Global Research

In its most recent report to the UN Security Council, the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) blandly recounted “progress” in service to their mission, but what is their mission? Up until 2013, MONUSCO had no combat mandate; they were somehow expected to keep the peace amidst a war for Congo’s resources without one. In 2013, however, as the M23 militia was ravaging North and South Kivu Provinces, the UN Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reported that M23 answered to the command of Rwandan Defense Minister James Kabarebe, who of course answered to Rwandan President Paul Kagame himself. There were competing factions within M23, and some of its officers answered to high-level officials in Uganda, who of course answered to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

This made Rwanda and Uganda’s wars of aggression so obvious that the UN Security Council finally felt obliged to do what the UN Charter compels them to: organize a UN military intervention to stop the Rwandan and Ugandan militias.

The UN Force Intervention Brigade, composed of Tanzanian, South African, and Malawian troops, was the first UN Peacekeeping mission with an explicit combat mandate, and they did indeed chase M23 back into Rwanda and Uganda.

Then the press reported that M23 had “surrendered” to Kagame and Museveni. That was more or less like reporting that the Confederate Army had fled South to surrender to General Robert E. Lee, but the world that had been horrified by M23’s atrocities applauded their defeat and turned its attention elsewhere.

Museveni, one of the aggressors, presided over a so-called peace conference in Uganda’s capital Kampala, which produced an agreement giving M23 everything it had asked for at the outset of the war. But who bothered to read or understand the agreement? Others no doubt did, but I’m the only one I know of who bothered to report what it said—on Pacifica Radio and in the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper, which the powerful players feel free to ignore, even if they were slightly discomfited.

The aggressors are not named

Violence has continued in the DRC’s Kivu Provinces. According to the Congo Research Group based at New York University, at least 99 Congolese civilians have been massacred since November 5 in North Kivu’s Beni Territory alone. UN Peacekeepers have failed to protect them from marauding militias, and protesters have taken to the streets in Beni, Goma, and Butembo to say that the peacekeepers are part of the problem and demand that they leave. In Beni they burned down most of at least one UN military base, and one protester has been reported killed, five wounded.

Smoke from the United Nations compound rises in Beni, Democratic Republic of Congo, Monday, Nov. 25, 2019. Angry residents of this eastern Congo city burned the town hall and stormed the UN peacekeeping mission, known as MONUSCO, after Allied Democratic Forces rebels killed eight people and kidnapped nine overnight. (AP Photo/Al-hadji Kudra Maliro)

With 18,000 troops, the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Congo is the largest in the world, and it has been in Congo for 20 years without protecting the people or the peace. A young protester in Beni told Aljazeera, “The UN is supposed to keep us safe, to keep peace in North Kivu, but we’ve never seen the peace. So we are so angry we don’t want them to stay here in North Kivu.”

Congolese Swiss historian Bénédicte Kumbi Njoko also spoke to Aljazeera:

“If we think about the UN and its presence, we need to go back to almost 59 years that the UN has been working in the Congo because there were problems in the country. And I think that if we take that into perspective, we can of course question the utility of this organization, because what we have seen the last 20 years now is that people are still dying and this war that is happening in the Congo has caused already more than 8 million deaths, so maybe the response that the UN is giving to that situation is not an appropriate one.”

South African mining researcher and community organizer David Van Wyk agreed.

“Sadly,” he said, “it’s one more failed intervention. The UN has failed the Congolese people from the very first day of the Congo’s independence 59 years ago.”

“Rebels,” “rebellions,” and “rebel groups”

Kumbi told me that she had asked Aljazeera why, like the rest of the international press, they describe the militias killing the Congolese people as “rebel groups” when they are in fact gangs—Rwandan, Ugandan, and Congolese—fighting over Congolese territory and resource riches.They are not Congolese nationals fighting for power or social justice as the term “rebel groups” implies. They are fighting at the country’s easternmost edges, on its borders with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. The war-torn Kivu Provinces couldn’t be farther from Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, which is on its western border with the Republic of Congo and near its Atlantic coast. So they are not trying to overthrow the existing government as any self-respecting rebels would.

Her question, Kumbi said, did not make it into Aljazeera’s final cut. It is essentially the same question that she demanded an answer to at a UN conference in Geneva back in 2013, where—until the gendarmes dragged her out—she interrupted then UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon with this scream:

“What about people of the Congo? Please! What about people of the Congo??? You don’t say anything about that! There’s been killed eight million people and you say you’re making fictitious peace and you’re telling us that this is peace when aggressors are not named! Rwanda is responsible for what is going wrong in the peace in Congo. And nobody says something about that! Burundi! Uganda! You should say that! We are sick and tired of hearing every time people just being so ‘peaceful’ with Africa. You should let Africa in peace!”

So long as the UN Security Council and the international press blame the war on non-existent “rebels” and “rebel groups” carrying out non-existent “rebellions,” the Congolese holocaust will go on. NGOs and UN agencies will continue to call for millions of dollars to help with the humanitarian crisis, comparing it to Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, and the displaced population already numbering four million will continue to rise. Neither the UNSC nor anyone else is going to defeat “rebels” or end a war they refuse to name.

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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

On November 19, the Detroit City Council voted down a bond proposal advanced by corporate-imposed Mayor Mike Duggan ostensibly designed to eliminate blighted residential properties in this overwhelmingly impoverished African American municipality.

The latest bond initiative came to the city’s legislative body in the aftermath of the release of scathing reports by several municipal entities related to the inefficient and corrupt conduct of the administration.

Most significantly, the Auditor General published a report on the city’s demolition program which was filled with rules violations, fiscal waste and environmentally compromised practices. This audit had been commissioned by Council President Brenda Jones some four years ago.

Testimony before the City Council in a public session on November 12 revealed that the Duggan administration had refused to provide documents related to the demolition program. In response to the Auditor General’s findings, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) on behalf of the Mayor, sought to discredit the conclusions.

Nonetheless, the data utilized in the AG report came from several city departments managing the projects which have been mired by cost overruns, a blatant disregard for the health and safety of the communities impacted as well as a general level of impunity in dealing with the City Council, the corporate press and residents of the city. Numerous community organizations appeared before the City Council for two straight weeks speaking out against the bond initiative. On the eve of the final vote, over 500 people jammed the Erma Henderson Auditorium at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (CAYMC) during a public hearing to condemn the Duggan policy demanding that City Council reject the scheme.

In a November 8 lead article in the Detroit Free Press it noted that:

“The sweeping audit revealed the Detroit Building Authority— along with one or more city departments in some instances: failed to properly provide oversight and administer contracts; did not fully comply with some local and state laws; didn’t monitor to ensure that demolition contractors met requirements. Auditor General Mark Lockridge also blasted the city for having ‘inconsistent and unreliable’ demolition data, as well as poor record keeping that made it difficult to perform the audit. ‘A perception that public officials are using the procurement system to reward themselves, their friends, or supporters, poisons the public’s confidence in government and shakes its faith in the bureaucratic process,’ he wrote.”

Federal Hardest Hit Funds Redirected and Expropriated

The AG’s findings mainly related to the city’s own demolition program. Far worse, the reported $250 million in Federal Hardest Hit Funds (FHHF) which were granted to the city initially to address the horrendous problems of mortgage and later property tax foreclosures, have instead become a source of widespread mismanagement as well and therefore subject to scrutiny by United States law-enforcement officials and 14^th District Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence.

Figures provided by the Duggan administration claims that over 19,000 vacant homes have been demolished since 2014. Of that number the majority, some 14,000, utilized FHHF allocations to tear down the structures. Private contractors hired by the Duggan administration demolished homes allowing asbestos, lead and other harmful materials to remain in the soil. Bricks and other housing debris were often left on the land where the structures were removed.

Congresswoman Lawrence was quoted in the November 14 issue of the Free Press saying:

“I want those sites tested and documented. And if they are contaminated, lets remediate it. … We cannot have contaminated soil that we use federal dollars for in a community. I was very involved in the details of Flint and one of the things we discovered is that there were cries or complaints or concerns about an issue happening in the community and for months there was no response from government, I am not going to have my record reflect that I did not respond. … We must act.”

After the failure of the state to enforce the utilization of the FHHF monies in a proper fashion under both Democratic and Republican administrations between 2010-2014, the contrived declaration of a financial emergency, the illegal placing of an Emergency Manager (EM) over the city in early 2013 along with the filing of bankruptcy by the state-appointed EM during that summer, set the stage for the injection of the federal funds into the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA). Attempts by the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other community organizations to have the FHHF resources put to practical and much needed use in stabilizing communities was rejected by the administration while the City Council, the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) and the federal government accepted the false notions that massive demolition would somehow foster development. In fact a recent study indicated that blight has worsened since the advent of the corporate-imposed Duggan regime. (See this)

Since 2014, the DLBA has been given unwarranted authority to survey, target, confiscate, resale and demolish homes throughout the city. The DLBA has been cited for several violations of basic best practices. The offices of the “quasi-governmental agency” established by the Michigan State Legislature has wasted hundreds of millions in federal funds which could have provided much needed relief for Detroit residents suffering from over-assessed property taxes, predatory mortgages, utility and water shutoffs.

In essence, the policies enacted by the bank-led “development” strategy in Detroit have in effect created more abandonment, dislocations and underdevelopment of communities. The city remains one of poorest major municipalities in the U.S. The nationality character of Detroit, being approximately 80% African American, provides a glaring example of the convergence between race and class oppression under capitalism.

The Need for a Broad-based Citywide Coalition to Reverse the Bank-led Strategy

Despite the determination of the Duggan administration to force the city residents into more indebtedness through the floating of General Obligation Bonds (GOBs) for demolitions, an alliance of community organizations were successful in defeating this plot which in all likelihood would provide more opportunities for patronage, profiteering, theft and environmental degradation. Such an alliance could be extended to meaningfully address the overall crises impacting the city now facing a renewed challenge as a direct result of the stalled prestige business complexes which have been showcased as examples of Detroit’s resurgence.

Many of the announced “development projects” over the last five years have failed to materialize. The much-championed “District Detroit” which began with the publicly-funded to the tune of over $300 million construction of Little Caesars Arena (LCA), had been deceptively sold to the City Council during the state-engineered bankruptcy as the first stage of the rebuilding of dozens of blocks of blighted and vacant areas formerly known as the Cass Corridor. Today, most of the land surrounding the LCA sports arena consists of parking lots and uninhabited buildings.

The “Hudson’s site project” established by billionaire Dan Gilbert along Woodward Avenue downtown has yet to begin construction. The Republican-dominated Michigan state legislature granted huge tax abatements and the capture of personal income taxes designed to be recycled back into the Gilbert financial empire. Gilbert, who suffered a stroke over six months ago, remains out of the public view. Meanwhile, the impatience of the majority African American residents and other progressive forces is impacting the corporate media and the City Council.

A Detroit Inspector General’s (IG) report recently condemned the Duggan administration for the deliberate destruction of e-mails (public documents) related to a non-profit corporation which is run by a physician which the Mayor has a personal relationship. Municipal employees and resources were mobilized to assist the “Make-Your-Date” non-profit ostensibly geared towards curbing the high infant mortality rate in the city.

Yet it is quite obvious that the program was far less than legitimate prompting the IG to call for disciplinary actions by the administration. The administration refused to implement any corrective measures. Several weeks ago the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel conducted a raid on the Information Technology (IT) division of the city in an ongoing investigation related to the ordering of e-mails deletions by high-ranking administration officials.

At a recent Moratorium NOW! Coalition meeting, members emphasized the need for the convening of a people’s Town Hall gathering independent of the City Council. This teach-in or conference would analyze the current situation in Detroit in light of the economic stagnation and the continuing problems of poverty, racism, financial exploitation, corruption and administrative impunity.

There is a need to reevaluate the entire municipal bond issuance process in light of the experiences in the city over the last two decades. Detroit residents have approved numerous bond initiatives where the funds have been redirected towards debt service payments to financial institutions. This phenomenon created the conditions for the illegal appointment of EMs in both the public school district and municipal government as a whole.

Municipal bonds supposedly designed to construct and refurbish school buildings have resulted in the structures being closed and razed. Payments on these bonds are set to continue for another twenty years. The same scenario holds true for the prestige projects littering downtown and midtown. Tax captures from funds which should be utilized for education and municipal services are funneled to the Detroit Downtown Development Authority (DDA) and the Neighborhood Strategic Fund (NSF).

The banks which were instrumental in the destruction of the city through racist predatory lending have announced the allocation of millions to the NSF. However, these programs have not resulted in genuine development. Certain areas such as the Livernois business district on the northwest side have been plunged into an economic crisis due to a lack of adequate construction planning. The same problems exist as well along Woodward Avenue in the New Center area.

Community organizations equipped with an analysis of the contemporary crises of capitalism will come to the realization that only socialist-oriented planning and development strategies provide any hope for a sustainable future. A nationwide effort is required for such an approach to municipal governance to be successful.

The problems of urban restructuring and displacement are part and parcel of the global character of capitalism and imperialism. Consequently, local organizing must take into consideration the necessity for revolutionary transformation of the conditions under which the working class and oppressed live and work.

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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

The most insidious and pervasive form of modern warfare by Wall Street and the Pentagon, acting in coordination, is passing largely unnoticed and unchallenged. This calculated attack is rolling back decades of progress in health care, sanitation, housing, essential infrastructure and industrial development all around the world.

Almost every developing country attempting any level of social programs for its population is being targeted.

U.S. imperialism and its junior partners have refined economic strangulation into a devastating weapon. Sanctions in the hands of the dominant military and economic powers now cause more deaths than bombs or guns. This weapon is stunting the growth of millions of youth and driving desperate migrations, dislocating tens of millions.

‘A crime against humanity’

Sanctions and economic blockades against Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are well known. But the devastating impacts of U.S. sanctions on occupied Palestine — or on already impoverished countries such as Mali, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Kyrgyzstan, Fiji, Nicaragua and Laos — are not even on the radar screen of human rights groups.

Most sanctions are intentionally hidden; they don’t generate even a line of news. Some sanctions are quickly passed after a sudden news article about an alleged atrocity. The civilians who will suffer have nothing to do with whatever crime the corporate media use as an excuse. What are never mentioned are the economic or political concessions the U.S. government or corporations are seeking.

Sanctions cannot be posed as an alternative to war. They are in fact the most brutal form of warfare, deliberately targeting the most defenseless civilians — youth, the elderly, sick and disabled people. In a period of human history when hunger and disease are scientifically solvable, depriving hundreds of millions from getting basic necessities is a crime against humanity.

International law and conventions, including the Geneva and Nuremberg Conventions, United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, explicitly prohibit the targeting of defenseless civilians, especially in times of war.

Sanctions draw condemnation

Modern industrial society is built on a fragile web of essential technology. If pumps and sewage lines, elevators and generators can’t function due to lack of simple spare parts, entire cities can be overwhelmed by swamps. If farmers are denied seed, fertilizer, field equipment and storage facilities, and if food, medicine and essential equipment are deliberately denied, an entire country is at risk.

The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, spoke to the XVIII Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 26. Addressing the 120 countries represented, he denounced the imposition of arbitrary measures, called “sanctions” by the U.S., as “economic terrorism which affects a third of humanity with more than 8,000 measures in 39 countries.”

This terrorism, he said, constitutes a “threat to the entire system of international relations and is the greatest violation of human rights in the world.” (tinyurl.com/uwlm99r)

The Group of 77 and China, an international body based at the U.N. and representing 134 developing countries, called upon “the international community to condemn and reject the imposition of the use of such measures as a means of political and economic coercion against developing countries.”

The Group explained:

“The criminal, anti-human policy of targeting defenseless populations, which is in clear violation of United Nations Charter and international law, has now become the new weapon of choice for these powerful states since they are faced with strong opposition from the majority of their own population to the endless wars of occupation that they are already involved in.”

The power of banks

The mechanism and the ability of one country or one vote to destroy a country on the other side of the world are not well understood.

International capital uses the dollar system. All international transactions go through U.S. banks. These banks are in a position to block money transfers for the smallest transaction and to confiscate billions of dollars held by targeted governments and individuals. They are also in a position to demand that every other bank accept sudden restrictions imposed from Washington or face sanctions themselves.

This is similar to how the U.S. Navy can claim the authority to intercept ships and interrupt trade anywhere, or the U.S. Army can target people with drones and invade countries without even asking for a declaration of war.

Sometimes a corporate media outlet, a U.S.-funded “human rights” group or a financial institution issues charges, often unsubstantiated, of human rights violations, or political repression, drug trafficking, terrorist funding, money laundering, cyber-security infractions, corruption or non-compliance with an international financial institution. These charges become the opening wedge for a demand for sanctions as punishment.

Sanctions can be imposed through a U.S. Congressional resolution or Presidential declaration or be authorized by a U.S. government agency, such as the departments of the Treasury, Commerce, State or Defense. The U.S. might apply pressure to get support from the European Union, the U.N. Security Council or one of countless U.S.-established regional security organizations, such as the Organization of American States.

A U.S. corporate body that wants a more favorable trade deal is able to influence numerous agencies or politicians to act on its behalf. Deep-state secret agencies, military contractors, nongovernmental organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and numerous corporate-funded foundations maneuver to create economic dislocation and pressure resource-rich countries.

Even sanctions that appear mild and limited can have a devastating impact. U.S. officials will claim that some sanctions are only military sanctions, needed to block weapons sales. But under the category of possible “dual use,” the bans include chlorine needed to purify water, pesticides, fertilizers, medical equipment, simple batteries and spare parts of any kind.

Another subterfuge is sanctions that supposedly apply only to government officials or specific agencies. But in fact any and every transaction they carry out can be blocked while endless inquiries are held. Anonymous bank officials can freeze all transactions in progress and scrutinize all accounts a country holds. Any form of sanctions, even against individuals, raises the cost and risk level for credit and loans.

There are more than 6,300 names on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List of individuals sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Treasury Department.

The OFAC describes its role this way:

“OFAC administers a number of different sanctions programs. The sanctions can be either comprehensive or selective, using the blocking of assets and trade restrictions to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.”

There is also a Financial Action Task Force list and an International Traffic in Arms Regulations list.

The sanctions weapon has become so extensive that there is now a whole body of law to guide U.S. corporations and banks in navigating sales, credit and loans. It is intended to be opaque, murky and open to interpretation, payoffs and subterfuge. There seems to be no single online site that lists all the different countries and individuals under U.S. sanctions.

Once a country is sanctioned, it must then “negotiate” with various U.S. agencies that demand austerity measures, elections that meet Western approval, cuts in social programs, and other political and economic concessions to get sanctions lifted.

Sanctions are an essential part of U.S. regime change operations, designed in the most cynical way to exact maximum human cost. Sudden hyperinflation, economic disruption and unexpected shortages are then hypocritically blamed on the government in office in the sanctioned country. Officials are labeled inept or corrupt.

Agencies carefully monitor the internal crisis they are creating to determine the optimum time to impose regime change or manufacture a color revolution. The State Department and U.S. covert agencies fund numerous NGOs and social organizations that instigate dissent. These tactics have been used in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Sudan and many other countries.

A weapon of imperialism in decline

Gone are the days of Marshall Plan-type promises of rebuilding, trade, loans and infrastructure development. They are not even offered in this period of capitalist decay. The sanctions weapon is now such a pervasive instrument that hardly a week goes by without new sanctions, even on past allies.

In October the U.S. threatened harsh sanctions on Turkey, a 70-year member of the U.S.-commanded NATO military alliance.

On Nov. 27, Trump suddenly announced, by presidential decree, harsher sanctions on Nicaragua, calling it a “National Security Threat.” He also declared Mexico a “terrorist” threat and refused to rule out military intervention. Both countries have democratically elected governments.

Other sanctions sail through the U.S. Congress without a roll call vote — just a cheer and a unanimous voice vote, such as the sanctions on Hong Kong in support of U.S.-funded protests.

Why Wall Street can’t be sanctioned 

Is there any possibility that the U.S. could be sanctioned for its endless wars under the same provisions by which it has asserted the right to wreak havoc on other countries?

The Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, in November 2017 asked the Hague-based ICC to open formal investigations of war crimes committed by the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Afghan forces, and the U.S. military and the CIA.

The very idea of the U.S. being charged with war crimes led then White House National Security Advisor John Bolton to threaten judges and other ICC officials with arrest and sanction if they even considered any charge against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

“If the court comes after us, Israel or other U.S. allies, we will not sit quietly,” Bolton said. He noted that the U.S. “is prepared to slap financial sanctions and criminal charges on officials of the court if they proceed against any U.S. personnel. … We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. … We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.” (The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2018)

Bolton also cited a recent move by Palestinian leaders to have Israeli officials prosecuted at the ICC for human rights violations. The ICC judges got the message. They ruled that despite “a reasonable basis” to consider war crimes committed in Afghanistan, there was little chance of a successful prosecution. An investigation “would not serve the interests of justice.”

Chief Prosecutor Bensouda, for proposing an even-handed inquiry, had her U.S. visa revoked by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Sanctions are a weapon in the capitalist world order used by the most powerful countries against those that are weaker and developing. One hundred years ago, in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson advocated sanctions as a quiet but lethal weapon that exerts pressure no nation in the modernworld can withstand.

Sanctions demonstrate how capitalist laws protect the right of eight multibillionaires to own more than the population of half the world.

U.N. sanctions demanded by Washington

The U.S., with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and 800 military bases, claims — while engaged in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya — that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran are the greatest threats to world peace.

In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. succeeded in winning harsh new sanctions against Iran and the DPRK by threatening, on the eve of “war games,” that the U.S. would escalate hostilities to an open military attack.

This threat proved sufficient to get other Security Council members to fall in line and either vote for sanctions or abstain.

These strong-arm tactics have succeeded again and again. During the Korean War, when the U.S. military was saturation-bombing Korea, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Warren Austin held up a submachine gun in the Security Council to demand expanded authority in the war from that body.

Throughout the 1990s the U.S. government used sanctions on Iraq as a horrendous social experiment to calculate how to drastically lower caloric intake, destroy crop output and ruin water purification. The impact of these sanctions were widely publicized — as a threat to other countries.

Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, when asked about the half a million children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

The sanctions imposed by the U.S. against Iran are book-length, spanning 40 years since the Iranian Revolution. The blockade and sanctions on Cuba have continued for 60 years.

Sanctions Kill campaign

It is an enormous political challenge to break the media silence and expose this crime. We need to put a human face on the suffering.

Targeted countries cannot be left to struggle by themselves in isolation  — there must be full solidarity with their efforts. The sheer number of countries being starved into compliance via U.S.-imposed sanctions must be dragged into the light of day. And one step in challenging the injustice of capitalist property relations is to attack the criminal role of the banks.

The effort to rally world opinion against sanctions as a war crime is beginning with a call for International Days of Action Against Sanctions & Economic War on March 13-15, 2020. Its slogans are “Sanctions Kill! Sanctions Are War! End Sanctions Now!”

These coordinated international demonstrations are a crucial first step. Research and testimony; resolutions by unions, student groups, cultural workers and community organizations; social media campaigns; and bringing medical supplies and international relief to sanctioned countries can all play a role. Every kind of political campaign to expose the international crime of sanctions is a crucial contribution.

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Medical doctors who wrote to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel last month calling for urgent action to protect the life of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have today issued a further urgent appeal.

Despite worldwide media coverage of their open letter, more than 80 medical doctors have received no response from the UK government. Their letter was sent on November 22. The doctors are now calling on the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice to intervene.

“We reiterate our grave concern that Mr Assange could die of deliberate medical negligence in a British prison and demand an urgent response from the UK Government”, the doctors write.

Their second open letter has been sent to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice the Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC.

“In our open letter, we urged the UK Government to change course immediately and transfer Mr Assange from Belmarsh Prison to a university teaching hospital for appropriate expert medical assessment and care. So far, we have received no substantive reply from the UK Government, nor has receipt of our letter been acknowledged.

“In our opinion, the UK Government’s conduct in this matter is irresponsible, incompatible with medical ethics and unworthy of a democratic society bound by the rule of law.”

The full text of the doctors’ open letter to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice is HERE. The letter was also sent to the Home Secretary.

Dr Bob Gill General Medical Practitioner MBChB MRCGP (UK)

“The continued detention of Julian Assange in his reported physical and psychological state is inhumane and a flagrant neglect of his right to access essential medical care. These shameful actions are those of a repressive dictatorship not a democracy and must be reversed.”

Dr Sue Wareham OAM MBBS General Medical Practitioner (retired) (Australia)

“The Australian government’s failure to speak out to protect an Australian citizen whose life is at risk is utterly shameful, as is the UK government’s failure to respond to the recent urgent open letter regarding Julian Assange’s health. Nations that call themselves civilised are keeping a man incarcerated, deprived of adequate health care, at risk of death, for the “crime” of publishing material that shed light on alleged war crimes. The Australian government should, at the very least, insist that Assange receive the health care he needs.”

Dr Richard House Chartered Psychologist, former psychotherapist and senior university lecturer (UK)

“The disgraceful treatment of Julian Assange should become a General Election issue, and the current government and Home Secretary held robustly to account for what appears to be deliberately inflicted suffering.”

Dr Victoria Abdelnur MD Specialist in Integrative Trauma Therapy (Germany and Argentina)

“The global medical community is watching, we know he needs urgent proper health care, and if he does not receive it soon, it will be crystal clear we are governed by criminals. The popular backlash will have astronomic proportions.”

Dr Stephen Frost BSc MBChB Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (UK and Sweden)

“How and why did it ever come about that five states–the UK, the US, Australia, Sweden and Ecuador—seemingly deliberately and cruelly conspired against one human being? We agree with the assessment of Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, that Julian Assange has been ‘psychologically tortured’ in the centre of London of all places.

“The torture must stop now, and Mr Assange must be provided with immediate access to the health care which he so obviously needs before it is too late. That doctors should have to write open letters to the UK government to demand appropriate health care for a victim of torture is beyond belief.”

The full text of the November 22 open letter and list of signatories can be found here.

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Madrid COP 25.   The climate emergency is presented as “the defining and most urgent issue of our time, and it cannot be avoided without a global shift away from fossil-fuel dependency.”

Our message to climate activists:

ASK YOURSELF WHY IS BIG OIL GENEROUSLY FUNDING THE CLIMATE PROTEST MOVEMENT?

WHY IS THE EU SUPPORTING NUCLEAR ENERGY AS A SOLUTION TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS?

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE “GREEN NEW DEAL”, A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR OPERATION? FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL

WHY ARE ENVIRONMENTAL MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES FOR MILITARY USE NOT PART OF THE CLIMATE DEBATE?

First published in September 2019

#FridaysForFuture: 

4500 climate strikes in over 100 countries. Several million protesters demand that governments around the World  “take action” on the devastating environmental impacts of climate change.

Many of the climate activists point to the destructive impacts of global capitalism on their lives. 

“Capitalism = death (or extinction)”.

“Cancel Capitalism.”

People’s lives are destroyed. Politicians are coopted by the corporate giants including Big Oil. The economic, environmental and social structures are undermined. The outcome is a process of Worldwide impoverishment. 

The oil giants were indelibly under fire. In New York City, climate activists confronted “Big Oil”: 

“ExxonKnew: Make Them Pay” outside a meeting of fossil fuel CEOs and government representatives at the Morgan Library and Museum, just blocks away from the U.N. Climate Summit in New York. 

Who is Funding the Protest Movement

“Exxon: Make Them Pay”?

The unspoken truth is that Big Oil funds the campaign against Big Oil. Sounds contradictory?

Climate activists have been lied to.

The Climate Movement (New Green Deal) is funded by major charities and corporate foundations including the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Trust, Shell Foundation, BP, Goldman Sachs, among others.

Whereas “Big Oil” is held responsible for the devastating impacts of the fossil fuel industry, the architect of Big Oil, namely the Rockefeller family is the major protagonist of the Green New Deal:

“Beginning in the 1980s, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund became leading advocates of the global warming agenda. … In their Sustainable Development Program Review, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund boasts of being one of the first major global warming activists, citing its strong advocacy for both the 1988 formation of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the 1992 establishment of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.” (The Energy & Environmental Legal Institute published in 2016).

Debate on the world’s climate is of crucial importance.

But who controls that debate? Major capitalist foundations ultimately call the shots?

There is an obvious contradictory relationship. The protest movement is funded by corporate foundations.

According to William Engdahl, the New Green Deal is a multibillion “economic project”:

Prince Charles, … along with the Bank of England and City of London finance have promoted “green financial instruments,” led by Green Bonds, to redirect pension plans and mutual funds towards green projects. A key player in the linking of world financial institutions with the Green Agenda is outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney. In December 2015, the Bank for International Settlements’ Financial Stability Board (FSB), chaired then by Carney, created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), to advise “investors, lenders and insurance about climate related risks.” That was certainly a bizarre focus for world central bankers.

And the Protest movement including the Extinction Rebellion provide a justification for investing in Green Bonds:

The omnipresent Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, … has just unveiled the first global index of top-ranking environmental stocks, done along with the London-based CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project. The CDP, notably, is financed by investors such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, American International Group, and State Street Corp.

The new index, called CDP Environment EW and CDP Eurozone EW, aims to lure investment funds, state pension systems such as the CalPERS (the California Public Employees’ Retirement System) and CalSTRS (the California State Teachers’ Retirement System) with a combined $600+ billion in assets, to invest in their carefully chosen targets.

A cursory review suggests that the key climate organizations are invariably funded by corporate capital (including the Oil giants):

• Climate Action  has links with a number of financial partners with a view to promoting “Green investments” in what is described as the “global sustainability industry.”
•  The Climate Institute at climate.org, is a major research entity funded by Ford Motor Company Fund, GE Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Shell Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, among others.
• The Climate Leadership Council  is an initiative of major corporations which funds the global climate consensus.

Global Warming. The Concepts

While climate activists express their concern regarding the nefarious impacts of global capitalism on climate, including those pertaining to militarization (and defense spending), the scientific analysis of climate under the auspices of the IPCC  largely focusses on a single variable: Carbon Dioxide (CO2), i.e. the impact of increased emissions of CO2 derived from fossil fuels (including fracking) on average global temperature.

Depletion of the ozone layer is what triggers global warming. The ozone layer is in the Earth’s stratosphere. “Ozone is constantly being produced and destroyed naturally. This ozone layer filters out ultra-violet (UV) rays from the Sun and protects life on Earth.”

Greenhouse gas emissions affecting the ozone layer largely consist of water vapor (50%), carbon dioxide (CO2) (20%) and clouds (25%).  The remaining greenhouse gases (5%) is made up of small aerosol particles, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxides (N2O) (both a greenhouse gas as well as an “ozone destroyer” with devastating impacts on climate). (approximate figures provided by NASA for 2011).

Decrease of the ozone layer “will increase the amount of Ultra Violet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, and worsen the impacts due to UV exposure.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the key UN body “for assessing the science related to climate change”.

The focus of the IPCC is to estimate the additional CO2 greenhouse gas generated by fossil fuel extraction. It is assumed that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from Planet Earth results solely from  CO2 emissions tied to  fossil fuel extraction (including fracking).

Note: The CO2 emissions resulting from fossil fuel extraction constitute a very small percentage of total CO2 emissions (estimated at 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions), i.e a very small percentage of the 20%.

The current IPCC climate debate focus consists of the following:

• -Rising CO2 emissions (from fossile fuels) constitute the sole cause of global warming, attributable to the depletion of the ozone layer.
• -To reduce the depletion of the ozone layer requires a reduction in fossil fuel extraction, which constitutes the major cause of rising CO2 emissions.

The IPCC May 2018 report entitled Global warming of 1.5°C puts forth the following methodology:

 “an understanding of the impacts of 1.5°C global warming above pre-industrial levels and related global emission pathways in the context of strengthening the response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.”

Most of the results in this IPCC study are based on model simulations of likely impacts comparing a 2.0 C increase in average global temperature to the 1.5°C global warming above pre-industrial levels.

The report highlights major environmental and social impacts which are based on simulations of rising temperature attributable to increased CO2 emissions attributable to fossil fuel extraction.

These include impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, species loss and extinctions (plants, insects and vertebrates), impacts on oceans and waterways, as well as social impacts including poverty.

The report distinguishes between terrestrial, freshwater and coastal ecosystems. It examines the impacts of global warming on ocean temperatures. It also addresses “associated increases in ocean acidity and decreases in ocean oxygen levels”and the impacts on marine life and biodiversity. The social impacts on (e.g. on fishing communities) are also acknowledged.

On land, impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, including species loss and extinction, are projected to be lower at 1.5°C of global warming compared to 2°C. Similarly, “limiting global warming to 1.5°C is projected to reduce risks to marine biodiversity, fisheries, and ecosystems, and their functions and services to humans”

Critique: Single Variable Analysis

There are many other complex factors which directly or indirectly affect climate and environmental structures including the ozone layer, which have been excluded from the IPCC model simulations.

The quantitative results of the IPCC are deterministic to say the least. According to MIT Professor Richard S Lindzen:

“Now here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance.

This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics.”

They omit variables which affect climate. With the exception of fossil fuel, they do not address the impacts of government policy on climate, nor do they address how US led wars as well as the multi-trillion dollar war economy threatens Planet Earth.

It is the art of omission:

• A single highly relevant variable carbon-dioxide (CO2)  “Explains Everything”. (ceteris paribus).
• With all other variables excluded, through omission, CO2 “Explains nothing”.
• CO2 emissions cannot reasonably explain the complexities of climate change.
• By centering solely on CO2, the Climate debate has excluded “everything else”.

The climatic and environmental crisis in different regions of the World are identified. The underlying causality is the single variable approach: CO2 emissions from fossil fuel extraction.

And the IPCC’s stylized results are then used to justify the Green New Deal multibillion corporate bonanza.

A whole series of important processes including biodiversity, animal life, poverty, species loss, etc have been explained by the IPCC solely referring to the impact of the the increase in CO2 emissions on global warming, nothing else.

Measurement: Biased and Flawed Global Temperature Readings

There are serious problems in estimating CO2 emissions (from fossil fuel) as well average global temperature.

Global warming cannot be identified and explained by a single global temperature. There are numerous regional temperatures which describe climatic conditions. A global (weighted) average temperatures established from major geographical readings does not provide an understanding of the complexities of climate.

Moreover, there is evidence that the Global Average Temperature is manipulated. This temperature has a direct bearing on gains and losses in multibillion dollar Carbon Trade transactions:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified. (Telegraph, 7 February, 2015)

This belief has rested on … official data records. … the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), … the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, UK Met Office.  [as well] as … measurements made by satellites, compiled by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS)  (The Telegraph, 24 January 2015)

The Impact of Radioactivity on Climate

Are increased CO2 emissions from fossil fuel the only cause of  climate change and environmental degradation?

In this article, we  focus briefly on the impacts on the Ozone Layer resulting from the explosion of nuclear bombs, an issue which has not been addressed by the New Green Deal, as well as radiation from nuclear  power plants. We also focus on Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) and the “militarization of the climate”.

Radiation from Nuclear Power Plants (Fukushima)

The dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination.

In this regard, since 2011, amply documented, marine life as well as species loss has been affected by the release of radioactive plutonium into the Pacific Ocean following the Fukushima-Daichi disaster.

Radioactive elements have not only been detected in the food chain in Japan, radioactive rain water has been recorded in California.

Nuclear Testing and Radioactive Fallout

The testing of nuclear weapons has been ongoing throughout the post WWII era. Among the more than 2000 tests, a large number of these tests are “not underground” or “underwater”, i.e the testing in the atmosphere. According to a 2000 Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation to the General Assembly

What would be the impact of the explosion of nuclear weapons on the World’s climate?

The issue of nuclear winter was first addressed in a 1983 study by  R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan (referred to as TTAPS)  “Global Atmospheric Consequences of Nuclear War”

The publication of the TTAPS study at the height of the Cold War unleashed a concern on the devastating impacts of nuclear war including its climatic impacts.

The extreme cold, high radiation levels, and the widespread destruction of industrial, medical, and transportation infrastructures along with food supplies and crops would trigger a massive death toll from starvation, exposure, and disease.

The TTAPS study concluded: “…the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded.”

It also created an awareness among US foreign policy-makers, which today is totally absent. Trump does not have the foggiest idea regarding the impacts of a nuclear war.

According to Atomic Archive.com which essentially summarizes the concepts of the TTAP study (p. 22) “When a nuclear weapon explodes in the air, the surrounding air is subjected to great heat, followed by relatively rapid cooling.”

These conditions are ideal for the production of tremendous amounts of nitric oxides. These oxides are carried into the upper atmosphere, where they reduce the concentration of protective ozone. Ozone is necessary to block harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface.

The nitric oxides produced by the weapons could reduce the ozone levels in the Northern Hemisphere by as much as 30 to 70 percent. Such a depletion might produce changes in the Earth’s climate, and would allow more ultraviolet radiation from the sun through the atmosphere to the surface of the Earth, where it could produce dangerous burns and a variety of potentially dangerous ecological effects.

It has been estimated that as much as 5,000 tons of nitric oxide is produced for each megaton of nuclear explosive power. See Atomic Archive

The 2008 Simulation of Nuclear Conflict. Impacts on Ozone Layer

In a major 2008 study by Michael Mills et al entitled Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict (Academy of Sciences of the United States) a  simulation was conducted  (largely based on the concepts outlined in the TTPS 1983 study) of a nuclear conflict involving 100 Hiroshima sized bombs. The simulation confirmed that the nuclear explosions “could produce long-term damage to the ozone layer, enabling higher than “extreme” levels of ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth’s surface, (see GSN, March 16, 2010).

Increased levels of UV radiation from the sun could persist for years, possibly with a drastic impact on humans and the environment, even thousands of miles from the area of the nuclear conflict. …

“A regional nuclear exchange of 100 15-kiloton weapons … would produce unprecedented low-ozone columns over populated areas in conjunction with the coldest surface temperatures experienced in the last 1,000 years, and would likely result in a global nuclear famine,” …

The research by Mills and colleagues was the first to address the possibility that a nuclear explosion could lead to increased ultraviolet radiation levels on Earth, according to a NCAR press release issued during the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.  NTI

According to Prof. Allan Robock:

In the 1980s, using simple climate models, we discovered that global nuclear arsenals, if used on cities and industrial areas, could produce a nuclear winter and lead to global famine.

Smoke from the fires would last for years in the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, and making it cold, dark and dry at the Earth’s surface. It would also destroy ozone, enhancing ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface.

While the immediate effects of nuclear strikes might kill hundreds of thousands, the numbers that would die from starvation in the years that followed could run into billions.

In the real sense of the word, nuclear war could potentially lead to a process of Human Extinction:

A very large nuclear war would be a calamity of indescribable proportions and absolutely unpredictable consequences, with the uncertainties tending toward the worse. . . . All-out nuclear war would mean the destruction of contemporary civilization, throw man back centuries, cause the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people, and, with a certain degree of probability, would cause man to be destroyed as a biological species . . . Andrei Sakharov, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1983

Those concerns have largely been excluded from the Climate Debate and the Extinction Rebellion.

The Extinction Rebellion Protest Movement has its eyes riveted on the rising emissions of Carbon Dioxide (from fossil fuel), heralded as “the most dangerous and prevalent greenhouse gas”.

All other variables are excluded. Scientific lies by omission.

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Impacts of Chemicals on the Ozone layer

In recent history, Ozone layer depletion was caused by chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. The CFCs are a greenhouse gas which was previously used in air conditioning and cooling units including refrigerators.

The use of CFCs was banned under the Montreal Protocol. A June 2016 study  however confirms that the Montreal Protocol failed to fully resolve the CFC ban:

“when countries began phasing out CFCs, manufacturers replaced them with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). HFCs don’t deplete ozone, but they are potent greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming. The challenge going forward, then, will be to develop new alternatives to HFCs — and to have the world adopt them, once again.”

Moreover, the Montreal Protocol did not eliminate methyl bromide (MeBr) which is an ozone-depleting substance .

Methyl bromide (MeBr) is used increasingly as a biocidal fumigant, primarily in agricultural soils prior to planting of crops. This usage carries potential for stratospheric ozone reduction due to Br atom catalysis, depending on how much MeBr escapes from fumigated soils to the atmosphere.

The IPCC simulations neglect the fact that HFC as well as MeBr constitute a threat to the ozone layer.

A recent UN report nonetheless confirms that despite the IPCC  alarm bell, “Earth’s protective ozone layer is finally healing from damage caused by aerosol sprays and coolants, a new United Nations report said.”

The ozone layer had been thinning since the late 1970s. Scientist raised the alarm and ozone-depleting chemicals were phased out worldwide.

As a result, the upper ozone layer above the Northern Hemisphere should be completely repaired in the 2030s and the gaping Antarctic ozone hole should disappear in the 2060s, according to a scientific assessment released Monday at a conference in Quito, Ecuador. The Southern Hemisphere lags a bit and its ozone layer should be healed by mid-century. (AP November 2018)

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Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD)

The militarization of climate is rarely mentioned in the Climate Debate. “In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned ‘military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.'”

It defined ‘environmental modification techniques’ as ‘any technique for changing –through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.’

While the substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, debate on weather modification for military use has become a scientific taboo.

Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter and environmentalists are focused on greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Neither is the possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, part of the broader debate on climate change under UN auspices. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Ecologist, 2007)

The US possesses a vast arsenal of  electromagnetic weapons which are capable of  disrupting  climate through environmental modification techniques (ENMOD). (See the author’s earlier writings)

The impacts of ENMOD techniques for military use were documented by CBC TV in the early 1990s. The  report acknowledged that the HAARP facility in Alaska (now closed down or transferred to another location) under the auspices of the US Air Force had the ability of triggering typhoons, earthquakes, floods and droughts:

“Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.”

CBC Video

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“Owning the Weather” for Military Use

According to US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, (originally at  http://csat.au.af.mil/2025/volume3/vol3ch15.pdf)

the US Military Would eventually “Own the Weather”.

Required Capability: Why Would We Want to Mess with the Weather? [title of Chapter 2, following Introduction]

‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.”  (emphasis added) US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report

source:  US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report

Concluding Remarks

Climate instability is an important concern. But it cannot be analyzed in isolation. It is an extremely complex process.

While there is a significant grassroots movement of young activists, the CO2 Climate Consensus has distracted millions of people from an understanding of the broader and ongoing threats to human life on Planet Earth. In turn, the climate debate has excluded the fact amply documented that climate can be used to serve military objectives.

These climate strikes are taking place at a time of crisis, largely marked by US threats to wage war on Iran. The use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran is contemplated.

Activists are often misled by those who fund the campaign including Rockefeller et al, as well as by the organizers and the public relations operatives involving Hollywood celebrities, et al.

The underlying science methodology is in many regard flawed.

In a bitter irony, the movement against capitalism is funded by capitalism. It’s called “manufactured dissent”.

Global warfare

Global warfare using advanced weapons systems coupled with deliberate acts of destruction, sabotage and destabilization of sovereign countries constitutes the most serious threat to the survival of humanity.

The globalization of war is coupled with the derogation of civil rights, the surveillance State, neoliberal IMF-World Bank macroeconomic reforms applied Worldwide which trigger mass poverty, unemployment and environmental destruction. This global policy framework (controlled by powerful financial interests) repeals workers’ rights, destroys family farming, undermines the Welfare state leading to the privatization health and education, etc.

What is required is a broad protest movement which encompasses these interrelated dimensions. The underlying causes of this Worldwide Crisis must be understood. It is not caused by a single variable (aka CO2 emissions).

The Extinction Debate and Nuclear War

Nine countries including US, Russia, France, China, UK, Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea together possess nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons. (2017 data) The US and Russia have 6185 and 6500 respectively.

According to ICAN, “The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning.”

Today’s nuclear bombs (with the exception of the so-called mini-nukes) are significantly more powerful in terms of explosive capacity than a Hiroshima bomb.

The B61.11 “mini-nuke” (categorized as a “low yield” “more usable” nuclear bomb) has an explosive capacity between one third and twelve times a Hiroshima bomb.

People should understand. There are enough nuclear bombs to destroy life on planet Earth several times over. Surely this should be part of the Extinction Debate.

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from previous wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.  (Michel Chossudovsky, 2011)

War rather than CO2 emissions is the greatest threat to humanity. Oops, according to the media, nuclear weapons are a means to achieving World peace.

Trump has a 1.2 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program, initially set up by Obama.

While this multibillion dollar project is intended “to make the world safer”, these (expensive) nuclear weapons are categorized as “more usable” “humanitarian bombs”, “safe for the surrounding population”, according to scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon.

US-NATO and their allies are involved in illegal acts of war. Nuclear war is on the drawing-board of the Pentagon.

But these wars are no longer illegal: they are part of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P). These are “humanitarian wars” or “counter-terrorism” ops despite the fact that millions of people have been killed and entire nations have been destroyed. It’s called “collateral damage”.

Needless to say, there are powerful financial interests behind the globalization of war. and without extensive media propaganda, they could not have a leg to stand on.

War is good for business. And luckily for the Military Industrial Complex, the antiwar movement is dead.

The Ritual of Rebellion Prevails. 

University of Manchester sociologist Max Gluckman (1911-1975) in his writings showed how ritualized forms of rebellion by those who protest against those in power “through a controlled expression of hostility to authority” ultimately leads to the reinforcement of the established structures of authority.

Is that not what is happening today?

The movement against capitalism is funded and supported by capitalism.

The antiwar movement is dead. There are no protests directed against global warfare and the use of nuclear weapons on a first strike basis.

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Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War

by Michel Chossudovsky

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from previous wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

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The Globalization of War

Author Name: Michel Chossudovsky

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Towards a World War III Scenario

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First published by GR on January 24, 2016

The 2016 Oxfam Davos Report which the mass media have ignored arrestingly shows that 62 individuals – 388 in 2010 – now own more wealth than 50% of the world’s population. More shockingly, it reports from its uncontested public sources that this share of wealth by half of the world’s people has collapsed by over 40% in just the last five years.

Yet the big lies persist even here that “the progress has been made in tackling world poverty” and “extreme poverty has been halved since 1990”.

Reversing Undeniable Fact as Ultimate Justification

Unbelievably, the endlessly repeated assertion of the form that ‘the poor are being lifted out of poverty in ever greater numbers’ continues on untouched despite the hard evidence that, in fact, the poorer half of humanity has lost almost half of their wealth in just the last five years.

This big lie is significant in its implications. For not only is a pervasive claim about the success of globalization undeniably falsified while no-one notices it. Basic market theory and dogma collapses as a result. What is daily claimed as an infallible benefit of the global market is shown to be the opposite of reality. What does it mean for “trickle-down theory” when, in truth, the trickle down goes up in hundreds of billions of dollars to the rich from the already poor and destitute?

What can we say now of the tirelessly proclaimed doctrine that the global market brings “more wealth for all” when, in fact, unimpeachable business evidence shows the opposite reality on the ground and across the world. For the poor have undeniably lost almost half their share of global wealth while the richest have multiplied theirs at the same time.

The evidence proves, in short, that the main moral and economic claims justifying the global market are very big lies becoming bigger all the time.

Worse than delusional, the lived reality of impoverishment of billions of people is reversed, the victims are continually proclaimed to be doing better under the system that increasingly deprives them of what little they have, and a trillion dollars worth of loss to the poorer half of humanity ends up in the pockets of the rich within only five years.

While the ever bigger lies go on justifying the global system that eats the poor alive as “poverty amelioration”, ever more of the same policies of accumulation by dispossession justify still more  stripping of  the majority as more “austerity”, more “welfare cuts”,  and more “labor flexibility” – in a word, more starvation and depredation of people’s lives and life conditions as “more freedom and prosperity for all”.

The Statistical Shell Game that Masks the Life-Devouring Reality

As World Bank, IMF and like figures claim to show the uplifting of the poor out of poverty across the world,  media of record like The Guardian and the New York Times report the claims with headlines to show all is well and getter for the poor and the majority as they are in fact grindingly reduced in their actual lives, work and life security. Thus the very big lies are instituted as given facts which economists and social scientists propagate without a blink.

In fact, these alleged great gains for the poor out of poverty and absolute poverty alike are based on income gains of less than a cup of coffee a day, an observation that is so well blocked from view that readers may now be seeing it for the first time. Thus the hypnotic thrall of the big lies are sustained, while no other life support system is. I have had economists and interviewers of high note respond angrily when this delusion is pointed out, as if I was letting down the poor rather than exposing the big lies. In this way, we find that the masking falsehoods  have gone so deep into expert and public assumption that the real-life world can no longer be engaged. These big lies then work in the background to the non-stop big lies that precede endless  foreign conflicts and wars to “defend the free world”

No-one appears to observe that the income gains ’lifting the poor out of poverty’ typically refer to emigrants from the countryside into polluted cities, insecure and dehumanized life conditions for those who formerly had at least a family dwelling, clean air and water and living horizons.  In short, the standard $1.50 +/- measure of uplift out of poverty and extreme poverty is inhumanly absurd, but triumphally used as proof that the system is serving the least too.

The Counter-Revolution against Social Evolution that Engineers Deepening Recession

Throughout the unseen redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich (now buried in much talk of “inequality”), ever more “market reforms” are enforced as “enhanced competition”, “liberalized de-regulation”,  “reduced welfare costs” and “austerity programs to correct excesses”. The “excessive entitlements” of the system are all projected on the victims so that  the truly insane entitlements of the richest to multiply their fortunes with no committed life function, value or coordinate but still more money-demand for them is somehow not noticed. This is yet another level of normalized big lies forming the ruling thought system.

In fact beneath the pervasive propaganda conditioning citizens to believe in the private money shell game devouring the world, the poorer half of humanity has been deprived of one trillion dollars of wealth while the 62 richest people have gained almost twice as much for themselves by the operations of this global disorder. Yet the Davos Report further emphasizes that still another US $760 billion goes annually to non-producing investors by immense transnational tax evasion with impunity across the world. Again the borderless money-capital freedom of ‘globalization’ vastly enriches the richest, while simultaneously doubling down on deprivation of the poor as ‘poverty reduction’.

Here the system is programmed in effect to strip the funding of all public sectors and institutions which have evolved to serve the common life interest. Public services and infrastructures too are perpetually driven towards bankruptcy not only by never-ending defunding, cutbacks, privatizations, and corporate lobby control of public policies and subsidies, but by ever-soaring public tax evasion near one trillion dollars annually about which governments and trade treaties have done nothing to correct yet.

Thus governments which could invest in sustaining humanity’s social and ecological life support systems from growing deterioration and collapse are now systematically bankrupted or debt enslaved along with most citizens. In consequence without governments knowing why, the world economy slips into ever deeper recession from the collapse of economic demand at the public and majority levels.

Eating the World Alive as Global Competition

The new law of human evolution is that are required to compete for more money and commodities for themselves as “necessary to survive”, with the borderless system de-regulated and structured to increasingly impoverish the great majority while multiplying the wealth of the rich. The facts are now long in. Corporate globalization is not only out of control. It is eating the world alive at all levels towards cumulative collapse of organic, social and ecological life organization. Global competition means, in fact, the majority’s life means and security keep falling as the environment is looted and polluted on ever larger scales of depredation. Yet only “more growth” of this system is imagined as a solution. The system is clinically insane

While the common life-ground is blinkered out a-priori by the ruling value system, those deprived and left behind disappear into multi-level big lies proclaiming the opposite. This is why the facts are not reported. This is why claimed actions to stop the world bleeding blinker out the system disorder causing them. This is why even progressives assume economic falsehoods as if they were true. Like a cancer system at the macro level, this exponentially multiplying private money-sequence system has only one set-point – to blindly grow itself while masking the life-devouring disorder as “enhancing people’s well-being”.

John McMurtry is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His work has been translated from Latin America through Europe to Japan,  and he is the author/editor of UNESCO’s three-volume Philosophy and World Problems, as well as more recently, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism; From Crisis to Cure.  

Realiza-se em Londres, em 4 de Dezembro, o Conselho Atlântico Norte dos Chefes de Estado e de Governo, que celebra o 70º aniversário da NATO, definida pelo Secretário Geral, Jens Stoltenberg, como “a aliança mais bem sucedida da História”.

Um “sucesso” inegável. Desde a demolição através da guerra, da Federação Jugoslava, em 1999, a NATO alargou de 16 para 29 países (30 se agora incluir a Macedónia do Norte), expandindo-se para Leste, muito próxima da Rússia. “Pela primeira vez na nossa História – sublinha Stoltenberg – temos tropas prontas para combate no Leste da nossa Aliança”. Mas a Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte foi além, estendendo as suas operações bélicas desde as montanhas afegãs e através dos desertos africanos e do Médio Oriente.

Agora a Grande Aliança ambiciona mais. Na Cimeira de Londres – anuncia, antecipadamente,  Stoltenberg – os dirigentes dos 29 países membros “reconhecerão o Espaço como o nosso quinto campo operativo”, que se junta ao terrestre, ao marítimo, ao aéreo e ao ciberespaço. “O Espaço é essencial para o sucesso das nossas operações”, sublinha o Secretário Geral, deixando perceber que a NATO desenvolverá um programa espacial militar. Obviamente, não fornece detalhes, mas informa que a NATO assinou um primeiro contrato de 1 bilião de dólares para modernizar os seus 14 aviões AWACS. Eles não são simples aviões radares, mas centros de comando voadores, produzidos pela Boeing americana, para a gestão da batalha através de sistemas espaciais.

Certamente quase nenhum dos líderes europeus (para a Itália, o Primeiro Ministro Conte) que, em 4 de Dezembro, “reconhecerão o Espaço como o  nosso quinto campo de operativo”, conhece o programa espacial militar da NATO, preparado pelo Pentágono e pelos altos comandos militares europeus subordinados, juntamente com as principais indústrias aeroespaciais. Muito menos sabem os Parlamentos, como o italiano, que aceitam qualquer decisão da NATO, sob comando USA, sem se preocupar com suas implicações político-militares e económicas.

A NATO é lançada no Espaço no prosseguimento do novo Comando Espacial criado pelo Pentágono, em Agosto passado, com o objectivo, declarado pelo Presidente Trump, de “garantir que o domínio americano do Espaço nunca seja ameaçado”. Trump então anunciou o estabelecimento subsequente da Força Espacial dos Estados Unidos, com a tarefa de “defender os interesses vitais americanos no Espaço, o próximo campo de batalha da guerra”. A Rússia e a China acusam os EUA de abrir o caminho para a militarização do Espaço, alertando que têm capacidade para responder. Tudo isso aumenta o perigo de guerra nuclear.

Mesmo que o programa espacial militar da NATO ainda não seja conhecido, uma coisa é certa: será extremamente caro. Na Cimeira, Trump pressionará os aliados europeus para que aumentem as suas despesas militares para 2% ou mais, do PIB. Até agora, fizeram-no oito países: Bulgária (que elevou para 3,25%, um pouco abaixo de 3,42%, dos EUA), Grécia, Grã-Bretanha, Estónia, Roménia, Lituânia, Letónia e Polónia. Os outros, apesar de permanecerem abaixo de 2%, estão empenhados em aumentá-la. Impulsionada pela enorme despesa USA – 730 biliões de dólares em 2019, 10 vezes superior à da Rússia – a despesa militar anual da NATO, segundo dados oficiais, ultrapassa 1 trilião de dólares. Na realidade, é superior à indicado pela NATO, pois que não inclui vários elementos de natureza militar: por exemplo, o das armas nucleares dos EUA, inscrita no orçamento, não do Pentágono, mas do Departamento de Energia.

A despesa militar italiana, que subiu de 13º para 11º lugar no mundo, importa, em termos reais, em cerca de 25 biliões de euros por ano, sempre a aumentar. Em Junho passado, o Governo Conte I adicionou 7,2 biliões de euros, também fornecidos pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico para a compra de sistemas de armas. Em Outubro, na reunião com o Secretário Geral da NATO, o governo do Conte II prometeu aumentá-la constantemente em cerca de 7 biliões de euros por ano a partir de 2020 (La Stampa, 11de Outubro de 2019).

Na Cimeira de Londres, serão pedidos à Itália mais biliões do dinheiro público, para financiar as operações militares da NATO no Espaço, enquanto não há dinheiro para manterem em segurança e reconstruir os viadutos que desabam.

Artigo original em italiano :

Il Summit lancia la Nato nello spazio, costi alle stelle

Il manifesto, 3 Dezembro 2019

Tradutora : Luisa Vasconcellos

For months Western media outlets have been retailing stories about riots in Hong Kong. With lip-smacking relish there have been such reports as “On October 1, China’s National Day, the first live round to hit a protester was fired by riot police pursued by protesters in the distant suburb of Tsuen Wan.”  Unfortunately for the anti-China zealots in the US and Europe there were no deaths of rioting students, except one “who fell from a parking garage during a police dispersal operation… escalating tensions between police and the public that have been increasingly strained over the months of worsening violence.” The two incidents in which rioters were shot by policemen made Western headlines.

On October 15 the US House of Representatives voted unanimously for a Bill that “addresses Hong Kong’s status under US law and imposes sanctions on those responsible for human rights violations in Hong Kong” and on November 16 the Senate moved “to expedite passage of a bill that would open a path to sanctions against those seen to be eroding freedoms in the Chinese territory.”

(On November 29 the BBC reported that when Hong Kong police entered the Polytechnic University “they found 3,989 petrol bombs; 1,339 explosive items; 601 bottles of corrosive liquids; and 573 weapons” but there will be no criticism by Congress about this arsenal.  US legislators apparently consider that petrol bombs intended to incinerate policemen do not violate human rights, providing they are thrown by those in mobs rioting against China.)

US domestic legislation criticising China is gross interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, but Washington’s finest are curiously selective about the countries they want to punish.  Given the size of the majority votes in both Houses, President Trump had no option but to sign the bill into law on November 27, thereby further complicating US-China relations and failing to benefit one single US citizen.

In the same period as the Hong Kong riots there was continued chaos in Iraq, not only involving the usual barbaric violence of car bombs and drive-by shootings, but extending to slaughter of civilian demonstrators by military forces. On November 25 it was reported that “Thirteen anti-government protesters have been killed by Iraqi security forces in one of the worst days of clashes in the country’s south.  Demonstrators outraged by rampant government corruption and poor services burned tires and blocked main road arteries. Seven protesters were killed in the southern province of Basra when Iraqi authorities used live fire and tear gas to disperse them, security and hospital officials said.”

Strangely, there wasn’t a word of protest about the Iraq carnage from any of those in Washington who are so supportive of human rights, although US legislators had been extremely vocal about the Hong Kong riots, with, for example, Republican Senator Marco Rubio declaring on November 19 that the anti-China Bill “is an important step in holding accountable those Chinese and Hong Kong government officials responsible for Hong Kong’s eroding autonomy and human rights violations.”  He was echoed by Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer who berated President Xi and told him that “You cannot be a great leader and you cannot be a great country when you oppose freedom, when you are so brutal to the people of Hong Kong, young and old, who are protesting.”

Then on November 27, the day Trump signed the anti-China Bill into law, the US military issued a statement that  “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley met with Iraqi Joint Headquarters Chief of Staff General Othman Al-Ghanimi today in Baghdad, Iraq. The senior leaders discussed the vital strategic partnership between the US and Iraq and the current security environment throughout the Middle East.  The partnership between the United States and Iraq is a crucial element to peace and security in the Middle East region.”

While the Generals were discussing security, Reuters reported that Iraqi forces “shot dead more demonstrators. In the holy city of Karbala they used live ammunition against protesters, killing two overnight. Two more were killed in clashes near Ahrar Bridge in Baghdad. Near Basra one protester died of wounds from gunfire, police and medics said, bringing the toll since unrest broke out on October 1 to 344 people dead nationwide.”

Rioting in Iraq began on the same day that in Hong Kong the “first live round to hit a protester was fired by riot police pursued by protesters,” which gave rise to heated anti-China diatribes in the US Congress.  But the two most senior military commanders of the US and Iraq had nothing to say publicly about the hundreds of Iraqis killed by soldiers of their own national armed forces.

US forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 with the stated aims of “disarming the country of weapons of mass destruction, ending Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism and freeing the Iraqi people from his repressive regime.”  As we know — and many of us wrote at the time — there were no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam did not support terrorism, although there is no doubt his regime was oppressive, and often brutally so.  However, the main long-term objective, according to GW Bush, was to “help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free… we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.”

But now it is evident that “millions lack access to adequate healthcare, education, clean water and electricity, with much of the country’s infrastructure in tatters.” The thousands who have taken to the streets in protests were subjected to “poverty, rampant corruption, unemployment and crumbling public services.”  The country is a heaving shambles, thanks to the Bush war, but a Congressional delegation that visited in early November could only “express their support for the efforts made by the Iraqi government to respond to the legitimate demands of the Iraqi people.”  When Vice-President Pence visited US troops at a base in Iraq on November 23 he didn’t meet any Iraqis and merely spoke on the phone with the prime minister who “assured me that they were working to avoid violence or the kind of oppression we see taking place even as we speak in Iran. He pledged to me that they would work to protect and respect peaceful protesters as part of the democratic process here in Iraq.”

There has been no criticism from the White House or Congress concerning the killing of hundreds of Iraqi civilians by their own government’s troops.  There were no threats of sanctions and no legislation enacted on the basis of  countering the “erosion of freedoms” — nothing except expressions of support for the Iraqi government whose prime minister has now resigned.

There is the smell of death in the streets of Iraq — but the stink of hypocrisy in Washington.

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Brian Cloughley is a British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan.

Featured image is from SCF

Tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean are rapidly rising after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with a Libyan official of the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), based in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, in Ankara last week. They agreed on their own Economic Exclusive Zone that penetrates into Greek and Cypriot waters, in violation of the United Nations Convention Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that favors Cypriot and Greek claims, a major reason why Turkey is only one of 15 UN members, out of 193, that has not signed it. Although Turkey claims it is acting within international law to enter the oil and gas-rich Greek and Cypriot waters, it never references which international law. This leads to the simple question of why Turkey has not signed UNCLOS if international law supposedly favors their claim?

The Turkish-GNA provocation against Greece comes as only last month Pakistan and Turkey conducted naval exercises where Pakistan violated Greek and Cypriot air and maritime space several times and harassed Cypriot merchant ships. This demonstrates that Turkey is bolstering its alliances to force its complete hegemony over the Eastern Mediterranean. This is to expand their maritime space in violation of international law to exploit the rich deposits of gas and oil in the region.

However, Turkey has once again defied international law, remembering the illegal invasion of northern Cyprus and Syria among many. This has now opened up a new quagmire that Erdoğan has probably not expected. With the NATO destruction of Libya in 2011, in which both Greece and Turkey took a minor part in, the country has been plagued by tribalism, feudalism and Islamic radicalism, with two major forces emerging from the mess – the GNA in coalition with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by General Khalifa Haftar and based in eastern Libya. This is unsurprising since Turkey has a long history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

Erdoğan has opened up a pandora’s box in Libya that will now surely backfire on him and see the dismantlement of the GNA. The GNA is now becoming increasingly isolated since Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have sworn to back General Haftar with weapons and money. It is expected with the arrival of new funds and weapons, Haftar will continue his assault to take Tripoli that he began in March. One major reason for this new support for the LNA is that Greece, Cyprus and Egypt are in a strategic regional alliance to protect their respective EEZ against Turkish aggression.

Haftar has also controversially announced that he wants relations with Israel. His desires for relations with Israel, a rarity among Muslim-majority countries, will surely bring Haftar more international recognition and legitimacy as a “reward,”, especially crucial as the majority of the world recognizes the Tripoli government.

A delegation of U.S. diplomats recently asked Haftar to halt military operations, citing that it will supposedly allow Russia’s military invasion of Libya. Haftar refused. Haftar’s Secretary of State said that the United States is completely wrong, as Libya has become a huge arena for settling accounts among regional powers – and this is true if we consider that the Saudis, Emirates and Egyptians are backing the LNA, while the Turks and Qataris backs the GNA.

Rather than being in compliance with international law, Erdoğan signed with the GNA an illegal agreement to carve out the Eastern Mediterranean for its own plans. Greece has given the GNA time until today to retract their deal with Turkey. Although Greece on the international scene is a minor player, it does wield significant influence in the Eastern Mediterranean and will use NATO and EU mechanisms to convince member states to retract their recognition of the GNA, which will only further isolate Turkey as it has attempted to build an alliance to counter the Greek-Cypriot-Egyptian military partnership.

In a rare occurrence, both the U.S. and Russia have criticized Turkey’s aggression and escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean, with the US State Department describing the Turkish and GNA move as “unhelpful” and “provocative.”

It is unlikely this will make a difference as it is expected that the GNA will adamantly refuse to renounce its agreement with Turkey, which will push Greece to back the LNA and encourage NATO and EU members to do the same. At the very minimum, the Saudi-Emirati-Egyptian tripartite has used Turkey’s aggression in the Eastern Mediterranean as an excuse to back the LNA, providing him with the money, weapons, intelligence and other resources to overcome the Turkish-backed GNA.

With Saif Gaddafi, the second son of Muammar Gaddafi, also announcing his support for Haftar, there is every potential that the internationally recognized GNA will have a multitude of pressure from NATO, the EU, the Saudi-Emirati-Egyptian alliance, and from Haftar and Gaddafi supporters. Erdoğan’s desperate pursuit for regional hegemony was first received with applause domestically, but it appears he has now opened a pandora’s box in Libya that is now likely to backfire on him.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Make no mistake. What’s going on is one of the most disturbing political spectacles in US history — one right wing of the one-party state trying to defrock the other wing’s leader for politicized reasons, not legitimate ones.

Daily theater in Washington is unrelated to removing Trump from office because the GOP-controlled Senate opposes the scam.

What’s happening is all about Dems wanting Trump delegitimized and weakened for winning an election he was supposed to lose.

They aim to gain a political advantage in November 2020, hoping to win the White House and Senate, while retaining House control.

The longer the sham drags on with no tangible results, the more it may benefit Trump and Republicans at the expense of Dems, notably because a GOP-controlled Senate impeachment trial, if held, will politicize proceedings to its advantage.

With that outcome in mind, Dems mat cut their losses by abandoning impeachment in favor of meaningless censure and endless Trump bashing as part of their campaign strategy in the run-up to November 2020 elections.

On Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee released “The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report.”

Without credible evidence, it accuses DJT of obstruction of justice by witness intimidation and tampering, soliciting foreign interference to benefit his reelection campaign, withholding military aid to Ukraine for political reasons, undermining the integrity of the US presidential election process, and endangering national security.

Short of specifically recommending articles of impeachment, the report calls for “mov(ing) forward with an impeachment inquiry,” adding:

“No other president has flouted the Constitution and power of Congress to conduct oversight to this extent (sic).”

“If left unanswered, President Trump’s ongoing effort to thwart Congress’ impeachment power risks doing grave harm to the institution of Congress, the balance of power between our branches of government, and the Constitutional order that the President and every ember of Congress have sworn to protect and defend (sic).”

Late Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee approved the report along party lines. It moves to the Judiciary Committee for its consideration, hearings to begin Wednesday, followed by members drafting articles of impeachment if things go this far.

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the following:

“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the (Dems) utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” adding:

“This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations. (It) reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something where there is no evidence.”

The GOP House Intelligence Committee responded to the Dems with its own report, stressing no evidence that corroborates charges by Dems , “no quid pro quo, bribery, extortion, or abuse of power,” adding:

The impeachment inquiry “is an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system.”

It’s “trying to impeach a duly elected president based on the accusations and assumptions of unelected bureaucrats who disagreed with President Trump’s policy initiatives and processes.”

Polls show the nation is largely divided on removing Trump from office by impeachment.

On Tuesday, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) said

“(p)olls released before Thanksgiving showed, broadly, that the preceding weeks of televised testimony failed to increase public support for removing Trump from office via impeachment,” adding:

“(I)mpeachment numbers (are) divided…down the middle…”(I)mpeachment is more a political process than a judicial one.”

A Quinnipiac poll noted that a small but significant number of Americans remain undecided on the issue.

Unless bombshell information comes out, highly unlikely but possible, the impeachment scam is going nowhere. It laid an egg.

Based on what’s gone on so far, it may end up hurting Dems and helping Trump’s reelection campaign.

There’s overwhelming just cause to remove him for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the same true for most of his predecessors, the vast majority of current and earlier congressional members, as well as most bureaucrats involved in foreign policy.

Dems aren’t going anywhere near his real offenses because they share guilt in crimes of war, against humanity, breach of the public trust, and other constitutional violations.

That’s the elephant in the room unaddressed issue, what dirty business in Washington is all about, its criminal class bipartisan.

The world’s leading human rights abuser is responsible for more harm to more people over a longer duration globally than any other nation in world history.

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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 Palácio do Planalto, Flickr

The Russian Armed Forces put into action an ambitious program to modernize and expand the strategic bomber fleet.

In March 2018, Russia announced that it would completely overhaul its entire Tu-160 long-range strategic bomber fleet by 2030. According to Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov, the entire fleet of Tu-160 bombers will be replaced with the newer Tu-160M2 version, in addition to heavy upgrades of all operational aircraft. All on-board radio-electronic equipment and engines will be replaced.

Serial production of the Tu-160M2 will begin in 2023 and the plan is for it to remain a state of the art warplane for the next 40 years. The Russian Aerospace Forces intend to purchase no less than 50 such aircraft.

The first such warplane is to be delivered in 2021, with 3 more in 2023. Afterwards serial production will continue with 3 Tu-160M2s being produced per year.

The Tupolev Tu-160 (NATO codename: Blackjack) is a long range, supersonic, variable geometry wing, strategic bomber -designed to penetrate sophisticated air defense systems at low altitude and supersonic speed. It is the Soviet counterpart to the US Air Force B-1B Lancer strategic bomber.

Armament (typically nuclear short range and long-range cruise missiles) is carried inside two weapons bays located at the middle of the fuselage.

The Tu-160M2 is a further development of the Tu-160 strategic bomber with state-of-the-art sensors and weapons.

In all, the Tu-160M2 is a highly upgraded version featuring detection reduction coatings, new more powerful and efficient engines giving it greater operational range, new avionics, electronics, glass cockpit, communications & control systems, a number of weapons, as well as improved thrust and unrefueled range. It will also be equipped with a new defensive system protecting it from missiles.

It will boast four new Kuznetsov NK-32 engines. The Kuznetsov NK-32 is an afterburning, three-spool, low bypass, turbofan jet engine, the largest and most powerful engine ever fitted on a combat aircraft. In maximum afterburner it produces 245 kN  of thrust (55,000 lbf).

It is expected that the Tu-160M2 will be armed with long-range standoff cruise missiles, including the Kh-101/Kh-102 (nuclear variant) air-launched cruise missile and the Kh-55 subsonic air-launched cruise missile.

The maiden flight of the first Tu-160M2 took place in January 2018.

The initial contract, signed on January 25, 2018, is for the production of 10 Tu-160M2s and the modernization of all other Tu-160s in the Russian Aerospace Forces by 2030.

The contract with United Aircraft Corporation’s Tupolev, for the first 10 warplanes, stands at 160 billion rubles (nearly $2.8 bn) and stipulates that the first Tu-160M2 should be delivered by 2023. Delivery of the final bomber in the first buy, according to the contract, is slated for 2027. Relaunching production itself required an investment of 37 billion rubles ($577 mil.).

The plan is for another 40 units of the Tu-160M2 to be delivered under future contracts yet to be signed.

In the meantime, the Russian Aerospace Forces operate 10 Soviet-era Tu-160s, and 7 modernized Tu-160M1s, commissioned in 2018. The Tu-160 was first introduced into service in 1987 and was the last supersonic strategic bomber to enter service with the Soviet military.

The Tu-95 is the oldest strategic bomber in service with the Russian Aerospace Forces. There are 48 of the Tu-95MSs and 12 of the modernized Tu-95MSMs.

The Russian Aerospace Forces also operate Tu-22M strategic bombers which are much smaller than the Tu-160 and Tu-95. All 63 Tu-22s in service underwent modernization. Sixty-one were modernized to the Tu-22M3 variant, 1 to the Tu-22M3M and the last one was turned into a Tu-22MR, which is currently being overhauled.

The current fleet of strategic bombers in the Russian Aerospace Forces numbers 140 warplanes. The Soviet strategic bomber fleet was much larger. As of 1982, the USSR had 110 Tu-95s, 140 Tu-22s, 70 Tu-22Ms, 75 M4s, and 425 Tu-16s.

Currently, the US operates three types of strategic bombers – the B-1B, the B-2, and the B-52. The US Air Force has 62 B-1Bs, out of which, according to data from August 2019, only 6 were fully operational, with the others being grounded or undergoing maintenance. They have been in service since 1985.

The longest serving bomber in the US Air Force is the B-52A which was commissioned back in 1955. The existing fleet was upgraded to the B-52H Stratofortress, commissioned in 1961. It is planned for this warplane to be operated until 2050. As of June 2019, there were 58 B-52 bombers in operation, with 18 more in reserve.

The B-2 is the only stealth bomber in operation anywhere in the world. It was commissioned in 1993. Thef US Air Force operates 20 such warplanes. There is also the B-21 Raider stealth bomber in development by Northrop Grumman. The first test aircraft is being built in Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, California, facility and has yet to make its maiden flight. The optimistic forecast is that the first bomber should enter service by 2025.

As of the end of 2019, the US and Russia operate comparable fleets of strategic bombers, with the US being technically ahead of Russia if we focus only on dry figures and do not question the forecast of expected progress for the B-21 Raider program.

At the same time, a challenge for the US Air Force is that its assets are dispersed all around the world in preparation for possible conflicts with a wide range of possible adversaries, including Russia, China and Iran. In turn, strategic bombers  of the Russian Aerospace Forces’ are mainly needed to deter the United States. This factor negates the numerical advantage of the US strategic bomber fleet.

As of early 2013, Russia had only 16 Tu-160 strategic bombers. Now, it has 17. Seven of them underwent deep modernization. If the Tu-160M2 program succeeds, and if Russia procures 50 Tu-160M2 bombers by 2030, that will not only put Russia on par with the US, it might put it ahead. All this depends on progression of the US’s B-21 development and modernization of its strategic bombers.

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The ongoing proceedings against Australian citizen Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, presently held in Belmarsh Prison near London, display a grave erosion of time-honoured principles of human rights, the rule of law, and the democratic freedom to gather and share information. We would like to join the extraordinary line of earlier protests in the case.

Fifteen years ago, the world was shocked by serious circumventions of the right to due process and fair trial when, as part of the U.S. war on terror, the CIA ignored local authority to abduct people in secret flights from European jurisdictions to third countries where they were subjected to torture and violent interrogation. Among those voicing protests was the London-based International Bar Association; see its report, Extraordinary Renditions, January 2009 (www.ibanet.org). The world should stand firm against such attempts to exercise superior, worldwide jurisdiction and to interfere in, influence or undermine the protection of human rights in other countries.

However, since WikiLeaks released evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has for nine years punished Julian Assange and deprived him of his freedom. To avoid extradition to the United States, Assange was compelled to seek asylum in the London embassy of Ecuador in August 2012. In April 2019, Ecuador — in violation of international asylum laws — handed Assange over to British police, and his private legal defence documents over to U.S. agents.

After exposing extensive U.S. abuse and power projection as a threat to international law and order, Assange himself experienced the full thrust of the same forces. Extortion of other countries to make them and their judicial systems bend the law is to undermine and violate human rights treaties. Countries must not allow the diplomacy and intelligence power culture to contaminate and corrupt the fair administration of justice in accordance with law.

Great nations like Sweden, Ecuador, and Britain have servilely complied with U.S. wishes, as documented in two 2019 reports by Nils Meltzer, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Among other things, Melzer concludes that,

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights/Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had already in 2015, and again in 2018, demanded the release of Assange from arbitrary and illegal detention. Britain is obliged to respect the CCPR rights and the rulings of the U.N./WGAD.

Assange is in precarious health and without the tools, time or strength for a proper defence of his rights. The prospects of a fair trial have been undermined in many ways. From 2017 onward, the Ecuadorian Embassy let a Spanish firm named Undercover Global send real time video and sound transmissions of Assange directly to the CIA, violating even the lawyer-client privilege by eavesdropping on his meetings with lawyers (El País 26 Sept. 2019).

Britain should follow the proud example of Iceland. That small nation firmly defended its sovereignty against a U.S. attempt in 2011 to exercise undue jurisdiction, when it expelled a huge team of FBI detectives that had entered the country and had started to investigate WikiLeaks and Assange without permission of the Icelandic government. The treatment of Julian Assange is below the dignity of the great nation that gave the world the Magna Carta in 1215 and the Habeas Corpus. To defend its national sovereignty and obey its own laws, the present British government must set Assange free immediately.

Signed by:

 Hans-Christof von Sponeck (Germany)

Marjorie Cohn, (U.S.A.)

Richard Falk (U.S.A.)

Martha L. Schmidt (U.S.A.)

Mads Andenaes (Norway)

Terje Einarsen (Norway)

Fredrik S. Heffermehl (Norway)

Aslak Syse (Norway)

Kenji Urata (Japan)

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Fredrik S. Heffermehl, cand. jur, LLM NYU, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and ex-Vice President of the International Peace Bureau. He is the author of The Nobel Peace Prize, What Nobel Really Wanted (Praeger, 2010 – expanded versions in Chinese, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish and [2014] Russian). [email protected] – http://www.nobelwill.org.

There is little doubt that Sayyed Moqtada al-Sadr controls the streets in Iraq and can make peaceful protests violent when he chooses. Notwithstanding the presence of several smaller players and those genuinely asking for serious reforms, Sayyed Moqtada can move the street in the direction he wants. However, the strategic objectives of Sayyed Moqtada are unknown to all politicians in Iraq, and perhaps outside Mesopotamia as well. Whoever wins a large number of MPs and the largest number of ministers has been always had the capacity to ask for the resignation of the government and its Prime Minister. He was the first to ask, from within the parliament, for Iran to leave Iraq- despite the fact that the “Islamic Republic” has been Moqtada’s best refuge ever since 2005 when he sensed his life was in danger and the US was planning to assassinate him. Sayyed Moqtada is at this moment in Iran, a country he returns to quite frequently. What does Sayyed Moqtada want?

Well-informed sources in Najaf say that those who burned down the Iranian consulate are followers of the current MP Adnan al-Zurfi. Although Al-Zurfi – who was first appointed by Paul Bremer as Najaf governor – denied his involvement. Najaf sources confirm that his followers burned the consulate twice in Najaf and proceeded to the shrine of Sayyed Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim, at Sahat al-Ishreen square, where they also burned down the library.

Sheikh Jalaleddine al-Sagheer, one of the closest assistants of the late Sayyed Mohammad Baqer, sent his men known as “Saraya al-Aqeeda” to protect the shrine, known as “Shaheed al-Mihrab”. Sayyed al-Hakim was assassinated in 2003 along with 75 others by a car bomb stationed outside the Imam Ali shrine by Mohammad Yassin Jarrad, the brother-in-law of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Sayyed Moqtada’s supporters present in the streets refused to protect the shrine. The antagonism reflects an old feud between the al-Sadr and al-Hakim families in Najaf.

Not only is there little link between the library of the shrine and the protestors demands to reform the governance system and fight political corruption, but young protestors who dominated the streets of Najaf were evidently unaware that the late Sayyed Mohammad Baqer was the uncle and not the father of Sayyed Ammar al-Hakim.

There is no doubt that Sayyed Moqtada is capable of holding the protestors back.  He and his men will not hesitate to engage a Shia-Shia battle, well aware that other Shia groups are not ready for such a battle. Indeed, in 2005, Sayyed Moqtada burned over 100 offices and institutions belonging to Majlis al-A’la and BADR all over southern Iraq, following an attack on his father’s office in Najaf. In 2016, Moqtada’s men burned down many offices belonging to several political and military Shia groups, including Hashd al-Shaabi offices, knowing there would be no reaction from the other side, even if they had superiority in firepower over Moqtada’s men.

Sayyed Moqtada confronted US and Iraqi armies in Najaf in 2004 following his occupation of the holy city. He left, along with his lieutenants and what remained of his men, following the intervention of the Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Sistani.

Sayyed Moqtada relies on his father’s reputation and the human assets he has inherited. He also relies on the restraint of other Shia groups and their unwillingness to engage in any inter-Shia conflict.

He is often wrongly cited as a king maker, even if he is not capable of selecting a Prime Minister, a President or a Speaker without the agreement of other major Shia and non-Shia groups. Other groups likewise cannot select top leaders without coordinating with Sayyed Moqtada. It goes both ways. So far, Sayyed Moqtada has enjoyed the support of a large group of MPs within the Parliament. The forthcoming election may bring surprises to all main political parties, including the Sadrists.

Moqtada never passes up an opportunity to show his determination in protecting what he believes are his achievements. Over a year ago, during the last elections, the High Commission of the election in Iraq declared that over 12 MPs had won illegally, and sought a re-count. During the night, the offices of the High Commission containing all ballots were burned down. The commission then declared that it had records of all papers on electronic servers. That same day, the offices containing the servers were also burned. The results could not be altered and Sayyed Moqtada kept his 53 MPs, the largest group within the Parliament.

During Sayyed Moqtada’s last visit to Iran four months ago, he declared to the media his intention to remove Prime Minister Adel Abdil Mahdi from power. The Iranians asked him to remain silent or leave so that it would not appear that his decision was in harmony with Iran’s wishes. Sayyed Moqtada choose the latter course and left the country.

Nevertheless, Iraqi political leaders consider Moqtada’s presence in Iran less problematic for Iraq than his presence in Mesopotamia. Moqtada is today back in Iran. His presence in Iran represents a source of security to the Sadrist leader, accused of the killing of Wissam al El’yawi and his brother Issam, the commander of the pro-Iranian AsaebAhlal-haq whose tribe has sworn vengeance.

Sayyed Moqtada doesn’t want  any role in the forthcoming election of the new Prime Minister. Instead he will likely call for the prime minister’s resignation a couple of months after he takes office, his usual practice. The political parties will force the Sadrist leader to participate in the choice of the new PM and share responsibility with the major political parties, called “whales”, widely accused of corruption.

Moqtada denied his responsibility for the burning down of the Iranian consulate in Najaf saying “I refuse to attack diplomatic missions. I even did not attack the US embassy because diplomats are our guests”.

Al-Sadr said he was giving the government “one year to reform the system and fight corruption”.But after only a few months of Abdel Mahdi in power, he asked his people to demonstrate in Baghdad and pushed them towards the “green zone”, Moqtada’s favourite place for demonstrations. He is a master of the streets but doesn’t have political plans or strategic objectives. He represents the opposition in a parliament, and a cabinet where he has the majority.

Sayyed Moqtada confronted the Marjaiya in Najaf – aware of how the Sadrist leader behaves with leaders in power when he has contributed in their election – by practically rejecting a private demand of the Grand Ayatollah at the beginning of the year to allow PM Abdel Mahdi to work without calling for his resignation. Sayyed Sistani recently criticised Moqtada, without naming him, and other political parties who refused to collaborate with Abdel Mahdi to facilitate fast reforms.

Sayyed Moqtada is not the only one who lacks statesmanlike qualities. Most Iraqi political leaders show little self-control and few achievements. This is why Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Sistani has the power he has. But what will happen when the elderly leader is no longer on the scene? What will become of Iraq?

Iraq is one of the most important countries in the Middle East with very rich resources. Terrorism is still present and the US-Israeli plan to partition is still on the table whenever the opportunity presents itself. The inhabitants and leaders of Mesopotamia, who are doing very little to achieve stability in their country, should remember the long-term goals of Iraq’s enemies and, instead, work on smoothing their internal differences.

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‘A plot against the whole country’ declared Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as he brandished a wad of leaked documents last week which he said proves that the UK National Health Service would indeed be ‘on the table’ when it came to US trade talks. Corbyn said the NHS was ‘up for sale’ if the Conservatives were to win the December election whereas Labour would ‘never let Donald Trump get his hands on our NHS’. Arguably it was a strategic move on Corbyn’s part to counter the previous day’s disastrous interview with the infamous Andrew Neil, but regardless its motivation, the exposure of the dossier was a blow to the Conservatives who have also recently lost their significant lead against Labour in the polls – down to just nine points.

The accusations that Boris Johnson is not telling the whole truth over Trump and the NHS come at a time when the UK Prime Minister is facing questions over his record on lying.  He had repeatedly denied that the NHS would be included in any trade discussions with the Trump administration, and had previously issued a version of the 451 page document, but with many pages blacked out.  However the Labour leader said that, as a result of the leak,  Johnson’s denials of such a deal with Trump were now ‘left in tatters’.

The Tory party has dismissed the documents as being significant, claiming they were simply readouts from meetings of the UK-US trade and investment working group (which reportedly took place from July 2017 till a couple of months ago). They attacked Corbyn by saying he was trying to divert attention from the issue of anti-semitism in his party. However there are some serious implications from the leaked papers which cannot be ignored.

Firstly, there is the issue of patenting, which could have a considerable impact on the pricing of medicines. Jeremy Corbyn indicated that discussions regarding a lengthening of patents had already been concluded between the sides, which would mean more expensive drugs. He gave the example of Humira, a drug used to treat Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis: ‘It costs our NHS £1,409 a packet. In the US, the same packet costs £8,115. Get the difference: £1,409 in our NHS, £8,115 in the USA,’ Corbyn said.  Furthermore, he went on to explain that one of the reasons for US drug prices being so high in comparison to the UK, was that there was a patent regime ‘rigged for the big pharmaceutical companies.’

BBC journalist Andrew Neil attempted to suggest in an interview with Shadow International Trade Secretary, Barry Gardiner, that drug patents did not in fact amount to the ‘sale of the NHS’ and that there was ‘no evidence in the documents whatsoever’ that the NHS was included in the trade deal negotiations.  However Gardiner hit back, stating that it was “A ridiculous and naive thing for you to say, and you are too smart a journalist for me to allow you to get away with it”. Gardiner went further to say that although it was not explicitly mentioned in the documents, the implication was made by the references to pharmaceutical services – which of course the Labour party want to bring strictly under government control if they are elected to power.

A second take-away from the documents, according to Jeremy Corbyn, is that the US prefers a No Deal Brexit.

“There would be all to play for in a no-deal situation but UK commitment to the customs union and single market would make a US-UK [free trade agreement] a non-starter,” they read.

The Conservatives have made light of this however, saying that it was ‘simply fact’ that it wouldn’t be possible to strike a free-trade deal with Trump if the UK were to remain in the single market and customs union.

But with lie upon lie being exposed by journalists and commentators, it’s now proving increasingly difficult to trust a word uttered by the Conservative leader and his party at present. The mantra seems to be ‘Say whatever with as much confidence and bluster as possible, and people will believe you.’  Take for example several of Johnson’s key lines: ‘Get Brexit Done’, ‘20,000 more police officers’ and ‘50,000 more nurses’. They may sound fantastic, but once you dig a bit deeper you realise it’s not worth taking them at face value. Firstly, ‘Get Brexit done’ we’ve heard before – Johnson promised to have the UK leave the EU October 31st ‘come what may’ – but did not deliver it. How is one to therefore to believe he will deliver on this now? As for the 20,000 new police officers – this is extremely misleading as the Conservative party was responsible for taking around 21,000 police off the streets in recent years.  And the ‘50,000 more nurses’ myth has been doing the rounds on social media of late as journalists have taken on key Conservatives ministers over the fact that 19,000 of the 50,000 are in fact nurses currently working in the NHS. So the figure is far from accurate.

But will such falsehoods be enough to dissuade a disgruntled British electorate from voting for Boris Johnson? With just over a week to go before the election, everything’s to play for…

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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

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) or drones, both armed and unarmed, have altered how states and insurgents conduct warfare in the Middle East. The widespread proliferation of these weapons, combined with the range of capabilities they confer and their potential to alter the logic of escalation between states, may cause significant inter-state conflict to occur. 

An increase in proliferation

Since the Cold War, the US has attempted to stop the spread of unmanned systems by pursuing a limited export policy. However, states in the Middle East have responded by either producing their own (Israel, Turkey and Iran) or by importing them (Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). Perhaps the most troubling development is yet to come; in November the US Defense Secretary, Mark Esper warned that China was beginning to export drones with fully autonomous offensive capabilities. Although China’s policy has been described as ‘ask no questions’, it is constrained by its desire to avoid arming non-state actors and therefore legitimising separatist movements.

Further, declining costs of commercial drones, combined with some DIY ingenuity has meant that groups such as ISIS and the Houthis rebels have been able to field aerial support, a capability that insurgent-type groups have lacked in the past. ISIS allegedly use UASs as light bombers and as reconnaissance aircraft to help coordinate devastating suicide attacks, whilst the Houthis (with Iranian assistance) have used drones as aerial improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for targeted assassination missions. 

Evolving capacity, multiplying impact

One emerging capability of drone operators is ‘swarming’, where multiple systems are used to achieve a shared objective. A crude version of this, in conjunction with cruise missiles, was utilised during the attack on Aramco’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities on September 14 (crude because true swarming requires that the individual systems alter their behaviour based on communication with one another and there is little evidence that this occurred). As a result of the attack, production of 5% of the global oil supply was temporarily halted and, the global price rose by 15%. Although Houthi rebels initially claimed credit, a consensus that Iran was responsible has emerged. The attack was successful, despite the Saudi Aramco sites enjoying protection from the Kingdom’s US ally, in the form of Patriot PAC-2 surface-to-air missile batteries but which proved entirely ineffective.

The Centre for the Study of the Drone recently found that the number of systems and products claiming to protect against UASs had risen from just 10 in 2015 to 235 by 2018. Perhaps not surprisingly, the counter-drone industry (at least in the civilian world) has been described as “peddling snake oil.” Given that very few sites are of such strategic importance in the Middle East (recall the impact on the global oil supply), this swarm technology may prove extremely effective in crippling key national infrastructure and military installations across the region, especially in lieu of a “silver bullet” solution to countering drones.

Likelihood of conflict escalation 

In the immediate aftermath of the Aramco attack, Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, expressed his deep concern that tensions would increase and accused Iran of “destabilising the whole region.” Nevertheless, the attack, perhaps surprisingly, did not lead to a military response.

In 2015, a wargame entitled ‘Game of Drones’ held in Washington DC concluded that that the presence of UASs in contested space had the effect of “lowering the threshold for military action in some circumstances because the perceived risk was lower.” However, this relies on the belief that your adversary will not treat the engagement of a manned system in the same way they would a drone in the same scenario. Even as advances in surveillance technology means UASs can reveal more of the battlefield, a new “fog of war” is introduced. This ambiguity, reflected in President Trump’s initial decision to launch counter-strikes against an Iranian attack, and then quickly to cancel, could lead to an escalation via two mechanisms.

First, a state could be baited into engaging a UAS, which is then used as a legitimising pretext to launch further strikes. Indeed, it has been suggested that “baiting” has been a significant facet of the Trump administration’s policy towards Tehran. The second mechanism is via miscalculation. Given the right set of conditions (perhaps a hawkish domestic base), repeated attacks on unmanned systems may compel one side to escalate, despite reluctance on both sides.

The emergence of autonomous and swarm drone technology across a range of actors, combined with an unclear logic of how targeting unmanned systems affect inter-state relations could, therefore, trigger conflict. The primary risk is that heightened short term tensions over drones lead to a conflict before longer-term issues can be solved. As these systems develop technologically and operationally – the emergence of autonomous systems will complicate the matter – close attention to the mechanisms involved in precipitating conflict in the Middle East must be made.

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Russia-China Cooperation, The Power of Siberia Project, Strategic Gas Pipelines

By Arabi Souri, December 04, 2019

The inauguration of the Power of Siberia project to transport gas from Russia to China will strengthen Russia’s position as the world’s first gas exporter and boost economic relations between the two countries in an unprecedented way.

Thanks to the US politicians getting busy with their inner fights over who won the presidency and later over who is more corrupt with power in a newly controlled country (Ukraine), the excessive use of sanctions, and the anti-‘free trade’ war, other global superpowers are solidifying their positions and leaping ahead in steady growth.

Medical Error: The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

By Prof. Martin Makary, Michael Daniel, and Dr. Gary G. Kohls, December 04, 2019

The annual list of the most common causes of death in the United States, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), informs public awareness and national research priorities each year. The list is created using death certificates filled out by physicians, funeral directors, medical examiners, and coroners. However, a major limitation of the death certificate is that it relies on assigning an International Classification of Disease (ICD) code to the cause of death.[1] As a result, causes of death not associated with an ICD code, such as human and system factors, are not captured. The science of safety has matured to describe how communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors, poor judgment, and inadequate skill can directly result in patient harm and death. We analyzed the scientific literature on medical error to identify its contribution to US deaths in relation to causes listed by the CDC.[2]

Going to the ICJ: Myanmar, Genocide and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Gamble

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, December 04, 2019

Be that as it may, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, with an ever dwindling number of peace prizes and awards to her name for questionable responses to the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority, has a plan.  She intends to personally plead the case of her country against charges of genocide being made in the International Court of Justice.  As the Ministry of the Interior has claimed, the argument against state brutality against the Rohingya has arisen due to ignorance about “the complexities of the issue and the narratives of the people of Myanmar.”

Climate and the Money Trail

By F. William Engdahl, December 04, 2019

In 2013 after years of careful preparation, a Swedish real estate company, Vasakronan, issued the first corporate “Green Bond.” They were followed by others including Apple, SNCF and the major French bank Credit Agricole. In November 2013 Elon Musk’s problem-riddled Tesla Energy issued the first solar asset-backed security. Today according to something called the Climate Bonds Initiative, more than $500 billion in such Green Bonds are outstanding. The creators of the bond idea state their aim is to win over a major share of the $45 trillion of assets under management globally which have made nominal commitment to invest in “climate friendly” projects.

Does the US Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 04, 2019

The broader issue of environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) must be addressed and carefully analyzed. It should also be understood that the instruments of weather warfare are part of the US arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their proposed use by the US military against “enemies” constitutes not only a crime against humanity but to put it mildly a threat to planet earth.

In this essay I am providing the reader with direct quotes from a publicly available 1996 US Air Force document on the use of environmental modification techniques which indelibly provide evidence that the threats are real and must be addressed.

Lebanon Protesters: Ensure a Unified ‘B-Team’ Runs Any New, Responsive Government

By Dr. Barbara G. Ellis, December 03, 2019

As Lebanon’s massive, countrywide, anti-government demonstrations continue, the vacuum provides time for those ardent, long suffering protesters to create the most responsive anti-austerity government in the Middle East. If any populace in that region could do it, it’s Lebanon’s well-educated, smart younger generations who predominate in the uprising.

China Retaliates Against Hostile US Legislation

By Stephen Lendman, December 03, 2019

In late November, House and Senate members unanimously passed the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRDA) of 2019.

Trump signed the measure into law, along with a companion bill, restricting exports of US crowd control devices to Hong Kong police.

The measures are all about US war on China by other means, wanting the country weakened, contained and isolated — politically, economically, financially and technologically. They’re unrelated to supporting democracy and human rights.

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Three Russian military police officers received light injuries when an improvised explosive device went off near their armored vehicle in northeastern Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on December 2. The incident happened when the Russian Military Police were fulfilling a reconnaissance task along the route for a joint Russian-Turkish patrol mission in about 1.5 km to the west of the village of Koran.

The IED attack became the most recent in a long series of provocations against Turkish and Russian patrols in northeastern Syria. Previously, radicals affiliated with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were trying to block patrols, and even throwing stones and petrol bombs at them.

These attacks were temporarily halted after on November 20 SDF security forces Asayish publicly apologized for the “unfortunate” incident with throwing of petrol bombs and promised to work to prevent such cases in the future. Nonetheless, it seems that the radical pro-US faction within the Kurdish leadership is too strong and provocations will continue.

If such actions lead to real casualties among the Russian personnel, this may force Moscow to reconsider its approach towards containing Turkish military actions against Kurdish armed groups in northeastern Syria.

Russian and Turkish forces conduct patrol missions under the October 22 memorandum signed in Sochi between Russia and Turkey. Units of the Russian Military Police coordinate their actions with Syrian border service and the Turkish Army. The goal of the effort is to provide assistance in ensuring security of citizens and maintaining order, as well as controlling the implementation of a memorandum on withdrawing Kurdish armed groups and their weapons some 30 km from the border.

Clashes between the Syrian Army and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led forces continued near Rasm al-Ward and Istablat in southeastern Idlib. These villages remain a de-facto no man’s land amid intense artillery duels and air strikes. Pro-government sources claim that militants suffered large casualties. However, they as well as pro-militant sources provided little evidence to confirm these claims.

Syrian and Russian airstrikes also hit fortifications and weapon depots belonging to militants near Kafr Nabl, Maarat Al-Numan, and Kafr Sijnah.

The Syrian Army is currently deploying reinforcements near the frontline in southern Idlib. This may indicate that government forces are planning to respond to militants’ recent attacks with own ground operation.

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Si svolge a Londra, il 4 dicembre, il Consiglio Nord Atlantico dei capi di stato e di governo che celebra il 70° anniversario della Nato, definita  dal segretario generale Jens Stoltenberg  «l’alleanza di maggiore successo nella storia».

Un  «successo» innegabile. Da quando ha demolito con la guerra la Federazione Jugoslava nel 1999, la Nato si è allargata da 16 a 29 paesi (30 se ora ingloba la Macedonia), espandendosi ad Est a ridosso della Russia. «Per la prima volta nella nostra storia – sottolinea Stoltenberg  – abbiamo truppe pronte al combattimento nell’Est della nostra Alleanza». Ma l’Organizzazione del Trattato del Nord Atlantico è andata oltre, estendendo  le sue operazioni belliche fin sulle montagne afghane e attraverso i deserti africani e mediorientali.

Ora la Grande Alleanza mira più in alto. Al Summit di Londra – preannuncia Stoltenberg  – i leader dei 29 paesi membri «riconosceranno lo spazio quale nostro quinto campo operativo», che si aggiunge a quelli terrestre, marittimo, aereo e ciberspaziale. «Lo spazio è essenziale per il successo delle nostre operazioni», sottolinea il segretario generale lasciando intendere che la Nato svilupperà un programma militare spaziale. Non fornisce ovviamente dettagli, informando però che la Nato ha firmato un primo contratto da 1 miliardo di dollari per modernizzare i suoi 14 aerei Awacs. Essi non sono semplici aerei-radar ma centri di comando volanti, prodotti dalla statunitense Boeing, per la gestione della battaglia attraverso i sistemi spaziali.

Certamente quasi nessuno dei leader europei (per l’Italia il premier Conte), che il 4 dicembre «riconosceranno lo spazio quale nostro quinto campo operativo», conosce il programma militare spaziale della Nato, preparato dal Pentagono e da ristretti vertici militari europei insieme alle maggiori industrie aerospaziali. Tantomeno lo conoscono i parlamenti che, come quello italiano, accettano a scatola chiusa qualsiasi decisione della Nato sotto comando Usa, senza preoccuparsi delle sue implicazioni politico-militari ed economiche.

La Nato viene lanciata nello spazio sulla scia del nuovo Comando spaziale creato dal Pentagono lo scorso agosto con lo scopo, dichiarato dal presidente Trump, di «assicurare che il dominio americano nello spazio non sia mai minacciato». Trump ha quindi annunciato la successiva costituzione della Forza Spaziale degli Stati uniti, con il compito di «difendere i vitali interessi americani nello spazio, il prossimo campo di combattimento della guerra». Russia e Cina accusano gli Usa di aprire così la via alla militarizzazione dello spazio, avvertendo di avere la capacità di rispondere. Tutto ciò accresce il pericolo di guerra nucleare.

Anche se non si conosce ancora il programma militare spaziale della Nato, una cosa è certa: esso sarà estremamente costoso. Al Summit Trump premerà sugli alleati europei perché portino la loro spesa militare al 2% o più del pil. Finora lo hanno fatto 8 paesi: Bulgaria (che l’ha portata al 3,25%, poco al di sotto del 3,42% degli Usa), Grecia, Gran Bretagna, Estonia, Romania, Lituania, Lettonia e Polonia. Gli altri, pur rimanendo al di sotto del 2%, sono impegnati ad aumentarla. Trainata dall’enorme spesa Usa  – 730 miliardi di dollari nel 2019, oltre 10 volte quella russa – la spesa militare annua della Nato, secondo i dati ufficiali, supera i 1.000 miliardi di dollari. In realtà è più alta di quella indicata dalla Nato, poiché non comprende varie voci di carattere militare: ad esempio quella delle armi nucleari Usa, iscritta nel bilancio non del Pentagono ma del Dipartimento dell’Energia.

La spesa militare italiana, salita dal 13° all’11° posto mondiale, ammonta in termini reali a circa 25 miliardi di euro annui in aumento. Lo scorso giugno il governo Conte I vi ha aggiunto  7,2 miliardi di euro, forniti anche dal Ministero per lo sviluppo economico per l’acquisto di sistemi d’arma.  In ottobre, nell’incontro col Segretario generale della Nato, il governo Conte II si è impegnato  ad aumentarla stabilmente di circa 7 miliardi di euro annui a partire dal 2020 (La Stampa, 11 ottobre 2019).

Al Summit di Londra saranno richiesti all’Italia altri miliardi in denaro pubblico per finanziare le operazioni militari della Nato nello spazio, mentre non si trovano i soldi per mantenere in sicurezza e ricostruire i viadotti che crollano.

Manlio Dinucci

The inauguration of the Power of Siberia project to transport gas from Russia to China will strengthen Russia’s position as the world’s first gas exporter and boost economic relations between the two countries in an unprecedented way.

Thanks to the US politicians getting busy with their inner fights over who won the presidency and later over who is more corrupt with power in a newly controlled country (Ukraine), the excessive use of sanctions, and the anti-‘free trade’ war, other global superpowers are solidifying their positions and leaping ahead in steady growth.

Destroying Syria by the US-led War of Terror was partly because the Syrian President Bashar Assad rejected to isolate Russia and Iran by severing the relations with them and by allowing a Qatari gas pipeline through Syria to Europe which would have starved both the Russian and Iranian nations.

Toppling the Ukrainian state, destroying the country’s economy, and installing puppets there by the US was in part to control the Russia – West Europ gas pipeline.

From here comes the added importance of this project that would supply the Chinese economy with flowing energy source for the coming 3 decades, provide the Russian economy with a considerable steady income for the coming 3 decades, and hurting further the US dollar as this ‘energy’ project uses the currencies of both nations and not the currency that controlled the energy production and trade for at least half a century.

Oddly enough it didn’t seem to be of concern to the US politicians and usual Pentagon propagandists to start with demonizing it and then analyzing their losses from creating enemies around the globe instead of engaging positively with the world, especially the established civilizations.

The following report by the Lebanese Al-Mayadeen news channel sheds some light on the global event:

It is a historic event according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the opening of the Power of Siberia pipeline between Russia and China will bring about a change in the world’s energy projects, not just between the two countries.

The inauguration, with the participation of the two heads of state on both sides of the border, was accelerated after the completion of the first phase of the project ahead of schedule, a phase, costing an estimated $ 20 billion out of $ 400 billion, the total cost of the Power of Siberia project.

This huge 30-year project was agreed between Moscow and Beijing via Russia’s Gazprom and China National Oil and Gas Company in 2014, it is the largest project to transport gas from eastern Russia to China, 4,500 kilometers of pipelines produced with a new and innovative technologies are supposed to transport 38 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually to China, this puts Russia at the forefront of natural gas providers for this country, which is the fastest-growing economy in the world today.

The Power of Siberia is one of 40 strategic economic agreements between the two countries over the past five years to enhance their cooperation in various fields, the level of cooperation in military production between them has risen in an unprecedented way, Russian and Chinese banks have given financial guarantees for trade using the currencies of the two countries amounting to tens of billions of dollars, the trade between the two neighbors, which share about 4,000 kilometers borders, jumped to $ 100 billion last year alone, this figure is expected to double over the next year.

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Featured image is from Syria News

This article was originally published in 2016.

Introduction

“2.6 million people die annually in low-and middle-income countries from medical errors, and that most of those deaths are related to misdiagnosis and administration of pharmaceutical products…Medication errors alone cost an estimated $42 billion (US dollars) annually. Unsafe surgical care procedures cause complications in up to 25% of patients resulting in 1 million deaths during or immediately after surgery annually…Four out of every ten patients are harmed during primary and ambulatory health care. The most detrimental errors are related to diagnosis, prescription and the use of medicines.” — The World Health Organization

Below is a medical online article that concluded that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US. The study, published in 2016 in the British Medical Journal, was authored by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The authors calculated that medical errors accounted for > 250,000 deaths every year in the US, which made iatrogenic (= physician, drug or vaccine-caused) deaths the third leading cause of death in the US, surpassed only by #1 heart disease (647,457) and #2 cancer (599,108) (2018 CDC data). 

It is important to note that medical errors and adverse effects from prescription drugs that have caused deaths or illnesses are rarely listed by physicians on death certificates or in rankings of causes of death or illnesses. The online article calls for better reporting by physicians. 

Also be aware that the study – as has been the case of ALL such studies of causes of death, acute illnesses, chronic illnesses or adverse drug effects – did NOT evaluate vaccine-induced deaths or injuries, mainly because virtually every physician, in every country (where powerful, for-profit pharmaceutical/vaccine corporations control the practice of medicine, most medical school curricula and most major media outlets), consistently fails – or refuses to acknowledge – even the most obvious vaccine injuries or deaths as worthy of being reportable diseases or worthy of being listed in their differential diagnostic impressions, discharge diagnoses or death certifications.

Dr. Gary G. Kohls, December 4, 2019

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Medical Error: The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

By Martin A Makary and Michael Daniel 

British Medical Journal, May 2016

Leaders currently in office rarely make an appearance before either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court.  International law remains affixed to the notion that heads-of-state are, at least for the duration of their time in office, safe from prosecution.  Matters change once the time in office expires.  

Be that as it may, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, with an ever dwindling number of peace prizes and awards to her name for questionable responses to the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority, has a plan.  She intends to personally plead the case of her country against charges of genocide being made in the International Court of Justice.  As the Ministry of the Interior has claimed, the argument against state brutality against the Rohingya has arisen due to ignorance about “the complexities of the issue and the narratives of the people of Myanmar.”

The case itself is drawn from the well of universal jurisdiction, a concept that Henry Kissinger finds so troubling to the freedom of flexible statecraft.  The former US secretary of state, in 2001, warned that subjecting international relations to judicial procedures came with risks.

“The danger lies in pushing the effort to extremes that risk substituting the tyranny of judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts.”

Kissinger ignores a lingering point stretching back to Roman law that universal jurisdiction, or at least the rhetoric of it, can be exercised against certain crimes that might revolt the tender conscience humanity.  Piracy, for instance, might be punished as an extra-territorial offence, though it should not be confused as being on all fours with international criminal law.  “I need not tell you the heinousness of this offence,” came the pre-deliberation address to the jury in the piracy trial of Capt William Kidd in 1701.  “Pirates are called ‘Hostes humani generis’ the enemies of the people.”

In this instance, the threat to Myanmar’s authority does not come from an internal action, but from the West African country of The Gambia as a representative of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.  Last month, a 46-page application was submitted by the Muslim-majority state to the ICJ, alleging the commission by Myanmar’s authorities of mass murder, rape and the destruction of communities living within Rakhine State, ostensibly as part of a “clearing” program. “The genocidal acts committed during these operations were intended to destroy the Rohingya as a group… by the use of mass murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, as well as the systematic destruction by fire of their villages, often with inhabitants locked inside burning houses.”    

Some 720,000 Rohingya were forced to flee to Bangladesh in light of these operations, and the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, established by the UN Human Rights Council, revealed nothing in the way of redeeming evidence on the part of government authorities.  Its August 2018 report made special mention of the predations of the security forces in Rakhine State, though also noted the actions of armed ethnic groups in Kahin and Shan States.  More detailed findings were published the following month.   

The Mission, having designated the Rohingya to be a protected group, satisfied itself that acts of genocide had been committed.  “Perpetrators have killed Rohingya, caused serious bodily and mental harm to Rohingya, deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Rohingya, and imposed measures intended to prevent births to Rohingya.”

Enough, then, to go on in terms of mounting a legal action, albeit in slightly different circumstances.  The instance of this case is irregular, given that the ICJ usually undertakes such hearings after consulting the findings of other tribunals, be it the International Criminal Court or those of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. 

The decision by Suu Kyi to take the matter on personally in both roles as state counsellor and foreign minister is garnering mixed reviews.  In Myanmar, propaganda units have been mobilised.  Support for the decision is being encouraged in the days leading up to the December 10-12 hearings through planned rallies being organised by the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) in Yangon, Mandalay, Monywa, and Mawlamyine.  

Numerous armed groups have expressed their approval.  Nyi Rang, external relations official for the United Wa State Army (UWSA) is one.  “We are proud and supporting her taking responsibility and travelling to face the trial.”  Colonel Khun Okkar, chairman of the Pa-O National Liberation Organisation (PNLO) is another. 

“We need to show our solidarity with the government which is trying to prove that the offences cannot be classified as genocide.” 

This position, it should be said, is not universally shared within Myanmar itself.  This stands to reason: not all ethnic armed organisations within the state are rooting for a government deemed the handmaiden of military brutality.  The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Arakan Army (AA) suggest that claims of genocide are not only plausible but historical, having taken place over seven decades of civil war.  According to a sombre spokesman for the AA, “She [Aung San Suu Kyi] should not be defending war criminals who try to hide behind the term ‘the charge of the nation’.”   

The prosecutor of the ICC has also opened up a preliminary investigation into the matter, an action approved by the Pre-Trial Chamber III of the ICC, though the action is limited by the fact that Myanmar is not a signatory to the court’s statute.  That said, the three-judge panel reasoned that an investigation could take place as long as part of the alleged criminal conduct occurred in the territory of a State Party.  Myanmar may well not be a State Party, but Bangladesh most certainly is. 

The Gambia case promises to revisit the at times contentious basis as to how universal jurisdiction is invoked, despite the acceptance by such organisations as Amnesty International that most UN Member States “can exercise universal jurisdiction over one or more crimes under international law, either as such crimes or as ordinary crimes under national law.”

The sight of Suu Kyi, defending the actions of the military against what security forces deem legitimate counterinsurgency operations, is going to paint a bleak picture indeed.  From the giddy summit of peace prizes and romanticised positions against tyranny, the civilian leader of Myanmar has become a powerful exponent of a certain brand of blood soaked Realpolitik, state brutality sanitised and reasoned.   

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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 New Eastern Outlook

As Lebanon’s massive, countrywide, anti-government demonstrations continue, the vacuum provides time for those ardent, long suffering protesters to create the most responsive anti-austerity government in the Middle East. If any populace in that region could do it, it’s Lebanon’s well-educated, smart younger generations who predominate in the uprising. 

However, most of those of us who have newspapered in Beirut tend to agree with long-time (43 years ) Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk who observed that it had a classic, fatal flaw:

Bring down the regime, the government, the masters of deceit, the cancerous centres of power: that is their only cry. The Lebanese protestors, in their hundreds of thousands, are demanding a new constitution, an end to the confessional system of government—and to abject poverty. They are absolutely right; but then they stop. It’s as if the revolutionaries of Beirut, Baghdad and Algiers are too pure to dip their fingers in the glue of political power, their goodness too heavenly to be contaminated by the dirt of politics, their demands too spiritual to be touched by the everyday hard work of future governance that they believe their courage alone will ensure victory. This is nonsense. Without leadership, they will be overwhelmed. The elites and kings who govern the Arab world have sharp claws.

As a former Beirut Daily Star editorial-page editor/writer, I read an archival interview of Krim Belkacem, one of the Algerian revolution’s leaders. Asked about post-war plans for education, healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, etc., he said: “A revolution never reveals such plans before winning lest it divide and lose the people—and the fight.”

The truth is, as Fisk writes, that most revolutionaries have no such plans beyond overthrowing a regime lest it divide their numbers. True, most revolutions “eat their young” by internal squabbling over leadership once the last shot is fired, as Algeria’s independence leader Ahmed Ben-Bella  learned in exile—and Belkacem’s assassination in Frankfort—despite seven years  of unified warfare against the French.

Now, most repressive rulers today get out the weaponry—rubber bullets, water cannons, concussion bombs, and live ammunition to clear the streets. In Beirut, luckiy, restraint seems to rule. Aside from police shortages to handle such massive numbers, a standoff response does saves costs on personnel, weapons, jailings, and lawsuits over deaths and injuries. And police absenteeism because family members are among the demonstrators.

In Lebanon, it was long-standing, dire public needs that eventually exploded October 17 into a massive countrywide demonstration triggered by a $6 monthly charge for the internet’s free Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. It affected almost everyone and became the last straw of austerity policies. The basics demanded by all party loyalists, thousands of refugees, those in 18 religious sects were legion: 24-hour electricity, clean tap water, garbage collections, unclogging sewers, ending blatant corruption, and failure to collect taxes from corporations and the rich.

So far, it’s unlikely that the civil-society group  doing a “Paul Revere” warning with a WhatsApp protest message were long-term planners. But the result was thousands hopefully and obediently waiting on promising words from the Prime Minister. His previous non-actions showed immediate redress was unlikely for these basic and common grievances.

Unfortunately, it never takes the Old Guard long to regroup and creep back into power in the guise of a caretaker government which then puts in power their candidates who will re-impose the same policies that led to an uprising in the first place.

How different it could be, as prime minister candidates emerge, if a demonstration group would confront them with a manifesto containing the people’s demands. If demonstrators could set off the uprising by mobile phones almost instantly, they ought to be able to quickly check out the picket signs expressing people’s chief demands. Then, help their preference for a prime minister hunt up prospective cabinet ministers willing to quickly fulfill those demands—and provide him or her with a nonsectarian “B-Team, a “brain trust” of expert advisers for all sectors of government. Such specialists would enable the new government to “hit the floor running” to answer those demands the moment their prime minister is chosen.

The new government should include eagle-eyed policy monitors—especially the enforcers—particularly for the country’s banking system at the start.

Success lies in rapid and effective action on behalf of ordinary citizens to retain public confidence. The Lebanese “window” is currently wide open for a long-needed, non-partisan government drawn from those demonstrators to execute fast-moving transitions from the past.

Perhaps one of the best examples in modern history of a B-Team quickly implementing programs pulling a nation out of economic destitution and despair is still U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain-trust ” during the 1930s Great Depression. “FDR’s B-Team was drawn from economics, law, politics, government, universities, labor, healthcare, science, and social programs.

In FDR’s “First Hundred Days,” they unrolled bold “New Deal” programs despite howling opposition from both parties in Congress and the colossal power of corporations and the “banksters.” Most of those major programs were generated by dozens of FDR’s proclamations and executive orders  because Congress was too paralyzed by the Depression to disobey party leadership.

Three days after FDR’s inauguration in March 1933, the B-Team’s first major plan—tackling the financial industry’s depredations—his eight-day bank “holiday” proclamation closed all banks. The night before reopenings, Roosevelt gave his first radio Fireside Chat to Americans, reassuring them that their deposits were safe.

In those “First Hundred Days,” the B-Team launched a staggering number of programs, agencies, and pushed tough regulatory laws , either benefitting or protecting the 99%: deposit insurance, banning bank ties to the stock market, policing Wall Street, regulating workplace practices, subsidizing staple crops, and providing low-cost loans to buy homes.

What followed was a public works program for millions of unemployed.  More than 3.5 million were building dozens of dams and the Tennessee Valley Authority to furnish cheap and reliable power and flood control. Improved highways and new bridges served motorists and truckers. Repairs were made to schools and hospitals and new ones were built and staffed. Millions of jobless young men were doing conservation improvements for waterways, fisheries, and agricultural wastelands. By FDR’s second term, his B-Team had inaugurated the Social Security program and given unions protections for wages, hours, and collective bargaining.

The cost for FDR’s New Deal was $500 billion  (in today’s dollars), primed both with temporary public debt and hiking income taxes  on the wealthy—and enforcing collections—so that by 1940 those earning $60,000 had a 47% rate and those above $5 million, 75%. Their outrage was just as great as the well-off would be in today’s Lebanon if fresh leadership put such teeth into new tax laws.

Treasury revenues spiked because paychecks were spent on food, housing, goods and services. In turn, retail and wholesale profits were banked—and taxed—providing increased lending funds for business and mortgages—and subsequent federal and state revenues from those taxes.

It could be argued that what worked in a near-bankrupt U.S. in the 1930s won’t work in today’s Lebanon. But if a quarter  of Lebanon’s population brought about the government’s fall, it’s possible that the slate could be wiped clean of policies from the country’s ususal hidebound, negligent, corrupt, and incompetent administrations.

For example, just to pass Lebanon’s 2019 budget  took 37 cabinet and parliamentary meetings. And confronted with a national debt of $85 billion and a credit rating of junk-bond status—and threatening rumbles from the 99%— government officials sped to Paris last year vowing “serious reforms” if CEDRE(Conference for Economic Development and Reform) could coble $11 billion together in loans and grants from its donors.

The purpose, the delegation claimed, was to cover 127 infrastructure projects  in three payment phases. Wise to Lebanon’s ways, however, CEDRE’s loan conditions  included a clamp-down on corruption, submitting the 2020 budget, filling vacancies in key regulatory offices, and a donor-monitoring committee. The loan would be cancelled if the committee found irregularities even in one project. CEDRE’s growing doubts about credibility and a charge of “sloppy” documentation means funds have yet to be released.

This needs to change. And only those demonstrators can make it possible.

Foreign Policy’s Sune Haugbolle  pointed out the country was at Ground Zero for total collapse:

With Lebanon’s credit ratings hitting junk status, unemployment rampant, and environmental degradation reaching cataclysmic levels, the floor under the sectarian system has caved in. The sheer corruption, incompetence, and social injustice of the political class have destroyed the social contract. What remains now is to rebuild it based on a new legal and political order.

To do that would require an FDR-type leader and a B-Team to immediately underpin that new order. Experts would have to be hired to fix electrical utilities, garbage collections and disposal, water systems and the like. Enforcers would have to get tough about collecting taxes from the rich and powerful—perhaps a bank holiday to prevent their sending money abroad. That alone could help finance repairs and rebuilding the country’s crumbling infrastructure. Corruption finally would have to be addressed and stringently punished.

As for a bank holiday, Lebanon’s private institutions are suspected of being “overstocked with cash” and of earning billions stored abroad from 30 years of high interests charged on government bonds. If the previous regime demanded $3.3 billion  from those private banks for the 2020 budget, it would seem a new government could force a few billion more to cover the nation’s resurrection.

Recruiting government talent for a B-Team and labor for such public-works projects should be easy. Most Lebanon’s universities have department chairs able to single out past and present talent for a B-Team capable to handle such monumental undertakings—banking to agriculture—to resurrect the country. High school faculties also know promising and dedicated students willing and able to intern with these experts. Working together, they would learn that shared professional skills rise far above and beyond sect, race, gender, and class.

Obviously, such a cabinet staff would have to be cooperative, tough, and altruistic millennials and those under 25. They would have to be willing to work at minimum wages at the outset, a cost well worth replacing those “elders” responsible for nearly destroying the country. And it’s possible. Those millions demonstrating throughout Lebanon were able to temporarily set aside centuries of enmity caused by tribal, cultural, sect, and social divisions. They were united in mutual demands of near-deaf governments.

A heavy proportion of the Beirut protesters were chiefly the millennials— students and workers —who packed Martyrs Square and side streets perhaps reaching to my former neighborhood in the Ras Beirut district. And unlike the usual ferocious Middle Eastern demonstrations, Beirutis proved to be nonsectarian in chants (“Revolution, “Thieves! Thieves!” ), and singing and dancing  in joyous displays of warm, communal response. In one instance, men stopped shouting and raising clenched fists to calm a terrified toddler in a car with “Baby Shark,” a globally popular children’s song.

That sea of thousands, waving Lebanese flags  reflects unity and promise for permanently changing the country after years of quiet desperation from rigid, uncaring, caste-ridden, and corrupt governments.

It’s not too late for new, forward-looking political leaders to round up a prime minister candidate and a B-Team helping to meet Lebanon’s critical challenges. The time indeed has come for a drastic change for the people in that benighted country. It can only come from those demonstrators. Now.

As the tough old adage should remind them: “It’s time to either put up or shut up.”

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Barbara G. Ellis, Ph.D., is the principal of a Portland (OR) writing/pr firm. A veteran professional writer and editor (LIFE magazine, Washington, D.C. Evening Star, Beirut Daily Star, Mideast Magazine), she also was a journalism professor (Oregon State University/Louisiana’s McNeese State University). Author of dozens of articles for magazines and online websites, and screenplays, she was a nominee for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history (The Moving Appeal). Today, she contributes to Truthout and Counterpunch, and has contributed to DissidentVoice, Global Research, and OpEdNews, as well as being a political and environmental activist.

Featured image is from OneWorld

In late November, House and Senate members unanimously passed the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRDA) of 2019.

Trump signed the measure into law, along with a companion bill, restricting exports of US crowd control devices to Hong Kong police.

The measures are all about US war on China by other means, wanting the country weakened, contained and isolated — politically, economically, financially and technologically. They’re unrelated to supporting democracy and human rights.

On Monday, spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, said Beijing will suspend US requests for its warships and aircraft to visit Hong Kong.

It’s imposing sanctions on US organizations funded by Washington and/or by corporate and other donors — ones involved in supporting and otherwise manipulating months of Hong Kong violence, vandalism and chaos, in cahoots with the CIA.

Targeted groups include the National Endowment for Democracy that’s mandated to combat it wherever it exists, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, Freedom House, and Human Rights Watch.

According to Sourcewatch, HRW earlier removed prominent international jurist/academic Richard Falk from one of its human rights committees for his vocal criticism of Israeli high crimes.

Along with Amnesty International, HRW is hostile to governments on the US target list for regime change — notably Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, among others.

Law Professor Francis Boyle earlier said

“if you are dealing with a human rights situation in a country that is at odds with the United States or Britain, it gets an awful lot of attention, resources (and) publicity” from these and similar organizations.

When it comes to US, UK, or other Western human rights abuses, “it’s like pulling teeth to get them to do something on the situation — because Washington and its allies aren’t on “the official enemies list.”

According to China’s Global Times, if the US “continues to provoke on Hong Kong, it is expected that (Beijing) will take follow-up actions.”

Under China’s “one country, two systems” policy, its authorities won’t permit the US or other countries to try exerting a sphere of influence over the city.

Measures announced on Monday are a shot across the bow, the first time Beijing imposed sanctions on US organizations, a show of strength against Washington’s dirty hands all over months of manipulated protests in Hong Kong.

The city is Chinese territory. Its authorities won’t tolerate foreign efforts to undermine its sovereignty.

According to Beijing’s official People’s Daily broadsheet, hostile US legislation “seriously violated the international law and the basic norm of international relations, and interferes with China’s domestic affairs,” adding:

Sanctions imposed show “the country’s firm resolution on the Hong Kong issue.”

Organizations like the ones sanctioned are involved in “grubby business in the name of justice. They offer capital and supplies for rioters, and control the protests behind the scene. Releasing malicious promotional materials, they are fanning confrontation, calling black white, and conducting political infiltration.”

“(T)hey are…notorious for their misdeeds in (US) ‘color revolutions’ across the world.”

“(A)ny attempt(s) against the Chinese, including (in) Hong Kong…will be countered resolutely.”

A Final Comment

On Sunday, the South China Morning Post said a US trade deal with China “must include US tariff(s) rollback,” along with scrapping Trump’s vow to impose further tariffs on $156 billion worth of Chinese imports if an agreement isn’t reached by December 15, adding:

“Trade experts and people close to the White House said last month…that signing of a phase one agreement may not take place until the new year as China pressed for more extensive rollbacks of tariffs.”

An unnamed US source said what both sides agreed on “was just the principle that the issues need to be solved through different stages,” adding:

“But when they got to (phase one details (alone), and how to implement them, the two sides were again not able to reach a consensus.”

In early November, both sides agreed on a limited phase one deal in principle, largely involving large-scale Chinese purchases of US agricultural products, the Trump regime reciprocating by rolling back unacceptable tariffs on Chinese imports.

Both countries are especially world’s apart on major structural issues that won’t likely be resolved no matter how many more rounds of talks are held.

The US wants China’s economic, industrial and technological development undermined.

Washington wants all nations worldwide subordinating their sovereign rights to its interests — clearly what Chinese authorities won’t tolerate.

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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 Global Times

A future without independent media leaves us with an upside down reality where according to the corporate media “NATO deserves a Nobel Peace Prize”, and where “nuclear weapons and wars make us safer”.

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NATO’s Continuing Enlargement Aims at Further Weakening of Russian Influence in the Balkans

By Paul Antonopoulos, December 03, 2019

Of the 29 NATO member states, 22 have already ratified the accession protocol of North Macedonia into the anti-Russian alliance. The ratification process will likely be completed before the end of NATO’s summit taking place in London this week, which will make North Macedonia the newest country in military alliance.

NATO’s Deep Political and Legal Crisis: Madness and Irrationality

By Jan Oberg, December 03, 2019

NATO’s London Summit on December 3 and 4, 2019 displays the deep political crisis of the 70-year-old alliance: Only a dinner and a short meeting, no statement to be issued, quarrels among the leading military members, accusations, substantial differences on Syria and many other issues, the deepest-ever Transatlantic conflict and the usual issues of burden-sharing.

NATO: “Brain Dead” and Divided

By Andrew Korybko, December 03, 2019

The backdrop against which this summit is taking place is one of uncertainty surrounding the organization’s future and many questioning whether it can even remain functional in its present form. The reasons for this existential crisis are many, but can be simplified as Trump’s demand that all member states finally pay the 2% of their GDP on defense that they’d mandated to, Turkey’s “autonomous” actions in Syria, some Central & Eastern European members’ supposed concerns about Russia, and France’s desire to present itself as the visionary of both an EU Army and a reformed NATO. Add to that the heavy American pressure being put upon the bloc’s members to curtail their economic relations with China and it’s clear that NATO is at a crossroads like never before.

Washington’s Grand Design: Draw NATO into Confronting Russia and China

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, December 02, 2019

The trend is up for defence spending across European Allies and Canada. Over $100 billion is expected to be added to the member states’ defence budgets by end-2020.

More importantly, the trend at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting at Brussels on November 19-20, in the run-up to the London summit, showed that despite growing differences within the alliance, member states closed ranks around three priority items in the US global agenda — escalation of the aggressive policy toward Russia, militarisation of space and countering China’s rise. 

Trump Was Right: NATO Should be Obsolete

By Medea Benjamin, December 02, 2019

The three smartest words that Donald Trump uttered during his presidential campaign are “NATO is obsolete.” His adversary, Hillary Clinton, retorted that NATO was “the strongest military alliance in the history of the world.” Now that Trump has been in power, the White House parrots the same worn line that NATO is “the most successful Alliance in history, guaranteeing the security, prosperity, and freedom of its members.” But Trump was right the first time around: Rather than being a strong alliance with a clear purpose, this 70-year-old organization that is meeting in London on December 4 is a stale military holdover from the Cold War days that should have gracefully retired many years ago.

Turkey Holds NATO Hostage Until Syria-related Demands Are Met

By Sarah Abed, November 29, 2019

Without Turkey’s formal approval NATO will have a difficult time expediting its defense plan for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Because the two issues are not directly related, some believe Turkey is holding Europeans hostage until they comply with their demands. Not only is Turkey the only Islamic member of NATO but it has the second largest military in NATO granting NATO access to Georgia and Azerbaijan, which makes one wonder, who needs the other more, NATO or Turkey?

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War: NATO Is Born from the Bomb

By Comitato No Nato, November 25, 2019

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union carried out its first experimental nuclear explosion. A few months earlier, on April 4, 1949, when Washington knew that the Soviet Union was about to have the nuclear bombs and was about to start the nuclear arms race, the United States created NATO. During the Cold War, the Alliance under US command included 16 countries: United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, German Federal Republic, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. Through this alliance, the United States maintained its dominance over European allies, using Europe as the front line against the Soviet Union.

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Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

Of the 29 NATO member states, 22 have already ratified the accession protocol of North Macedonia into the anti-Russian alliance. The ratification process will likely be completed before the end of NATO’s summit taking place in London this week, which will make North Macedonia the newest country in military alliance.

This now appears even more likely since U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave his endorsement, saying on Twitter:

“Pleased to announce the United States deposited its ratification of North Macedonia’s NATO Accession Protocol. One step closer to welcoming North Macedonia as NATO’s 30th Ally!”

This will make North Macedonia the fourth country out of the six successor states of Yugoslavia to become a NATO member, following Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. With Bosnia effectively a NATO satellite, this leaves Serbia as the bulwark of anti-NATO and pro-Russia sentiment in the region, especially as the other fellow Balkan countries, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, are also NATO members.

The confusing Macedonia question was a key priority for Russia’s Balkan policy – North Macedonia is an overwhelmingly Orthodox and Slavic country that had the potential to become another pro-Russia state in the Balkans, alongside neighboring Serbia. However, North Macedonia since its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 pursued a pro-Western policy and joined the NATO program Partnership for Peace as early as 1995 and became a European Union candidate a decade later.

This had not discouraged Russian efforts to push North Macedonia out of the NATO sphere of influence. The governments in Athens and Skopje have competed over the name Macedonia since North Macedonia became independent from Yugoslavia, as Greece’s northern region is also confusingly called Macedonia. Effectively, as North Macedonia was continuously vetoed by Greece from joining NATO and the EU because of the name dispute, Russian efforts to radicalize Macedonian identity was encouraged. The strategy to radicalize Macedonian identity to be more anti-Western and pro-Russian was an effort to avoid a situation like the Prespa Agreement that brought a finalization to the Macedonian name dispute in 2018, opening the way for North Macedonia to join NATO and the EU, without a Greek veto.

The Prespa Agreement, named after a lake that traverses the borders of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania, defined exactly what was meant by “Macedonia” and “Macedonian.” For Greece, according to the agreement, these terms denote an area and people of Greece’s northern region, who continue the legacy of the Ancient Macedonian Hellenic civilization, history and culture, as well as the legacy of Alexander the Great. In reference to North Macedonia, these terms denote the modern territory of North Macedonia, Slavic language and Slavic people with their own history and culture unrelated to the Ancient Macedonians. The agreement also stipulates the removal of North Macedonian irredentist efforts against Greek territory and to align them with UNESCO and Council of Europe’s standards.

The radicalization of an independent Macedonian identity was in the hope that North Macedonians would reject the name change, despite the scholarly and historical consensus that the Ancient Macedonians were Greek. This hoped North Macedonian denunciation of the West was on the basis that resolving the name dispute goes against North Macedonian nationalist doctrine as any name change must support the historical reality that the Ancient Macedonians were Hellenes. This was a bad calculation that encouraged the North Macedonians to concentrate their efforts and resources on historical revisionism on not only Hellenic legacy, but also Bulgarian and Serbian, as  historical figures like King Samuel of Bulgaria, Ilyo Voyvoda, Aleksandar Turundzhev, Yane Sandanski, Hristo Batandzhiev and many others are claimed by both North Macedonia and Bulgaria, and the unrecognized and schismatic Macedonian Orthodox Church separated in an ugly divorce from the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1967.

This historical revisionism meant ignoring serious ambitions for a Greater Albania that expands into the western territories of North Macedonia. Ignoring efforts for Albanian expansionism, something that has been partially achieved with the Albanian control of Kosovo, has undermined North Macedonian security and opened the gates for it to become a major puppet of NATO to preserve their territorial integrity. As argued in a previous article, because the overwhelming majority of Albanians want a Greater Albania, it is unlikely to be achieved with Washington’s backing in Greece, Montenegro and North Macedonia as they do not pose a threat to U.S. hegemony in the Balkans, but rather serve it, by resisting Russian influence in the region.

As long as Skopje remains loyal to globalist agendas, the U.S. will not back Albanian expansionism in the country. However, the U.S. can certainly use the Albanian minority as a destabilizing force, as seen with Kosovo’s illegal declaration of independence and the 2001 Albanian uprising in North Macedonia. In addition to Washington having the option to use the Albanians as a destabilizing factor, the Albanians themselves may formant instability without U.S. backing as 53% of the approximately 500,000 Albanians in North Macedonia believe in a Greater Albania.

With Russian influencers failing to invigorate anti-NATO sentiment in North Macedonia, there comes the reality that the Balkan country, confident after the finalization of the name dispute, can now march into the hands of its new NATO puppet masters. It is for this reason that a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official said that:

“Russia’s position regarding the expansion of NATO is well known: it is a destructive process that undermines confidence and stability in Europe, leads to increased antagonism.”

According to the official, it is not a military threat that North Macedonia would pose to Russia but a set of risks to European security that “must be guaranteed by totally different methods, instead of involving this [Balkan] country in military planning of the Alliance and in an anti-Russian policy.”

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city and the region’s economic power horse is getting back on its feet again, despite all the efforts by the US and its NATO stooges and terrorists.

It’s moving forward slowly but steadily, with over 600 establishments resuming work at the once-thriving Aleppo Industrial City at Sheikh Najjar, which Turkey’s madman Erdogan and his anti-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood criminals looted to its skeleton and then destroyed like all other areas infested by followers of these two cults.

The following report by SANA from the Aleppo Industrial City at Sheikh Najjar reveals the latest updates there:

The English transcript of the above video

Investment in the Sheikh Najjar industrial city in Aleppo is growing steadily in light of providing the necessary requirements for the industry in terms of infrastructure services and the facilities granted for the reconstruction of facilities affected by terrorism, and building new blocks and supplying them with production lines.

Hazem Ajan – Director of Sheikh Najjar Industrial City: After the city completed most of its service projects for production facilities and delivered basic services of electricity and water to the production workshops in the industrial city we moved on with our plans to strategic projects in the city like the Exhibition City that provides basic promotion of the city’s products in particular and local products in general, because it was selected as an exhibition city at the level of Aleppo province.

The project of labor housing has also started on an area of 258 hectares in coordination with the Public Housing Establishment, we are currently coordinating with the Union of Artisans in the first handicraft area, which provides about 500 artisans plots.

Hussam Salahia – Owner of a textile facility: After the liberation of the industrial city we returned and renewed our work and now produce bathrobes and dyeing yarns, our yarns industry is national product.

Anas Dabbagh – owner of a facility for engineering industries and heaters: We were working before the war and despite the crisis and the damage done to us where the factory was sabotaged, we re-repaired and worked and continue to work. We produce everything related to heaters, we provide the needs for the local market and we export to Lebanon and other countries.

Omar Oso – Owner of Food Industries Establishment: We manufacture tahini and halawa in addition to jam. Production stages start with sesame, we add sugar to make halawah.

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Syria is under unprecedented draconian sanctions by the USA and a host of countries under its control, these sanctions are imposed to punish the Syrian people for not accepting the US hegemony like its other slaves around the world and to impede the rebuilding of the country after almost 9 years of the US-led War of Terror.

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A collection of essays concerning the boundaries being established by walls, Build Resistance not Walls centers its arguments on the walls of Palestine: the so called security fence that runs some 700 km through Palestinian lands of the West Bank, and the Gaza wall of various constructions that is about 60 km long.  It goes far beyond these two physical manifestations of walls, taking the reader into global geographies and into global ideologies, strategies, and mindsets using walls to, essentially control global populations.  It is in essence about the extension of the global frontiers of empire, an empire based on corporate capitalism that dehumanizes the majority of people and destroys environments, while extracting profits for the elites.  The empire is based on Israeli-American desires of hegemonic control.

Various themes

The essays speak for themselves on different topics, but several themes are common to all sections of the work.

The most common element is how Israel plays a dominant role in the physical structures of different walls.  Their militarized expertise is advertised as being “field tested”, an acknowledgement of their use of various mechanisms and structures to control and subjugate a population.  Several major Israeli companies sell directly or have subsidiaries selling hardware of different kinds – imaging devices, sound detection systems, radar, facial recognition, drones  – as well as selling techniques for crowd control in general, at walls or away as desired.  It also sells techniques for individual controls (passbooks, intimidation, delays, beatings, interrogation, torture, rape), techniques also used by the former School of the  Americas, now WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

Another general common element is the recognition that walls are used to create separations between “us” and “others” with the latter being basically subhuman, beyond the law and thus can be easily killed, ignored, or mistreated in any manner.  The context in which this duality exists comes from the corporate world and its capitalist requirements for exploitable labour, constrained labour, while resources and profits flow out of one country or region into the banks and homes of the privileged elites.  It is a “the hegemonic structure of exclusion, exploitation, discrimination, and destruction.”

Walls in this sense strip people of their culture, their land, their means of making a living.  This is more and more a global phenomenon with walls of some kind being represented from the favela slums of Rio de Janeiro, through the European neocolonial walls in Morocco, the physical wall for northern Mexico and its subordinate walls attempting to keep migrants away at Mexico’s contact with the Central American republics.

As another theme, walls are not exclusively physical barriers.  Many walls are constructed by different legalities, the various so called free trade agreements being prime barriers, with Mexico being a prime example.  With the creation of NAFTA, Mexican farmers were devastated with the import of cheap (subsidized )imported U.S. corn and meat products.  Having lost their lands the farmers then became subject to the regimes of exploited labour made possible by the corporate interests embedded in NAFTA.  Corporate elites are the main beneficiaries, both for general manufacturing but in particular those industries aligned with weapons, security infrastructure, and extending into personnel requirements (e.g. private for profit prisons).

The theme of “frontiers” is brought up frequently.  The developed countries, the U.S. and the European Union in particular, maintain their frontiers largely away from their homelands.  Other countries are encouraged-bribed-forced to create barriers of some kind or another to keep recalcitrant and belligerent local indigenous populations under control in order that corporate profits are not interfered with.  U.S. frontiers, based largely on Israeli technology, are finding their way throughout the world, aggravating already bad conditions in these countries.

Migrants that make it through the various walls are used by “capital and complicit governments in order to create conflict between exploited people and between the poor; between poor nationals and indigent foreigners. A “war” between the poor that favors capitalism and reinforces racism and xenophobia.”

A lesser theme, although very important, are the walls built by media, public relations firms, and the educational systems of the countries involved.  These are soft walls, but create a lifetime barrier of lies built on exceptionalism and moral superiority along with the ever present fake calls for democracy and freedom being protected, protected from the ‘other’.  The fundamentalist pentacostal churches play a large role with this in the U.S., both in support of their moral Christian superiority over savages and in their support of the apocryphal events supposedly focused on Israel.

A summary is made difficult as the theme of walls covers most aspects of domestic and international discussions.  The American-Israeli empire is at the center of providing field tested structures, technologies, and methodologies to subordinate not just indigenous but all populations to the global military-industrial-capitalist complex that seeks to extract wealth and resources.  It leaves behind broken societies, families, cultures, and individuals, wounded, maimed, dead and dying.

At the heart of it all, a cancer that has metastasized around the world is Palestine, “a laboratory for so many cruelties…the laboratory for our lives.”

The essays within Build Resistance not Walls provide an expanded and valuable series of perspectives on the walls of our lives.  It serves well to illuminate how current political ideologies are expressed throughout the world as barriers to people and their homelands.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The first factory of its kind in Syria and the Arab world opened November 21, 2019, in Damascus.  Central Pharmaceutical Industries Company, ‘Mainpharma’, celebrated the opening of its factory for the manufacturing of anticancer drugs at Adra Industrial City, in the Damascus countryside.  Syrian Health Minister, Dr. Nizar Yazigi, said that the number of authorized pharmaceutical laboratories has reached 96 laboratories, which cover over 90 percent of domestic needs.  20 additional factories for pharmaceutical manufacturing are in the pipeline for Adra Industrial City.  Adnan Jaafu, chief executive of the company, said the factory will produce 70 percent of the entire spectrum of chemotherapy drugs, which will cover the domestic needs, and the excess will be exported. Syria imports all medicine for the treatment of tumors and vaccines from abroad. 

The losses of the pharmaceutical industry due to war are 152 billion Syrian lira.  Over 100 factories are awaiting the Ministry of Health (MOH) approval. Russia, China, Cuba, India, and Iran have contracted to sell the raw materials to Syria for medicine production.

“The MOH gives free medicines to 1,864 health centers, and 150 hospitals around Syria.” said Dr. Yazgi to ‘RT Arabic’ on November 16, 2019.  The state-run hospitals are treating patients free of charge; however, the challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry include the increase in the production costs, because of the fallen currency rate.

US-NATO backed terrorist destruction

The conflict in Syria, which began in 2011, gradually affected the 3 areas with the highest concentration of pharmaceutical factories: Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs, which caused a severe shortage of medicines in Syria.  The US-NATO backed terrorists concentrated on destroying infrastructure, and businesses.  The terrorists made life unbearable for civilians, as the factories closed down because of attacks, and the employees lost their jobs and income, which in turn led to the mass migration of Syrian refugees, most of whom were economic migrants, having lost their income because of the terrorists.  As the factories stopped production, medicines were no longer available, and yet importing medicines were prevented by the US-EU sanctions.  5,000 pharmacies and 24 pharmaceutical factories stopped service during the war, and in Aleppo, the industry was almost wiped out.

Terrorists looting for the Turkish government

Fares Al-Shihabi, Member of Parliament, and President of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry said in August 2012, about 20 medicine factories in Aleppo, and many other factories were exposed to theft, looting, and kidnapping, noting that the production constitutes more than 50 percent of Syria’s production of pharmaceuticals. Shihabi said that two of the owners of these facilities were kidnapped, and many of the industrialists began to close their businesses and leave the country.  The spokesman for the United Nations in Geneva, Tariq Jassar Fitch, said that “a large number of factories closed, which led to a severe shortage of medicines,” adding that the country is in an urgent need of medicine for tuberculosis, hepatitis, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and kidney disease.  Iran provided Syria with quantities of drugs worth 1.2 million US dollars for the treatment of chronic diseases.

In January 2013, Shihabi stressed that the Aleppo Chamber of Industry had decisive evidence on the involvement of the Turkish government in stealing production lines and machines from hundreds of factories in Aleppo city and smuggling them into Turkey, against international laws. Syria formally accused Turkey of looting factories in the industrial city of Aleppo and sent letters to UN chief Ban Ki-moon and the UN Security Council.

“Some 1,000 factories in the city of Aleppo have been plundered, and their stolen goods transferred to Turkey with the full knowledge and facilitation of the Turkish government,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in the letters.

By 2014, Aleppo industrialists said, more than 300 factories were plundered and their equipment sold in Turkey, and they may take Turkey to The Hague, to settle their accounts at the International Court of Justice.

“The basic reason for the fall of Aleppo and Idlib to armed groups is the terrorists sent from Turkey and the support Turkey gives to them.” said a senior Syrian commander.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) took back Sheikh Najjar, in Aleppo,  in July 2014.

 “They had occupied 80% of the factories.  It took us 48 hours to take back Sheikh Najjar. They destroyed most businesses by setting off their booby traps as they were fleeing”, said the commander.

Hazim Accan, the director-general of the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City, said

“There are 963 production facilities, mostly textiles, food, chemicals, medicines, aluminum, iron and plastics. Today 366 of them are operational. They were badly damaged. Electricity and water systems collapsed. Half of the non-operational facilities were dismantled and taken to Turkey.”

US-EU sanctions prevent medicine exports to Syria

According to Habib Abboud, Syrian deputy health minister for pharmaceutical affairs, the sanctions US-EU imposed on Syria involved the pharmaceutical industry, by preventing exporting raw materials to Syria, even though medicines are purely humanitarian.

“Despite the fact that this is medicine and it should be away from any sanctions, many countries have imposed sanctions and restrictions on Syria,” he said.

Syria has lost certain types of drugs, including those related to deadly and chronic diseases, such as: “Nitroglycerin” for minor strokes attack, “Daflon” for veins’ disorders, “Altroxan”, “Thiamasul” a medicine for the thyroid gland, asthma sprays, “Vlozon”, “Azmirol”, as well as cardiac patches “Netroderm”, and most of these have no alternative.

Pre-war situation

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics in Syria, in 2010 there were 70 plants producing pharmaceuticals, and only 2 were state-owned.   These provided more than 91% of the domestic needs: especially psychiatric, dermal, gynecological, ophthalmic medications and children’s syrup.   At that time, blood derivatives, cancer drugs, and vaccines were imported, yet the prices were affordable for all levels of society.  The pharmaceutical industry employed around 30,000 workers and Syria held 2^nd place among Arab countries in covering its local needs, as well as held the 2^nd place among Arab countries in the volume of exports of medicines.  The Syrian medicines ranked #1 in Yemen and Iraq, and had been exported to 57 countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and had been used by UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Present situation

Today, the pharmaceutical industry in Syria is on the rebound, but hampered by the post-war economic crisis, US-EU sanctions which continue to prevent importing drugs or the raw materials to make drugs, and the devalued Syrian currency, which makes drug prices higher than many consumers can afford. ‘Diamond Pharma’ factory in the countryside of Damascus was able to re-open after the SAA fully liberated the Damascus countryside in May 2018. As of July 2019, Aleppo has managed to complete 1,216 projects of rehabilitation to infrastructure, and this has allowed more than 15,000 industrial facilities to re-open after years of closure.  565 facilities are now in production in Sheikh Najjar Industrial Zone.  Syrian businesses have fought back against the US-NATO attack for ‘regime change’, which has failed, but succeeded in destroying much of Syria and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, injuries, and displacements.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a political commentator. 

Featured image is from www.news.cn

Political

NATO’s London Summit on December 3 and 4, 2019 displays the deep political crisis of the 70-year-old alliance: Only a dinner and a short meeting, no statement to be issued, quarrels among the leading military members, accusations, substantial differences on Syria and many other issues, the deepest-ever Transatlantic conflict and the usual issues of burden-sharing.

Legal

But the political dimension of NATO’s crisis is only one. There is also a legal crisis. You’ll recognize it if you care to read the NATO Treaty text – something academic and media people don’t generally seem to have done. They would then have noticed that the Alliance of 2019 consistently operates outside – indeed in violation of – its own goals, purposes and values. For instance, the UN Charter which should be NATO’s guideline has been violated on a permanent basis for decades – such as in its out-of-area bombings of Yugoslavia with no UN mandate.

The contempt shown for international law in general and the UN Charter in particular is an integral part of NATO’s existential crisis.

Moral

And, third, there is a moral dimension to NATO’s crisis. Of course, no one talks about it.

It’s the simple fact that no war that individual NATO members states or NATO as NATO have engaged in can be termed anything but predictable fiascos when judged by the alliance’s own stated goals and criteria – just think of Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… all crystal clear moral catastrophes causing unspeakable suffering, death and destruction to millions upon millions while achieving none of the stated goals that were set to explain and legitimize these wars such as creating democracy, respecting human rights, liberating women or stopping alleged genocides.

By now, the world should have been told enough lies about NATO’s benevolent motives, policies and actions for taxpaying citizens to mobilize resistance to it.

These three crises can all be related to the response of the Western world to the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact 30 years ago – i.e. to the choice to expand NATO and exploiting the weakness of Russia.

Intellectual

The last and perhaps most-hidden-of-all crisis is NATO’s intellectual crisis.

It’s now an alliance that operates in a kind of echo chamber with little, or no, sense of the realities of the world. It’s there for its own sake. When you listen to its Secretary-General – not only Stoltenberg but Fogh Rasmussen and earlier ones – you sense a level of creativity and intellectualism that reminds you of leaders who also happened to be Secretaries-General such as, say, Leonid Breznev.

Irrespective of some little objective analysis of the situation, NATO sings only one tune: There are new threats all the time, we must arm more, we need new and better weapons and we must, therefore, increase military expenditures.

And how is it legitimized?

By uttering mantras. No matter what NATO and its members choose to do, it is simply stated without a trace of argument or documentation that more money will increase four things: Defence, security, stability and peace. And be good for basic Western values such as freedom, democracy and peace.

How come – the small boy watching the Emperor would ask – that no matter what NATO has done the last 70 years, it is still maintaining that it needs more to create that defence, security, stability and peace?

What’s wrong with a system that keeps applying the same medicine decade after decade and gets further and further from achieving the stipulated goal?

Military expenditures in general – no balance and no reality check

NATO’s main enemy is supposed to be Russia. It doesn’t matter that Russia’s military expenditures are about 6-7 % of NATO’s total expenditures (29 countries). It doesn’t matter that NATO’s technical quality is superior. It doesn’t matter that Russia’s military expenditures are falling year-by-year – decreased to US $ 64 billion in 2018 from US $ 66 billion in 2017. It doesn’t matter that Russia’s military expenditures averaged only US $ 45 billion from 1992 until 2018.

Only? Yes, NATO’s total budget is US $ 1036 billion of which the US stands for 649.

And it doesn’t matter that the old Warsaw Pact budget were some 65-75% of NATO’s during the first Cold War and we were told back then that some kind of balance was good for stability and peace. Today we are told that the more superiority NATO has, the better it is for world peace.

In short, reality doesn’t matter anymore to NATO.

The 2 per cent goal

And this is where the 2 per cent of GNP comes into play and reveals just how deep NATO’s crisis is. But have you seen anybody questioning this 2 per cent goal as the philosophical nonsense – or forgery – it is?

It resembles the Theatre of the Absurd to tie military expenditures to the economic performance of a country. Imagine a person sets off 10 % of her/his income to buy food. Suddenly he or she wins in a lottery or is catapulted into a job that yields a 5 times higher income. Should that person then also begin to eat 5 times more?

The 2 per cent goal is an absurdity, an indicator of defence illiteracy. People who take it serious – in politics, media and academia – obviously have never read a basic book about theories and concepts in the field of defence and security. Or about how one makes a professional analysis of what threatens a country.

If military expenditures are meant to secure a country’s future, do the threats that this country faces also vary according to its own GNP? Of course not! It is a bizarre assumption.

Decent knowledge-based defence policies should be decided on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of threats and contain dimensions such as:

What threatens our nation, our society now and along various time horizons? Which threats that we can imagine are so big that we can do nothing to meet them? Which are such that it is meaningful to set off this or that sum to feel reasonably safe? What threats seem so small or unlikely that we can ignore them?

What threats are most likely to go from latent to manifest? How do we prioritize among scarce resources when we have other needs and goals than feeling secure such as developing our economy, education, health, culture, etc.?

And, most importantly, two more consideration: What threats can be met with predominantly military means and which require basically civilian means? And how do we act today to prevent the perceived threats from becoming a reality that we have to face – how do we, within our means, prevent violence and reduce risks as much as possible.

All these questions should be possible to answer with the new mantra: Just always give the military 2 per cent of the GNP and everything will be fine?

The MIMAC

MIMAC is the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – the vested interests of small elites in symbiosis with governments which run on and benefit from bizarre standards like the 2 per cent goal.

One purpose of that goal is to make serious, empirical and relevant threat analysis irrelevant. It’s a perpetuum mobile – a way of securing that MIMAC always gets what it needs, no matter what the consequences are for thosee who pay it all, the citizens and their tax money.

Imagine that Russia disappeared from the earth tomorrow. And NATO would quickly find some other “enemy” by which to legitimate that it anyhow needs also 2 per cent of your BNP in the future. At least!

NATO Titanic

Its Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg two days ago announced this mind-boggling news, swallowed by media as the most natural thing of the world in need of no questions – read it on NATO’s homepage:

“Ahead of the meeting of NATO Leaders in London to mark the Alliance’s 70th anniversary, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday (29 November 2019) gave details of large increases in Allied defence spending. Mr. Stoltenberg announced that in 2019 defence spending across European Allies and Canada increased in real terms by 4.6 %, making this the fifth consecutive year of growth. He also revealed that by the end of 2020, those Allies will have invested $130 billion more since 2016. Based on the latest estimates, the accumulated increase in defence spending by the end of 2024 will be $400 billion. Mr. Stoltenberg said: “This is unprecedented progress and it is making NATO stronger.’ “

Read it carefully: NATO’s military expenditure increase 2016-2020 is US $ 130 billion – that is twice as much as Russia’s total annual budget!

There is only two words for it: Madness and irrationality. Madness in and of itself and madness when seen in the perspective of all the other problems humanity must urgently find funds to solve.

The total regular UN budget for the year 2016-17 was US $ 5.6 billion. That is, NATO countries spend 185 times more on the military than all the world does on the UN.

Do you find that sane and in accordance with the problems humanity need to solve? This author does not. I stand by the word madness. There exists no rational academic, empirical analysis and no theory that can explain NATO’s military expenditures as rational or in service of the common good of humankind.

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The world’s strongest, nuclear alliance is a castle built on intellectual sinking sand. It’s a political, moral, legal and intellectual Titanic.

The only armament NATO needs is legal, moral and intellectual. And unless it now moves in this direction, it deserves to be dissolved.

The inverse proportion between its destructive power and its moral-intellectual power is – beyond any doubt – the largest single threat to humanity’s future.

This challenge is at least as serious and as urgent as is climate change.

Perhaps it is time to stop keeping NATO alive by taxpayers’ money and start a tax boycott in all NATO countries until it is dissolved or at least comes down to – say – one-tenth of its present wasteful military level? Not to speak of its bootprint destruction of the environment…

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Good bye, Lebanon, metaphorically and truly.

Good bye to a country which, many believe, actually has already ceased to exist.

For five long years I have been commuting between the Asia Pacific and the Middle East.And Beirut, for all that time, was one of my homes.

I arrived in Beirut when the situation in the region was beginning to be unbearable; when destabilized, tortured Syria commenced losing its children in large numbers. They were forced to leave their homeland, heading for Beirut and the Beqaa Valley, and in fact, to all parts of the world. I arrived when Syrian refugees were freezing to death, exploited and brutalized in ancient, godforsaken villages lost in the deep, lawless Lebanese valleys.

I was not supposed to write about it, but I did. I was not supposed to see what I saw. It was the UN’s shame, a well-hidden and well covered one, obscured by technical jargon. Refugees were not called refugees, and camps were not really officially registered as camps. What you had clearly seen with your own eyes, you were told, was actually totally something else. But it wasn’t. Eyes hardly lie.

Lebanon’s mirages, sandcastles and myths. If you live here, they surround you, suffocate you, choke you, all the time.

I arrived when the Palestinians began rebelling inside the horrific camps; hopeless, monstrous places where tens of thousands of human beings have been forced to live, for decades, without help, with hardly any rights.

And I left when the country collapsed. When the gap between the haves and have nots reached such enormous proportions, that it often began to appear that there were actually two different countries, even universes, on the same tiny geographical territory that is called Lebanon.

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But before I left, there was an uprising.

Of course, periodically, there are rebellions here, which are misleadingly called “revolutions”. The“revolution” of 2005, of 2015, and now again, in 2019.

I worked in the center of Beirut, in the squares packed with the protesters. I tried to understand, to analyze, to find context.

And what did I witness? Huge clenched fists, those of the Serbian “Otpor”, a CIA-Serbian (extreme right-wing) ‘organization’, which forced the government of Slobodan Milosevic out of power, and which later infiltrated and destroyed genuine revolts all over the Middle East; revolts cynically called by the Western mass media – “Arab Spring”.

I actually saw many signs of Otpor, a sister group of Canvas, and when I asked protesters in Beirut whether they knew what these organizations represented, they replied that “no”, they didn’t but “they’d definitely ask their designers”.

There was a lot of waving of flags, plenty of singing, and even dancing. Rebellion Lebanese-style. One big party. Smiles, laughter, even when things get desperate.

Protesters have many grievances, and they are willing to discuss them, openly: corruption, hardship, almost non-existent social services, and hardly any future.

But do not look for any signs of ideology here, in 2019: this is not a communist, or even a socialist, rebellion, although historically, Lebanon has vibrant socialist and communist movements, both of them.

One thing is certain: protesters “do not like ‘elites’”, but you will search in vain for slogans denouncing capitalism; something that is so common in Chile and of course, in Bolivia (but not in Hong Kong, where the riots are clearly backed by the West and by some local ‘elites’).

Protesters do not like electricity blackouts, water shortages, filth accumulated everywhere because of the failed garbage collection and recycling. The protesters hate the high prices, and traffic jams.

But what do they want, really?

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They want a “better Lebanon”. But what is that?

A Lebanon free of racism, for instance? No, I never saw any signs denouncing racism.

When I first began living here, I was horrified by the bigotry of the locals.

A driver working for one of the UN agencies, did not even try to hide his ‘beliefs’:

“The Turkish nation has improved. In the past, they only screwed Asian women, and as a result, they all looked like dogs. After they conquered the Balkans, and began screwing European women, their stock got better.” 

Arriving at Rafik Hariri International Airport, I often saw humiliated Philippine, Ethiopian, or Kenyan women, locked in crowded rooms, guarded by Lebanese security forces. They looked like slaves, treated like meat. Unhurriedly, their “owners” would come to fetch them, signing release papers, leading them away.

The abuse of domestic workers in Lebanon is horrific; torture, rape and death are common. Foreign workers are regularly committing suicide. While there is hardly any legal protection for them.

Is this going to change? Are protesters demanding a “better Lebanon” which would once and for all finish with this sort of discrimination?Again, I have never heard about such demands.

And what has been sustaining Lebanon, financially, for decades?

All over West Africa, unscrupulous, racist and brutal Lebanese businesspeople have been exploiting local folks, while plundering natural resources. The things that I heard in Ivory Coast, would shock even the most hardened readers. But are there any slogans in Beirut demanding theplunder of West Africa stop?

Another fabled source of income are the narcotics, grown and processed in the Beqaa Valley. If it were to be marijuana, who cares? But Lebanon is producing heroin and cocaine, but above all, so-called “combat drugs”, including Captagon, which is used on the battlefields of Syria and Yemen. Captagonis regularly smuggled out of the country by the Saudis, and used in jihadi operations, as I have reported.

Is this going to end? Are Lebanese protesters demanding a “better Lebanon” without drugs that are helping to kill and torture tens of thousands of innocent people, all over the region?

What are the other sources of income here? Banking, of course. Banks that operate all over the Middle East, and the Gulf.

And, of course, “foreign aid”. Aid which is supposed to “help the immigrants”, as well as the poor Lebanese who are “suffering from the waves of refugees”, arrivingfrom countries destabilized by the West. These funds regularly disappear, fully or partially”,into the deep pockets of the Lebanese elites, who make sure to generate profits no matter what: when the refugees keep arriving, and even when they leave.

Before I departed, I spent one week wandering all around Beirut, day and night, searching foranswers, looking for signs that the protesters were really determined to change the country. Not just for themselves, but for everyone in Lebanon, and for the entire Arab world.

I encountered too many abstract slogans, most of them of Western origin.Not even a trace of Syrian Pan-Arabism. Nothing that would even remotely resemble internationalism. This was clearly a “European-style” rebellion.

*

As always, the Lebanese security forces were intimidating me and many others.

Coming to Martyr’s Square, at night, I only pointed the lens of my camera in the direction of a group of lazy, cynical looking soldiers, and it propelled them immediately into action. They tried to force me to delete the images, to apologize. I did not budge. I had no problem photographing police in Hong Kong, or in Paris, Chile or other places. And I have had enough, after 5 years here, of these inept and arrogant brutes.

But here, the armed forces are “unique”; not much is expected from them. It is Hezbollah which comes to the rescue of Lebanon whenever it is attacked by Israel. Hezbollah fighters are well trained, and they are disciplined. While the Lebanese army (and its various “forces”) is manned by those who cannot find a decent job. If it protects somebody or something, it is the Lebanese regime, sustained bythe West and Saudi Arabia.

I refused to hand over my phones and cameras to them.

“Arrest me,” I offered, extending both my hands.

They did not. It would be too much effort, and paperwork.

Later, the protesters hugged me:

“It is great that you did not surrender your material to them. You see, if it was us, the Lebanese, they would beat us up, and smash our cameras.” 

A lady protester added:

“You never know what they are hiding, but they are hiding something, always. Perhaps they did not want the world to see how lazy they are. They stand here, in clusters, doing nothing, chatting. Then, when they get tired of doing nothing, they mobilize and attack us. They are unpredictable.”

A couple of months ago, during the short conflict between Israel and Lebanon (Israeli drone attack and Hezbollah retaliation), I managed to drive to the border, as I had on several previous occasions.

Almost the entire defense of Lebanon has been resting on the shoulders of Hezbollah, with UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) troops, consisting of Indonesian, South Korean, Italian, Ghanaian and others forces, patrolling the frontier in armored vehicles, and providing mostly psychological deterrence from the large fortified bases, including the one at Naqoura.

Lebanese armed forces have very little ability to defend their country. That includes theLebanese Air Force, which mainly counts on things that could be described as toy airplanes, with converted Cessna models.

Now, theLebanese army and police are facing and confronting their own people, protecting the regime in Beirut, as well as foreign, mainly Western and Saudi, interests.

*

But back to the main question which is, surprisingly, very rarely asked by the Western mass media outlets: “What do Lebanese people really want? What is the goal of the uprising?”

Rebellion began on October 17, against proposed tax on WhatsApp calls. It soon turned into call for resignation of the entire government; call for total overhaul of the Lebanese system. Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, resigned. Others stayed, but country has been paralyzed for weeks.

Some Lebanese call what is happening on the streets of Beirut, Tripoli and other cities, an “October Revolution”, but in reality, this uprising has very little to do with the iconic Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

However, one positive thing is that many Lebanese people are now calling for direct democracy, and for a people’s parliament.

Alessandra Bajec recently wrote for The New Arab newspaper:

“Protests and strikes are not the only nationwide thing dominating Lebanon. Open discussions held by groups of citizens is the latest phenomenon happening on the streets of Lebanon. 

A series of open discussions led by a variety of groups of citizens are held daily around Lebanon helping to feed the hearts and minds of the revolutionary movement since the start of the country’s so-called “October Revolution”. 

I witnessed those gatherings in Beirut. It is an impressive idea, in a way far more advanced than what has been observed in Europe, during the recent protests in France and elsewhere.

It is clear that Lebanese rebels have had enough of the sectarian politics, of savage capitalism (although, this is not being pronounced as such), and of the endemic corruption.

For decades, after the devastating Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), thecountry remained bitterly divided. Again, it is actually something that is not supposed to be discussed, even mentioned, but allegiances in this nation of (officially) 4.4 million, have been commonly pledged toreligious leaders and movements, and not to the state.

David Morrison wrote in Labor & Trade Union Review:

“Lebanon’s political system has a uniquely confessional character, which has its origin in the National Pact of 1943.  Under this unwritten Pact, the President of the Republic must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and the President (Speaker) of the Parliament a Shiite Muslim. 

What is more, 50% of the 128 seats in the Parliament are allocated to Christians, and 50% to Muslims, and these allocations are further sub-divided for Christian and Muslim sects.  In total, seats are allocated to each of 18 sects.  Nationally, the 64 Christian seats are allocated as follows: Maronite 34, Greek Orthodox 14, Greek Catholic 8, Armenian Orthodox 5, Armenian Catholic 1, Protestant 1 and Others 1; and the 64 Muslim seats are allocated as follows: Sunni 27, Shiite 27, Druze 8 and Alawite 2. 

So, in total Christians have 50% of the seats, and the Sunni and Shiite communities just over 20% each. 

There was no provision in the National Pact for altering these allocations to reflect demographic changes.  And there is still none today.  These allocations may have corresponded to the proportion of each sect in the electorate at one time, but they certainly don’t today.  But it’s impossible to say with any precision what they should be, since there hasn’t been a national census since 1932.  This is a very sensitive issue within Lebanon, an issue that has the potential to trigger civil conflict.” 

Naturally, this sclerotic and stale system of secretive divides and coalitions, led to outrageous corruption. Religious and family clans managed to amass tremendous wealth, while enjoying almost absolute impunity.

Discussing sensitive political issues with various Lebanese protesters and activists in 2015 (“You Stink” movement), as well as during the recent uprising of 2019, I came to the clear understanding that most of the educated protesters (and Lebanon is without any doubt one of the most educated nations in the Arab world), have been totally rejecting the sectarian system. In fact, they were thoroughly disgusted with it.

As early as in 2015, one of the main demands was to “unite Lebanon”; to make sure that it gets governed by people elected based on their virtues and excellence, instead of religious beliefs.

Particularly young people have had enough of those escapes to Cyprus (in order to get married), if a couple belonged to two different religions, or if one or both individuals had no religion at all. They were revolted by the fact that their child could no be registered in their own country, if there was no official Lebanese marriage certificate.

And most of the people I spoke to, understood that the shocking lack of transparency on which the Lebanese regime has been thriving, only serves those very few extremely rich individuals and families. The economy of the country is shattered, debt is at 150% GDP, basically unserviceable, and the divide between the rich and poor, monstrous. For millions, leaving the country became the only option. But luxury marinas are full of lavish yachts, while Maserati sport cars and Range Rover SUVs are parked all over the capital, in front of luxury restaurants and bars.

The Lebanese revolutionaries are organizing open discussions, but that is not all – they want a totally new political system.

The problem is, they are not sure, which one.

But, they are certain that by holding open forums and public meetings,they will, eventually, find out what precisely it is they want.

Alessandra Bajec continues witha description of direct-democracy groups:

Rachad Samaha, a social activist and core member of the free discussions group adds, “We were talking among ourselves about how we could be more involved in the revolution… not just by joining protests, but through helping to bring people together to discuss issues that we are all fighting against. We can then reach some common ground.” 

Centering such group discussions over the need to change the current political system, and put an end to sectarianism, and possible ways to fix the country’s rapidly declining economy has been the leading drive for prompting exchanges of views between people from within the largest protest movement. 

The major matters of national concern voiced by citizens taking part in the talks include the accelerating economic crisis, the embezzlement of public funds, the decades-long ruling political elites who are being held responsible for the deepening crisis, and the confessional system, where power is divided among sects and has created patronage networks and clientelism at the detriment of the population.” 

All this is true. But this is Lebanon, the Middle East, where nothing is really simple.

Here, the West has a tremendous influence, and so do the best allies of Washington in the region, the Saudis. All this money ‘wasted’, all that eye-closing, simply ought to have guaranteed certain allegiances.

Under the surface, the West, Israel and Saudi Arabia are all after Iran, and Iran is allied with Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is the only true and powerful social force in Lebanon, where almost everything public has been already privatized, or stolen, or both.

Hezbollah is also the only true protection that Lebanon has, against Israel. While the West does not want anyone to be protected against Israel.

Predictably, Hezbollah is on the “terrorist list” of the United States, and on the lists of several of its allies.

Hezbollah had a strategic alliance with the previous government of Hariri, who resigned several weeks ago (and Hezbollah was warning against pushing for the collapse of the government, and even tried to clear the roadblocks erected by the protesters).

Now, what will really happen if the protesters win? Who will be benefiting? What if theold regime collapses; what if there is no more Hezbollah, and no more protection against the “Southern Neighbor”?

*

What kind of Lebanon can replace this present, terribly inefficient, even brutal and corrupt state?

If you are in Achrafieh neighborhood, the richest place in Lebanon, where the old Christian money resides, you would be told, by many, things that you would most likely not want to hear.

You’d be “explained” that Lebanon was supposed to be a Christian country, that the French created it as the only Christian state in the Middle East. You would hear Palestinians being insulted, horribly, and you would see posters of extreme-right-wing political leaders.

Once, there, I had a haircut, and an old barber parted with me, by raising his right hand into the air, and shouting: “Heil Hitler!” (After that, I quickly switched to a Syrian barber).

A neighbor once told me:

“French imperialism? Oh, but we would love to have the French back! That would be brilliant, to be colonized by them, again, no?” 

It was not a joke. He meant it. Each and every word, that he uttered.

These things are not supposed to be written about, at least not in the mainstream press. But this is not the mainstream press, and I believe that without understanding these nuances, it is impossible to understand Lebanon, and what could happen if the revolution wins.

Who is singing and dancing at the center of Beirut? Who is demanding for the resignation of the entire regime? Are these mainly Christians or Muslims? I am not sure. Judging by the number of headscarves, most likely, the majority are not Muslim. But again, I am not sure. This is not a question that one can present, to the protesters.

This is definitely not a revolution that would advance the interests of the Muslim-socialist Iran. And the same could be said about what is going on, simultaneously, in Iraq.

Can Western-backed “secularism” convert Lebanon into a Western outpost in the Middle East? Could it further hurt, even damage, Syria? Theoretically, yes. Could it hurt the interests of non-Western, anti-imperialist countries like Russia and China? Most definitely.

Is that what is happening? Could this be another shade of the “Color Revolutions”, or a continuation of the so-called Arab Spring?

No one can answer these questions, yet. But the situation has to be monitored, extremely carefully. Given the history of Lebanon, given its position in the world, its political and economic orientation, as well as education, the country can go either way. Given the choice, people could opt for a socialist state, or of returning to the Western colonial realm.

The West is doing all it can to bring Lebanon into its orbit. The clenched fists of Otpor are clear proof and warning of it. It is a well documented fact, thatCanvashas been operating here at least since 2005.

*

Leaving Beirut, at the gate, I was once again stopped by anofficer of the security forces. He was rude. They always search for Israeli stamps or for exit stamps, or something, in the passports. And I had enough of him. Here, at Rafik Hariri, I saw them, for years, humiliating Ethiopian women, crushing Syrians, while treating like gods, white visitors from Europe and the United States.

“Why not fight Israelis, instead of women and children?” I suggested to him, grinning.

And all hell broke loose. And they dragged me away from the gate. And the giant Boeing 777-300 had to wait, as Air France refused to back down and download my luggage and leave me behind.

They called some generals back in Beirut. They were jumping around, shouting something, bluffing. I couldn’t care one single bit. My work here was finished. In Paris, I had nine days to kill, writing, before departing for South America. Waiting there, or in some filthy jail in Lebanon, made very little difference to me. I would haveliked to be in Damascus, but my visa had already expired. So, I just waited.

In the end, they let me go. Prisoners who are not scared, are not fun to hold.

The airplane maneuvered towards the runway, then the engines roared, and we took off. Halas.

My memory cards are holding hours of footage from all corners of Lebanon. I was not sure what will I do with it.

Above all, I was not sure what the Lebanese will do with their own country.

A giant clenched fist was stickingout from the Martyr’s Square. Wasthis a foreign implant, a well-planned sabotage, or a genuine symbol of resistance?

On Independence Day, the fist was burned down, destroyed. Vandals!, screamed foreign media. I am not sure: this is extremely complex country.

The country was collapsing. Perhaps it has already collapsed. People were talking, shouting, singing. Some were living in dire misery. Others were driving Ferraris and torturing imported maids.

The country has been desperately trying to go forward. But forward could mean many, many different directions.In Lebanon, for each person, for each group: forward is towards somewhere else!

*

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Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China and Ecological Civilization. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

All images in this article are from the author

The fake news allegations that Russia “meddled” in Bolivia’s recent election in order to help (“former”) President Morales win and the more recent claims late last month that its soldiers are supposedly “waiting for his return” in order to presumably help restore him to power are nothing more than provocations designed to manufacture the “plausible pretext” for the coup “authorities” to renege on their country’s previously agreed-upon deals with Moscow unless the latter possibly concedes to renegotiating “better” (lopsided) terms, but even then, some of the most strategic projects might still be canceled under heavy US pressure.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is both brain dead and divided as it holds latest annual meeting in London, with nothing but uncertainty surrounding its future and many questioning whether it can even remain functional in its present form.

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth.

1. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the time. Most scientists believe that this mass extinction was precipitated by glaciation and falling sea levels (possibly a result of the Appalachian mountain range forming), catastrophically impacting animal life which lived largely in the ocean at the time.
2. The Late Devonian Extinction happened about 364 million years ago and destroyed 75% of species on Earth. Possibly spread over hundreds of thousands of years, a sequence of events that depleted the oceans of oxygen and volcanic ash that cooled the Earth’s surface are believed to have driven the extinctions. It was to be 10 million years before vertebrates again appeared on land. ‘If the late Devonian extinction had not occurred, humans might not exist today.’
3. The Permian-Triassic extinction, which occurred 251 million years ago, is considered the worst in all history because around 96% of species were lost. ‘The Great Dying’ was precipitated by an enormous volcanic eruption ‘that filled the air with carbon dioxide which fed different kinds of bacteria that began emitting large amounts of methane. The Earth warmed, and the oceans became acidic.’ Life today descended from the 4% of surviving species.
4. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction happened between 214 million and 199 million years ago and, as in other mass extinctions, it is believed there were several phases of species loss. The blame has been placed on an asteroid impact, climate disruption and flood basalt eruptions. This extinction laid the path that allowed for the evolution of dinosaurs which later survived for about 135 million years.
5. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, best known of ‘the Big 5’ mass extinctions, occurred 65 million years ago, ending 76% of life on Earth including the dinosaurs. A combination of volcanic activity, asteroid impact, and climate disruption are blamed. This extinction period allowed for the evolution of mammals on land and sharks in the sea.
6. The sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history is the one that is being experienced now. Unlike earlier mass extinctions, which helped to pave the way for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the precipitating cause of this extinction event is Homo sapiens itself and, moreover, Homo sapiens is slated to be one of the species that becomes extinct.

Let me explain why this is so by touching on the diverse range of forces driving the extinctions, concepts such as ‘co-extinction’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’, the ways in which extinction impacts are often ‘hidden’ in the short term, thus masking the true extent of the destruction, and the implications of all this for life on Earth, including Homo sapiens, in the near term.

But before I do this, consider this excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind written by Yuval Noah Harari, commenting on the expansion of ancient humans out of Africa:

‘If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution [which Harari argues occurred during the period between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago and probably involved an internal restructuring of the Sapiens brain to facilitate learning, remembering, imagining and communicating while also, in the case of the earlier date, coinciding with the time when Sapiens bands started leaving Africa for the second time], the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution [about 12,000 years ago], only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools.

‘This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution’ with mammoths, for example, vanishing from the Eurasian and North American landmasses by 10,000 years ago as Homo sapiens spread. Despite this, mammoths thrived until just 4,000 years ago on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel, then suddenly disappeared with the arrival of humans.

While there has been some debate about the full extent of the human impact compared to, say, climate and environmental changes including ice age peaks – see, for example, ‘What killed off the giant beasts – climate change or man?’ and ‘What Killed the Great Beasts of North America?’ – the archeological record provides compelling evidence of the role of Homo sapiens as, in Harari’s words, ‘an ecological serial killer’. There is further well-documented evidence in Professor Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People an excerpt of which in relation to New Zealand, where the megafauna survived until Maoris arrived just 800 years ago and then rapidly vanished, can be read here: ‘The Future Eaters’.

And the onslaught has never ended as the inexorable encroachment of Homo sapiens to the remotest corners of the Earth (including virtually all of the thousands of islands of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans) has inevitably led to the extinction of myriad local species including birds, insects and snails. In fact, following the Industrial Revolution about 270 years ago which enabled the development of killing technologies on a scale unheard of previously, the human assault on life on Earth has accelerated so effectively that 200 species of life are now driven to extinction daily.

Whatever other claims they might make about themselves, human beings are truly the masters of death.

So where do we stand today?

According to one recent report, the Earth is experiencing what could be described as ‘just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg’. See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’. ‘Just the tip?’, you might ask.

Extinction-causing Behaviours

The primary human behaviours that are modifying Earth’s biosphere, with catastrophic outcomes for many species, are readily apparent and well-described in the scientific literature: destruction of habitat (such as oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) whether through military violence, radioactive contamination, industrial activities (including ecosystem destruction to build cities, roads and railroads but a vast range of other activities besides), chemical poisoning or other means; over-exploitation; biotic invasion and the effects of environmental modification, including climatic conditions, leading to temperature rise, more frequent droughts, ocean acidification and other impacts which so alter a locality’s environmental conditions that tolerance limits for inhabiting species are breached causing localized extinctions. Unfortunately, however,  there are other, more complicated, mechanisms that can exacerbate species loss.

‘In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse.’ In simple language, a species cannot survive without the resources (the other species) on which it depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire systems’.

This is because resource and consumer interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity (including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several higher-level consumers.

Summarizing the findings of several studies based on simulated or real-world data, Dr. Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw explain why ‘we should expect most events of species loss to cause co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural rate at which populations and species are now disappearing, and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive biological communities to collapse. Furthermore, co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the population size of a species could result in the local disappearance of other species depending on the first. This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes.’

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of this phenomenon, Strona and Bradshaw note that ‘As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources – a process known as “co-extinction” – is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss’ [emphasis added] and that ‘ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.’ See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’.

In their own recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Professors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document another frequently ignored element in understanding the accelerating nature of species extinctions.

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’, even in ‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists and accountants).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of local populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Another recent study examined ‘Experimental Evidence for the Population-Dynamic Mechanisms Underlying Extinction Cascades of Carnivores’, and was undertaken by Dr. Dirk Sanders, Rachel Kehoe & Professor F.J. Frank van Veen who sought to understand ‘extinction cascades’. Noting that ‘Species extinction rates due to human activities are high’, they investigated and documented how ‘initial extinctions can trigger cascades of secondary extinctions, leading to further erosion of biodiversity.’ This occurs because the diversity of consumer species is maintained due to the positive indirect effects that these species have on each other by reducing competition among their respective resource species. That is, the loss of one carnivore species can lead to increased competition among prey, leading to extinctions of those carnivore species dependent on prey that loses this competition.

Another way of explaining this was offered by Dr. Jose M. Montoya:

‘Species do not go extinct one at a time. Instead… ecosystems change in a kind of chain reaction, just like in bowling. The impact of the ball knocks down one or two pins, but they hit other pins and this ultimately determines your score. Likewise, when in an ecosystem one species goes extinct many others may follow even if they are not directly affected by the initial disturbance. The complex combination of direct and indirect effects resulting from species interactions determines the fate of the remaining species. To predict the conditions under which extinctions beget further extinctions is a major scientific and societal challenge under the current biodiversity crisis…. Sanders and colleagues… show how and why initial extinctions of predators trigger cascades of secondary extinctions of the remaining predators.’ See ‘Ecology: Dynamics of Indirect Extinction’.

To fully grasp the extent of the crisis in our biosphere, we must look well beyond Earth’s climate: There are a great many variables adversely impacting life on Earth, many of which individually pose the threat of human extinction and which, synergistically, now virtually guarantee it absent an immediate and profound response. As reported in the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services researched and published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the scientific body which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services this provides to society – ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPBES Global Assessmentranks, for the first time at this scale, the 5 direct drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact. So what are the culprits behind nature’s destruction?’ Number 1. on the IPBES list is ‘Changes in land and sea use, like turning intact tropical forests into agricultural land’ but, as noted, there are four others. According to this report: one million species of life on Earth are threatened with extinction.

And in their latest assessment of 100,000 species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that not one species had improved prospects of averting extinction since their previous ‘Red List’ report. See ‘News Release’ and ‘From over 100,000 species assessments in IUCN update, zero improvements’.

Of course, separately from the systemic extinction drivers noted above, including the unmentioned destruction of Earth’s oceans through its absorption of carbon dioxide, pollution with everything from pesticides to plastic, and chronic overfishing which is pushing many ocean species to, or over, the brink of extinction as well, humans also engage in yet other activities that drive the rush to extinction. Hunting wildlife to kill it for trophies or pet food – see ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food” Condemned’ – and trafficking wildlife: a $10-20 billion-a-year industry involving illegal wildlife products such as jewelry, traditional ‘medicine’, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as exotic pets – see ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’ and ‘China must lead global effort against tiger trade’ – play vital roles as well.

In summary, the tragedy of human existence is that the Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens the capacity to plan, organize and conduct an endless sequence of systematic massacres all over the planet but, assuming that we have the genetic capacity to do so, our parenting and education models since that time have ensured that we have been denied the emotional and intellectual capacities to fight, strategically, for our own survival. And the time we have left is now incredibly short.

So what can we do?

Given that the ongoing, systematic industrial-scale destruction of Earth’s wildlife has its origin in evolutionary events that took place some 70,000 years ago but which probably had psychological origins prior to this, it is clearly a crisis that is not about to be resolved quickly or easily.

‘Why the mention of psychology here?’ you might ask. Well, while many other factors have obviously played a part – for example, abundance of a species in a particular context might mean that the issue of killing its individual members for food does not even arise, at least initially – it is clear that, given the well-documented multifaceted crisis in which human beings now find themselves, only a grotesquely insufficient effort is being put into averting the now imminent extinction of our own species which critically requires us to dramatically stem (and soon halt) the tide of wildlife extinctions, among many other necessary responses. See, for example, ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

It is psychologically dysfunctional, to put it mildly, to participate in or condone by our silence and inaction, activities that will precipitate our own extinction, whether these are driven by the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – or by our own dysfunctional overconsumption. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

For that reason, after 70,000 years, we must finally ask ‘Why?’ so that we can address the fundamental drivers of our extinction-threatening behaviour as well the several vital symptoms that arise from those drivers. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental question is this: Why are humans behaving in a way that will precipitate our own extinction in the near term? Surely, this is neither sensible nor even sane. And anyone capable of emotional engagement and rational thinking who seriously considers this behaviour must realize this. So why is it happening?

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience, people who are emotionally functional and capable of critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and respond to crises (or even problems) strategically. Despite this profound social shortcoming, some individuals have nevertheless emerged who have one or more of these qualities and they are inevitably ‘condemned’ to sound the alarm, in one way or another, and to try to mobilize an appropriate response to whatever crisis or problem confronts them at the time.

But, as is utterly obvious from the state of our world, those with these capacities have been rare and, more to the point, they have had few people with whom to work. This is graphically illustrated by the current failure to respond strategically to the ongoing climate catastrophe (with most effort focused on lobbying elite-controlled governments and international organizations), the elite-driven perpetual (and ongoing threat of nuclear) war as well as the other issues, such as the use of geoengineering and the deployment of 5G, that threaten human survival. See ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’, ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ and ‘Why Activists Fail’.

Given the preoccupation of modern society with producing submissively obedient students, workers, soldiers, citizens (that is, taxpayers and voters) and consumers, the last thing society wants is powerful individuals who are each capable of searching their conscience, feeling their emotional response to events, thinking critically and behaving strategically in response. Hence our parenting and education models use a ruthless combination of visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to ensure that our children become terrified, self-hating and powerless individuals like virtually all of the adults around them.

This multifaceted violence ensures that the adult who emerges from childhood and adolescence is suppressing awareness of an enormous amount of fear, pain and anger (among many other feelings) and must live in delusion to remain unaware of these suppressed feelings. This, in turn, ensures that, as part of their delusion, people develop a strong sense that what they are doing already is functional and working (no matter how dysfunctional and ineffective it may actually be) while unconsciously suppressing awareness of any evidence that contradicts their delusion. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’,‘Do We Want School or Education?’ and ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

So if we are going to address the fundamental driver of both the destruction of Earth’s wildlife and the biosphere generally, we must address this cause. For those adults powerful enough to do this, there is an explanation in ‘Putting Feelings First’. And for those adults committed to facilitating children’s efforts to realize their potential and become self-aware (rather than delusional), see ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Beyond this cause, however, we must also resist, strategically, the insane elite-controlled governments and corporations that are a key symptom of this crisis – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – by manufacturing and marketing a vast range of wildlife (and life)-destroying products ranging from weapons (conventional and nuclear) and fossil fuels to products made by the destruction of habitat (including oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) and the chemical poisoning of agricultural land (to grow the food that most people eat) while also using geoengineering and deploying 5G technology worldwide. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

But we can also undermine this destruction, for example, by refusing to buy the products provided by the elite’s corporations (with the complicity of governments) that fight wars (to enrich weapons corporations) to steal fossil fuels (to enrich energy, aircraft and vehicle-manufacturing corporations) or those corporations that make profits by destroying habitats or producing poisoned food, for example. We can do this by systematically reducing and altering our consumption pattern and becoming more locally self-reliant as outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ or, even more simply, by committing to The Earth Pledge (below).

In a nutshell, for example, if we do not travel by car or aircraft, NATO governments will have much less incentive to invade and occupy resource-rich countries to steal their resources and corporations will gain zero profit from destroying wildlife habitat as they endlessly seek to extract the resources necessary to manufacture and fuel these commodities thus saving vast numbers of animals (and many other life forms besides) and easing pressure on the biosphere generally.

You can also consider joining those working to end violence in all contexts by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

The Earth Pledge 

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rainforest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Perhaps the key point to be learned from the evidence cited above is that just as we have triggered a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops that ‘lock in’ an ongoing deterioration of Earth’s climate which we are now virtually powerless to halt (if we were even trying to do so), we have also precipitated a biodiversity crisis that is self-reinforcing because the loss of each and every species has an impact on those species that are dependent on it, precipitating chains of events that make further extinctions inevitable. This is one of the ‘negative synergies’, for example, contributing to the Amazon rainforest’s rapid approach to the tipping point at which it will collapse. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point’.

Hence, we are approaching the final act of a tragedy that had its origins in the Cognitive Revolution some 70,000 years ago and which we have not been able to contain in any way. The earlier acts of this tragedy were the countless species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that Homo sapiens has driven to extinction.

Now, in the final act, we will drive to extinction 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after….

Until, one day very soon now, unless you and those you know are willing to commit yourselves wholly to the effort to avert this outcome, the human assault on life on Earth will reach its inevitable conclusion: the extinction of Homo sapiens.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.

So far, groups in the following countries have announced that they are organizing events on January 25, 2020 as part of the Global Day of Protest against 5G:

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Australia
Austria
Canada
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
France

Germany
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States

If you are organizing an event in a country that is not on that list, please contact Dorotea at [email protected].

Current List of Companies Planning 5G Satellites

As of today, the following companies are planning to launch, or are already launching, 5G satellites into low orbit around the Earth:

SpaceX, based in the United States, has plans for 42,000 satellites, has already launched 120, intends to launch 60 at a time twice a month during 2020, and is developing a larger rocket that can launch 120 at a time. As soon as 420 satellites are in orbit, it plans to turn them on. That could be as early as February 2020.

OneWeb, based in the United Kingdom, has plans for 5,260 satellites and intends to launch 30 at a time every three to four weeks beginning in January 2020. As soon as 300 satellites are in orbit, in late 2020, it plans to turn them on.

Telesat, based in Canada, has plans for 512 satellites, and intends to begin service in 2021.

Amazon has plans for 3,236 satellites and intends to begin service as soon as 578 are in orbit.

Facebook has plans for thousands of satellites but has not disclosed its plans to the public.

Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, has plans for 640 satellites, to be deployed between 2022 and 2026.

Aerospace Science and Industry Corp., a Chinese state-owned company, has plans for 156 satellites, to be in place by 2022.

The above companies will broadcast only 5G and will sell user devices that will be mounted on homes and vehicles and will function as small cells. Another company, Lynk, has plans for “several thousand” satellites that will communicate directly with cell phones and will broadcast not only 5G, but also 2G, 3G and 4G. Lynk intends to begin service in 2023.

In addition to these satellite plans, Loon, a subsidiary of Google, has a contract to provide Internet to remote areas of the Amazon rainforest in Peru from stratospheric balloons.

China Already Has Nationwide 5G and Is Developing 6G

Two countries already have nationwide 5G, China and South Korea. And the insanity continues to escalate: China is already developing 6G. On November 7, CNBC reported that 37 universities, research institutes, and enterprises will be involved in developing 6G technology in China. 6G will use even higher frequencies than 5G, and will send even greater tsunamis of data all over this fragile world. And other countries are rushing to compete as well. The University of Oulu in Finland has a 6G research institute. On September 29, 2019, Rohde and Schwarz demonstrated a prototype system operating at 300 GHz at a workshop in Paris. And in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission is planning to open up frequencies up to 3 THz (3,000 GHz) for research purposes.

Change Begins with Us

Today, the world’s immortal forests are being turned into laser paper for the world’s computers. The world’s great oceans are filling up with microplastics, into which our shampoo bottles and grocery bags, by the disposable billions, are breaking down. Highways, ever wider and faster, are being bulldozed through mountains and across fjords, and invading the last great roadless areas on Earth. And billions of handheld devices are blanketing the Earth with lethal radiation. As Rachel Carson warned, not just the songs of birds, but the croakings of frogs and the buzzings of insects are growing rapidly fainter all over the Earth.

And it is not because we humans have become magically more aggressive towards the Earth since I was born. We were on this Earth for hundreds of thousands of years without doing damage to it. It is our new technology that is aggressive. It is a mistake to think that because IT is so powerful, that WE are so powerful. We aren’t. The truth is exactly the opposite. We are as delicate and vulnerable as the insects, birds and frogs, and we live or die as they do.

The most aggressive piece of technology yet invented is the cell phone. The question we have got to confront is, do we want to survive? Which do we want more: our phones or our planet? Consider:

• Radio frequency radiation is the first pollutant in history that is being deliberatelyspread over every square inch of the Earth, with the goal of leaving no place unpolluted.
• In order for your cell phone to work, the entire wireless infrastructure, including all the cell towers, has to be there, all over the planet.
• A cell phone is not safer than a cell tower. The technology is the same. The radiation is the same. Your biggest source of exposure is your phone, not the towers.

Everyone wants cell phones. No one wants cell towers. Unless this changes, 5G will not be stopped and life on Earth will end. 5G is only more of what we already have, that has already decimated the world’s insect, amphibian and bird populations, and that has caused the present epidemics of cancer, diabetes and heart disease.[1] That is why 5G is not just a threat but an opportunity. The only way we will stop 5G is if we throw away our cell phones. And if we can give up this catastrophic piece of human progress, then it becomes possible to deal rationally with the others—the others that are causing climate change, global deforestation, and the terminal pollution of our soils, oceans and atmosphere.

It is up to us.

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The idea of mobility as a human right has come to be synonymous with private transport. For decades, the car has come first: what right does any government have to encroach on the freedom and autonomy of individual motorists? Labour governments have done little to challenge this notion since mass car ownership took off in the 1960s, and it’s only now, embracing the challenge of achieving zero carbon emissions as soon as is practicable, that Labour has recommitted itself to decent public transport.

Its 2019 manifesto states that ‘Labour will build a sustainable, affordable, accessible and integrated transport system, founded on the principle that transport is an essential public service.’ While it may be an essential service for millions of people – whether or not they have a car at home – public transport has been treated as the cranks’ option since 2010 by a Conservative government that has built more roads than at any point since the early 1990s while permitting the desecration of the bus network. 

Relative to this country’s wealth and population density, public transport cannot afford to get worse. Three thousand bus routes have been lost since 2010 as local authority subsidies to services dropped by 45 per cent. The number of miles travelled by bus fell by nearly five per cent between 2017 and 2018 alone, while car and van traffic, which started falling after the 2008 crash, has risen steadily since 2010. 

Meanwhile, Northern, the second-largest railway franchise holder in the UK, operates most local rail services in northern England but has only got 45.4% of them to run on time in the last month. Plans to electrify major rail routes to west Wales and Cornwall, and through the Peak District to Manchester, have all been cancelled or put on indefinite hold by the Tories. For local travellers in Wales, the south-west of England and most of the north, this has meant another decade spent travelling on clapped-out, unreliable diesel trains. 

Rather than commit to electrification – as Labour does in its manifesto – the Tories have persisted with the introduction of expensive ‘bi-mode’ trains which can switch between electric and diesel, giving hapless former transport secretary Chris Grayling a further excuse to keep much of the rail network west and south of Cardiff trapped in the 19^th century. 

The glaring geographical exception to this rule is London, where Crossrail 2 has been signed off before Crossrail 1 is even finished and Transport for London has been not only allowed, but encouraged, to maintain a policy of low fares and high regulation. If Labour win on 12^th December, the special favours granted to London transport will be extended to the rest of the country. Local authorities will be encouraged to apply to run their own bus services for the first time since deregulation in 1986, and those that do will be rewarded with a subsidy allowing under-26s to travel for free.

Once young adults, as well as children, disabled people and the elderly, can travel by bus for free, most of the constituencies disproportionately reliant on public transport will enjoy a service that is free at the point of use. With Labour offering free broadband, free tuition, free dentistry, the only thing missing from Labour’s pivot towards universal basic services is free public transport for all. 

As already discussed in the pages of Tribune, 100 cities around the world already offer free urban public transport on the grounds that mobility is a right and that the provision of transport should be a basic offering of urban life, like bin collections. This is a key point. For the green revolution to be truly embedded in the daily life of everyone, we need cheap or free zero-emission collective transport. It is the very least we should be afforded in a country as rich as ours. 

By reimagining public transport as a service that enables relationships to be maintained and nurtured, that allows us to get to work in a comfortable and dignified manner, that gives us the chance to relax and enjoy our surroundings rather than be hurtled through them while nestled in someone’s armpit, Labour is offering the chance to reimagine everyday life as a source of enjoyment and nourishment, as opposed to one of stress and endurance. 

If we do not win, we face not so much the further active destruction of the network, but a continued cruel indifference to it. The Tories like to pretend that no one notices or suffers when a bus route is axed. For many people it can mean the difference between a social, independent life and a life of isolation and reliance. 

Labour’s manifesto commitments on transport represent the beginning, rather than the culmination, of a socially just and environmentally sustainable policy. Rather than imagining a car-free future, it imagines electric cars to be the future. It timidly encourages people to ‘leave their car at home’ and take better, cheaper, nicer buses and trains, rather than telling them they won’t need one any more. Fifty years of car domination can’t be overcome in a single term. Yet, as with the offer of free fibre broadband, the promise of better public transport has transformative potential to improve the quality of everyday life. We can’t afford for it to get any worse.

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Lynsey Hanley is a freelance writer and the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide.

Featured image is from Tribune

Trade between the European Union (EU) and the Islamic Republic of Iran has dropped roughly 74.92% percent this year from January to September compared to last year during the same timeframe, due to US-imposed sanctions, according to the European statistical office. The top three trading partners in the European bloc were Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations have described the US’s secondary sanctions as abuse of its global financial dominance.

Iran’s commodities exports have fallen 94% and imports have declined 51.15%. Before the sanctions, the EU was Iran’s main trading partner, but now China and the United Arab Emirates have risen to the first and second slots respectively.

While most discussions regarding Iran and EU trade relations center on oil, a crucial indicator of Europe-Iran trade relations lies in European technology and the billions of dollars’ worth of European parts, machinery, and transport equipment exports, which play an important role in Iran’s industrial sector and economy.

In May 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) complaining that the deal didn’t curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities but Europeans and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have repeatedly confirmed that the nuclear deal was working and that Iran was in compliance.  Since then the remaining five world powers who signed the nuclear deal with Iran, namely the UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany have tried to keep the nuclear deal alive by urging the United States to return to the deal and lift the harsh sanctions.

Immediately after leaving the nuclear deal, the United States reinstated crippling sanctions under its “maximum pressure campaign” with the goal of bringing about “regime change” while reducing Iran’s oil exports to zero.

Iran patiently waited for over a year for the United States to either return to the deal or for European nations to ease their suffering. France advocated for a $15 billion dollar line of credit and an EU Instrument for Supporting Trade Exchanges commonly referred to as INSTEX, became “operational” in June of this year, but hasn’t offered Iran any relief yet.

INSTEX was created to circumvent Washington’s sanctions as a payment channel with the UK, France, and Germany to help Iran continue to trade. The exchange of goods is allowed without requiring direct transfers of money, serving as a diplomatic shield. Good intentions aside, it’s been useless.

Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark and Belgium announced on November 29th that they are in the process of becoming shareholders in INSTEX, in order to support the JCPOA and the economic parts of it and facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran. A joint statement of support for the preservation and full implementation of the JCPOA was made. They reiterated that the nuclear agreement was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council and is an instrumental tool for global non-proliferation and stability in the region.

Unfortunately, neither the line of credit nor INSTEX have been properly implemented yet. With no relief in sight and economic conditions worsening, Iran started to scale back on its commitments under the JCPOA, thus far it has taken four such steps and has vowed to continue to scale back its obligations every sixty days, until there’s a solution.

For almost three decades the United States was Iran’s main military and economic partner and played an important role in its infrastructure and industry modernization, from 1950 until 1978. All of that ended when the US-backed Shah of Iran Mohammed Reza Pahlevi was forced to step down during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And that’s when the United States cut economic and diplomatic ties, froze billions of dollars of assets, and banned Iranian imports.

Iran is the world’s third largest consumer of natural gas after the United States and Russia, and a major oil exporter since 1913.Iran’s economy is dominated by oil and gas production, ownership of 10% of the world’s proven oil reserves and 15% of its gas reserves have earned Iran recognition as an energy superpower. This of course puts a huge target on its back for US imperialism and intervention.

Since mid-2018 US sanctions have been placed on Iran’s oil sales, banking transactions, metals trading, petrochemicals, shipping etc. and as a result, Tehran was forced to raise oil prices on November 15th by fifty percent and impose a strict rationing system. Soon after, protests erupted and at least eight people linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were arrested by Iranian security agents.

Although trade has significantly decreased, Washington’s destructive attempts to kill economic relations between Iran and the European Union have fallen short. If successful, Washington would have benefited from increasing its own oil and commodities trade, at the expense of others.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

On December 2, the 25th two-week long United Nations climate conference begins in Madrid, Spain. The stated task of the conference, referred to as COP 25 (Conference Of Parties), is to make sure there are plans to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. The goals of that agreement, which are nonbinding, are:

1. Reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030;
2. Achieve a net zero global carbon footprint by 2050; and
3. Stabilize the global temperature increase at 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Last week, prominent scientists issued a warning that significant changes related to the climate crisis are already happening and could create a cascading effect that locks in catastrophic levels of temperature and sea-level rise. They view the pledges made by countries to take climate action as insufficient and leading to a three degrees Celsius temperature rise by the end of the century.

It is this reality that is spurring people around the world to take action in the growing global climate emergency movement. Many people are asking what they can do about the climate crisis.

Too little, too late

Each new climate report is direr. The climate crisis is here now. Oceans are heating up and acidifying as they absorb carbon dioxide. This is slowing ocean circulation and killing coral reefs. Ocean circulation impacts the weather – slowing is already changing weather patterns and worsening storms. Coral reefs are necessary for providing habitat and protecting coastlines.

According to a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, ice is melting at an unprecedented pace and sea-level rise is accelerating. This is leading to more frequent and chronic flooding. The world has already warmed to 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels causing droughts and frequent wildfires.

Of great concern is the fact that these changes are not isolated. They feed into and feed off of each other causing a cascading impact that is leading us to a point of no return, at least for thousands of years. For example, as the land thaws, stored methane is being released. Methane is the most potent greenhouse gas in the short term causing more warming and more thawing. The prominent scientists cited above explain this:

“…as science advances, we must admit that we have underestimated the risks of unleashing irreversible changes, where the planet self-amplifies global warming. This is what we are seeing already at 1°C global warming…”

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are failing. Levels are rising even though we need at least a 7.6 percent reduction each year to reach the Paris Agreement goals. Growing energy demand is the biggest culprit. Colder winters and warmer summers mean more energy used to heat and cool our homes and other buildings. In the United States, gas consumption increased by ten percent in 2018 after years of decline. The increase in renewables is not even meeting new energy demands, let alone replacing polluting forms of energy production.

Even though the United Nations admits that not enough is being done to address the climate crisis and that there is no time to waste, it does not wield its power to make sure that effective actions are taken. Instead, as we wrote in 2014, the UN is dominated by global finance and corporations and their subservient governments pushing financial schemes and green technology to enrich themselves even when those projects don’t solve the problem.

In this year’s meeting, the major focus will be the rules for the newest form of a global carbon trading market mandated by the Paris Agreement. Carbon trading has been in existence since the Kyoto Protocol and has not reduced carbon emissions. California’s cap and trade system, one of the largest in the world, is being copied by other countries, but ProPublica found that carbon emissions in California have risen by 3.5 percent under the program as it allows big polluters to purchase credits and even increase their emissions.

There have already been mass protests around the world leading up to the COP meetings. In expectation of more protests at the meetings in Spain, more than 5,000 police have been called out. Thousands of anti-capitalist activists, environmental defenders, and concerned citizens are arriving from all over the world to demand that countries take concrete measures to halt global climate change. The police are on high alert throughout the COP meetings until December 14.

This is the last year that the United States will participate in the United Nations COP meetings as Trump formally withdraws from the Paris Agreement. What are activists in the US to do?

Climate Demonstrators in Cologne on November 29, 2019, before the UN climate summit. Source DPA

Action for the climate

The United States is the second-largest total GHG emitter in the world and the third-largest per-capita GHG emitter behind Saudi Arabia and Australia. The US is the largest producer of new fossil fuels. People in the US have a critical responsibility and role to play in the solution to the climate crisis.

There are lots of discussions going on right now about what people need to be doing and the answer is that we need to be using all the tools available. We cannot count on institutions such as the United Nations, governments and corporations to take appropriate actions without outside pressure. We need to organize resistance and build the solutions in our communities.

A core requirement of effective social movements is to have a clear vision of what they are working to achieve. To be transformational, this vision must embody not only the goal (for example, reducing GHG emissions) but also the structure of the system that will achieve that goal. Two major components of that structure are the ways decisions will be made and how the system will be financed. For more information on social transformation, visit the Popular Resistance School.

Currently, it is the powerholders who make and profit from the decisions. A new system, such as the Green New Deal, could be structured in a way that puts those who are most impacted by the decisions in control and could be financed in a way that reduces the wealth divide. The Ecosocialist Green New Deal, developed by Howie Hawkins, a candidate running for the Green Party presidential nomination, is the strongest proposal. It has the fastest timeline, includes a transition to a peace economy with 75 percent cuts to the military, an Economic Bill of Rights and a Green Economy Reconstruction Program. It would transform multiple sectors of the economy to put in place a clean energy economy by 2030 as well as transitioning to public or worker-controlled ownership.

The next requirements are a strategy to achieve the vision and tactics to serve that strategy. There are a broad range of actions to take and a number of roles to play. Here is a partial list of current actions:

1. Pushing agencies to address the climate crisis in their policies – When the Trump administration announced it would allow more oil and gas drilling on federal lands, advocacy groups came together and sued the Bureau of Land Management to make sure GHG emissions are assessed in considering oil and gas leases. A court recently sided with the groups and hundreds of thousands of acres of leases are being suspended. Another example is the Beyond Extreme Energy campaign to transform the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which grants permits for energy projects, to the Federal Renewable Energy Commission.
2. Direct action to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure – Major campaigns to stop pipelines, fracking and new oil and gas infrastructure are going on across the country. Oil and gas corporations cite this resistance as their biggest obstacle. Last week, activists in Wingdale, NY shut down construction of the Cricket Valley Fracked Gas Power Plant. They are pressuring Governor Cuomo to shut it down for good. And in Clearbrook, Minnesota, activists blocked construction of the Line 3 Pipeline. You don’t have to lock down or climb a tripod to participate. There are many roles required for direct actions such as media support, legal observers, jail support and more.
3. Driving disinvestment in dirty energy – Students, faculty and supporters took action last week to disrupt the Harvard-Yale football game with a message to their schools to divest from fossil fuels and cancel Puerto Rico’s debt. This was one action in an ongoing divestment campaign. The European Investment Bank took a positive step recently by promising to phase out investment in dirty energy over the next two years. Though it is promising to be the first climate bank, activists will still need to watchdog what the bank supports to make sure it is not investing in more false solutions.
4. Protecting the right to protest – We know our actions are having an impact when the state tries to criminalize them. A new law was signed by the governor of Wisconsin making it a felony to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. This is the tenth state to pass such a law. In South Dakota, their anti-protest law was successfully fought in the courts this year.
5. Pressuring lawmakers (and candidates) – During the Extinction Rebellion Global Hunger Strike, which started Nov. 20, a group of activists sat-in House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office calling for her to hold a public meeting with them. Two of them continued their hunger strike through this weekend. The Sunrise Movement has organized actions targeting lawmakers, candidates and the Democratic Party throughout the year. They, along with Fridays for Future, will target lawmakers with a climate strike on December 6.
6. Constructive programs to build alternatives – There are many programs to build positive alternatives from developing regenerative agriculture to a resurgence of small farmers and urban gardens to expanded public transportation, walkable communities, and bike lanes, to incentives for clean energy installation and the formation of worker-owned cooperative green businesses. Recently a new law was passed requiring new roofsin Brooklyn, NY to either have solar panels or greenery. Visit the CREATE section of Popular Resistance for more information.

These are a few examples of many activities for the climate that are being organized. Here are a few final thoughts and observations. First, while changing our personal habits to reduce consumption and emissions is important for transitioning to the world we are working to create, we must remember that the drivers of the crisis are systemic and require systemic solutions. Second, activists often struggle with the issue of activism versus electoral politics. Our view is that in the manipulated US election system, we can’t elect our way out of these crises. Throughout history, it has been mass popular movements that have forced powerholders to either make necessary changes or to lose their power. Electoral politics is a useful tool when it is used to raise awareness for our issues and expose the failings of the current political system but the major focus of our work must be movement building.

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments is the rise of anti-capitalist protests around the world against neoliberalism, a model that drives privatization of land, water, services and more. We can’t solve the climate crisis using capitalist economic models because capitalism is fundamentally about extracting profits at all costs and is based on the overconsumption of a consumer-oriented economy.

Another promising development is the work to make connections between the many crises we face. We cannot solve the climate crisis in isolation because it requires a major restructuring of our entire society. This is the opportunity the climate crisis provides. Over the next decade, with a clear vision of where we want to go, we can shape the world to be one that respects self-determination, human rights and sustainability. That will only come about through organization, planning, and action to create a mass movement.

The seeds of that mass movement are growing. The opportunity has never been so great and the stakes have never been so high.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. 

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Last weekend, the province of Idlib once again turned into the main hot point in Syria.

On November 30, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation and several foreign Jihadi groups, including the Turkistan Islamic Party and Ajnad al-Kavkaz launched a major attack on positions of the Syrian Army in southeastern Idlib.

The advance started with an ambush of an army unit near Tell Dam. 6 soldiers were reportedly killed and 5 others were captured. Then, militants attacked and captured the villages of Sarjah, Ejaz, Rasm al-Ward and Istablat. Pro-militant sources claimed that at least 2 units of army military equipment were destroyed there.

Photos and videos from the ground showed that in many cases terrorists used Turkish-supplied weapons, like HY-12 mortars and HAR-66 anti-tank weapons.

The Syrian Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Forces responded with intense airstrikes on militants’ columns and facilities, as well as provided close air support to soldiers defending their positions. As always pro-militant sources claimed that airstrikes hit civilian targets only.

On December 1, the Syrian Army launched a counter-attack recapturing Ejaz. Government troops also re-entered Sarjah and several areas around it. The situation is developing.

The recent escalation in southern Idlib may lead to resumption of large-scale hostilities and lead to a new ground offensive of the Syrian Army in the region. Greater Idlib will remain the zone of instability as long as groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies operate there. So, this threat should be eliminated.

The National Front for Liberation is a Turkish-backed coalition of militant groups, and a part of the Turkish-controlled fraction known as the Syrian National Army. The Syrian National Army is the main proxy force of Turkey in northeastern Syria. Therefore, the Ankara government bears at least a partial responsibility for hostile actions of its proxies.

At the same time, the situation became relatively stable in northeastern Syria. Over the past days, there have been no intense fighting between Turkish-led forces and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces.

On November 30, the Russian Military Police established an observation point in the border town of Amuda in northern al-Hasakah. The point is located in a large building that has been reportedly used by the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units as a military academy.

Under the Turkish-Russian agreement on northeastern Syria, Kurdish units have to be withdrawn from a 30km zone near the Turkish border and the ceasefire has to be established in the area. Russian forces likely create these observation posts to monitor the ceasefire and propel a political dialogue between the Kurdish leadership and the Assad government.

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“It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”—Thomas Paine

While Congress subjects the nation to its impeachment-flavored brand of bread-and-circus politics, our civil liberties continue to die a slow, painful death by a thousand cuts.

Case in point: while Americans have been fixated on the carefully orchestrated impeachment drama that continues to monopolize headlines, Congress passed and President Trump signed into law legislation extending three key provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which had been set to expire on December 15, 2019.

Once again, to no one’s surprise, the bureaucrats on both sides of the aisle—Democrats and Republicans alike—prioritized political grandstanding over principle and their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution.

As Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) predicted:

Today, while everyone is distracted by the impeachment drama, Congress will vote to extend warrantless data collection provisions of the #PatriotAct, by hiding this language on page 25 of the Continuing Resolution (CR) that temporarily funds the government. To sneak this through, Congress will first vote to suspend the rule which otherwise gives us (and the people) 72 hours to consider a bill. The scam here is that Democrats are alleging abuse of Presidential power, while simultaneously reauthorizing warrantless power to spy on citizens that no President should have… in a bill that continues to fund EVERYTHING the President does… and waiving their own rules to do it. I predict Democrats will vote on a party line to suspend the 72 hour rule. But after the rule is suspended, I suspect many Republicans will join most Democrats to pass the CR with the Patriot Act extension embedded in it.

Massie was right: Republicans and Democrats have no problem joining forces in order to maintain their joint stranglehold on power.

The legislation passed the Senate with a bipartisan 74-to-20 vote. It squeaked through the House of Representatives with a 231-192 margin. And it was signed by President Trump—who earlier this year floated the idea of making the government’s surveillance powers permanent—with nary a protest from anyone about its impact on the rights of the American people.

Spending bill or not, it didn’t have to shake down this way, even with the threat of yet another government shutdown looming.

Congress could have voted to separate the Patriot Act extension from the funding bill, as suggested by Rep. Justin Amash, but that didn’t fly. Instead as journalist Norman Solomon writes for Salon, “The cave-in was another bow to normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.”

That, right there, is the key to all of this: normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.

In the 18 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks, it has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments—and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well.

The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience are now considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

The Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens—no doubt a reflexive impulse shared by small-town police and federal agents alike.

This, according to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr., was a fantasy that “had been brewing in the law enforcement world for a long time.” And 9/11 provided the government with the perfect excuse for conducting far-reaching surveillance and collecting mountains of information on even the most law-abiding citizen.

Federal agents and police officers are now authorized to conduct covert black bag “sneak-and-peak” searches of homes and offices while you are away and confiscate your personal property without first notifying you of their intent or their presence.

The law also granted the FBI the right to come to your place of employment, demand your personal records and question your supervisors and fellow employees, all without notifying you; allowed the government access to your medical records, school records and practically every personal record about you; and allowed the government to secretly demand to see records of books or magazines you’ve checked out in any public library and Internet sites you’ve visited (at least 545 libraries received such demands in the first year following passage of the Patriot Act).

In the name of fighting terrorism, government officials are now permitted to monitor religious and political institutions with no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government has subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation; monitor conversations between attorneys and clients; search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without showing probable cause; and jail Americans indefinitely without a trial, among other things.

The federal government also made liberal use of its new powers, especially through the use (and abuse) of the nefarious national security letters, which allow the FBI to demand personal customer records from Internet Service Providers, financial institutions and credit companies at the mere say-so of the government agent in charge of a local FBI office and without prior court approval.

In fact, since 9/11, we’ve been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized (under the USA Patriot Act, banks are required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any objectionable people), and our activities watched.

We’re also being subjected to invasive patdowns and whole-body scans of our persons and seizures of our electronic devices in the nation’s airports. We can’t even purchase certain cold medicines at the pharmacy anymore without it being reported to the government and our names being placed on a watch list.

It’s only getting worse, folks.

Largely due to the continuous noise from television news’ talking heads, most Americans have been lulled into thinking that the pressing issues are voting in the next election, but the real issue is simply this: the freedoms in the Bill of Rights are being eviscerated.

The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches and the like—all sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—a recitation of the Bill of Rights would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document. However, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

What once were considered inalienable, fundamental “rights”  are now mere privileges to be taken away on a government bureaucrat’s say-so.

To those who have been paying attention, this should come as no real surprise.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the Constitution has been on life support for some time now, and is drawing its final breaths.

The American government, never a staunch advocate of civil liberties, has been writing its own orders for some time now. Indeed, as the McCarthy era and the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. and others illustrates, the government’s amassing of power, especially in relation to its ability to spy on Americans, predates the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001.

What the Patriot Act and its subsequent incarnations did was legitimize what had previously been covert and frowned upon as a violation of Americans’ long-cherished privacy rights.

After all, the history of governments is that they inevitably overreach.

Thus, enabled by a paper tiger Congress, the president and other agencies of the federal government have repeatedly laid claim to a host of powers, among them the ability to use the military as a police force, spy on Americans and detain individuals without granting them access to an attorney or the courts. And as the government’s powers have grown, unchecked, the American people have gradually become used to these relentless intrusions into their lives.

In turn, the American people have become the proverbial boiling frogs, so desensitized to the government’s steady encroachments on their rights that civil liberties abuses have become par for the course.

Yet as long as government agencies are allowed to make a mockery of the very laws intended to limit their reach, curtail their activities, and guard against the very abuses to which we are being subjected on a daily basis, our individual freedoms will continue to be eviscerated so that the government’s powers can be expanded, the Constitution be damned.

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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].

The impunity with which the US aggresses Hong Kong is insane. Equally or more insane is western media coverage of what is going on in Hong Kong. Not one word on how the incredible “pro-democracy” vote of the rather unimportant District Council Elections was achieved. Of the 18 District Councils, 452 of 479 seats (71%) went to “pro-democracy” candidates. Such an extreme anti-Beijing vote could only be obtained by massive western propaganda at the cost of millions of dollars, targeted with algorithms, developed on the principles of the now (apparently) defunct Cambridge Analytica. And this with 70% of eligible voters going to the polls.

None of this practically non-realistic result was analyzed by the west and reported on. In reality, the vast majority of Hong Kongers is sick and tired of the western inspired violence, but are very much proud of being Chinese citizens. They were told by the propagandists that voting for ‘democracy’ candidates was the way to bring peace. And Peace is what everyone wants. After all, integrated into China in 1997, they have enjoyed much more freedom than under British colonialism, where they were not even allowed to vote for their district councils.

The absurdity does not stop here. The US Congress has recently passed legislation that would allow the US monitoring ‘democracy’ and human rights in Hong Kong, the so called “Human Rights and Democracy Act”, with the caveat of imposing sanctions, if Beijing would transgress on the US imposed rules. Can you imagine? Can anyone imagine this all-overarching arrogance?

The US Congress passing legislation to control another foreign territory? And the west goes along with it. It may happen soon in Europe too that the US dictates what sovereign nations are allowed to do and not to do. It is already happening. The US prohibits Europe to do business with whom they want – i.e. Iran, if not, they are being punished. No comments. It’s just the new normal. In the case of Hong Kong, Beijing has protested, called the US Ambassador twice to discuss the matter – to no avail.

It gets even more ludicrous. Madame Michelle Bachelet, High Commissioner of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, has published in the Saturday issue of the South China Morning Post an article seeking full and “independent and impartial judge-led investigation” into police conduct at protests as part of confidence-building measures. The statement in itself already takes sides, as it does in no way address the foreign-inspired violence of protesters, who, for example, are using a university campus to build Molotov-type bombs and other incendiary devices.  The Chinese Government immediately rebuked the article accusing Ms. Bachelet of further inflaming ‘radical violence’.

In a statement issued on Sunday, Chen Yaou, spokesman for China’s permanent mission to the UN, launched a scathing attack on what he called an “erroneous article” by Michelle Bachelet. Chen emphasized that China “strongly opposed” Bachelet’s article, saying she had interfered in the internal affairs of China and would only encourage protesters to use more radical violence. Mr. Chen added that

“the protesters were seeking to create chaos in the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region), paralyze the HK SAR government and seize the administrative power of the Hong Kong SAR with the aim of rendering the ‘one country, two systems’ principle defunct.”

Cheng also said that his government stands fully behind Ms. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive.

Despite the overwhelming pro-democracy vote on 24 November 2019, protests continue. Thousands took to the streets on Saturday afternoon assembling before the United States Consulate in Central, to “express gratitude” for passing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. They were waving US flags, chanting the Star-Spangled Banner and are asking for more support. They pledge not to let go until all their demands are met.

Essentially, they want total independence from Beijing and become a US colony. They should look at Puerto Rico, what it means to be a US colony, what Washington has in store for its colonies. Or closer to their own history, they should look at their UK colonial past – and remember their state of oppression, the almost zero rights they had then.

What does this all mean for Hong Kong? At the time of the UK handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong contributed about 18% to China’s GDP. Already before the protests began some 6 months ago, it had shrunk to a mere 3%. Within the last few months HK’s economic output has further declined, as key financial institutions want stability and therefore are leaving Hong Kong for safer venues, i.e. Singapore, and, indeed, for Shanghai which is rapidly becoming the financial hub of the east.

The real purpose of the 50-year special status of Hong Kong that the UK (and US) negotiated with Beijing, was to keep this unregulated eastern financial paradise alive for western oligarchs’ often illicit and tax-evading financial transactions of which the western – UK and US – bankers and financiers were the key beneficiaries and profiteers. These US-inspired violent protests are meant to destabilize the Government of Beijing – which is, of course, a pipedream – when in fact, they are slowly committing suicide. Washington and London are disabling Hong Kong of her west-serving money-laundering capacity.

And if it comes really down to the level of intolerant crime and violence against the majority of HK citizens by this foreign-inspired and funded disruption of SAR, Beijing could in less than 24 hours put an end to it. So simple. The west could just gape, but say nothing, because it is in Beijing’s full right to restore law and order in their territories.

Now, let’s look again at the US arrogance to pass legislation to control a foreign territory. Could anyone imagine the logical opposite? China passes legislation to ban any foreign interference in their territories with the threat of sanctions. These could include outright import bans for certain US goods, for example agricultural produce, or stopping crucial exports to the US (iPhones, computers, other US-outsourced manufactured-in-China goods), barring certain US citizens from entering China – or, god forbid, building a military base in Venezuela and / or Mexico; Mexico being the latest Latin American country being harassed by the US for Mexico’s left-leaning government.

It is only by equals facing equals that maybe, just maybe can achieve harmonious and peaceful coexistence. This applies politically as much as it does economically – and in economics, China is the unspoken front-runner with a strong and stable currency backed by her economic output and by gold, versus an entire not only US, but western economy based on fiat money.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. After working for over 30 years with the World Bank he penned Implosion, an economic thriller, based on his first-hand experience. Exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: More than a million Hong Kongers joined marches in June to oppose a China extradition law. But some say the US is quickly backing the protests. Photo: Don Ng/ EyePress

The Rohingya refugees have, for decades now, been fleeing their homeland, the Rakhine province in Myanmar. Mostly through Yangon’s inaction, elements of the military and members of the majority Buddhist population were left to run rampage amongst this helpless Muslim minority. Made stateless by Yangon in 1982, left totally vulnerable to the frightful violence of rape, mass killings — some burnt alive in their own homes — they fled, in 2017, to Bangladesh, some 700,000 of them. There have been waves of genocidal killings of Rohingyas in Myanmar beginning in 1978.

In September 2019 a UN-appointed independent International Fact-Finding Mission in a report insists that “hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya who remain in Myanmar may face greater threat of genocide than ever, amid Government attempts to erase their identity and remove them from the country”. However. Myanmar has rejected the findings of the report saying that the mission was never approved by Yangon and they have, in turn, begun their own investigations.

In 2017, when boatloads of starving Rohingyas drifted to the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia dying of hunger with many lost at sea, Turkey protested the exodus.  Malaysia and Indonesia, too, protested but Myanmar is a fellow ASEAN member. ASEAN holds dear its principle of non-interference and, therefore, they were silenced. Instead both Indonesia and Malaysia took in the refugees. In a recent speech at the UN the Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohammad, remarked on the world’s silence with regard the Rohingya tragedy.

Despite the media silence, the UN has assured itself enough to announce in November, for the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague to begin preliminary investigations. The investigation began in Bangladesh, a signatory to the ICC, where most of the Rohingya refugees are living in overcrowded conditions in Cox Bazaar, reputedly the world’s largest refugee settlement. It is assumed, here, that under the UN’s auspices the investigation will be even more thorough.

And too, on 11 November, Gambia, Africa’s smallest country, has filed a lawsuit, at the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Myanmar of genocide against Rohingya Muslims, on the principle of “universal jurisdiction”, a legal concept enshrined in many countries.  The principle is built on the premise that war crimes and crimes against humanity are too horrific to ignore and can, therefore, be tried in any country. This is an expensive endeavour which can cost millions, if not billions of dollars and Gambia is poor. But Gambia is a majority Muslim nation and a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It is this grouping that is behind Gambia. While the outcome is uncertain — although the facts as established by the UN’s “Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar” would favour Gambia’s position — Myanmar has made it known that it will appear before the court, its team headed by Aung San Suu Kyi herself, leader of the civilian government. This seeming defiance suggests that Yangon may have something up its sleeve.

Closely, on the heels of this legal action, comes another lawsuit, this time naming names, including the Nobel Peace Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, for crimes against Rohingya Muslims. The case is filed in Argentina, again under the principle of “universal jurisdiction”.

The action is led by an Argentinian lawyer Tomas Ojea, once a UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar between 2008 and 2014. Ojea is a first- hand witness to the suffering of the Rohingyas. Two Argentine human rights groups are supporting the lawsuit.

Do these imminent cases suggest that the Rohingyas can now hope to return to their homes? An agreement reached between Bangladesh and Myanmar to allow a return of the refugees to their homeland could not be implemented because there have beenfew to no takers.  The victims remain untrusting of their tormentors. The Rohingyas seek, instead, for guarantees for a pathway to citizenship, land entitlement and compensation, and want their safety secured. In short, they seek justice in Myanmar. Can the trust between the government and the people be re-established after such a heinous betrayal?

Observers are agreed that while Yangon is willing to negotiate and sign agreements, on the ground no promises made are fulfilled. For example, the agreement which allows the Rohingyas to return from Bangladesh is hollow given the official policy towards the Rohingyas still in the country. They are kept in internment camps deprivedof their basic human rights. According to a UN Report, those fleeing are shot to death, including children. Children have no access to education and health-care in these camps and worse, their restricted movement means food is not liberally available and access to clean water limited. They are at the mercy of the Myanmar authorities.

Can the UN end this humanitarian crisis now that the tragedy is squarely on the lap of this supranational organisation intended to prevent genocides and other crimes against humanity? The example of Palestine tells us to temper our optimism. Proof of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, is everywhere even as I write Gaza is being bombed mercilessly. US vetoes in the UN Security Council in support of Israeli aggression have only demonstrated the UN’s impotence. Geopolitics has become a massive obstacle to justice in the contemporary world. And, the ICJ can only issue advisory opinions. Will geopolitics again foil the ham-fisted, if not arm-twisted, attempts of the UN?

In September 2017, the Faculty of Law of Malaysia’s University of Malaya, together with a couple of non-government organisations (NGO) including JUST, hosted a 5-day session of the Rome based Permanent People’s Tribunal on “State Crimes Allegedly Committed in Myanmar against the Rohingyas, Kachins and Other Groups”. Evidence presented shows thousands of Rohingyas have lost their lives and hundreds of thousands displaced. Again evidence is aplenty but if in seven decades the genocide of the Palestinians has been allowed to play out in public, can we expect any better for the Rohingyas?

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Askiah Adam is Executive Director of the International Movement for a JUST World (JUST).

The impending trial in Nigeria of Omoleye Sowore on charges including treason is promising to stir a hornet’s nest. Sowore, a high-profile media publisher, was arrested in August of this year because he called for a revolution after the February elections which he claimed were not credible. Himself a contestant,

Sowore’s seven-count indictment also includes the charge of harassing President Muhammadu Buhari, the former military ruler who secured a second term in office. Speculation is brewing as to what the strategy of the defence team will be: should it adopt one that aggressively asserts that Nigeria is indeed in need of revolutionary change? Or will it argue that Sowore’s words were mere rhetoric. The charge that Sowore was harassing Buhari, an ex-military strongman now elderly and frail adds a personal dimension; revealing an animus towards the defendant which has seen him being held in defiance of a court’s grant of bail. It should also bring into focus and public debate the irony of Buhari having been the leader of a military regime that overthrew a constitutionally elected government, an act of treason, that led to a hardline government which purposely operated beyond the rule of law. 

Nigeria’s political history is replete with treason trials. The trial, during the First Republic, of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and other members of the now defunct Action Group party in the 1960s was the first of its kind and led to convictions for treasonable felony. In 1982, a businessman named Zanna Bukar Mandara was found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari, the man whose government Buhari would depose. Unlike Awolowo, Sowore is not being accused of attempting to import weapons into the country to seize power. Neither, as was the case with Mandara is Sowore being accused of soliciting the help of members of the Nigeria armed forces to aid in a takeover of the government. The trials of military men for abortive enterprises such as occured in 1976, 1986 and 1990 were of course noted for their secrecy, as well as the executions by firing squad that followed. Sowore is not going to be put on trial for his life, but can expect a stiff sentence like those incurred by his civilian predecessors: Awolowo was sentenced to a 10-year term of imprisonment and Mandara to 15.

So how should Sowore and his defence team approach the trial? A strategy which indicts the political system and its leaders would be a risky one, but one which could generate widespread sympathy from the masses. In 1953, Fidel Castro’s four-hour speech in court when defending himself after the failed attack on Moncada Barracks ended with the famous words “La historia me absolvera”. And Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, a young Ghanaian airman arrested after an abortive coup in May 1979 put on a defiant performance at his court martial where his powerful criticism of the military regime generated such sympathy from the public and empathy from the ranks of the military that an uprising of junior members of the armed forces sprung him from his prison cell and overthrew the ruling junta.

Sowore possesses none of the oratorical skills of a Castro or Rawlings. And he does not have a substantive political movement behind him or armed supporters who could threaten the Nigerian state.

But the yearning for a Nigerian revolution is not a misplaced one. Plummeting living standards, mass unemployment among the young, including graduates, poor roads and the rationing of electricity supplies continue to consign minerally and human resource-rich Nigeria to the status of a failed state.

Further than this is the irony of the present Nigerian government prosecuting a citizen for treason when the man at its helm, Muhammadu Buhari was himself an accessory, an instigator and a beneficiary of treason at various points in history. It was Buhari himself who overthrew the democratically elected government of Shehu Shagari and brought to an end the Second Republic. Section 1(2) Chapter I and Part I of the 1979 constitution provided that “The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall not be governed, nor shall any person or group of persons take control of the Government of Nigeria or any part thereof, except in accordance with the provisions of this constitution.” Under that constitution, the role of the armed forces was prescribed as “defending Nigeria from external aggression”, “suppressing insurrection and acting in aid of civil authorities to restore order when called upon to do so by the President, but subject to such conditions as may be prescribed by an Act of the National Assembly”.

The action on New Year’s Eve in 1983 was in contravention of the constitution.

Buhari had earlier shown contempt for constituted authority when as the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Division, he had cut off food and fuel supplies to neighbouring Chad during a border dispute that also saw him pursue Chadian intruders deep into Chadian territory. His entrance into Chadian territory had been in express contravention of Shagari’s order not to do so.

If an analogy is made with the uprising of junior officers of the Ghana armed forces in 1979, then Buhari’s actions in overthrowing a constitutionally elected government were tantamount to a capital offence, for which he should have ended on the gallows. In Ghana, a number of senior military officers, including three former heads of state, who had served in three military regimes were executed by order of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council for breaching Ghana’s Criminal Code of 1960, the Armed Forces Act (1962) and the Superior Order Rule attendant to the Armed Forces Regulation.

Certainly under the Criminal Code existing at the time of the Buhari-led coup, the combination of actions inherent within a coup d’etat: conspiracy to overthrow the government (s.41), incitement to mutiny (s.44b), causing disaffection among members of the armed forces (s.46a) and concealment of treason (s.40) warranted the death penalty (s.49a).

It would be remiss not to mention Buhari’s role in the tragic fate of a young Nigerian army officer named Daniel Bamidele. In October 1983, Bamidele heard rumours of a coup plot against President Shagari and promptly reported this to his commanding officer, the then Major General Buhari. Unbeknownst to Bamidele, Buhari was at the heart of the plot and a week later was detained at a military barracks under the auspices of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. He was released towards the end of November in a state of bewilderment until on News Year’s Day, he learnt that Buhari had emerged as Nigeria’s military head of state.

Bamidele was earmarked for retirement in the early part of 1984, but Buhari, whose consent was needed to confirm the laying off of those officers who were on the list, crossed out Bamidele’s name. In 1986, Bamidele was arrested by the regime led by General Ibrahim Babangida -the man who overthrew Buhari in a palace coup- for concealing his knowledge of an alleged coup plot. Given his previous experience, he had remained silent when criticisms were voiced by fellow officers of the policies of the Babangida regime.

He was executed by firing squad in March of that year.

Buhari, steeped in treason, did try to effect a revolution of sorts in Nigeria as a military rule. He won praise, not only for insisting in an attempt to chart a course which was independent from foreign control, but also one which aimed to change the negative habits of Nigerians. This came through the “War on Indiscipline” spearheaded by his co-ruler Major General Tunde Idiagbon.

But his rule, initially well-received for its anti-corruption stance, was mired by breaches in civil rights. Then as now, the Nigerian character in so far as pertains to discipline is still lacking. Nigeria’s social and economic problems have arguably worsened. Today, the insecurity caused by kidnapping gangs, the Boko Haram insurgency, as well as clashes between Fulani Herdsmen and farming communities around the country has endured despite Buhari’s consecutive election pledges to bring order to the country. The economy is stagnating, and just as was the case during his time as a military leader, his respect for human rights has come under question given the brutal suppression of a now proscribed Shi’ite group and pro-secessionist movements among ethnic igbos.

Given these conditions, Nigeria is certainly ripe for revolution. But the permutations of Sowore’s perceived revolution such as transferring Nigeria’s leadership to a younger generation, the redistribution of national wealth and the tackling of corruption, while laudable, fall short of the sort of revolution which offers Nigeria a salvation from the bondage of the past. Genuine change can only come from a reformation of the mind and culture of its people; something hardly addressed in a substantive manner by Nigerian intellectuals and politicians.

There are no indications that his counsel, Femi Falana, a presumed heir to the legacies of radical lawyers Gani Fawehinmi and Tunji Braithwaite, will proceed with a bold strategy of justifying the grounds for a Nigerian revolution. It seems unlikely that this will be the case. And if so, it would be less a case of a shortcoming on the part of the defendant and his lawyer than it is of the Nigerian public, a long-suffering and insouciant species forever content to complain, but perennially inactive at combating the incompetence, the corruption and the brutality of its political representatives.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Adeyinka Makinde.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Featured image is from the author

The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the regime of Donald Trump for its attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries after the US State Department issued a statement to interfere in the works of the Syrian Constitution Committees deliberations in Geneva.

A spokesperson for the ministry said to the Syrian official news agency SANA ‘the dialogue is a Syrian-Syrian one and no one has the right to interfere in it or support any party under any pretext.’

The spokesperson outlined that the role of the United Nations represented by its special envoy Geir Pederson is limited to facilitating the committees’ discussions only and does not interfere in the contents.

Earlier, the US State Department issued a statement accusing the Syrian delegation to the Geneva talks to discuss amendments to the Syrian constitution of impeding the talks by placing obstacles.

Trump Regime’s State Dept statement

The Syrian delegation asked the Turkish delegation to set the principles on Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity before discussing less important details in the constitution, the delegation sent by the Turkish regime of the madman Erdogan rejected to set such a principle. Erdogan Regime Delegation threw a tantrum, refused to even enter the meeting hall, and issued its rejection via media, violating the agreed-upon Code of Conduct, similar to Erdogan-the-Guarantor consistent breach of the de-escalation zones in Syria.

Observers following the talks referred their rejections to the conflict of interest it would cause with their sponsor carrying out an illegal incursion of northern Syria.

The condemnation by the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was expected, firstly, it’s a blatant attempt by the US to achieve in politics and diplomatic pressure what it failed by sponsoring terrorist groups in Syria and by direct invasion, secondly, it’s the same US regime that its officials have been crying non-stop for the past 3 years over alleged Russian interference in their own ‘democratical’ system claiming that some accounts from Russia bought Facebook ads worth of around US$ 3000(!) which placed Donald Trump as the president of the USA!

It’s the same regime that spent hundreds of billions of dollars directly and through its regional slaves to topple yet another legitimate government in the region and this time in Syria, and replace the elected officials with planted puppets.

The author of this post is trying to feel sorry for the US citizens and taxpayers whose government is dealing with double-face around the world, but to be honest, I’m failing to feel sorry. It’s been endless times their government interfered in every other country around the world and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars of their hard-earned tax money on investigations of alleged Russian interference worth of 3000 dollars. No one can be that simple, that dumb, and that naive for that long period of time and for those countless times their government on behalf of them and using their resources have committed such crimes and violations of international law abroad, it’s like the US citizens themselves support these heinous acts.

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All images in this article are from Syria News unless otherwise stated

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The December 3-4 summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in London resembles a family reunion after the acrimony over the issue of military spending by America’s European allies. 

The trend is up for defence spending across European Allies and Canada. Over $100 billion is expected to be added to the member states’ defence budgets by end-2020.

More importantly, the trend at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting at Brussels on November 19-20, in the run-up to the London summit, showed that despite growing differences within the alliance, member states closed ranks around three priority items in the US global agenda — escalation of the aggressive policy toward Russia, militarisation of space and countering China’s rise. 

The NATO will follow Washington’s lead to establish a space command by officially regarding space as “a new operational domain”. According to NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, this decision “can allow NATO planners to make a request for allies to provide capabilities and services, such as satellite communications and data imagery.” 

Stoltenberg said,

“Space is also essential to the alliance’s deterrence and defence, including the ability to navigate, to gather intelligence, and to detect missile launches. Around 2,000 satellites orbit the Earth. And around half of them are owned by NATO countries.” 

Equally, Washington has been urging the NATO to officially identify China’s rise as a long-term challenge. According to media reports, the Brussels meeting acceded to the US demand and decided to officially begin military surveillance of China. 

The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hit out at China after the Brussels meeting:

“Finally, our alliance must address the current and potential long-term threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.  Seventy years ago, the founding nations of NATO came together for the cause of freedom and democracy.  We cannot ignore the fundamental differences and beliefs in the – between our countries and those of the Chinese Communist Party.” 

So far so good. However, it remains to be seen if Washington’s grand design to draw NATO into its “Indo-Pacific strategy” (read containment of China) will gain traction. Clearly, the US intends to have a say in the European allies’ growing business and economic relations with China to delimit Chinese influence in Europe. The US campaign to block 5G technology from China met with rebuff from several European countries. 

On the other hand, the European project has unravelled and the Franco-German axis that was its anchor sheet has become shaky. The rift between Paris and Berlin works to Washington’s advantage but, paradoxically, also hobbles the western alliance system. 

The French President Emmanuel Macron annoyed Germany by his recent calls for better relations with Russia “to prevent the world from going up in a conflagration”; his brutally frank remarks about NATO being “brain dead” and the US policy on Russia being “governmental, political and historical hysteria”; and his repeated emphasis on a European military policy independent of the US. 

The congruence of interests between Berlin and Washington vis-a-vis Macron manifested itself in the NATO’s endorsement of the US-led escalation against Russia and China, with France rather isolated. However, this congruence will be put to test very soon at the summit meeting of the Normandy format over Ukraine, which France is hosting on December 9, following the NATO’s London summit. France is helping Russia to negotiate a deal with Ukraine. 

The recent phone calls between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky underscored the growing interest in Moscow and Kiev at the leadership level to improve relations between the two countries. 

In the final analysis, the Franco-German relations are of pivotal importance to not only Europe’s strategic future but the western alliance system as such. If anyone was in doubt, the French veto in October means sudden death for the proposal on European Union accession of the Balkan state of North Macedonia, which NATO is inducting as its newest member. Berlin and Washington are livid, but a veto is a veto. 

With NATO being set up by Washington for a confrontationist posture, Russia and China won’t let their guard down. Addressing a meeting of the Russian Federation Security Council on November 22, Putin said,

“There are many uncertainty factors… competition and rivalry are growing stringer and morphing into new forms… The leading countries are actively developing their offensive weapons… the so-called ‘nuclear club’ is receiving new members, as we all know. We are also seriously concerned about the NATO infrastructure approaching our borders, as well as the attempts to militarise outer space.” 

Putin stressed,

“In these conditions, it is important to make adequate and accurate forecasts, analyse the possible changes in the global situation, and to use the forecasts and conclusions to develop our military potential.” 

The US-led military build-up against Russia and China will be on display in two big exercises next year codenamed ‘Defender 2020 in Europe’ and ‘Defender 2020 in the Pacific’. 

Significantly, only four days before Putin made the above remarks, Chinese President Xi Jinping told him at a meeting in Brasilia on the sidelines of the BRICS summit that “the ongoing complex and profound changes in the current international situation with rising instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination to jointly uphold the basic norms governing international relations, oppose unilateralism, bullying and interference in other countries’ affairs, safeguard the respective sovereignty and security, and create a fair and just international environment.” 

Putin responded by saying that

“Russia and China have important consensus and common interests in maintaining global strategic security and stability. Under the current situation, the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication and firmly support each other in safeguarding sovereignty, security, and development rights.” (Chinese MFA) 

The Russian response is also visible on the ground. The share of modern weapons and equipment in the Russian Army and Navy has reached an impressive level of 70 percent. The first pilot batch of next-generation T-14 Armata tanks will arrive for the Russian troops in late 2019 – early 2020. 

On November 26, Russian Defence Ministry stated that Moscow’s breakthrough Avangard missile system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force in December. 

For the first time, the electronic warfare systems at Russia’s military base in Tajikistan will be reinforced with the latest Pole-21 jamming station that can counter cruise missiles, drones and guided air bombs and precision weapon guidance systems. Moscow is guarding against the US and NATO presence in Afghanistan. 

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Featured image: Moscow’s breakthrough Avangard missile system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force in December 2019 (Source: Indian Punchline)

As an integral part of its ongoing propaganda, Israel, along with its fervent supporters and legions of paid and anonymous agents, zealously repeats and disseminates – in the media, on university campuses, in blogs and comment sections, at conferences and more – the same old, tired Zionist myths. 

Propaganda guides and tool kits, such as the “global language dictionary”, offer ready-made arguments and counter-arguments to sell Israel to journalists and critics. Such talking points come with tips on what tone and rhetorical tactics to use, what words and formulas “work”, and how to discuss “sensitive” issues, such as Israel’s illegal colonisation and annexation of Palestinian land, Jewish settlements and the killing of civilians.

All of which are now set to get worse since US President Donald Trump has both rewarded and emboldened Israel by recognising its illegal and brutal colonisation (its “settlements”). By the same token he has offered yet another spectacular demonstration of the complete contempt of the United States for the rule of international law.

Setting such an example will only send the message to all the despots, autocrats and tyrants of various stripes around the globe that not only it is ok to steal, colonise, and brutalise weak and defenceless populations, but that you may even be rewarded by the West for adopting the “law of the jungle”.

Disinformation machine

The media is saturated with uplifting news about the “Israeli economic miracle”, its wealth and high living standards, and its thriving startup and high-tech industry. But have you ever heard from a mainstream Western media outlet or politician that a fifth of Israelis live below the poverty line, that people are forced to look through rubbish for food to avoid starving, or that Israel has (according to the Jerusalem Post) the highest poverty rate in the developed world?

The answer is most likely not, and we should ask ourselves why. Other lies propagated by Israel’s disinformation machine include origin myths, the most famous being the romantic theme of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land”, which strangely persists, despite its historical absurdity. Israel relies a lot on ignorance and gullibility.

This magnificent interactive photographic collection of pre-1948 Palestine is enough to pulverise that revisionist lie, which seeks to eliminate the very notion of the existence of Palestinians on the land before it was taken from them by Western colonial powers to be given to Jewish emigrants from Europe and elsewhere. Palestinians were made to pay for a Holocaust that Europe had committed, and in which they themselves played no part.

Besides the pathetic nature of such PR operations to counter critics and improve Israel’s disastrous global image, its effectiveness is more than a little uncertain.

When news and images of Israel’s killing and mutilation of Palestinian children, deliberate bombing of schools, and indiscriminate use of white phosphorus on entire neighbourhoods circulate around the world, it is hard to convincingly portray such a predatory, violent and terrorist rogue state as noble, democratic, peaceful or gentle.

 “The Only Democracy” in the Region

By far the most common Zionist myth is the notion that Israel is the “only democracy” in the region – one that some even describe as a liberal, egalitarian, Western-style democracy. This grotesque, self-serving fairytale perpetuates the fallacy of a similarity of regimes, of a common destiny, and of a natural alliance between Israel and Western nations. Racist propaganda often pits this against the inevitably “barbaric”, backward and undemocratic Arab states and Muslim-majority societies.

This misleading description echoes the larger, even more sinister – but equally fallacious – Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” discourse, which is itself the cultural reformulation in civilisational terms of the old ideologies of racial differences.

Repeating a lie multiple times does not make it true, although Israel’s agents clearly think it does. Israel is no democracy, and certainly not a “liberal, egalitarian” state. Two cold, hard facts can easily debunk this myth.

Firstly, there is the acquisition of Israeli nationality and citizenship through religion. The Law of Return allows any Jew, anywhere in the world, to emigrate to Israel and obtain full Israeli citizenship, whether or not they have ever set foot there or have any relatives living there. A privileged, royal path to citizenship is reserved exclusively for Jews, while being denied to members of other religions. Religious discrimination is thus institutionalised as official policy.

Archaic marriage laws

Just imagine for a minute how “democratic” countries such as France, Germany, Britain or the United States would be if they decided that from now on, Christians from all over the world – but only Christians – could freely emigrate and settle there, and unlike members of any other religion, or even atheists, they would automatically be granted citizenship upon arrival.

This would amount to discarding their most fundamental and basic democratic principles, including their cherished secularism – but such institutionalised religious discrimination is exactly what Israel practices.

Secondly, there is the issue of marriage. Given the massive pro-Israeli propaganda machine, coupled with the silent complicity of our Western media and governments, many people might be unaware that in Israel, only religious authorities are allowed to officiate marriages. Civil, non-religious marriages are not permitted.

Even worse, inter-religious, mixed marriages are also forbidden by law, forcing inter-religious couples to marry abroad. When they return, the non-Jewish partner often receives second-class citizen treatment by the state.

Again, let’s imagine what would happen to the French, British, German or US democracies if we were to apply such archaic principles. Rather unthinkably for those of us living in actual democracies, the Israeli state manages to make those already backward practices even harsher, levying a two-year prison sentence on couples who get married by a religious authority not accredited by the state.

Despite all this, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his PR minions continually explain to us – with a straight face – how democratic, egalitarian, tolerant, open and enlightened the state of Israel has always been, and how it grants all of its citizens equal rights.

Institutionalised apartheid

Israel was already a profoundly racist, unegalitarian, undemocratic, ethno-religious state before the nation-state law was passed last year. Now, it is even worse.

Conceived of from the start as an ethno-religious “Jewish state” – a description it has finally openly acknowledged through the nation-state law – just as other countries thought of themselves as “white states” (South Africa, the segregationist US), it is not surprising that Israel quickly instituted a veritable apartheid system.

This reality is easily visible to anyone on the ground, and has been abundantly documented for decades by the media, all major human rights organisations, UN-mandated independent teams on the ground, Palestinian and Israeli activists, NGOs and academics, who explain how Israel’s apartheid regime constantly invents new, creative ways to perpetuate and consolidate itself.

Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants have themselves denounced Israel as a structurally segregationist, and even fascist, apartheid state. One can safely assume that when you have survived Auschwitz, as did Professor Hajo Meyer, you can recognise fascism in action – particularly in your own country.

ANC veterans who spent their own lives fighting apartheid in South Africa have also declared that what they saw in Israel was in some respects worse than what they confronted at home. Even US President Jimmy Carter wrote an entire book on Israel’s apartheid, explaining how Palestinians were caged in an open-air prison worse than what the South Africans had to face.

Legalised discrimination

Israel’s discrimination against its Arab citizens, among others, is thus not just a societal, economic or cultural phenomenon. Every country has a share of that. In Israel’s case, discrimination is institutionalised, inscribed in its justice system as well.

“Israeli law includes numerous provisions that explicitly assert and institutionalise a principle of inequality between Jews and Arabs,” notes Arab-Israeli professor and politician Yousef Jabareen.

“To cite only one example, the Israeli flag, with its Star of David, represents only the Jewish majority of the country. But this differential treatment is certainly not limited to the realm of the symbolic. It exists in all domains of life: the definition of the state and its symbols, but also immigration laws, citizenship, political participation, access to land, culture, religion, budgetary policies, etc.”

Similar to the Law of Return, the “settlements” in the occupied West Bank – often direct breaches of Israeli law itself and major violations of international law – are exclusively reserved for Jews.

Israel invests considerable resources there on infrastructure and social services, but non-Jews are not allowed to live in the settlements – even though they are often built on confiscated land privately owned by Palestinians.

These settlers live among a population of more than three million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, who live under an all-pervasive, brutal military occupation. Another two million Palestinians live under siege and ongoing military terror in Gaza. None have a right to vote in Israeli elections.

Again, imagine the outcry if Britain or the US started invading territories outside of their internationally recognised borders, illegally annexed the land and resources, and then began creating Christian-only settlements in those areas.

The dozens of Israeli laws that explicitly discriminate against Arab citizens and Palestinians in the occupied territories are well documented. They can be accessed through the Adalah searchable database, and they apply to all aspects of Palestinian life: citizenship, education, political and economic rights, residency, language, culture, religion, and so on.

Hyper-violent colonialism

Even access to water, the most fundamental and life-sustaining resource, is the object of differential treatment by Israel, which has never hesitated to confiscate water or to use it as a war weapon to collectively punish entire populations.

Since the nation-state law has been adopted, Israel’s already systemic discrimination has become even worse, with new laws being passed to further entrench and expand inequality.

In addition to all of this evidence that Israel is no democracy, the state has also become globally infamous for its relentless, illegal, supremacist, hyper-violent colonialism; its annexation of land at gunpoint; its terroristic military; and its armies of fanatic Jewish “settlers”, who are little more than international rogues and land thieves.

During its half-century of illegal occupation and annexation, which is now doomed to get even worse, Israel has wilfully and knowingly violated almost every major international law convention, treaty and UN resolution, including the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the 1947 Partition Plan, the Camp David and Oslo accords, and so on.

Such lawless behaviour has given Israel the distinct honour of being among the countries that for decades have been, and continue to be, regularly condemned by all major human rights organisations out there, and by the UN itself.

Distinctly Israeli terror

It is difficult to find a worse rogue state than Israel. From its very inception, writ with ethnic cleansing, Israel has made the collective punishment of defenceless civilian populations, the killing of entire families, the deliberate mutilation of children, the bombing of schools and hospitals, and other barbaric atrocities as distinctly, recognisably Israeli as challah, hamin and gefilte fish.

Even Israeli soldiers themselves – thousands of them, often elite soldiers regrouped in veteran organisations such as Breaking the Silence – are exposing and documenting Israel’s systematic and deliberate targeting of defenceless Palestinians. As much as the ANC veterans know apartheid, and Holocaust survivors know fascism, when they see it, these brave soldiers surely know what they are talking about, as they were once a part of it.

But they, too, are probably just “antisemites” or “self-hating Jews”; instead of them, maybe we ought to believe the likes of Netanyahu, who continues to claim that Israel is the region’s “only democracy”?

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Dr Alain Gabon is an associate professor of French based in the United States and the head of the French Department at Wesleyan College in Virginia. He has written numerous papers and articles on contemporary France and on Islam in Europe and throughout the world.

If the truth about the war on Syria was known and accepted by broad-based Western populations, then there would be no war on Syria.

If the truth were known and accepted there would be no terrorism in Syria.

If the truth were known and accepted Syria would still rank as one of the top five (1) safest countries in the world.

If the truth were known Christians and Muslims and everyone would be safe. Christians and Muslims in Syria would never have been slaughtered had the truth been known and accepted.

If the truth were known and accepted there would be no economic blockades that cause death and disaster and terrorism with intent.

But the truth is not known and accepted by broad-based Western populations because we have been smothered by blankets of suffocating, criminal war propaganda for years. Our tax dollars pay for the indoctrination. Just like our tax dollars pay for NATO and its globalizing tentacles of death and destruction that are literally imperilling the world.

So,why is the Truth not known and accepted by broad-based Western populations?

Renowned author Michel Collon demonstrates the characteristics of war propaganda that deny us the right to know.

First, the real interests that push for war must be hidden. Privileged access to and control of resources, including oil pipelines, must not be mentioned.

Second, history must be erased. People musn’t be aware of the longstanding imperial efforts to divide, weaken, and colonize Syria. They must not know that the war on Syria was planned well in advance by imperial powers.

Third, the leader of the country must be demonized. People must never know that elected President Assad has always been popular, even according to a NATO poll,(2) and that the invading terrorists were never accepted nor welcomed by the vast majority of Syrians.

People must not know that it is the aggressors, the US and allies, who have and use Weapons of Mass Destruction, not only in Syria, but in Iraq, and every other country that they invade. Depleted Uranium impacts present and future generations. Babies in Vietnam are still being born with deformities thanks to that war and the US deployment of Agent Orange.

Perceptions must be fabricated in such a way that the Western aggressors are seen as defending “victims”.

The entire Western-perpetrated war has created a country full of victims. The real intention of war is to kill and harm and maim and destroy. Destabilize means to destroy. The notion that it is humanitarian is beyond ridicule, but this is the perception that must be embedded in Western populations.

Finally, alternate viewpoints must be suppressed.

Warmongers must monopolize the discussion.

People must not know that the White Helmets (3) are terrorists, that they fabricate fake chemical weapons incidents, that they create false flags, that they engage in involuntary organ harvesting. People must not know the truth.

The Truth, widely accepted, would deliver Peace. The Truth must be erased.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

Notes

(1) RealClear World and Gallup, “Top 5 Most Personally Safe Countries.” 27 October, 2010.
(https://www.realclearworld.com/lists/top_5_personal_safety_countries/syria.html ) Accessed 29 November, 2019.

(2) “NATO reveals 70% of Syrians support Bashar al-Assad.” VOLTAIRE NETWORK, 6 JUNE 2013.
(https://www.voltairenet.org/article178779.html?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=9aadf28a533396ad5ebd8ea7ca0a80c110a39911-1575044240-0-AcCxkjY1iKAL5NA2qz5mxkDPrbY9fDr9uiK-odHiFQ01P-8l4JYuoleZQj9dlRvM3HRs3TNXjKyWcZmlN4NGjFA2n16YX2SdkQbTontqN7KTVaPMLcFqOMTiU62qjylvbxHrnWXqq5UhElws7LUS6w0oCbTHG2tg58lqh7RURlz3Cib5oIITDojuE1dNzl5f1wPpLolOH7-iujj3YA_aZxxL9Z4jg3SJgDmvrv2z42Ho8nwWg1e6ltQa1fR7zaSyUVgIblwQGpUZRZUlsT0gNgRRVXDt2ydXMyFQ59ENiYZ_ ) Accessed 29 November, 2019.

(3) Mark Taliano, “Video: Who are The White Helmets? Fake News and Staged Rescues. Canada’s beloved ‘humanitarian heroes’, the White Helmets.” Global Research, 26 December, 2018.
( https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-who-are-the-white-helmets-fake-news-and-staged-rescues/5663906) Accessed 29 November, 2019.

Featured image is from the author

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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Over the past few months I have been asked by various groups and individuals to provide an update on the refugee situation on Samos.

Until now I have not responded to these requests for the simple reason I have nothing new to add to earlier blog articles. For as far as the refugees here are concerned it is still the same old shit.

Of course there have been changes over time the most notable being the EU/Turkey pact of 2016. Before the pact, refugees on the whole were held for months, sometimes just a few days, before being allowed to move off the islands. Now it can be years. But whether it has been just for a few days or 3 years the refugees have never been welcomed or embraced by the authorities. This is perpetually demonstrated by the penal like design and construction of the camp, its appalling accommodation, its unspeakable food, lack of basic medical facilities, wholly inadequate toilets and showers, the refusal to open empty schools and hotels to offer decent spaces for people to live,…..the list goes on¹. Its been like this for so long now that it’s almost normalised. And there is no end in sight. All of the latest proposals from the recently elected conservative (New Democracy) government promise more repression and more detention. It is always hard to predict in Greece what will actually be implemented but on Samos at least the Government is now building a new camp located on the site of an old slaughter house in the middle of nowhere which will not only be closed, but will also contain a prison for holding those identified for deportation.

So there is simply nothing to update on this basic reality except to say that the main responsible agencies have become masters of consistency in the reproduction of shit. The seemingly endless publication of critical reports which highlight many of these issues on Samos and elsewhere have not made one iota of difference. Water off a duck’s back.

In the meantime the refugees continue to arrive. 600 last week which makes a mockery of the government’s periodic ‘decongestion’ efforts of periodically shipping ferry loads of refugees to the mainland. Turkey has long recognised that the massive numbers of refugees living in Turkey (3 million plus) and its awareness that the EU is desperate that they should stay there and not move onto Europe gives them a powerful weapon. Currently there is little doubt that the recent increase in refugees arriving on the frontier islands is an attempt by the Turkish government to force the EU to stop harassing Turkey over its oil and gas explorations around Cyprus. To that end, Turkey is now making life very difficult for refugees especially those living in Istanbul with forced deportations especially back to Syria and Afghanistan. This is the context of the current increase in numbers seeking to escape from Turkey. Refugees are little more than a pawn in this conflict used mercilessly to extract concessions from one side or the other.

On Samos, as with the other frontier islands, it has now become widely seen as a ‘bad thing’ for refugees to be detained for so long on the islands. But on Samos at least the reality is more paradoxical. Today increasing numbers of refugees on Samos would prefer to stay here rather than be moved to the mainland. Many know that camps such as Nea Kavala in northern Greece – an isolated former airfield- are far worse than Samos. It is hard to forget David’s reaction when he arrived from Samos to the Nea Kavala camp. Total shock! He told me that he along with the 300 refugees who were moved there from Samos just walked around in a daze at what they found. Many wanted to come back to Samos where at least they had easy access to the town and its facilities and some much needed services provided by volunteer groups and NGOs. But most importantly, because of their extended stay on Samos this is where they have established networks of friends and in the ‘jungle’ surrounding the Hotspot, they have built shelters and homes some of which are breathtaking in their comfort. No one in their right mind would dispute that the camp and the surrounding jungle is a hell hole. But it is also much more. It is also a place of homes and of people (including thousands of children) making a life. To ignore this as many do leads to a fundamental mistake in failing to acknowledge the extent of refugee well-being falls on their shoulders and their humanity. This week Younis a young Palestinian from Gaza was telling me how much he enjoyed visiting his friends in the jungle and spending the evening laughing and eating sitting around an open fire. In parts of the jungle the refugees are developing clusters of around 10 shelters with each cluster having its own shower and toilet!

Part of the Jungle

Last week over 600 new refugees arrived on Samos. Included in that number was Juno from the Congo, traveling alone. Once finished with the initial processing he and the others in his boat were taken to the camp. They were told to find somewhere to sleep in the jungle. He was given no tent, no blanket and no money for at least 2 weeks. All he was told was where the Africans have their tents. This is now the common experience for new arrivals, especially single men and women. Families with children usually fare better. If it wasn’t for the solidarity and self-organisation of the refugees Juno would have found himself in danger. Within days of his arrival he like hundreds before him were hauling wood and polythene into the jungle where at a small cost he had his shelter made. There is a thriving shelter building business now in the camp!

So there we have it. Despite the shit and their abandonment the great majority of refugees irrespective of origin are engaged in that elemental human activity of making a home drawing on whatever materials they can afford or scrounge.

But the skills, the talents, the ingenuity and the extraordinary resilience of the refugees as a whole is not applauded and not even noticed in most cases. Although in an Open TV broadcast in late November 2019, the reporter Zizi Mousios observed “ what is happening in Samos is something unprecedented,we started in Leros, we went to Kos , here [on Samos] we have a favela” (My Samos Blog, 29^th November 2019).

Since the autumn we have had a new mayor (Giorgos Stantzos) in Samos town. He is making a lot of noise about the camp and refugees. He wants the lot out. “There is no way that Samos, which doesn’t have a mosque, will accept a Muslim village” (The Samos Uprising, Ekathimareni Nov 28^th 2019). Amongst his latest announcements he has expressed concern about the high number of ‘unauthorised’ structures that the refugees have built in the jungle, and the creation of ‘neighbourhoods’ there. The fact these shelters allow the refugees to survive is utterly ignored. That we are not burying bodies every week is almost entirely due to the refugees. Amidst the anger, the tensions and conflicts which are ever present realities of refugee life on Samos there is also a deep resource of solidarity and care which in the end is far more significant.

In stark contrast to the authorities, the refugees have been and are busy still preparing for the heavy winter rains which started a few days ago. I can’t speak of the other frontier islands but Samos has monsoon like weather, especially in January and February, but also earlier like now when it can rain torrential for days at a time. To my knowledge, never in the past 13 years have the authorities done anything significant to help the refugees get through this season. Adherence to the deterrent doctrine which so self-evidently fails to halt the movement of refugees, is as strong as ever. So nothing, nothing at all is or should be done to improve conditions and services for refugees as to do so would attract even more. And flowing from the same deterrence doctrine resources which should and could be directed towards refugee welfare are flowing with ever greater rapidity into border hardening, surveillance, and militarisation:

“The European military and security industry through their successful lobbying has succeeded in framing migration as a security threat rather than a humanitarian challenge. This has turned on a seemingly limitless tap of public funding for militarising our borders yet prevented the policies and investments we need to respond humanely to refugees and to tackle the root causes of forced migration.”

Available data shows at least €900 million has been spent on land walls and fences, €676.4 million on maritime operations (2006 to 2017) and €999.4m on its virtual walls (2000-2019). In addition, companies have benefited from the €1.7 billion budget of the European Commission’s External Borders Fund (2007-2013) and the €2.76 billion Internal Security Fund – Borders (2014-2020). In the next EU budget cycle (2021–2027), the European Commission has earmarked €8.02 billion to its Integrated Border Management Fund (2021-2027) and €11.27 billion to its coastguard agency Frontex.  (TNI, November 2019)

Here on Samos, the much heralded Zeppelin airship has come and gone (no explanation given for its departure) but now we are more likely to see patrol boats and warships from our beaches than fishing boats; we now have to negotiate our departures through intensively policed ports with their accompanying plain clothes officers sidling up to you in the queue to board the ferry asking for your papers, as well as the armoured ninja turtle police crawling around and on top of the lorries seeking out those refugees trying to escape from Samos. This impacts on all of our lives. We can see the growth in police numbers in Samos town as well as their modern paramilitary vehicles on our streets and the coach loads of riot police sitting day in and day out on the roads around the camp.

Welcome to Samos!

For the refugees these changes have made their journeys from Turkey to Samos more difficult and hazardous. It is common place now to hear that refugees have made 5, 6, 7 or more attempts to cross. According to the Aegean Boat Report between November 11^th and November 17^th 2019 a “total of 164 boats started their trip towards the Greek Islands, carrying a total of 6097 people. However, 91 boats were stopped by TCG/police, and 2444 people arrived on the Greek Islands. So far this year 2849 boats have been stopped by The Turkish Coast Guard and Police.” (See this). But for the moment at least the patrol boats operating out of Samos are still rescuing refugees who have made it into Greek waters and bringing them to the island. Ten years ago this was not the case and the Samos coastguards were notorious for their push-backs.

This is what I witness on Samos this little Greek island that finds itself on the frontier of Europe. This tiny spot on the map has and continues to be a gateway into Europe for tens of thousands of refugees. It is for the great majority their first taste of Europe. And what a taste they get! Over the years it takes to become a ‘legal’ human being again, they are treated like SHIT. If they were horses, or dogs, those responsible for their cruel treatment would be hauled in front of the courts.

But tiny as it is, Samos along with all the frontier islands must not be ignored for these are some of the places where a terrifying politics of cruelty has taken root and is flourishing, virtually unopposed. Sometimes the press will fleetingly remind a wider world of Samos if there is something sensational to report, usually deaths at sea. But as with mushrooms the policies, practices and doctrines that are being played out on Samos and elsewhere along the frontier flourish better in darkness. This is what it feels like.

And it is dismaying and disheartening that such elemental cruelties are allowed to continue year on year. The consequences, many yet waiting to be revealed for both the refugees as well as the people of Europe are certain to be dire. It would seem that others are now recognising this. Dr Christos Christou, International President, Médecins Sans Frontières has just published an open letter to ‘European Leaders’. Returning from the Greek frontier islands, he wrote:

“The situation is comparable with what we see after natural disasters or in war zones in other parts of the world. It is outrageous to see these conditions in Europe – a supposedly safe continent – and to know that they are the result of deliberate political choices. (my emphasis)

Rather than acknowledging the human cost of your approach, you continue to call for a more forceful implementation of the EU Turkey deal. You even consider more brutal measures, like the Greek government’s recently announced plans to convert the hotspots into mass detention centres, and to accelerate deportations.

Stop this madness.….

As MSF, we can’t accept this blatant dehumanisation. No matter what assistance we provide to our patients, afterwards we have to send them back to the conditions which are making them ill, conditions that you have deliberately created. ….

As a medical doctor representing a humanitarian organisation, I am outraged to see how you have justified and normalised this suffering, as if it were an acceptable price to pay to keep as many people as possible out of Europe.

No political reasoning can justify measures that deliberately and consciously inflict harm – and we have repeatedly warned you these policies do. Stop ignoring it, stop pretending that they don’t.“(November 27 2019, see this)

The entire approach of the authorities responsible both in Greece and the EU has led to the creation of a mega business with powerful vested interests which has much to gain and is unlikely to be shifted. It is naive to think otherwise. The growing grass root mobilisations around the world against global annihilation are fueled by the understanding that the greed and avarice of the powerful will drive us to extinction. And it is the very same values that frame the cruelties unleashed on the refugees. Any chance of a future for humanity rests not in the citadels of existing power. This is where MSF and other NGOs get it wrong, time and again, for none of their critical reports or statements over the years have had any impact on power and their policies Change will only come from the ‘bottom’ and only when we realise more widely that virtually all the major challenges facing humanity – environmental destruction, wars, massive inequalities and poverty and the flows of people forced to move as a consequence are deeply inter-connected. They draw their power from the same well.

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This article was originally published on Samos Chronicles.

The UK-based Independent online newspaper recently published an article about a potential link between air pollution from vehicles and glaucoma. It stated that according to a new study air pollution is linked to the eye condition that causes blindness.

The report explained that researchers had looked at vision tests carried out on more than 111,000 people across Britain between 2006 and 2010 and cross-referenced results against levels of air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Those living in areas with higher amounts of fine particulate matter were at least 6% more likely to have glaucoma than those in the least polluted areas.

Glaucoma affects half a million people in the UK and can cause blindness if left untreated. However, the study cited by The Independent, published in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, was unable to prove that air pollution was a trigger.

Following the article, environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason put together a 20-page report on glyphosate and has sent it out to key public health officials and media outlets, including The Independent’s editor. In her report, she states that the European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage and is toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects. But she claims that the media still remains silent on the matter. Even in UK towns and cities, glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide is still being sprayed on weeds and super-weeds which have become Roundup-resistant.

Mason implores The Independent and other mainstream media outlets to write with honesty about the use and harmful effects of glyphosate-based weedicides and other agrochemicals. She quotes the UN expert on Toxics, Baskut Tuncak, who in 2017 urged the EU to put children’s health before pesticides. Children form the most vulnerable part of the population as pesticides can adversely affect their development.

Offering insight into the incidence of cataracts in England, Mason notes that annual rates of admission for cataract surgery rose 10‐fold from 1968 to 2004: from 62 episodes per 100,000 population to 637. A 2016 study by the WHO also confirmed that the incidence of cataracts had greatly increased: in ‘A global assessment of the burden of disease from environmental risks’ it says that cataracts are the leading cause of blindness worldwide. Globally, cataracts are responsible for 51% of blindness. An estimated 20 million individuals suffer from this degenerative eye disease.

Mason discusses long waiting lists for cataracts in England. Because the NHS cannot cope with the pressure, private companies are cashing in. The growing demand for cataract operations is forcing the NHS to send increasing numbers of patients to be treated privately.

In Wales, where Mason resides, 35,000 patients are at risk of going blind from macular degeneration and glaucoma while on the NHS waiting list. All the municipal councils in Wales use glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate now accounts for about 50% of all herbicide use in the US. About 75% of glyphosate use has occurred since 2006, with the global glyphosate market projected to reach $11.74 billion by 2023.

Figures for the use of glyphosate in the UK show a similar trend, which Mason has documented in her many reports. And let us not forget at this point that the current Conservative government regards Brexit as an ideal opportunity to usher in crops that have been genetically engineered to withstand the application of glyphosate or similar chemicals. The agrochemicals sector stands in the wings salivating at the prospect. This has nothing to do with boosting yields or ‘feeding the world’ as Boris Johnson asserts (claims which fail to stand up to scrutiny) but has everything to do with facilitating industry ambitions.

Never in history has a chemical been used so pervasively. Glyphosate is in our air, water, plants, animals, grains, vegetables and meats. It’s in beer and wine, children’s breakfast cereal and snack bars and mother’s breast milk. It’s even in our vaccines.

Of course, the power of the pesticides companies has been well noted. In 2017, global agrochemical corporations were severely criticised by UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver. A report presented to the UN human rights council accused them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions.”

The report authored by Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak says pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole”, including an estimated 200,000 deaths a year from acute poisoning. Its authors said:

“It is time to create a global process to transition toward safer and healthier food and agricultural production.”

Hilal Elver says:

“Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger.  According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed nine billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.”

Elver said many of the pesticides are used on commodity crops, such as palm oil and soy, not the food needed by the world’s hungry people:

“The corporations are not dealing with world hunger; they are dealing with more agricultural activity on large scales.”

Mason notes that chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to a range of diseases and conditions and that certain pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a threat to the entire ecological system on which food production depends. The excessive use of pesticides contaminates soil and water sources, causing loss of biodiversity and destroying the natural enemies of pests. The impact of such overuse also imposes staggering costs on national economies. Moreover, the use of neonicotinoid pesticides is particularly worrying because they are linked to a systematic collapse in the number of bees around the world. Some 71% of crop species are bee pollinated. 

Mason goes on to describe the various lawsuits in the US against Bayer (which bought Monsanto) and the tactics used by Monsanto to conceal glyphosate-based Roundup’s carcinogenicity, including capturing regulatory agencies, corrupting public officials, bribing scientists and engaging in scientific fraud to delay its day of reckoning.

Following the court decision to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson, attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said the following at the post-trial press conference:

“… you not only see many people injured, but you also see a subversion of democracy. You see the corruption of public officials, the capture of agencies that are supposed to protect us all from pollution. The agencies become captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers… Monsanto… has used those strategies…”

There is now also a good deal of scientific evidence linking glyphosate to obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease and brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts. Strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10. Researchers also peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children.

The compound is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body, including iron, magnesium, zinc, selenium and molybdenum. Roundup disrupts the microbiome destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects.

Neurotransmitter changes in the brain have been detected due to exposure to glyphosate. This is why, according to Mason, there are so many mental health and psychiatric disorders, depression, suicides, anxiety and violence among children and adults. It is even found in popular breakfast cereals marketed for UK children.

And this says nothing about the cocktail of pesticides sprayed on crops. The Soil Association and PAN UK have indicated that exposure to mixtures of pesticides commonly found in UK food, water and soil may be harming the health of both humans and wildlife. A quarter of all food and over a third of fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK contain pesticide cocktails, with some items containing traces of up to 14 different pesticides.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Environment has identified the rights threatened by environmental harm, including the rights to life, health, food and water and has mapped obligations to protect against such harm from private actors. In effect, where pesticides are concerned, the public are being denied the right to a healthy environment.

But it’s not just the powerful pesticides lobby that is to blame here. Rosemary Mason says the British public (and indeed people across the world) have a right to information. However, she concludes that the public have been denied this because mainstream media outlets have on the whole for too long opted to remain silent on the pesticides issue.

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This article touches on just a few of the points in Rosemary Mason’s report. Readers can access the full text of ‘Glyphosatecauses serious eye damage’ on the academia.edu site.

Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Featured image is from Beyond Pesticides

The new generation of wireless technology, 5G, is fraught with controversy.  Researchers and scientists worldwide are deeply concerned.  Beverly Rubik, a renowned expert in biophysics, will discuss the issues and how we can protect ourselves.

5G is Federally Mandated but its health impacts are untested.  Fortunately, a Federal Court has vacated portions of the FCC order that attempt to circumvent environmental review.  As of August 9, 2019, all applications to install and operate 4G and 5G systems NATIONWIDE are INCOMPLETE and must include this review.

The 5th generation of wireless, with frequencies in the gigahertz range, is now being rolled out.  5G antennas will be installed every 200 to 1000 feet in our neighborhoods, and a total of 20,00 5G satelites will soon circle the glove in low orbit.  This roll out is federally mandated, overriding local government jurisdiction.  The perils of this technology include:

• paucity of research on health impacts and inadequate safety standards.
• 5G’s threat to children, pregnant woman, and those with electrosensitivity
• already existing evidence that wireless radiation is a causal factor in cancer

In this presentation, learn what 5G is and what you can do:

• discover how 5G greatly differs from earlier generations of wireless
• find out about the evidence for 5G’s health and environmental effects
• get a comprehensive update on the political and regulatory issues
• learn practical ways to protect yourself and your loved ones

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Beverly Rubik earned her Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of California in Berkeley, and has conducted research for nearly 40 years on the energy field of the life (the biofield).  She is an internationally renowned expert on the biofield and energy medicine and the author of over 90 scientific papers and two books.  She has conducted research on the effects of 4G on human exposure and the blood and was a featured expert interviewed in the recent 5G Crisis Summit (www.theSummit.com).  Dr. Rubik is founder and president of the Institute for Frontier Science, a 501c3 nonprofit laboratory in Emeryville, CA.  She is an adjunct faculty member in the College of Integrative Health Studies at Saybrook University in Pasadena.

Bloomberg says he wants to stop Donald Trump but he’s really running to stop Bernie Sanders.

“Bloomberg targeted black people for political gain with whites and he created great suffering in the process.”

In 2002 Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as mayor of New York City. In that same year the men known as the Central Park Five had their sentences vacated. They all served between 6 and 13 years in prison for a rape they did not commit. They sued New York City for the wrongful convictions but the Bloomberg administration refused to pay. They had to wait until he left office in 2014 to receive their $40 million settlement.

Michael Bloomberg recently announced that he will seek the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2020. Unlike late comers such as Deval Patrick he actually has a chance to win the nomination or to play a role in choosing someone else. His weapon is not in any of his policy provisions but in his bank account. Bloomberg has an estimated net worth of $55 billion, a figure which makes him among the richest people on the planet. Like the old joke about the 900 pound gorilla he can do whatever he wants, including prevent a progressive from getting the nomination.

Bloomberg says he is “Running for president to stop Donald Trump and rebuild America.” In reality he is running to stop Bernie Sanders because he knows that given a level playing field Sanders would emerge triumphant. Bloomberg’s strategy is to skip the early states and focus on Super Tuesday in March. This plan is a sign that he is more interested in being a spoiler than in actually being president himself.

“His weapon is not in any of his policy provisions but in his bank account.”

Bloomberg’s impact on New York will be felt for years to come. He described New York as “a luxury product” and he acted accordingly by accelerating the displacement of black people through gentrification. In order to make sure that black New Yorkers got the memo and quickly left town he instituted the notorious stop and frisk police program.

At the height of stop and frisk terrorism nearly 700,000 people, nearly all of them black and Latino, were stopped without probable cause. Men, women and even children were stopped, and sometimes arrested. Arrest records can have a lasting negative impact, especially on the lives of black people. Any interaction with police, no matter how minor the cause, carries a risk of harm or even death.

Most police departments have quotas for parking tickets, but the NYPD had quotas for arrests during the Bloomberg era. Individual cops risked being reprimanded or penalized themselves if they didn’t make arrests as often as possible. This legacy of unleashing the modern day slave patrol is enough reason to make Bloomberg unacceptable as a presidential candidate.

“The NYPD had quotas for arrests during the Bloomberg era.”

Bloomberg never backed down from his position while in office. He even said that white people were stopped too often and black people not enough. He has changed his tune of late and now offers a disingenuous apology for the policy he defended as mayor.

There are many reasons to oppose a Bloomberg presidential campaign. Billionaire rule has damaged New York, the nation and the entire world. The word “oligarch” is an insult when applied to other nations like Russia, but an American oligarch has announced his intention to buy the presidency for himself or someone else and opposition has been quite muted.

Michael Bloomberg was the worst mayor for black New Yorkers. While Rudy Guiliani and his overt appeals to racism drew ire, Bloomberg’s approach of buying off opposition allowed him to get away with doing far worse. Al Sharpton was among those who took Bloomberg’s hush money. The National Action Network was a recipient of Bloomberg’s philanthropy and Rev. Sharpton was silent while every black person in town was a potential target for police abuse.

“Bloomberg said white people were stopped too often and black people not enough.”

Donald Trump’s role in inflaming white public opinion in the Central Park case is well known. He paid for newspaper ads calling for the death penalty. Even when his targets were exonerated he stood by his original statement. It is important to remember the role he played in inciting a judicial lynch mob.

But Bloomberg’s equally disgraceful behavior is largely unknown. No one in New York City media then or now wants to anger the rich guy. The fact that financial compensation was withheld received little or no attention. He may have better manners, but he targeted black people for political gain with whites and he created great suffering in the process.

The corporate media always follow orders from the ruling elites. They were instructed to promote Joe Biden as being more electable but his campaign has been a gigantic embarrassment. Other “centrist” Democrats wring their hands because they can’t agree on a candidate while Bloomberg has decided that if he wants this thing done right he had better do it himself.

No one knows if Bloomberg is more electable than Trump. Everyone knows that his wealth gives him a huge advantage and he can decide who will or won’t be the Democratic Party nominee. His presence in the race is decidedly undemocratic and should be denounced.

If Bloomberg is true to form he will have black staffers to provide a friendly public face. He will find respected people to endorse him and explain away his offenses. But his candidacy should be a line in the sand and anyone who supports him should be deemed equally unacceptable.

Black Bloomberg supporters will be outing themselves as traitors and Uncle Toms. It is important to know one’s enemy. That is a silver lining in this cloud.

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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Featured image is from BAR

Judge José de la Mata of Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, had been facing a good deal of stonewalling on the part of his British colleagues.  He is overseeing an investigation into the surveillance activities of a Spanish security firm aimed at WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, during his stay at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

De la Mata had issued a European Investigation Order (EIO) in September seeking the assistance of British authorities in trying to interview Assange on the matter. This involved allegations that David Morales, owner of the security outfit UC Global SL, “invaded the privacy of Assange and his lawyers by placing microphones inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London without consent from the affected parties.”  Morales, for his part, was indicted in October on privacy violations, bribery and money laundering.

While EIO requests are generally regarded as mundane and automatic, the United Kingdom Central Authority was not so sure.  De la Mata’s requests, specifically to interviewing Assange by videoconference, were initially blocked.  The initial response, signed by Rashid Begun, claimed that “these types of interview are only done by the police”.  The justice, Begun stated curtly, had also lacked clarity in his description of events, and the appropriate elaboration on what jurisdiction was being invoked.

It took an irritated De la Mata to retort in a subsequent letter that, “In this case, Julian Assange is a witness, not an accused party”, a point that enabled him to be interviewed by videoconference.  He also reiterated that “all the events and crimes under investigation” had been clearly stated.

The question of jurisdictional bar was also given short shrift.  As the alleged crimes by UC Global had taken place on Spanish territory; given that the microphones deployed against Assange had been purchased in Spain; and given that information obtained in London was uploaded to servers in UC Global SL’s headquarters in Jerez de la Frontera, a clear nexus was established.

The UK Central Authority has had a change of heart.  On December 20, Assange is set to be transferred from his current maximum security abode, Belmarsh, to Westminster Magistrates Court to answer questions that will be posed by De la Mata.

To date, the evidence on Morales and the conduct of his organisation is bulking and burgeoning.  It is said that the company refurbished the security equipment of the London Ecuadorean embassy in 2017, during which Morales installed surveillance cameras equipped with microphone facilities.  While Ecuadorean embassy officials sought to reassure Assange that no recordings of his private conversations with journalists or legal officials were taking place, the opposite proved true.

An unconvinced Assange sought to counter such measures with his own methods.  He spoke to guests in the women’s bathroom.  He deployed a “squelch box” designed to emit sounds of disruption.  These were treated as the measures of a crank rather than those of justifiable concern.

The stance taken by Ecuador has not shifted, despite claims by Morales that any recordings of Assange were done at the behest of the Ecuadorean secret service.  Instead, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno has used the unconvincing argument that Assange, not Ecuador, posed the espionage threat.  “It is unfortunate that, from our territory and with the permission of authorities of the previous government, facilities have been provided within the Ecuadorean embassy in London to interfere in the processes of other states.”  The embassy, he argued, had been converted into a makeshift “centre for spying”.

German broadcasters NDR and WDR have also viewed documents discussing a boastful Morales keen to praise his employees for playing “in the first league…  We are now working for the dark side.”   The dark side, it transpires, were those “American friends”, members of the “US Secret Service” that Morales was more than happy to feed samples to.  NDR has added its name to those filing charges against UC Global for allegations that its own journalists were spied upon in visiting the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The allegations have the potential to furnish a case Assange’s lawyers are hoping to make: that attaining a fair trial in the United States should he be extradited to face 18 charges mostly relating to espionage would be nigh impossible.  The link between UC Global, the US intelligence services, and the breach of attorney-client privilege, is the sort of heady mix bound to sabotage any quaint notions of due process.  The publisher is well and truly damned.

Not that this convinces such legal commentators as Amy Jeffress, former US Department attaché at the US embassy in London.  The appropriate standard here, she surmises, is whether extradition accords with the guarantees of the UK Human Rights Act.  Privacy may well be protected, but it is duly balanced, if not ditched, by the imperatives of combating crime and national security.

US outlets have been gingerly moderating the Spanish angle in the Assange affair.  The New York Times, for instance, concedes that, “After President Trump took office in 2017, the CIA began espionage aimed at Mr Assange, WikiLeaks and their ties to Russian intelligence, and the Justice Department began building case against him.”  A cautionary note, however, is struck: it remained “unclear whether it was the Americans who were behind bugging the embassy.”

Such reservation has infuriated journalists of Stefania Maurizi’s ilk, those who have long praised the work of WikiLeaks and paid visits to Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy.

“Appalling,” she tweeted, “how the NY Times minimise the spying activities against all of us inside the embassy: my phones were secretly unscrewed, all my electronic equipment secretly accessed.”

These proceedings constitute the running down of the clock on the extradition process that promises to internationalise the US effort in punishing the publication of national security information.  In the meantime, a sinking feeling is being registered by physicians concerned that Assange may not be able to withstand the trauma the legal process is evidently inflicting on him.  As medical authorities from eight states have noted, “The medical situation is urgent”, so much so, in fact, that there was little time to lose.  The efforts of De la Mata, at the very least, offer a temporary and much needed roadblock, if not total reprieve.

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

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

Almost as a nighttime fog, hatred rapidly traverses the neighborhoods of the traditional urban middle-class of Bolivia. Their eyes fill with anger. They do not yell, they spit. They do not raise demands, they impose. Their chants are not of hope of brotherhood. They are of disdain and discrimination against the Indians. They hop on their motorcycles, get into their trucks, gather in their fraternities of private universities, and they go out to hunt the rebellious Indians that dared to take power from them.

In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize motorized hordes with sticks in hand to punish the Indians, those that they call ‘collas’, who live in peripheral neighborhoods and in the markets. They chant “the collas must be killed,” and if on the way, they come across a woman wearing a pollera [traditional skirt worn by Indigenous and mestizo women] they hit her, threaten her and demand that she leave their territory.

In Cochabamba, they organize convoys to impose their racial supremacy in the southern zone, where the underprivileged classes live, and charge – as if it were a were a cavalry contingent – at thousands of defenseless peasant women that march asking for peace. They carry baseball bats, chains, gas grenades. Some carry firearms. The woman is their preferred victim. They grab a female mayor of a peasant population, humiliate her, drag her through the street. They hit her, urinate on her when she falls to the ground, cut her hair, threaten to lynch her, and when they realize that they are being filmed, they decide to throw red paint on her symbolizing what they will do with her blood.

In La Paz, they are suspicious of their employees and do not speak when they bring food to the table. Deep down, they fear them, but they also look down on them. Later, when they are on the streets shouting, they insult Evo and with him, all of these Indians that dared to build intercultural democracy with equality. When they are many, they tear down the Wiphala, the Indigenous symbol, they spit on it, they step on it, they cut it, they burn it. It is a visceral hatred that they unload on this symbol of the Indians that they wish they could extinguish from the earth along with all those that are represented by it.

Racial hatred is the political language of this traditional middle class. Academic titles, trips and faith serve for nothing because in the end, what is important is purity of ancestry. Deep down, the imagined lineage is stronger and seems to stick to the spontaneous language of the skin that hates, of the visceral gestures and of their corrupt morals.

Everything exploded on Sunday [October] 20, when Evo Morales won the election with 10% more than the runner-up, but no longer with the immense advantage of before nor with 51% of the votes. It was the sign that the regressive, huddled forces were waiting for – the timid liberal opposition candidate, the ultra-conservative political forces, the OAS [Organization of American States], and the indescribable traditional middle class. Evo had won again but he no longer had 60% of the electorate. He was weaker and they had to go after him.The loser did not recognize his defeat. The OAS spoke of “clean elections” but of a weak victory and asked for a second round, counseling to go against the constitution that states that if a candidate wins more than 40% of the votes and has more than 10% over the runner-up, they are elected. And then the middle class launched its hunt of the Indians. On the night of Monday, October 21, they burned 5 of the 9 electoral offices, including the ballots. In Santa Cruz, a civic strike brought together the inhabitants of the central zones of the city, following which the strike branched out to the residential zones of La Paz and Cochabamba. And this unleashed terror.

Paramilitary groups began to besiege institutions, burn trade union offices, set fire to the residences of candidates and political leaders of the governing party [Movement Towards Socialism]. Even the private home of the president was looted. In other places, families, including children, were kidnapped and threatened with being whipped and burned if their parent, who was a minister or union leader, did not resign. An endless night of the long knives had been unleashed, and fascism peeked out.

The people’s forces comprising workers, miners, peasants, Indigenous people and urban dwellers resisted the civic coup and began to retake territorial control of the cities. But just as the balance of the correlation of forces was shifting in their favor, the police mutiny occurred.

The police had for weeks shown great indolence and ineptitude in protecting the common people while they were being attacked and persecuted by fascist groups. But from Friday [November 8], many of them displayed an extraordinary ability to attack, detain, torture and kill working-class protesters. When it came to dealing with the children of the middle class, they apparently did not have the capacity. But when it came to repressing rebellious Indians, the deployment, violence and the arrogance was monumental.

The same happened with the armed forces. During all of our time in government, we never allowed them to repress civil mobilizations, not even during the first civic coup d’état in 2008. And now, in the midst of the convulsion and without us having asked them anything, they told us that they did not have anti-riot capacities, that they only had 8 bullets per member and that a presidential decree was necessary for them to be on the streets in even a protective capacity. However, they had no hesitation in seeking the resignation of president Evo, in violation of the constitution. They did whatever was possible to attempt to kidnap him while he was traveling to and was in Chapare. And then, when the coup was consolidated, they went to the streets to shoot thousands of bullets, to militarize the cities and assassinate peasants. And all of this without any presidential decree. In order to protect the Indian, they needed a decree. To repress and kill Indians, it was enough to obey what the racial and classist hatred decreed. And now, in only 5 days, there are more than 18 dead and 120 injured with live bullets. Of course, nearly all of them are Indigenous.

The question we must respond to is, how did the traditional middle class incubate so much hatred and resentment towards the people, leading them to embrace racialized fascism centered on the Indian as the enemy? What did they do to irradiate their class frustrations to the police and armed forces and become the social base of this process of becoming fascist, of this state regression and moral degeneration.

The answer is the rejection of equality, which is to say, the rejection of the fundamentals of a substantial democracy.

The last 14 years of the government of the social movements were characterized by the process of leveling of the social classes, the sharp reduction in extreme poverty (from 35% to 15%), the broadening of rights for all (universal access to healthcare, to education and to social protection), the Indianization of the State (more than 50% of functionaries in public administration must be Indigenous, new national narrative around the Indigenous sector) and the reduction of economic inequality (the difference of income between the richest and the poorest fell from 130 to 45). All this meant the systematic democratization of wealth, access to public goods, opportunities and state power. The economy has grown from 9 billion dollars to 42 billion dollars, widening the market and internal savings, which has allowed many people to have their own homes and improve their work activity.

Thus, in a decade, the percentage of people of the so-called “middle class” in terms of income, went from 35% to 60%. The largest part of them came from the working-class and Indigneous sectors. It was essentially a process of democratization of the social goods through the construction of material equality. But this inevitably has caused a rapid devaluation of the economic, educational and political capital held by the traditional middle class. In the past, a notable last name, the monopoly over ‘legitimate’ knowledge, and their family relationships allowed the traditional middle class to access posts in public administration, obtain loans and bids for projects or scholarships. Today, the number of people that fight for the same post or opportunity has not only doubled – reducing the possibilities to access these goods by half – but, additionally, the ‘up-and-coming’, the new middle class with Indigenous, working class origins, has a combination of new capital (Indigenous language, trade union links) of greater value and state recognition to fight for the available public goods.

As such, it is about a collapse of what was a characteristic of a colonial society: ethnicity as capital, basically, the imagined foundation of the historical superiority of the middle class above the subaltern classes because in Bolivia, social class is only comprehensible and is visualized under the form of racial hierarchies. That the sons of this class have been the shock force of the reactionary insurgency is the violent cry of a new generation that sees how the inheritance of the last name and skin fades in the face of the democratization of goods. Although they raise the flag of democracy that is understood as a vote, in reality, they have risen up against democracy that is understood as the leveling of social classes and distribution of wealth. This is why we see the overflowing of hatred, the outpouring of violence – because racial supremacy is something that is not rationalized. It lives as a primary impulse of the body, as a tattoo of the colonial history in the skin. As such, fascism is not only the expression of a failed radical transformation of values, but paradoxically in post-colonial societies, the success of a material democratization.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that while nearly 20 Indigenous people have been shot dead, those that murder them and order their murder narrate how they are acting to safeguard democracy. But in reality, they know what they have done is to protect the privilege of caste and last name.

Racial hatred can only destroy. It is not a horizon for the future. It is nothing more than a primitive vengeance of a class historically and morally declining that shows that a coup-supporter is crouched behind every mediocre liberal.

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Published on CELAG. English translation by Zoe PC.

Featured image: Indigenous woman have been most targeted by the racially-driven violence during this civic-military coup d’état. Photo: Redfish

During November, at least 373 people were killed and 3,136 were wounded. Mass graves gave up 73 bodies as well. October saw 433 deaths and thousands more wounded.

Protests continued last month, but the Iraqi government ceased giving official casualty reports in October. In November, at least 203 dead and 3,026 were wounded, according to media reports. According to Dr. Ali Albayati, a member of Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights, the casualty numbers for the protests are likely 409 dead and 17,745 injured. These figures are from October 1 to about November 30. It is unclear how accurate they are. Many of the wounded avoid seeking medical help in hospitals to avoid being arrested.

As for non-protest violence, it is likely being underreported as well. Altogether, at least 170 were killed, and 110 were wounded. Also, 76 bodies were found in mass graves.

Of those figures, 19 civilians, 21 security personnel, and 83 militants were killed. Another 66 civilians, 35 security personnel, and one militant were wounded. Five Italian security personnel working with the Coalition were also wounded.

In the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), at least 42 guerrillas were killed, and two were wounded. Turkish strikes also killed five civilians, and wounded another.

Finally, at least 70 victims of the Anfal Genocide were found in a mass grave. The graves dates from the 1980s. Six people were found in an Islamic State grave.

At least seven people were killed, and 84 more wounded in recent violence:

Protest News:

In Baghdad, at least one demonstrator was shot dead, and 10 others were wounded.

A protester was shot dead in Najaf.

Parliament has accepted Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi’s offer of resignation. Also, a police officer was sentenced to death for killing a protester.

Although Sunnis have been wary of protesting, several gatherings were held in Sunni cities, such as Mosul, to mourn the casualties that occurred in southern Iraqi towns and Baghdad. Sunnis are afraid that the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad will brand them terrorists for protesting. Demonstrators also blocked a highway between Baghdad and Kirkuk in a show of support.

Violence unrelated to protests:

Near Baquba, a roadside bomb killed a militiaman and wounded three more.

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Margaret Griffis is a journalist from Miami Beach, Florida and has been covering Iraqi casualties for Antiwar.com since 2006.

Featured image is from South Front

Almost two and a half years after the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” onto a Daesh hideout in eastern Afghanistan, locals say they have been afflicted by “many diseases” and agricultural lands are not yielding crops.

TOLOnews reporter Abdulhaq Omeri interviewed residents of Mohmand Dara village, in the Achin district in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

Omeri witnessed many children and teenagers suffering from skin problems and listened to many residents speak of the bomb’s lasting effects.

In April 2017, US Forces dropped a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) on a Daesh stronghold of caves and tunnels in eastern Nangarhar province.

The bomb, nicknamed the “mother of all bombs” is one of the most powerful conventional (non-nuclear) weapons in the US arsenal, according to the US Department of Defense.

MOAB is a concussive bomb, meaning it detonates above ground rather than penetrating hardened defenses.

Anyone within 300 meters will be vaporized, experts say, while those in a one kilometer radius outside ground zero will be left deaf.

Nangarhar residents said the bomb has had a lasting effect on the area.

“The ‘mother of all bombs’ was dropped here,” said Pacha Shinwari, a local resident. “You can see that the stones can be broken easily, the plants are dry, the trees are dry, the nearby houses are all destroyed–40 or 50 of them.”

“The government evacuated the people (before the bomb was dropped), but when we came back, we saw that the houses were destroyed,” local resident Mohammadullah said.

Some teenagers are suffering from skin problems following the bomb explosion.

“Many diseases have emerged in this area after the bomb was used. Most of them have skin problems such as acne and skin irritations,” local resident Jam Roz said.

“The agricultural yields are not the same as in the past. The harvests are lesser than in the past,” said Aminullah, another resident.

Medical doctors and analysts interviewed by TOLOnews said the use of such bombs leaves an impact on areas where it is dropped.

“There are some concerns about the emergence of diseases after the use of the mother of all bombs in Achin, but so far the public health directorate has not recorded any disease that is related to the bomb,” said Zahir Adil, a spokesman for Nangarhar’s Directorate of Public Health.

“This bomb has three effects. First, it impacts the eyes. People will feel irritation in their eyes. Second, it impacts the inner organisms of the people who breathe the air where it has been used. It also impacts pregnant women and newborn babies… Afghanistan is a laboratory now. Third, it has an impact on lungs,” military affairs analyst Atiqullah Amarkhil said.

President Ashraf Ghani’s advisor and state minister for Human Rights and International Relations, Sima Samar, confirmed that the use of the MOAB in Nangarhar has had long-term effects on residents of Mohmand Dara village.

“It inevitably impacted the health of the Afghan people, especially in areas where explosives are used a lot, including the ‘mother of all bombs,’ which has left its mark on the lives of Afghans,” Samar said.

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Featured image is from Tolo News

The following article was written in response to a question asked by Ms. Sheila Khalid, a Ph.D. student working on the topic “Pakistan-Russia Relations in the Post-9/11 Era” at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, as part of her academic research.

If you have turned on a TV or read the news during the past few months, you have probably heard of the widespread fires that wrought havoc on the Amazon rainforest this year. Fires occur in the rainforest every year, but the past 11 months saw the number of fires increase by more than 70% when compared with 2018, indicating a major acceleration in land clearing by the country’s logging and farming industries.

The smoke from the fires rose high into the atmosphere and could be seen from space. Some regions of Brazil became covered in thick smoke that closed airports and darkened city skies.

As the rainforest burns, it releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and larger particles of so-called “black carbon” (smoke and soot). The phrase “enormous amounts” hardly does the numbers justice – in any given year, the burning of forests and grasslands in South America emits a whopping 800,000 tonnes of black carbon into the atmosphere.

This truly astounding amount is almost double the black carbon produced by all combined energy use in Europe over 12 months. Not only does this absurd amount of smoke cause health issuesand contribute to global warming but, as a growing number of scientific studies are showing, it also more directly contributes to the melting of glaciers.

In a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers has outlined how smoke from fires in the Amazon in 2010 made glaciers in the Andes melt more quickly.

South America: the Andes mountains run along the western edge of the Amazon basin (centre). AridOcean / shutterstock

When fires in the Amazon emit black carbon during the peak burning season (August to October), winds carry these clouds of smoke to Andean glaciers, which can sit higher than 5,000 metres above sea level.

Despite being invisible to the naked eye, black carbon particles affect the ability of the snow to reflect incoming sunlight, a phenomenon known as “albedo”. Similar to how a dark-coloured car will heat up more quickly in direct sunlight when compared with a light-coloured one, glaciers covered by black carbon particles will absorb more heat, and thus melt faster.

By using a computer simulation of how particles move through the atmosphere, known as HYSPLIT, the team was able to show that smoke plumes from the Amazon are carried by winds to the Andes, where they fall as an invisible mist across glaciers. Altogether, they found that fires in the Amazon in 2010 caused a 4.5% increase in water runoff from Zongo Glacier in Bolivia.

The Zongo glacier is found on the slopes of Huayna Potosi, one of Bolivia’s highest mountains. Ryan Michael Wilson / shutterstock

Crucially, the authors also found that the effect of black carbon depends on the amount of dust covering a glacier – if the amount of dust is higher, then the glacier will already be absorbing most of the heat that might have been absorbed by the black carbon. Land clearing is one of the reasons that dust levels over South America doubled during the 20th century.

Glaciers are some of the most important natural resources on the planet. Himalayan glaciers provide drinking water for 240m people, and 1.9 billion rely on them for food. In South America, glaciers are crucial for water supply – in some towns, including Huaraz in Peru, more than 85% of drinking water comes from glaciers during times of drought. However, these truly vital sources of water are increasingly under threat as the planet feels the effects of global warming. Glaciers in the Andes have been receding rapidly for the last 50 years.

The tropical belt of South America is predicted to become more dry and arid as the climate changes. A drier climate means more dust, and more fires. It also means more droughts, which make towns more reliant on glaciers for water.

Unfortunately, as the above study shows, the fires assisted by dry conditions help to make these vital sources of water vanish more quickly. The role of black carbon in glacier melting is an exceedingly complex process – currently, the climate models used to predict the future melting of glaciers in the Andes do not incorporate black carbon. As the authors of this new study show, this is likely causing the rate of glacial melt to be underestimated in many current assessments.

With communities reliant on glaciers for water, and these same glaciers likely to melt faster as the climate warms, work examining complex forces like black carbon and albedo changes is needed more now than ever before.

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Matthew Harris is PhD Researcher, Climate Science, Keele University.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro founded a new political party in November as he faces a noisy divorce with the Social Liberal Party (PSL). Since the beginning of his political career as a councillor in Rio de Janeiro in 1989, Bolsonaro has been a member of another seven political parties, in addition to PSL. To compete in the presidential elections, he joined the PSL, along with his sons Eduardo and Flavio.

The relationship has come to a messy end now. Bolsonaro was recorded stating that PSL President Luciano Bivar would be “burned out” while telling a supporter to “forget about the PSL”; his son Eduardo was embroiled in a battle for the PSL presidency in the House of Representatives; and, the party was hit by a candidacy scandal involving embezzlement and the Minister of Tourism, Marcelo Álvaro Antônio.

The launch of Bolsonaro’s new party, Alliance for Brazil, was held at the Royal Tulip Hotel in Brasilia on November 21. To be formally able to run an election, there is still a long way to go. It is necessary first to fulfil obligations established by the electoral legislation and to collect 500,000 signatures in Brazil, something that he is expected to do with ease.

The initial ideology of the Alliance already allows us to visualize the fundamentals of the new political party. The text provides an insight into the new party, and of course, it certainly has not divorced from the reactionary Bolsonaro that we have become accustomed with. The party “demands” the  members to “defend life from conception,” “guarantee of access to weapons,” “defense of the family as an essential core of society,” “combat any ideology that seeks the eroticization of children,” “combat attempts to legalize illicit drugs,” and to “fight communism Globalism,” among other things.

Of course, he never offered a solution to the severe economic crisis in Brazil. What helped him be elected was to distract Brazilians over the struggle of identity politics rather than the ailing economy. It appears he will run on the very same platform, despite the massive 11.8% unemployment rate and the informal employment rate reaching a record high of 41.3%, which represents 38.6 million Brazilians.

Essentially, Bolsonaro’s new party is an attempt to repeat the National Renewal Alliance, the official party of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The target audience of Bolsonaro’s party is effectively Brazilians with the same reactionary ideology whose counterparts in Bolivia forced the coup of Evo Morales and have continued to serve U.S. interests in Venezuela against President Nicolás Maduro.

The first clues that Bolsonaro is wanting a return of the dictatorship era is his push for changes in the rules of the Law and Order Guarantee operations to ensure an “exclusionary of illegality” for security forces that serves to prevent violent protests. The exclusion of illegality is an old campaign promise from Bolsonaro but was recently barred by the House of Representatives working group that analyzes the anti-crime package presented by Justice Minister Sergio Moro. Effectively Bolsonaro is attempting to militarize security forces in Brazil under the guise of preventing violent protests, despite Brazilian protests being overwhelmingly peaceful and usual have a party/samba vibe to it.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office for Citizens’ Rights of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) classifies the presidential proposal as “blatantly unconstitutional and unparalleled, even compared to the institutional acts of the military dictatorship.” The illicit exclusionist is an attempt to tarnish and eliminate the Brazilian Constitution, which has excelled in fighting inequality. Bolsonaro’s push for changes in the law allows police to freely kill without impunity, as has recently occurred in neighboring Bolivia.

Despite the possible problems that may arise from the point of view of representation, Bolsonaro will probably lead deputies, senators, mayors, councillors and other politicians from other parties to join his cause. As Bolsonaro is president, he will be able to attract these politicians and vast resources to his new political party. The fate of the PSL party fund, a very rich fund at that, remains open. Politicians who follow Bolsonaro and are allies of the Alliance want to bring their resources to the new party. This is crucial to the future and survival of the party of the initiative. The dispute over the appeals will likely be judicialized. Another legal point that must be considered is that politicians who leave their respective political parties may lose their mandate.

Although the Alliance does not have a sound economic plan and rather allows “the market” to dictate it, Brazilians in their hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are likely to become members of this new political party. With Bolsonaro nearing one year into his mandate, he has done nothing to alleviate poverty, corruption and suffering in Brazil. However, he has been successful in distracting much of the population with identity politics under the guise of defending Christian values. With this thinking permeating in Brazil, it is likely that his new party will be highly successful, despite the clear threat of Bolsonaro wanting a return to the years of Brazil’s dictatorship.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Featured image is from Antonio Scorza / Shutterstock

The three smartest words that Donald Trump uttered during his presidential campaign are “NATO is obsolete.” His adversary, Hillary Clinton, retorted that NATO was “the strongest military alliance in the history of the world.” Now that Trump has been in power, the White House parrots the same worn line that NATO is “the most successful Alliance in history, guaranteeing the security, prosperity, and freedom of its members.” But Trump was right the first time around: Rather than being a strong alliance with a clear purpose, this 70-year-old organization that is meeting in London on December 4 is a stale military holdover from the Cold War days that should have gracefully retired many years ago.

NATO was originally founded by the United States and 11 other Western nations as an attempt to curb the rise of communism in 1949. Six years later, Communist nations founded the Warsaw Pact and through these two multilateral institutions, the entire globe became a Cold War battleground. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the Warsaw Pact disbanded but NATO expanded, growing from its original 12 members to 29 member countries. North Macedonia, set to join next year, will bring the number to 30. NATO has also expanded well beyond the North Atlantic, adding a partnership with Colombia in 2017. Donald Trump recently suggested that Brazil could one day become a full member.

NATO’s post-Cold War expansion toward Russia’s borders, despite earlier promises not to move eastward, has led to rising tensions between Western powers and Russia, including multiple close calls between military forces. It has also contributed to a new arms race, including upgrades in nuclear arsenals, and the largest NATO “war games” since the Cold War.

While claiming to “preserve peace,” NATO has a history of bombing civilians and committing war crimes. In 1999, NATO engaged in military operations without UN approval in Yugoslavia. Its illegal airstrikes during the Kosovo War left hundreds of civilians dead. And far from the “North Atlantic,” NATO joined the United States in invading Afghanistan in 2001, where it is still bogged down two decades later. In 2011, NATO forces illegally invaded Libya, creating a failed state that caused masses of people to flee. Rather than take responsibility for these refugees, NATO countries have turned back desperate migrants on the Mediterranean Sea, letting thousands die.

In London, NATO wants to show it is ready to fight new wars. It will showcase its readiness initiative – the ability to deploy 30 battalions by land, 30 air squadrons and 30 naval vessels in just 30 days, and to confront future threats from China and Russia, including with hypersonic missiles and cyberwarfare. But far from being a lean, mean war machine, NATO is actually riddled with divisions and contradictions. Here are some of them:

• French President Emmanuel Macron questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe, has called NATO “brain dead” and has proposed a European Army under the nuclear umbrella of France.

• Turkey has enraged NATO members with its incursion into Syria to attack the Kurds, who have been Western allies in the fight against ISIS. And Turkey has threatened to veto a Baltic defense plan until allies support its controversial incursion into Syria. Turkey has also infuriated NATO members, especially Trump, by purchasing Russia’s S-400 missile system.

• Trump wants NATO to push back against China’s growing influence, including the use of Chinese companies for the construction of 5G mobile networks–something many NATO countries are unwilling to do.

• Is Russia really NATO’s adversary? France’s Macron has reached out to Russia, inviting Putin to discuss ways in which the European Union can put the Crimean invasion behind it. Donald Trump has publicly attacked Germany over its Nord Stream 2 project to pipe in Russian gas, but a recent German poll saw 66 percent wanting closer ties with Russia.

• The UK has bigger problems. Britain has been convulsed over the Brexit conflict and is holding contentious national election on December 12. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, knowing that Trump is wildly unpopular, is reluctant to be seen as close to him. Also, Johnson’s major contender, Jeremy Corbyn, is a reluctant supporter of NATO. While his Labour Party is committed to NATO, over his career as an anti-war champion, Corbyn has called NATO “a danger to world peace and a danger to world security.” The last time Britain hosted NATO leaders in 2014, Corbyn told an anti-NATO rally that the end of the Cold War “should have been the time for NATO to shut up shop, give up, go home and go away.”

• A further complication is Scotland, which is home to a very unpopular Trident nuclear submarine base as part of NATO’s nuclear deterrent. A new Labour government would need the support of the Scottish National Party. But its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, insists that a precondition for her party’s support is a commitment to close the base.

• Europeans can’t stand Trump (a recent poll found he is trusted by only 4 percent of Europeans!) and their leaders can’t rely on him. Allied leaders learn of presidential decisions that affect their interests via Twitter. The lack of coordination was clear in October, when Trump ignored NATO allies when he ordered U.S. special forces out of northern Syria, where they had been operating alongside French and British commandos against Islamic State militants.

• The US unreliability has led the European Commission to draw up plans for a European “defense union” that will coordinate military spending and procurement. The next step may be to coordinate military actions separate from NATO. The Pentagon has complained about EU countries purchasing military equipment from each other instead of from the United States, and has called this defense union “a dramatic reversal of the last three decades of increased integration of the transatlantic defence sector.”

• Do Americans really want to go to war for Estonia? Article 5 of the Treaty states that an attack against one member “shall be considered an attack against them all,” meaning that the treaty obligates the US to go to war on behalf of 28 nations–something most likely opposed by war-weary Americans who want a less aggressive foreign policy that focuses on peace, diplomacy, and economic engagement instead of military force.

An additional major bone of contention is who will pay for NATO. The last time NATO leaders met, President Trump derailed the agenda by berating NATO countries for not paying their fair share and at the London meeting, Trump is expected to announce symbolic US cuts to NATO’s operations budget.

Trump’s main concern is that member states step up to the NATO target of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic products on defense by 2024, a goal that is unpopular among Europeans, who prefer that their taxdollars to go for nonmilitary items. Nevertheless, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will brag that Europe and Canada have added $100 billion to their military budgets since 2016–something Donald Trump will take credit for–and that more NATO officials are meeting the 2 percent goal, even though a 2019 NATO report shows only seven members have done so: the U.S., Greece, Estonia, the UK, Romania, Poland and Latvia.

In an age where people around the world want to avoid war and to focus instead on the climate chaos that threatens future life on earth, NATO is an anachronism. It now accounts for about three-quarters of military spending and weapons dealing around the globe. Instead of preventing war, it promotes militarism, exacerbates global tensions and makes war more likely. This Cold War relic shouldn’t be reconfigured to maintain U.S. domination in Europe, or to mobilize against Russia or China, or to launch new wars in space. It should not be expanded, but disbanded. Seventy years of militarism is more than enough.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Featured image is from the author

The Brazilian Bar Association for Human Rights and the Arns Commission on Wednesday denounced President Jair Bolsonaro formally for “crimes against humanity” and incitement to genocide of the Amazon indigenous peoples.

This complaint was filed before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, an institution created in 2002 that has already tried several war criminals.

Among other things, human rights lawyers indicated that the Brazilian president did not act promptly to stop “environmental crimes” in the Amazon basin.

Within this globally important ecosystem, deforestation has grown by 29.5 percent due to the clearing of forests and premeditated fires in which far-right militias would have participated.

“In Brazil, we don’t find an efficient way to prosecute Bolsonaro,” explained Jose Carlos Dias, the director of the Arns Commission, which was created in honor of the late Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns who protected hundreds of Argentineans, Uruguayans, and Chileans activists during the dictatorships.

#BolsonaroAssassino @IntClinTrials @mbachelet @UN @UNHumanRights @ONUBrasil @OEA_oficial @UNICEF @ONU_derechos @washingtonpost @guardian @lemondefr @EmmanuelMacron @lemondefr @elmundoes @elpais_america @BBCWorld @nytimes @NicolasMaduro @PresidenciaCuba #BolsonaroCriminoso pic.twitter.com/4gAIuYWaE5

— Lula Presidente Jean Wyllys exilado político (@Gustavoucranian) November 29, 2019

“The Amazon burns. However, whoever puts out the fire is imprisoned.” The meme at the bottom contains two press clippings that say, “‘I want those bums of the Landless Movement killed,’ Bolsonaro says.” “‘Two members of the Landless Movement are shot dead by two hooded men in a camp,’ the Military Police says.”

Meanwhile, far-right President on Friday accused the U.S. actor Leonardo DiCaprio of paying money to promote fires in the Amazon.

“Leonardo Dicaprio is a cool guy, isn’t he? Giving money to set the Amazon on fire,” Bolsonaro told his supporters who were gathered in front of the government headquarters.

The far-right president thus resumed his attacks against human rights defenders and environmental activists whom he accuses of being responsible for this year’s fires in the Amazon.

Once again, however, he did not offer any proof of his accusations. He just spoke wryly about them.

“They take a picture and send it to an NGO. Then the NGO spreads it and contacts Leonardo DiCaprio, and he makes a US$500,000 donation to that NGO. Leonardo DiCaprio, you are collaborating with the fires in the Amazon,” Bolsonaro said.

The Brazilian president’s comments follow a police raid against two environmental organizations that work in the Amazonian state of Para.

“Several volunteer firefighters were arrested and later released. Local police say they are being investigated for allegedly igniting fires to obtain funding,” Central Maine reported.

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