economic surplus in the form of debt service, holding labor and also corporate industry in bondage. Mortgage debt is the price of obtaining a home of one’s own. Student debt is the price of getting an education to get a job. Automobile debt is needed to buy a car to drive to the job, and credit-card debt must be run up to pay for living costs beyond what one is able to earn. This deep indebtedness makes workers afraid to go on strike or even to protect working conditions, because being fired is to lose the ability to pay debts and rents. So the rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector by lowering wage levels while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent and insurance out of their take-home pay.

Debt deflation and the transition from finance capitalism to an Austerity Economy

By injecting $10 trillion into the financial markets (when Federal Reserve credit is added to U.S. Treasury allocation), the CARES act enabled the stock market to recover all of its 34 percent drop (as measured by the S&P 500 stocks) by June 9, even as the economy’s GDP was still plunging. The government’s new money creation was not spent to revive the real economy of production and consumption, but at least the financial One Percent was saved from loss. It was as if prosperity and living standards would somehow return to normal in a V-shaped recovery.

But what is “normal” these days? For 95 percent of the population, their share of GDP already had been falling ever since the Obama Depression began with the bank bailout in 2009, leaving an enormous bad-debt overhead in place. The economy’s long upswing since World War II was already grinding to an end as it struggled to carry its debt burden, rising housing costs, health care and related monthly “nut.”

This is not what was expected 75 years ago. World War II ended with families and businesses rife with savings and with little debt, as there had been little to buy during the wartime years. But ever since, each business cycle recovery has started with a higher ratio of debt to income, diverting more revenue from business, households and governments to pay banks and bondholders. This debt burden raises the economy’s cost of living and doing business, while leaving less wage income and profit to be spent on goods and services.

The virus pandemic has merely acted as a catalyst ending to the long postwar boom. Yet even as the U.S. and other Western economies begin to buckle under their debt overhead, little thought has been given to how to extricate them from the debts and defaults that have accelerated as a result of the broad economic disruption.

The “business as usual” approach is to let creditors foreclose and draw all the income and wealth over subsistence needs into their own hands. Economies have reached the point where debts can be paid only by shrinking production and consumption, leaving them as strapped as Greece has been since 2015. Rejecting debt writedowns to restore social balance was implanted at the outset of modern Western civilization. Ever since Roman times it has become normal for creditors to use social misfortune as an opportunity to gain property and income at the expense of families falling into debt. Blocking the emergence of democratic civic regimes empowered to protect debtors, creditor interests have promoted laws that force debtors to lose their land or other means of livelihood to foreclosing creditors or sell it under distress conditions and have to work off their debts.

In times of a general economic disruption, giving priority to creditor claims leads to widespread bankruptcy. Yet it violates most peoples’ ideas of fairness and distributive justice to evict debtors from their homes and take whatever property they have if they cannot pay their rent arrears and other charges that have accrued through no fault of their own. Bankruptcy proceedings will force many businesses and farms to forfeit what they have invested to much wealthier buyers. Many small businesses, especially in urban minority neighborhoods, will see years of saving and investment wiped out. The lockdown also forces U.S. cities and states to cope with plunging sales- and income-tax revenue by slashing social services and depleting their pension funds savings to pay bondholders. Balancing their budgets by privatizing hitherto public services will create monopoly rents and new corporate empires.

These outcomes are not necessary. They also are inequitable, and instead of being a survival of the fittest and most efficient economic solutions, they are a victory for the most successful predatory operators in society. Yet such results are the product of a long-pedigreed legal and financial philosophy promoted by banks and bondholders, landlords and insurance companies to reject economy-wide debt relief. They depict writing down debts and rents owed to them as unthinkable. Banks claim that forgiving personal and business rents would lead absentee landlords to default on their mortgages, threatening bank solvency. Insurance companies claim that to make their policy holders whole would bankrupt them. So something has to give: either the population’s broad economic interests, or the vested interests insisting that labor, industry and the government must bear the cost of arrears that have built up during the economic shutdown.

As in oligarchic Rome, financial interests in today’s world have gained control of governments and captured the political and regulatory agencies, leaving democratic reformers powerless to suspend debt service, rent arrears, evictions and depression. The West is becoming a highly centrally planned economy, but its planning center is Wall Street, not Washington or state and local governments.

Rising real estate arrears prompt a mortgage bailout

Canada and many European governments are subsidizing businesses to pay up to 80 percent of employee wages even though many must stay home. But for the 40 million Americans who haven’t been employed during the closedown, the prospect is for homelessness and desperation. Already before the crisis about half of Americans reported that they were living paycheck to paycheck and could not raise $400 in an emergency. When the paychecks stopped, rents could not be paid, nor could other normal monthly living expenses.

America is seeing the end of the home ownership boom that endowed its middle class with property steadily rising in price. For buyers, the price was rising mortgage debt, as bank credit was the major factor in raising property prices – a home is worth however much a bank will lend against it. For non-whites, to be sure, neighborhoods were redlined against racial minorities. By the early 2000s, banks began to make loans to black and Hispanic buyers, but usually at extortionately high interest rates and stiffer debt terms. America’s white home buyers now face a fate similar to that which they have long imposed on minorities: Debt-inflated purchase prices for homes so high that they leave buyers strapped by mortgage and compulsory insurance payments, alongside declining public services in their neighborhoods.

When mortgages can’t be paid, foreclosures follow. That causes declines in the proportion of Americans that own their own homes. That home ownership rate already had dropped from about 58 percent in 2008 to about 51 percent at the start of 2020. Since the 2008 mortgage-fraud crisis and President Obama’s mass foreclosure program that hit minorities and low-income buyers especially hard, a more landlord-ridden economy has emerged as a result of foreclosed properties and companies bought by speculators and vast absentee-owner companies like Blackstone.

Many businesses that closed down did not pay the landlords. Realizing that if they are held responsible for paying full rents that accrued during the shutdown, it would take them over a year to make up the payment, leaving no net earnings for their efforts, the incentive was to close. That was especially the case for restaurants with compulsory limited “distance” seating and other stores obliged to restrict the density of their customers. Many restaurants and other neighborhood stores decided to go out of business. Some 19 percent of mortgage loans had fallen into arrears already by May, along with about 10 percent of retail stores.

The commercial real estate sector owes $2.4 trillion in mortgage debt. About 40 percent of tenants did not pay their rents for March, April and May, from restaurants and storefronts to large national retail markets. A moratorium on evictions put them off until August or September 2020. But in the interim, quarterly state and local property taxes were due in June, which also was when the annual federal income-tax payment was owed for the year 2019, having been postponed from April in the face of the shutdown.

The prospective break in the chain of payments of landlords to their banks may be bailed out by the Federal Reserve, but nobody can come up with a scenario whereby the debts owed by non-elites can be paid out of their own resources, any more than they were rescued from the junk-mortgage frauds that left over-mortgaged homes (mainly for low-income victims) in the wake of Obama’s decision to support the banks and mortgage brokers instead of their victims. In fact, it takes a radical scenario to see how state and local debt can be paid as public budgets are thrown into limbo by the virus pandemic.

The fiscal squeeze forces governments to privatize public services and assets

Since 1945, the normal Keynesian response to an economic slowdown has been for governments to run budget deficits to revive the economy and employment. But that can’t happen in the wake of the 2020 pandemic. For one thing, tax revenue is falling. Governments can create domestic money, of course, but the U.S. government quickly ran up a $2 trillion deficit by June 2020 simply to support Wall Street’s financial and corporate markets, leaving a fiscal squeeze when it came to public spending into the real economy. Many U.S. states and cities have laws obliging them to balance their budgets. So public spending into the real economy (instead of just into the financial and corporate markets) had to be cut back.

U.S. states and localities are facing a huge tax shortfall that is forcing them to cut back basic social services and infrastructure. Sales taxes from restaurants and hotels, income taxes, and property taxes from landlords not receiving rents are mounting from millions to billions. New York City mayor de Blasio (image on the left) has warned that schools, the police and public transportation may have to be cut back unless the city is given $7 billion. The CARES act passed by the Democratic Party in control of the House of Representatives made no attempt to allocate a single dollar to make up the widening fiscal gap. As for the Trump administration, it was unwilling to give money to states voting Democratic in the presidential or governorship elections.

The irony is that just at the time when a pandemic calls for public health care, political pressure for that abruptly stopped. Logically, it might have been expected the virus to have become a major catalyst for single-payer public health care, not least to prevent a wave of personal bankruptcy resulting from high medical bills. But hopes were dashed when the leading torch bearer for socialized medicine, Senator Bernie Sanders, threw his support behind Joe Biden and other opponents for the presidential nomination instead of focusing the primary elections on what the future of the Democratic Party would be. It decided to focus the 2020 U.S. election merely on the personality of which candidate would impose neoliberal policy: Republican Donald Trump, or his opponent running simply on a platform of “I am not Trump.”

Both candidates – and indeed, both parties behind them –sought to downsize government and privatize as much of the public sector as possible, leaving administration to financial managers. Past government policy would have restored prosperity by public spending programs to rebuild the roads and bridges, trains and subways that have fallen apart. But the fiscal squeeze caused by the economic shutdown has created pressure to Thatcherize America’s crumbling transportation and urban infrastructure – and also to sell off land and public enterprises, basic urban health, schools – and at the national level, the post office. Fiscal budgets are to be balanced by selling off this infrastructure, in lucrative Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) with financial firms.

The neoliberal rent-extractive plan is for private capital to buy monopoly rights to repair the nation’s bridges by turning them into toll bridges, to repair the nation’s roads and highways by making the toll roads, to repair sewer systems by privatizing them. Schools, prisons, hospitals and other traditionally public functions are set to become lucrative consulting opportunities on the road to privatization. Even the police are to be privately owned security-guard agencies and managed for profit – on terms that will provide interest and capital gains for the financial sector. It is a New Enclosures movement seeking monopoly rent much as landlords extract land rent.

Having given $10 trillion dollars to support financial and mortgage markets, neoliberals in both the Republican and Democratic parties announced that the government had created so large a budget deficit as a result of bailing out the banking and landlord class that it lacked any more room for money creation for actual social spending programs. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell advised states to solve their budget squeeze by raiding their pension funds to pay their bondholders.

For many decades, public employees accepted low wage growth in exchange for pensions. Their patient choice was to defer demands for wage increases in order to secure good pensions for their retirement. But now that they have worked at stagnant wages for many years, the money ostensibly saved for their pensions is to be given to bondholders. Likewise at the federal level, pressure was renewed by both parties to cut back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with Obama’s 2010 Simpson-Bowles Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to reduce the deficit at the expense of retirees and the poor.

In sum, money is being created to fuel the financial sector and its stock and bond markets, not to increase the economy’s solvency, employment and living standards. The corona virus did not create this shift, but it catalyzed and accelerated the power grab, not least by pushing public-sector budgets into crisis.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Every successful economy has been a mixed public/private economy with checks on the financial sector’s power to indebt society in ways that impoverish it. Always at issue, however, is who will control the government. As American and European industry becomes more debt ridden, will they be oligarchic or democratic?

A socialist government such as China’s can keep its industry going simply by simply writing down debts when they can’t be paid without forcing a closedown and bankruptcy and loss of assets and employment. The world thus has two options: a basically productive public financial system in China, or a predatory financial system in the United States.

China can recover financially and fiscally from the viral disruption because most debts ultimately are owned to the government-based banking system. Money can be created to finance the material economy, labor and industry, construction and agriculture. When a company is unable to pay its bills and rent, the government doesn’t stand by and let it be closed down and sold at a distressed price to a vulture investor.

China has an option that Western economies do not: It is in a position to do what Hammurabi and other ancient Near Eastern palatial economies did for thousands of years – write down debts so as to keep the economy resilient and functioning. It can suspend scheduled debt service, taxes, rents and public fees from having to be paid by troubled areas of its economy, because China’s government is the ultimate creditor. It need not contend with politically powerful bankers who insist that the economy at large must lose, not themselves. The government can write down the debt to keep companies in business, and also their employees. That’s what socialist governments do.

The underlying problem is finance capitalism. Its roots lie at the heart of Western civilization itself, rejecting the “circular time” permitting economic renewal by Clean Slates in favor of “linear time” in which debts are permanent and irreversible, without public oversight to manage finance and credit in the economy’s overall long-term interest.

It often is easier to get rich in such times of disaster and need than in times of normal prosperity. While the U.S. economy polarizes between creditors and debtors, the stock market anticipates fortunes being made quickly from the insolvency of business with assets and property to be grabbed. Coupled with the Federal Reserve’s credit creation to support the financial and real estate markets, asset prices are soaring (as of June 2020) for companies that expect to get even richer from the widespread distress to come in autumn 2020 when evictions and foreclosures are scheduled to begin again.

In that respect, the corona virus’s effect has been to help defeat the financial sector’s enemy – governments strong enough to regulate it. The fiscal squeeze resulting from widespread unemployment, business closedowns, rent and tax arrears is being seized upon as a means of dismantling and privatizing government at the federal, state and local levels, at the expense of the citizenry at large.

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Featured image is from the author

There has been considerable controversy regarding Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Republican National Convention address pre-recorded at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and aired last Tuesday night. As usual however, the discussion, if one might dignify it using such a term, has been partisan in nature and focused on issues that one might consider to be of secondary importance. The perceived problems for Democrats and their media allies have been first of all the inappropriateness of a Secretary of State getting involved at all in an electoral campaign and also the possible illegality of overseas Embassy money and resources being used in support of a political speech. Misuse of government property is, perhaps not coincidentally, a charge also being leveled against President Donald Trump for his use of the White House as a prop in his final address to the convention.

To be sure, the money issue can be fixed by the Republican National Committee reimbursing the federal government proportionate to the expenses incurred by Pompeo on his trip for the actual costs associated with the speech. The other issue, which effectively comes down to enforcement of the Hatch Act prohibiting government employees from engaging in political activity, is admittedly more difficult, and it also runs contrary to the tradition that the Secretary of State represents the entire country and should avoid participating in explicitly partisan events. Congress’s Oversight committee is currently looking into the options for responding to the Pompeo speech, though it is already clear that it will turn out to be the usual partisan political finger pointing exercise.

Pompeo started out by stating how Donald Trump’s policies had made every American, including his own family, safer. He then went on to provide the evidence, how among “bold initiatives” all over the world in foreign policy

“The president has held China accountable for covering up the China virus and allowing it to spread death and economic destruction in America and around the world and he will not rest until justice is done.”

Pompeo then went on to give Trump top marks for brokering the historic “peace deal” between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He enthused that “This is a deal that our grandchildren will read about in their history books.”

Pompeo also praised other foreign policy “successes” to include the assassination of Iranian General and “terrorist” Qassim Soleimani and the “defeat” of ISIS, both of which are, to put it mildly, greatly exaggerated. But he saved his best news for last, praising how President Trump had moved the U.S. Embassy to “this city of God” the “rightful capital of the Jewish homeland, Jerusalem.” It was inter alia an in-your-face show of support for Israel, which was the one foreign country praised by multiple speakers on every night of the Republican convention.

If the underlying issue is that Pompeo was clearly in a political mode when praising Donald Trump and his policies, then it should be observed that the Jerusalem address differs little from what Pompeo has said on a score of occasions in Washington and elsewhere. That he made the comments to a narrow audience drawn from one political party is disturbing, but it could still be framed as a discussion of foreign policy before a gathering of Americans. And as for possible consequences, Pompeo and Trump would certainly ignore any actions initiated by inspectors general in the State Department and executive branch who might try to sanction the Secretary based on “political” comments that are sandwiched into what will be described as a foreign policy briefing. Pompeo has in fact already fired one State Department inspector general who was reportedly investigating the Secretary’s spending on gatherings that were political in nature. The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel also is working on a motion to hold Pompeo in contempt for his refusal to respond to subpoenas over his “transparently political misuse of Department resources.”

An additional complaint about the speech has been the fundamentalist Christian content, which, though not in any way illegal, was regarded by many as unseemly. But that, it might seem, is part of the more significant issues raised by the content and venue for the address. Pompeo’s trip to Jerusalem was timed to coincide with the Republican conference. It was not just coincidence that he was in Israel and was able to photo-op his shaking of the hand of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, guarantee the Jewish state’s security and appear on the big screen at the convention with Jerusalem behind him. It was, in short, once again playing the Israel card to raise the enthusiasm level of the GOP’s most loyal constituency, the Christian Zionists. And to ensure that the message was received, it was delivered by the Trump administration’s leading Christian Zionist, Mike Pompeo.

But the ultimate irony is that the presentation by Pompeo was essentially a bit of theater, relying on a fraudulent rendition of America’s hypothetical foreign policy successes under Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign against China is very much a work-in-progress that could have a very serious downside, while simultaneously the relationship with the Kremlin, involving per Pompeo “deterring Russian aggression,” has become worse than it was when the Cold War ended. Meanwhile America’s European allies regard Trump and Pompeo as dangerous sociopaths.

And the “Deal of the Century” agreement between Israel and the UAE is already in tatters, with UAE representatives canceling a meeting after learning that the Jewish state has been pressuring Pompeo and the White House to block any sale of advanced F-35 fighter aircraft to the Arab state to “preserve Israel’s military advantage.” The agreement was a sham in any event, intended to give Trump a “victory” to help his electoral prospects at the expense of the hapless Palestinians, and no other Arab states, with the possible exception of basket case Sudan, appear willing to follow the UAE’s lead.

Since the so-called agreement, the Israeli air force has reverted to normal, pounding targets in both Lebanon and Syria, very little of which is being reported in the U.S. media. Nor have accounts of American provocations against Russian military personnel in Syria made the front pages, which, given the danger involved, is probably where they should be if the media were in any way responsible. Indeed, one has to go to the Grayzone to learn just to what extent both of America’s leading political parties are itching for more intervention in Syria to increase pressure on Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

Unfortunately, the message coming from Pompeo in Jerusalem is not just an isolated political gambit. The United States of America has become the instigator and sustainer of a disproportionate share of global violence. With a hotly contested election coming up, there may be some hope that the brutal foreign policy prevailing since 9/11 will change, but, unfortunately, the reality is that in Washington some things will always remain the same.

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Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on August 24, 2020 in Jerusalem. (Photo: Pompeo/Twitter)

Unlawfully imposed US sanctions on targeted nations, entities and individuals are weapons of war by other means.

On Wednesday, Pompeo said the Trump regime blacklisted ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the court’s Jurisdiction, Complementary, and Cooperation Division head Phakiso Mochochoko under a June White House executive order, saying the following:

The US “never ratified the Rome Statute that created the court, and we will not tolerate…attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction,” adding:

“Individuals and entities that continue to materially support those individuals risk exposure to sanctions as well.”

The State Department earlier “restricted the issuance of visas for certain individuals involved in the ICC’s efforts to investigate US personnel.”

While the US didn’t ratify the Rome Statute, Afghanistan did in February 2003.

Image on the right: Fatou Bensouda

When agreeing to probe charges of US war crimes in the country, an appeals chamber of the ICC unanimously reversed a lower chamber’s decision that halted an inquiry because the US doesn’t recognize the court’s jurisdiction to probe its officials, only those of its adversaries.

An ICC statement said that after Afghanistan “deposited its instrument of accession to the Rome Statute on 10 February 2003,” the court “may…exercise its jurisdiction over crimes listed in the Rome Statute committed on the territory of Afghanistan or by its nationals from 1 May 2003 onwards.”

In response to the unacceptable Trump regime’s actions, a breach of the letter and spirit of international law, a statement by the court said the following:

“These coercive acts, directed at an international judicial institution and its civil servants, are unprecedented and constitute serious attacks against the Court, the Rome Statute system of international criminal justice, and the rule of law more generally.”

Separately, Judge O-Gon Kwon, president of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—Republic of Korea said the following:

Sanctioning court officials by the Trump regime “weaken(s) our common endeavor to fight impunity for mass atrocities.”

“We stand by our court and its staff as well as those cooperating with it in implementing its judicial mandate.”

“A meeting of the Bureau of the Assembly will take place shortly to consider the measures imposed by the (Trump regime) and ways to give effect to our unstinting support for the court.”

Since beginning its probe of US Afghanistan war crimes in 2017, the ICC said it received over 700 complaints from aggrieved victims.

In June, Trump declared a state of national emergency over the ICC’s probe of US war crimes in Afghanistan.

At the time, he issued an executive order that authorizes blocking property of ICC officials in the US if sanctioned by Washington. It also prevents them from traveling to the US.

There’s no ambiguity about US high crimes of war and against humanity in all its preemptive wars by hot and other means throughout the post-WW II period and earlier.

In early March, ICC judges authorized an investigation into accusations of war crimes by US military and intelligence personnel, Afghan forces, and the Taliban in the country.

Given the ICC’s history since established in 2002 of targeting victims of US high crimes, never the US or its imperial partners earlier, it’s unclear what will come of its probe into indisputable US war crimes in Afghanistan.

Though mandated to prosecute individuals (not nations) for crimes of war, against humanity, genocide and aggression, the court never targeted the main offenders of these crimes.

It requires a giant leap of faith believe it’ll go now where it never went before.

Maybe illegal Trump regime sanctioning of its chief prosecutor and another key official will convince the court to respond by fulfilling its mandate against the world’s leading perpetrator of war crimes USA in one of its theaters — Afghanistan.

There’s no ambiguity of its criminal history.

It’s put up or shut up time for the ICC to hold the US responsible for high crimes too grievous to ignore in all its preemptive wars of aggression against nonbelligerent states threatening no one.

A Final Comment

The 2002 American Service Members’ Protection Act (ASPA, aka Hague Invasion Act) “protect(s) United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international court to which the United States is not party.”

The measure authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.”

Decades of US high crimes are well documented, its officials never held accountable. Nor have their counterparts in other NATO countries and Israel.

Will this time be different? Will the ICC fulfill its mandate by conducting a credible probe of US war crimes in Afghanistan?

Will the court call for holding culpable individuals accountable for offenses in the country it determined to be war crimes?

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Admittedly, a lot of good happened over the last years in Lithuania, but unfortunately we have also see political leadership that is not interested in developing their own country.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed Lithuania’s alleged “undemocratic methods” to support the Belarusian opposition.

“We see attempts to unbalance the situation. As a matter of fact, no one is concealing this. Our Lithuanian neighbours have already overstepped all bounds of decency in the demands that they are putting forth. And we have reasons to presume that they are working with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya via undemocratic methods that do not show much respect for the sovereignty of Belarus,” said Lavrov.

Responding to Lavrov’s statement, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius said that Lithuania had no intention of meddling into Belarus’ affairs, as it has no right of doing so, but it would assist people prosecuted by the Minsk government.

In turn, press secretary of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Anatoly Glaz said:

“We have carefully read the statements of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In any case, these are our neighboring countries, and their opinion is important for us. It is, however, becoming less and less important in the light of recent hasty steps, and it is unfortunate to state this. It is not clear how this step of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia will support the sovereignty and independence of Belarus they have spoken so much about.”

In his words,

this “express desire to repeat old mistakes and thoughtlessly go round in a circle certainly causes sincere disappointment”.

“As you know, the biggest foolishness is to do the same thing and hope for a different result. The history of our independent state eloquently confirms that any attempts of sanctions on Belarus lead their initiators only to the opposite effect. We are absolutely convinced that today’s decision of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia will also be no exception. Moreover, our Baltic neighbors have also launched a spiral of sanctions. We have previously stated that Belarus would have to take adequate response to the initiators of such steps. This will be done. We will patiently wait for the moment when common sense will prevail in the minds of our partners. We are confident that this moment will come sooner than some might think,” said the representative of the Belarusian MFA.

However, statements by Lithuanian politicians are attempts to divert the attention of citizens from the country’s problems.

According to Eurostat, the unemployment rate in Lithuania in July was one of the highest in the European Union (EU). The unemployment rate among young people under 25 years old increased over the year from 11.3% to 23.1%, driving emigration to countries such as Norway and the U.K.

Many Lithuanians, especially the young people, who should lead the country forward, are terrible disillusioned over the development, and leave in droves. They are registered as unemployed in Lithuania. Those who are left here show dissatisfaction over how they have been treated.

The Lithuanian authorities hope that the young people will leave Belarus and go to Lithuania. They are doing everything possible to achieve this goal.

As for the sanctions that the Baltic States have imposed travel sanctions on Belarusian leaders, including Alexander Lukashenko.

Besides, the Baltic States will soon sign a political declaration, committing to block Belarusian nuclear imports.

It should be noted that Latvia showed solidarity with Lithuania in boycotting electricity from the Belarusian nuclear power plant just last week. However, Latvia said it would trade with Russia, leaving a possibility for Astravyets energy to enter the common network via Russia. Therefore, talks on how to trade with non-EU countries will have to continue.

In turn, Belarus refuses to send its cargoes through the Klaipeda port.  A.Lukashenko expressed hope to agree with Russia on the diversion of the transit of Belarusian cargoes from the Baltic States to Russian ports. According to some media estimates, Belarusian companies account for one third of the capacity of the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda and the transit of Belarusian goods makes up about 2 per cent of Lithuania’s GDP. If Belarus stops transit through Klaipeda, the Lithuanian Railways company (Lietuvos geležinkeliai) will also suffer. As a result, the state budget of Lithuania will not receive up to 30% of taxes.

Obviously, political and economic differences between neighboring countries will negatively affect all countries in the region.

Besides, analysts are confident that if such rhetoric between Lithuania and its neighbors continues, it will further damage Lithuania’s already weak economy.

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Jonas Dringelis is an independent journalist.

Featured image is from the author

The big financial news yesterday was that, despite the pandemic, Wall Street just recorded its best August in more than 30 years.

However history was also made in what is yet another seismic shift in the financial clout of the oil industry.

The once mighty Exxon suffered the corporate humiliation of being booted out the highly influential Dow Jones Industrial Index.

“The last day of August also marked the first day of trading for the newly reconfigured Dow”, reported the Washington Post. “The index, which tracks 30 large publicly traded companies, swapped out three companies.” And one of those was oil giant, ExxonMobil.

Do not underestimate the significance of this moment. Exxon is the oldest member of the influential Index, having joined in 1928.

The Seeking Alpha investor website calls the move the “ultimate insult” for Exxon. As an article in NPR notes:

“The Dow Jones Industrial Average is the classic blue-chip stock index. Exxon Mobil is an iconic blue-chip stock … It reflects just how once-dominant Exxon has diminished.”

Even a year ago if you had said Exxon was going to be booted out of the Dow Jones you would have been laughed at. But how the once mighty have fallen.

Twenty one years ago, in 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged, it not only created the world’s largest private oil company, but for many years, Exxon Mobil was the world’s largest publicly traded company.

But the company’s demise has been a long time coming. The Motley Fool investor website has calculated that Exxon’s stock has lost value over the past 20 years. This compares to an increase of over 130% for the S&P 500.

Such was the size of the company that even seven years ago, Exxon was still the world’s most valuable corporation. But since then, the company’s market value has disintegrated a staggering $267 billion.

Even the normally loyal Dallas News notes that “Exxon’s stock had fallen in four of six years before 2020 and is down another 40% year to date.”

“Exxon is now a shell of its former self”, argues one commentator for CNN, calling the company’s removal from the Dow a “humiliation.”

It is hard to see a route back into the Dow for Exxon as investors take flight over climate change and COVID-19 and look to lucrative renewables instead. CNN concludes “Exxon is the best-known company in the fossil fuels industry at a time when investors would prefer to bet on solar, wind and Tesla.”

Bloomberg adds that

“The removal of Exxon Mobil Corp. from the index after an uninterrupted presence since 1928 shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s not the end of Big Oil, but it may signal the start of the beginning of the end.”

Make no mistake, it really is yet another significant milestone in the demise of Big Oil.

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With the signing of the Abraham Accord, UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash praised the formalisation of Israeli ties as a “bold initiative of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed” that has frozen West Bank annexation to allow “more time for peace opportunities through the two-state solution”. He called it “a realistic approach”. 

Reaction to this initiative has been mixed, especially within the Arab world. Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi denounced the deal, telling bin Zayed:

“May you never experience the agony of having your country stolen; may you never feel the pain of living in captivity under occupation; may you never witness the demolition of your home or murder of your loved ones. May you never be sold out by your ‘friends.’”

Jordan also criticised the deal, despite having signed a 1994 peace treaty with Israel, with Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi warning:

“If Israel sees the agreement as an incentive for the end of the occupation and the return of the Palestinian people’s right to freedom and to establish their independent state on the 1967 borders with Eastern Jerusalem as its capital, the region will move towards a just peace. However, if Israel does not do this, the conflict will deepen and threaten the whole region.”

Regime survival

More recently, a controversial tweet from Jordan’s Prince Ali bin Hussein featured the word “traitor” across photographs of bin Zayed. Although it was later taken down, the tweet received more than 900 retweets, with comments ranging from praise of bin Hussein’s “honourable stance” to reminding him of “the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty in Wadi Araba, your Highness”.

The mixed reception is a reminder that Jordan’s relationship with Israel is intertwined with its majority Palestinian population, expelled from occupied land in waves from 1948-67. This population is significant and effects how the Hashemite dynasty constructs its legitimacy and regime survival, which might be at the core of Jordan’s anger towards the UAE’s new deal.

Under the 1994 peace treaty, Jordan was forced to formally relinquish claims to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This was problematic, as Jordan’s Hashemites have drawn on religious lineage for legitimacy, including custodianship of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque.

But in exchange for peace with Israel, Jordan grew closer to a major US ally. This had two advantages: Jordan could push Israel for more US aid and act as a covert mediator between Israel and proximate states.

The former was an urgent need throughout the 1990s. “Jordan’s tilt toward Iraq in the 1990 Kuwait crisis had poisoned American-Jordanian relations,” noted Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy. “Aid had been stopped, military support and logistics cut off, and the Jordanians’ only port at Aqaba was under quarantine to check for traffic transiting to Iraq via Jordan.”

In 1994, King Hussein “was ready to go for a peace treaty [in exchange for] Israeli help with Washington to restore relations, including the resumption of military aid … as well as delivery of a squadron of F-16 jet fighters for the Royal Jordanian Air Force.”

Mediation channels

Jordan’s treaty with Israel allowed Amman to attempt to counter its unpopularity with attempts to hold peace summits that could bolster its status as an arbiter. This was apparent in 2013, when King Abdullah II announced Amman’s willingness to act as a facilitator for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“The window of opportunity is still open to re-galvanise” peace efforts, he insisted during a joint press conference with US President Barack Obama.

There is no doubt that the task of balancing a Palestinian populace, religious legitimacy through landmarks in Jerusalem, and a peace treaty with Israel gave Amman the credentials to push this initiative. It would also ensure that Jordan could profit from the ability to host Israeli political figures and Arab leaders who wished to communicate discreetly.

For a resource-dry monarchy, the ability to provide such channels have allowed it to be regarded as an essential and stable actor in the region. This notion is especially true when considering that Jordan was only the second Arab country after Egypt to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

The Egypt-Israel treaty of 1979 cost then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat his life; he was assassinated in 1981. Jordan’s King Hussein did not seem to face such repercussions, leading some analysts to describe him as an adroit ruler in an unstable region. He passed the reins to King Abdullah in 1999.

Deepening Gulf-Israel ties

Yet, recent events in the Gulf are challenging Jordan’s status as Israel’s strongest facilitator in the Arab world. Under right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Gulf relations have started to thaw.

In October 2018, Netanyahu was welcomed by Oman’s Sultan Qaboos. Oman’s communications minister said the visit was symbolic of “the good relations that are developing between the Israeli government and the Sunni countries that oppose the Iranian terror, which also threatens them”.

The focus on Iran as a common enemy seems to have encouraged a deepening of Gulf-Israel ties. Indeed, as early as 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was reportedly visiting Israel for secret talks on regional peace. This was followed in October 2018 by a $250m deal for Israeli spy equipment and “strategic military exchanges”.

Saudi Arabia’s smaller ally, Bahrain, has maintained covert contacts with Israel since 1994 (ironically, the year of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty). Like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain regards Iran as a threat, with Iran periodically making territorial claims to Bahrain.

“Bahrain’s outreach to Israel certainly underscores a continuing, and probably increasing, interest in exploring the prospects for better relations, and even potentially a new strategic relationship, between Israel and the Gulf Arab countries,” noted Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Future peace talks

As the UAE leads a new opening with Israel, there is no doubt the US will be pleased. For a cash-strapped kingdom such as Jordan, 2020 is reversing the political benefits of 1994.

If Abu Dhabi is now closer to Israel and Washington and were able to freeze settlements, would this mean that future peace talks would be headed away from Amman and towards the UAE? Would a reduced role for Jordan mean less US aid? If the so-called Abraham Accord eclipses the 1994 Washington Declaration, what relevance would Jordan still have for the US?

The US would still consider Jordan’s geostrategic value, but a reduced importance as a conduit for Arab access to Israel may mean reduced aid, reduced living standards and greater socioeconomic difficulties amid a backdrop of increasing unrest. Perhaps this is why Jordanian artist Emad Hajjaj was arrested for his cartoon critical of the new relations.

In addition to shifting geopolitics, the status of Al-Aqsa mosque as a Jordanian religious buttress is now under threat. From Jerusalem, the response to a change in Al-Aqsa’s religious status has been swift and firm. Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti has prohibited Muslims from the UAE from visiting and praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque insisting that any visitors to the mosque must pass through Jordan or the Palestinian territories – not Ben Gurion Airport.

But can such a fatwa be pragmatically enforced, and what about Jordan’s response? The fatwa represents a rejection of the Israeli occupation, but Al-Aqsa also represents Jordanian religious legitimacy.

With a Palestinian majority populous, King Abdullah II has responded coldly to UAE-Israel relations but will no doubt be balancing this response with access to Washington and the Emirates.

No matter what balancing act is chosen, one thing is clear: if Jordan still wants Washington’s attention, it must also please the UAE.

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Dr. Nicolai Due-Gundersen is author of The Privatization of Warfare (Cambridge: Intersentia) and former Adviser to the Arab Institute for Security Studies (ACSIS), Amman, Jordan. His research currently examines non-democratic political legitimacy in the face of the Arab Spring. He tweets @Nicolaiofarabia

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Lukashenko’s entirely speculative claim last week about Poland’s supposed intention to annex Belarus’ Grodno region was nothing more than an attempt to trick Putin into “pulling a Crimea” by compelling him to comply with Russia’s CSTO mutual defense obligations to its “Union State” partner in the face of this hyped-up foreign threat, which was a ruse that the Russian leader was much too wise to fall for.

If Poland Didn’t Annex Lvov, Why Would It Annex Grodno?

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What is Covid-19, SARS-2. How is it Tested? How is It Measured? The Fear Campaign Has No Scientific Basis

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 02, 2020

The data and concepts have been manipulated with a view to sustaining the fear campaign.

The estimates are meaningless. The figures have been hyped to justify the lockdown and the closure of the national economy, with devastating economic and social consequences. The Virus is held responsible for poverty and mass unemployment.

‘The Corruption Is Bottomless’: Documents Reveal Chair of Postal Service Board Is Director of McConnell-Allied Super PAC

By Jake Johnson, September 02, 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s deep and longstanding ties to U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors chairman Robert Duncanare coming under heightened scrutiny after corporate paperwork filed Monday listed Duncan as a director of a major GOP super PAC closely aligned with the Kentucky Republican.

The new filing (pdf) with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission—an independent regulatory agency that oversees political action committees—names Duncan as one of three directors of the Senate Leadership Fund, a massive super PAC that has spent nearly $18 million in support of Senate Republicans thus far in the 2020 election cycle.

US Seeks Formal Alliance Similar to NATO with India, Japan and Australia

By Robert Delaney, September 02, 2020

The US government’s goal is to get the grouping of four countries and others in the region to work together as a bulwark against “a potential challenge from China” and “to create a critical mass around the shared values and interests of those parties in a manner that attracts more countries in the Indo-Pacific and even from around the world … ultimately to align in a more structured manner”, said Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun.

Since 9/11, the Government’s Answer to Every Problem Has Been More Government

By John W. Whitehead, September 02, 2020

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn.

Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

All the Latest on Trump’s War on Our Public Postal Service

By Sarah Anderson, September 02, 2020

Less than two months after Trump ally and GOP megadonor Louis DeJoy took the helm of the U.S. Postal Service, the House of Representatives met in an emergency session to address widespread fears about potential sabotage of this vital public agency at a time when it is needed more than ever to deliver medicine and other essentials and to facilitate mail-in voting.

On August 22, 26 Republicans joined 231 Democrats to pass H.R. 8015, which addresses these concerns by: providing $25 billion in direct emergency relief for USPS, requiring all official election mail to be treated as “first-class mail,” and prohibiting the removal of mail sorting machines and mailboxes and reversing any already implemented changes that could delay mail delivery.

Big Pharma’s Man at FDA to Approve Coronavirus Vaccine Before Clinical Trials Completed?

By Stephen Lendman, September 02, 2020

At times, meds are more dangerous than diseases they’re supposed to protect against or cure.

Independent experts agree that all vaccines are hazardous to human health because they contain mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, phenoxyethanol (antifreeze), and other toxins able to weaken and potentially destroy the human immune system.

If Trump Tries to Hijack the Election, We Must be Ready to Resist

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, September 02, 2020

For nearly four years, we have been laser focused on November 3, 2020, the day that Donald Trump could be voted out of office. In all likelihood, however, the election will not be decided that evening as it has in the past (with the notable exception of the 2000 election). That is because in order to protect themselves against COVID-19, a record number of people will forego the polls and mail their ballots, which take longer to count. There are several scenarios of what could transpire between November 3 and January 20. All of them are frightening.

In a statement [1] released Wednesday morning, Germany’s federal government said special toxicology tests carried out on Alexei Navalny since he arrived from Russia had given “unequivocal proof” that a Novichok agent had been used on the Russian dissident.

Navalny was transported out of Siberia to Berlin last month after he fell ill due to the suspected poisoning of his tea. He has been in a medically induced coma since he arrived in Germany. Novichok is the same group of nerve agents used on the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal, who was attacked in Britain two years ago.

On March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.

In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, Novichok.

Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.

In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018, the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats and the Trump administration ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American consulate in Saint Petersburg. The relations between Moscow and Western powers reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in December 1991.

A month after the Salisbury poisonings, an alleged chemical weapons attack took place in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018, and Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in Syria on April 14, 2018, in collaboration with the Theresa May government in the UK and the Emmanuel Macron administration in France. The strike took place little over a year after a similar cruise missile strike on al-Shayrat airfield on April 6, 2017, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, though both cruise missile strikes were nothing more than a show of force.

But the fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed in the April 14, 2018, strikes against a military research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by the French and 8 by the UK aircrafts demonstrated the unified resolve of the Western powers against Russia in the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in the UK a month earlier.

It bears mentioning that the American air and missile strikes in Syria are not only illegal under the international law but are also unlawful according to the American laws. While striking the Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, Washington availed itself of the war on terror provisions in the US laws, known as the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), but those laws do not give the president the power to order strikes against the Syrian government targets without prior approval of the US Congress which has the sole authority to declare war.

The Intercept reported last year [2] that the Trump administration had derived the authority to strike the Syrian government targets based on a “top secret” memorandum of the Office of Legal Counsel that even the US Congress couldn’t see. Complying with the norms of transparency and the rule of law were never the strong points of the American democracy but the Trump administration has done away with even the pretense of accountability and checks and balances in the conduct of international relations.

Moreover, over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and material support to the militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of Syrian militants and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the eight-year conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [3] in January last year, Israel’s outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his shift in strategy in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched against the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [4] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel’s air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purpose of Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

Though after Russia provided S-300 missile system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance aircraft was shot down by Syrian air defenses during an Israeli incursion into the Syrian airspace, on September 2018, killing 15 Russians onboard, the Israeli airstrikes in Syria have been significantly scaled down.

Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria last year, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria. After the drawdown of US troops at Erdogan’s insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria, the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and at al-Tanf military base.

Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained thousands Syrian militants battling the Syrian government there.

It’s worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel’s concerns regarding the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Regarding the continued presence of American forces in oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it’s worth pointing out that Syria used to produce roughly 400,000 barrels crude oil per day. Answering questions from Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of State Pompeo confessed [5] last month that the State Department had awarded an American company, Delta Crescent Energy, with a contract to begin extracting oil in northeast Syria.

Much like the “scorched earth” battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic State which burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds in eastern Syria – Washington’s basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to Damascus.

After the devastation caused by nine years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington hampering efforts to provide international assistance to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over Syria’s own valuable resources.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

Notes

[1] Germany Says Aleksey Navalny Was Poisoned With Novichok Nerve Agent:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/aleksey-navalny-was-poisoned-with-novichok-nerve-agent-germany-confirms

[2] Donald Trump ordered Syria strike based on a secret legal justification even Congress can’t see:

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/14/donald-trump-ordered-syria-strike-based-on-a-secret-legal-justification-even-congress-cant-see/

[3] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/gadi-eisenkot-israel-iran-syria.html

[4] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/benjamin-netanyahu-admits-israel-to-blame-for-damascus-strikes-1.812590

[5] Delta Crescent Energy awarded the contract to extract Syria’s oil:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/08/20/opinion/oil-could-keep-us-middle-east-very-long-time/

He has become part of the furniture when it comes to discussions about privacy rights and personal liberties, arguably an odd sort of thing for a man who also dealt in the shadows of intelligence secrets.  But Edward Snowden has been doing his bit to reveal and chip away at the foundations of the national security state that continues to thrive.  The advent of coronavirus and pandemic surveillance will merely serve to advance it, but in June 2013, Snowden’s exposures of National Security Agency practices were raw and unsettling to the wonks of the establishment. 

The most troubling of the revelations was not that the NSA conducts surveillance, its natural bread and butter; it was how such grubbily enterprising efforts as the metadata collection program were allowed to flourish with feral abandon.  The forests of paranoia after the 9/11 attacks on US soil proved rich for such legislative instruments as the USA PATRIOT Act.  Section 215, in particular, authorised the bulk collection by agencies of telephony metadata, known in the trade as call detail records.  It had been barely read by members of Congress in a hurry; patriotism can encourage a special sort of dedicated illiteracy.    

The NSA program, at least in that form, was ended with the reforms passed by the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015.  Critics were quick to note that section 215 was merely given a trim and a clean.  The original provision permitted the NSA to store call detail records (time, duration, the numbers communicating in a call, excluding the content of the call) and search them as required.  Since the changes, such records are held by telephone companies; the agency can only request them via an order of the Foreign Intelligence Service Court. 

The provision, according to Human Rights Watch, “still permits the government to collect a staggering amount of data, in secret and without a warrant, on how people use their phones, chilling freedom of expression and association.”  Between 2015 and 2019, the program cost $10 million and could only boast one significant lead, a palpably poor return for even the most devout surveillance types. 

The expiry of Section 215 powers in March 15, 2020 led to a merry legislative jig.  The Senate passed the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act in May.  The oversight measures proposed by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) made it through, expanding the role of independent advisers to the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Service Act of 1978.  But in so doing, the Senate failed to adopt the amendment proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT), which would have prevented the government conducting warrantless surveillance on internet browsing and search histories. 

Wyden was more than a touch irritated at his colleagues. 

“The legislation,” he outlined in a statement, “hands the government power for warrantless collection of Americans’ web browsing and internet searches, as well as other private information, without having to demonstrate that those Americans have done anything wrong.” 

The Senate also refused to prohibit the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and surveillance conducted under the Article II executive power against people in the United States or in proceedings against them, both ideas of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).

Privacy advocates were feeling a touch deflated.  It took a decision by a three-judge panel of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals handed down on September 2 to add a spring to their steps, if only after the fact.  The decision in United States v Moalin was not bound to make them break out into a canter.  The facts of the case covered the previous incarnation of bulk surveillance exposed by Snowden.  The outcome was also a tad troubling.  The four appellants, Somali immigrants convicted in 2013 for transferring $10,900 in support of the terrorist group al-Shabaab, had their convictions upheld.   

The judges “held that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment [protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures] when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans, including at least one of the defendants, pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act”.  Unfortunately for the defendants, “the metadata collection, even if unconstitutional, did not taint the evidence introduced by the government at trial.”  The application for suppression of the evidence – what were described by the defendants as the “alleged ‘fruits’ of the unlawful metadata collection,” failed.  Additionally, the FISA wiretap evidence was not held to be “the fruit of the unlawful metadata collection.”

Scattered through the judgment are a few sprinklings of hope for privacy advocates.  Some of these are merely confirmations and recapitulations.  Others are clarifications for the intelligence community.  The government had, for instance, argued that “ordinary criminal investigations” should not be treated in the same context as those in a “foreign intelligence context”.  The Fourth Amendment protections should be applied differently.

Not so, claimed the panel.  The judges acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment required notice to be given to a defendant “when the prosecution intends to enter into evidence or otherwise use or disclose information obtained or derived from the surveillance of that defendant conducted pursuant to the government’s foreign intelligence authorities.”  As the Fourth Amendment did apply to foreign intelligence investigations, it followed that “US criminal defendants against whom the government uses evidence obtained or derived from foreign intelligence may have Fourth Amendment rights to protect.”  The problem for the defendants here was that failure to provide notice by the government did not prejudice them.

The American Civil Liberties Union’s Patrick Toomey saw the ruling as vindicating “that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ records violated the Constitution.”  The mandatory notice requirement for authorities constituted an essential “protection” in a field of “novel spying tools”.  The Snowden legacy continues to be harvested, if unevenly.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

The summer of 2020 will certainly be remembered for many events, and most of them unrelated to the 21st century’s first pandemic. In the East Mediterranean, four key events stand out among others this summer – tensions and hostilities between NATO members Greece and Turkey; the peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates; the devastating Beirut Port explosion; and, renewed attacks and reprisals between Israel and the Islamist forces active in the Gaza Strip. Of these though, the most immediate issue is the current hostility between Greece and Turkey, especially since it was revealed only yesterday in Germany’s Die Welt that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered for a Greek ship or fighter jet be destroyed. The order, according to Die Welt, was refused by his generals.

With these emerging issues over the summer, global and regional powers are using geopolitical manoeuvring to advance their spheres of influence. This has brought the East Mediterranean to the forefront of many state interests, especially those seeking to expand their power, particularly France, Germany and Turkey.

The dispute between Greece and Turkey is clearly territorial and energy related, with the latter desperately seeking cheap energy sources for its large population of nearly 85 million. The movements that Germany developed in the East Mediterranean aims to structure a wider national sphere of influence, both to stabilize the southern peripheries of Europe and to limit French attempts to regain and strengthen its influence in the region. By offering the Hamburg frigate to the “Irini” European naval operation to enforce an arms embargo on Libya, Berlin fielded a military asset which will not upset the equilibrium of the Mediterranean Basin, but will probably change Irini’s mission to be much less hostile towards Turkey that is arming and backing jihadists belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood Government of National Accords based in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

Germany has also tried to involve itself in the current Greco-Turkish hostilities in the East Mediterranean by attempting to translate the strength of its political and economic dominance over the two countries to force them to negotiate. However, this has been without any success as Turkey continues to act unilaterally and make threats of war against Greece. The Germans are effectively attempting to compete with the French in the region. Paris resolutely sides with Athens while Germany is unwilling to relinquish its centuries’ long alliance with the Turks.

The US is close to a presidential election and the last thing that President Donald Trump wants is to present his constituents with a new war thousands of miles away from home. France, Germany and Turkey, all involved in the East Mediterranean at the moment, have understood this. It is entirely plausible that Germany is somehow trying to replace the US in a very large area, ranging from the Mediterranean to the borders of Russia, using the European Union to achieve this. The convergence of a conflict in the Aegean and Germany’s involvement should be seen as competitive, and not complementary to American moral suasion. These ambitions were clearly perceived in the Oval Office and probably contributed to the US’ decision to lighten the American military presence in Germany. In Washington, no one wants the consolidation of German supremacy in Europe. Formally allied countries are behaving more frequently as competitors, if not outright rivals. It is happening between Greece and Turkey, as well as between France and Germany, and Germany and the US.

The world has not become more violent or volatile, but rather the forces that shape it and the structure of international relations have changed. The decline of exclusive US power has seen the rise of a multipolar world order, with not only the rise of great global powers like China, but also regional powers that are willing to engage in realpolitik to expand their sphere of influence, like Turkey. The decline of US unipolarity has freed up space to be exploited by Middle Powers.

France and Turkey have shown no particular hesitation in using all tools at their disposal to advance their agenda, including the military. Germany has also attempted to appear in the Mediterranean, a circumstance that seems to have awakened even Italy from its torpor, even if it remains extremely confused in its East Mediterranean policy as it attempts to appease the EU, as well as Turkey, to try and expand its influence into Libya. This has been too no effect. Many countries will find it increasingly difficult to claim absolute extraneousness to the logic of geopolitical competition, especially as the East Mediterranean becomes increasingly hostile. The truth is, as much as Germany attempts to become an influencer in the Mediterranean, especially in support of their Turkish allies, Berlin will not be able to break the French dominance in the region, as it is not a Mediterranean country, nor does it have a Mediterranean naval base. France has an entire Mediterranean coastline complemented with several bases and a massive fleet, and can therefore easily project its power in the region. Germany will not have this capability in the foreseeable future in the East Mediterranean. For this reason, Germany will not be able to break French dominance in the region.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

In Europe civil air traffic is expected to drop by 60% this year compared to 2019, due to Covid-19 restrictions, putting more than 7 million jobs at risk. On the other hand, military air traffic is growing.

On Friday, August 28, six US Air Force B-52 strategic bombers flew over the thirty NATO countries in North America and Europe in a single day, flanked by eighty fighter-bombers from allied countries in different sections.

This large exercise called “Allied Sky” – said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg – demonstrates “the powerful commitment of the United States to the Allies and confirms that we are able to deter aggression.” The allusion to “Russian aggression” in Europe is evident.

The B-52s, that were transferred on August 22 from North Dakota Minot Air Base to Fairford in Great Britain, are not old Cold War planes used only for parades. They have been continuously modernized, and retain their role as long-range strategic bombers. Now they are further enhanced.

The US Air Force will shortly equip seventy-six B-52s with new engines at a cost of $20 billion. These new engines will allow bombers to fly 8,000 km without refueling in flight, each carrying 35 tons of bombs and missiles armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. Last April, the US Air Force entrusted Raytheon Co. to produce a new long-range cruise missile, armed with a nuclear warhead for the B-52 bombers.

With these and other strategic nuclear attack bombers, including the B-2 Spirit, the US Air Force has made over 200 sorties over Europe since 2018, mainly over the Baltic and the Black Sea close to Russian airspace.

European NATO countries participate in these exercises, particularly Italy. When a B-52 flew over our country on August 28, Italian fighters joined in. simulating a joint attack mission.

Immediately after, Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon fighter-bombers took off to deploy to the Siauliai base in Lithuania, supported by about one hundred specialized soldiers. Beginning September 1, they will remain there for 8 months until April 2021, to “defend” the Baltic airspace. It is the fourth NATO “air policing” mission carried out in the Baltic area by Italian Air Force.

Italian fighters are ready 24 hours a day to scramble, to take off on alarm and intercept “unknown” aircrafts: they are always Russian airplanes flying between some internal airport and the Russian Kaliningrad exclave through international airspace over the Baltic.

The Lithuanian base of Siauliai, where they are deployed, has been upgraded by the United States; USA has tripled its capacity by investing 24 million euros in it. The reason is clear: the air base is just 220 km from Kaliningrad and 600 from St. Petersburg, a distance that a fighter like the Eurofighter Typhoon travels in a few minutes.

Why is NATO deploying these and other conventional and nuclear dual-capacity aircrafts close to Russia? Certainly not to defend the Baltic countries from a Russian attack which would mean the beginning of the thermonuclear world war if it happened. The same would happen if NATO planes attacked neighboring Russian cities from the Baltic.

The real reason for this deployment is to increase tension by creating the image of a dangerous enemy, Russia preparing to attack Europe. This is the strategy of tension implemented by Washington, with the complicity of European governments and Parliaments and the European Union.

This strategy involves a growing military spending increase at the expense of social spending. An example: the cost of a flight hour of a Eurofighter was calculated by the same Air Force in 66,000 euros (including the aircraft amortisation). An amount larger than two average gross salaries per year in public money.

Every time a Eurofighter takes off to “defend” the Baltic airspace, it burns in one hour the corresponding of two jobs in Italy.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Over the last several months the security situation in the Cabo Delgado province of the Republic of Mozambique has worsened in the aftermath of several armed attacks by a self-proclaimed Islamist group.

One strategic port town, Mocimboa da Praia, was seized by 1,000 insurgents jeopardizing the homes and livelihoods of the people in the area along with endangering a key sector in the national economy which has held the promise of significant development for this former Portuguese colony.

Mocimboa da Praia is located just 70 kilometers from the border with the United Republic of Tanzania, a contiguous state with a long history of cooperation with the ruling party, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which led the armed independence struggle against Portuguese colonialism during the 1960s up until independence during 1974-75. The port was the base for the military operations in the north aimed at preventing further damage by the rebel group which calls itself the Ahlu Sunnah Wal-Jamaa (ASWJ), known as well as “Al-Shabaab”, meaning “the youth” in Arabic.

This port was the scene of the emergence of the ASWJ nearly three years ago in October 2017 when 30 rebels attacked a police station killing two officers and causing property damage. After 2017, the number and severity of the ASWJ attacks have grown exponentially.

Since 2017, when the rebels were responsible for 3 armed attacks, these operations have accelerated with 19 in 2018, 34 in 2019 and 43 so far in 2020. According to Thunis Marais of the Rhula Intelligent Solutions, a Mozambique-based risk management firm, there could have been as many as 617 attacks by the ASWJ resulting in 1,842 deaths. (See this)

The escalation of these rebel attacks has generated concern throughout the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional organization. SADC is composed of 15 states extending from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) down to the Republic of South Africa and outward into the Indian Ocean states of Seychelles, Mauritius, Madagascar and the Union of Comoros. At two recently-held regional conferences of SADC in August, the issue of Mozambican security was discussed as regional governments pledged to assist Maputo.

Summit 40th Website Carousel

Even among mass organizations, there is a growing awareness of the danger posed by the attacks in Cabo Delgado. Obviously, the numerical rise in attacks indicates that external funding, perhaps connected with the same interests that have facilitated the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), are now involved in spreading the same threats to Southern Africa.

The Role of Western Capitalist States in Southern African Energy Development

Over the last several years, geological surveys of the Indian Ocean coastline of Mozambique and neighboring countries indicate that there are vast Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) deposits which have drawn the attention of international mining companies and financial institutions. Prospects for the extraction of LNG could provide the Mozambique government with much needed revenue to build infrastructure including public transportation, housing, healthcare and education.

There are multi-national corporations from the United States and France involved in the development of the LNG projects. The Mozambique LNG Total website says of the status of the country’s energy resource:

“The Mozambique LNG Project started with the discovery of a vast quantity of natural gas off the coast of northern Mozambique in 2010, leading to a $20 billion Final Investment Decision in 2019. Now, through cooperation and responsible project planning, the project is on track to deliver LNG in 2024. For now, our plans for the approximately 65 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas include a two-train project with the ability to expand up to 43 million tons per annum (MTPA). The Project is operated by Total – the world’s second largest LNG player with a leading presence in Africa – which is uniquely qualified to ensure the Mozambique LNG Project helps to meet the world’s increasing demand for sustainable, reliable and cleaner energy sources.” (See this)

U.S.-based energy firm Anadarko Petroleum Corporation has agreed to construct a LNG liquefaction and export terminal in Mozambique which will cost approximately $20 billion. Reportedly Anadarko has agreed to a takeover by Occidental Petroleum Corporation which will then sell its interests to Total SA, the same firm mentioned above that is based in France. (See this)

In addition to the role of Anadarko and Occidental, the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) of the U.S., an independent federal agency, has agreed to provide $4.7 billion in financing for the Mozambique LNG project in an effort to enhance Washington and Wall Street’s competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for economic influence in Africa. An EXIM press release in June says of the effort that:

“As part of EXIM’s historic 2019 reauthorization, Congress directed EXIM to establish the ‘Program on China and Transformational Exports.’ The Program’s purpose is to advance the United States’ comparative leadership in the world with respect to China and strengthen America’s competitiveness through EXIM’s support of transformational U.S. exports—and the U.S. jobs that make them possible—as U.S. companies seek to compete and win in the global marketplace.” (See this)

Many geo-political regions of the world are expected to move away from a reliance on coal for energy purposes to LNG since it is considered a cleaner form of energy. Consequently, Mozambique and other regions of East Africa has been the source of much exploration and economic speculation.

Aggravating the already existing security situation in Mozambique, the impact of climate change has also been a major challenge since 2019 when Cyclones Idai and Kenneth struck the northern region of the country causing monumental environmental and structural damage along with the loss of wildlife and people. Consequently, the appearance of an armed insurgency grouping will further hamper the capacity of the government in the capital of Maputo to rapidly address these formidable issues.

Solidarity Expands to Mass Organizations

During a SADC People’s Summit held virtually from August 18-21, there was a regional call for solidarity with Mozambique in response to the security situation in Cabo Delgado. Also in Tanzania, the country will be holding general elections on October 28.

Both Mozambique and Tanzania have Islamic populations which extend back for centuries even prior to the advent of colonialism. Mozambique has a smaller proportion of Muslims than Tanzania and its islands. In Mozambique it is estimated that 17% of the population are Muslim largely centered in the north of the country. In Tanzania on the mainland, it is said that 35% of the people adhere to Islam while on the island of Zanzibar, 99% of the population are Muslim.

The existence of significant Muslim populations in Mozambique, Tanzania as well as other East African states such as Kenya and Somalia, provides an opening for the Islamist groupings aligned with ISIS to gain a base within the countries. Often, as in other states in West Asia such as Iraq and Syria, the existence of uneven social development and unresolved political grievances can be exploited to wage attacks on governments and the people. These Islamist groupings have their origins in geo-political areas where the U.S. has waged war against sovereign states including Libya in 2011, where the Pentagon and NATO overthrew the government of former leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi rendering the North African country to impoverishment and instability.

Similar attacks on civilians such as public executions through beheadings and other forms of violence are surfacing in the character of the insurgent activities being carried out in Mozambique, Kenya and Somalia. These armed actions against civilians and government installations are at variance with the character of the wars waged by national liberation movements such as FRELIMO which focused attention during the independence struggle on structures which upheld the colonial and imperialist systems based in the Western countries.

According to a report on the People’s Summit in August:

“The Southern African People’s Solidarity Network (SAPSN) has called upon peace-loving citizens in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to stand in solidarity with the people of Mozambique as the country deals with multiple and overlapping crises, including military conflicts and religious extremism. SAPSN also instructed citizens in the region to stand in solidarity with citizens in the United Republic of Tanzania as the country holds its General Election on October 28 this year.” (See this)

SAPSN People’s Summit in August 2020

The gathering urged regional governments and people’s organizations to stand in solidarity against extremism, drug trafficking, human rights violations and the attempt to plunder resources by local and foreign interests. The SAPSN Declaration issued at the conclusion of the conference emphasized:

“We understand that the growing conflict in Northern Mozambique is ultimately the result of extra-activism and theft of natural resources at the cost of the local small-scale food producers, including farmers, fisher folks, livestock holders, herders, and host communities.”

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

There was a time when New Delhi was proudly selling the notion of establishing its own New Silk Road – from the Gulf of Oman to the intersection of Central and South Asia – to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Now it looks like the Indians have stabbed themselves in the back.

In 2016, Tehran and New Delhi signed a deal to build a 628-km rail line from strategic Chabahar port to Zahedan, very close to the Afghan border, with a crucial extension to Zaranj, in Afghanistan, and beyond.

The negotiations involved Iranian Railways and Indian Railway Constructions Ltd. But in the end nothing happened – because of Indian foot-dragging. So Tehran has decided to build the railway anyway, with its own funds – $400 million – and completion scheduled for March 2022.

The railway was supposed to be the key transportation corridor linked to substantial Indian investments in Chabahar, its port of entry from the Gulf of Oman for an alternative New Silk Road to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Upgrading rail/road infrastructure from Afghanistan to its neighbors Tajikistan and Uzbekistan would be the next step. The whole operation was inscribed in a trilateral India-Iran-Afghanistan deal – signed in 2016 in Tehran by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The unofficial New Delhi excuse revolves around fears that the project would be slammed with US sanctions. New Delhi actually did get a Trump administration sanctions waiver for Chabahar and the rail line to Zahedan. The problem was to convince an array of investment partners, all of them terrified of being sanctioned.

In fact, the whole saga has more to do with Modi’s wishful thinking of expecting to get preferential treatment under the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which relies on a de facto Quad  (US, India, Australia, Japan) containment of China. That was the rationale behind New Delhi deciding to cut off all its oil imports from Iran.

So far all practical purposes, India threw Iran under the bus. No wonder Tehran decided to move on its own, especially now with the $400 billion, 25-year “Comprehensive Plan for Cooperation between Iran and China”, a deal that seals a strategic partnership between China and Iran.

In this case, China may end up exercising control over two strategic “pearls” in the Arabian Sea/Gulf of Oman only 80 km away from each other: Gwadar, in Pakistan, a key node of the $61 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and Chabahar.

Tehran, so far, has denied that Chabahar port will be offered on a lease to Beijing. But what is a real possibility, apart from Chinese investments in an oil refinery near Chabahar, and even, in the long run, in the port itself, is an operational link between Gwadar and Chabahar. That will be complemented by the Chinese operating the port of Bandar-e-Jask in the Gulf of Oman, 350 km to the west of Chabahar and very close to the hyper-strategic Strait of Hormuz.

How corridors attract

Not even a Hindu deity on hangover could possibly imagine a more counter-productive “strategy” for Indian interests in case New Delhi backs off from its cooperation with Tehran.

Let’s look at the essentials. What Tehran and Beijing will be working on is a de facto massive expansion of CPEC, with Gwadar linked to Chabahar and further onwards to Central Asia and the Caspian via Iranian railways, as well as connected to Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean (via Iraq and Syria), all the way to the EU.

This game-changing progress will be at the heart of the whole Eurasian integration process – uniting China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and of course Russia, which is linked to Iran via the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).

For the moment, for all its hefty reverberations in multiple areas – upgrade of energy infrastructure, refurbishing of ports and refineries, construction of a connectivity corridor, investments in manufacturing, and a steady supply of Iranian oil and gas, a matter of national security for China – there’s no question that the Iran-China deal is being effectively downplayed by both sides.

The reasons are self-evident: not to raise the Trump administration’s ire to even more incandescent levels, considering both actors are considered “existential threats”. Still, Mahmoud Vezi, chief of staff for President Rouhani, guarantees the final Iran-China deal with be signed by March 2021.

CPEC, meanwhile, is on a roll. What Chabahar was supposed to do for India is already in effect at Gwadar – as transit trade to Afghanistan started only a few days ago, with bulk cargo arriving from the UAE. Gwadar is already establishing itself as a key transit hub to Afghanistan – way ahead of Chabahar.

For Kabul, the strategic factor is essential. Afghanistan essentially depends on overland routes from Pakistan – some can be extremely unreliable – as well as Karachi and Port Qasim. Especially for southern Afghanistan, the overland link from Gwadar, through Balochistan, is much shorter and safer.

For Beijing, the strategic factor is even more essential. For China, Chabahar would not be a priority, because access to Afghanistan is easier, for instance, via Tajikistan.

But Gwadar is a completely different story. It’s being configured, slowly but surely, as the key Maritime Silk Road hub connecting China with the Arabian Sea, the Middle East and Africa, with Islamabad collecting hefty transit funds. Win-win in a nutshell – but always taking into consideration that protests and challenges from Balochistan simply won’t disappear, and require very careful management by Beijing-Islamabad.

Chabahar-Zahedan was not the only recent setback for India. India’s External Affairs Ministry has recently admitted that Iran will develop the massive Farzad-B gas field in the Persian Gulf “on its own” and India might join “appropriately at a later stage”. The same “at a later stage” spin was applied by New Delhi for Chabahar-Zahedan.

The exploration and production rights for Farzad B were already granted years ago for India’s state company ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL). But then, again, nothing happened – due to the proverbial specter of sanctions.

Sanctions, by the way, had been in effect already under Obama. Yet at the time, India and Iran at least traded goods for oil. Farzad B was scheduled to be back on track after the signing of the JCPOA in 2015. But then Trump’s sanctions iced it again.

It doesn’t take a PhD in political science to ascertain who may eventually take over Farzad B: China, especially after the signing of the 25-year partnership next year.

India, against its own energy and geostrategic interests, has in fact been reduced to the status of hostage of the Trump administration. The real target of applying Divide and Rule to India-Iran is to prevent them from trading in their own currencies, bypassing the US dollar, especially when it comes to energy.

The Big Picture though is always about New Silk Road progress across Eurasia. With increasing evidence of closer and closer integration between China, Iran and Pakistan, what’s clear is that India remains integrated only with its own inconsistencies.

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Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Court hearings in Britain over the US administration’s extradition case against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms.

A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his liberty for 10 years. According to UN experts, he has been arbitrarily detained and tortured for much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless psychological pressure. He has been bugged and spied on by the CIA during his time in political asylum, in Ecuador’s London embassy, in ways that violated his most fundamental legal rights. The judge overseeing his hearings has a serious conflict of interest – with her family embedded in the UK security services – that she did not declare and which should have required her to recuse herself from the case. 

Today one year ago we visited #Assange in prison.

He showed clear signs of prolonged psychological #Torture.

First I was shocked that mature democracies could produce such an accident.

Then I found out it was no accident.

Now, I am scared to find out about our democracies… pic.twitter.com/enElUmA1fK

— Nils Melzer (@NilsMelzer) May 9, 2020

All indications are that Assange will be extradited to the US to face a rigged grand jury trial meant to ensure he sees out his days in a maximum-security prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years.

None of this happened in some Third-World, tinpot dictatorship. It happened right under our noses, in a major western capital, and in a state that claims to protect the rights of a free press. It happened not in the blink of an eye but in slow motion – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

And once we strip out a sophisticated campaign of character assassination against Assange by western governments and a compliant media, the sole justification for this relentless attack on press freedom is that a 49-year-old man published documents exposing US war crimes. That is the reason – and the only reason – that the US is seeking his extradition and why he has been languishing in what amounts to solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. His lawyers’ appeals for bail have been refused.

 Severed head on a pike

While the press corps abandoned Assange a decade ago, echoing official talking points that pilloried him over toilet hygiene and his treatment of his cat, Assange is today exactly where he originally predicted he would be if western governments got their way. What awaits him is rendition to the US so he can be locked out of sight for the rest of his life.

There were two goals the US and UK set out to achieve through the visible persecution, confinement and torture of Assange.

First, he and Wikileaks, the transparency organisation he co-founded, needed to be disabled. Engaging with Wikileaks had to be made too risky to contemplate for potential whistleblowers. That is why Chelsea Manning – the US soldier who passed on documents relating to US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan for which Assange now faces extradition – was similarly subjected to harsh imprisonment. She later faced punitive daily fines while in jail to pressure her into testifying against Assange.

The aim has been to discredit Wikileaks and similar organisations and stop them from publishing additional revelatory documents – of the kind that show western governments are not the “good guys” managing world affairs for the benefit of mankind, but are in fact highly militarised, global bullies advancing the same ruthless colonial policies of war, destruction and pillage they always pursued.

And second, Assange had to be made to suffer horribly and in public – to be made an example of – to deter other journalists from ever following in his footsteps. He is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed at the city gates.

The very obvious fact – confirmed by the media coverage of his case – is that this strategy, advanced chiefly by the US and UK (with Sweden playing a lesser role), has been wildly successful. Most corporate media journalists are still enthusiastically colluding in the vilification of Assange – mainly at this stage by ignoring his awful plight.

Story hiding in plain sight 

When he hurried into Ecuador’s embassy back in 2012, seeking political asylum, journalists from every corporate media outlet ridiculed his claim – now, of course, fully vindicated – that he was evading US efforts to extradite him and lock him away for good. The media continued with their mockery even as evidence mounted that a grand jury had been secretly convened to draw up espionage charges against him and that it was located in the eastern district of Virginia, where the major US security and intelligence services are headquartered. Any jury there is dominated by US security personnel and their families. His hope of a fair trial was non-existent.

Instead we have endured eight years of misdirection by the corporate media and its willing complicity in his character assassination, which has laid the ground for the current public indifference to Assange’s extradition and widespread ignorance of its horrendous implications.

Corporate journalists have accepted, entirely at face value, a series of rationalisations for why the interests of justice have been served by locking Assange away indefinitely – even before his extradition – and trampling his most basic legal rights. The other side of the story – Assange’s, the story hiding in plain sight – has invariably been missing from the coverage, whether it has been CNN, the New York Times, the BBC or the Guardian.

From Sweden to Clinton 

First, it was claimed that Assange had fled questioning over sexual assault allegations in Sweden, even though it was the Swedish authorities who allowed him to leave; even though the original Swedish prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed the investigation against him, saying “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever”, before it was picked up by a different prosecutor for barely concealed, politicised reasons; and even though Assange later invited Swedish prosectors to question him where he was (in the embassy), an option they regularly agreed to in other cases but resolutely refused in his.

It was not just that none of these points was ever provided as context for the Sweden story by the corporate media. Or that much else in Assange’s favour was simply ignored, such as tampered evidence in the case of one of the two women who alleged sexual assault and the refusal of the other to sign the rape statement drawn up for her by police.

The story was also grossly and continuously misreported as relating to “rape charges” when Assange was wanted simply for questioning. No charges were ever laid against him because the second Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny – and her British counterparts, including Sir Keir Starmer, then head of the prosecution service and now leader of the Labour party – seemingly wished to avoid testing the credibility of their allegations by actually questioning Assange. Leaving him to rot in a small room in the embassy served their purposes much better.

When the Sweden case fizzled out – when it became clear that the original prosecutor had been right to conclude that there was no evidence to justify further questioning, let alone charges – the political and media class shifted tack.

Suddenly Assange’s confinement was implicitly justified for entirely different, political reasons – because he had supposedly aided Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign in 2016 by publishing emails, allegedly “hacked” by Russia, from the Democratic party’s servers. The content of those emails, obscured in the coverage at the time and largely forgotten now, revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton’s camp and efforts to sabotage the party’s primaries to undermine her rival for the presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders.

Guardian fabricates a smear 

Those on the authoritarian right have shown little concern over Assange’s lengthy confinement in the embassy, and later jailing in Belmarsh, for his exposure of US war crimes, which is why little effort has been expended on winning them over. The demonisation campaign against Assange has focused instead on issues that are likely to trigger liberals and the left, who might otherwise have qualms about jettisoning the First Amendment and locking people up for doing journalism.

The Guardian: Fake news and hostility toward Assange in 44 headlines. #DumpTheGuardian https://t.co/jwl5ZbEOL7

— FiveFilters.org ⏳ (@fivefilters) April 19, 2019

Just as the Swedish allegations, despite their non-investigation, tapped into the worst kind of kneejerk identity politics on the left, the “hacked” emails story was designed to alienate the Democratic party base. Extraordinarily, the claim of Russian hacking persists even though years later – and after a major “Russiagate” inquiry by Robert Mueller – it still cannot be stood up with any actual evidence. In fact, some of those closest to the matter, such as former UK ambassador Craig Murray, have insisted all along that the emails were not hacked by Russia but were leaked by a disenchanted Democratic party insider.

An even more important point, however, is that a transparency organisation like Wikileaks had no choice, after it was handed those documents, but to expose abuses by the Democratic party – whoever was the source.

The reason that Assange and Wikileaks became entwined in the Russiagate fiasco – which wasted the energies of Democratic party supporters on a campaign against Trump that actually strengthened rather than weakened him – was because of the credulous coverage, once again, of the issue by almost the entire corporate media. Liberal outlets like the Guardian newspaper even went so far as to openly fabricate a story – in which it falsely reported that a Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and unnamed “Russians” secretly visited Assange in the embassy – without repercussion or retraction.

Assange’s torture ignored 

All of this made possible what has happened since. After the Swedish case evaporated and there were no reasonable grounds left for not letting Assange walk free from the embassy, the media suddenly decided in chorus that a technical bail violation was grounds enough for his continuing confinement in the embassy – or, better still, his arrest and jailing. That breach of bail, of course, related to Assange’s decision to seek asylum in the embassy, based on a correct assessment that the US planned to demand his extradition and imprisonment.

None of these well-paid journalists seemed to remember that, in British law, failure to meet bail conditions is permitted if there is “reasonable cause” – and fleeing political persecution is very obviously just such a reasonable cause.

The 'Breach of Bail' Allegation Against Assangehttps://t.co/XYkRmHn1cB

— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) April 7, 2019

Similarly, the media wilfully ignored the conclusions of a report by Nils Melzer, a Swiss scholar of international law and the United Nations’ expert on torture, that the UK, US and Sweden had not only denied Assange his basic legal rights but had colluded in subjecting him to years of psychological torture – a form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, that was refined by the Nazis because it was found to be crueller and more effective at breaking victims than physical torture. 

Assange has been blighted by deteriorating health and cognitive decline as a result, and has lost significant weight. None of that has been deemed worthy by the corporate media of more than a passing mention – specifically when Assange’s poor health made him incapable of attending a court hearing. Instead Melzer’s repeated warnings about the abusive treatment of Assange and its effects on him have fallen on deaf ears. The media has simply ignored Melzer’s findings, as though they were never published, that Assange has been, and is being, tortured. We need only pause and imagine how much coverage Melzer’s report would have received had it concerned the treatment of a dissident in an official enemy state like Russia or China.

In the past two years, in the entire mainstream UK press:

– Number of Editorials, Op-Eds mentioning "Nils Melzer": 0.

– Number of Editorials, Op-Eds mentioning "Assange" and "torture": 0.

(Factiva database search, 29 August 2020)

— JamieSW (@jsternweiner) August 29, 2020

A power-worshipping media

Last year British police, in coordination with an Ecuador now led by a president, Lenin Moreno, who craved closer ties with Washington, stormed the embassy to drag Assange out and lock him up in Belmarsh prison. In their coverage of these events, journalists again played dumb.

They had spent years first professing the need to “believe women” in the Assange case, even if it meant ignoring evidence, and then proclaiming the sanctity of bail conditions, even if they were used simply as a pretext for political persecution. Now that was all swept aside in an instant. Suddenly Assange’s nine years of confinement over a non-existent sexual assault investigation and a minor bail infraction were narratively replaced by an espionage case. And the media lined up against him once again.

A few years ago the idea that Assange could be extradited to the US and locked up for the rest of his life, his journalism recast as “espionage”, was mocked as so improbable, so outrageously unlawful that no “mainstream” journalist was prepared to countenance it as the genuine reason for his seeking asylum in the embassy. It was derided as a figment of the fevered, paranoid imaginations of Assange and his supporters, and as a self-serving cover for him to avoid facing the investigation in Sweden.

But when British police invaded the embassy in April last year and arrested him for extradition to the US on precisely the espionage charges Assange had always warned were going to be used against him, journalists reported these developments as though they were oblivious to this backstory. The media erased this context not least because it would have made them look like willing dupes of US propaganda, like apologists for US exceptionalism and lawlessness, and because it would have proved Assange right once more. It would have demonstrated that he is the real journalist, in contrast to their pacified, complacent, power-worshipping corporate journalism.

The death of journalism 

Right now every journalist in the world ought to be up in arms, protesting at the abuses Assange is suffering, and has suffered, and the fate he will endure if extradition is approved. They should be protesting on front pages and in TV news shows against the endless and blatant abuses of legal process at Assange’s hearings in the British courts, including the gross conflict of interest of Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the judge overseeing his case.

They should be in uproar at the surveillance the CIA illegally arranged inside the Ecuadorian embassy while Assange was confined there, nullifying the already dishonest US case against him by violating his client-lawyer privilege. They should be expressing outrage at Washington’s manoeuvres, accorded a thin veneer of due process by the British courts, designed to extradite him on espionage charges for doing work that lies at the very heart of what journalism claims to be – holding the powerful to account.

Journalists do not need to care about Assange or like him. They have to speak out in protest because approval of his extradition will mark the official death of journalism. It will mean that any journalist in the world who unearths embarrassing truths about the US, who discovers its darkest secrets, will need to keep quiet or risk being jailed for the rest of their lives.

That ought to terrify every journalist. But it has had no such effect.

Careers and status, not truth 

The vast majority of western journalists, of course, never uncover one significant secret from the centres of power in their entire professional careers – even those ostensibly monitoring those power centres. These journalists repackage press releases and lobby briefings, they tap sources inside government who use them as a conduit to the large audiences they command, and they relay gossip and sniping from inside the corridors of power.

That is the reality of access journalism that constitutes 99 per cent of what we call political news.

Nonetheless, Assange’s abandonment by journalists – the complete lack of solidarity as one of their number is persecuted as flagrantly as dissidents once sent to the gulags – should depress us. It means not only that journalists have abandoned any pretence that they do real journalism, but that they have also renounced the aspiration that it be done by anyone at all.

It means that corporate journalists are ready to be viewed with even greater disdain by their audiences than is already the case. Because through their complicity and silence, they have sided with governments to ensure that anyone who truly holds power to account, like Assange, will end up behind bars. Their own freedom brands them as a captured elite – irrefutable evidence that they serve power, they do not confront it.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that corporate journalists care less about the truth than they do about their careers, their salaries, their status, and their access to the rich and powerful. As Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky explained long ago in their book Manufacturing Consent, journalists join a media class after lengthy education and training processes designed to weed out those not reliably in sympathy with the ideological interests of their corporate employers.

A sacrificial offering 

Briefly, Assange raised the stakes for all journalists by renouncing their god – “access” – and their modus operandi of revealing occasional glimpses of very partial truths offered up by “friendly”, and invariably anonymous, sources who use the media to settle scores with rivals in the centres of power.

Instead, through whistleblowers, Assange rooted out the unguarded, unvarnished, full-spectrum truth whose exposure helped no one in power – only us, the public, as we tried to understand what was being done, and had been done, in our names. For the first time, we could see just how ugly, and often criminal, the behaviour of our leaders was.

Assange did not just expose the political class, he exposed the media class too – for their feebleness, for their hypocrisy, for their dependence on the centres of power, for their inability to criticise a corporate system in which they were embedded.

Few of them can forgive Assange that crime. Which is why they will be there cheering on his extradition, if only through their silence.  A few liberal writers will wait till it is too late for Assange, till he has been packaged up for rendition, to voice half-hearted, mealy-mouthed or agonised columns arguing that, unpleasant as Assange supposedly is, he did not deserve the treatment the US has in store for him.

But that will be far too little, far too late. Assange needed solidarity from journalists and their media organisations long ago, as well as full-throated denunciations of his oppressors. He and Wikileaks were on the front line of a war to remake journalism, to rebuild it as a true check on the runaway power of our governments. Journalists had a chance to join him in that struggle. Instead they fled the battlefield, leaving him as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters.

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/ 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

“Anyone who believes anything the US government says is gullible beyond the meaning of the word.” –Paul Craig Roberts, 2014

The dramatic reversal in official U.S. policy regarding facial masking is epitomized by, first, the May, 2020 report of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in which facial masks are acknowledged to be ineffective in blocking viral transmission, this followed two months later by CDC’s inexplicable July, 2020 recommendation that the public be masked. The earlier report was based on a review of 14 randomized controlled trials and reviews since 1982. The radical change two months later was based on nothing that could in any way negate the dozens of earlier studies.

On the July, 2020 web page, a heading, ‘Evidence for Effectiveness of Wearing Masks’, shows a ridiculous artist’s rendition of the now familiar spiked spheres indicating viruses bouncing off a cloth surface like pingpong balls off concrete (although the text states “droplets”). It is a visual lie, purposeful and unforgivable. A link to “emerging evidence” of mask efficacy leads to a bibliography of 19 “Recent Studies” (scroll down). It is difficult to explain to non-scientists what do, and what do not, qualify as bona fide scientific studies, but, just to make a point, the first listed in this CDC bibliography is a report based on a single asymptomatic infection. This might qualify as an item to incorporate into a study, but it is not in itself a “study” by the 17 (no kidding) listed authors.

The other 18 (on the website’s August 7, 2020, “update”) consist primarily of reports of viral loads, the prevalence of asymptomatic patients, “presumed” transmission in a family of 5, rates of spread, fabric filtration efficiency, even laser light visualization of oral droplets (really). Only 4 deal with masks per se, and not one comes close to making a case for the efficacy of public masking. One actually ends with the authors support of

“…. surgical mask use as one of the recommended cough etiquette interventions” [their term]. Etiquette? Check them out (scroll down). The list, a pathetically limp effort by the CDC to justify its indefensible authorization of public masking, does absolutely nothing to overturn years of studies that, in sum, show public masking to be ineffective in preventing transmission of viruses. There are no new definitive scientific studies yielding the claimed “…. hard evidence that risk of transmission goes down dramatically when people wear masks.”

Masks, and only those of a professional grade, are intended specifically as protection for health professionals dealing with infected patients likely to spread pathogens in aerosol form. The program to mask society is a grotesque governmental manipulation of a frightened and confused public. The CDC, by its hawking of the public masking charade, betrays the public trust. The situation absolutely reeks of a concealed project of global scale, and if serious investigative journalism were a norm, there would be reporters all over the apparent political connections like flies on rotting meat. Instead, we have major media intent on eclipsing a vast source, authoritative but suppressed, of anything that counters the totalitarian “official narrative”.

The contemporary situation regarding the CDC and media is not unique. In 2009, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson reported on CBS that the CDC suddenly advised against testing for H1N1 “Swine Flu” virus (in disregard of its federal mandate) after having declared it an epidemic. The professed reason for the reversal was that further tracking during a known epidemic would waste resources. In an interview by Jon Rappoport, Attkisson added that she learned through the Freedom of Information Act that before the CDC halted testing, nearly none of the cases that had been reported as H1N1 had actually been Swine Flu, or any flu at all. And what then? CBS, and news media generally, ignored her discovery and continued to claim a Swine Flu epidemic. Attkisson summed up with “We aired numerous stories pumping up the idea of an epidemic, but not the one that would shed original, new light on all the hype [and] it meant that many in the public took and gave their children an experimental vaccine that may not have been necessary.”

There is now a doubling down on enforcement of public masking. Here, September 16, 2020 on C-Span, is CDC Director Robert Redfield [skip to 1:04:40] testifying before Congress: “Face masks are the most important powerful public health tool we have ….. We have clear scientific evidence they work, and they are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask [he holds up a standard cloth mask] is more guarantee to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%, and if I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine’s not going to protect me. This mask will.” According to decades of scientific studies, the statement by the CDC Director is pure fabrication.

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When it comes to conspicuous in-your-face lying, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) may have set a bureaucratic record. Anyone still unaware that a third World Trade Center building, Building 7, collapsed later in the day on 9/11/2001 has either been in some form of solitary confinement or embalmed by TV reporting and America’s “newspapers of record”. Building 7 dropped suddenly and perfectly because it had been professionally prepared for destruction long before 9/11/2001, and a few minutes into this 15-minute presentation by A&E makes that very clear. The twin facts that Building 7 was (1) such a masterful controlled demolition that it has been called “a work of art”, and (2) its not having even been mentioned in the official 9/11 Commission Report (itself a shameless hoax), indicates not only the crime, but also an ongoing cover up with tendrils extending into many sectors of government, media and, most sadly, academia.

The 2008 release of NIST’s study, which offers the lie that office fires caused the collapse, is astounding in its brazenness and includes their computer simulation that bears no resemblance to what you actually see as 7 begins its drop with perfect symmetry at near free fall speed, as if thousands of tons of structural steel suddenly did not exist. The 4-minute video within the NIST release includes a governmental functionary lying into the camera as he most certainly was ordered to do. He is lying because the collapse of Building 7, in all of its naked obviousness, is the single event most likely to “open one’s eyes”, this leading to the discovery of an entire catalog of lies. From the standpoint of the creators of the 9/11 attack, the “office fires” lie must be protected at all cost.

The falsehoods being perpetrated by the CDC and NIST are not isolated within circumscribed strategies. Instead, both are enmeshed in a much larger, multi-faceted imperial project that has a global reach. For those who search out its disturbing details, there is a toll. William Pepper, who spent 40 years in pursuit of the truth regarding the King Assassination, wrote regarding the experience, “Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen.” That is a fair description of my own sentiments as I watch the pronouncements of medical experts from the CDC and engineers from NIST.

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Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network (SWAN) and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at [email protected]

Late on August 31, air defense forces of Syria were activated to repel Israeli missile strikes on the countryside of the Syrian capital of Damascus and the southern part of the country. According to reports, Israeli missiles targeted positions of Iranian-backed forces in the area of Mahajah and Hezbollah positions in the area of Izraa in the province of Daraa. Another group of missiles reportedly hit alleged positions of Iranian-backed forces in the area of Sahnaya in the Damascus countryside. The missiles were allegedly launched from the area of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

According to Syrian media, at least 2 people were killed and 7 others were injured in the attack. Material damage was also reported. The Israeli strikes were likely conducted as a part of the current Israeli-Hezbollah tensions in the region. Just recently, the sides exchanged a number of threats and the Israeli military even struck a supposed Hezbollah target on the Israeli-Lebanese contact line. In response, Hezbollah vowed to kill an Israeli soldier for every killed Hezbollah member. Therefore, if some Hezbollah members were killed in the August 31 attack, the movement will have to respond to this by force, or its public image in the region will be significantly undermined. Such a blow will be especially painful in the conditions of the developing political and social crisis in Lebanon following the Beirut port explosion on August 4.

On August 29, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency claimed that the United Arab Emirates has had intelligence agents in northern Syria working with Kurdish YPG and PKK militias over the past few years. They reportedly trained YPG/PKK members in the fields of espionage, counter-espionage, sabotage, acts of assassination, signals intelligence, information security and communication networks. This training allegedly took place in the areas of Qamishli, Hasaka and Deir ez-Zor.

Earlier, on August 27, Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen TV reported that a group of Saudi service members had entered the area of al-Shaddadi in the province of al-Hasakah. According to reports, the Saudi side has been trying to convince local Arab tribes to support the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF mostly consists of and is led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) that in its own turn have ties with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK is considered a terrorist group by Turkey and a number of other countries, including the United States. Thus, Turkey conducts military operations against the SDF and the YPG in northern Syria, while the United States supports them with weapons, funds and diplomatic cover.

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The director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has welled-up because of it.  In March, he feared that the world’s elderly citizens risked being marginalised in any pandemic policy.  “If anything is going to hurt the world, it is moral decay.  And not taking the death of the elderly or the senior citizens as a serious issue is moral decay.”

The elderly have, along with other categories of doomed vulnerability, found themselves centre stage in this epidemiological play of death.  They feature in morbidity reports across the globe.  They are designated objects of state charity to be protected in some cases, shunned in others.  Often, they are abandoned, left to perish alone, with only medical staff for company, if that.   

In March, the theme of abandonment featured strongly in accounts from Spain, where choices on the elderly, cruel and desperate, were made.  Retirement homes had become bits of paradise for coronavirus transmission.  Staff, poorly equipped and terrified, neglected and ignored their obligations.  During the course of disinfecting various care homes, the country’s military made alarming discoveries.  Residents were abandoned; others were found dead in bed.  Spanish Defence Minister Margarita Robles promised that the government would be “strict and inflexible when dealing with the way older people are treated”.

In Australia, the picture was repeated.  In Victoria’s second coronavirus surge, dead aged care residents were left in their beds at various aged care facilities across Melbourne for hours on end.  An already rotten system was shown to be putrefying.  Professor John Moloney, an emergency field doctor, came up with the understatement of the moment.  “What it shows is that there are significant pockets of society that are very vulnerable and it doesn’t take much to tip them over.”  It did not take long for squabbles to take place: the Victorian state government, already troubled by a failed quarantine system, sniping with the Commonwealth government, which wields general control over the aged care system.   

The federal health minister, Senator Richard Colbeck, has come across as a ditherer of some note.  His expertise, and lack of interest in his portfolio, is commensurate with his lack of interest in seniors.  When asked the obvious question by a parliamentary inquiry as to how many elderly residents had died from coronavirus, he remained untroubled by knowledge. It took 35 seconds of awkward silence as he rifled through his documents. 

Labor Senator Katy Gallagher would not wait: 254, as of the morning of Thursday, August 20.  Her colleague, Penny Wong, had come to the conclusion that the minister was resolutely incompetent.  “You know,” she explained on the ABC news channel on August 26, “I sit in the Senate every day with this bloke … I would not trust the care of my parents to him.”

Galloping diseases unveil accepted hypocrisies.  In reaching judgement on the impact of COVID-19, some world leaders have suggested a calculus at play. In a March 22 interview, Ukraine’s former health minister Illia Yemets obtusely advised the government to focus on those “who are still alive” – those above 65 were nothing better than “corpses”. 

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has also gone for the fatalist line.  He pleads the case for the hungry poor and unemployed – the economy first, in other words – even as he minimises the effect of a lethal virus that disproportionately harms them.  Towards the end of March, he laid bare his morgue-driven logic.  “I’m sorry, some people will die, they will die, that’s life.”  The same went for his old mother, a lady aged in her nineties.  Car factories should not stop, he argued, “because of traffic deaths.”

In the United States, the business interest remains in perennial battle against that of health.  The pro-economic faction in the Trump administration remains strong while such establishment voices as the New York Times argue “that a trade-off will emerge – and become more urgent in the coming months, as the economy slides deeper into recession.” 

Industries do not stop because morgues fill.  Impetuously, Beppe Sala, the mayor of Italy’s economic engine, Milan, shared a video with the slogan “Milano non si ferma” (Milano does not stop) at the end of February.  The virus was not to be feared; the engine had to keep purring.  “We bring home important results every day because every day we are not afraid.  Milan doesn’t stop.”  The NSS Magazine was effusive in praise at such audacity and happy that the scaremongers had not won the day. The “mayor’s intervention demonstrated how the institutions must work in synergy with the private sector to avoid uncertainty about the future and to support the realities that have made Milan a European city.” 

In a matter of weeks, Italy had become the next global epicentre of infection, passing China’s death toll from the virus.  Sala came to rue his enthusiasm.  “It was a video that went viral on the internet.  Everyone was sharing it, I also shared it, rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly.”

The calculus of death is something embraced by those who claim to be far sighted realists, wedded to a form of grim reaper choice theory.  Conservative, and not infrequently reactionary columnist for The Australian Janet Albrechtsen makes the case.  And she prosecutes it with considered callousness.  Writing in May, Albrechtsen offers a view not atypical to the spread sheet specialists who allocate resources and prioritise life.  In that world, the elderly are doomed.  “Government and policymakers are confronted by tough questions every day about where to spend money.”

She insists on speaking to doctors, though an unnamed “senior anaesthetist” is quoted as telling her that health decisions “are often shrouded in secrecy, but we don’t have unlimited resources to treat everyone to the maximum.”  A patient’s age becomes relevant in deciding, for instance, “who will get more years of life from a set of lungs or a new heart.”

Seeing humans as viable producers – and only that – leads to the endorsement of a particularly nasty streak of eugenics.  The Canadian, Oxford-based historian Margaret MacMillan, otherwise credited with being fairly liberal minded, makes the case that those over seventy “were not productive members of society, were not the people we need to get the economic engines going again, and we tend to be more vulnerable, so we should stay out of the way and let others get on with it”.  The productive will out; the elderly are merely needless intrusions.

Such needless intrusions can be disposed of.  Steel cold in reflection, a piece run in the British paper The Telegraph was not shy about suggesting as much, even as the death toll rose.  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” opined columnist Jeremy Warner, “from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”  The virus could be congratulated.

Such mightily inhumane reasoning merely serves to ignore that old question of adequate resources and funding.  To that end, the global economy itself needs a grand post-pandemic refitting.  UN Secretary General António Guterres suggests

“designing fiscal and monetary policies able to support the direct provision of resources to support workers and households, the provision of health and unemployment insurance, scaled up social protection, and support to businesses to prevent bankruptcies and massive job losses.” 

When health becomes a matter of profit and Social Darwinian priorities; when the granting of medical services becomes a crude exercise of penny pinching because the tax dollars are not there, choices on survival assume an almost criminal form.  Harm and the risk of making them can be minimised.  Sentimentality need not come into it.  But COVID-19 has shown that human rights, and notably those of the elderly, are brittle before the march of pandemics, made worse by the desk bound policy maker and politicians captivated by bottom lines and budgets.   

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: The private Herron nursing home in a Montreal suburb lost 31 patients to COVID-19 after their caregivers fled the premises (Source: Eric THOMAS/AFP)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s deep and longstanding ties to U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors chairman Robert Duncan are coming under heightened scrutiny after corporate paperwork filed Monday listed Duncan as a director of a major GOP super PAC closely aligned with the Kentucky Republican.

The new filing (pdf) with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission—an independent regulatory agency that oversees political action committees—names Duncan as one of three directors of the Senate Leadership Fund, a massive super PAC that has spent nearly $18 million in support of Senate Republicans thus far in the 2020 election cycle.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Senate Leadership Fund has recently received multi-million dollar donations from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and other right-wing billionaires.

Duncan—who raised more than $400 million for the GOP during his tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2007 to 2009—was nominated to the USPS Board of Governors by President Donald Trump in 2017 confirmed by the McConnell-led Senate in August of 2018. A McConnell spokesperson told the Louisville Courier Journal last month that the GOP leader recommended Duncan to Trump.

“As a businessman, a public servant, and a dedicated mentor to young people, Mike is an outstanding choice to help oversee the world’s largest postal organization,” McConnell said in an April 2018 Senate hearing considering Duncan’s nomination.

🚨 NEW: in paperwork filed minutes ago, USPS Board of Governors Chairman Robert M. Duncan is listed as Director of Mitch McConnell's $130M super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund.https://t.co/vYxNfIag9F pic.twitter.com/ILOzdXcCPb

— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) August 31, 2020

News of Duncan’s current high-level role on a super PAC closely linked to McConnell added fuel to growing concerns that recent USPS operational changes imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to both McConnell and President Donald Trump—are a ploy to influence the outcome of the November election in the GOP’s favor and, ultimately, privatize the Postal Service.

The sweeping changes—many of which DeJoy vowed to suspend last month in the face of immense public backlash—have dramatically slowed package deliveries across the nation and intensified concerns about the timely arrival of mail-in ballots in November. Last month, Democratic lawmakers urged the Board of Governors to remove DeJoy over his mail service changes and conflicts of interest, but members of the board—which unanimously appointed DeJoy in May despite his lack of USPS experience—have remained supportive of the postmaster general.

“Can the GOP’s takeover of USPS be any more blatant?” economist Robert Reich asked Monday in response to the new filing.

“The corruption is bottomless,” added Renee Graham, a columnist for the Boston Globe.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing last month, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) called attention to Duncan’s ties to the Senate Leadership Fund and American Crossroads, another major Republican super PAC. Duncan confirmed that he on the boards of both GOP organizations while also serving as chairman of the USPS Board of Governors.

In today’s @OversightDems #USPS hearing I pointed out that while serving as the Chairman of the USPS Board of Directors Robert M. Duncan is simultaneously serving on the board of two Republican Super PACS: @Senate_Fund and @AmericanXRoads. pic.twitter.com/gbJUGM9Yvi

— Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (@CongressmanRaja) August 24, 2020

Lawmakers and progressive commentators suggested that McConnell’s close relationship with the top official on the USPS Board of Governors could have something to do with the Republican leader’s refusal to consider House-passed legislation providing $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service. In a tweet last month, McConnell dismissed widespread concerns about mail slowdowns across the U.S. as “overblown conspiracy theories.”

“Is this why the Senate Majority Leader refuses to pass legislation to protect the USPS?” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus,  asked Monday night in response to the new document.

Advocacy group Swing Left tweeted late Monday that the fresh details surrounding Duncan’s ties to McConnell further highlight the need to oust the Kentucky senator, who is set to face off against Democratic challenger Amy McGrath in November.

“What a coincidence—the USPS chair’s other job is at Mitch McConnell’s super PAC, while Mitch kills Postal Service funding to secure our elections with his ‘Senate Graveyard,'” the group said. “We have to take his gavel away this November.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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News and information can only go so far.  Despite the utopian fluffiness about having multiple platforms, the consumers of news want only one thing: the reassurance that their prejudice is secure and their world view left unchallenged.   The reader of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun would dare not venture into the sinned waters of The Guardian.  Those of The Guardian would argue that readership was an oxymoronic term when used for the Sun. 

Facebook did nothing to cure this.  It simply secured an easy avenue for having pre-cooked material, tailored with its platform, available for outlets wishing to furnish them with content.  Through its algorithmic tyranny, it has assisted in reducing users to a standard conformist imbecility.  Using Facebook for news, which it admittedly does not create, is using a low grade heroin for affirmation, a junkie’s form of denial.  It offers little by way of redemption: you are encouraged, through your habitual likes and visits, to simply ingest the same hog feed.

Like Google, Facebook is facing Australia’s proposed draft media bargaining code with concern and threat.  The draft legislation proposes to involve government regulators in the relationship the company has with news sharing and largely arose because of foot dragging by the digital giants in negotiations with Australian regulators.  While Facebook News, a service that pays approved publishers, was established in the United States, no Australian equivalent was forthcoming. 

Taking the voluntary element out of proceedings, an impatient Australian Consumer and Competition Commission decided to produce a mandatory code on revenue distribution.  It romantically and mystifyingly, envisages Australian news outlets, “including independent community and regional media”, getting “a seat at the table for fair negotiations with Facebook and Google.”

The response from Facebook’s Australasian managing director Will Easton is a stab at being ominous.

“Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram.  This is not our first choice – it is our last.”

The news field is bedevilled by unsympathetic characters.  Remember the now defunct News of the World, the world’s finest lavatory reading?  The Leveson Inquiry?  Few should feel for such giants as News Corp, whose contribution to the news effort, including bankrupting the integrity of the Fourth Estate, has left a dubious, often sordid legacy.  Murdoch has, over the years, smacked his lips at the prospect of making Facebook pay for the content of his outlets, which he regards almost whimsically as meritorious.  In 2018, he suggested that, if the company wanted “to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies”.  Comically enough, he claimed that such publishers “are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content” but not being adequately remunerated for them. 

A government policy favouring such a beast is worthy of scepticism and the spectre of News Corp sitting at the table with Facebook is a spectacle of disturbing hilarity.  But Facebook’s relationship with news is also fraught, contending with claims that its platform permits all sorts of matter, masquerading as news, to make its way through the feed.  This is a point media organisations such as Nine never tire of reminding the company of, claiming itself to be a provider of “reliable news content to balance the fake news that proliferates on [Facebook’s] platform.”  The University of Canberra’s 2020 Digital News Report also found that some 36 per cent of Australians were “most worried about misinformation” on Facebook.

The company is also being rather selective whenever it becomes the news.  Take the way Easton describes the consequences of following the proposed code, the most galling of all being that Facebook will supposedly have to pay for all shared news content.  But not every item of news will necessarily require payment (heaven forfend).  In some cases, the value is bound to be negligible.  The ACCC acknowledges that

“Facebook already pays some media for news content. The code simply aims to bring fairness and transparency to Facebook and Google’s relationships with Australian news media businesses.”

The language of Easton’s statement is also reminiscent of dictatorial benevolence: We support local news outlets, “particularly local newspapers”; “we recognize that news provides a vitally important role in society and democracy”, though our “News Feed is not a significant source of revenue for us.”  The Facebook News Feed generated gratis “additional traffic worth an estimated $200 million AUD to Australian publishers.” 

The question now on the lips of news sharers is whether Facebook will make good its threat.  The Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is feeling bolshie about it all.  “We don’t respond to coercion or heavy-handed threats wherever they come from.”  Former ACCC chairman Allan Fels is unworried, proposing that the government deploy a weapon far more discomforting to the Silicon Valley giants.  “They could drop the code and just apply a tax – a general tax on digital transactions.  And the platforms have far more to lose from that.”

Some users will feel the digital pinch.  The Digital News Report claims that 39 percent of Australians use Facebook for news in the general category (the global average being 42 percent); 49 percent have done so for news specific to COVID-19. But in the jungle of punditland, views vary.  Business law academic Rob Nicholls shifts the emphasis back to the news producers themselves.  Should Facebook bar its sharing services, he writes in The Conversation, “it will potentially lead to very uncompelling content on both Facebook and Instagram.  Can you imagine Instagram or Facebook without the ABC or Australian news sources?” 

Facebook, Nicholls also reasons, clearly misunderstands the nature of mandatory industry codes.  Akin to a franchising code of conduct that acknowledges the power imbalance between franchisors and franchisees, the ACCC legislation recognises the same “for news media businesses and social media platforms.”

Easton, should the threat be made good, will be returning Facebook to what it once was: the social network of old created by dysfunctional anti-social types desperate to be loved.  “Facebook products and services in Australia that allow family and friends to connect will not be impacted by this decision.”  The just will be barred from sharing news on it, which, in the scheme of things, might not be such an awful thing.

Time, then, to get inventive.  Go back to libraries. (Where and when you can.)  Subscribe to a range of other news outlets directly.  Encourage them to deliver news instead of being the news.  Cut out the niggling middleman and go for the source, be it via app, or email subscription.  There is even some research suggesting that this is already taking place.  James Meese and Edward Hurcombe have identified “a renewed focus on subscriptions”.  Older media companies have also noticed readers visiting their publication home pages, challenging “the idea that [they] depend totally on Facebook.”  Facebook was never a deity but whatever it is, the time has come to well and truly demote it.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Black Agenda Report

Washington’s goal is to get countries in the Indo-Pacific region to work together as a bulwark against ‘a potential challenge from China’, says the US official- He says the four nations are expected to meet in Delhi sometime this autumn

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Washington aims to formalise its closer Indo-Pacific defence relations with India, Japan and Australia – also known as “the quad” – into something more closely resembling the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nat), a senior US State Department official said on Monday.

The US government’s goal is to get the grouping of four countries and others in the region to work together as a bulwark against “a potential challenge from China” and “to create a critical mass around the shared values and interests of those parties in a manner that attracts more countries in the Indo-Pacific and even from around the world … ultimately to align in a more structured manner”, said Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun.

“The Indo-Pacific region is actually lacking in strong multilateral structures,” he said. “They don‘t have anything of the fortitude of Nato or the European Union. The strongest institutions in Asia oftentimes are not, I think, not inclusive enough and so … there is certainly an invitation there at some point to formalise a structure like this.”

Once again, NATO is operating dangerous and bold military maneuvers in regions close to the European Russian border. This time, the country hosting the tests is Estonia, a Baltic State that in recent decades has been characterized by a strong pro-Western and anti-Russian stance. The small European country is occupied by a large contingent of American troops and will be in such a situation until at least September 10, when the operations end.

The tests started on September 1 are already causing a small diplomatic crisis between Russia and the United States. The Russian Embassy in Washington commented on the exercises with great antipathy:

“The Russian Federation has repeatedly offered to the United States and its allies to limit training activities and to divert exercise areas from the line of contact between Russia and NATO. We consider the actions of the US Armed Forces in Estonia provocative and extremely dangerous for regional stability (…) What signal from NATO members want to send us? Who is actually fueling tensions in Europe? And all this is taking place in the context of an aggravated political situation in that region of the European continent. Rhetorical question: how would the Americans react if such shooting were carried out by our military near the US borders?”.

In addition to the diplomatic crisis, military tension broke out in the region last Tuesday. NATO planes that would be used in the exercises were intercepted unexpectedly by Russian fighters while flying over the border area. In addition, Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus, put his troops on high alert and started his own military exercises, understanding NATO’s maneuvers as a provocative and threatening measure, not only against Russia, but also Belarus.

The exercises also begin during a series of events that have raised tensions in the region. On Friday, an American B-52 bomber and a Russian Su-27 aircraft conducted dangerous maneuvers in European airspace, chasing each other. On the same day, similar tensions were reported in the Ukrainian Black Sea. Countries with less military potential are becoming concerned and feel threatened by hostilities, such as Sweden, which has issued a danger warning to its troops.

This is not the first time that the Baltic countries have become the scene of NATO military actions especially aimed at provoking Russia. For years, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have increased their participation in NATO programs, together with Poland, countries that since the end of communism have been adhering to positions against Russia on the international stage. This exercise currently being carried out in Estonia is in its eighth edition, having already become an annual NATO program. In 2020, Germany, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Spain, United States, Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Norway, Poland, United Kingdom, Czech Republic and Romania are participating in the operations.

The objective, according to its organizers, is to test NATO’s defense capabilities against possible attacks on European soil. However, despite the official narrative, the provocative nature of the tests is truly clear, especially when we take into account the current global moment, where the world faces a terrible pandemic, of which the US is precisely the biggest victim. In early 2020, a NATO military program was in preparation, foreseeing a series of audacious exercises in Europe, mainly in the border region with Russia. This program – dubbed “Defender Europe 2020” – was canceled just a few months ago due to the pandemic. At the time, Defender Europe’s tests were interpreted as provocative acts against Russia because they foresee a large concentration of American military contingent on the Russian border, which we are also witnessing now in Estonia. Although such tests have been going on for years, in 2020 the implementation of this program in the midst of the pandemic has a much more provocative dimension: Washington is transmitting to Russia its message that it remains awake in the geopolitical scenario.

But this is not the most correct attitude. While the pandemic data on American soil is approaching 200,000 dead and the country is dealing with a strong internal crisis, with violent demonstrations and racial tensions, Washington is preparing war plans and demonstrations of strength in other continents.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Sino/US relations are more fraught with dangers than at any time since Nixon’s 1972 meeting with Mao in Beijing — followed by formal normalization of relations by Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping in 1979.

Growing mistrust and friction define bilateral relations today because of Washington’s aim to undermine China’s political, economic, industrial, technological, and military prominence on the world stage.

Trump’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy director Peter Navarro earlier said “(w)e are at war” with China.

According to his war secretary Mark Esper,

“(t)he Pentagon is prepared for China,” adding:

Beijing aims “to displace us (sic) — certainly from the region and preferably on the global stage (sic).”

“(I)f we don’t wake up to the long-term challenge and the possible threat that China presents to us (sic), then we may find ourselves living in a world different (from) what we want to live in (sic).”

Pompeo called China the “central threat of our times,” vowing US toughness to counter its growing prominence, a “threat” to Washington’s hegemonic aims.

In response to Trump regime pressure, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway and Sweden, along with right wing EU parliament members agreed to join a US-led anti-China alliance.

According to Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, the Trump regime seeks a NATO-like alliance of Indo-Pacific nations to counter China, adding:

The region “lack(s) strong multilateral structures.”

It doesn’t “have anything of the fortitude of NATO or the European Union.”

“The strongest institutions in Asia oftentimes are not, I think, not inclusive enough and so…there is certainly an invitation there at some point to formalize a structure like this.”

US-dominated NATO began modestly in April 1949 with 12 founding members.

Today it has 30 with longterm aims of expanding the alliance worldwide to serve US imperial interests.

As long as it exists, world peace and stability will remain unattainable.

The risk of global war with nuclear weapons will haunt humanity at a time when Washington’s only enemies are invented. No real ones exist.

China, Russia, Iran, and other sovereign independent countries on the US target list for regime change seek cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.

Their military expenditures are a small fraction of what Washington spends for global militarization and belligerence.

NATO has always been about offense, not defense, notably since the Soviet Union dissolved nearly 30 years ago.

As long as the alliance exists and expands, a permanent state of war will threaten humanity.

Last week, Trump regime national security advisor Robert O’brien vowed to challenge China in its part of the world, saying:

The US “is not going to back down from its long-held principles that the world’s ocean-ways and international waters should be free for navigation, and the same with space and with air rights in international airspace.”

He added that so-called “quad” countries USA, Japan, Australia and India meetings are planned in September and October to counter China.

Pompeo and O’Brien aim to enlist other Indo-Pacific nations to ally with the US against China, a policy certain to heighten regional tensions more than already.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review,

“(a) smarter way for Asia to move forward…would be to avoid ideological conflict, accept the region’s realities, set aside or solve sovereignty disputes and focus on the hard-nosed issues of economic development for which the region has a good track record,” adding:

This “approach is necessary because previous attempts to forge a common Western-led Asian strategic structure have had little success.”

The 1954-formed Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) dissolved in 1977.

Since then, there’s been no multinational Asian military alliance — what Washington wants reestablished to serve its regional imperial interests.

Earlier attempts to include India in a pro-Western Asian alliance fell short.

The US is an unreliable partner because of its global militarism and belligerence at the expense of cooperative relations among the world community of nations that mutually benefit them all.

Washington’s notion of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is all about its aim to dominate the region.

At this year’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong warned that “(w)e  do not want to end up with rival blocs forming or countries having to take one side or another.”

Asian nations should work cooperatively with others worldwide non-confrontationally in the interest of regional and world peace.

It’s also in their interest to have the Indo-Pacific Asian-led, not dominated by a non-regional power.

Separately, a Pentagon warship provocatively sailed through the 112-mile-wide Taiwan Strait for the second time in two weeks — defying the Sino/US agreed on one-China principle, prompting its Foreign Ministry to express “deep concerns to the US side,” adding:

“The Taiwan question is the most sensitive and important issue between China and the US.”

“We urge the US to abide by the one-China principle and the three joint communiques, to be prudent and act appropriately with regards to Taiwan so that it doesn’t harm China-US relations and the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait’s region.”

“We sternly warn related parties that any statement and act that sabotages the one-China principle and stirs up trouble in the Taiwan Straits does not fit the fundamental interests of China and the US, and damages the well-being of compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, as it brings a real threat to peace and stability in the region, which is very dangerous.”

Beijing rejects a statement by the Pentagon, saying the transit of its warships through the Taiwan Strait “demonstrates the US  commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” adding:

“The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere” in international waters and airspace.

Last week in agreement with China, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen warned “of the risk of accidental conflict from the rise in (regional) military activities.”

According to Chinese military expert Song Zhongping, provocative transiting of the Taiwan Strait by US warships poses a “real threat” to Beijing.

It risks possible collisions with Chinese warships that monitor its waters or an incident resulting in confrontation.

Along with its vessels, PLA satellites, radar, aircraft, reconnaissance drones, and warplanes monitor movements of US regional military forces close to Chinese territory.

If trespass into its waters or airspace occurs, a defensive response follows to counter the intrusion.

China Arms Control and Disarmament Association advisor Xu Guanghu noted that provocative US military activities in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait help the PLA prepare for combat by treating the intrusions as “simulated enemies.”

A PLA spokesman explained that its forces are on constant high alert to defend Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity against threats posed by the Pentagon’s regional presence.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

 

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”—Anonymous

Have you noticed that the government’s answer to every problem is more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty?

The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn.

Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

To the police state, this COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge boon, like winning the biggest jackpot in the lottery. Certainly, it will prove to be a windfall for those who profit from government expenditures and expansions.

Given the rate at which the government has been devising new ways to spend our money and establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems, this current crisis will most likely end up ushering in the largest expansion of government power since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

As chief correspondent Dan Balz asks for The Washington Post, “Government is everywhere now. Where does it go next?”

When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control.

This expansion of government power is also increasing our federal debt in unprecedented leaps and bounds. Yet the government isn’t just borrowing outrageous amounts of money to keep the country afloat. It’s also borrowing indecent sums to pay for programs it can’t afford.

The government’s primary response to this COVID-19 pandemic—flooding the market with borrowed money in the amount of trillions of dollars for stimulus payments, unemployment insurance expansions, and loans to prop up small businesses and to keep big companies afloat—has pushed the country even deeper in debt.

By “the country,” I really mean the taxpayers. And by “the taxpayers,” it’s really future generations who will be shackled to debt loads they may never be able to pay back.

This is how you impoverish the future.

Democrats and Republicans alike have done this.

Without fail, every president within the last 50 years has expanded the nation’s debt. When President Trump took office on January 20, 2017, the national debt—the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back—was a whopping $19.9 trillion. Despite Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp and eliminate the debt, the federal debt is now approaching $27 trillion and is on track to surpass $78 trillion by 2028.

For many years now, economists have warned that economic collapse would be inevitable if the national debt ever surpassed the size of the U.S. economy. The government passed that point in June 2020 and has yet to put the brakes on its spending.

In fact, the Federal Reserve just keeps printing more money in order to prop up the economy and float the debt.

At some point, something’s got to give.

As it now stands, the U.S. is among the most indebted countries in the world.

The National Debt Clock in New York, last year. By the end of June this year, the national debt in the United States had surpassed the gross domestic product. (Credits: Gabby Jones for The New York Times)

Almost a third of the $27 trillion national debt is owed to foreign entities such as Japan and China.

Most of the debt, however, is owed to the public.

How is this even possible? Essentially, it’s a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

First, the government requires taxpayers to pay a portion of their salaries to the Social Security Trust Fund. The government then turns around and borrows from Social Security to cover its spending needs. Then the government raises taxes or prints more money in order to pay out whatever is needed to the retirees.

It’s a form of convoluted economics that only makes sense to government bureaucrats looking to make a profit off the backs of the taxpayers.

According to the U.S. Debt Clock, each taxpayer’s share of the national debt is $214,000 and growing.

That’s almost five times more than the median income for what Americans earn in a year. That’s also almost five times more than the average American has in savings, across savings accounts, checking accounts, money market accounts, call deposit accounts, and prepaid cards. Almost 60% of Americans are so financially strapped that they don’t have even $500 in savings and nothing whatsoever put away for retirement.

Just the interest that must be paid on the national debt every year is $338 billion and growing. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the fastest growing item in the budget over the next decade will be interest on the debt.

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported in 2019, before COVID spending pushed the country over the fiscal cliff, “Interest payments will rise from $325 billion last year to $928 billion by 2029, a nearly threefold increase. If tax cuts and spending increases are extended, interest will exceed $1 trillion and set a new record as a share of the economy. The federal government will spend more on interest than on Medicaid or children by 2020. By 2024, interest will match defense spending.”

Bottom line: The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who will have to pay for it.

As financial analyst Kristin Tate explains, “When the government has its debt bill come due, all of us will be on the hook.”

Despite the tax burden “we the people” are made to bear, we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it wants—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

This brings me to a curious point: what the future will look like ten years from now, when the federal debt is expected to surpass $78 trillion, an unsustainable level of debt that will result in unprecedented economic hardship for anyone that does not belong to the wealthy elite.

Interestingly enough, that timeline coincides with the government’s vision of the future as depicted in a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

“Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a video created by the Army and used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University.

According to the video, the government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power, and is grooming its armed forces (including its heavily armed federal agents) accordingly to solve future domestic political and social problems.

The training video, titled “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” is only five minutes long, but it provides a chilling glimpse of what the government expects the world to look like in 2030, a world bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Far from draining the politically corrupt swamps of Washington DC of lobbyists and special interest groups, however, the Trump Administration has further mired us in a sweltering bog of corruption and self-serving tactics.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting during a war?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

Funny how closely fact tracks fiction these days.

Just recently, in fact, I re-watched Escape from L.A., John Carpenter’s 1996 post-apocalyptic action film that imagines a future (2013, in fact) in which the United States has elected a president for life who runs the country according to his own theocratic moral law. Anyone who runs afoul of the president’s moral laws is stripped of their citizenship and either electrocuted or deported to the island of Los Angeles, a penal colony where lawlessness reigns supreme.

As the film’s opening narrator recounts:

In the late 20th century, hostile forces inside the United States grow strong. The city of Los Angeles is ravaged by crime and immorality. To protect and defend its citizens, the United States Police Force is formed. A presidential candidate predicts a millennium earthquake will destroy L.A. in divine retribution. The earthquake measuring 9.6 on the Richter scale hits at 12:59 P.M. August 23rd in the year 2000. After the devastation, the Constitution is amended, and the newly elected president accepts a lifetime term of office. The country’s capital is moved from Washington, D.C., to the president’s hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. Los Angeles Island is declared no longer part of the United States and becomes the deportation point for all people found undesirable or unfit to live in the new, moral America. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped among the shorelines, making any escape from L.A. impossible. From the southeastern hills of Orange County to the northwestern shore of Malibu, the great wall excludes L.A. from the mainland. The president’s first act as permanent Commander in Chief is Directive 17: once an American loses his or her citizenship, they are deported to this island of the damned, and they never come back.

Carpenter is a brilliant filmmaker whose dystopian visions of the future are eerily prescient, but this film is particularly unnerving: environmental disasters; engineered viruses used like weapons to control the masses; riots and looting that leave the populace longing for law and order; religion used like a weapon; martial law; surveillance that keeps every citizen under the government’s watchful eye; and a growing awareness that the only path to freedom left for humanity is to shut down the government and start over again.

We’re almost there now.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, unless we make some effort to reject the sorry excuse for representative government that we have been saddled with, the future that awaits us—whether it’s the future envisioned by the Pentagon in its training video or the future imagined by Carpenter—will be a living nightmare from which there is no escape.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The CBC (the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation) published an article about Saturday’s lockdown protest in Ottawa. It heralds with this ironic deck: “Online misinformation about pandemic safety measures thriving.” Ironic, because CBC’s website has been one of the most abhorrent purveyor of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 “pandemic.”

The article demonstrates the CBC’s lack of journalistic integrity by describing the protesters as “venting their frustrations over science-backed measures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19.”

Notice how they said “science-backed” instead of “evidence-based”? Science-backed could simply mean a scientist with a theory. It’s a careful choice of words considering that the evidence shows that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu, and “safety” measures are ineffective and far from safe.

Furthermore, why would it make people more safe if we “slow the spread,” as they say? Clearly, hospitals in Canada are nowhere near maximum capacity. COVID patients are not overflowing into emergency tent clinics.

According to Health Canada only 2,335 people in a country of 37 million were admitted to ICU. Which is an interesting number, considering that we (apparently) have had 9,120 deaths from COVID-19. That means that 75% of those who died from COVID never received the coveted care we are being forced to social distance for. According to a 2015 Critical Care report Canada has 3,170 ICU beds capable of ventilation. That leaves 700 ventilators that never pumped a lung. Not that we would have needed that many, since only 466 of ICU patients actually received mechanical ventilation.

Of course, we have no idea how many of those COVID cases were also suffering from the flu or had other pre-existing conditions. The coronavirus was merely at the “scene of the crime” (if you believe the PCR witness).

So how can the CBC claim that COVID-19 containment measures are about “safety.” What’s safe about driving millions of people into poverty? Unless they are talking about saving the reputation of politicians. And that’s why people are protesting. The rest of their illogical smear piece focused on protestors’ opposition to being forced to wear mask.

Be kind, don’t support medical tyranny by wearing a mask

Image on the right: Since when has wearing a mask become an act of kindness?

“[Mask wearing has] been shown to be a very effective public health measure,” claims Dr. Craig Jenne, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Alberta. He was quoted in CBC’s latest corona propaganda piece where they belittled Canadians protesting the corona “safety” measures being enforced upon them.

So how does Jenne know mask wearing has been “a very effective public health measure”? I guess it depends what “effect” Health Canada was aiming for. Mindless servitude or improved health?

If it’s the latter then I assume Health Canada has a control group in some remote corner of Newfoundland where the population observed all the new normal dictates sans the masks?

Otherwise, is Jenne just guessing? Is he possibly confusing personal bias with objective science? After all, the government’s own documents admit that seven randomized controlled trials (with verified outcomes) show masks don’t stop primary or secondary infection.

But the CBC article likes to skip pesky facts and stick to the opinions of “experts” on the government’s payroll. Of course, Jenne did share one fact with us: “We know, for example, that masks can reduce the transmission and spread of droplets by more than six-fold.”

Yes, we know masks stop droplets. I don’t need intravital microscopy and a degree in spitology to see that. Now, if it’s a six-fold reduction, that’s well, interesting. I guess. More vital is that despite the fact masks do such a wonderful job of collecting spit in front of your mouth… they still do not decrease viral infection in any way.

Jenne then tries to excuse the fact that mandatory masking violates the Canadian Bill of Rights: “Wearing a mask is not a large ask and [it] is not an arduous process to literally protect the lives of people in your community.”

Sure, if they did protect anyone, which as far as we know, after 20 years of testing, they do not. So stop suggesting people who don’t wear masks are putting people at risk, because you have no proof. It seems far more likely that those wearing masks are putting people at risk of living in a deranged germaphobic society under a tyrannical regime absent of even the facade of democracy.

Jenne’s concludes with another illogical point: “If we can do our part to keep viral numbers down, we can protect [those who cannot wear masks for medical reasons].” Protect? Even the most official, optimistic and unscientific rhetoric admits that masks would only delay someone from contracting a virus, not prevent it.

As Albert Camus wrote: “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

A good conscience is the last thing they need. I refuse the mask by claiming an ethical-religious exemption. And the two times I had to wear one, I wore a Guy Fawkes mask of dissent. Please, consider doing the same. Be kind, and do not support this violation of freedom, science and humanity in any way.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Daily Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, COVID-27: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca

All images in this article are from the author

The House passed legislation to defend the Postal Service, but unless the Senate takes action, the Postmaster General will be free to continue policies that have slowed the mail and raised concerns about mail-in voting.

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The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice of intent to sue today over the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Revised Methods” for assessing pesticide risks to endangered species.

At the request of the pesticide industry, the EPA made extensive changes to the process set forth by the Obama administration — all of which would allow the agency to dismiss real-world impacts from pesticides. The new methods are designed to allow the EPA to ignore widespread harm from pesticides to most of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals, including American burying beetles, Rio Grande silvery minnows and Hawaiian hoary bats.

“The science is clear: Pesticides cause devastating harm to many of our most vulnerable plants and animals, and yet the EPA’s response is to issue new methods so it can cover its eyes and pretend everything’s fine,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center. “The EPA’s refusal to protect endangered species from pesticides and continued bowing to the pesticide industry is nothing less than a national disgrace.”

The Revised Methods purposefully ignore many common ways imperiled plants and animals are harmed and killed by pesticides. For example, under the Revised Methods, the EPA will not consider downstream runoff of pesticides into water bodies where endangered aquatic species, like fish and snails, live. The new rules also allow the EPA to deliberately ignore the impacts of pesticides on endangered plants that depend on insect pollination, but whose pollinators are imperiled by pesticides.

The EPA’s final Revised Methods are only slightly less harmful than its draft version, which was described by the attorneys general of 10 states and the District of Columbia as “antithetical to the plain language and purpose of the ESA.”

Despite heavy criticism, the agency finalized many of the key provisions it designed to reduce protections for endangered species, including limiting protection to species whose range overlaps less than 1% with a pesticide-treated area, even if that 1% is the species’ most essential habitat, such as spawning habitat for salmon.

To date the EPA has never completed a nationwide Endangered Species Act consultation on pesticides or implemented a single conservation measure for any endangered species developed through such consultations.

Instead the agency has disregarded the expert recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and undermined years of work by career scientists in order to prevent the implementation of common-sense restrictions on harmful pesticides.

“The EPA has fully embraced the worst tactics of the tobacco industry and climate-deniers, all so it can continue to ignore the serious harms it allows to be inflicted on endangered plants and animals,” said Burd. “We will not let the EPA get away with this.”

Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the new assessment methods were driven by political-level appointees at the EPA, Department of the Interior, Department of Commerce and the White House.

From 2013 to 2017, career scientists at the EPA and federal wildlife agencies worked to implement the recommendations of the National Academy of Science assessing the impacts of pesticides. This collaborative and transparent process was developed with hundreds of hours of stakeholder input but was halted when then acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was briefed on the results of the initial assessments in October 2017.

This unprecedented effort to scuttle endangered species consultations spurred the EPA and wildlife agencies to attempt to justify their failure to release the analysis and to demonstrate they are taking action to save endangered animals on the brink of extinction.

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Featured image is from CounterPunch

As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All.  This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal.  However, it is not the final goal.  It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world.

Contrasting Cuban changes in medicine during the last 60 years with the US non-system of medical care gives a clear picture of why changes must be all-encompassing.  The concept of Medicare-for-All is deeply intertwined with attacks on Cuba’s global medical “missions” and the opposite responses to Covid-19 in the two countries.

Going Forward or Going Backward?

Immediately after the 1959 revolution Cubans began the task of spreading medical care to those without it.  This included a flurry of building medical clinics and sending doctors to poor parts of cities and to rural areas, both of which were predominantly black.

As the revolution spread medicine from cities to the country, it realized the need to expand medical care across the world.  This included both sending medical staff overseas and bringing others to Cuba for treatment.  Cuba spent 30 years redesigning its health care system, which resulted in the most comprehensive community-based medicine in the world.

Throughout the expansion of health care, both inside the country and internationally, Cuban doctors used “allopathic” medicine (based largely on drugging and cutting, which is the focus of US medical schools).  But they simultaneously incorporated traditional healing and preventive medicine as well as respecting practices of other cultures.

Today, the most critical parts of the Cuban health care system include (1) everyone receives health care as a human right, (2) all parts are fully integrated into a single whole which can quickly respond to crises, (3) everyone in the country has input into the system so that it enjoys their collective experiences and (4) health care is global.

In contrast, the call for Medicare-for-All by the left in Democratic Party is a demand for Allopathy-for-US-Citizens.  It would extend corporate-driven health care, but with no fundamental change towards holistic and community medicine.  Though a necessary beginning, it is a conservative demand which does not recognize that a failure to go forward will inevitably result in market forces pushing health care backward.

There is already a right-wing effort to destroy Medicare and Medicaid in any form and leave people to only receive medical treatment they can pay for.  It is part of the same movement to destroy the US Post Office and eliminate Social Security.  It is funded by the same sources trying to get rid of public education except for a few schools that will prepare the poor to go to prison or be unemployed.  These are neoliberals who believe that Black-Lives-Do-Not-Really-Matter.  They hate all the gains won during the last century and a half and want to overturn any form of environmental protection, any workers’ rights, the eight-hour work day, child labor laws, and civil rights, including voting rights.

Destroying Health Care Advances of the Cuban Revolution

What does the Cuban health care have to do with Medicare-for-All in the US?  Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life expectancy than the US while spending less than 10% per person annually on health care.  It has provided medical education to so many from other countries that in 1999 it opened the Latin American School of Medicine to bring students from impoverished countries to study and become doctors.  By 2020 it had trained over 30,000 doctors.  It had also trained huge numbers of other health professionals from beyond its shores.

Even before Cuba brought in students, it sent its own professionals on “missions” to help those in other countries.  Over the past six decades more than 400,000 Cuban medical professionals have worked in 164 countries and improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The US response to this incredible international medical revolution documents that it is not satisfied to stop medical care from improving but has an irresistable urge to reverse gains across the globe.  The US government glommed onto complaints from physicians in multipe countries who whined because Cuban doctors would go to jungles and other dangerous areas where the the rich urban doctors refused to venture.  Of course, the US had its own reasons to despise Cuban medical assistance.

Cuba has long done humanitarian work in education as well as medicine which puts its northerm behemoth to shame.  Its actions expose that health care can be done vastly cheaper with better outcomes than corportate medicine, which traumatizes financiers of the sickness industry.

Republicans and Democrats are firmly united with corporate media in hiding Cuban medical accomplishments from the US population.  They defnitely do not want other poor countries to replicate Cuba’s system.  Horrifed at the prospect that Cuban health care would shine as an example, the US went to work to undermine and destroy Cuban medical internationalism in any way it could.

In August 2006 the George W. Bush administration began the “Cuban Medical Professional Parole” program to encourage Cuban medical staff on international missions to desert and move to the US, with no questions asked. Only 2-3% did so; but their departure left those poor countries with less care.

This is in line with any corporate goals to destroy local health care and replace it with profit-based health care across the globe.  Driven by the same market factors that compel extraction, transportation and food production industries to go international, the US sickness industry likely feels the urge to create and control a global market of “health care providers.”  One of its main obstacles will be community health systems, which actually work much better for poor people.

As the knowledge of the success of Cuba’s medical information spread, its detractors flew into a frenzy and clutched onto wild hallucinations.  As accurately explained by Vijay Prashad, they fantasized that Cuba was engaging in “human trafficking” by forcing its doctors to work internationally.  The accusation is blatantly absurd since Cuban doctors always have the choice of whether to broaden their medical knowledge by going abroad and treating diseases that have been eradicated in Cuba or to stay at home.

It is true that its doctors have incredibly low wages (as do all working people in Cuba) due to the destructive effects of the US embargo.  In one of the great ironies of propaganda machines, the US seeks to criminalize Cuba in the eyes of the world by screeching that medical wages are low while itself being the cause of meager pay.

Results of this attacking Cuba during Covid-19 have been murderous.  After Lenín Moreno became president of Ecuador in 2017 he abruptly veered from what he promised and ordered Cuban doctors to leave.  At the same time Venezuela and Cuba had a total of 27 Covid-19 deaths, Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, had an estimated death toll of 7,600.  Similarly, when the neoliberal Jair Bolsonaro took power in Brazil in 2019, he threw out Cuban doctors.  This left the country with rising infant mortality and so unprepared for Covid that even inviting them back was unable to undo the damage.  Following the 2019 anti-democratic coup in Bolivia, the ultra right-wing Jeanine Áñez had herself anointed as president and expelled Cuban doctors, which devastated that country’s health care system.  Although Bolivia is a physically isolated country with a population of only 8.7 million it had 2200 deaths by June 2020.

Who Coped with Covid-19?

The fact that Cuba had gone far, far beyond Medicare-for-All is what allowed it to have such spectacular control over Covid.  Its politicians unified behind the ministry of health which developed a national strategy.  That strategy was in effect before the island’s first victim had succumbed to the disease.  Social distancing, masks and contact tracing were universally accepted.  According to Susana Hurlich, medical students went door-to-door collecting data, distributing homeopathic medication (PrevengHo-Vir), and, most important, finding out what problems people needed help with.

Neighborhood doctors collected data to send to polyclinics and helped make certain that residents’ medical and other needs were met.  Clinic staff met needs that neighborhood doctors could not provide and sent patients they could not care for to hospitals.  Hospital doctors slept at hospitals for 14 day shifts before being quarantined for another 14 days so they would not infect their families or communities.

On July 18, deaths from Covid-19 numbered 140,300 in the US and 87 in Cuba. Though its population is only 30 times that of Cuba, the US had 1,612 times as many deaths.

As US politicians conspired with corporations to see how much profit could be made from the pandemic, Cuban health care went international.  When northern Italy became the epicenter of Covid-19 cases, one of its hardest hit cities was Crema. On March 26, 2020 Cuba sent 52 doctors and nurses. A smaller and poorer Caribbean nation was one of the few aiding a major European power.

On March 12, 2020 nearly 50 crew members and passengers on the British cruise ship Braemar either had Covid-19 or were showing symptoms as the ship approached the Bahamas, a British Commonwealth nation. During the next five days, the US, the Bahamas, and several other Caribbean countries turned it away.  On March 18, Cuba became the only country to allow the Braemar’s over 1000 crew members and passengers to dock.

The incidents of Crema and the Braemar were hardly without precedent.  They resulted from 60 years of medical internationalism by Cuba.  Just as Cuba’s actions during Covid-19 reflected its development, so the horrible expansion of the disease in the US, Brazil and India showed the lack of concern under reactionary rule.

Capitalism has exterminated hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in order to consolidate growth and power.  Whether enslaving Africans, or slaughtering native Americans to steal land, or experimenting with nuclear bombs during WWII, or destroying health systems that would prevent mass death during a pandemic, these are merely “costs of doing business” to capitalism.  Driving native peoples off of land is not unique to US in the past, but continues today throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Trump has terribly bungled coping with Covid-19, but the approach of Democrats is not essentially different.  Neither corporate party has any intention of providing Cuban-type care within the US. And they certainly do not even imagine putting protection of the world’s poor from Covid above profit potentials for US corporations.  They never had any intention of telling US public that 72 countries had requested Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B for treating Covid-19.  They wanted people to believe that only an American or European country could discover treatment.

Is Thinking Beyond Medicare-for-All Part of the Real World?

Is the idea of a radical health care transformation even worth talking about as right-wingers seem to be on the move across much of the world?  Let’s remember our past.  During the time the reactionary Richard Nixon was president (1969-1974), despite an overwhelming pro-war victory, the following were accomplished under his reign: declaration of an end to the Vietnam War, start of the Food Stamp program, decriminalization of abortion, recognition of China, creation of Environmental Protection Agency, passage of Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of FBI’s COINTEL program, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, formal ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act.

We have never won as many gains since then, even when there was a Democratic House, Senate and president.  The essential difference between then and now was the existence of mass movements.  Perhaps it is the time for today’s movements to ask if a fair and just payment of reparations by the US and western Europe for the pain and suffering they have caused throughout the world should include providing medical care for those billions of people who Cuba cannot afford to help.  Health care is not genuine health care if it fails to be health-care-for-the-world.

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Don Fitz ([email protected]) is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought where a version of this article first appeared.  He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor.  His book, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, has been available since June 2020.

The announcement on 13 August that Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will normalise relations, around the same as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was suspending plans to annex more areas of the West Bank that it seized during the 1967 ‘Six Dar War’, has naturally raised the adjunct question about what this deal means for the two powerhouses of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran? As with so many queries relating to the Middle East, the answer is not as straightforward as many might imagine, but it is outlined below. To begin with, the Israel-UAE deal is a lot more multi-layered than the simple announcement implies, which means that the response of Saudi and Iran to it is equally multi-faceted.

“More than any other outcomes from this deal, the UAE wanted to put itself firmly in the U.S.’s most-favoured allies for receiving future business and financing deals, as it suffered a big hit from the Saudi-led oil price war that just ended, and to be included in the U.S.-Israel intelligence and security network to protect itself from Iran,” a senior source who works closely with the European Union (EU) on energy security told OilPrice.com last week.

“This formal deal, though, just officially clarifies what has been happening for some time between Israel and the UAE in the field of intelligence co-operation to counteract Iran’s growing power in the region that has become more militaristic, given the increasing dominance of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] in Tehran,” he said. 

A key part of this joint intelligence initiative between the UAE and Israel (and, by extension, the U.S.) has been the dramatic increase in the past two years of the purchase of commercial and adjunct residential properties in Iran’s southern Khuzestan province – a key sector for its oil and gas reserves – by UAE-registered businesses, particularly those based in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, said the source.

“Around 500,000 Iranians left Iran around the time of the [1979 Islamic] Revolution and settled in Dubai, in the first instance, and then Abu Dhabi, and they have never been in favour of the IRGC having the key role in Iran, so some of them have been used to front businesses or commercial property developments in Khuzestan that are being funded from business registered in those two states of the UAE,” he added.

“However, these apparently Abu Dhabi and Dubai businesses are actually being funded from a major Israeli property company that in turn is funded from a Israel-U.S. operation specifically set up for this project, with a budget of US$2.19 billion,” he told OilPrice.com. “These businesses, and the additional property acquisitions for the individuals working for these business in Khuzestan, mean that not only is the native Iranian population being diluted by non-Iranian Arabs [although broadly Persian in demographic terms, indigenous Arabs make up around two per cent of Iran’s population] but also the opportunity for on-the-ground intelligence gathering has been dramatically enhanced,” he underlined. “Basically, Israel is doing through the UAE presence in southern Iran exactly what Iran has been doing to Israel through its presence in Lebanon and Syria.”

Given the obvious opportunities for increased intelligence-gathering and economic and political disruption within Iran’s borders stemming from the new Israel-UAE deal, Iran has been unsurprisingly hostile to it. Iranian Parliament Speaker’s Special Aide for International Affairs, Amir-Abdollahian, made a very public show shortly after the announcement, of meeting with Palestine’s Ambassador to Tehran, Salah Zavavi, and stated that:

“The UAE’s act to normalise relations with the Zionist regime is a strategic mistake, and the UAE government must accept responsibility for all its consequences.”

He added that Iran remains firmly behind the Palestinian people. Palestine’s Zavavi asked the speakers of all parliaments of Islamic countries to condemn the action of the UAE and to support the ‘inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’.

More indicative of future actions over and above just words was the subsequent high-level meeting of Iran’s Defence Minister, Brigadier General Amir Hatami, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoygu. Even publically, Hatami alluded to the new military deals reached with China and Russia – revealed exclusively by OilPrice.com – referring to the joint strategic, regional and international goals and interests between Tehran and Moscow, underlining the “developing mutual defence co-operation” between the two sides. Hatami then castigated the U.S.’s recent attempts to invoke a ‘snapback’ of full international sanctions against Iran through the United Nations Security Council:

“In recent years, Iran and Russia have launched a joint and purposeful effort to counter the unilateralism and bullying policies of the U.S. and the Trump administration in the region,” he noted. “The realistic response of the UN Security Council [UNSC] and the rejection of the recent U.S. anti-Iran resolution on extension of arms embargoes against Iran, once again, brought a major defeat for the U.S. and its regional allies and proved the global opposition to unilateralism,” he underlined.

“The guarantee of China and Russia’s support as two of just five Permanent Members on the UNSC was one of the absolutely key reasons why Iran agreed to the military elements of the 25-year deal it had made earlier with China,” said the EU source. Indeed, with this new Israel-UAE deal now formally announced, the IRGC (with the rubber-stamped blessing of Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) is fully set to allow the presence of Chinese and Russia naval assets in and around Iran’s key ports at Chabahar, Bandar-e-Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas, in line with the military element of the agreement, as from 9 November, a senior source who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week.

These deployments will be accompanied by the roll-out of Chinese and Russian electronic warfare (EW) capabilities that will encompass each of the three key EW areas – electronic support (including early warning of enemy weapons use) plus electronic attack (including jamming systems) plus electronic protection (including of enemy jamming). Based originally around neutralising NATO’s C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems, part of the new roll-out of software and hardware from China and Russia in Iran will be the Russian S-400 anti-missile air defence system (“to counter U.S. and/or Israeli attacks”) and the Krasukha-2 and -4 systems (“as they proved their effectiveness in Syria in countering the radars of attack, reconnaissance and unmanned aircraft”).

So, what will Saudi Arabia’s position be in the wake of the Israel-UAE deal?

“Saudi Arabia, in particular, may be quietly supportive but is unlikely to normalise relations,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington told OilPrice.com last week. “The clerical establishment has had a privileged role in the Kingdom since the eighteenth century, the king is the custodian of the two holy mosques, and Saudi Arabia is the founder of the Organization of the Islamic Conference,” he added.

‘Quietly’ is the operative word here as, according to the Iran source, currently 62 per cent of the aforementioned US$2.19 billion Israel-UAE property fund for new settlements of UAE citizens into Iran’s Khuzestan comes from “Saudi Arabian-connected organisations.”

This fits in with the widely held view among dedicated-Saudi analysts that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) is far more sympathetic to the agreement – and to the ultimate strategic aim of the U.S. and Israel of undermining the IRGC’s grip on the country – than his father, King Salman. King Salman told the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation just last year that the Palestinian cause remained a core issue and that the kingdom “refuses any measures that touch the historical and legal position of East Jerusalem.” On the other hand, he is 84 years old and in poor health and even Saudi’s Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, cautiously welcomed the Israel-UAE agreement, saying: “It could be viewed as positive.” It is also apposite to note that back in 2002 – not that long ago in global geopolitical terms – it was the Saudis who launched the ‘Crown Prince Abdullah Peace Plan’ at the Beirut Arab summit, offering Israel full recognition in exchange for a return to its pre-1967 borders.

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Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow.

American oil companies are keen to export more plastics to Africa through Kenya. According to the New York Times, a lobby group representing Big Oil and chemical companies, including Shell, Exxon and Total, has been pushing the US government to use a US-Kenya trade deal to dump petro-chemicals and plastics across Africa, to prop up Big Oil’s dwindling profits amidst a global pandemic and an oil crash.

Letters from the lobby group, identified by Unearthed, also call for the lifting of limits on the plastics waste trade, a move which experts say amounts to an attempt to legally circumvent existing law in Kenya banning plastics which could have a domino effect in many other countries across Africa that have banned the single-use of plastics.

In reaction to these developments, Landry Ninteretse, Africa Team Leader at 350.org, said:

“It’s not surprising that oil companies are feeling the heat, with science consistently demonstrating the link between fossil fuels and climate change. Big oil’s time is up; the world is moving away from oil and gas. This proposal by oil companies to use their oversupply of oil to manufacture plastics and dump them in Africa is completely unacceptable.

For decades, Big Oil has used its power and influence to deny climate change and exacerbate social injustices and inequalities. But its treacherous actions are now being exposed. Africa is not their garbage dump. Instead of bringing more pollution here, they must pay for years of damage already done. Africans are more vigilant than ever, and we will not accept any more destructive activities to take place across the continent – be it in Kenya, or any other country.

We strongly condemn the actions of the American Chemistry Council and the big oil companies behind this lobby group and call upon the Kenya and US governments to throw out this proposal. The same energy and resistance demonstrated against the proliferation of fossil fuels on the continent will be deployed to combat this unfortunate adventure of a declining industry.”

On February 6, President Trump and President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya announced their intent to begin free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations. If successful, it would be the first U.S. FTA with a country in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is now being hijacked by Big Oil.

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Leonardo Sakamoto reflects on the police killing of João Pedro Matos Pinto, a 14-year-old black boy, and one of many Brazilian George Floyds.

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João Pedro Matos Pinto was a 14-year-old black boy. On 18 May, he was playing with his cousins when the house in São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro state, was invaded by police. He was killed by a rifle shot that pierced his body from stomach to shoulder. The police claimed they were chasing suspects, but his family say the story is false. Community leaders counted 72 bullet holes in the house. João’s father said he only got good marks at school.

João Pedro is one of the many Brazilian George Floyds.

Black people accounted for 55 per cent of the country’s population, but more than 75 per cent of those killed in police operations between 2017 and 2018, according to the 2019 Yearbook of the Brazilian Public Safety Forum. Whites are around 44 per cent of the population but account for less than a quarter of victims of police killings. In Rio de Janeiro, black 21-year-olds are 147 per cent more likely to be killed by police than the rest of the population.

At the same time, the majority of Brazilians killed by Covid-19 are black. A survey commissioned by Épocamagazine shows that 61 per cent of the 54,488 victims who had died of the disease by the end of June, and whose race was identified, were black.

The problem is not genetic. It is related to lack of basic sanitation, food insecurity and difficulty in accessing medical care. Poverty is not colour-blind. By being more lethal to black and poor people, the pandemic parallels police violence statistics in cities like Rio de Janeiro.

There are no direct government orders to shoot black and poor people. But security forces are trained to defend the property and quality of life of those who live in the ‘postcard’ parts of major Brazilian cities while ‘containing’ those who don’t. Rio de Janeiro Governor Wilson Witzel and President Jair Bolsonaro openly advocate that officers should not be held accountable for killings during police operations. This encourages them to shoot first and ask questions later.

Before the pandemic, Brazil’s black and poor population were already experiencing a massacre in the suburbs at the hands of drug traffickers and paramilitaries, as well as official police and military forces. Covid-19 made things worse, helped by Bolsonaro’s denial of its danger and lack of public policy responses to it.

This fits perfectly with what Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics’ – where a government believes it can decide who lives and who dies. In Brazil, the government not only believes this; it actually makes those decisions.

Two days after João Pedro’s death, an 18-year-old black man called João Vitor was killed by police in Rio’s City of God – a district world famous for the movie of that name.

It happened while volunteers were distributing food to alleviate the suffering caused by Covid-19. The police accuse the dead young man of being a criminal. But he will never be able to tell his version of events.

Following these cases, Brazil’s Supreme Court banned police operations in favelas during the pandemic. But videos show that poor blacks are still victims of police brutality, leaving no doubt that there is a long way to go in the fight against the structural racism that defines us as a nation.

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Leonardo Sakamoto is a journalist, political scientist, director of Repórter Brasil and UN adviser.

Featured image: A man takes rest on the roadside in a Carapicuiba City favela. Image by Luiz Gonzaga De Souza/Pixabay

At times, meds are more dangerous than diseases they’re supposed to protect against or cure.

Independent experts agree that all vaccines are hazardous to human health because they contain mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, phenoxyethanol (antifreeze), and other toxins able to weaken and potentially destroy the human immune system.

Noted vaccine expert Dr. Viera Schiebner stressed that

“(t)here is no evidence whatsoever of the ability of vaccines to prevent any diseases.”

“To the contrary, there is a great wealth of evidence that they cause serious side effects.”

In her book titled “Vaccination 100 years of Orthodox Research,” she explained that vaccinations are biological weapons.

They can damage internal organs and leave children or adults vulnerable to severe autoimmune diseases – including diabetes, arthritis, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, polio and numerous others.

They’re dangerous and unreliable. Thousands of severe adverse reactions occur annually – including permanent disabilities, at times deaths.

Rushed to market coronavirus vaccines by Big Pharma will be especially hazardous and should be avoided to protect human health.

When available, a full COVID-19 vax treatment of millions of Americans would have a market potential dollar volume of around $150 billion of near-total profit, according to one estimate.

The global market potential is much greater — why the race is on to cash in big, with full support from policymakers in Washington.

There’s no need to be vaxxed when a known cure for COVID-19 already exists.

Big Pharma, establishment media and US policymakers are suppressing what everyone has a right to know because of a potential bonanza of profits once FDA-approved coronavirus vaccines are declared developed and ready for human use.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) combined with either azithromycin or doxycycline and zinc are cheap, safe, and highly effective in curing the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19 when used early after infections are diagnosed.

Physicians using this protocol stress its effectiveness — why hazardous to human health vaccines aren’t needed and should be avoided.

Big Pharma’s FDA chief Stephen Hahn told the Financial Times (FT) that he’s “prepared to authorize a vaccine before phase three clinical trials (are) complete(d), as long as officials believed the benefits outweighed the risks (sic),” the broadsheet reported.

Without justification, he claimed rushed development is unrelated to boosting Trump’s reelection prospects — despite DJT saying he wants a vaccine available for human use pre-election, adding:

“It is up to the (drug company) sponsor to apply for authorization or approval, and we make an adjudication of their application.”

“If they do that before the end of phase three, we may find that appropriate. We may find that inappropriate. We will make a determination.”

Approving a likely hazardous substance for mass-vaxxing in the US and elsewhere is unacceptably playing Russian roulette with human health — what no public health official should authorize anywhere.

In early August, Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine was released for human use, following 20 years of research and development.

Despite years of research elsewhere, no successful coronavirus vaccines were ever developed, notably not in the West.

Highly promoted, rushed to the rescue Big Pharma COVID-19 vaccines for mass-vaxxing will be the largest ever public health experiment likely to go awry with potentially harmful consequences for untold numbers of victims.

Public health experts in the US and abroad warned that these vaccines “could be unsafe,” the FT reported.

Hahn ignored reality, claiming that approving a coronavirus vaccine for human use before completion of phase three trials is permissible by “emergency authorization” for certain groups, without further elaboration, adding:

“Our emergency use authorization is not the same as a full approval.”

“The legal, medical and scientific standard for that is that the benefit outweighs the risk in a public health emergency.”

Fact: Risks way outweigh the benefits of using vaccines for any purpose.

Fact: At times, the risk of causing diseases they’re supposed to protect against is unacceptably high.

The 2016 documentary film “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” discusses the link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism.

According to senior MIT research scientist Stephanie Seneff, autism at its current observed rate is projected to affect around half of vaccinated boys by 2025.

US major media journalists are instructed by the CDC on how to report on vaccines — what to say, what to suppress, ignoring scientific evidence.

Dr. Toni Bark called vaccine science “Frankenscience” for good reason.

Epigenetic researcher Dr. Mae-Wan Ho explained that

“vaccines…can be dangerous, especially live, attenuated viral vaccines or the new recombinant nucleic acid vaccines.”

“They have the potential to generate virulent viruses by recombination and the recombinant nucleic acids could cause autoimmune disease.”

Children’s Health Defense founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained that in 2017, the WHO “reluctantly admitted that the global explosion in polio is predominantly (from a) vaccine strain,” adding:

“The WHO is a sock puppet for the pharmaceutical industry” — the same true for the CDC and other US public health agencies.

Mass-vaxxing advocate Bill Gates “serve(s) his personal philosophy that good health only comes in a syringe,” JFK Jr. explained.

Big Pharma’s interest is all about max-profiteering above all other considerations, no matter the risks to public health.

None of this gets publicly reported. Instead, the myth of safe vaccines and importance of getting them persists — despite clear evidence proving otherwise.

A Final Comment

Last weekend, Trump said the FDA is moving too slowly in approving a coronavirus vaccine for human use.

The FT reported that “(a) day later, Dr Hahn and Mr Trump jointly announced emergency authorization for convalescent plasma, which uses the plasma of recovered Covid-19 patients as a treatment” — with little of no evidence of its efficacy.

Hahn told the FT that he regretted saying plasma treatments would have saved many lives, adding:

“I certainly regret contributing to any misperception. I could have done a much better job…explaining relative risks.”

Anyone testing positive for COVID-19 should seek immediate treatment with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — combined with either azithromycin or doxycycline and zinc.

Avoid hazardous to human health vaxxing to stay safe.

*

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

This article by Vietnam War Veteran, author, lawyer and peace activist Brian Willson was first published by Global Research in 2002. It outlines, what most people in America do not know regarding the long history of US crimes against humanity. It is of relevance to the ongoing Ukraine War. Who are the War Criminals?

***

North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s. US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s  population was killed off over a three period of intensive bombings:

“After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, [General] LeMay remarked,“Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”6 It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerance of another.”

During The Second World War the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89% and the US lost 0.32%. During the Korean war, North Korea lost 30 % of its population.

These figures of civilian deaths in North Korea should also be compared to those compiled for Iraq  by the Lancet Study (John Hopkins School of Public Health). The Lancet study estimates a total of 655,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, following the US led invasion (March 2003- June 2006).

Michel Chossudovsky,  Global Research, December 2, 2017, September 2, 2020

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The demonization of North Korea by the United States government continues unrelentlessly. The wealthy oil and baseball man who claims to be president of the United States, used his first State of the Union address on January 29, 2002 to brand perennial enemy North Korea, along with former allies Iran and Iraq, as “the world’s most dangerous regimes” who now now form a threatening “axis of evil.” Unbeknown to the public, because it was intended to have remained a secret (whoops!), was the fact that this claimed president presented a “Nuclear Posture Review” report to Congress only three weeks earlier, on January 8, which ordered the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for use of nuclear weapons. The first designated targets for nuclear attack were his newly identified members of the “axis of evil,” along with four other lucky nations as well – Syria, Libya, Russia, and China. That this is nothing short of a policy of ultimate terror remains unaddressed in the U.S. media.

That Koreans are deeply concerned is an understatement. However, they understand the context in which their “evil” is being portrayed, not an altogether new threat levelled at them. However, the dangerous escalation of policy rhetoric following the 9-11 tragedy now boldly warns the world of virtual total war. Vice-president Richard Cheney, another oil man from Texas, declares that the U.S. is now considering military actions against forty to fifty nations, and that the war “may never end” and “become a permanent part of the way we live.”1 The Pentagon has declared that the widening gap between the “Haves” and “Have-nots” poses a serious challenge to the U.S., requiring a doctrine of “full spectrum dominance.” Thus, the U.S. demands total capacity to conquer every place and its inhabitants in and around the Earth, from deep underground bunkers, including those in North Korea and Iraq, through land, sea, and air, to outer space. All options for achieving global and spatial hegemony are now on the table. Already, the U.S. military is deployed in 100 different countries.2 Total war, permanent war. Terror!

Addiction to use of terror by the United States is nothing new. The civilization was founded and has been sustained by use of terror as a primary policy. For example, in 1779, General George Washington ordered destruction of the “merciless Indian savages” of upstate New York, instructing his generals to “chastize” them with “terror.” The generals dutifully carried out these orders. In 1866, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered “extermination” with vindictive earnestness of the Sioux. They were virtually exterminated. Secretary of War Elihu Root (1899-1904) under President’s McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, justified the ruthless U.S. military conduct in the Philippines that savagely killed a half-million citizens by citing “precedents of the highest authority:” Washington’s and Sherman’s earlier orders.3

War against nations around the world is not new either. The U.S., over its history, has militarily intervened over 400 times, covertly thousands of times, in over one hundred nations.4 Virtually all these interventions have been lawless. It has bombed at least eighteen nations since it dropped Atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. It has used chemical warfare against Southeast Asia, and has provided chemical warfare agents for use by other nations such as Iraq. It has used biological warfare against China, North Korea, and Cuba. The Koreans are quite aware of most of this history. Most U.S. Americans are not. But now the U.S. has declared a unilateral terrorist war on the whole world.5

Two of the interventions in the Nineteenth Century were inflicted against Korea, the first in 1866. The second, larger one, in 1871, witnessed the landing of over 700 marines and sailors on Kanghwa beach on the west side of Korea seeking to establish the first phases of colonization. Destroying several forts while inflicting over 600 casualties on the defending Korean natives, the U.S. withdrew realizing that in order to assure hegemonic success, a much larger, permanent military presence would be necessary. The North Korean people regularly remark about this U.S. invasion, even though most in South Korea do not know of it due to historic censorship. Most in the U.S. don’t know about it either, for similar reasons, even though in all of the Nineteenth Century, this was the largest U.S. military force to land on foreign soil outside of Mexico and Canada until the “Spanish American War” in 1898.

I believe it important for U.S. Americans to place themselves in the position of people living in targeted countries. That North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, i.e., one-twentieth the population of the U.S., many of them poor, a land slightly larger in area than the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, continues to be one of the most demonized nations and least understood, totally perplexes the Korean people. It is worthwhile to seek an understanding of their perspective.

I recently visited that nation and talked with a number of her citizens. I travelled 900 ground miles through six of North Korea’s nine provinces, as well as spending time in Pyongyang, the capital, and several other cities. I talked with dozens of people from all walks of life. Though times have been hard for North Koreans, especially in the 1990s, they long ago proudly rebuilt all of their dozens of cities, thousands of villages, and hundreds of dykes and dams destroyed during the war.

U.S. interference into the sovereign life of Korea immediately upon the 1945 surrender of the hated Japanese, who had occupied the Korean Peninsula for forty years, is one of the major crimes of the Twentieth Century, from which the Korean people have never recovered. (SEE “United States Government War Crimes,” Spring 2002 – issue # 1 of Global Outlook). From a North Korean’s perspective they

(1) have vigorously opposed the unlawful and egregious division of their country from day one to the present,

(2) were blamed for starting the “Korean War” which in fact had been a struggle between a minority of wealthy Koreans supporting continued colonization in collaboration with the U.S. and those majority Koreans who opposed it,

(3) proudly and courageously held the U.S. and its “crony U.N. allies” to a stalemate during the “War,” and

(4) have been tragically and unfairly considered a hostile nation ever since. They have not forgotten the forty years of Japanese occupation that preceded the U.S. imposed division and subsequent occupation that continues in the South. They deeply yearn for reunification of their historically unified culture.

Everyone I talked with, dozens and dozens of folks, lost one if not many more family members during the war, especially from the continuous bombing, much of it incendiary and napalm, deliberately dropped on virtually every space in the country. “Every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, and village” was ordered bombed by General MacArthur in the fall of 1950. It never stopped until the day of the armistice on July 27, 1953. The pained memories of people are still obvious, and their anger at “America” is often expressed, though they were very welcoming and gracious to me. Ten million Korean families remain permanently separated from each other due to the military patrolled and fenced dividing line spanning 150 miles across the entire Peninsula.

Let us make it very clear here for western readers. North Korea was virtually totally destroyed during the “Korean War.” U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s architect for the criminal air campaign was Strategic Air Command head General Curtis LeMay who had proudly conducted the earlier March 10 – August 15, 1945 continuous incendiary bombings of Japan that had destroyed 63 major cities and murdered a million citizens. (The deadly Atomic bombings actually killed far fewer people.)

Eight years later, after destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, LeMay remarked, “Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”6 It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerance of another.

Virtually every person wanted to know what I thought of Bush’s recent accusation of North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.” Each of the three governments comprising Bush’s “axis of evil” of course immediately condemned the remarks, North Korea being no exception. I shared with them my own outrage and fears, and they seemed relieved to know that not all “Americans” are so cruel and bellicose. As with people in so many other nations with whom the U.S. has treated with hostility, they simply cannot understand why the U.S. is so obsessed with them.

Koreans were relieved to learn that a recent poll had indicated eighty percent of South Koreans were against the U.S. belligerant stance against their northern neighbors. The North Korean government described Bush as a “typical rogue and a kingpin of terrorism” as he was visiting the South in February, only three weeks after presenting his threatening State of the Union address.7 It was also encouraging that the two Koreas resumed quiet diplomatic talks in March just as the U.S. and South Korea were once again conducting their regular, large-scale, joint military exercises so enraging to the North, and to an increasing number of people in the South among the growing reunification movement there.8

In the English-language newspaper, The Pyongyang Times, (February 23, 2002) there were articles entitled “US Is Empire of the Devil,” Korea Will Never Be a Threat to the US,” and “Bush’s Remarks Stand Condemned.” Quite frankly, all three of these articles relate a truth about the U.S. that would draw a consensus from many quarters around the world.

While in country, together we listened to Bush’s March 14 Voice of America (VOA) radio chastizement of North Korea. First, he stated that the North’s 200,000 prisoner population was proof of terrible repression. Though I had no way of knowing the number of prisoners in the North, any more than Bush did, I do know that the United States has 2 million prisoners which is similar in per-capita detention rate to that of North Korea if the 200,000 figure is accurate. Furthermore, the U.S. has a minimum of 3 million persons, mostly minority and poor, under state supervision of parole and probation. The U.S. sweeps its class and race problems into prison.

Second, Bush declared that half the population was considered unreliable and, as a result, received less monthly food rations. The Koreans are a proud people living in a Confucian tradition, having rebuilt their nation from virtual total destruction during the Korean war. I did not notice any obvious display of dissent. That some Koreans are desperate due to lack of food, water, and heat, especially in some rural areas, does not necessarily translate into dissent, though some are seeking relief by travel to neighboring countries.9

Third, Bush claimed that Koreans who listen to foreign radio are targeted for execution. Together we regularly listened to U.S.VOA radio broadcasts and they freely discussed the content of the broadcasts without fear of reprisals.

Fourth, Bush condemned the DPRK for spending too much on its military, causing food shortages for the people. Note: Again it must be remembered that it was the U.S. that unilaterally divided Korea following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, and subsequently ruled with a military occupation government in the south, overseeing the elimination of virtually the entire popular movement of (majority) opposition to U.S. occupation, murdering hundreds of thousands of people. The consequent Korean civil war that openly raged in 1948-1950 was completely ignored when the U.S. defined the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. The U.S. remains at war with the DPRK, never having signed a peace treaty with her. The war has left a deep scar in the Korean character with a memory that is regularly provoked by continued belligerance directed at the DPRK. The U.S. regularly holds joint military exercises with South Korean military forces aimed at the DPRK. The U.S. retains 37,000 military troops at 100 installations south of the 38th parallel. The U.S. has its largest Asian bombing range where it practices bombs five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, despite opposition from many South Koreans. And now Bush has identified North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” targeted for nuclear attack. This is no remote idea to North Koreans. The U.S. possesses nuclear weapons on ships and planes in the Pacific region surrounding North Korea. Virtually every nation in this perilous position would be concerned about their defense.

It is worth noting that the United States is the leading military spender in the world resulting in substantial underfunding of its own indispensable social programs.

Fifth, Bush accused the DPRK of selling weapons to other nations. That is like the pot calling the kettle black. The U.S. is by far the largest manufacturer of conventional, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the world. It is also the largest seller of these weapons, and has used conventional (against dozens of nations), biological (Cuba, China, Korea, perhaps others), chemical (Southeast Asia), and nuclear (Japan, and threatened to use them on at least 20 other occasions) weapons. In addition it has armed other nations with these weapons of mass destruction, including Iraq, one of those countries now identified as part of the “axis of evil.” In the year 2000, international arms sales were nearly $37 billion, with the U.S. being directly responsible for just over half of those sales. South Korea was the third largest buyer of weapons from the United States with $3.2 worth of military hardware.10 And in January 2002, South Korea was seriously contemplating purchasing an additional $3.2 billion worth of 40 F-X fighter jets from U.S. arms giant Boeing.

At the conclusion of this VOA radio broadcast, Koreans and I looked at each other in disbelief. But we also knew that we were in solidarity with each other as part of the human family. When I said goodbye to my new friends we embraced knowing that we live in a single world made up of a rich diversity of ideas and species. We know that we are going to live or die together, and hope that the arrogant and dangerous rhetoric and militarism of the United States will soon end so we can all live in peace. However, for that to happen, there will need to be a dramatic awakening among the people and a corresponding expression of massive nonviolent opposition that will make such threatening behavior impossible to carry out.

*

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S. Brian Willlson is a Vietnam veteran, long-time peace activist, and writer. He has visited a number of countries studying the impacts of U.S. policy. His essays are posted on his website, www.brianwillson.com. He published a small autobiography, On Third World Legs (Charles Kerr, 1992), which describes his ordeal of having been intentionally run over by a U.S. Government munitions train accelerating to over three times the 5 mph legal speed limit during a peaceful protest in California in 1987. He now walks on two prostheses after losing each leg below the knee. Brian Willson possesses two honorary Ph.D.s and a Juris Doctor degree.

Notes

1. Bob Woodward, “CIA Told To Do ‘Whatever Necessary’ to Kill Bin Laden,” The Washington Post, October 21, 2001.

2. Bradley Graham, “Pentagon Plans New Command For U.S. Four Star Officer, Would Over See Homeland Defense,” The Washington Post, January 26, 2002.

3. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building. New York: Schocken Books, 1990, p. 329.

4. B.M. Blechman and S.S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces As A Political Instrument. Wash., D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1978, Appendix B; Congressional Research Service (Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division), Instances of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1993. Wash., D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 1993; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995; John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1991.

5. William Blum, Rogue State. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000; Stephan Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets From the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

6. Richard Rhodes, “The General and World War III,” The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, p. 53.

7.”North Korea Calls Bush ‘Kingpin of Terrorism,” Reuters wire story, February 23, 2002.

8.”South Korea Envoy to Travel North,” BBC News Online: World: Asia-Pacific, March 25, 2002. Retrieved March 26, 2002, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1891000/1891457.stm

9. Ji-Yeon Yuh, “North Korean Enemy Should Be Made Friend,” The Baltimore Sun, February 27, 2002.

10. Thom Shanker, “Global Arms Sales Rise Again, and the U.S. Leads the Pack, ” The New York Times, August 20, 2001.

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We publish this incisive analysis by Dr. Marjorie Cohn with a view to encouraging debate on the 2020 elections. The broader issue is that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are a threat to democracy in the US.

***

For nearly four years, we have been laser focused on November 3, 2020, the day that Donald Trump could be voted out of office. In all likelihood, however, the election will not be decided that evening as it has in the past (with the notable exception of the 2000 election). That is because in order to protect themselves against COVID-19, a record number of people will forego the polls and mail their ballots, which take longer to count. There are several scenarios of what could transpire between November 3 and January 20. All of them are frightening.

Once again, Trump has deployed federal agents on U.S. soil over the objection of local authorities, in an apparent attempt to sow chaos and then claim he must be reelected to restore law and order. On August 26, Trump tweeted he would send “federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER” in the wake of protests against the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot in the back seven times by a police officer in the presence of Blake’s children. Blake, who remains in critical condition, was left paralyzed. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers declined the White House’s offer of federal assistance. Although Evers had deployed the National Guard the day before, Trump said, “Governor should call in the National Guard in Wisconsin.”

Trump had declared a national emergency and sent federal troops to Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, during anti-racism protests after the public police lynching of George Floyd.

Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice is reviewing presidential emergency action documents (PEADs). PEADs, which originated with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to deal with a possible Soviet attack, have purported to authorize unconstitutional actions, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary detention and the declaration of martial law. They are so secret that not even Congress has seen them, but Freedom of Information Act requests have occasionally led to the revelation of their contents in public sources. PEADs could provide Trump with an unfettered opportunity to employ authoritarian, even military, tactics to maintain power.

Trump is preemptively sowing doubt about the outcome of the election. On July 30, he suggested delaying the election, although he does not have the legal authority to do so. And he has floated the idea of sending federal troops to the polls (to police nonexistent voter fraud) which would cause voter intimidation.

Citing no evidence, Trump declared on the first night of the Republican National Convention,

“[Democrats are] trying to steal the election.… The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

Indeed, when Chris Wallace asked Trump on “Fox News Sunday” in late July, “Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results of the election?” Trump replied, “No. I have to see.”

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen likewise warned during his testimony last year before the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee,

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Worried that large numbers of mail ballots will be cast for Joe Biden, Trump admitted he is blocking emergency funding for the beleaguered United States Postal Service (USPS). Touting a false fear of widespread fraud, Trump stated,

“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” adding, “Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”

It is no coincidence that since June 15, when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy assumed the reins, the USPS instituted several changes that have slowed down mail service, including the removal of 671 sorting machines. DeJoy, who had no prior experience with the Postal Service and has extensive conflicts of interest, is also a major Trump campaign contributor.

Post-Election Scenarios

The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) is a bipartisan organization of campaign chairs, academics and former government officials, established last year out of concern about the manipulation and disruption of the 2020 presidential election and transition. It was convened by Georgetown University Law Center professor Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman, former vice chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

In June, TIP conducted election crisis scenario exercises, called “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” to “identify risks to the rule of law or to the integrity of the democratic process” between Election Day and Inauguration Day. TIP assembled a group of more than 100 experts for the experiment. Calling the results “alarming,” TIP’s report assessed “with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape” and “Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power.”

The report warned of “an unprecedented assault on the outcome” of the election. “Of particular concern is how the military would respond in the context of uncertain election results.” Most frightening is TIP’s warning, “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

TIP’s report noted,

“President Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for potentially ignoring or disrupting the voting process, by claiming, for instance, that any mail-in ballots will be fraudulent and that his opponents will seek to have non-citizens vote through fraud.”

Four scenarios developed by TIP were as follows:

(1) the winner was unknown the morning after the election and the race was too close to predict with certainty;

(2) Biden “won outright” the popular vote and the Electoral College;

(3) Trump won the Electoral College by a healthy margin but lost the popular vote by a healthy margin; and

(4) Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College by narrow margins.

The report stated that in all four hypothetical exercises, Trump cast doubt on the official election results. The second scenario initially showed him alleging massive fraud, demanding investigations and appealing to the media to cast doubt on the result. He “later accepted a loss” once it became clear that his attempts to overturn the election results would not likely succeed. In the fourth scenario, Trump would not concede and set up a fierce competition that concluded with “an uneasy and combative but ultimately successful transition.”

In all four scenarios, Trump encouraged violence and chaos in the streets. His strategy called for recounts, investigations into “voting irregularities” to undermine public confidence in the results of the election, attempting to stop the counting of mail ballots — even ordering Barr to seize mail ballots — organizing his base to take to the streets, and relying on right-wing media to sow chaos and intimidate officials to side with Team Trump. When he trailed in the popular vote count, Trump challenged Biden to “prove a negative” — that there had been no voting fraud.

Participants in the exercises were particularly concerned about “the President’s ability to federalize the national guard; to deploy the military domestically; to launch investigations into opponents and to freeze their assets; and even to control communication in the name of national security.” Barr’s Justice Department “could provide legal cover for the President’s actions.” The report cited Trump’s prior appeals to “Second Amendment people” to defend their rights and his calls to supporters to “liberate” states with restrictive COVID-19 rules. Trump could initiate a foreign crisis after the election or during the transition. Barr might launch a bogus investigation of “terrorist ties” of members of Biden’s transition team to justify surveillance or a false flag operation before the election or in the contested period after the election.

In addition, Republican state legislators in swing states could refuse to certify a Biden victory in the face of Trump’s claims of fraud, according to Harvard government professor Daniel Carpenter. Vanita Gupta, former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, worries that Trump could “weaponize” COVID and use it as a pretext to issue stay-at-home orders to prevent people from going to the polls when the deadline for requesting absentee ballots has expired.

Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman posits a situation in which Congress must choose the victor and Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are deadlocked. The Presidential Succession Act would make Pelosi the president but is the Supreme Court likely to ratify that outcome? Meanwhile, there would be violence in the streets.

The TIP exercises did not really consider legal strategies both sides could employ, nor did they predict how “the media will shape and drive public opinion.”

What Can Be Done to Safeguard the Election Process?

TIP recommends that congressional leaders conduct oversight hearings and seek assurances from military and agency leaders about their contingency plans. “Military and law enforcement leaders need to plan now for these possibilities to avoid becoming unwitting pawns in a partisan battle,” the report concluded. As Veterans for Peace has urged, service members have a duty to obey lawful orders and a duty to disobey unlawful orders. Many would refuse orders to deploy to U.S. cities to help Trump illegitimately maintain power.

Ackerman proposes that Congress create a special election commission with five Supreme Court justices, comprised of two liberals, two conservatives and the chief justice. It would investigate election challenges and determine the validity of disqualifications.

Meanwhile, Facebook is taking steps to counter false claims of victory on the site by Trump supporters. It is planning for what to do if Trump tries to invalidate the election results with accusations that USPS lost mail ballots or other groups meddled with the vote. Facebook has considered a “kill switch” to stop political advertising from spreading misinformation after Election Day. Twitter and YouTube have also considered unspecified actions they might take after the election. The bottom line is that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter “have to potentially treat the president as a bad actor” who may subvert the democratic process, Alex Stamos, director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and former executive at Facebook, told The New York Times.

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) will continue to dispatch legal observers to observe and document potentially unlawful or unjustified interference with demonstrators’ rights by law enforcement. NLG members provide legal support for those arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights. Organizations including the NLG, ACLU and Protect Democracy will ready their legal strategies for the battles in the courts.

Finally, the people must mobilize to mount mass actions to ensure the integrity of the election. Those of us who write and do media commentary should continue to educate people about the legal and political situation and organize resistance to attempts to undermine the veracity of the election results.

In light of the massive uprisings against white supremacy in response to the murder of George Floyd, and now the shooting of Jacob Blake, we can expect widespread popular resistance if Trump tries to hijack the election.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Prevê-se que o tráfego aéreo civil na Europa irá diminuir este ano 60% em comparação com 2019, devido às restrições ao Covid-19, colocando em risco mais de 7 milhões de empregos. Em compensação, aumenta o tráfego aéreo militar.

Na sexta-feira, 28 de Agosto, seis bombardeiros estratégicos B-52 da US Air Force sobrevoaram num só dia, todos os 30 países da NATO na América do Norte e na Europa, acompanhados nos diversos trajectos pr 80 caça-bombardeiros dos países aliados. Este grande exercício denominado “Céu Aliado” – disse o Secretário-Geral da OTAN, Jens Stoltenberg – demonstra “o poderoso compromisso dos Estados Unidos para com os Aliados e confirma que somos capazes de desencorajar a agressão”. É evidente a alusão à “agressão russa” na Europa.

Os B-52s, transferidos em 22 de Agosto da Base Aérea de Minot, no Dakota do Norte, para Fairford, na Grã-Bretanha, não são os velhos aviões da Guerra Fria usados ​​apenas para as paradas militares. Continuamente modernizados, conservaram o seu papel de bombardeiros estratégicos de longo alcance. Agora ainda estão mais aperfeiçoados.

A Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos, com uma despesa de 20 biliões de dólares, equipará 76 aviões B-52s com motores novos, em breve, que permitirão aos bombardeiros voar 8.000 km sem reabastecimento durante o voo, cada um carregando 35 toneladas de bombas e mísseis convencionais ou nucleares.

A Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos, no passado mês de Abril, encarregou a Raytheon Co. de construir um novo míssil de cruzeiro de longo alcance, armado com uma ogiva nuclear, para os bombardeiros B-52.

Com esses e outros bombardeiros estratégicos de ataque nuclear, incluindo o B-2 Spirit, a US Air Force realizou pela Europa, mais de 200 surtidas desde 2018, principalmente sobre o Báltico e sobre o Mar Negro perto do espaço aéreo russo. Os países europeus da NATO participam nestes exercícios, em particular a Itália.

Quando, em 28 de Agosto, um B-52 sobrevoou o nosso país, os caças italianos juntaram-se a ele para simular uma missão de ataque conjunto. Imediatamente a seguir, os caça-bombardeiros Eurofighter Typhoon da Força Aérea Italiana partiram para instalar-se na base de Siauliai, na Lituânia, apoiados por cerca de cem soldados especializados. A partir de hoje, 1 de Setembro, irão permanecer lá durante 8 meses, até Abril de 2021, para “defender” o espaço aéreo do Báltico.

É a quarta missão de “polícia aérea” da NATO, realizada no Báltico pela nossa Força Aérea. Os caças italianos estão prontos 24 sobre 24 horas para lutar = ‘scramble’, para levantar voo ao sinal de alarme e interceptar aviões “desconhecidos”, que são sempre aviões russos a voar entre algum aeroporto interno e o enclave russo de Kaliningrado, através do espaço aéreo internacional sobre o Báltico.

A base lituana de Siauliai, onde estão instalados, foi modernizada pelos Estados Unidos, que triplicaram a sua capacidade investindo de 24 milhões de euros. O motivo é claro: a base aérea fica a apenas 220 km de Kaliningrado e 600 km de São Petersburgo, distância que um caça tipo Eurofighter Typhoon percorre em poucos minutos.

Por que é que a NATO está a intoduzir perto da Rússia, estes e outros aviões de capacidade dupla,  convencionais e nucleares?

Claro que não é para defender os países bálticos de um ataque russo que, se acontecesse, significaria o início da guerra mundial termonuclear. O mesmo aconteceria se os aviões da NATO atacassem no Báltico, cidades russas limítrofes. A verdadeira razão para esta prática é aumentar a tensão, fabricando a imagem de um inimigo perigoso, a Rússia, que se prepara para atacar a Europa.

Esta é a estratégia de tensão concretizada por Washington, com a cumplicidade dos governos e dos parlamentos europeus e da própria União Europeia. Esta estratégia envolve um aumento crescente das despesas militares em detrimento das despesas sociais.

Um exemplo: o custo de uma hora de voo de um caça Eurofighter foi calculado pela mesma Força Aérea em 66.000 euros (incluindo a depreciação do avião). Montante, em dinheiro público, superior a dois salários brutos médios por ano.

Cada vez que um Eurofighter decola para “defender” o espaço aéreo do Báltico, queima dois empregos numa hora, em Itália.

 

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original em italiano :

Perché l’Italia schiera i suoi caccia in Lituania

ilmanifesto, 01 settembre 2020

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

 

Undoubtedly, Nigeria has entered a period of political uncertainty. With the next presidential election fast approaching, some politicians and experts are strongly advocating for, among others, a constitutional review considered as the best way to preserve peace and stability in the country. The reviewed constitution will take into account the ethnic diversity and provide for equal representation of southern and eastern regions in the federal system of governance.

In an early September interview, Maazi Oluchi Ibe, a historian and a former lecturer at Gregory University, a private educational institution named after Pope Gregory, located in Uturu, Abia State of Nigeria, talks to Kester Kenn Klomegah, about the political developments, the reasons for economic disparity and the Biafrans’ unquenchable desire for political freedom and self-determination.

Here are the interview excerpts.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah: Do you consider an urgent constitutional review as the first step towards national integration in the Federal Republic of Nigeria?

Maazi Oluchi Ibe: I think it is better to look at this issue from the perspective of who, in the present-day Nigeria, wants integration. If the Hausa, Fulani, or Yoruba want integration or re-integration for that matter, they are welcomed to it. There is a section of Nigeria that has long gone beyond the idea of integration. That part is the Biafra which has been under forceful military occupation by Nigeria since 1970. Biafra gave Nigeria a clear, unambiguous path to integration at Aburi in 1967. What Biafrans saw clearly in 1967 is what the rest of Nigeria is contemplating today. Biafrans are also telling Nigerians today that that we saw 53 years ago is no longer tenable. Possibly in a couple of decades, Nigeria will wake up to that reality too.

The net minimum for any look at the Nigerian constitution is a simple declaration for a plebiscite amongst the people of Biafra for self-determination. That remains the only basis. However, it is important we let those who feel concerned and who think that a mere constitutional review will solve the Nigerian quagmire, to know that history our guide. Every Nigerian constitution was watered on the blood of Biafrans. From 1945, to as recent as August 25^th, 2020 when young Biafrans holding a peaceful meeting were shot to death at Emene Enugu, it has been genocide and countless killings of Biafrans. What then is the guarantee that the next constitutional review will not follow suit?

We will not cease saying that what ails Nigeria is beyond constitution making and reviews. What ails Nigeria is the forceful amalgamation of incompatible entities into a geographical expression. Is it not callous that pre-war Europe made up of multi-ethnic nations who were mired in ceaseless wars until they unbundled through the creation of ethnic nations will turn round in Africa and create exactly what made old Europe unstable for centuries? Even the two Germans that were separated in 1945 have joined back together as one nation. That is the natural order of things. Same Europeans came to African and forced ethnic nation, some as twice the population of an average European nation, into forceful unions with others as large and they think it will stand? No, it will not stand as the former USSR has proved, ditto, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and in Africa, Eritrea, and Sudan. To further muddle the waters, the British allowed two contentious expansionist religions that are almost equal in population to live in one geographical space called Nigeria. What sort of idiotic experiment was that? Imagine what it has caused since 1914 in terms of human lives, mainly the lives of innocent Biafrans. No, it is not a constitutional review matter.

KKK: Why are there rising blatant criticisms about the current constitution adopted in 1999?

MOI: Simply because Nigeria has never had a constitution. Even the so called ‘famed’ 1963 Republican constitution was a gross failure and that was why the army step in a mere three years after its proclamation. The current infamous 1999 constitution was merely a baring of the fangs that in the past were covered with a glove. The ‘good’ thing about this constitution was that its criminal creators did not hide the fact that it was a creation of a military decree. Imagine the impunity and the blood cuddling guts of declaring a military decree as emanating from ‘We the People!’ That very first statement in that piece of paper was and is a blatant lie and they are not hiding the fact.

KKK: What are the narratives and the reasons for underdevelopment in the Biafra State?

MOI: Some of the greatest disaster that befell Biafra from the war of independence were so subtle that an unconscious mind will hardly notice them, while many were so conspicuous that they scream to the high heaves for all to see. For instance, the divide and rule system introduced by the British colonizers where perfected by the Fulani oligarchy that took over Nigeria with Biafrans at the receiving end.

Across a once peaceful land compared to what was obtainable in other sections of Nigeria, the conquering caliphate army imposed all sorts of divisions, ethnic, geographic, demographic, and so on. That is why today, they would rather want Biafrans to fight within themselves over artificial boundaries they created to divide us, like their British did. Such externally imposed divisive tendencies does not call for economic development. But, we are more conscious of such subtleties now.

In addition, there is what Professor Chidi Osuagwu, defined as the deprivation of Knowledge and its concomitant effect over the decades on Biafran economy. Professor Chidi Osuagwu, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Imo state, had done an article on Igbo deprivations in Nigeria from where the excerpt on the missionary school’s take over came from. Immediately after the war, the Nigerian caliphate government struck at the lifeblood of Biafran development, that is, the Missionary Schools. They took over the mission schools after the war aimed at slowing down and degrading the booming educational Sector in Biafraland that was the driver of Biafran progress. Today, the state of education in Biafraland viz-a-viz what was obtainable pre-Biafran war of independence speaks volume.

By consciously shutting down economic activities in Biafraland through strangulatory policies, significant amongst them the £20 policy, that is, giving Biafrans only £20 without putting into consideration whatever holdings Biafrans held in their prewar bank accounts which the conquering army confiscated. Their nationalization decree of 1972 that turned over all major companies and conglomerated into the Nigerian caliphate governments’ hands. Other examples are the policy of importing from far away Lagos instead of nearby Port Harcourt and other natural seaports available in Biafraland. Mind you, Port Harcourt seaport was opened as far back as 1917, but today lies fallow. The cumulative effect of these policies was the forceful dispersal of Biafran youths from our homeland. Today they remain the largest economic migrant group the whole of Africa.

These glaring constraints naturally forced an implosion leading to insecurities which were in turn blamed on the people and used as an excuse to militarize the land. Biafra is the most militarized region today in West Africa, if not the whole of Africa. Why not militarize the North with an ongoing war that has lasted over ten years?

Let us also not forget that by consciously imposing political leadership akin to the warrant chiefs the British imposed on Biafraland during the colonial period, the present Nigerian system has a grip on what gets done and what does not in Biafraland. What brings home the truth of the parlous economic situation in Biafraland today is not to compare it with what obtains in Northern Nigeria but to recall the fact the pre 1967 economic indices showed the then Eastern region (Biafra) as the fastest developing economy in the world.

KKK: How do you envisage women’s role in the current struggle for freedom, peace, and development in Biafra State?

MOI: Biafran women are the most resilient in Africa if not world over. Possibly no other group of women have passed through what they did and are still passing through in contemporary history. These were women who lost children, siblings, husbands, fathers, and mothers in the genocidal war Nigeria imposed on Biafra in 1967. 53 years after they are still forced to endure rapine, and harassment in their very homes and farms by terrorist herdsmen buoyed by Nigerian government. Yes, they are very patient but whenever their patience dissipates as it has, you are going to be confronted with a different level of struggle. No other people know this more than the British who thinking that Biafran women were as docile as their British counterpart of the early 20^th century crossed the invisible line. The now famous Aba women war of 1929, remember was fought solely by Biafran women based on same issues as has been confronting their nation since 1970.

It is only in this part of the world that you have women having equal if not superior rights to men. That was why when confronted by the British judicial panel over the Aba women’s war, on why the women listened to their menfolk and went on rampage, the angry women leaders of the revolution had retorted, ‘here, men do not speak for us!’ This, when published in the British press in the 1930s was picked up by British women suffragettes and became their catchphrase, ‘here men do not speak for us, as reported by Harry Gailey. Gailey authored “The Road to Aba: A Study of British Administrative Policy in Eastern Nigeria” and was published by New York University Press in 1970.

KKK: Is human rights violations becoming a thorny issue in Nigeria? Why armed northern Islamic attacks on Christian-dominated southwestern and southeastern States?

MOI: Human rights violations and armed Northern Islamic attacks on Christians have gone beyond the description, ‘thorny.’ It is now an existential threat. It is a choreographed, preplanned attempt at not just ethnic cleansing but a grand Islamization conquest in their quest to ‘deep the Koran into the Atlantic,’ as promised them by their forebears. This is happening with impunity with tens of thousands killed as the world watch without lifting a finger. What did we do? Is it wrong to be Christian and Biafran? What makes our own Christianity different from that of the rest of the world that they have refused to help? How come all the international news media have refused mentioning the daily carnage? Who says Biafra with its 95% Christian population, an ancient democratic and republican system, sharing the best of contemporary Western ideas cannot be helped to be a bastion against militant Islamism that poses a great threat not just to Biafrans but the rest of the world? It is unbelievable.

KKK: Does Buhari’s administration recognize all the issues you have discussed above?

MOI: How can someone who subscribes to the philosophy that ‘Western knowledge’ is bad recognize any of these issues? These issues are diametrically opposed to his ideals and what he has come to execute. He has been sincere in stating, in clear terms, all he has been doing are pro-militant Islam and anti-westernization and modernity. Buhari’s administration is completely blind to these important facts. The federal government would rather exacerbate them than otherwise.

KKK: What are the expectations from regional organizations, especially the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and of course, the African Union?

MOI: They do not exist. There is no point wasting energy on things that do not exist unless we want to get entangled in an empty academic exercise. When last for instance did ECOWAS or African union make a statement on the daily bloodshed in Nigeria?

Unfortunately for ECOWAS, Africa and the Western world that have refused to raise a finger and are all seating on the sideline waiting for Nigeria to implode, that implosion will come sooner or later and when 200 million refuges start streaming all over Africa and into the Western world, a world that could not handle six million Syrian refuges, maybe, then all our eyes will open. This is the time for the world to halt the recalcitrant marauding Nigerian legal and illegal security forces bent on decapitating everything on their path to the total domination of our space.

This is the time for the world to force Nigeria to a round table. This forced amalgamation of 1914 has not worked and will never work. Our situation is not that of a window dressed constitutional review. We are all worlds apart. There is simply two diametrically opposed cosmological views that cannot live side by side in this space. It happened in India and in 1947/8, the British did the right thing – separated Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan. That right thing – separation, is our minimum demand.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah is a passionate and frequent contributor to Global Research.

The debate over voting by mail in America in November generally is defined by the interests of the two major political parties. Democrats insist that such voting enfranchises large numbers of citizens who would not otherwise be able to vote and is also secure. The Republicans argue that a large volume of voting by mail will guarantee that the election results will not be known for some time after the election and also that casting a ballot without being physically present increases the possibility of fraud.

Beyond that, the recent use of largescale mail-in voting in New York State suggest that there can be considerable delays in the mechanics of actually counting the ballots, while many ballots were also completely invalidated for various reasons, but some states like Oregon and Utah have been successfully using mail-in for years. So essentially the argument is a political one. The Democrats are expecting that most voters who postal vote will vote for them while the Republicans would like to repress that type of voting precisely for the same reason, i.e. that it would likely benefit Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates. There will certainly be both detected and undetected fraud in the voting, but the questions are “How much?” and “Will it affect any results?” If the fraud is not significant many would argue that it is a price that should be paid to improve voter turnout.

Elections are run at the state and county level in the United States, not nationally. A recent review of procedures to register and vote in my home state of Virginia determined that one can both register and vote without any human contact at all. The registration process can be accomplished by filling out an online form, which is linked here. Note particularly the following: the form requires one to check the box indicating U.S. citizenship. It then asks for name and address as well as social security number, date of birth and whether one has a criminal record or is otherwise disqualified to vote. You then have to sign and date the document and mail it off. Within ten days, you should receive a voter’s registration card for Virginia which you can present if you vote in person, though even that is not required.

It is important to consider no documents have to be presented to support the application, which means that all the information can be false. You can even opt out of providing a social security number by indicating that you have never been issued one, even though the form indicates that you must have one to be registered, and you can also submit a temporary address by claiming you are “homeless.” Even date of birth information is useless as the form does not ask where you were born, which is how birth records are filed by state and local governments. Ultimately, it is only the social security number that validates the document and that is what also appears on the Voter’s ID Card, but even that can be false or completely fabricated, as many illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. have discovered.

In a state like Virginia, the actual mail-in ballot requires your signature and that of a witness, who can be anyone. That is also true in six other states. Thirty-one states require your own signature while only three states require that the document be notarized, a good safeguard since it requires the voter to actually produce some documentation. Seven states require your additional signature on the ballot envelope and two states require that a photocopy of the voter ID accompany the ballot. In other words, the safeguards in the system vary from state to state but in most cases, fraud would be relatively easy.

Possible fraud in the voting not to mention delays in post office delivery of the mail-in ballots, have, not surprisingly, political consequences that are beginning to surface in discussions of what might actually happen the night of the election. If the civil disturbances that have been occurring over the past three months continue and the Republicans are successful in hammering on the law-and-order theme, it is likely that the results of the presidential vote will be much tighter than some current polls seem to suggest.

So, what happens on the day after? Well, the elections in 2000 and 2016 suggest that there might be problems. In 2000, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore even though the latter had more votes nationally. There was considerable fear that violence might result, but the issue was resolved by a recount in Florida followed by a Supreme Court ruling and Bush’s legitimacy, though questioned, was conceded. In 2016, of course, Hillary Clinton had 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but his large majority in the Electoral College meant that the result was largely unchallenged, though it was soon to be attributed to “Russian help.”

This year might be different due to the simmering anger over coronavirus measures as well as the racial turmoil. That might not matter much but for the fact that President Donald Trump has opened the door to discussion of possible fraud in the election and has also suggested that the result might not be legitimate. He has particularly focused on mail-in voting and it has been conjectured that he might be deliberately taking steps to hinder post office ability to deliver the ballots on time. The viral badinage appears to be working for the GOP as a recent opinion poll suggests that only 45% of prospective voters are confident of the integrity of election results.

What might be coming, from one perspective, is suggested by a Trump tweet from the November 2018 election in Florida, in which he declared “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

More recently, on July 30^th, Trump tweeted

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

The president has also claimed repeatedly that the Democrats are trying to “steal the election.”

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has predictably made matters worse by asserting that

“…sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and honoring our Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the United States… They’re doing everything they can [to] suppress the vote with [their] actions: scare people, intimidate by saying law enforcement will be there, diminish the role of the postal system in all of this. It’s really, actually shameful.”

She called them “Enemies of the state,” a version of Hillary Clinton’s famous faux pas in declaring that Trump supporters in 2016 were “deplorables.”

Pelosi also has called for cancellation of the planned presidential debates between Trump and Biden, saying she does not want to legitimize any conversation with the president. She has also added fuel to the fire by claiming that Trump is “…welcom[ing], in fact, Russian intervention, letting Putin decide who will be President instead of the American people.” So, the stage is set for some very significant grievances to play out from either side. It is being suggested that Donald Trump might try to delay the election, which he does not have the power to do, or let it take place in expectation that he will have the lead in conventionally cast votes when the polls close and will be able to declare both victory and that the election is over without any further counting because of fraud on the mail-in ballots. If, on the other hand, Trump loses, the argument could be broadened, with the president calling the all of the voting invalid because of widespread mail-in fraud.

As more Americans than ever are frustrated and angry over the political system while also being ideologically divided into various camps characterized by hard core support of positions that are impossible to reconcile, the situation could explode. And, one must point out, more Americans are armed than ever before while they continue to buy weapons at a record rate. Throw into the mix a police force that is demoralized and evidently increasingly incapable of dealing with civil unrest and November 3^rd’s election could well unleash forces that could make the rioting and violence that is sweeping across America currently look insignificant.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Sky News

The Black Lives Matter slogan and the demand for “racial justice” echo as the defining characteristic of the ongoing resistance from Portland to Kenosha. But the drama of the moment obscures the limitation of these demands. What we mean is those demands can be easily manipulated by the same forces the resisters in the streets believe they are in opposition to.

Private corporations such as Uber and Amazon and professional sports teams have contributed money and lined up behind the demand that “Black Lives Matter.” But as these private companies, the media and right-wing neoliberal politicians in the Democratic Party all line up in favor of racial justice, isn’t it wise for someone to inquire what exactly they are backing? This question is especially important in the midst of the pandemic, in which the non-white working-class populations are suffering and dying in disproportionate numbers, with hundreds of African/Black people dying every week.

Extrajudicial murders of Black people at the hands of U.S. police number fewer than 300 per year, on average. The opposition to murders at the hands of police is understandable, given African/Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but represent an average of 25 percent to 30 percent of lethal encounters with the police. These numbers don’t even account for the numbers of African/Black people shot and beaten by the police.

However, other disproportionalities are not being contextualized as racial justice issues. Astronomical rates of Black unemployment, Black people in lines for food assistance, Black people representing the most vulnerable so-called “essential” workers, Black people lacking health insurance, Black people impoverished and Black people unnecessarily dying during a pandemic are expressions of capitalist state violence. But they have been exempted from the category of racialized oppression.

This contradiction might explain why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos can make sure workers trying to organize themselves are fired, but then turn around and claim “Black Lives Matter.”

Black human-rights fighter Ella Baker famously said to Black people and to other oppressed people, “You and I cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism.” If the current demand for racial justice was identified with the position Ella Baker articulated, would the corporations, the media, liberal foundations, and right-wing Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris still support it?

The answer is obvious. That is why even the leading personalities of the Black Lives Matter movement have not publicly embraced Ella Baker’s position.

And that is why we have and must continue to develop a Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). Members of this alliance are clear there can be no justice, peace or human rights as long as this rapacious, inhumane colonial/capitalist system is allowed to reproduce poverty, war and the structures of white supremacy.

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A dangerous vehicle collision between U.S and Russian soldiers in Northeastern Syria on Aug. 24 highlights the fragility of the relationship and the broader test of wills between the two major powers.

According to White House reports and a Russian video that went viral this week, it appeared that as the two sides were racing down a highway in armored vehicles, the Russians sideswiped the Americans, leaving four U.S. soldiers injured. It is but the latest clash as both sides continue their patrols in the volatile area. But it speaks of bigger problems with U.S. provocations on Russia’s backdoor in Eastern Europe.

A sober examination of U.S. policy toward Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union leads to two possible conclusions. One is that U.S. leaders, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, have been utterly tone-deaf to how Washington’s actions are perceived in Moscow. The other possibility is that those leaders adopted a policy of maximum jingoistic swagger intended to intimidate Russia, even if it meant obliterating a constructive bilateral relationship and eventually risking a dangerous showdown. Washington’s latest military moves, especially in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, are stoking alarming tensions.

There has been a long string of U.S. provocations toward Russia. The first one came in the late 1990s and the initial years of the twenty-first century when Washington violated tacit promises given to Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if Moscow accepted a united Germany within NATO, the Alliance would not seek to move farther east. Instead of abiding by that bargain, the Clinton and Bush administrations successfully pushed NATO to admit multiple new members from Central and Eastern Europe, bringing that powerful military association directly to Russia’s western border. In addition, the United States initiated “rotational” deployments of its forces to the new members so that the U.S. military presence in those countries became permanent in all but name. Even Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was uneasy about those deployments and conceded that he should have warned Bush in 2007 that they might be unnecessarily provocative.

During his stint in power as Pakistan’s prime minister until July 2017, Nawaz Sharif had nurtured cordial working relationship with India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi. This, along with his role in Kargil conflict of 1999 with India, was precisely the reason why Pakistan’s military establishment turned against him and he was eventually disqualified from holding public office by a Pakistan’s apex court’s ruling in July 2017 acting on the instructions of the establishment.

Imran Khan is himself a secular liberal and is known to have cultivated close friendships with many Indian celebrities, including with glamorous “Khans of Bollywood,” during his cricketing career. He is also credited with inaugurating a Sikh Gurdwara at Kartarpur, to the opening ceremony of which former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was also invited, and for allocating land for a Hindu temple to be built in Islamabad since assuming premiership in August 2018.

Pakistan’s military is wary of pacifist tendencies of civilian politicians and jealously guards its traditional national security domain. Therefore, within months of Imran Khan being inaugurated as prime minister of Pakistan, a terrorist attack took place in Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir on the Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2019, inflicting 40 fatalities among Indian paramilitary forces. The vehicle-bound suicide attack was conducted by a Kashmiri native Adil Dar allegedly belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militant outfit operating from across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Candle Light March organised in Mehsana, Gujarat, India in wake of 2019 Pulwama attack (Source: Nizil Shah/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The timing of the terrorist attack was critical as it happened on the eve of Indian general elections due to take place in May 2019. Some sort of retaliation was obvious, but what Narendra Modi did, even Pakistani military strategists could not have anticipated it.

In a pre-dawn airstrike on February 26, 2019, 12 Indian Mirage 2000 fighter jets intruded into Pakistan’s airspace and dropped their payload on the top of a mountain at a terrorist training camp, allegedly belonging to the same jihadist group that had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir on February 14, 2019.

Although Pakistan military’s officials claimed after the Indian incursion that the Indian jets had intruded 3-4 miles in Muzaffarabad sector of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, according to location provided by local residents and subsequent news reports, the site of the airstrike was deep inside the Pakistani territory between Balakot and Mansehra in northwestern Pakistan. Thankfully, no loss of lives was reported as the bombs fell in the open and created four large craters.

In response, Pakistan’s air force struck six targets inside Indian-administered Kashmir the next day on February 27. Indian air force chased Pakistani aircrafts inside Pakistan-administered Kashmir where an Indian MiG-21 aircraft was shot down by Pakistan’s air force and an Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman was arrested, who was released a couple of days later on March 1, 2019, as a gesture of goodwill on the orders of Prime Minister Imran Khan, even though Pakistan’s military’s top brass had reservations against his unconditional release.

Although the military escalation between nuclear-armed rivals was amicably resolved, the confrontation soured the relationship between Imran Khan and Narendra Modi to the extent that Imran Khan began calling Modi a Hindu fascist and the latter in turn couldn’t stand the sight of Imran Khan.

The February 2019 face-off between Pakistani and Indian armed forces was reminiscent of another stand-off between the hostile neighbors a decade earlier in November 2008. In August 2008, Pakistan’s longtime dictator General Pervez Musharraf was ousted from power and a liberal and secular Pakistan People’s Party formed the government.

Wary of a rapprochement between civilian-led governments in Pakistan and India, Pakistan’s military establishment orchestrated another terrorist attack in November 2008 in which ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan, carried out twelve coordinated shooting and bombing attacks lasting four days across the Indian metropolis Mumbai, inflicting 174 fatalities including nine attackers. One of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, was captured alive who was subsequently hanged in November 2012.

In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as the military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception.

Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have institutional interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in the 1960s was a liberal establishment. Then, the General Zia-led administration in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad was evidently a religious conservative establishment. And lastly, the General Musharraf-led administration from 1999 to 2008 was once again regarded as a liberal establishment.

Similarly, the Egyptian and Turkish military establishments also have a liberal outlook, but they are equally capable of forming alliances with conservatives if and when it suits the institutional interests of military. In fact, since military’s top brass is mostly groomed in urban milieus, therefore its high-ranking officers are more likely to have liberal temperaments.

The establishment does not judge on the basis of ideology, it simply looks for weaknesses. If a liberal political party is unassailable in a political system, it would join forces with conservatives; and if conservatives cannot be beaten in a system, it would form an alliance with liberals to perpetuate the stranglehold of the “deep state” on its traditional domain, the security and defense policy of a country.

The biggest threat to nascent democracies all over the world does not come from external enemies, but from their internal enemies, the national security establishments, because military generals by their very training have a chauvinistic mindset and a hawkish temperament. An additional aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of military coups in developing democracies is that they lack firm traditions of democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism which act as bars against martial laws.

All political parties in Pakistan at some point in time in history were nurtured by the security establishment. The founder of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was groomed by General Ayub’s establishment in the 1960s as a counterweight to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League in the East Pakistan province of Pakistan, which is now a separate country Bangladesh, though the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) later turned out to be a fiercely anti-establishment political force under the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto.

Similarly, Nawaz Sharif was nurtured by General Zia’s administration during the 1980s to offset the influence of Benazir Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party, which was deemed a “security risk” by the military’s top brass. And finally, Imran Khan was groomed by General Musharraf’s establishment to counterbalance the ascendancy of Nawaz Sharif, who had fallen out with the establishment after the Pakistani military’s ill-conceived Kargil operation in the Indian-administered Kashmir in 1999.

It’s quite ironic, however, that as soon as the establishment’s former protégés develop a political constituency for themselves, they opportunistically turn against their erstwhile patrons in the military and strive to monopolize power in the hands of their respective political organizations. It might take some time for the newly elected government of Imran Khan to cross swords with its rogue benefactors, but it is bound to happen sooner or later.

Regardless, Prime Minister Imran Khan is an educated, well-informed, articulate and charismatic leader. Being an Oxford graduate, he is much better informed than most Pakistani politicians. And he is a liberal at heart. Most readers might disagree with the assertion due to his fierce anti-imperialism and West-bashing demagoguery, but allow me to explain.

It’s not just Imran Khan’s celebrity lifestyle that makes him a liberal. He also derives his intellectual inspiration from the Western tradition. The ideal role model in his mind is the Scandinavian social democratic model which he has mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in his speech at Karachi before a massive rally of singing and cheering crowd in December 2012.

His relentless anti-imperialism as a political stance should be viewed in the backdrop of Western military interventions in the Islamic countries. The conflagration that neocolonial powers have caused in the Middle East evokes strong feelings of resentment among Muslims all over the world. Moreover, Imran Khan also uses anti-America rhetoric as an electoral strategy to attract conservative masses, particularly the impressionable youth.

Finally, we need to bear in mind the fact that Imran Khan’s political party draws most of its electoral support from women and youth voters. Both these segments of society, especially the women, are drawn more toward egalitarian liberalism than patriarchal conservatism, because liberalism promotes women’s rights and its biggest plus point is its emphasis on equality, emancipation and empowerment of women which constitute more than 50% of population in every society.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

Hikers in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights found at least 5 armed and unguarded Merkava Mk. IV battle tanks.

The doors of the battle tanks were open with equipment and munitions left completely unguarded inside. The incident took place amid the growing tensions between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces in both the Golan Heights area and along the Israeli-Lebanese contact line.

During the past weeks, the Israeli military was actively deploying troops and equipment to reinforce their positions in these areas. It is highly likely that the abandoned battle tanks were a part of these reinforcements. So, if Israeli sources do not know how to explain this failure, they can easily blame Hezbollah.

Indeed, Israel is already taking steps to do this. On August 29, the Lebanese group’s Central Media released a video of the incident that took place about a week ago. The video showed a dummy soldier moving amid a cloud of thick smoke on the Israeli-Lebanese separation line. Two Merkava IV battle tanks of the IDF were guarding the “robot soldier.” The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) often use such “dummy targets” in an attempt to trick Hezbollah in times of tensions.

On August 26, IDF aircraft carried out several airstrikes on what it called “observation posts” of Hezbollah near the contact line in southern Lebanon. The IDF said the strikes were a response to a security incident, in which shots were fired at an Israeli force operating near the town of al-Manar. The incident, which took place at 22:40 on August 25, resulted in no casualties, according to the IDF’s statement.

“The IDF considers the Lebanese government responsible for what happens from its territory,” Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, a spokesman for the IDF, said, adding: “We view the incident with extreme seriousness, like every attempt to violate the sovereignty of the State of Israel, and our forces will remain in a state of great readiness to preserve the sovereignty of Israel and the security of the population as needed.”

Thus, the IDF reinforced its threats to carry out strikes on Lebanon in response to any attack or provocation from this direction. Apparently, the IDF sees the possible strikes on “dummy soldiers” intentionally put in danger areas on the contact line with Lebanon as one of such attacks. Lebanese sources claim that the IDF is intentionally seeking a pretext for military actions against Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Secretary-General of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah vowed that Hezbollah will kill an Israeli soldier every time the Israeli military kills one of his group’s fighters. The Lebanese leader made the new threat in a televised speech commemorating the 10th of Muharram, a holy Islamic day highly admired by Shiites, on August 30. The Hezbollah-Israeli tensions seem to be ready to explode with an open military confrontation at any moment.

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It does not seem possible that here in the United States, a country that has long prided itself on its humanity, a man could be serving a life sentence for stealing hedge clippers. Yet, shocking as it is, Fair Wayne Bryant’s story is the story of thousands of Americans whose lives have been decimated by draconian laws that disproportionately affect minorities.

Bryant, a black man, was sentenced to life in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers from a Louisiana carport storage room in 1997. He has already served twenty-three years for this petty crime, and on 31 July the Louisiana Supreme Court denied a request to review his life sentence. The denial followed a lower appeals court’s 2019 decision that concluded “his life sentence is final.”

The only judge on the Louisiana Supreme Court to dissent (or even issue an opinion) was Chief Justice Bernette Johnson. She wrote a stinging rebuke, observing that Bryant’s “life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of hedge clippers is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose.” How is it possible that one judge after another could condemn a man to life behind bars for such an insignificant and non-violent transgression? One must conclude that these judges have lost their capacity for mercy – and what indeed is justice without mercy? As Shakespeare put it, “It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”

We cannot, however, simply condemn the judges who issue these cruelly harsh sentences. In over 80 percent of cases where the judge hands down a life sentence without parole – the harshest sentence that can be imposed short of the death penalty – for a non-violent offense, the judge has little alternative: the sentence is automatic and mandatory.

Image on the right: The Louisiana Supreme Court building in New Orleans (Nolanwebb/Wikipedia)

Chief Justice Johnson points out that

“Mr. Bryant’s incarceration has cost Louisiana taxpayers approximately $518,667. Arrested at 38, Mr. Bryant has already spent nearly 23 years in prison and is now over 60 years old. If he lives another 20 years, Louisiana taxpayers will have paid almost one million dollars to punish Mr. Bryant for his failed effort to steal a set of hedge clippers.”

It is surely an absurd, extravagant, and shameful use of taxpayer funds. In fact, taxpayers spend nearly $2 billion a year to keep non-violent offenders locked away for life.  So how does such a thing occur?

Bryant was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, under the habitual offender statute, due to four prior felony convictions. While an appellate court determined that to deny Bryant the possibility of parole was actually illegal, there are in fact over three thousand prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offenses. This is a human rights issue, and the shame of it should shock every American possessed of conscience. A 2013 ACLU report found that roughly seventy-nine percent of those 3,278 prisoners, “were sentenced to die in prison for non-violent drug crimes.” Other infractions were as minor as “siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts” or “breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch…”

Only the first of Bryant’s previous convictions was for a violent crime, a 1979 attempted armed robbery of a cab driver. Bryant pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. The other subsequent convictions were non-violent. In 1987, Bryant was convicted of possessing stolen goods worth over $500, for which he was sentenced to two years in prison. In 1989, he was convicted of attempted forgery of a check worth $150 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. And in 1992, he pleaded guilty to burglary of an inhabited dwelling and was sentenced to four years in prison. As Johnson points out,

“Such petty theft is frequently driven by the ravages of poverty or addiction, and often both. It is cruel and unusual to impose a sentence of life in prison at hard labor for the criminal behavior which is most often caused by poverty or addiction.”

Indeed, Bryant’s life sentence goes beyond draconian – it is an obscene parody of justice; it is in itself a crime against all that makes us human; for the law has in effect decided that this man’s life is without any value, that he is unworthy of humane consideration. Indeed, these unjust laws are an affront to the fundamental principle that every human being is possessed with inherent dignity and worth. When you punish petty theft with the same severity that murderers and rapists might receive, you make a mockery of justice and in fact weaken the significance of these far more serious transgressions.

Precedent set by the Louisiana Supreme Court established that while a sentence might be permissible under the habitual offender statute, it may still violate a defendant’s constitutional rights if it is excessive and “makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment.” Supposing that Bryant’s sentence was technically allowed, it was nonetheless plainly an infringement of his “right to humane treatment,” guaranteed by Article I, Section 20, of the Louisiana constitution; which forbids “cruel, excessive, or unusual punishment” and assures that “Full rights of citizenship shall be restored upon termination of state and federal supervision following conviction for any offense.”

Johnson goes on to argue that Bryant’s case is a modern manifestation of ‘pig laws’ which were “largely designed to re-enslave African Americans” following the Civil War,  targeting such actions “as stealing cattle and swine – considered stereotypical ‘negro’ behavior – by lowering the threshold for what constituted a crime and increasing the severity of its punishment.”

To drive Johnson’s point home, we might note that the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where Bryant is serving out his life sentence, was once the site of a slave plantation. Like the prison, the plantation was also known as Angola, after the African country from where the slaves originated. The Angola plantation was acquired by a major in the Confederate Army following the abolition of slavery. Inmates living in former slave quarters were subjected to a penal labor system in which prisoners could be leased out to private individuals, effectively maintaining slavery by other means. As Paul Gardullo, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, stated: “People – mostly young black men – were rounded up for petty crimes, and they were put to work as a way to control the newly free.”

Bryant’s case is by no means an isolated one. Excessive punishment, especially lengthy prison terms, is one of the major contributors to the “unprecedented rise of the prison population” and the distinctly American phenomenon of mass incarceration. Habitual offender laws, and harsh drug laws have been shown to be racially biased and ineffective (79.1 percent of the nearly 4,000 people incarcerated in Louisiana prisons as habitual offenders are black). In a 1994 interview John Erlichman frankly admitted that Nixon’s “war on drugs” was designed to criminalize black people.

So, Fair Wayne Bryant has spent most of his adult life in prison and may spend the rest of his life there for a petty theft. Since the death of George Floyd this country has been searching its soul, struggling to come to terms with its racist history, and searching for a path forward, a future in which there may indeed be “a new birth of freedom.” But if this nation is to overcome the plague of systemic racism, then we must revisit habitual offender statutes and end mandatory life sentences for non-violent offences. Bryant and thousands of others like him are being denied their fundamental right under the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution not to be subject to “cruel and unusual punishment.” This inhumanity chokes the cause of justice and hollows our commitment to human rights the world over.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Russia won the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. On August 11, its Sputnik V was registered for use by the Russian Ministry of Health.

Development of the vaccine followed 20 years of research, what its scientists called another “Sputnik moment” — referring to Russia’s 1957 first ever “successful launch (of a) man-made satellite by the Soviet Union.

According to US funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — part of its global propaganda media that broadcasts in 59 languages on radio, television, and online — the Trump regime “blacklist(ed) three Russian military and civilian scientific facilities, citing their alleged involvement in chemical and biological weapons research (sic),” adding:

Targeted facilities include a “Russian Defense Ministry facility that is involved in Russia’s attempts to develop the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine.”

The US Commerce Department said it’s blacklisting “60 entities in Russia, China” and elsewhere, falsely claiming:

Their activities are “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

The Commerce Department’s action means that nations, businesses, other entities or individuals engaging in normal activities with blacklisted facilities risk US sanctions.

Russian ones were targeted for being first to develop and have available for use a COVID-19 vaccine that can compete with Big Pharma’s aim for maximum vaccine market potential with minimal foreign competition.

In response to the unacceptable Trump regime actions against Russian scientific facilities, its Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following:

“We find it outrageous that three Russian scientific research institutes have been included on the American blacklist,” adding:

“A particularly disturbing fact is that these sanctions precisely affect those scientists and specialists who…have been tirelessly laboring on the development of a Russian vaccine against COVID-19.”

“It is not clear how the American government is going to explain to its citizens this attempt to punish the people who are working successfully on a remedy against the disease, which has already taken the lives of over 180,000 US citizens.”

“We don’t believe that this is a step in the right direction in cooperating to fight the pandemic, the importance of which, we think, Washington cannot even deny.”

“Once again one gets the impression that the run-of-the-mill use of sanctions is a tool of pressure to thrust forward one’s own companies’ interests – right now pharmaceutical ones – which mirrors the continued push of its own natural gas into the European market.”

Russian research facilities and scientists involved in COVID-19 vaccine development are not involved in working on chemical and biological weapons of any kind, Zakharova stressed.

Unlike the US, Russia eliminated its entire CW arsenal in 2017.

“This is confirmed by the authorized international structure, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which includes 193 countries, among them the US,” she explained, adding:

“Russia continues to conscientiously carry out all of its responsibilities under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).”

“Washington…prefers to act not within the framework of international agreements, but at its own discretion” extrajudicially.

The US is the only CWC member-state that maintains an arsenal of banned chemical weapons.

Substances “are being patented in the US related to the use of full-fledged combat toxic substances, including nerve agents,” said Zakharova.

It operates facilities for the development and production of bioweapons.

“There are no grounds to assert that the activity of American biological labs fully complies with the provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC),” Zakharova stressed.

Trump’s Commerce Department blacklisted facilities of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Central Research Institutes No. 33 and No. 48, along with the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology.

These facilities have no involvement in developing banned chemical or biological weapons as the Trump regime falsely claimed.

Blacklisting them is part of Washington’s war on Russia by other means, along with wanting to give corporate America a competitive advantage over foreign competition.

A Final Comment

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the Trump regime’s blacklisting of Russian research facilities a “sanctions theater of the absurd,” adding:

“This is a follow-up to (US) sanctions dependence” against targeted nations, entities and individuals.

Peskov called Washington’s claim that targeted Russian facilities are covertly engaged in developing chemical and biological weapons “absolute nonsense,” adding:

“(T)his another example of uncovered and rampant non-competitive struggle” by the US.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image is from Natural News

Canada is supporting US efforts to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.

A recently leaked USAID document highlights “the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.” The stated aim is to replace president Daniel Ortega with “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” HighlightingWashington’s aim, Ben Norton notes, “the 14-page USAID document employed the word ‘transition’ 102 times, including nine times on the first page alone.”

Recently Canada’s representative to the Organization of American States, Hugh Adsett, joined five other countries in calling on the OAS’ Secretary General to organize a special session focused on human rights and democracy in Nicaragua. At the recent OAS meeting Adsett criticized Nicaragua, saying the Covid-19 pandemic “should not be used to weaken democracy”.

Ottawa has supported a number of OAS resolutions and initiatives targeting Nicaragua’s government. Along with the US, Paraguay, Jamaica and Argentina, Canada was part of the 2019 OAS High-Level Diplomatic Commission on Nicaragua, which Managua blocked from entering the country. The commission claimed there was an “alteration of constitutional order that seriously affects the democratic order” in Nicaragua. But, the group failed to win majority support at the OAS General Assembly.

Ottawa has severed aid and sanctioned officials from a government former US national security adviser John Bolton listed as part of a “troika of tyranny” (Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua). Ortega’s government is part of the Venezuela-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), which is a response to North American capitalist domination of the hemisphere.

Since the Sandinistas’ won power in 2007 poverty rates dropped substantially in the nation of six million. The government expanded access to electricity in rural areas and doubled the proportion of electricity from renewable sources to over half. Access to drinking water has increased as have health indicators improved. Women’s role in parliament grew sharply and Nicaragua’s murder rate remained a fraction of its northern neighbours. According to a July 2019 UN report, there were 8.3 murders per 100,000 Nicaraguans compared with nearly 70 murders per 100,000 in El Salvador and Honduras.

A little more than a year after his third consecutive election victory a protest movement challenged Ortega’s presidency. Ostensibly what unleashed the uprising was a social security reform pushed by the International Monetary Fund. But, pension benefits were largely maintained with the government offloading most of the cost on to employers. Despite a relatively working-class friendly reform, many student organizations and NGOs aligned with the major employer federation, the wealthiest Nicaraguans and the conservative Catholic church to oppose the government. Many of these groups were financed and trained by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy, USAID and Freedom House, which is close to the CIA. The movement was greatly influenced by Washington, which has long been powerful in the small, impoverished, country.

The protests quickly turned violent. At least 22 police officers were killed and as many as 300 lost their lives in politically related violence during 2018. The North American media and internationally connected NGOs blamed the government for all the rights violations. But, this was absurd, as the death toll of police highlight. It was also public knowledge that opposition rebels had been attacking government supporters for years. In March 2016 the New York Times published a long sympathetic story headlined “Ortega vs. the Contras: Nicaragua Endures an ’80s Revival” about a small number of anti-government rebels targeting police stations and Sandinistas in rural areas.

Still, Canadian officials blamed the government — either implicitly or directly — for the violence. Between April 23 and July 18, 2018, Global Affairs put out at least four press releases critical of the situation in Nicaragua. Chrystia Freeland’s statements became steadily stronger with the former foreign minister eventually demanding an immediate end to the “violence, repression, arbitrary detentions and human rights violations” and for “the government of Nicaragua to help create the conditions for safe, peaceful, and constructive discussions.” Subsequently Canada’s foreign minister questioned Ortega’s democratic legitimacy. In June 2019 Freeland declared, “Canada will continue to stand with the people of Nicaragua and their legitimate demands for democracy and accountability.” But, Ortega won the election in a landslide and it’s hard to imagine that he suddenly lost all support.

In March 2016 the New York Times reported, “Mr. Ortega enjoys strong support among the poor” while eight months later The Guardian noted he “cementedpopular support among poorer Nicaraguans.” At the end of 2016 Ortega was re-elected with 72% of the vote in an election some in the opposition boycotted.

The Liberals raised the conflict in Nicaragua in international forums. At a Women Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Montréal in September 2018 Freeland said “Nicaragua” was one of “the pressing issues that concern us as foreign ministers.” The “situation in Nicaragua” was discussed between Freeland and foreign minister Aloysio Nunes at the third Canada-Brazil Strategic Partnership Dialogue a month later.

In August 2018 the Liberals officially severed aid to Nicaragua. Canadian funding for five major government backed projects was withdrawn.

Ten months later Canada sanctioned nine Nicaraguan government officials, including ministers and the president of the National Assembly. Individuals’ assets were frozen and Canadians were prohibited from dealing with said persons. The sanctions were adopted in co-ordination with Washington. “United States and Canada Announce Financial Sanctions to Address the Ongoing Repression in Nicaragua”, noted the US State Department’s release.

The Liberals’ stance towards Nicaragua contrasts sharply with its words and actions towards its Central American neighbour Honduras. While Canada condemned Ortega, severed aid and sanctioned officials, it maintained friendly relations and aid spending after Juan Orlando Hernandez defied the constitution by running for a second term as president and then brazenly stole the election.

The Liberals regime change efforts in Nicaragua are part of a broader pro-US/corporate policy in the hemisphere rife with hypocrisy.

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Featured image: A woman stands near a burning barricade holding Nicaraguan flag, April 2018 (Source: Yves Engler)

Politologist Georgii Bovt gave an interview recently in which he said: ‘A movement which doesn’t have a leader, program, or strategy, will die’. In fact, the expert gave the Belarus protest movement one more month at best. A pessimistic prognosis no doubt for the thousands who protested against the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko over the weekend; but nonetheless it remains to be seen how long the Belarussian opposition can encourage people out on to the streets. As the colder, autumnal weather sets in, will the people of Minsk be as keen to venture out in support of opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya?

This remains to be seen. For as Georgii Bovt aptly put it, this is an opposition movement which is lacking all the necessary components to enforce change. In any political or ideological campaign, one of the most important factors is leadership, and indeed the personality of the leader. As German political and social theorist Max Weber noted, a charismatic leader is vital for the success of political movements; in this case it is essential if one is intent on unseating an incumbent president of 26 years together with the system he has in place. It has been identified, for instance, that the success of the Bolshevik revolution was down to, in part, the immense role played by Vladimir Lenin. Charisma, energy, and drive are necessary traits of an effective leader, and typically, such charismatic individuals emerge at times of change, like the one Belarussians are experiencing now.

However, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is lacking all these qualities. In fact, her presentation is so poor it’s cringeworthy to watch. She looks positively bored when interviewed and has this annoying habit of sighing before answering the question, as if she genuinely can’t be bothered. In addition, she is nervous and unsure of herself, seeming incapable of answering questions without reeling off scripted answers. Her press conference last week was a prime example of this; in answer to two very separate questions she gave an identical response, which did not in fact answer the question. The only reply which appeared to reveal her own genuine thoughts was her answer to the final question asked, to which she expressed that she very much hoped that the President would listen to the Belarussian people:

‘You know, what I want to say is…I very much hope and I believe that the leadership will listen to its people, and the fact that we are always told that the President loves his people and country and what he sees just now will show him that people want change. And I hope he will come to his senses and the people will be listened to and he will come round to holding new, transparent elections.’

After these words, her press conference was abruptly, and unexpectedly cut short. It was as if she had strayed off target, had said something she wasn’t supposed to. And indeed she had. For the reality is that in this statement Tikhanovskaya reveals to us that she does not consider herself leader of Belarus, and has no interest in the position. She is simply a puppet; it’s just not clear who is pulling the strings. The very fact that she acknowledges the ‘leadership’ contradicts her assertions that she, not Lukashenko is the elected President. Her reference to the fact that Lukashenko ‘loves his people and country’ contrasts with her movement’s message that he is a brutal dictator. It is an extraordinary statement from an opposition candidate attempting to oust the President. It plainly contradicts her other, scripted, sleek videos in which she adopts a defiant, authoritative tone and doesn’t hold back in condemning Lukashenko.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is the most reluctant leader there ever was. But others are determined to push her into the limelight. Maria Kolesnikova, for example, who was at Tikhanovskaya’s side during the election campaign, is quite a different character, and much less modest. A musician and arts manager, she lived for 12 years in Germany and is described as having a ‘certain affinity for the West’. She has been involved in protests in Belarus for over a decade and was campaign manager for former presidential hopeful Viktor Babariko (arrested by the authorities on corruption charges and therefore unable to run in the election), with whom she worked at Belgazprombank.  As she said in one interview:  ‘I share his values completely — they’re exactly the same as mine’. Recently she presented a video instructing Belarussian civils servants and military personnel to reject orders, saying that they would be handsomely rewarded for doing so.  Just exactly where the funding is coming from for such ‘bribes’ is not clear. But given her clear ideas, defiance and motivation for change in Belarus, it’s not clear why Kolesnikova herself is not presenting herself as a candidate. Is it because, unlike Tikhanovskaya, she lacks good spoken English, a desirable skill for communication with western diplomats?

Who knows. But the opposition will no doubt live to regret their decision to choose Tikhanovskaya to head up the movement. After three weeks of protests in Belarus, the government has made no concessions and no promise to hold new elections. Emmanuel Macron was in a weaker position in France back in 2018/19 when he was forced to concede to the Yellow Vests with promises of raising the minimum wage and cutting taxes. The momentum of the post-election demonstrations in Belarus has been lost. In one interview Tikhanovskaya was asked why people were not listening to her demands to strike; she responded by saying that people were striking. She isn’t in touch with reality, and the reality is that people need to put food on the table, and therefore need to keep working. Lukashenko knows this and so has the upper hand. Although he is unlikely to last in the long-term, Alexander Grigoryevich is going nowhere soon.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

US war on China by other means because of its growing prominence on the world stage has both countries on a potential collision course toward direct confrontation if cooler heads in Washington don’t step back from the brink.

Unacceptable US actions against China and its enterprises are reminiscent of FDR’s economic war on imperial Japan that led to full-blown global war.

In the age of super-weapons, another one could destroy planet earth and all its life forms if things go this far.

US imperial rage risks the unthinkable. Its aim for unchallenged global dominance threatens everyone everywhere.

Bipartisan US policy toward China is all about wanting its economic, industrial, and technological growth undermined, along with wanting the country isolated politically.

Beijing earlier vowed to retaliate against unacceptable US actions appropriately at a time and ways of its choosing.

Since Trump took office, scores of Chinese enterprises were blacklisted from the US market, notably communications and high-tech ones on the phony pretext of protecting national security.

The policy is all about aiming to give corporate America a competitive advantage — and not just against Chinese firms.

Blacklisted ones on the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (SIC) Entity List are barred from purchasing US technology with Washington’s permission.

The exclusionary list includes “businesses, research institutions, government and private organizations, individuals, and other types of legal persons — that are subject to specific license requirements for the export, reexport and/or transfer (in-country) of specified items.”

On Saturday, China announced tightened export controls on nearly two dozen cutting-edge technologies — the first such changes since 2008.

According to China’s Ministry of Commerce and Science and separate Technology Ministry, revised controls apply to nuclear equipment and materials, seaborne satellite launching pads, equipment used in building manmade islands, artificial intelligence interface, drone technology, ultra-high voltage transmission and clean coal power generation, quantum encryption and early warning technology, metal 3D printing, as well as advanced drilling tools and software used in oil and gas extraction.

Xinhua explained that new controls apply to China’s privately-owned TikTok video sharing firm that the Trump regime banned from operating in the US under ownership of its ByteDance parent company, adding:

If the firm intends “to export related technologies, it (must) go through licensing procedures” that can take up to 30 days for approval if granted.

TikTok’s technology in question is the company’s algorithm for its “For You” page that recommends more videos to watch based on known user preferences.

According to China trade expert Cui Fan, ByteDance will have to “consider whether it is necessary to suspend” TikTok’s sale to a US firm based on Beijing’s revised export controls.

China’s Foreign Ministry expressed strong opposition to Trump’s ban on TikTok, forcing the company to seek a US buyer so it can continue operating in the country.

China expert Gao Lingyun said tightened Ministry of Commerce and Science requirements were likely because of hardline Trump regime policies toward the country’s enterprises, adding:

They’re China’s response to the US Entity List.

The Wall Street Journal reported that new restrictions may “throw a wrench into talks between…ByteDance and potential buyers.”

So far the firm and the White House haven’t responded to Beijing’s new export requirements.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

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33rd Anniversary of Brian’s Surviving the US Train Assault in California, September 1, 2020 in front of the US embassy, Managua, Nicaragua

Buenos dias.  I am here today in front of the US Embassy in Managua to protest US intervention in Nicaragua and also to publicly deliver a letter in which I and others request a meeting with Ambassador Sullivan to denounce US intervention in Nicaragua.

I first came to Nicaragua in 1986 to study Spanish and to learn about the Nicaragua’s Revolution.

I came back three more times in 1986 and 1987 to document the criminal conduct of President Reagan’s so-called terrorist “Freedom Fighters”, trained, armed and funded by the US people through their Congress and President. Upon doing research, several of us discovered that most of the weapons – mortars, assault rifles, pistols, land mines, grenades, rockets, small arms ammunition, etc. – coming to El Salvador and Nicaragua, originated from the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station (CNWS). We acquired copies of the shipment orders.

In addition, we gained more information after young Nicaraguan soldiers shot down on October 5, 1986, a US CIA C-123 weapons supply plane with a surface-to-air missile (SAM), twenty miles from the Costa Rican border north of San Carlos, Nicaragua. One of the four crew members, mercenary Eugene Hasenfus from Wisconsin, USA, parachuted to safety before being captured. The three other crew members were killed in the crash. It was Hasenfus’ tenth air supply drop of weapons to awaiting Contra terrorists.  The plane was carrying thirteen thousand pounds of military supplies, including sixty AK-47s, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, grenades and their launchers, jungle boots, and water packets originating from Brooklyn, New York.  I and two other US military veterans were able to interview Hasenfus for several hours in his Tipitapa prison cell gathering many additional details of the US arms shipments.

The US continued to relentlessly fund the criminal terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people despite it being in violation of both international and US Constitutional law, and a ruling of the World Court. Thousands of people were murdered and maimed. The US Congress and President have never been held to account for these vicious crimes, enjoying virtual immunity. Thus, some of us US citizens chose to act in direct efforts to stop the US murder policy being conducted in all of our names as US citizens.

Thirty-three years ago, on a bright sunny day on September 1^st, 1987, I went to the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station (the Pentagon’s largest storage arsenal on the US West Coast) at about 11 am, with two other military veterans, along with about 50 supporting witnesses.   We took our positions to begin our permanent human blockade ON the Station’s railroad tracks.  Everyday, locomotives hauled boxcars full of various armaments from the interior storage bunkers carried on three miles of tracks to be loaded on ships in the Sacramento River. Destination: To murder peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua, 3,500 miles further south.

This US Navy base had a history of citizen civil disobedience. It had been used during the unpopular US War against Viet Nam sending armaments to Asia where many civil blockades had attempted to interfere with movement of those weapons. There was an official protocol for the military to call local police to make arrests, before moving the weapons train whose legal speed limit was but 5 mph. We had notified the US military authorities in writing, and in person, several days in advance of September 1, and again on that day, of our plans for beginning our veteran’s blockade.  The large sign posted within a few feet of the location of our human blockade warned of the penalties for interfering with movement of munitions: one year in prison and a $5,000 fine. We expected that sooner or later we would be arrested and imprisoned.

There was a contingent of armed US Marines who protect the base grouped some 30 feet from our position.  And there was mumbling from them about “we hear there is going to be violence today”. We said, “no, we are nonviolent”.

Near High Noon, the first weapons train became visible some 700 feet or so down the tracks. The other two veterans and I took our firm positions between the rail’s two tracks, to wait for our arrests.  I was sitting in a lotus position, the other two were crouched but firmly planted on their feet.  Our many witnesses were observing along the outside of the tracks, including one friend with a video camera who was to document our treatment by police during the arresting process.  As the train came closer and closer, it appeared that it might be accelerating above its 5-mph speed limit, but that seemed extraordinarily unlikely in light of official protocol and violation of security requirements operating this dangerous munitions train.

But, as fate would have it, the train was accelerating, and as it got closer and closer to our human blockade, it was clear it had no intention of stopping.  Our autonomic nervous system urgently responded with adrenalin, and our bodies moved accordingly. One veteran jumped at the last second to the left off the tracks. The second veteran, 67 years old, jumped straight up in the air and grabbed onto the railing above the cowcatcher platform where two train spotters were standing in phone contact with the operating engineer at the rear of the locomotive. As I had been sitting, I tried to bolt to the right off the tracks but was too late and my body went completely under the locomotive and its trailing boxcars.  The train continued for another 500 feet before it stopped and was surrounded by dozens of armed US Marines.

I spent one month in the hospital recovering from my injuries – double leg amputations below the knee, fractured skull with destruction of right frontal lobe, facial reconstruction including re-attaching severed outer left ear, two broken elbows, broken right wrist, many cracked ribs, broken right shoulder blade, damaged right kidney, and many skin abrasions, including 100 stitches inside my mouth. I left the hospital with two prosthetic legs and a walker.

We learned that the FBI had investigated me and one of the other two veterans as “domestic terrorist suspects” since 1986. A local Sheriff investigation claimed a fear that we were planning to hijack the train, and that the three-man train crew was ordered that day to NOT stop the train. A formal Navy investigation concluded that the train was accelerating to 17 mph, more than three times its legal speed limit.  At the time of impact; that the crew could see us for at least 650 feet, but they never attempted to brake the train, which was what I expected (naturally) per protocol and legal regulations.  I had no intentions to play chicken with a 200,000-pound locomotive.

The US never apologized, and no local, state, or national agency ever brought criminal charges against the navy or its train crew.  After a three-year series of motions and countermotions, a court settlement was reached.

Current US Criminal Plans to overthrow the Democratically elected, sovereign Nicaragua government.

Examining US State Department, NDI (National Democratic Institute) and USAID (US Agency for International Development) and NED (National Endowment for Democracy) communications from 2010 to 2018, it is clear that the US has been preparing for an illegal change of government before, but no later than, the 2021 elections. Their extensive and continuous communications reveal:

• “final goals” of “regime change” to a government “akin to the interest of the US government”;
• “promote mobilizations against the government of Daniel Ortega”;
• “the US government, through its Embassy and the USAID have been preparing the conditions to carry out a non-violent coup d’etat against the Nicaraguan government”;
• “create a mass of young people critics of the government”;
• “create a negative opinion about Daniel Ortega”;
• “discredit the electoral process”;
• “promote antigovernment awareness in vulnerable sectors of the society”;
• “training young leadership and exerting control over the ‘independent’ means of communication…. looking out on the 2021 elections”;
• “undermining the image of the Nicaraguan government”;
• “strengthening the civil society organizations, the media war and the creation of a platform for young leaders, and, at the same time, guaranteeing an international following”; and
• “training in data journalism and data visualization…to influence on the Nicaraguan public opinion and to create a negative opinion about the Daniel Ortega’s government”, using funds from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.  

On July 31, 2020, we learned that the US has launched a new brazen, criminal and arrogant plan to overthrow Nicaragua’s government. A well-orchestrated plan financed by the United States to launch a coup d’état in Nicaragua over the next two years was leaked in a document from the US embassy. US official are fearful that President Ortega and the FSLN will win the 2021 scheduled elections.  The document’s title is   RAIN, Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua, and indicates an intention to contract a US company (Blackwater or its successor?) to take charge of carrying out the coup. The plan’s criminal purpose is to “destroy public order” and “do other violent actions” before, during and/or after the 2021 elections.  The funds to implement this plan are or have been allocated through the International Development Agency (AID) which is also the US institution that has provided the most money openly in recent years to the Nicaraguan opposition for coup activities. USAID will fund these destabilizing activities, using local partners: public opinion analysts, media, businesspersons, NGOs, students, and social networks to orchestrate false news reports. USAID provided millions of dollars to fund the 2018 US-attempted coup operators against Nicaragua.

The new coup government must immediately submit to the policies and guidelines established by the United States, including persecution of Sandinistas, dissolving the National Police and the Army, among other institutions. The document seeks to aggravate the COVID 19 pandemic, which is well under control at present, unlike in the United States, despite US sanctions.   The opposition has already received more than $31 million from the United States between the end of 2017 and May 1, 2020.  The document also details the participation of the US Embassy in Managua, currently under leadership of US Ambassador Kevin K. Sullivan, who will be in charge of executing a series of diplomatic actions such as the creation of a commission to delegitimize the ousted government while legitimizing the new government imposed by a coup d’état.

Therefore, today, a group of US citizens and Nicaraguans are requesting a meeting with Ambassador Sullivan, to ask him to denounce the RAIN coup plan, or any other plan to destabilize the Nicaragua society and government.   We want to also remind him of the laws being violate by current US foreign policy against Nicaragua.  These laws include:

1. United Nations Charter [Article 2(4) reads as follows: All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations], and [51: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security”].
2. II. Any United States military and paramilitary intervention in the affairs Nicaragua is illegal under domestic law, specifically the War Powers Resolution, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Neutrality Act, and the United States Constitution [US Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
3. III. 1956 Treaty of Friendship with Nicaragua.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Si prevede che il traffico aereo civile in Europa calerà quest’anno del 60% rispetto al 2019, a causa delle restrizioni per il Covid-19, mettendo a rischio oltre 7 milioni di posti di lavoro. Cresce in compenso il traffico aereo militare.

Venerdì 28 agosto, sei bombardieri strategici B-52 della US Air Force hanno trasvolato in un solo giorno tutti e 30 i paesi della Nato in Nordamerica ed Europa, affiancati nei diversi tratti da 80 cacciabombardieri dei paesi alleati. Questa grande esercitazione denominata «Cielo Alleato» – ha dichiarato il segretario generale della Nato Jens Stoltenberg – dimostra «il potente impegno degli Stati uniti verso gli Alleati e conferma che siamo in grado di scoraggiare l’aggressione». Evidente l’allusione alla «aggressione russa» in Europa.

I B-52, trasferiti il 22 agosto dalla base aerea Minot in Nord Dakota a quella di Fairford in Gran Bretagna, non sono vecchi aerei della Guerra fredda usati ormai solo per le parate. Continuamente ammodernati, hanno conservato il loro ruolo di bombardieri strategici a lungo raggio. Ora vengono ulteriormente potenziati.

La US Air Force, con una spesa di 20 miliardi di dollari, doterà tra breve 76 B-52 di nuovi motori, che permetteranno ai bombardieri di volare per 8.000 km senza rifornimento in volo, trasportando ciascuno 35 tonnellate di bombe e missili a testata convenzionale o nucleare.

La US Air Force, lo scorso aprile, ha affidato alla  Raytheon Co. la costruzione di un nuovo missile da crociera a lungo raggio, armato di testata nucleare, per i bombardieri B-52.

Con questi e altri bombardieri strategici da attacco nucleare, compresi i B-2 Spirit, la US Air Force ha effettuato sull’Europa dal 2018 oltre 200 sortite, soprattutto sul Baltico e il Mar Nero a ridosso dello spazio aereo russo. A queste esercitazioni partecipano i paesi europei della Nato, in particolare l’Italia.

I bombardieri strategici americani B-52H Stratofortress sorvolano 30 nazioni NATO in un giorno

Quando il 28 agosto un B-52 ha sorvolato il nostro paese,  gli si sono affiancati caccia italiani per simulare una missione congiunta di attacco. Subito dopo cacciabombardieri  Eurofighter  Typhoon dell’Aeronautica italiana sono partiti per schierarsi nella base di Siauliai in Lituania, supportati da un centinaio di militari specializzati.  A partire da oggi 1° settembre vi resteranno per 8 mesi, fino all’aprile 2021, per «difendere» lo spazio aereo del Baltico.

È la quarta missione Nato di «polizia aerea» effettuata nel Baltico dalla nostra Aeronautica. I caccia italiani sono pronti 24 ore su 24 allo scramble, al decollo su allarme per intercettare aerei «sconosciuti», che sono sempre aerei russi in volo tra qualche aeroporto interno e l’exclave russa di Kaliningrad attraverso lo spazio aereo internazionale sul Baltico.

La base lituana di Siauliai, in cui sono schierati, è stata potenziata dagli Stati uniti, che ne hanno triplicato la capacità investendovi 24 milioni di euro. Il perché è chiaro: la base aerea dista appena 220 km da Kaliningrad e 600 da San Pietroburgo, distanza che un caccia tipo l’Eurofighter Typhoon percorre in pochi minuti.

Perché la Nato schiera a ridosso della Russia questi e altri aerei a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare?

Non certo per difendere i paesi baltici da un attacco russo che, se avvenisse, significherebbe l’inizio della guerra mondiale termonucleare. Lo stesso avverrebbe se gli aerei Nato attaccassero dal Baltico le città russe limitrofe. La vera ragione di tale schieramento è quella di accrescere la tensione, fabbricando l’immagine di un pericoloso nemico, la Russia, che si prepara ad attaccare l’Europa.

È la strategia della tensione attuata da Washington, con la complicità dei governi e dei parlamenti europei e della stessa Unione europea. Tale strategia comporta un crescente aumento della spesa militare a scapito di quella sociale.

Un esempio: il costo di un’ora di volo di un caccia Eurofighter è stato calcolato dalla stessa Aeronautica in 66.000 euro (compreso l’ammortamento dell’aereo). Una somma, in denaro pubblico, superiore a due retribuzioni medie lorde annue.

Ogni volta che un Eurofighter decolla per «difendere» lo spazio aereo del Baltico,  brucia in un’ora, in Italia, due posti di lavoro.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Todos somos testemunhas de como a China planeja meticulosamente seus principais movimentos geopolíticos e geoeconômicos até 2030 e além.

O que lerão a seguir teve origem numa série de discussões privadas multilaterais entre analistas de inteligência e pode ajudar a traçar os contornos do panorama geral.

Na China, o caminho claramente aponta para aumento da demanda interna e para a mudança da política monetária para criar crédito que consolide a construção de indústrias domésticas de renome internacional.

Paralelamente, há debate sério em Moscou no sentido que a Rússia deva seguir o mesmo caminho. Nas palavras de um analista, “a Rússia não deve importar coisa alguma, além da tecnologia absolutamente necessária, e só até que possa criá-la. Além disso, deveria exportar exclusivamente o petróleo e gás imprescindíveis para pagar por importações – que devem ser severamente limitadas. A China ainda necessita de recursos naturais, o que faz dos dois países aliados especiais. Todas as nações devem ser tão autossuficiente quanto possível.”

Acontece que essas declarações espelham perfeitamente a estratégia do Partido Comunista Chinês, como delineado pelo Presidente Xi Jinping na reunião do Comitê Central em 31 de julho passado. Também vai de encontro a uma robusta ala neoliberal no PC Chinês – colaboracionistas? – que sonham com converter o partido à democracia no estilo ocidental, subserviente aos interesses do capital ocidental.

Comparar a velocidade econômica de China e de EUA é comparar um Maserati GranTurismo Sport (equipado com motor V8 Ferrari) e um Toyota Camry. Proporcionalmente, a China tem enorme reserva de gerações jovens muito bem educadas; migração acelerada do ambiente rural para o urbano; erradicação crescente da pobreza; mais poupança; sentimento diferenciado de satisfação; mais disciplina social – confucionista; e respeito infinitamente maior pela mente racionalmente educada. Na China, o processo de crescimento do comércio interno será mais que suficiente para manter a dinâmica, em andamento, do imprescindível desenvolvimento sustentável.

O fator hipersônico

Enquanto isso, no front geopolítico, o consenso em Moscou – do Kremlin ao Ministério do Exterior – é que a administração Trump é “incapaz para acordos”, eufemismo diplomático para se referir ao que se descreve também como bando de mentirosos; e também “incapaz para a legalidade”, outro eufemismo, desta vez para designar, por exemplo, o lobby para forçar que os EUA disparem o gatilho das sanções, quando se sabe que Trump já abandonou há tempos o JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, também “Plano de Ação Conjunta Global”).

Recentemente, o Presidente Putin comentou que negociar com a equipe de Trump é como jogar xadrez com um pombo: o pombo anda pelo tabuleiro e espalha merda, derruba peças, declara vitória e some.

Por outro lado, os mais altos níveis do governo russo empenham esforço concreto para consolidar uma aliança eurasiana definitiva, unindo Alemanha, Rússia e China.

Mas essa aliança consolidada só será possível na Alemanha, depois de Merkel. De acordo com um analista (norte)americano, “o que segura a Alemanha é o medo de perder suas exportações de automóveis e outros bens para os Estados Unidos, mas não é difícil explicar que isso acontecerá em breve, por causa da taxa de câmbio dólar/euro, com o euro cada vez mais caro.”

No front nuclear, para além da situação dramática na Bielorrússia – já que não haverá Maidan em Minsk – Moscou já tornou bem claro, em termos contundentes, que qualquer ataque de mísseis da OTAN será interpretado como ataque nuclear.

Acredita-se que o sistema de mísseis defensivos russos – dentre eles o já testado sistema S-500, e a seguir o sistema S-600, já projetado – possa ser 99% efetivo. Significa que a Rússia ainda sofrerá danos, em caso de ataque. Não por outra razão, a Rússia construiu uma extensa rede de abrigos antibombas nucleares nas grandes cidades, com capacidade para pelo menos 40 milhões de pessoas.

Analistas russos veem a mesma tendência também na atitude chinesa de defesa. Pequim pode desenvolver – se já não o fez – um escudo defensivo; e mesmo assim preservar a possibilidade de contra-atacar os Estados Unidos com mísseis nucleares.

Os melhores analistas russos, dentre eles Andrei Martyanov, sabem que as três principais armas em uma suposta guerra no futuro serão os mísseis ofensivos/defensivos e submarinos combinados com capacidades para guerra eletrônica.

Atualmente, a principal arma – e os chineses compreendem-no muito bem – são os submarinos nucleares. Os russos observam como a China constrói sua frota de submarinos – carregados de mísseis hipersônicos –, mais rapidamente que os Estados Unidos. Frotas de superfície estão obsoletas. Uma alcateia de submarinos chineses pode derrotar facilmente um porta-aviões e respectivo grupo de combate. De fato, todos os 11 porta-aviões dos EUA já são obsoletos.

Assim, na possibilidade horrenda de que se torne impossível navegar por mar, no caso de EUA, China e Rússia bloquearem todo o tráfego marítimo, pode-se ver a principal razão estratégica pela qual a China optou por manter por terra, a partir da Rússia, as rotas pelas quais circulam muitos de seus recursos naturais.

Dutos de transporte terrestre de petróleo e gás podem ser rapidamente reparados, no caso de serem bombardeados. Essa é a enorme importância que tem, para a China, o gasoduto Poder da Sibéria – e também da gama estonteante de projetos da empresa russa Gazprom.

O fator Ormuz

Segredo guardado a sete chaves em Moscou é que, logo depois de a Alemanha ter imposto sanções em função da Ucrânia, um grande operador global de energia apresentou proposta, à Rússia, para desviar para a China nada menos que 7 milhões de barris diários de petróleo, além de gás natural. Aconteça o que acontecer, essa impressionante proposta permanece sobre a mesa de Shmal Gannadiy, alto conselheiro do Presidente Putin para assuntos de petróleo e gás.

No caso de a proposta vir a ser implementada, a China assegura-se de que receberá, a partir da Rússia, todos os recursos naturais de que precisa. Nessa hipótese, reação lógica da Rússia seria contornar as sanções da Alemanha e levar suas exportações de petróleo para a China, a qual, do ponto de vista russo, tem tecnologia de consumo melhor que a Alemanha.

Claro que tudo isso pode mudar com a iminente conclusão do Gasoduto Ramo Norte 2 (ing. Nord Stream 2) – apesar de a equipe Trump manter sua política de não carregar prisioneiros, ao sancionar tudo e todos relacionados ao assunto.

Conversas de inteligência nos bastidores deixam bem claro para os industriais alemães que, se a Alemanha perder sua fonte russa de energia em petróleo e gás natural, combinado com o eventual bloqueio do Estreito de Hormuz, no caso de ataque (norte)americano contra o Irã, a economia alemã pode simplesmente colapsar.

Conversas de inteligência acontecem por todo o país, sobre alguma possível Surpresa de Outubro patrocinada pelos Estados Unidos – um ataque sob falsa bandeira pelo qual o Irã seria responsabilizado. A equipe de “pressão máxima” da administração Trump contra o Irã nada tem a ver com o JCPOA. O que importa é que, mesmo indiretamente, a parceria estratégica Rússia/China tornou claro que Teerã será protegida como ativo estratégico importante – e ponto crucial da integração da Eurásia.

As considerações de inteligência centram-se no possível cenário da – muito improvável – queda do governo iraniano. Neste caso, o primeiro movimento de Washington seria desconectaro sistema SWIFT de compensações bancárias internacionais. O alvo seria a economia russa, para ser destroçada. Por isso Rússia e China estão trabalhando aceleradamente para inaugurar e pôr em operação seus próprios sistemas de compensação: MIR russo e CIPS chinês. E para deixar de lado o dólar, no seu comércio bilateral.

Pequim já percebeu que caso se confirme este cenário, a China pode perder de uma só vez dois aliados cruciais; nesse caso, estaria sozinha para enfrentar Washington, apanhada em estágio no qual pode não ser capaz de assegurar o fornecimento dos recursos naturais que tanto necessita. Trata-se de ameaça existencial real. Isso explica o raciocínio por trás da crescente interconexão na parceria estratégica entre China e Rússia, e o acordo com duração de 25 anos no valor de $400 bilhões de dólares, com o Irã.

A volta de Bismarck

Outro possível acordo secreto já discutido nos mais altos escalões da inteligência é a possibilidade de um Tratado de Resseguro Bismarckiano, a ser estabelecido entre Alemanha e Rússia. A consequência inevitável seria uma aliança de fato Berlin-Moscou-Pequim abrangendo a Iniciativa Cinturão e Estrada, com criação simultânea de uma nova moeda – digital? – para toda a aliança eurasiana, que incluiria atores periféricos, mas importantes, como França e Itália.

Muito bem. Pequim-Moscou está feito. Pequim-Berlin é trabalho em andamento. Falta cuidar do Berlin-Moscou.

A situação representa não só tremendo pesadelo para a elite anglo-norte-americana infartada de Mackinder, mas na realidade, implica também a passagem do bastão geopolítico, da mão dos impérios marítimos, de volta à mão da massa terrestre da Eurásia interior.

Deixou de ser ficção. Está sobre a mesa.

Aproveitando o ensejo, voltemos um pouco no tempo, até o ano de 1348.

Os mongóis da Horda Dourada estavam na Crimeia, sitiando Kaffa – porto comercial no Mar Negro controlado pelos genoveses.

De repente, o exército mongol começa a ser dizimado pela peste bubônica. E passa a catapultar cadáveres contaminados, para dentro da cidade da Crimeia.

E o que aconteceu, quando os navios começaram a navegar, de Kaffa para Gênova? Levaram a praga para a Itália.

Em 1360, a Morte Negra estava literalmente em toda parte – de Lisboa a Novgorod, da Sicília à Noruega. Talvez tenha dizimado cerca de 60% da população da Europa – mais de 100 milhões de pessoas.

Pode-se argumentar que a peste teria retardado por um século o Renascimento.

Covid-19 não é peste medieval, longe disso. Mesmo assim, cabe perguntar: que Renascimento estaria sendo retardado?

Bem, o que se pode dizer é que, na realidade, a pandemia de Covid-19 já está fazendo avançar o Renascimento da Eurásia. Ocorre justamente quando o Hegemon, ex-“fim da história”, explode internamente [“Sobre faces tensas repuxadas pelo tempo”] “Distraída da distração pela distração” [“Cheias de fantasmagorias e ermas de sentido]”,[3] para citar T. S. Eliot. Atrás do nevoeiro, nas excelentes pastagens à sombra, os movimentos vitais para reorganizar a massa terrestre do interior da Eurásia já estão em movimento.

Pepe Escobar

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Artigo original em inglês :

Definitive Eurasian Alliance Is Closer than You Think

Asia Times, 26 de Agosto de 2020

Tradução : Roberto Pires Silveira

 

Notas :

[1] Ver Pepe Escobar, “Teatro de sombras: O Novo Grande Jogo na Eurásia”, 10/1/2017, Blog do Alok, orig. Asia Times (NTs).

[2] T. S. Eliot, Quatro Quartetos, parte V, BURNT NORTON, in T.S.Eliot, Poesia. Tradução Ivan Junqueira. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981.

[3] T. S. Eliot, “Quatro Quartetos”, parte III, BURNT NORTON, in ELIOT, T.S. Poesia. Tradução Ivan Junqueira. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981. p.199-204.

South Korea has been the object of praise and envy of the world for its great success in anti-virus war, off-line presidential election despite the virus crisis and the best performance in GDP growth among the OECD countries. In fact, the year on year GDP growth in the second quart of 2020 was -3.2% for Korea as against – 9.8% for the whole of OECD and even -24.2% for the UK.

Unfortunately, South Korea may have to go back to day-one of the anti-virus war started in January. This time, the propagation wave of the virus is, most likely deliberately, planned by the far-right coalition of the conservatives. 

On August 15, at the Gwang-hwa-moon Square near the Seoul city hall, there was a huge rally of 20,000 people who were against the progressive government of Moon Jae-in. Most of the participants did not wear masks; they ignored social distancing. Many of them had been already infected but they came; they shouted; they sang; they did spit at the personnel of the public health bureau. The obvious objective was to spread the virus as much as possible.

The rally was forbidden by the Korean Centers for Disease Control (KCDC), but the court allowed knowing very well the danger. It is suspected that the judge who allowed the rally was a member of the conservative force which tries to discredit the progressive government of Moon Jae-in

What is happening is, perhaps, a major battle between the   conservative oligarchy and the progressive people of Korea. The outcome of this battle will surely affect not only the peace process in the Korean peninsula but also the regional security.

The rally was organized by the conservative oligarchy led by a self-ordained pastor called Jun Kwang-hoon. Since the rally, the cumulated cases of infection have increased from 12,410 on August 15 to 15,502 on August 26, a daily increase of 281. On August 14, only 85 new cases were reported.

This paper has three parts.

First, the paper analyses the dynamics of the inter-force fight, especially, the formation and the evolution of these forces.

Second, the paper looks into how the inter-force can affect the corona-virus war. The conservative oligarchy is doing its best to spread the virus in order to topple the progressive government of Moon Jae-in. As for the progressive force, it is trying hard to win the anti-virus war without lockdown and the use of police power.

Third, the paper argues that the fierce inter-force fight in Korea will have significant implications not only for the peace on the Korean peninsula but also for the regional security and even world peace.

1. The Dynamics of the Inter-Force Fight

1.1. The conservative Oligarchy

The conservative oligarchy is composed of conservative party, the Unified Future Party (UFP), far-right protestant church, new-right intellectuals, conservative media, the conservative judiciary system, and the Chaebols (large industrial and financial conglomerates).

All these groups have one thing in common; they are all pro-Japan, anti-North Korea and anti-progressive government. This oligarchy is a powerful vested-interest group with enormous wealth and privileges cumulated since seventy years through illegal and immoral activities.

The oligarchy forms a tightly interconnected corrupted community, the function of which is to protect and expand their vested interests at the expense of the welfare of the people.

The Conservative Political Party: The present conservative party, the UFP, is the linear descendant of the long line of dictatorship: the police dictatorship of Rhee Syngman (1948-1960) (right), the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee (1962-1979) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1987). The government of Lee Myung-bak (2008-2012) and that of Park Geun-hye (2013-2017) were constitutionally democratic governments, but, in reality, the presidents acted as de facto dictator through the complete control of the legislative, the judiciary and the executive and, of course, the media.

The Protestant Church: The unfortunate part of Korea’s history is the North-South division of the country and pathetic reaction of the protestant church. The protestant church came to Pyongyang in North Korea during the 19th century and flourished until 1945, when the country was divided and North Korea was occupied by communist Russia which treated religion as poison. There was one protestant pastor, Rev. Han Kyun-jik, who found himself obliged to close his church and flee with his followers to the South, where he created a church called Young-rak Church, now, one of the largest protestant churches in Korea.

Han sent some of his English speaking members to the American military government and the government of Rhee Syngman. Han and Rhee had one thing in common, the hatred for communism and North Korea. Rhee needed someone who could get rid of those who were not with his dictatorship. Rhee then decided to label those who were not with him as communists. Rev. Han formed a terrorist gang with his young and tough church members called “Seo-buk Youth Gang-the North-West Youth Gang” , which took part in most of the killing fields ordered by Rhee.

The youth gang of Rev. Han were brainwashed to believe that the communists were red-faced devils who challenged the angel of God, the Church. There are these passages in the Book of Revelation, the last Book of the Bible (12:3 and 7).

“There was a huge ‘red’ dragon with seven heads…Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon who fought back with his angels; but the dragon was defeated.”

Here, the red is communism which must be condemned just like the red dragon was condemned. Hence, it is the duty of Christians to kill communism. No doubt, the brainwashed terrorist youth believed this and President, Rhee Syngman was more than happy to use this group to liquidate those who were against his dictatorship.

The protestant church goers who participated at the 8.15 rally believe that North Korea is the biblical red dragon and that Moon Jae-in is the defender of the red dragon.

The Intellectuals: Most of the Korean conservative intellectuals are those who have studied abroad with money coming from pro-Japan parents who had acquired huge wealth by receiving the Japanese colonial assets distributed by the American military government and  Rhee’s government.

At present, many of them receive huge funds from Japan for studies designed to justify and glorify the Japanese invasion in Korea. One of the channels of transmission of Japanese money to Korea is the Center for Academic Studies which is installed in one of the leading universities in Seoul. This study center would have received US $ 30 million from Japan.

The conservative intellectuals have organized a group called “New Right” with the mission to rewrite, in Japan’s favour, the Japanese colonial history. In fact, a book was completed in which Japan was described as a benevolent power which came to Korea for the good of Koreans. Fortunately, as soon as Moon Jae-in took over the power in 2017, the book was abolished.

The Media: The role of the media in Korea has little to do professional journalism; they do not investigate; they write and say what the money provider asks; they are a profit seeking business. To be more precise, they are there to make money by fabricating stories, making lies to protect the vested interests of the conservative oligarchy in exchange of fat bribe money.

The media is the most corrupted entity led by the ardent pro-Japan media giants comprising the Chosun Ilbo, the Dong-ah Ilbo, which were created and flourished during the Japanese occupation owing to their collaboration with the Japanese colonial government in justifying the Japanese occupation and helping the fight against Korean patriots. In addition, there is the Joong-ang Ilbo created by the Samsung Group. In Korea, these journals are labelled as Cho-Joong-Dong which are the most pro-Japan and which are the most effective guardian of the conservative oligarchy’s vested interests.

Most of the journals, TV stations with the exception of KBS, MBC and other government funded TV stations are funded by the Chaebols led by Samsung, construction firms and other members of the oligarchy.

The Judiciary System: The corrupted oligarchy has survived all these years owing to the protection of the corrupted judiciary system. The wrong doings of the oligarchy are ignored, while a slight anti-oligarchy activity is punished. The media report what the prosecutor’s office dictates; they seldom investigate the story; they write or they say what the Prosecutor dictates; they are simply the Prosecutor’s parrot.

The Chaebols: In the dynamics of the conservative oligarchy, the role of the Chaebols is of paramount importance. Over the years, the Chaebols have played the central role in the oligarchy; the Chaebols have provided unlimited amount of bribe money for the key member of the oligarchy in exchange of political and judicial favours. The head of the Chaebols seldom go to prison for their crimes; even if they are imprisoned, they are quickly pardoned by the president of the country.

1.2. The Progressive Political Force

The progressive political force has been formed through enormous sacrifice of Korean people. Right from the beginning of the post-war era, Korean people were alienated and treated by the conservatives as enemy and, as a result, they were victims of massive murders, illegal incarceration and torture; they were excluded from decent jobs. Nobody knows how many Koreans were murdered by the conservative oligarchy, but no doubt, several hundred thousand souls were sacrificed.

In particular, those patriots who fought against Japan were identified and completely blocked from making decent living. One of the poorest groups in Korea up to now is the group of the patriots’ descendants. They have been denied the right to have descent job; they were made so poor that their children could not have descent education; they were constantly harassed by the police; they had to deny their family identity.

The government of Moon Jae-in has been doing a lot in honouring and helping the patriots and their descendants. But, nothing can compensate for their suffering imposed by the conservative oligarchy.

Despite the fearful police and military dictatorship, Korean people have fought back with bare hand against the conservative oligarchy through the following massive popular uprisings; the 4.19 Revolution (April 19, 1960), the 10.16 Bu-Ma Democratic Protests (October 16, 1979), the 5.18 Kwang-ju Uprising (May 18, 1980), the 6.10 Struggle (June 10, 1987) and the Candlelight Revolution (October 26, 2016-April 29, 2017). Perhaps 30 million people went down the street to fight against the corrupted conservative oligarchy.

The progressive force was able to form a government twice in the past and the third is that of Moon Jae-in. The first progressive government of Kim Dae-jung (1997-2003) made a series of social reform but could not resist successfully the wrong doings of the powerful conservative oligarchy. The second progressive government of Rho Moo-hyun (2003-2008) was successful in making the government less bureaucratic. Moreover, it created a mechanism through which the ordinary people could come to the Blue House (Korean White House) meet the president and talk to him. He wanted to return the country to the people, the country which had been stolen by the pro-Japan conservatives for their own interests.

President Rho Moo-hyun was the target of a bribery scandal fabricated by the government of Lee Myung-bak, the Prosecutor and the media. He killed himself to free his family from suffering. President Rho has left the most powerful political and ideological legacy, the legacy of just society where the government exists only for the people and where every person is important and deserves respect, dignity and love.

2. Impact of the Inter-force fight on the COVID-19

The power and the glory of the conservative oligarchy is now threatened after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in 2017; Park was taken out of her office for her corruption and her abuse of power. She is now in prison for 15 years.

On the other hand, the reputation of President Moon Jae-in is rising in Korea for his love of people, a government devoid of corruption, the promotion of more equitable income distribution, the development of small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which had been exploited with no pity by the Chaebols, the victory over the corona-virus without lockdown, the peaceful off-line general election in the midst of the virus crisis. Furthermore, he is highly respected throughout the world for his leadership in the North-South peace dialogue and the productive mediation role for the Pyongyang-Washington peace dialogue.

The brilliant success of the Moon jae-in government threatens the very survival of the conservative party and the conservative oligarchy. As expected, the UFP has been doing, for last three years, everything possible thing to discredit the Democratic party of Korea (DPK) and President, Moon.

Here is what the conservative party, UFP, has been doing to discredit the government of Moon Jae-in:

• The FUP has blocked since three years through the Judiciary Committee of the National Assembly most of laws related to the welfare of the people and the North-South peace Dialogue in order to tell the people that the progressive party (DPK) and the Moon’s government are incompetent to govern and look after the people.
• The second political tactic of the conservatives consists in discrediting and dishonouring important leaders of the progressive force. The popular tricks often used consist in accusing the leaders for fabricated sexual abuse or involvement if bribery scandal. The Prosecutor intervenes to make the impression that the scandal deserves investigation. By the time the truth is revealed, it is too late to recover the damaged reputation and the integrity of the falsely accused. In this process, the role of the media is crucial; they publish or broadcast what the Prosecutor says; they never verify if the accusation is justified.

The most known case is that of Professor Cho Guk who is the most respected expert in judicial matters and served as one of the advisor to President Moon. A year ago, he was appointed as Justice Minister with the mission of reforming Korea’s judiciary system, in particular the reform of the Prosecutor which had been abusing its unlimited power, criminally protecting the interests of the conservative oligarchy and even challenging the authority of the president.

• The conservative oligarchy funds a great number of individual you-tube facilities and manufactures fake news and events in order to give the impression that the policy of Moon’s government is failure. For instance, they say that Korea’s economic behaviour is the worst among the OECD countries; the truth is the other way around; for the second quarter of 2020, Korea’s GDP fell by 3.2% as against a decrease of more than 20% in many other OECD countries. Among other things, the conservative oligarchy fabricates false news about North Korea’s threat in order to give the impression that Moon’s government is incapable of assuring the national security. For instance, they fabricate a story that a North Korean military unit invaded a certain place in South Korea.

All these efforts and plots to discredit the government of Moon Jae-in have failed. Then, there appeared unexpected ally for the conservatives, namely, the corona virus. The plan of the conservative oligarchy was to spread the virus intentionally to prove the present government’s failure in handling the virus. The conservatives even mobilized the cult Shincheonji in March to spread the virus. But, the cult Shincheonji was soon under control and the virus crisis was almost terminated.

The conservative oligarchy lost the general election in April allowing the DPK to win almost two-third of seats in the National Assembly. What was left for the oligarchy was the huge rally at the Kwang-hwa-moon Square on August 15 mobilizing twenty thousand people from all over the country. The objective of the rally was to use the virus as terror weapon to kill the progressive force.

The August 15 rally was the well planned virus war declared by the conservative oligarchy against the progressive force led by Moon Jae-in. The principal leader was Jun Kwang-hoon who represents a radical ultra-right faction of the Protestant Church in Korea. He is one of those who seem to believe that the communism is the biblical red dragon and his church is the angel Michael. Jun argues that Moon Jae-in is trying to convert South Korea into a communist country and, therefore, his government should be destroyed.

The oligarchy has adopted the following tactics in relation to the 8.15 rally.

• It mobilized the brain-washed elderly from all over the country. The strategy was planned for long time. They came by chartered buses; they were amply paid by the oligarchy. They were instructed to do the following
  • Thy should believe that the virus would not infect the selected Christians
  • If they die because of the virus, they are martyrs.
  • They should not go to the government-run KCDC for test, because the government is the enemy of Christians.
  • They should close all mobile phones so that the KCDC cannot track the rally participants.
  • They should not tell even the family about their rally participation
  • Even if they are inflicted they should travel freely
• Many of the participants had already been infected before coming to the rally so that the virus can be transmitted to as many people as possible.
• Some of the participants spat at the KCDC team members so that the virus can be transmitted from the local offices of he KCDC.
• The organizers, especially, the Sarang-jeil church led by Jun Kwang-hoon, refuse ot provide the list of the participants. Even worse, the list made available was intentionally fabricated including the names of persons who do not exist.

One thing is clear. The ultimate objective of the 8.15 rally and many other events and manoeuvres organized by the conservative oligarchy is the destruction of the progressive regime and retake the power at the next presidential election in 2022.

The interesting question is why the conservatives are so desperately determined to destroy the progressives. The answer is simple and strait; it is the matter of preserving their vested interests which include wealth, privileges, prestige, envy, protection from judicial punishment for their crimes, sharing of government positions and many other advantages given to them. These vested interests are so precious that they are ready to do anything to topple the progressive government which is threatening heir interests.

The damaging impact of the inter-force conflict on the corona-virus crisis is very serious. Since the 8.15 rally, as we saw above, every day, hundreds of infections are reported and there is a great danger of community propagation.

President Moon has spent all his life for the promotion of human right; he hates to use force to fight the virus.  But, he announced, on August 25th, his intension of using police forces to solve the virus war declared by the conservative oligarchy.

3. Impact of Inter-Force Fight on the Regional Security 

No doubt, the fight between the conservatives and the progressives has become an open war and there is no guarantee that the progressives will win the war. There are three reasons. First, this time a good part of brainwashed radical Protestant Church members are leading the virus war. There are several millions of Protestant Christians in Korea. Second, the Chaebols are at the center of the oligarchy with unlimited funds. Third, the medical doctors have declared work stoppage and their motivation is suspected to have a link with the virus war; they are suspected to support the conservative oligarchy.

The government has to win the new virus war at all cost. President,  Moon Jae-in may have to declare even the emergency of level 3 which means a total lockdown never used so far.

In this conjuncture, the interesting question is about the impact of the possible outcome of the 2022 election on the peace in the Korean peninsula and the regional security.

If the conservative oligarchy wins, we may have to face the following consequences.

• North-South peace dialogue will become difficult leading to renewed danger of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula.
• The tension Pyongyang-Washington will increase and the presence of American military force including the additional deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) will be enforced.
• Seoul-Beijing relations will become more tense and the whole regional security will become uncertain.
• In Japan, the possibility of the far-right political force represented by Abe Shinzo to go through the amendment of the pace constitution will increase. And, Japan will try to colonize again South Korea through political and economic and financial influences, if not military invasion, in close complicity with Korean conservative oligarchy. If this happens, the whole regional security will be adversely affected, given the Japan’s ambition to restore its former power and glory.

On the other hand, if the progressive force wins the 2022 election after having successfully dealt with the second virus crisis, the following results are expected.

• The North-South peace dialogue will continue and even the inter-Korea economic cooperation will become possible, which will lead to the common prosperity to the North and the South.
• The peace on the Korean peninsula and North-South economic integration may allow Korea to play key role in the formation of the East-Asian regional globalism.
• The peace on the Korean peninsula may weaken the justification of the large presence of American military strength in the region. This will attenuate the danger of Sino-U.S. armed conflict.
• The peace on the Korean peninsula will weaken the justification of the amendment of the peace constitution and decrease the danger of armed conflict Sino-Japan and Korea-Japan.

To sum up, what is happening in Korea can happen in many other democratic countries. That is, the virus can be deliberately propagated in order to protect the vested interests of corrupt politicians. If there is any way to prevent it, it is the strong will of the united citizens supported by the people around the world.

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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the Observatoire de l’Asie de l’Est (OAE) of the Centre d’Études sur l’Intégration et la Mondialisation (CEIM), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from Xinhua

When President Donald Trump accepted his party’s nomination for another term last night at the Republican National Convention, he pledged that the push by his administration’s Operation Warp Speed to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine would succeed “before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner.”

That promise concerns many vaccine veterans. They worry that political forces—the U.S. presidential election on 3 November, nationalistic pride to “win” a race, the need to resuscitate economies—could lead to premature and dangerous approvals under mechanisms such as the emergency use authorization (EUA), a pathway used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow rapid access to diagnostics, treatments,  and vaccines. Long a bastion of regulatory rigor that many other countries look to for guidance, FDA has been criticized for issuing EUAs for two COVID-19 treatments, convalescent plasma and hydroxychloroquine, based on scant data and apparent political pressure. (The hydroxychloroquine EUA has since been revoked.) Paul Offit, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who is a member of a group that advises FDA about its vaccine decisions, suspects the Trump administration might seek a COVID-19 vaccine EUA before the elections and say: “We Warp Speeded our way to a vaccine.”

China and Russia already have approved limited use of COVID-19 vaccines outside of clinical trials, offering baffling—and sharply criticized—rationales. In the United States, Operation Warp Speed, as its name implies, hopes to move vaccine candidates forward more quickly than ever before. It has invested more than $10 billion in developing eight different COVID-19 vaccines, with much of that money pre-purchasing hundreds of millions of doses so they will be at the ready if an FDA approval comes through. Three of the Warp Speed-backed vaccines have entered efficacy trials, and one manufacturer has pledged to start delivering the first of 300 million doses as early as October—though one person close to Operation Warp Speed says, “There won’t be enough vaccine in October to create anything other than a news story.”

FDA officials have insisted they have “unwavering regulatory safeguards” and will not cut any corners. “The acceleration is really around taking financial risk [with regard to] the development process,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at a U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing about the country’s COVID-19 response in June. “We will rely upon data and science when it comes to that decision about an EUA.”

Peter Marks, who runs the FDA division that oversees vaccine approval, has vowed that he would resign if the Trump administration pushed through a vaccine that was not clearly safe and effective. And he insists that FDA will consult with the Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which Offit sits on, to publicly discuss data related to any approval request. “Approval should be something that we can make transparent, and to do anything less than that is really a disservice to people,” Marks says. VRBPAC’s next meeting is scheduled for 22 October, 12 days before the presidential and congressional elections.

Science spoke with a range of researchers and regulators about how a COVID-19 vaccine approval might be accelerated and the potential consequences.

What’s the traditional vaccine approval pathway?

After initial laboratory and animal tests, vaccines enter phase I human trials that typically have about 20 to 100 people and primarily analyze safety and immune responses. Phase II studies are larger versions of phase I trials. Phase III studies attempt to determine whether a vaccine works by comparing people who receive it with those who are given a placebo shot and, over several months or years, seeing how many in each group get infected. For COVID-19 vaccines these trials involve anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 people and will need a total of about 150 cases of disease to determine whether a candidate works. Once the trial endpoints are met, a vaccine developer seeking FDA approval would file a biologics license application; VRBPAC would review the data at a public meeting, then vote on whether the vaccine should receive approval—a recommendation FDA normally follows. The approval process, which involves inspecting the vaccine’s manufacturing plants, can often take 1 year.

How does an EUA work?

An EUA in the United States, and similar regulatory pathways in many countries, allows use of an unlicensed vaccine outside of a clinical trial. The EUA could stipulate the use of the vaccine in a limited population, for example, health care workers or the elderly. Or it could be for the general population. An EUA offers liability protections to vaccinemakers, and it remains in effect as long as there is a public health, military, or national security emergency. When the emergency ends, so does the approval.

What safety and efficacy evidence would FDA require before issuing an EUA?

FDA issued a “guidance for industry” in June that says any emergency decision on a COVID-19 vaccine would be based on factors such as “the target population, the characteristics of the product, [and] the preclinical and human clinical study data.” The guidance specifies that FDA will only approve an EUA for a vaccine that has at least 50% efficacy. But estimates of efficacy have error bars of sorts; for a COVID-19 vaccine, FDA wants 95% confidence that efficacy is no lower than 30%. The decision to consider an EUA request would likely be based on data reviewed by the independent boards, set up by the vaccine’s sponsors or clinical trial investigators, that monitor safety and efficacy during the study.

What harm could an EUA do?

Public Citizen, a public advocacy group, has argued that regardless of whether a COVID-19 vaccine is effective, an EUA could fuel existing vaccine hesitancy. “The ‘logic’ of saving several months by a faster but riskier EUA pathway will surely be outweighed by the loss in public confidence in the vaccine, accompanied by decreased willingness to be vaccinated,” Public Citizen warned in a 6 August letter to Marks and his superiors. An EUA for a vaccine might also make it more difficult to recruit people for clinical trials of that vaccine and others, because participants might not want to take the risk of receiving a placebo when they can get a shot of a product that’s authorized for use.

What if the vaccine doesn’t work well or causes harm?

Vaccines go into healthy people, so putting them into use before fully assessing their risks and benefits is a bigger gamble than issuing an EUA for an experimental treatment for someone already ill. If a hastily approved COVID-19 vaccine candidate proves ineffective or has serious side effects, confidence in what many see as the best hope to ending the pandemic could plummet. The Solidarity Vaccines Trials Expert Group of the World Health Organization (WHO) argued in an editorial published in The Lancet yesterday that a weakly effective vaccine could actually worsen the pandemic if it induced authorities to relax control measures, such as mask wearing, or if vaccinated people believed they were immune and increased their risk-taking behavior.

Has an EUA ever been used for a vaccine?

Yes. In 2005 FDA granted an EUA for an anthrax vaccine for people who the military determined were at high risk of attack from anthrax used as a biological weapon. The episode provoked lawsuits claiming there was no evidence that the vaccine, which the military required soldiers to get, worked against the type of inhalational anthrax used in bioweapons. A judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but by then the vaccine had become voluntary.

What’s the difference between FDA’s expanded access program and an EUA?

Typically expanded access, also called compassionate use, covers treatments, not vaccines, in the United States. It’s for individuals who have a life-threatening condition and no alternatives or for small groups of sick people when a treatment has promising evidence but efficacy has not been proven yet. Anyone who receives the experimental medicine signs an informed consent form, and institutions that provide it have to seek permission from FDA, submit a protocol, report adverse events, and do continued safety monitoring. An EUA eliminates these requirements. FDA allowed nearly 100,000 people to receive convalescent plasma through expanded access—an unusually large instance of compassionate use—but last week granted an EUA that proponents said would cut paperwork. The Democratic Republic of the Congo used its own expanded access regulation to allow more than 300,000 people to use an unlicensed Ebola vaccine.

Does Europe have a similar emergency approval process?

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) can issue “conditional approval” for a vaccine during a pandemic. Under a rolling-review process, companies continue submitting data as they becomes available. The United Kingdom, which will be leaving the EMA’s authority because of Brexit, today issued a consultation for public comment on how its regulatory agency might issue its own temporary authorization of an unlicensed COVID-19 vaccine.

How did China and Russia speed approval of their COVID-19 vaccines?

China on 25 June gave CanSino a 1-year approval to use its COVID-19 vaccine in the Chinese military, although there is no evidence beyond statements by company officials that anyone has received it. On 22 July, China also allowed Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group Company to give its COVID-19 vaccine to health care workers, customs workers, and others in “high-risk” professions. Both vaccines are still in phase III efficacy trials. CanSino also reportedly is in discussion with regulators in Pakistan and unnamed Latin American countries about early approval of its vaccine.

Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow on 11 August received a “registration certificate” to give a COVID-19 vaccine to what a Ministry of Health spokesperson described as “a small number of citizens from vulnerable groups,” including medical staff and the elderly. Dubbed Sputnik V, a clear reference to the U.S.-Soviet space race, the product is billed as “the first registered COVID-19 vaccine.” The registration says it cannot be used widely until after 1 January 2021, but President Vladimir Putin said, “I hope we can start a massive release of this vaccine soon.”

Many countries do not have strong regulatory agencies. How do they decide whether to use a COVID-19 vaccine that is not licensed?

WHO has what it calls an Emergency Use Listing, which many low- and middle-income countries have relied on in the past. “We can give a benefit/risk decision on a product and specify the conditions under which it should be used,” says Emer Cooke, director of WHO’s Regulation of Medicines and other Health Technologies. “We act like a regulatory body, but we’re not a regulatory body.” Cooke, who recently was elected to head EMA later this year, says their job is especially complex now because of the flood of COVID-19 vaccine candidates and the intense pressure to find one that is safe and effective. “I think we are seeing more political influences now than we would normally see,” she says.

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Jon is a staff writer for Science.

Years of US support to Al-Qaeda and ISIS and efforts to effect regime change in the country have culminated in the theft of Syria’s oil, but is that really America’s coup de grâce in Syria?

Near the end of July, one of the most important recent developments in U.S. foreign policy was quietly disclosed during a U.S. Senate hearing. Not surprisingly, hardly anybody talked about it and most are still completely unaware that it happened.

Answering questions from Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of State Pompeo confirmed that the State Department had awarded an American company, Delta Crescent Energy, with a contract to begin extracting oil in northeast Syria. The area is nominally controlled by the Kurds, yet their military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was formed under U.S. auspices and relies on an American military presence to secure its territory. That military presence will now be charged with protecting an American firm from the government of the country that it is operating within.

Pompeo confirmed that the plans for implanting the firm into the U.S.-held territory are “now in implementation” and that they could potentially be “very powerful.” This is quite a momentous event given its nature as a blatant example of neocolonial extraction, or, as Stephen Kinzer puts it writing for the Boston Globe, “This is a vivid throwback to earlier imperial eras, when conquerors felt free to loot the resources of any territory they could capture and subdue.”

Indeed, the history of how the U.S. came to be in a position to “capture and subdue” these resources is a sordid, yet informative tale that by itself arguably even rivals other such colonial adventures.

To capture and subdue

When a legitimate protest movement developed organically in Syria in early 2011, the U.S. saw an opportunity to destabilize, and potentially overthrow, the government of a country that had long pushed back against its efforts for greater control in the region.

Syria had maintained itself outside of the orbit of U.S. influence and had frustratingly prevented American corporations from penetrating its economy to access its markets and resources.

As the foremost academic expert on Middle East affairs, Christopher Davidson, wrote in his seminal work,

“Shadow Wars, The Secret Struggle for the Middle East,” discussing both Syria and Libya’s strategic importance, “the fact remained that these two regimes, sitting astride vast natural resources and in command of key ports, rivers, and borders, were still significant obstacles that had long frustrated the ambitions of Western governments and their constituent corporations to gain greater access.”

“With Syria,” Davidson wrote, “having long proven antagonistic to Western interests… a golden opportunity had presented itself in 2011 to oust [this] administration once and for all under the pretext of humanitarian and even democratic causes.”

The U.S., therefore, began organizing and overseeing a militarization of the uprising early on, and soon co-opted the movement along with allied states Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Writing at the end of 2011, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad explained how there was no longer any doubt that “the Syrian popular struggle for democracy [has] already been hijacked,” given that “the Arab League and imperial powers have taken over and assumed the leadership of their struggle.”

Soon, through the sponsoring of extremist elements, the insurgency was dominated by Salafists of the al-Qaeda variety.

According to the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by 2013 “there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad” and “the U.S. was arming extremists.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that “although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists,” still “the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming.”

When ISIS split off from al-Qaeda and formed its own Caliphate, the U.S. continued pumping money and weapons into the insurgency, even though it was known that this aid was going into the hands of ISIS and other jihadists. U.S. allies directly supported ISIS.

U.S. officials admitted that they saw the rise of ISIS as a beneficial development that could help pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give in to America’s demands.

Leaked audio of then-Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that “we were watching… and we know that this [ISIS] was growing… We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage — that Assad would then negotiate.” As ISIS was bearing down on the capital city of Damascus, the U.S. was pressing Assad to step down to a U.S.-approved government.

Then, however, Russia intervened with its air force to prevent an ISIS takeover of the country and shifted the balance of forces against the jihadist group. ISIS’ viability as a tool to pressure the government was spent.

The arsonist and the firefighter

So, a new strategy was implemented: instead of allowing Russia and Syria to take back the territories that ISIS captured throughout the war, the U.S. would use the ISIS threat as an excuse to take those territories before they were able to. Like an arsonist who comes to put out the fire, the U.S. would now charge itself with the task of stamping out the Islamist scourge and thereby legitimize its own seizure of Syrian land. The U.S. partnered with the Kurdish militias who acted as their “boots on the ground” in this endeavor and supported them with airstrikes.

The strategy of how these areas were taken was very specific. It was designed primarily to allow ISIS to escape and redirect itself back into the fight against Syria and Russia. This was done through leaving “an escape route for militants” or through deals that were made where ISIS voluntarily agreed to cede its territory. The militants were then able to escape and go wreak havoc against America’s enemies in Syria.

Interestingly, in terms of the oil fields now being handed off to an American corporation, the U.S. barely even fought ISIS to gain control over them; ISIS simply handed them over.

Syria and Russia were quickly closing in on the then-ISIS controlled oilfields, so the U.S. oversaw a deal between the Kurds and ISIS to give up control of the city. According to veteran Middle East war correspondent Elijah Magnier, “U.S.-backed forces advanced in north-eastern areas under ISIS control, with little or no military engagement: ISIS pulled out from more than 28 villages and oil and gas fields east of the Euphrates River, surrendering these to the Kurdish-U.S. forces following an understanding these reached with the terrorist group.”

Sources quoted by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that ISIS preferred seeing the fields in the hands of the U.S. and the Kurds rather than the Syrian government.

The rationale behind this occupation was best described by Syria expert Joshua Landis, who wrote that the areas of northern Syria under control of the Kurds are the U.S.’ “main instrument in gaining leverage” over the government. By “denying Damascus access to North Syria” and “controlling half of Syria’s energy resources” “the U.S. will be able to keep Syria poor and under-resources.” So, by “promoting Kurdish nationalism in Syria” the U.S. “hopes to deny Iran and Russia the fruits of their victory,” while “keeping Damascus weak and divided,” this serving “no purpose other than to stop trade” and to “beggar Assad and keep Syria divided, weak and poor.”

Or, in the words of Jim Jeffrey, the Trump administrations special representative for Syria who is charged with overseeing U.S. policy, the intent is to “make life as miserable as possible for that flopping cadaver of a regime and let the Russians and Iranians, who made this mess, get out of it.”

Anchoring American troops in Syria

This is the history by which an American firm was able to secure a contract to extract oil in Syria. And while the actual resources gained will not be of much value (Syria has only 0.1% of the world’s oil reserves), the presence of an American company will likely serve as a justification to maintain a U.S. military presence in the region.

“It is a fiendishly clever maneuver aimed at anchoring American troops in Syria for a long time,” Stephen Kinzer explains, one that will aid the policymakers who hold “the view that the United States must remain militarily dominant in the Middle East.”

This analysis corroborates the extensive scholarship of people like Mason Gaffney, professor of economics emeritus at the University of California, who, writing in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, sums up his thesis that throughout its history “U.S. military spending has been largely devoted to protecting the overseas assets of multinational corporations that are based in the United States… The U.S. military provides its services by supporting compliant political leaders in developing countries and by punishing or deposing regimes that threaten the interests of U.S.-based corporations.”

In essence, by protecting this “global ‘sprawl’ of extractive companies” the U.S. Department of Defense “provides a giant subsidy to companies operating overseas,” one that is paid for by the taxpayer, not the corporate beneficiaries. It is hard to estimate the exact amount of money the U.S. has invested into the Syria effort, though it likely is near the trillion dollar figure. The U.S. taxpayer doesn’t get anything out of that, but companies that are awarded oil contracts do.

What is perhaps most important about this lesson however is that this is just a singular example of a common occurrence that happens all over the world. A primary function of U.S. foreign policy is to “make the world safe for American businesses,” and the upwards of a thousand military bases the U.S. has stationed across the globe are set up to help protect those corporate investments. While this history is unique to Syria, similar kinds of histories are responsible for U.S. corporation’s extractive activities in other global arenas.

So, next time you see headlines about Exxon being in some kind of legal dispute with, say, Venezuela, ask yourself how was it that those companies became involved with the resources of that part of the world? More often than not, the answer will be similar to how this U.S. company got involved in Syria.

Given all of this, it perhaps might seem to be too mild of a critique to simply say that this Syria enterprise harkens back to older imperial eras where conquerors simply took what they wished: the sophistication of colonialism has indeed improved by leaps and bounds since then.

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Steven Chovanec is an independent journalist based in Chicago, IL. His writings have appeared in outlets such as The Hill, teleSUR, Truthout, MintPress News, Insurge-Intelligence, and others. Follow him on Twitter @stevechovanec

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

A coalition of 27 U.S. states, commonwealths, territories, counties, and cities filed a federal lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s “unlawful, unjustified, and sweeping revisions” to a 50-year-old law that the president claimed would “streamline” infrastructure projects by limiting environmental reviews.

After revealing plans to alter the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in January, President Donald Trump announced what critics called “reckless and unprecedented” changes during a July campaign stop. The revisions, detailed in a final rule released by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), swiftly provoked legal threats from advocacy organizations.

The lawsuit (pdf) filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, follows a similar challenge to the NEPA changes from national environmental groups, filed in the same court last month.

“NEPA is an unsung hero of environmental protection that protects our shared environment,” Ferguson said in a statement. “NEPA allows our voices to inform public decisions, provides a tool for holding the government accountable, and builds transparency into the federal decision-making process to build trust.”

“This administration’s insidious attack on one of our most important environmental laws is an attack on the democratic process itself,” the Washington attorney general declared. “I will fight to make sure the people are heard.”

Becerra put the rollback and subsequent suit in the context of Trump’s broader deregulatory agenda targeting environmental protections and how states and local governments—often led by Democratic elected officials—have fought against it.

“The Trump administration has spent the better part of four years trying to roll back critical protections and undo hard-fought progress, particularly when it comes to our environment, public lands, and natural resources,” Becerra said. “But we haven’t let this unlawful conduct go unchecked. We’ve fought back—and won.”

“Today, we’re filing our 100th lawsuit against the Trump administration,” he noted. “With today’s challenge, our goal is simple: preserve the public’s voice in government decision-making as federal projects threaten to harm the health of our families in our own backyards.”

The Trump Admin spent the last four years rolling back critical protections and undoing hard-fought progress, particularly for our environment.

Now @RealDonaldTrump is gutting the National Environmental Policy Act—one of our bedrock environmental laws.

We’re suing. pic.twitter.com/nuje513lAx

— Xavier Becerra (@AGBecerra) August 28, 2020

David J. Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law, said in response to the suit that “state attorneys general again are stepping up, this time to stop the Trump administration from going back on the basic ‘good government’ promise that before federal officials approve major projects, they must review potential adverse impacts, make them public, and hear the views of affected citizens.”

“We should not need to rely on our last line of defense—state attorneys general—to enforce the rule of law,” added Hayes, former Interior Department deputy secretary in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “But here we are again, needing to turn to state legal officers and the federal courts to right the latest national environmental wrongs that the Trump administration is imposing on the American people.”

In March, Becerra co-led a coalition of 20 attorneys general who argued in a letter that the administration’s proposed rule violated both NEPA and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA); relied on a deficient rulemaking process; restricted the scope of impacts considered in environmental reviews; and unlawfully and without justification limited the requirement that an agency evaluate reasonable alternatives.

Pretty remarkable quote from California AG @XavierBecerra on why so much of this case will be fought on procedural grounds. pic.twitter.com/9JnRO3WOVW

— Rebecca Beitsch (@RebeccaBeitsch) August 28, 2020

As the California attorney general’s office explained Friday, the lawsuit argues that the final rule violates NEPA and APA because it:

• is contrary to NEPA’s language and purpose and exceeds the Council on Environmental Quality’s statutory authority;
• is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with law; and
• was promulgated without preparing an Environmental Assessment or an Environmental Impact Statement evaluating the rule’s environmental and public health impacts.

As Hayes put it:

“The administration’s final NEPA rule shatters that long-standing legal promise embedded in one of our nation’s earliest and most important environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act.”

“In particular, the final rule abandons any environmental review for broad categories of project approvals that will leave our most vulnerable citizens—including many already impacted by historic, unjust environmental harms—voiceless and at the mercy of an administration that favors industry profits over Americans’ health and well-being,” he said. “And when reviews are begrudgingly undertaken, the new rule enables officials to downplay or skip altogether serious analyses of climate impacts and health dangers associated with proposed projects and connected activities.”

Ferguson and Becerra were joined in the filing by the legal representatives for Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia, the territory of Guam, the city of New York, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and Harris County, Texas.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: Activists gather outside of the Alliance Center in Denver across the street from a public hearing by the Council on Environmental Quality’s proposed update to NEPA Regulations on February 11, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

On August 1, a rare in-depth investigative piece appeared on the BBC News website based on credible and serious allegations that UK Special Forces had executed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan. The BBC article was produced in tandem with a report, ‘”Rogue SAS Afghanistan execution squad” exposed by email trail’, published by the Sunday Times.

Special Forces are the UK’s elite specialist troops, encompassing both the SAS (Special Air Service) and the SBS (Special Boat Service). The allegation, by two senior officers, is that there was a ‘deliberate policy’ of British Special Forces illegally killing unarmed men in Afghanistan under the pretext of assassinating Taliban leaders.

The new revelations were based on documents recently released to solicitors Leigh Day as part of an ongoing case at the High Court brought by an Afghan man, Saifullah Ghareb Yar. He says that four members of his family were shot dead in rural Helmand in a ‘night raid’ in the early hours of 16 February 2011.

The UK government claims that the family members were ‘killed in self defence.’ But the newly-released documents contradict this assertion. As the BBC article noted:

‘Just hours after the elite troops had returned to base, other British soldiers were exchanging emails describing the events of that night as the “latest massacre”.’

In other words, this was not the first such case where killings of unarmed civilians by Special Forces had taken place.

Saifullah’s family were asleep at 1am when they woke suddenly to the sound of helicopter rotors, followed by shouting through megaphones. Saifullah was a teenager, caught in the middle of a Special Forces ‘kill or capture’ mission. He told the BBC what happened:

‘My whole body was shaking because of the fear. Everyone was frightened. All the women and children were crying and screaming’.

His hands were tied and he was put in a holding area with the women and children.

The BBC report continued:

‘He had not been there for long when he heard gunfire.

‘After the troops had left, the bodies of his two brothers were discovered in the fields surrounding their home. His cousin had been shot dead in a neighbouring building.

‘Going back into his house, Saifullah found his father, lying face down on the ground.

‘“His head, the forehead area, was shot with many bullets, and his leg was completely broken by the bullets’.”

The official UK Special Forces report on the killings claimed that the British soldiers had been threatened by the Afghan men brandishing weapons. In particular, the official report claimed that after initially securing the compound they went back in to search the rooms with one of the men they had detained. This man, said Special Forces, suddenly reached for a grenade behind a curtain. Their report stated:

‘He poses an immediate threat to life and is engaged with aimed shots. The assault team members take cover. The grenade malfunctions and does not detonate’.

Another of the four Afghan men was killed when told to go into another building to open the curtains, said Special Forces. He supposedly emerged with a rifle and was then shot dead.

The official account of the killings, noted the BBC, was ‘met with suspicion by some in the British military.’ The more detailed article in the Sunday Times includes the disbelieving response of a senior officer reading the Special Forces’ version of events:

‘Basically, for what must be the 10th time in the last two weeks, when they sent [an Afghan man] back into the [building], to open the curtains(??) he re-appeared [sic] with an AK [AK-47 assault rifle].’

An internal army message included a summary of the official Special Forces report and concluded by saying: “You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!”

However, it appeared as though Special Forces had made it up.

The serious allegations in the BBC and Sunday Times articles followed a Panorama programme, ‘War Crimes Scandal Exposed’, last November in the wake of the government’s announcement that investigations into alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan would be closed, before a single soldier had even been prosecuted. Panorama worked with the Sunday Times Insight team, revealing ‘evidence of a pattern of illegal killings by UK Special Forces.’

In the programme, BBC reporter Richard Bilton met UK detectives, formerly of the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT), who spoke for the first time about how they were prevented from prosecuting soldiers suspected of serious crimes. These detectives believe that the Ministry of Defence and senior military officers were involved in the cover-up of torture and illegal killings. This happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

IHAT was set up by the Labour government in 2010. But, as Bilton noted for Panorama:

‘Despite years of work, not a single one of the almost 3,400 allegations against British troops [in Iraq] was prosecuted.’

He continued:

‘Then, in 2017, the Conservative government shut IHAT down. The government claimed it was down to the actions of one solicitor. Phil Shiner ran Public Interest Lawyers, a legal firm that brought over a thousand cases to IHAT. He was struck off following allegations he had paid fixers to find clients in Iraq.’

In her speech to the Conservative party conference that autumn, Prime Minister Theresa May, proclaimed to great applause that:

‘we will never again in any future conflict let those activist left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave, the men and women of our Armed Forces’.

But, as one former IHAT detective told Panorama:

‘It was helpful to close IHAT down, wasn’t it? [ironic tone]. You don’t need an excuse. All you’re going to say is, “Right, everything’s now tainted. We can bin all that. Yippee.” It was a whitewash. Public Interest Lawyers and Phil Shiner – that was used as an excuse to get rid of a lot of jobs and say: “IHAT, you’re finished”.’

As Bilton observed:

‘Phil Shiner broke the rules. But that doesn’t mean all the allegations made by Iraqi civilians were untrue. The detectives we’ve spoken to say IHAT was shut down for political reasons. It was a cover-up.’

He added:

‘IHAT detectives say the government never wanted any soldiers prosecuted, no matter how strong the evidence.’

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, at the same time that the government announced IHAT would be shut down, it also decided to end an investigation, Operation Northmoor, into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Bilton:

‘Northmoor’s team of detectives had been investigating allegations of executions by British Special Forces. They had linked dozens of suspicious killings on night raids. But Northmoor was closed before they even interviewed key Afghan witnesses.’

He added:

‘Some of those killed were undoubtedly members of the Taliban. But the UN has concluded that Coalition forces killed more than 300 innocent civilians.’

This is a shocking statistic. Perhaps the most appalling case Panorama investigated was the brutal killing of four boys in the Helmand village of Loy Bagh in October 2012, shot dead while they were sitting drinking tea. Bilton reported:

‘Detectives discovered Special Forces didn’t tell the truth about the raid. The first military reports failed to disclose British involvement.’

Instead, they attempted to pin the blame on Afghan forces; a common evasive tactic.

‘Detective say UK forces were falsely attributing suspicious deaths to Afghan forces, so British troops wouldn’t be investigated.’

The British soldier who shot the four boys later claimed to UK detectives working for IHAT that he shot two of the boys because they were standing and pointing weapons at him, and he shot at the other two ‘when they appeared out of the shadows’.

But the evidence of bullet holes low down in the room was inconsistent with his account. The boys had been sitting, just as claimed by Afghan witnesses, not standing.

Such clashes with evidence and testimony from the scene of killings fit a pattern of official accounts of raids written up afterwards by UK Special Forces alleging ‘self defence’.  Former intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge told Panorama that the night raids were a ‘perpetual motion machine of killing and capturing’. Former Operation Northmoor detectives believe the case brought by Saifullah Ghareb Yar (see above) is part of a pattern of cover-ups they were investigating. They allege that the British military and the government have covered up numerous murders by closing down IHAT (in Iraq) and Operation Northmoor (in Afghanistan).

Mark Urban, Defender Of The Faith

The new BBC online investigative piece, published on August 1, together with the Panorama progamme last November, are rare examples of serious public-interest BBC journalism attempting to hold the UK military and government to account. Will other BBC journalists, with responsibility for ‘defence’ and foreign affairs, pursue the latest revelations regarding the case of four members of Saifullah Ghareb Yar’s family being executed in Helmand province?

Consider, in particular, Mark Urban, diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Newsnight, who has spent years reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan, very much from within a propaganda framework aligned with UK government policies and interests. For example, in a 2015 comment piece in the Evening Standard, Urban was happy to amplify the Cold War narrative spun by former top-ranking UK military officials:

‘Speaking to Britain’s former top military leadership, you find General Shirreff, or former Chief of the General Staff Gen Sir Peter Wall, arguing that Russia is the principal worry. Lt Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, former Director of Special Forces, or General Lord David Richards (former Chief of the Defence Staff) believe the Islamic State is the real game changer. Talk to some of the US military leaders or intelligence people and they are more worried about China.

‘Either way, the ability of countries such as the UK to do something about these emerging threats is limited by the dramatic cuts enacted after the Cold War.’

For Urban, there was no need to insert ‘emerging threats’ in inverted commas; it was simply a given that China and Russia threaten the UK. The possibility that it could be the West that is threatening China and Russia is presumably unthinkable.

As John Pilger writes in a new piece commemorating the victims of the US atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, intended as a show of strength to show the Soviet Union who was the world’s boss:

‘Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S. strategist told me, “the perfect noose”.’

But, as ever for compliant Western propagandists like Urban, the Orwellian framework that ‘we’ are only ‘defending’ ourselves is deeply embedded in establishment-friendly ‘journalism’.

As we have previously noted, Urban is a former defence correspondent at the Independent. He served in the British Army, both as a regular officer for nine months as well as serving four years in the Territorials. He has hosted a series of virtual reality war games on the BBC, Time Commanders, re-enacting key battles. He is also the author of several books:

• Soviet Land Power (1985)
• War in Afghanistan (1987)
• Big Boys’ Rules: The SAS and the secret struggle against the IRA (1992)
• UK Eyes Alpha: Inside British Intelligence (1996)
• The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell (2001)
• Rifles: Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters (2003)
• Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World (2005)
• Fusiliers: Eight Years with the Redcoats in America (2007)
• Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the Secret Special Forces War in Iraq (2010)
• The Tank War: The British Band of Brothers – One Tank Regiment’s World War II (2014)
• The Edge: Is The Military Dominance Of The West Coming To An End? (2015)
• The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy (2018)

On August 3, we checked Urban’s Twitter account and noted that he had made only the most cursory reference to the allegations regarding Special Forces in Afghanistan in a replyto someone called Henry Hyde who had flagged them up to him.

‘Yes Henry. It gives a fuller version of allegations previously reported by the paper in relation to a particular squadron of 22 SAS during its tour in Afghan.’

Hyde replied:

‘Highly disturbing stuff.’

Urban did not respond further.

We asked him via Twitter on August 3:

‘Hello Mark @markurban01

You’ve reported on #Afghanistan for @BBCNewsnight over many years.

Why are you not drawing attention to these important allegations of UK Special Forces executing unarmed civilians?’

Urban did not reply. This contrasts with the early years of Media Lens when Urban – as well as other high-profile ‘mainstream’ journalists – would engage in substantive email exchanges with us. In 2007, for example, we critiqued his assertion in a BBC report that US troops were ‘here to help’ in Iraq.  This, of course, was the propaganda line that the US and its allies were desperate to sell to the public following the bloodbath of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation.

To his credit back then, Urban replied to us, although he disparaged our analysis as being:

‘put together by you sitting at home, sifting current events through a dense filter of ideology.’

The implication was, of course, that Urban – as an ‘impartial’ BBC News correspondent – was subject to no ‘filter of ideology’ at all. Long-term readers may recall Andrew Marr’s similar assertion in the Daily Telegraph back in 2001 that when he joined the BBC as political editor, his ‘Organs of Opinion were formally removed’.

Ironically for Urban, our analysis that had been ‘put together by [us] sitting at home’, was supported in 2007 by a serving British Army officer who had read the exchanges with Urban in our media alerts, and had then written to him. The anonymous officer said that the view that the war had been ‘illegal, immoral and unwinnable’ was ‘the overwhelming feeling of many of my peers’.

As a result of these exchanges involving Media Lens, the British army officer’s views were reported on Newsnight; one of the vanishingly rare occasions in which the ‘mainstream’ media have so much as mentioned us. At that time, the Newsnight editor was Peter Barron, with whom Media Lens had had several polite and respectful email exchanges.

We had a further lengthy exchange with Urban in 2009 following this extraordinary claim about anti-war protesters in his BBC ‘War and Peace’ blog that:

‘it was their hand wringing and magnification of every set back or mis-step that played a key role in undermining the political will to achieve more in southern Iraq.’

As we noted in our reply:

‘You have misunderstood the whole basis of the anti-war protest. The argument is that the invasion was illegal, in fact a classic example of the supreme war crime – the waging of a war of aggression. The Nuremberg trials were clear that it makes not a jot of difference whether such criminality has positive outcomes – the waging of aggressive war is illegal.’

This entirely rational and well-established point, rooted in international justice, was apparently incomprehensible to Urban who replied:

‘Are you comparing British soldiers to Nazis? I cannot see the comparison; either in legal or moral terms.’

This standard ‘mainstream’ resort to ‘moral equivalence’, when the crimes of the West are raised, has been demolished by Noam Chomsky who once told BBC interviewer Tim Sebastian:

‘Moral equivalence is a term of propaganda that was invented to try to prevent us from looking at the acts for which we are responsible… Minimal moral integrity requires that if we think something is wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.’

In late 2009 and early 2010, the Sunday Times published articles by its reporter Jerome Starkey detailing the killing of eight Afghan schoolboys in a night raid by US-led troops. We wrote two media alerts at the time (here and here), highlighting how a Nato spokesperson had initially denied that schoolchildren had been shot in the head – several of them after first being handcuffed – and then retracting their cover story. Western authorities later offered relatives ‘compensation’ of US$2,000 for each life taken. We noted the dearth of follow-up ‘mainstream’ interest to Starkey’s courageous reporting, including the BBC’s failure to report the allegations fully and responsibly.

Without access to all of Newsnight’s broadcasts during this period, it is not possible to categorically say whether the programme reported much of this, if anything. As the usual correspondent for reporting from Afghanistan, it would most likely have fallen to Mark Urban to cover it.

Following the latest revelations on August 1 on the killing of four of Saifullah Ghareb Yar’s relatives in Helmand (see above), an anodyne piece by Urban appeared on the BBC News website on August 3, blandly titled, ‘Defence Secretary to review SAS Afghanistan emails’. This was later on the same day that we had tweeted him. Arguably, this means he had been too busy to respond; though surely a short reply would have taken him just a few seconds. However, the focus of Urban’s piece was not the shocking execution of unarmed civilians, but on how the revelation of secret emails about Special Forces operations in Afghanistan was:

‘causing recriminations within the Ministry of Defence, with a process starting this week to re-examine how ministers were kept in ignorance of their content.’

The emphasis of his report was the ‘fresh worries’ in the Ministry of Defence about the revelations and the stressful impact on army veterans:

‘The allegations about D Squadron’s tour – each of 22 SAS’s sub-units rotated through Afghanistan in turn for 3-4 months – are not new.

‘They have already been investigated by the Royal Military Police under Operation Northmoor, a prolonged inquiry that ended without any soldiers being charged.

‘Veterans of the regiment have complained about the stress of such prolonged enquiries.’

The piece mentions allegations of ‘a deliberate policy… to engage and kill fighting aged men on target even when they did not pose a threat’, but was shorn of details of the killing of unarmed civilians. This fits a pattern of Urban’s reporting. We have been unable to find anything substantive about the impact of Special Forces’ operations on Afghan and Iraqi civilians in his Twitter timeline, his BBC blog, or anything he has published online or in any newspaper. It is almost impossible to give a definitive set of search results with 100 per cent confidence. But, as an example, if one searches the BBC News website using the search terms “Mark Urban” + “Special Forces” + “civilians” only a handful of results are returned; and nothing of substance in which the emphasis is on civilian victims.

For instance, in a 2011 BBC News website piece by Urban, titled ‘Impact on special forces of Navy Seals helicopter loss’, there was a token mention in the final paragraph of the occasions when ‘Afghans report civilians being killed’. This encapsulates Urban’s propaganda journalism as a whole: overwhelming weight is given to the priorities of the UK establishment and the military, with only passing mention of the destructive impact of UK policy and actions on the victims.

Admittedly, we have not read Urban’s books in the lengthy list above. But would it be at all likely that his reporting in book form would suddenly shift by one hundred and eighty degrees to focus, not on British armed forces, but on their victims?  In a review of Urban’s book, ‘Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the Secret Special Forces War in Iraq’, Observer foreign correspondent Jason Burke noted:

‘Few reporters succeed in cultivating any sources within the closed world of the British special forces; Urban has found dozens who have spoken with unprecedented candour.’

Given Mark Urban’s history of ‘cultivating’ sources within British special forces, and his privileged extensive access to UK military and intelligence agencies, how likely is it that he would not have known about the serious allegations of the execution of innocent civilians going back many years? His unwillingness to seriously explore allegations of this kind is hugely significant.

Burke notes that Urban ‘had to battle with the Ministry of Defence’ to have the book published, but then adds:

‘one wonders what reception a work more critical of British special forces’ operations might have received in Whitehall. The author’s personal admiration for the men who constitute his subject is clear. Language veers from the breathless – “Britain’s hand-picked troops”, the “SAS had got its man”– to the soldierly – firefights are “epic”, problems are “aggro”.’

Would the author’s ‘personal admiration’ for these men be so high if he had investigated and reported the many credible accounts of unarmed civilians being killed by Special Forces, followed by cynical attempts at cover-ups aided, if not directed, by senior figures within the Ministry of Defence?

Remarkably, in November 2010, almost one year after the killing of eight schoolchildren by Nato-led forces had been reported by the Sunday Times, Urban had told Newsnight viewers:

‘The biggest mistake of the coalition’s early years here was under-investment in the Afghan forces.’

It takes a particularly ‘dense filter of ideology’, to use Urban’s own words, to devote scant attention to Western crimes in the killing of schoolchildren, and other unarmed civilians, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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The US presidential elections coming this November will determine whether the current President Donald Trump or the Democratic nominee Joe Biden (if his mental capabilities are still intact) will run the White house.

But whether Trump or Biden becomes president, Israel is the real winner in all of this.  Trump is no doubt already controlled by the neocons and his relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is close, but Joe Biden who declared he was a Zionist back in 2008 is trying to win Israel’s support once again.  Here is his interview with Shalom TV:

Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo is a neocon and Israel’s lead spokesperson who addressed the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem said that “I’m speaking to you from beautiful Jerusalem, looking out over the old city.” Pompeo praised Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. Pompeo claimed that Trump “squeezed the Ayatollah, Hezbollah and Hamas.”

Pompeo also mentioned Trump’s decision when he authorized a missile strike murdering one of Iran’s top generals, Qasem Soleimani when he said that “in the Middle East, when Iran threatened, the president approved a strike that killed the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani.” Soleimani was the same man who fought against the US-backed Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and against Al-Qaeda during the September 11th attacks, but that is obviously forgotten in the mainstream media. Trump has imposed Israel’s agenda by relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump has also recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory even though it is Syrian territory and he imposed a one-sided so-called “peace plan” with the Palestinians with his Zionist son-in-law Jared Kushner with no Palestinian input into the plan. Trump’s peace deal between the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a Western puppet state and Israel did not change Netanyahu’s commitment to annexation plans in the West Bank which according to him was “still on the table.”

Under Trump’s first term, Israel has gained an edge politically over the Palestinians and has created more tensions between Israel and Iran.  But the Democrats with Joe Biden and his vice-president nominee Kamala Harris are leading the charge and are fighting hard to win Israel’s support. Harris recently said that “Joe has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” during a virtual fundraiser with potential Jewish-American voters.

Harris repeated what almost every American politician had said since Israel’s creation in 1948

“I pledge to you the Biden-Harris administration will sustain our unbreakable commitment to Israel’s security, including the unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation pioneered during the Obama-Biden administration and the guarantee that Israel will always maintain its qualitative military edge.”

Before Barack Obama left office in 2016, he signed a $38 billion memorandum of assistance to Israel over a 10-year period.

No matter who wins the elections come this November, Israel wins and the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East lose. The Israel lobby known as the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), is one of the most powerful lobbyists’ in Washington D.C. (besides Big Pharma and Big Oil) is an influential group of Zionists who have an agenda to erase the Palestinians and their history from their lands and expand its territory in the Middle East like they did with the Golan Heights under Trump.

Democrat or Republican, both sides have blood on their hands when it comes to the Palestinians and all of the wars in the Middle East. Unfortunately, another major loser in all of this pandering to the Israelis is of course the American taxpayer, something both sides of the political spectrum ignore. With a Biden-Harris presidency or the current status quo with Trump-Pence, the Middle East will once again be in turmoil after the November elections and that’s a fact the world cannot ignore.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCN

The critical assessment of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) last month by the influential Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies coupled with India’s eagerness all summer to court the Eurasian Great Power into joining its so-called “Indo-Pacific” projects have combined to create the impression that Russia might be backtracking on President Putin’s previously expressed intention last year to integrate his country’s Greater Eurasian Partnership with the New Silk Road.

Debunking The Dogma

War goddess Hillary never left the political stage gently into that good night.

Eager to avenge her loss to Trump in 2016, she keeps resurfacing instead of fading away like old soldiers.

With Biden holding a commanding lead in most polls through late August, she went public again last week, saying the following:

“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” adding:

“I think that (Republicans) have a couple of scenarios that they are looking toward. One is messing up absentee balloting.”

“They believe that helps them so that they then get maybe a narrow advantage in the Electoral College on Election Day.”

“So we’ve got to have a massive legal operation, and I know the Biden campaign is working on that.”

“We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places.”

Political dirty tricks in the US cut both ways, a process profoundly not open, free and fair under one-party rule with two right wings.

Independent candidates are virtually shut out of contention, given no chance to compete on a level playing field.

According to investigative journalist Gregg Palast, “22% of all mail-in ballots don’t get counted,” citing a 2016 MIT study, adding:

The “safest way to vote” by absentee ballot is requesting one “2 months in advance.”

If doesn’t arrive by mid-October, pick one up “at your county board of elections, fill it out, and return it right there…and demand validation of your signature.”

“Don’t go postal.”

“In 2016, more than 141,000 ballots were rejected because someone challenged the signature.”

Voter suppression is longstanding practice in the US, today done with electronic ease on corporate-controlled voting machines.

In his book titled “How Trump Stole 2020,” Palest said “Trump & Co are stealing the election right now (by) ballot bandit(ry),” claiming he “stole 2016 and they’re at it again.”

US 2020 elections will be unlike any others in modern times with many, maybe most, voters exercising their franchise by mail – even though it’s as safe to show up at polling stations as go grocery shopping most people do regularly.

Weeks earlier, Trump falsely claimed mail-in ballots are “rigged,” refusing to say that he’ll accept November 3 election results if Biden wins, adding:

“I’m not a good loser, I don’t like to lose.” Depending on how things turn out, he’ll decide post-election whether to accept the result, saying:

“I have to see…I’m not just going to say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”

His campaign manager Tim Murtaugh said

“(w)e won’t know what kind of shenanigans (Dems) will try leading up to November” — claiming if things are “free and fair…Trump will win.”

In July, Biden accused Trump of trying to “indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work,” adding:

He’ll claim “they’re not real…not fair.” He might try to delay the election if polls show him way behind close to November 3, said Biden.

Last week Trump claimed the only way he’d lose is if things are rigged.

A statement by his campaign denied that he’ll try to hijack the election.

His campaign lawyer Matthew Morgan slammed Hillary’s remarks quoted above, saying she’s “trying to lay the groundwork for Joe Biden to deny the election results when…Trump wins.”

Separately, Speaker Pelosi urged Biden not to debate Trump, saying he hasn’t “comported himself in a way that has any association with truth, evidence, data, and facts.”

Farcical US political debates are scripted theater without substance.

They feature well-rehearsed posturing, slogans, and one-liners over solutions to cutting-edge domestic and geopolitical solutions — along with promises made to be broken if elected.

On issues relating to war and peace, corporate empowerment, neoliberal harshness, and police state crackdowns on nonbelievers, both right wings of the US one-party state are on the same page.

Their rhetoric, style and party labels alone differ. In office they’re much the same on issues mattering most.

Whenever US elections are held, dirty business as usual continuity always wins. It happens every time the same way.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.