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Gabbard deserves praise for being anti-war and on the right side of other major issues.

Her “vision for America” includes world peace over endless US wars, no longer “supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.” 

She supports Medicare for all and other social justice policies over neoliberal tyranny harming most Americans.

Political rhetoric is one thing, following through another entirely. Time and again, candidates promise one thing, then go another way if elected — notably true of the Clintons, Bush/Cheney, Obama, Trump, and congressional leadership, betraying the public trust in office time and again.

That said, Gabbard alone among US presidential aspirants wants “trillions of dollars on regime change wars in the Middle East” and elsewhere ended.

She calls for using the nation’s resources for “affordable housing, (fixing) aging infrastructure…invest(ing) in education, healthcare, and so much more.”

Her Stop Arming Terrorist Act prohibits direct and indirect US support for ISIS and other jihadists.

She opposes Trump’s trade war with China, his regime’s economic terrorism on Iran and Venezuela, his JCPOA  pullout, along with US interventionist policies against any sovereign state.

She’s against legislation that “restrict(s) freedom of speech by imposing legal penalties against those who participate in the BDS movement.”

She called all anti-government forces in Syria and elsewhere terrorists, not moderate rebels, stressing “(t)hat is a fact.”

She said “issues of war and peace” are central to her campaign, describing herself as an anti-war/anti-Trump progressive.

Undemocratic Dems, other US dark forces, and establishment media consider her unfit for high office for being anti-war/pro-social justice.

Unfairly denied participation in September’s Dem debate, she was one of 12 party aspirants in the October 15 one, her remarks alone noteworthy Tuesday night.

She slammed the NYT/CNN lying machines. Calling them neither neutral or objective, she accused them of disigracefully “smear(ing) and call(ing) (her) a traitor.”

CNN, the most distrusted name in television propaganda masquerading as news, shamefully called her “a puppet for the Russian government.”

The channel and other US establishment media operate as press agents for imperial wars, Wall Street, and other corporate interests.

They’re unapologetically hostile to peace, equity, justice, and journalism the way it should be.

In an article updated on Wednesday, the NYT shamefully accused Gabbard of “injecting chaos in the (Dem party) primary” process, supporting “isolationist foreign polic(ies),” adding:

“(A)n array of alt-right internet stars, white nationalists…anti-Semites…and Russians have praised her.”

The above and volumes more like it is typical Times disinformation and fake news. In virtually all its editions, the NYT feature “news that’s” unfit to read.

Gabbard’s agenda is progressive and anti-war — notions the Times, CNN, and other establishment media abhor.

They collectively threaten fundamental freedoms just societies cherish.

Tune them out! Avoid their on air and print rubbish! Follow credible independent media exclusively, mainly online, the only way to be informed.

Some of Gabbard’s Tuesday night remarks were as follows:

“(H)yperpartisan (calls for impeaching Trump) began shortly after (his) election. (A)s unhappy as that may make us (Dems), he won that election in 2016.”

To her discredit, she supports the politicized impeachment inquiry, a Ukrainegate spinoff from the failed Russiagate scam.

At the same time, she said if House impeachment isn’t followed by removal from office by Senate members, it’ll “further (deepen) the divides in this country that we cannot afford.”

The real divide is between privileged Americans and vast majority of others, exploited and otherwise mistreated so monied interests can benefit — fascist tyranny wrapped in the American flag.

Gabbard: A “universal basic income is a good idea to help provide that security so that people can have the freedom to make the kinds of choices that they want to see.”

“(B)ad trade deals (like NAFTA harm ordinary Americans, compromising their ability to) provide for their families.”

“(W)hat we need to do is look at how we can best serve the interests of (all) the American people” — not just the privileged few.

She strongest remarks were as follows, denouncing Turkish “slaughter of the Kurds,” calling it “another negative consequence of the regime change war that we’ve been waging in Syria,” adding:

“Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime change war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media, who have been championing and cheerleading this regime change war.”

“Not only that, but the New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war.”

“Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears.”

“This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable.”

“As president, I will end these regime change wars by doing two things — ending the draconian sanctions that are really a modern-day siege the likes of which we are seeing Saudi Arabia wage against Yemen, that have caused tens of thousands of Syrian civilians to die and to starve, and I would make sure that we stop supporting terrorists like al-Qaida in Syria who have been the ground force in this ongoing regime change war.”

“I’d like to ask Senator Warren if she would join me in calling for an end to this regime change war in Syria, finally.”

Warren, Sanders, Biden, and other undemocratic Dems are on the wrong side of most major issues, their voting records belying their rhetoric.

Gabbard slammed Buttigieg’s support for endless regime change wars, saying:

“(W)hat you’re saying, mayor Pete, is that you would continue to support having US troops in Syria for an indefinite period of time to continue this regime change war that has caused so many refugees to flee Syria, that you would continue to have our country involved in a war that has undermined our national security, you would continue this policy of the US actually providing arms in support to terrorist groups in Syria, like al-Qaida, HTS, al-Nusra and others, because they are the ones who have been the ground force in this regime change war? That’s really what you’re saying!”

It’s what he, Biden, Warren, Sanders and the others are saying — talking peace while supporting endless wars of aggression, including Israeli state terror against Palestinians, Gabbard the only real peace candidate.

The real question needing to be asked and answered is “(w)ho is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief,” Gabbard stressed, adding:

“This is the most important responsibility that the president has. What Donald Trump has been doing in Syria, and what we have just seen with him, inviting Turkey to come in and slaughter the Kurds, show what an unfit president looks like.”

“It highlights how critical it is that we have a president and commander-in-chief who is ready on day one, bringing experience and understanding in foreign policy and national security.”

“Bringing the experience that I have, both serving in Congress now for nearly seven years, serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee, serving on the Armed Services Committee, subcommittees related to terrorism and upcoming threats, serving on the Homeland Security Committee, the experience that I have as a soldier, serving for over 16 years in the Army National Guard, deploying twice to the Middle East, being able to serve in different capacities, joint training exercises, training the Kuwait National Guard.”

“I understand the importance of our national security. I am prepared to do this job, to fulfill this responsibility as commander-in-chief on day one.”

CNN co-host Erin Burnett cut Gabbard off from asking the other Dem candidates where they stand on war and peace and what credentials do they have to serve as commander-in-chief — saying: “We’re going to take (a) break now.”

Note: Establishment media NYT and CNN co-sponsored Tuesday’s “debate,” wrecking its legitimacy except for Gabbard’s remarks.

What’s needed are real debates, , hosted by apolitical independent organizations, not scripted ones, featuring slogans and one-liners over solutions, along with promises made to be broken by most aspirants if elected.

Independent candidates should either be invited to participate or given equal nationally televised airtime to air their views.

The US is a one-party state with two right wings, Gabbard an exception to the rule — why she has virtually no change of being Dem standard bearer in November 2020.

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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.

The right’s New Jerusalem: The birth of any new nation-state typically requires revolutionaries. And the British and Unionist Conservative Party is today the (perhaps surprising) political agent of a potentially new English nation-state. For this is not a Conservative party that is interested in conserving anything, least of all the conditions for keeping the United Kingdom’s constituent parts together. The threat of a no-deal Brexit is looming, support is growing in Scotland for independence, and in Northern Ireland the prospects of a Border Poll that could lead to a United Ireland are accelerating. Even in Wales, support for independence is rising.

Boris Johnson’s rhetoric around the so-called ‘surrender bill’ designed to stop a Halloween no-deal crash-out is pitched squarely at an England still trapped in the last reel of a Second World War movie. And it could play well with the electorate. A hard Brexit of some sort before or after the presumably imminent General Election could see the constituent parts of the British state peel away, leaving the English state standing alone. And the New English state will not be pretty.

English nationalism does not have anything of the progressive potential which smaller nationalisms fighting against larger oppressive political units can often have. English nationalism is the larger oppressive nationalism. It has, I think, four key features.

Firstly, England has a strong centralised state, around which it has wrapped a supra-national political unit called Britain – including Wales and Scotland and the United Kingdom, which included the whole of Ireland from 1801 until 1921 and now Northern Ireland. This wrap-around state construction was designed to stop Scotland and Ireland being a place where European enemies could launch intrigues and attacks. So English nationalism taps into centuries of distrust directed at European powers and is itself a power-hoarding apparatus.

Secondly, English nationalism demands a muscular military presence able to project itself internationally as befits a country with an imperial legacy that it cannot quite leave behind. Britain’s Imperial adventures around the world meant that its conservative political culture never really saw itself as a European power, but as a world power. England solved the problem of not being able to dominate Europe directly due to its own geographical position and the relative strength of other powers (Spain, France and eventually Germany), by conquering territories elsewhere that could not withstand its military and economic power.

Thirdly, English nationalism depends on powerful ideological resources around British exceptionalism. For example, an island nation protected by the sea and the White Cliffs of Dover with an unbroken political order that has avoided internal revolution or external invasion for hundreds of years. Central to this appeal to deep historical continuity is also the constitutional monarchy – which reconciles tradition and freedom, hierarchy and liberty. This exceptionalism and constitutional monarchy became all the more pronounced following the French revolution where attempts at radical change could be said to lead to tyranny. However, conservative gradualism is just one of many conservative moral-cultural reflexes that have been liquidated by neo-liberalism.

Finally and most importantly, England is the heartland of a historic commitment to a brutal free-market political economy. This last point is crucial for understanding recent history. English nationalism is the means by which conservatism displaces the anger and discontent which its own economic policies produce, onto a series of scapegoats. EU Brussels bureaucracy and inward migration from the EU are only the latest in a long line of such scapegoats. However, conservative English nationalism has yet to acquire any lucidity about is its own fraught and contradictory relationship with the British state and the political forces mobilising English nationalism which themselves remain, formally at least, committed to ‘the Union’.

Thatcherism forged the template for the contemporary English nationalism that we see today in the Brexit crisis. Thatcherism flaunted an aggressive foreign policy (the war in Ireland, the Falklands war, a virulent anti-communism and pro-nuclear policy) that invoked the imperial past, aggressive militarism, unstinting Atlanticism, and a hefty dose of xenophobia and racism to wash it all down.  Alongside the aggressive foreign policy was a new authoritarian populism (the term coined by Stuart Hall) that attacked social democratic rights and civil society institutions as the preserve of elites who thought they knew better than ‘the people’ (understood as consumers not citizens). How familiar that sounds today, from Michael Gove’s dismissal of ‘experts’ in 2016, to Johnson’s framing of the forthcoming election as one between Parliament vs the People.. And of course, Thatcher herself was deeply Eurosceptic, seeing in it, as today’s Brexiters do, a threat to the conservative national identity from where they draw some of their powerful ideological wellsprings (the British legislature, the British judiciary, the British army, etc).

English nationalism was reforged by Thatcherism in order to extricate itself from the British social democratic project. While successful at a domestic level, in the late 80s and 90s, it was unable to extricate itself from the EU project. The right had historically viewed with antipathy a continent which it regarded as having been bypassed by conservatism on the way to building a global empire. Thatcher’s anti-EU stance was an important factor in her being deposed, of course. But today it’s returning – unfinished business that now threatens not just the remnants of British social democracy but the British state itself.

“Thatcher’s anti-EU stance was an important factor in her being deposed, of course. But today it’s returning – unfinished business that now threatens not just the remnants of British social democracy but the British state itself.”

Thatcherism had never really disappeared, it just lost its leading position within governing elite circles. Tony Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister grafted a new set of political and cultural options onto a broadly similar neo-liberal political economy. But the paradox is that the pursuit of that broadly similar political economy sowed the seeds for the Thatcherite version of the same project to be resurrected (on steroids). As inequalities deepened during the Blair years and then culminated in the post-crash austerity project enforced by the Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition government, so deep resentments against Westminster seethed. And it was Thatcherite nationalism (stretching across the ERG wing of the Conservative party and into an ascendant UKIP) that was best placed to capitalise on this. They have the best displacement mechanisms that can transform economically generated pain into various cultural consolations. This is because they have the cultural reference points and images most deeply embedded in the major institutions. It is their rhetoric that strikes the emotional chords most powerfully (‘Take Back Control’). Against these displacement mechanisms, neo-liberal liberalism (stretching from Cameroonian Conservatives, across the Lib-Dems and deep into the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour party) has no answer, at least within England. At the same time, the neo-liberal liberals may have torpedoed the only political project that could have offered an alternative in the forthcoming election, namely Corbyn’s alt-left Labour party.

“The Thatcherite revolution transformed Britain but at the cost of opening up fault lines that led to the 2014 Referendum on Scottish independence. The second Thatcherite revolution, if it transpires in the form of a hard Brexit, will likely lead to a second (and successful) independence poll for Scotland. From there the dominoes are likely to fall, with Northern Ireland and even Wales (in time) going.”

Angela Merkel recently warned of the dangers posed by Britain if it were to become a ‘Singapore-on-the Thames’ free market economy on the edge of Europe, attracting investment by undercutting the EU’s floor in standards and regulations.

Merkel and other European leaders are acutely aware that the neo-liberal extremists are even more committed to the market abandoning social responsibilities than the EU is. Yet this is not a vision that has much traction outside of England and pursuing it threatens to unwind the supra-national political construct that the English state once wrapped around itself. It may be a case of unintended consequences. It may be consequences that the English nationalists do not believe will really happen. How, they might think, would anyone want to leave a country graced with the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel at the helm?

It may be that in the end, as polling indicates, they and their party members do not really care. Conservative English nationalism is the content that is slowly bursting through the political form of the British state, liquidating its apparently most cherished construct. Unlike Scotland, England’s leaving will travel further and faster in the very direction that is causing the problems in the first place. The New Right’s Jerusalem, if it comes to pass, will consume itself and everyone in it.

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Mike Wayne is a Professor of Media at Brunel University and author of England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities Pluto Press 2018. This article also appeared at openDemocracy.

Featured image is from TP

The U.S. Armed Forces are not withdrawing from the eastern Euphrates River Valley region of Deir Ezzor or its plethora of oil fields, a military source in Damascus told Al-Masdar News.

According to the source, the U.S. Armed Forces won’t withdraw from these areas because of Iran’s presence in eastern Syria and the reality that Damascus would again have access to Deir Ezzor’s vital oil fields.

He would add the U.S.’ two largest military bases in Syria are in eastern Syria near some of the country’s largest oil fields like Al-‘Umar.

Damascus has wanted the Al-‘Umar and Conoco oil fields to be returned to their government; however, with the U.S.’ large military presence in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor, they have found themselves blocked from these critical petrol supplies.

Furthermore, with the ongoing sanctions against the Syrian government, the U.S. administration sees the return of these oil fields to Damascus as a benefit to the state and their allies like Iran.

Syria has been under an economic siege for several years now, leaving much of the country in dire need of resources like medicine, gas, et al.

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UBI promoter Andrew Yang may be the first candidate for president running under a major party banner to advocate it, but he is certainly not the first in history.

The idea of UBI has been around at least since Thomas More included it in his 16^th century Utopia and Thomas Paine, the author of Revolutionary War tract Common Sense, wrote of it as a bedrock ideal of social justice.

In our own era, UBI was mentioned favorably by conservative economist Milton Friedman and civil rights champion Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It also drew the attention of President Richard Nixon. and morphed into today’s Earned Income Credit.

But Andrew Yang is faced with the same question as every other economic reformer, which is how are we going to pay for it? The answer is always the same: income redistribution through taxing the rich. But no matter how much that might appeal to our sense of fairness, it has never worked.

The problem is that the income redistribution argument always assumes a well-cooked and scrumptious pie—the economy—that can readily be divided however we like. So it’s just a matter of which socioeconomic class has the power to decide. But the big scrumptious pie analogy itself has rarely been challenged.

The fact is that in a world of competing nation states, one country’s prosperity has always been at the expense of others. Competition among nations for a favorable balance of trade led to World Wars I and II, when Germany began to outpace Great Britain. Today the American empire that came out of these wars feverishly tries to maintain its dominance by control of the world’s financial system through enforcing the role of the dollar as the international reserve currency and the basis of oil trading.

Meanwhile, the U.S. sovereign debt continues to skyrocket. Not to mention domestic household and business debt, including student loan debt, at levels that collectively can never be repaid. National income, including the income of the very rich, is far less than the long-term liabilities, always payable with interest.

So again, where is the money going to come from for UBI or any other social program that can resolve the ongoing collapse not only of workers’ income but of the entire American middle class?

What we have steadfastly refused to face during the modern era is that no capitalist economy has ever succeeded in providing sufficient income through paid employment to support its population. Private enterprise has one goal: maximize income and minimize expenses, including labor costs. Thus the people who work for the private sector will never have enough money to buy what they produce. Class war is a given. Also, the race to maximize production results in long-term waste of resources, even perhaps global warming.

The U.S. did not emerge from the Great Depression until it first became the “arsenal of democracy” for Great Britain and France, then built its own war machine to fight in Europe and the Pacific. But Germany also had to use military rearmament as the convenient tool to regain its own prosperity after the devastation of World War I. Both sides unabashedly used war as a means to support their domestic economies.

Does this sound familiar? In the U.S. today, our own private sector is woefully inadequate to assure prosperity, especially with so many jobs outsourced abroad. So to compensate, we have maintained a huge military-industrial complex that from an economic standpoint is nothing but corporate welfare on a massive scale. Throw in government employment at the federal, state, and local levels, along with all the economic activity in the manufacturing and service sectors that feed directly off the spending power of public employees, and the myth of unabashed capitalism vanishes.

Boom times come only when the government spends. And since taxation totally fails to support such a system, government debt constantly grows. Always trying to keep one step ahead of economic collapse is a privately-owned and managed financial system, headed by the Federal Reserve, with its own army of employees kept busy shuffling numbers.

Then as every possible job is taken over by automation, which is the ultimate cost-cutting measure, consumer purchasing power falls even further, and disaster looms. This is the situation Andrew Yang is trying to address.

But it was figured out in the 1920s by a Scottish engineer name C.H. Douglas. In a series of books, Douglas explained the structural elements that ensure a perpetual gap between a nation’s income and its GDP. The main cause of the gap is savings, particularly retained earnings by businesses that need to invest for the future. Economist John Maynard Keynes saw the same thing. Keynes’s solution was government deficit spending, which helped bring us to where we are today.

But Douglas saw the gap between income and production as a positive, an indicator of a nation’s economic prosperity. So he proposed that an amount equivalent to the gap be issued to the public as an annual National Dividend. The system he proposed was called Social Credit. Douglas’s ideas are alive today among researchers in Great Britain and elsewhere. If applied worldwide the disastrous standoff among nations and blocs for supremacy and survival would change rapidly because the tensions created by unjust and untenable monetary structures would find relief other than through war and conquest.

I learned of Douglas’s ideas when I worked in the Carter White House in 1979-80 and immediately saw their applicability. Much later, I retired from the government in 2007, after spending the last 20 years with the U.S. Treasury Department. I wrote a book entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, where I traced the history of the debt-based monetary system and explained how Douglas’s Social Credit would solve the underlying problems. I also have spoken on the subject at the Public Banking Institute and other venues.

I believe Social Credit, aka UBI, would do the job, if implemented as a dividend and not through taxation. I hope Andrew Yang is listening.

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Richard C. Cook is a retired federal government analyst. He is also the author of the definitive account of the Challenger disaster, “Challenger Revealed.” He may be reached at [email protected].

In Ecuador, the fight against IMF austerity measures is far from over. Just a few hours after my article was published on Sunday, 13 October, Ecuador  – and the IMF’s Killing Spree – President Lenin Moreno declared the infamous Decree 883 was canceled, i.e. the astronomical price increases for fuel were reversed, the (police) state of emergency and curfew were called off. He wanted to put an end to the 11 days of protests with police and military induced violence.

The police, supported by the army carried out repression during the protests, like they have not been seen in Ecuador’s recent history, claiming at least 7 death, about 1,340 injured and more than 1,100 arrested. The streets of Quito were an absolute chaos; destruction, fire, tear gas, smoke.

Austerity measures, other than an exorbitant hike in fuel prices, included shrinking government spending, laying off 23,000 state employees, privatization of social services and infrastructure – and more – all linked to the IMF loan of US$ 4.2 billion. These measures were apparently also “canceled”. At least, so it looked and sounded at the outset.

This seeming victory was achieved largely thanks to the indigenous movement, the Conaie (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) – an umbrella organization of indigenous groups across Ecuador.They have relentlessly fought for their rights and against the ferocious abrogation of all the social benefits they acquired – finally – during the ten years of Rafael Correa’s socialist government – which served, and still serves, as an example for much of Latin America.

Not the indigenous groups, or anybody else of the Ecuadorian people – were consulted about the IMF loan. The basic IMF deal was already brokered in January 2019, when Lenin Moreno met Madame Lagarde, at that time still head of the IMF, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. There were just some “minor issues” that Moreno had to resolve before he could sign this horrendous debt onto Ecuador’s books.

One of the “issues” was a request by the US via its extended arm, the IMF – to expel Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to bring him closer to extradition to the US, where he may face the death penalty, or Guantanamo, for having said and published the truth about the atrocious war crimes committed by the United States. And neo-Nazi, Moreno, complied. Julian Assange is now slowly degenerating by torture and disease in a UK maximum security prison. And the world says nothing. Not even our “Peace Loving’ UN system. All is quiet. Not to molest the Chief-in-Tyrant, sitting on his cardboard throne in Washington.

Just a few days after British police dragged Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the 4.2-billion-dollar loan / debt deal was signed. No coincidence. Assange was holed-up by self-imposed asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, for almost seven years, for justified fear of being “renditioned” to the US or another torturing US ally.

Now, when all the austerity measures were to be cancelled, by nullifying Decree 883, why did Moreno assemble a team of advisers to work out a new decree? Who are these advisers? People from the IMF, from the US Treasury – or simply “Fifth Columnists”, trained and funded by NED (National Endowment for Democracy)? – Why isn’t the decree and with it all IMF-imposed austerity simply canceled? Full stop?

In any case, Sunday night, Conaie reported that a “commission” was set up to “draft the decree that replaces it 883 – that this does not end until the agreement is fully implemented”.

Who is part of this commission and what exactly is the commission drafting? Will the commission prepare a new decree with new conditions? None of this is clear at this point. Is Conaie prepared to make conditions that in the long-rung could be disastrous? Does Conaie know that the empire never gives up, i.e. the IMF – as long as they have their dirty fingers in Ecuador with 4.2 billion dollars? No compromise, please, Conaie!

If anything, the new “decree” should include a clause requesting full cancellation of the IMF loan. Otherwise, the IMF will not let go, will come back in one form or another to grab Ecuador’s resources. That is the US doctrine, never depart from a goal – and it is extended through the IMF, the World Bank and through other financial institutions over which the US Treasury has control. This is modern warfare through a financial handle on a country, stealing accumulated social capital and natural resources by strictly enforced austerity programs – causing famine, disease, desperation, and death. See recent examples, Greece, Ukraine, Argentina.

Of course, it takes two to tango, and without a corrupt government on the other side, the IMF can do nothing.

What will happen to the protest leaders? Is this being covered by the new decree? The front men and women of a revolution that shook the country for eleven days? Many of the leaders, and others, are incarcerated as political prisoners and should be freed.

A new decree to replace the old one, Decree 883, smells like a rat; like a new deception is being prepared and the apparent “victory” is just a make-believe for the moment – to reinstate order in Quito and the country. Instead of crushing Ecuadorians with a bulldozer, i.e. the Decree 883 that attempted to shove all the IMF austerity measures down the throat of the Ecuadorians at once, it may come piecemeal, little by little, so the immediate impact will be less noticeable and eventually the sour bites are sliding better down the throat of Ecuadorians – so Moreno may expect. This would not be the first time that a Government weasels its way out of protests: Stop the “killer measures” for now, and reintroduce them later, slowly in a different format.

Conaie’s leaders are concerned about this. They have said so. They would like to know what the new decree contains, and want to have a say in its drafting, before they definitely call off their protests. What they really want, is the resignation of Lenin Moreno. That’s what they should aim for, because this man has already proven several times in only two years of presidency that he is a liar, cannot be trusted, and sells the people and their natural resources for the benefit of a small Ecuadorian elite and their foreign partners, mostly US oil corporations. Even if he were to cave in now, Moreno will come back, if allowed to stay in power, to neoliberalize the country. That’s his compact. That’s the premise under which he has been made president.

And, what nobody talked about, nor are there any reports in either mainstream or progressive news – is, what will happen with the US$ 4.2 billion IMF loan? – Why is it not cancelled? Is the cancellation of this loan going to be part of the new decree? Ecuador doesn’t need the loan. With a debt – GDP ratio of 40%, there is definitely no need whatsoever to call for IMF’s “help”. As proportion of GDP, Ecuador’s debt is only two-thirds of that of Germany.

Instead of foreign loans, Ecuador’s Government could call in the outstanding debt of about US$ 4.5 billion from fines, unpaid interests and other overdue fees from corporations and Ecuadorian oligarchs – so the government could recapitalize her treasury with own, interest free money. But instead, Moreno “forgave” the debt of the oligarchs, when contracting the IMF loan. That in itself is telling a lot. President Moreno used to be Correa’s Vice President, running on the same Platform, the center-left PAIS Alliance, turned tables less than a year into his presidency, destroyed the PAIS Alliance and betrayed his compatriots miserably.

Canceling an IMF loan is relatively easy. There is no law that would prevent Ecuador from withdrawing from the IMF deal, at no penalty. This has happened many times before. All that’s needed are politicians with a people-oriented mentality – a people’s friendly attitude – and the country would be rid of this debt and rid of the dictate of the IMF.

Conaie may consider insisting on two objectives before calling off the protests and moving back to their lands: One, canceling the IMF loan of US$ 4.2 billion, and two, suspending the Parliament and President Moreno of his functions; calling-in a caretaker government and planning new elections within 3 months; elections, in which Rafael Correa might again run for President.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Global Research Publishers bring you “Voices from Syria”, an important book by Mark Taliano. The book is available for order on our online store.

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Mark Taliano is an author and independent investigative reporter who travelled to Syria with the Third International Tour of Peace to Syria in 2016. In this book, he combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes mainstream media narratives about the dirty war on Syria.

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PREFACE:

The Syrian Arab Republic (Syria) is an ancient holy land surrounded by terrorist-sup-porting countries that want to destroy it. These countries, in turn, are supported by the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The secular government of Syria is led by Bashar al-Assad, its elected President. al-Assad is progressive and forward-looking. The terrorists invading and occupying parts of the country are neither progressive nor forward-looking, and most Syrians are happy to be rid of them. Many Syrians are critical of al-Assad for being too soft on the terrorists. They have dubbed him Mr. Soft Heart.

Al-Assad has earned the support of most Syrians by providing for them and by protecting them. Healthcare and education, including higher education, are free in Syria. Before the externally orchestrated and perpetrated war on Syria started, Syria was one of the safest countries in the world to visit.

Now that the West has injected terrorists into the country and imposed illegal sanctions on Syrians, the war-torn country and its people are mostly defiant. The future of the country is theirs to decide, as per international law, and they will not be colonized. Their defiance comes easily thanks to the Western-supported, illegal “opposition” that confronts them.

Image: Author Mark Taliano

None of the “opposing” terrorists are moderate. They slaughter Christians, minorities, and Muslims alike. They seek a blank slate upon which to impose their extremist Wahhabi ideology, and they seek to erase both Syria’s history and its people.

Historical memory teaches us that the West’s use of proxy mercenaries is not new. The West has destroyed a series of countries in quick succession since 11 September 2001 (9/11), including but not limited to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all by design, and always aided and abetted by mercenary ground troops.

But Syria has strong institutions and strong allies. It will be victorious, to the benefit of Syrians and humanity.

This book presents the story of Syria and Syrians as they struggle valiantly against NATO terrorism.

The narrative contradicts mainstream messaging, as it must. The West and its agencies could never garner public support for their genocidal campaigns if the truth emerged and was acknowledged by a broad base.

Truth leads to peace, but the governing polities that manipulate us and contaminate the public mindset enrich themselves through war, mass slaughter, and propaganda campaigns. Truth and justice are their unstated enemies.

This book aims to shed light on truth, justice and governing lies, with a view to expanding the reach of global peace and destroying the cancer of terrorism.

We initially recount the story of Syria as told by Syrians, unfiltered by mainstream media propaganda. We see and hear the trauma lived by defiant, heroic Syrians, and we discover that this ancient, holy land will surely survive the current barbarian invasion to rise again as a beacon of civilization, hope, and dignity.

The externally orchestrated war is being resolved internally – by Syrians, for Syrians –and the solutions are often the fruit of genuine democratic processes, in contrast to the processes masquerading as democracy in the West. Syria insists on being a sovereign nation.

We subsequently elaborate upon the real story of Syria and the drivers behind the current war, in which the US-led Empire is using terrorist proxies to advance its reach, contrary to the wishes of the vast majority of Syrians.

The alternative to Syria’s elected government is genocidal despotism and sharia law. The (non-existent) “moderates” cannot be separated from the “extremists” because all of the mercenary terrorists share the same goals and the same ideologies.

The predictable result of engineered deception is that domestic Western populations re-main deceived and politically passive. The truth is inverted and large swaths of our populations remain deluded. Whereas the West and its allies support all the terrorists invading Syria, our domestic populations think that we are fighting terrorism. This is the great fraud of the “Global War on Terrorism.”

Between 15 and 23 September 2016, I travelled to war-torn Syria because I sensed years ago that the official narratives being fed to North Americans across TV screens, in newsprint and on the internet were false.

The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were all based on lies; likewise for Ukraine. All of the post-9/11 wars were sold to Western audiences through a sophisticated network of interlocking governing agencies that disseminate propaganda to both domestic and foreign audiences.

But the dirty war on Syria is different. The degree of war propaganda levelled at Syria and contaminating humanity at this moment is likely unprecedented.

I had studied and written about Syria for years, so I was not entirely surprised by what I saw. What I felt was a different story.

Syria is an ancient land with a proud and forward-looking people. To this ancient and holy land we sent mercenaries, hatred, bloodshed and destruction. We sent strange notions of national exceptionalism and wave upon wave of lies.

As a visitor I felt shame, but Syrians welcomed me as one of them. These are their stories; these are their voices.

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**Voices from Syria** – PDF Edition

Author: Mark Taliano

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-9-1

Year: 2017

Product Type: PDF File

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Excerpt from Foreword by Michel Chossudovsky:

We bring to the attention of our readers Mark Taliano’s Book entitled Voices from Syria. In contrast to most geopolitical analysts of the Middle East, Mark Taliano focusses on what unites humanity with the people of Syria in their struggle against foreign aggression. Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than five years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and more than two years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes which have largely targeted Syria’s civilian infrastructure.

Taliano refutes the mainstream media. The causes and consequences of the US-led war on Syria, not to mention the extensive war crimes and atrocities committed by the terrorists on behalf the Western military alliance are routinely obfuscated by the media. He is committed to reversing the tide of media disinformation, by reaching out to Western public opinion on behalf of the Syrian people. Voices from Syria provides a carefully documented overview of life in Syria, the day to day struggle of the Syrian people to protect and sustain their national sovereignty.

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Special: Voices from Syria + The Dirty War on Syria (Buy 2 books for 1 price!) 

Author Name: Mark Taliano / Tim Anderson

ISBN Number: 978-0-9879389-1-6 / 978-0-9737147-8-4

Year: 2017 / 2016

Pages: 128 / 240

List Price: $41.90

Special Price: $19.95

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Voices from Syria is also available via Amazon here

German language print version also available here

Damascus in April 2017 was still being shelled from Ghouta (the civilian death toll being now 11,000 deaths) and the district of Bab Touma where we were staying had been targeted, as both Vanessa and Eva have reported. So it was with a strange kind of joy that we drove through the Old City gate, guarded by Syrian Army soldiers, to arrive at our hotel. It was exhilarating knowing I was finally here! And the next morning, when the sound of an explosion in the near distance woke me up, there was a surreal sense that I had passed through into a parallel reality. But this was life for the people of Damascus: the waiters and waitresses glided back and forth throughout breakfast as the booms continued and in the streets people were going about their business much as you see here in this video I shot last year as we walked back to our hotel through Bab Touma.

On October 16, units of the Syrian Army entered the city of Raqqah for the first time since 2014. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has controlled the city since 2017, when they with help from the United States seized it from ISIS. The Syrian Army reportedly established several observation posts in the area and continued deployment within the SDF-held area.

According to pro-government sources, government troops are also preparing to enter the Omar oil fields. A day earlier, on October 15, Syrian troops and Russian Military Police units started patrolling the contact line between Turkish-backed forces and the SDF near Manbij.

On October 16, US-led coalition forces withdrew from the Kharab Ashk military base where dozens of US and French troops had been deployed. US-led forces burned the base in order to destroy equipment that they were not able to evacuate.

Watch the video here.

The Turkish Army and Turkish-backed militants are developing their offensive on SDF positions. They captured thirteen villages west of Tell Abyad and made another attempt to secure Ras al-Ayn. According to pro-SDF sources, 49 Turkish-backed militants were killed in an SDF counter-attack in the town. SDF units employed US-supplied military equipment. Pro-Turkish militants captured a Humvee armored vehicle near the town.

There are also reports that the SDF and the Syrian Army jointly recaptured the villages of al-Ahras, al-Rihaniyah and Manajir from Turkish-led forces south of Ras al-Ayn. Nonetheless, this was a tactical development involving Turkish proxies only. It is not likely that government forces and the SDF will carry out large-scale joint operations attacking positions of the Turkish Army. The main reason is that such an attack may lead to a large-scale escalation in the region and even a limited open conflict between Syria and Turkey.

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On October 7, 2019, the U.S. President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops from northeast Syria, where the contingent alongside Kurdish militias controlled the vast territories. Trump clarified that the decision is connected with the intention of Turkey to attack the Kurdish units, posing a threat to Ankara.

It’s incredible that the Turkish military operation against Kurds – indeed the territorial integrity of Syria has resulted in the escape of the U.S., Great Britain, and France. These states essentially are key destabilizing components of the Syrian crisis.

Could this factor favourably influence the situation in the country? For instance, after the end of the Iraqi war in 2011 when the bulk of the American troops left the country, the positive developments took place in the lives of all Iraqis. According to World Economics organization, after the end of the conflict, Iraq’s GDP grew by 14% in 2012, while during the U.S. hostilities the average GDP growth was about 5,8%.

Syria’s GDP growth should also be predicted. Not right away the withdrawal of U.S., French, British, and other forces, but a little bit later after the end of the Turkish operation that is not a phenomenon. The Turkish-Kurdish conflict has been going on since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when Kurds started to promote the ideas of self-identity and independence. Apart from numerous human losses, the Turks accomplished nothing. It is unlikely that Ankara would achieve much in Peace Spring operation. The Kurds realize the gravity of the situation and choose to form an alliance with the Syrian government that has undermined the ongoing Turkish offensive.

Under these circumstances, Erdogan could only hope for the creation of a narrow buffer zone on the Syrian-Turkish border. The withdrawal of the Turkish forces from the region is just a matter of time. However, we can safely say that the Turkish expansion unwittingly accelerated the peace settlement of the Syrian crisis, as the vital destabilizing forces left the country. Besides, the transfer of the oil-rich north-eastern regions under the control of Bashar Assad will also contribute to the early resolution of the conflict.

It remains a matter of conjecture what the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia agreed on during the high-level talks. Let’s hope that not only the Syrians, but also key Gulf states are tired of instability and tension in the region, and it’s a high time to strive for a political solution to the Syrian problem.

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A senior Iraqi security expert disclosed that Washington is attempting to transfer 3,000 members of the ISIS terrorist group from Syria to Iraq. Hafez Al-Basharah told the Arabic-language al-Ma’aloumeh news website on Tuesday that the US which has created and supported the ISIS terrorists in the past few years is now plotting to create a safe area for them in Iraq. He added that Washington, which has chosen three areas in Iraq for the ISIS relocation, wants to transfer the militants first to the regions under Turkey’s military attacks in Syria and then to Iraq.

“The first region that the US intends to transfer the ISIS terrorists is an area between Albu Kamal in Syria and Qa’em in Iraq; the second region is Ein al-Assad base; and the third area is one of the US bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan region,” al-Basharah said.

The Arabic-language media outlets had reported in July that Washington planned to bring back a more dangerous version of the ISIS terrorist group to Iraq and Syria after its failure to achieve its mischievous goals in the region. The Arabic-language website of the Russian Sputnik news agency quoted Hessam Sho’aib, a Syrian military expert on terrorist organizations, as saying that a recent report by the US-based Institute for Studies of War (ISW) on rebirth of the ISIS terrorists in Iraq and Syria exposes this reality that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has created the ISIS and is preparing the grounds for the return of the terrorist groups, especially the ISIS, to the region.

Sho’aib noted that the ISW’s report on ISIS’ dominance over several regions in Iraq and Syria such as Mosul shows that the US is not looking for establishment of peace in the region and ISIS’ retreat from Raqqa has taken place on CIA’s order and not a defeat in war against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

He reiterated that the SDF is also a part of the CIA’s plot for Syria, and said, “The US has come to know that it cannot conduct any kind of military operation against Iran, and therefore it has resorted to reviving the terrorist groups to carry out terrorist attacks as a much cheaper scenario for the region.”

Sho’aib noted that Washington uses the terrorist groups in the region as a pressure lever, and said that the purpose of reviving the terrorist organizations is preoccupying the regional countries’ armies, specially Iraq, Syria and Iran.

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A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations. This is Britain – caught up in its own Brexit Catch 22. It started its own fire, bought no extinguisher and now everyone is engulfed in its flames where a never-ending amount of fuel is added. It’s like being in hell. Every day is the same – more flames.

If a country could have chosen a worse time in history to have voted for Brexit it would be right now. Britain was a central power broker in a group of countries with a built-in market of 500 million that enabled it to negotiate with the other great power players of the world by pooling their own as one. With Germany, France and Italy, Britain was indeed a global power player with 23 other smaller nations that broadly speaking had to agree with it. The EU made itself stronger in a truly globalised market, at a time of intense challenge to the world order.

Instead, Britain has ended up negotiating itself into the worst possible scenario it could have ever imagined. It now can’t go back or forward. Instead, with this latest iteration of a withdrawal agreement, Britain is attempting to sidestep a fast-moving modern global system, which will inevitably fail.

For the free-trade jihadists, represented by the ERG, Farage’s Brexit Party and their fanboy hedge-funders – the cash machine of chaos is soon to start ringing. For all of their complaints of Project Fear, their fact-free protestations are drowned out by numerous reports, not just from economic experts but government departments. But that’s OK for them.

Right now, Russia is siding with China and between them are rewriting the geopolitical rules in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The One Belt initiative demonstrates the desire to isolate America and combine Eurasia to a new trading regime. Eurasia is the largest continent on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Located primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres. It is home to nearly 5 billion people. The EU is ultimately heading in that direction over time.

And Britain has chosen to walk away from a club that made it safer, healthier and wealthier (in so may ways), making itself more dependent on Trump’s America – a country who chose an isolationist and nationalistic one-way road to institutional racism and neofascism – as its own influence in the world wanes.

America has $20 trillion in direct government debt, a military body that has admitted it spent over $8trillion in 15 years and is unable to account for several trillion more. America’s unfunded liabilities have just been calculated to be an eye-watering £210trillion.

America can no longer afford to be the world’s bully boy. The consequence is that it has chosen to fight the world with economic wars. This could not be demonstrated any better than Trump’s recent announcement that American troops are being sent to the Mid-East, for hire, whilst withdrawing from Syria and leaving their allies – the Kurds to face annihilation. Why would anyone trust America (or Britain that blindly follows) if this is how they treat allies.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it – America has no friends in the world – it has only sycophants and the frightened. The point for Britain is that the EU provided us with friends – 500 million friends. We negotiated as equals – but like in Orwell’s Animal Fram – we were more equal than others in this club of 28. But now, like America, we have voted for no friends. And just like Catch 22 we can escape club rules but only by delivering ourselves straight into the hands of free-marketeers whose own rules will ensnare us all with all of their exploitative and underhand strategies that by design will make us all worse off.

No Consensus – at all – anywhere

There is a stark reality that everyone should take note of. What we have is the result of a referendum in 2016 at 52/48 to leave the EU. Three and a half years later there is no consensus by the electorate for any course of action. The most popular of electorate scenario’s today is to remain the in EU – but only by 34%. By contrast, no-deal is supported by 23% of the electorate. But then again, if you ask the electorate would they choose no-deal or revoke – no-deal is supported by 34% and revoke Article 50 by 22%. Ask just Leavers and Remainers and bingo – it’s the other way round – no-deal gets 51% support and Remain gets 67% support.

Remain voters can’t agree. On average, nearly four in 10 Remain voters say Brexit should simply be reversed, while about three in 10 opt for another vote. You can guess what Leavers want – the same as they voted for but they can’t agree on what.

On average, during the last month, polls that ask people how they would vote in a second referendum suggest that 88% of those who backed Remain would do so again. Among those who voted Leave, 86% have not changed their minds. If calculated exactly the same, that 2% difference adds 350,000 votes to Remain – meaning the result would simply be even tighter.

This Catch22 was enabled and facilitated by the state and this demonstration of the disintegration of statecraft should tell everyone just one thing. Britain’s system of governing is in terminal failure. Many will tell you that representative democracy and that the rule of law is working exactly as it should do. But how is Britain supposed to thrive in a modern world if our leaders are capable of doing this to the country and no-one can agree on the way forward – for decades? In the meantime, everyone else is still on the bus and Britain is being left behind.

The great con

What we are witnessing is a great con. The ERG are full of millionaires that will be doing the exploiting. The Brexit Party who number just 20 political candidates – are made up of bankers, hedge-fund managers and derivative traders – the same crew as Farage and his pals. They represent little more than the Trojan horse of Britain’s demise.

Simon Wren-Lewis is a well-known economist. In his time, he has worked for Her Majesty’s Treasury as a budget-team member for the National Income Forecasting Team amongst other notable roles.

”The reason is that currently Johnson’s proposals for a free trade deal abandon regulatory alignment. They want to reduce workers rights and consumer protection and environmental protection, and that will mean a far less extensive trade deal with the EU than under the backstop. That in turn means that the long term economic costs of any deal will still be large, although obviously not so large and we avoid the short term disruption.“

Dr Nicholas Westcott is Research Associate, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy:

“In today’s international jungle it will also be more important than ever to have friends, and a no-deal Brexit is the best way to lose them fast. The Commonwealth is too disparate, and will wonder if this is how Britain treats its neighbours, how will it treat them? So Britain may have no option but to turn to the US, swapping 27 firm and equal friends for one big fickle one. Good luck with that.”

These are the comments now coming from dozens of professionals who vastly outnumber economists or experts that support leaving the EU.

But Britain is stuck in its Catch22. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the PM’s latest deal will continue to fail Britain’s long-term interests and will inevitably boost division and nationalism. In a modern world, the EU was in fact, central to Britain’s power. What Johnson, Farage and the Brexit jihadists are really pushing for is a deregulation fest – called the ‘Singapore Scenario‘. Incredibly, Singapore, a median ranking country in the early 1990s for inequality is now one of the worst in the world by ranking 149th out of 157 countries in the CRI Index. It also fell into the 22nd spot out of 23 countries in East Asia and the Pacific in reducing inequality.

In Singapore, tax reductions were met with lower public spending. That is about the only direction guaranteed by Britain’s Catch22. To out-compete the EU – it will have no choice but to do the same. This is why Johnson is already crowing about tax-free ports and promoting the prospect of reduced corporation tax.

It makes no difference if this government or any other government in future does a deal, no-deal, revokes, offers EUref2 or any other combination. There is no accepted consensus with a majority of the electorate for the time being. We are trapped in the Brexit Catch 22.

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As spectacular and indicative of America’s sinking fortunes in Syria as its bombing of its own military base in northern Syria was – it is also an indicator of something else much more sinister.

CNN in its article, “US conducts airstrike on weapons storage site as troops pull out of Syria,” notes that (emphasis added):

“On Oct. 16, after all Coalition personnel and essential tactical equipment departed, two Coalition F-15Es successfully conducted a pre-planned precision airstrike at the Lafarge Cement Factory to destroy an ammunition cache, and reduce the facility’s military usefulness,” US Army Col. Myles Caggins, a spokesman for the US-led military coalition fighting ISIS, confirmed in a statement Wednesday.

And indeed the airstrike eliminated the facility’s military usefulness once and for all.

Larfarge Facility Served ISIS, then US Occupation of Syrian Territory 

Missing from CNN’s article was the long and dubious backstory of the Lafarge facility.

In a 2018 Guardian article titled, “Lafarge charged with complicity in Syria crimes against humanity,” it was reported that the company had paid terrorists including members of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) millions of Euros in protection money, bought supplies from them, and may even have sold cement to them.

The article noted:

The French cement giant Lafarge was charged on Thursday with complicity in crimes against humanity and financing terrorists, for allegedly paying millions to jihadists, including the Islamic State group, to keep a factory open in war-torn Syria.

The article also noted:

A source close to the inquiry said investigators also suspected that Lafarge sold cement to Isis.

Worse still – as early as 2014 the French government was in contact with Washington in a bid to have the facility spared despite its central role in aiding, abetting, and providing material support to ISIS and other terrorist organizations in Syria.

France asked the United States in 2014 not to bomb a Lafarge cement plant in northern Syria, an area which was at the time controlled by Islamic State, emails that are part of an investigation into the company’s Syria operations show.

While Reuters attempts to question whether or not the US knew the facility was aiding and abetting terrorist organizations it is inconceivable that Washington would be unable to unlock the “mystery” as to how a Western corporation was still able to do business in the heart of ISIS-occupied territory.

With ISIS mostly defeated where the facility is located and with Syrian forces prepared to retake the area it is located in – only then did the US decide to eliminate the facility after serving for years – first in support of US-backed terrorists – then the US’ own illegal occupation of Syrian territory.

While documented evidence ranging from the US’ own Defense Intelligence Agency to leaked e-mails written by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirms the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria was the result of extensive and deliberate state-backing from the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – the fact that the US only destroyed a facility serving ISIS and Al Qaeda when it became clear it would never be able to be used by them again – adds further light to the truth of Washington’s deliberate and central role in engineering, executing, and perpetuating the devastating war in Syria.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that forces taking over where Lafarge’s facility was located will undoubtedly be tasked with fighting the remnants of or state-sponsored resurgence of ISIS and Al Qaeda in the near future – minus a key facility that would have helped them do so.

From the beginning of the conflict when the French government refused to have a facility destroyed it and its US allies knew was aiding and abetting terrorists – to America’s destruction of the facility to deny its and the surrounding base’s resources to Syrian forces tasked with preventing ISIS and Al Qaeda’s resurgence – the facility is a symbol of the West’s malicious and insidious state-sponsorship of terrorism in their failed proxy war against Damascus.

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This article was originally published on Land Destroyer Report.

Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from LDR

Turkish forces invaded north-east Syria (NES) only when it had coordinated with the US to define the red line of the invasion. Moreover, both superpowers, the US and Russia, protected Turkey by blocking an EU-drafted UN resolution to halt the Turkish advance. Turkey refused to allow the US to arm, train and give an independent state to the Syrian Kurds on the Turkish borders and simultaneously keep Turkey as an ally. President Donald Trump had no choice but to accept Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s position over that of the Kurdish separatists. Russia considered the Turkish presence in NES much easier to deal with than the US forces and the disillusionment of the Kurds with their US mentor worth allowing President Erdogan’s operation. So, who is the winner and who is the loser among these players?

Ankara has played one of the most disastrous roles in the Syrian war since the beginning,  allowing jihadists to flock into Syria from all over the world. The Turkish position was in harmony with the US-EU directives calling for regime change in Syria or a failed State so that each player could take a chunk of the country and leave it in total chaos. Moreover, Turkey supported the jihadists to attack and successfully occupy the city of Idlib starting from the Turkish borders. It did the same when jihadists attacked Kesseb and threatened the province of Latakia.

However, President Erdogan did pull out his proxies from Aleppo, allowing the Syrian Army to free the northern city with fewer human losses. It also played an effective role in the fall of al-Ghouta, in the suburb of Damascus, to the benefit of the Syrian Army.

President Erdogan also pushed his forces into Jarablus in NES and, two years later, occupied Afrin, disturbing the Syrian Kurds’ dream of a “Rojava” state. His invasion of NES caused the end of Northern Kurdistan and, indirectly, pushed the US forces out of NES, with the exception of a “small footprint” at al-Tanaf.

The Turkish President is today an essential partner in the Astana peace process due to his control over 10% of the Syrian territory and his influence over militants and jihadists. He has also managed to play his cards well by creating a balance between the US and Russia, buying weapons from both despite the discontent and disapproval of the US administration.

Although Turkey failed to deliver on its promise to paralyse, contain and dismantle the jihadist groups in Idlib, it allowed a military expedition against them when the jihadists refused to stop sending armed drones against the Russian military base in Hmaymeem.

Today, President Erdogan will be negotiating a new constitutional framework in Astana, holding Idlib and aiming (hoping) to control almost 14,000 sq km (440×32) of NES. His country is hosting 3.6 million refugees and would like to relocate a few million to Syria. He also needs to satisfy his Syrian proxies, who will accuse him of treachery if he doesn’t offer to these at least the minimum of their required objectives: a reintegration into the Syrian system without persecution for their previous acts, and an approved change in the constitution.

Although President Erdogan was thoroughly in the US-NATO camp at the beginning of the Syrian war and went as far as to shoot down a Russia jet on November 2015, he has managed to strike a balance with Moscow. He is becoming a strategic partner of Russia, not only buying the S-400 but also part of the Gazprom-sponsored pipeline Turkish Stream that is expected to supply Europe with Russian gas. President Erdogan may find himself threatening to leave NATO – to the jubilation of Russia – if the US imposes sanctions on his country and on Turkish personalities.

The Syrian war is not yet over. The role of President Erdogan is still to be played out in its last phase. Is the Turkish presence in Syria to last as long as the occupation of north-east Cyprus? That will definitely indicate a military confrontation with Damascus in the long term and the disapproval of his Russian and Iranian allies.

The Syrian Kurds and the Arab tribes loyal to Damascus will not stand idle in the face of a long Turkish occupation. That will no doubt disturb the relationship between the allies, who need to look for the development of commercial and business relationships at a time when the US is fighting for its hegemony and freely imposing sanctions on so many countries. It all depends on the latest Turkish moves in the Levant, and Turkey will have to choose what to become: a partner or an enemy, and of whom?

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent warm greetings to African leaders, business people and participants early October, signaling that everything is set for the first Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi, southern coastal city of Russia.

The message reads, in part:

“Today, the countries of Africa are well on their way towards social, economic, scientific and technological development, and are playing a significant role in international affairs. They are strengthening mutually beneficial integration processes within the African Union and other regional and sub regional organizations across the continent.”

In recent years, the traditionally friendly ties of partnership between Russia and Africa have gained new momentum, both at a bilateral level and in various multilateral formats. In addition to preserving past experience of successful cooperation, have also managed to make significant new steps forward.

Trade and investment are growing dynamically, and new joint projects are under way in extractive industries, agriculture, healthcare, and education. Russian companies are ready to offer their scientific and technological developments to their African partners, and share their experience of upgrading energy, transport and communications infrastructures, according to President Putin.

It is, broadly, expected that the Summit will help identify new areas and forms of cooperation, put forward promote collaboration between Russia and Africa to a qualitatively new level and further contribute enormously to the development of bilateral relations between Russia and Africa.

According to the Organizing Committee, some 50 African heads of state have already confirmed their participation. It will feature more than 200 CEOs, ministers of key industries, and representatives of the expert community from Russia and Africa. The events will be attended by more than 3,000 representatives of African businesses.

The main event are the plenary session “Russia-Africa: Uncovering the Potential for Cooperation” during which the Presidents of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, are expected to speak. A final declaration of the Summit titled “For Peace, Security, and Development” has been prepared and it includes items on the global and regional agendas that are important for Russia as well as comprehensive proposals on diverse ways to develop the full scope of future Russian-African relations.

In addition, at least 23 intergovernmental and interagency agreements and other agreements between African and Russian companies will be signed on the sidelines.

Under the theme “Russia and Africa: Uncovering the Potential for Cooperation” here are the key areas the Summit will discuss:

The Role of Media in Russian-African Relations

The African continent is becoming ever more important in today’s international order. Russian-African relations are adding an additional dimension to developments, especially with the boost provided by rapidly expanding links across a vast range of areas.

The media can, and indeed must be a decisive factor in building effective ties. Africa is frequently portrayed in the media as suffering from numerous intergovernmental, religious, and ethnic conflicts; political and economic instability; and an array of demographic and social problems. Knowledge of today’s Russia and the steps being taken by its political leaders to tackle global challenges is also given little space in the continent’s media landscape.

Contribution of Nuclear Technologies in the Development of Africa

Today, African countries face major challenges. Rapid population growth and the worsening energy crisis are constraining economic growth on the continent. The poor transport infrastructure, access of the population to health services, low level of education and food supply insecurity are severely hampering Africa’s efforts to improve the quality of life in the region. It is clear that to solve these problems a large-scale development programme is required, including a strategy based on achieving the UN sustainable development goals. Nuclear technologies can become a driver for socio-economic development and a comprehensive solution to the systemic continent-wide problems.

Humanitarian cooperation: Development Goals and Corporate Social Responsibility

Humanitarian partnership between Russia and African countries is becoming increasingly important. It is an area covering the development of human capital (education and culture), social programmes, healthcare, and access to essential benefits supporting people’s lives and national development in countries across the continent.

Current Objectives in Developing the Housing Construction Market on the African Continent

Access to housing is one of the most pressing issues facing most African countries. Modern housing and a comprehensive approach to spatial planning can help ensure sustainable urban development and socioeconomic growth. We must now determine the needs of the housing construction market in African countries and identify joint solutions and ways of working together to achieve the most effective results in the shortest possible time. Practical steps aimed at identifying, supporting, and implementing joint projects are vital to such partnerships.

Investing in Africa

In 2050, Africa’s total GDP will reach $29 tn, exceeding the combined GDP of US and Euro zone in 2012. Pan-African and national growth strategies as well as global thinktanks’ forecasts highlight the following growth areas and potential key drivers of the continent’s rise in the medium and long term: commodities; infrastructure (utilities and roads) and industrialization; demography; education; expanding middle class; access to financial services. These factors will define the continent’s investment outlook: future investment climate, current investments and their diversification. They have potential either to bolster or hamper the capital inflows.

Economic Sovereignty for Africa: Problems and Solutions

In order to fulfil their development objectives and meet the needs of their citizens, countries in Africa are compelled to turn to foreign sources of financing. However, these mainly take the form of credit from international financial institutions and direct loans whereby the creditor imposes socioeconomic and political requirements which limit a country’s sovereignty. Sovereign bonds and other forms of borrowing on the capital market account for just a small proportion of African debt, but some countries on the continent are still unable to access this form of financing. As a result, more than USD 100 billion of borrowing potential is going untapped. More than USD 200 billion of existing debt could be refinanced under less stringent conditions.

Russia and Africa: Energy for Development and Cooperation

Africa today has a population of over one billion people, huge resource potential and a platform for development. The continent has the potential to become one of the world’s largest economies and most populated regions by 2050 through organic growth and reform. Creating a foundation for growth at the very outset and using the continent’s mineral wealth in the most effective way possible requires the right energy policy.

Transport Infrastructure on the African Continent: Opportunities to Implement Joint Projects

The transport sector in Africa possesses excellent potential for development. The continent’s railways offer great promise, as do joint ventures. Several African nations have prioritized the development of their transport infrastructures, particularly given transport’s ability to spur growth in key industries. The expansion of transport links brings with it additional jobs and expertise, and improves quality of life for the local population. Russia is able to offer technology and expertise at the very forefront of construction, planning, engineering, and equipment supplies. However, there remain a number of barriers to the market, as well as a lack of financing and country specific risks.

Financing as an Essential Instrument of Economic Growth in Africa

The African continent has enormous economic potential and is actively integrating into the system of international economic relations. Prospects for Russia to increase its trade with African countries are directly linked to the diversification of its merchandise exports. However, this is only a realistic aim if international financing channels are put in place to facilitate growth in trade. Given the interest in Russia and Africa increasing economic cooperation, new solutions need to be found to implement ambitious trade projects.

Russian–African Collaboration in the Diamond Industry

The diamond mining industry is key to the economies of several African countries, accounting for a significant portion of income from exports. Today, diamond mining faces a number of industry-wide challenges, attempts to tackle which will determine its future.

The Future of the African Continent: Sovereignty and Traditional Values as Crucial Elements of a Development Strategy

In an era of globalization, protecting national values and priorities is a pressing concern. Economic and political sovereignty are the foundation of development in a polycentric world, and African countries are no exception. The African Union’s strategic framework Agenda 2063 highlights the importance of preserving African values and Pan-Africanism.

Collaboration in Industry: Potential Areas of Growth

The development of high-tech and export-oriented industries in the Russian manufacturing sector has laid the groundwork for expanding areas of collaboration and launching ambitious long-term projects. What needs to be done to bring about a substantial improvement in collaboration between Russia and Africa? Which areas of cooperation are of most interest to Russian businesses and African nations? What projects and forms of Russian-African partnership are in need of financial support from parties such as Afreximbank?

Doing Business in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities

Today, Africa is one of the most promising and fastest-growing regions of the world, with leading powers actively competing with one another. However, the continent should not be viewed as a single, monolithic market. Its economy varies from place to place in terms of type, scale, and structure. Africa today is a place of great political, cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. As a result, each country has a unique business culture, requiring an individual approach from any company wishing to enter its market.

Biosecurity: Current Projects and Opportunities for Cooperation

Global threats in today’s interconnected world, such as epidemics of infectious diseases, have a huge impact on the development of African nations. Robust healthcare systems and the ability to react to these threats can boost prosperity and help countries to thrive. Over the past few years, the African continent has had to tackle outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases affecting thousands of lives and costing national economies millions of dollars. Russia has a great deal of experience in reacting to health threats, and today is implementing large-scale projects in countries around the world.

Digital Transformation as a Driver of State Development

Today, digitalization is a major driver of state development. Effective e-government simplifies communication between people and the state, and helps create an effective system for departments to interact with one another. As a result, people gain quicker access to government services. In turn, this leads to greater user satisfaction, and substantial monetary savings.

The Eurasian Economic Union and Africa: Trends and Opportunities to Develop Integrated Processes and Collaborate

Over the past few decades, economic integration processes have become an overarching trend in regional development throughout the world. They have helped member states to successfully embed themselves in the global economy and minimize the risk of crises occurring in various industries. Economic integration provides a new perspective on crucial projects related to infrastructure, logistics, energy, trade, agricultural and industrial development, digitalization, migration policy, and employment.

It offers additional opportunities to form common approaches to issues concerning the environment, renewable energy, and other factors determining scientific and technological progress. In view of the substantial expertise that regional associations offer, the next logical step is to foster dialogue between them and exchange experience at the forefront of integration, with the aim of optimizing economic integration processes and collaborating on the widest possible range of issues.

Technological Sovereignty and Security in a Digital World: Solutions to Tomorrow’s Challenges

Africa’s fast-growing commercial sector is making rapid inroads in the virtual space. African companies are overcoming problems related to communication and financial infrastructure and choosing to immediately build their business online, implementing modern mobile solutions as they do so. However, the cyber security measures used by these fast-growing companies cannot keep up with their rapid development, leaving the companies vulnerable to cyber criminals.

In terms of governmental information systems, a monopolization of global IT markets by a handful of major Western corporations could result in financial losses in Africa, threatening citizens’ personal safety and Africa’s sovereignty at large. Russian companies are global leaders in digital security and are capable of protecting African businesses from cyber threats while ensuring digital sovereignty for African states. Success can be guaranteed through building partnerships between African and Russian companies and training up an IT security workforce in each country.

Using Minerals in Africa for the Benefit of Its Peoples

There is a long history of Soviet and Russian specialists participating in and supporting the systemic geological study of a number of countries in the African continent. Their work on natural resource bases has done a great deal to aid mineral extraction. These countries now have the opportunity to leverage modern means of geological research and exploration, and in doing so, continue the comprehensive study of subsoil resources. This could lead to new and globally unique sites being developed, both on land and the continental shelf.

Business Associations in Russia and Africa: A Starting Point for Long-Term Business Partnership

A major barrier hindering greater cooperation between the Russian and African business communities is a lack of awareness regarding the current state of markets, along with trade and investment opportunities. There is also an insufficient level of trust towards potential partners. These issues can be solved through establishing an effective system of communication between public business associations in Russia and African nations. These organizations can both serve the interests of entrepreneurs, and also guarantee their reliability and integrity.

Russia and Africa: Science, Education, and Innovation for Economic Development

The accelerated development of both Russia’s and Africa’s economic potential is inextricably linked to scientific output and the improvement of general education and professional training. The 21st century has heralded the rise of the knowledge economy. Scientific research and development results in new products and industries, and is able to make a vital contribution to tackling current social and economic challenges facing our countries. The Soviet Union made an invaluable contribution to developing the scientific and educational potential of a number of African countries.

A Safe Africa

Illegal migration, contraband, and criminal activity are all too frequent problems facing the African continent. The biggest threat of all though is terrorism. Experts agree that to ensure a country’s national security, a set of measures needs to be taken, along with preventative action to combat possible threats. The biggest vulnerabilities in this regard include weak border control, unprotected industrial facilities, and large urban areas where it becomes easy to disappear into a crowd. An effective set of measures has been developed in Russia to counter terrorism, curtail illegal activity, and provide dependable protection for citizens. Russian organizations and companies are ready and able to share their experience with African partners.

Drivers of Growth in National Healthcare Systems

National healthcare systems are simply unable to cope economically with the burden of disease in Africa. Particular attention is given to infectious diseases; however, there is a growing need to fight against cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes. What’s more, the high cost of medicines and services, together with a shortage of vital modern equipment, is hindering access to medical care in African countries.

The lack of medical personnel is a particularly pressing problem. Cutting-edge technologies, such as mobile phones, blockchain, 3D printing, UAVs, and others clearly need to be applied as drivers of growth in this area. If used correctly, they could significantly improve the quality of medical services while cutting costs. The high number of people in Africa suffering from chronic diseases and requiring remotely administered care and treatment will spur the development of telemedicine.

New Forms of Cooperation between Russia and Africa: Opportunities for Special Economic Zones Based on the Project to Establish a Russian Industrial Zone in Egypt

A new model for the development of production lines is based on closing the gap between production and delivery to the end consumer, minimising logistical and technical expenses and facilitating projects with a social dimension to successfully develop the local economy. Based on this logic, creating and facilitating conditions conducive to competitive production, including the production of quality hi-tech products, can be done most effectively through the use of points of entry.

Such points draw on the advantages of special (free) economic zones, which provide additional competitive advantages when gaining access to local markets. The project to create a Russian Industrial Zone – devised and implemented at the interface between governments, state development institutions and business communities – is a unique step toward ensuring state investment and implementing the industrial zone mechanism to support access to foreign markets for relevant companies.

Digitalization in the Mining Industry: New Opportunities, Robots, Artificial Intelligence

Africa is a world leader in volume of reserves and the extraction of many valuable raw materials and fuels, over 90% of which is then exported. The mining industry forms the basis of many countries’ industrial capacity and exports and accounts for around 75% of all foreign investments. Traditional field development methods are becoming increasingly expensive. Productivity is dropping due to high maintenance costs, unreliable equipment, reactive troubleshooting, low capacity factors, and incidents related to safety violations.

Russian Geological Exploration in Africa: Looking to the Past and to the Future

Africa is exceptionally rich in mineral reserves, although these have not yet been studied comprehensively. Compared with other continents, it boasts the largest ore reserves of manganese, chromite, bauxite, gold, platinum, cobalt, diamond, and phosphorite. It also has substantial oil, natural gas, graphite and asbestos reserves. Russian companies, for their part, have a wealth of experience leading exploratory work and are interested in working on the African continent.

Creating a New Quality of Life in Africa

Africa has the fastest-growing population in the world. Over 50% of people living in Africa are under the age of 26. At the same time, the quality of life in the African continent is one of the lowest in the world.

Women in Russian-African Relations: Gender Balance in Politics, the Economy and the Social Sector

Developing female entrepreneurship and leadership is currently of interest in every region of the world and is discussed at platforms of leading international organisations and associations. According to forecasts, women’s full involvement in the economy will allow global GDP to reach 28 trillion dollars by 2025, which is equal to that of the Chinese and US economies combined. On average, a woman in Europe currently earns 15% less than a man working in the same position. This gender gap is even more pronounced in Africa and Asia. In 2019, Russia presented an integrated systemic development model entitled ‘Women and the economy’ at UNIDO, which was formed on the basis of best practice in Russia and beyond.

The Contribution to Global Sustainable Development Made by Young People in Russia and Africa

It is crucial that young people play a role in international cooperation and efforts to build an environment allowing young leaders and entrepreneurs to be fully involved in efforts to tackling global challenges. These aims also tally with the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Collaboration between young people in Russia and Africa can be strengthened by exchanging best practices and working together on specific projects. Leadership and startup communities play a particularly important role in establishing partnerships, as these are the most effective mechanisms for enacting a structural shift in the socioeconomic sphere.

Oil and Gas Projects in Africa: Implementation Prospects

The African continent’s oil reserves are estimated at 129.2 billion barrels, or 7.5% of global reserves, and it produces 8.2 million barrels per day, representing 8.6% of global production. There is significant potential for the continent to increase production and monetize reserves. At the same time, Russian companies currently have a limited presence in the region. Broadening Russian-African cooperation could boost competition and efficiency in field development, and provide an additional stimulus for efforts to localize equipment and strengthen technological partnership.

Sustainable Partnership in Agriculture: Institutions, Tools, and Guarantees

The steady development of African countries in the last few years, together with growing populations and income levels are all factors helping to boost agricultural production. However, a deficit of modern technology, lack of land suitable for farming, and a shortage of qualified personnel mean that the needs of the African market have not been fully met.

Russia’s unique geographic conditions, together with its vast land and water resources, provide the country with enormous agricultural potential. In the past few years, Russian companies have taken active steps to increase exports of agricultural products and food. Indeed, Russia is already one of the ten largest food suppliers to Africa. However, a range of barriers related to infrastructure is currently hindering effective trade. Removing these could help collaboration reach an entirely new level.

The Roscongress Foundation, a socially oriented non-financial development institution, is the organiser of the events, and the Russian Export Center and Afreximbank are the co-organisers of this first Russia-Africa Summit.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah writes frequently on Russia, Africa and BRICS. He is the author of the Geopolitical Handbook titled “Putin’s African Dream and The New Dawn: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities” devoted to the first Russia-Africa Summit 2019.

Throughout most of Obama’s war, now Trump’s, against Syrian sovereign independence and territorial integrity, Kurdish YPG fighters and their politicians allied with US imperial aims for their own self-interest — including support for jihadists used as Pentagon/CIA proxy foot soldiers.

Kurdish betrayal complicates rapprochement with Damascus. Trust must be earned. Kurds have lots of proving to do.

For now, an uneasy alliance was formed against a common Turkish foe. Southfront said agreed on terms between both sides haven’t been revealed — each side with its “own version of events,” adding:

For Kurdish politicians and fighters, it’s for “the defense sphere only,” a political agreement to be discussed “in the coming days.”

Russia is acting as “guarantor” of terms agreed on, Moscow alone able “to prevent the further Turkish incursion into northeastern Syria.”

If things go as planned, Syrian forces will be deployed along areas bordering Turkey to “guarantee” Syrian Arab Republic territorial integrity — what Russia called for throughout years of war, along with preserving the country’s sovereignty.

“(A)reas captured by” Turkish and proxy fighters will remain active conflict theaters until “liberated,” said Southfront.

According to Damascus, oil-producing areas east of the Euphrates river must be returned to government control.

Assad may grant concessions to Kurds short of an autonomous state within the Syrian Arab Republic — maybe something along the lines of the US federal system.

Under the US 10th Amendment,

“powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Something like the above might work for both sides. As for Turkish cross-border aggression, Erdogan wants to seize and control as much Syrian territory as possible, part of his revanchist agenda.

Syrian Arab Army forces aim to preserve and protect the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity against all illegal foreign occupiers.

Syrian troops entered and control strategic Manbij, its surrounding areas, Kobani, Raqqa, Tabqa, Ayn Isa, and areas near Tell Tamr, Kurdish YPG fighters operating alongside them.

Russian military police are deployed between their forces and Erdogan’s to prevent both sides from clashing — a key objective.

US troops still illegally occupy southern Syrian territory. Its special forces and CIA elements may be operating covertly anywhere in the country.

Pentagon-led terror-bombing remains a constant threat, along with continued arming and training of ISIS and other jihadists on its regional bases.

On Wednesday, Erdogan claimed Turkish forces control about 1,000 sq. km of northern Syrian territory.

On Thursday, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that Ras al-Ayn civilians in harm’s way of Turkish aggression were hospitalized with “severe burns” believed to be from (banned) “chemical substances,” adding:

“(S)ources (reported that) the Turkish regime used the internationally-banned (white) phosphorus in shelling residential neighborhoods in Ras al-Ayn city.”

US-dominated NATO and Israel use chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned terror weapons against adversaries time and again, accountability never forthcoming.

In response to Trump’s letter to Erdogan discussed in a same-day article, Turkish media reported that it was “rejected…and thrown away,” an unnamed Ankara source saying:

“The straightest answer to this letter is the Operation Peace Spring, which began on October 9,” adding:

“Trump understood such proposals were not valid. (He) has seen that he cannot make Erdogan do anything with the mediation offer.”

Erdogan and Trump will meet next month in Washington. On October 22, the Turkish president will meet with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Syria the topic of discussion for both meetings.

On Thursday morning in Ankara, Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’Brien and special presidential envoy James Jeffrey met with Turkish foreign minister Cavusoglu — reportedly only for “45 minutes…no further details…given” on how talks went, according to Turkish media.

On Wednesday, Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said

“(n)either sanction threats nor condemnations can deter us from our rightful cause (sic),” adding:

So-called “Operation Peace Spring will continue without slowing down until it reaches its aims.”

There’s nothing “rightful” about aggression, the highest of high crimes by one state against another.

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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 Liberty Nation

The legal battle over the extradition of Mun Chol-Myong to the United States continues, as Malaysian courts postpone judgment until the end of October. Mun is a 54-year-old citizen of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea who has lived in Malaysia since 2008.

He was arrested at the behest of the United States in May and charged with four counts of money laundering, two counts of conspiracy to launder money, and violating sanctions against the DPRK.

Although Malaysia approved the US extradition request, Mun filed a legal objection. He is currently being held without bail.

The charges stem from his work with Sinsar Trading Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-based company where he worked as a development officer.

Many compare his situation with that of three people in Singapore who were arrested for violating UN sanctions by sending perfume, wine, and watches to the DPRK. Unlike Mun, however, the US did not seek their extradition.

Jagjit Singh, Mun’s lawyer, denied the accusations and said recently that the US was using his client for political purposes in order to gain leverage over the DPRK. The case shows that the extent of the US’s bullying knows virtually no limits, and that there is no escaping the reach of the US government.

Further, it demonstrates the backward priorities of the US government.

This is clear when we contrast their approach to Mun with their approach to the billionaire Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma. Beginning in 1995 the Sacklers manufactured, promoted, and sold the deadly opiod, OxyContin.

Through aggressive marketing, bribery, and misinformation, the Sacklers are larely responsible for initiating the deadly opioid crisis in the US, which has taken tens of thousands of lives. Yet the Sacklers all remain free and remain billionaires.

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Dr. Derek Ford is Associate Professor, DePauw University.

From the minute Mumia picked up a microphone and a pen at the age of 14, Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police department has been seeking to silence him.  Just look at the FBI files- documenting that the Philadelphia PD Civil Disobedience Unit Red Squad trailed him — and the Police Chief Frank Rizzo targeted him — feeding his name to the FBI to put him on the “security index.”  Mumia was literally covering community events and rallies, and writing for the Black Panther Party Paper, all this while he was still in his teens!

During the 1995 PCRA hearings, 13 yrs after Mumia’s questionable murder conviction, a Philadelphia police officer was heard by a NY Times reporter outside the courtroom saying “we should have executed him that night.”

Remember: it was Philly cops who shot Mumia.  The Philly cops who brutally beat him at the scene, in the police wagon, and on the floor of the Jefferson Hospital emergency room entrance.

Joe McGill, the prosecutor on Mumia’s case, and Ed Rendell, the District Attorney at the time, worked closely with the police to frame and convict Mumia for the Dec. 9th 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

In 2020, a new hearing in Philadelphia Common Pleas could be, and should be, free from bias.  Everyone knows that Mumia’s trial judge in 1981-1982 was s stone cold racist.   A current sitting homicide judge on the Common Pleas Court bench has commented that Albert Sabo was “the most racist and sexist judge I have ever met.”

Here is information that has been suppressed and buried for decades and now could be available for the first time during a new trial.

• Did DA Joe McGill pay off witnesses with favors and cash?
• Did McGill allow the cabbie with a suspended license to keep driving? Photos of the crime scene by the Philadelphia Bulletin prove the cab driver’s car was literally not at the scene.
• Did Joe McGill illegally remove Black jurors because of their race?
• Did Joe McGill track and fix the outstanding cases of other key witnesses?
• Did the DA’s office for 37 yrs withhold and suppress critical information from Mumia’s criminal defense team?
• Did judge Albert Sabo state “I am going to help them fry the n*****” in front of Judge Richard Klein and court clerk Terry Maurer Carter?
• Did Alfonso Giordano Philadelphia Police Commander– the highest ranking officer on the scene of officer Faulkner’s murder on Dec. 9th 1981 falsely state that Mumia confessed while he was beating him in the police van?  At the time Giordano was under federal scrutiny for running gambling, extortion and payoffs and thus not used as a trial witness. He testified at pretrial hearings but was not “available” at trial.  He retired the day after Mumia was found guilty, with full pay. Soon thereafter he pleaded guilty to tax evasion for the bribes taken from illegal gambling in East Division, 29 officers were convicted in just that scandal alone.

A few months ago, I got a chance to speak with Maureen Faulkner.  I asked her:

“What did she think was going to happen next in Mumia’s case? 

She replied:

“You have to go to Prison Radio’s website and listen. Judith Ritter, Mumia’s lawyer really thinks they have a chance.”   

Maureen, paused, and continued. She had to admit:

“We are in a really hard spot.  There is not much we can do, the way it is going…We have to fight to keep Mumia in prison as long as possible.” 

Finally the tides are turning. Justice is palpable.

While Maureen Faulkner, widow of Daniel Faulkner, is being put forward as the face of the opposition in recent court proceedings, the real players behind the scenes are the Fraternal Order of Police.  And they are worried. There is a lot of self-interest on the part of the 6500-member Philadelphia Police Union in toppling Larry Krasner, the popular new DA with an anti-corruption agenda.

Early this fall, in a groundbreaking development, Krasner filed a brief in Superior Court (see sidebar) agreeing that a new evidentiary hearing should be held in Mumia’s case by the Philadelphia Common Pleas court.  “The Commonwealth does not oppose defendant’s motion for a remand to the PCRA court for defendant to present newly-discovered evidence.”

This PCRA hearing would evaluate the evidence found in the six previously undisclosed banker boxes from Storage Room 17, that Larry Krasner found after taking office and turned over to the defense.   Maureen Faulkner tried to file an objection to the seeking removal of Krasner’s office. But just last week, her pro se application to intervention in the Superior Court Appeal was denied.

10-4-19 FOP breakfast Rally for Maureen, John “Jack” O’Neil, Esq.  Staff attorney for the IBEW Electrical Workers Union.  He is volunteering to assist Maureen.  He also ran against Krassner and placed a distant sixth.   Note that the “trades unions” in Philadelphia  share with the FOP a notoriously racist history.  The motto of both the IBEW and Lodge 5 – could easily be “protect upper middle class white jobs, at the expense of people of color.”  Note Krasner has identified and gone after a key lynch pin to the problem of mass incarceration: “police overtime” which is fed by the churning of false arrests in poor communities.  (see the 39th District scandal, and others).  

Fast forward to October of 2019, “Mumia Abu-Jamal is just one step away from Freedom”,  Maureen announced at her press conference at the DA’s office at 3 Penn Square in Philadelphia.

Things are changing. Grassroots organizing popularly elected a progressive District Attorney Larry Krassner who is willing to hold the police and former district attorneys accountable.  It has been 37 years, and we are closer to justice than we have been since the 1995 PCRA hearing. The courts may be slow to follow, but there is no way to go back. We are on the path to freedom.

You have been there, making it happen, each and every single step.  Thank you.

We all must remember that the Philadelphia police have been violent and racist and corrupt for decades. They have a lot to lose if Mumia wins — because when Mumia wins, the forces that support Black dignity and freedom are winning.

Let us not misunderstand the depth of racism – throughout the police department in Philadelphia.  Here is a picture of the brand new (this month) acting Police Chief Christine Coulter.  Here she is wearing an LAPD t-shirt mocking the beating of Rodney King.  “LAPD “We treat you like a King”. She did not resign when this photo surfaced.

John McNesby, the FOP Lodge 5 President, is deeply invested in continuing the brutal power that the Philly police department enjoyed in the past.   At the FOP Lodge Five Event in April he tells his brother officers: “Krasner is going after cops instead of keeping this city safe…We have so many officers on the do-not-call list, we could invade Cuba”.   This was a riff on the line by former Mayor and Police Chief Frank Rizzo that “We could invade Cuba and win”. The “do not call list” includes officers designated by the DA’s office as not available to testify at trial because they have been caught by the courts “test-a-lying” or they have been indicted.

The scandals regarding police corruption are splashed across the Philadelphia Inquirer’s front page each and every single week.  This week another African-American man was exonerated after proving police falsification of evidence. Willie Veasy’s return to his family after 27 years of bondage was the 10th so far this year.

Mumia Abu-Jamal will follow Willie Veasey out of imprisonment. But only because thousands of you have stood by him and committed to this fight for justice. We still have work to do, we still need every one of you to make sure that justice is done and Mumia comes home.

Join all of us. It is time to move this forward towards justice and freedom and bring Mumia home.

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Read the first part of this series here.

The elements of a new international financial crisis are in place. Although we do not know when it will break out, it is unavoidable, and its impact on world economy will be as significant as the 1880s-90s, 1930s-40s and more recent 2008-09 meltdowns. Worse, far fewer of the global capacities of the latter period – rapid lowering of interest rates, printing of money to buy up state debt (‘Quantitative Easing’), and sufficient fiscal space for bailouts – are available to global crisis managers. And most troubling, many more of the proto-fascistic political characteristics reminiscent of the 1930s are looming, especially in the new contextualisations of the Global South.

The contributing economic factors include:

• sharply increased private debts of corporations;
• speculative bubbles in financial asset prices: stock markets, debt security prices, and in some countries, the real estate sector (at the end of December 2018, a major stock market crash almost broke out in the United States and the contagion effect was immediate, an additional signal that a major crash will have as great a global impact as did 2008-09’s);
• the major banks remain extremely fragile, with share values falling in the United States and Europe since the second half of 2018;
• the US real estate market has become fragile again, overall global prices up by 50% since 2012, with lev- els in excess of those reached just before the crisis that began in 2005-2006;
• Quantitative Easing policies in Europe and their return in the US (as the Federal Reserveeases interest rates in mid-2019 under pressure from President Donald Trump, running for re-election) represent further factors that have the effect of pushing ‘risk on’ funding into South African securities, but at the expense of further rapid outflows when ‘risk off’ sentiments dominate.

Total Debt (Corporate, Household, Government) in the World Economy, 2012-19

Source: Institute of International Finance 2019

Economic growth in the most industrialized “old” countries remains weak. Especially in Europe after low growth in 2017, the year 2018 ended with stagnation and in the case of Germany, a fall in industrial production in the 4^th quarter. German authorities lowered their growth forecasts for 2019 to 1% (while in 2016-2017 the annual growth rate exceeded 2%). In the euro zone, growth in the third quarter of 2018 was only 0.2%, the lowest in 4 years. In Japan, growth over the year through period April 2018 – March 2019 was around 0.9%, also down on 2017. The US economy is also in a slowdown phase; the IMF forecasts growth of 2.5% in 2019 compared to 2.9% in 2018. In other words, the North continues to suffer sustained stagnation.

Moreover, Chinese growth is still slowing, as discussed below, as are the economies of the other BRICS, except for India, which is growing at just over 7% annually. Russia is experiencing very weak growth, of the order of 1.2% in 2018 and a forecast of 1.3% for 2019. South Africa was in recession in the first half of 2018, and again in 2019 was likely to fall into a technical recession thanks to -3.2% GDP growth rate in the first quarter. Brazil, which experienced a severe recession in 2015-2016, has regained some growth, but it is very low, at just over 1% in 2018, and out of desperation, the Bolsonaro government authorised a large interest rate cut in mid-2019.

Other so-called emerging countries are also suffering profound economic crises, especially Turkey, Argentina and Venezuela. The symptoms include devaluation of the currency, great difficulties in repaying public and private external debt, and rising joblessness; these are also the kinds of conditions that generate political instability, which all three countries have suffered in different ways in recent years.

To complete the set of gloomy indicators, we will consider the African continent in more detail below, where South Africa’s comparative advantage rests in exporting automobiles, construction and mining services, banking, cellular phones and other consumer goods through Johannesburg-based retail networks (in one case, Massmart, controlled from the US via Walmart). As discussed later, economic conditions are even worse for imports and FDI profit repatriation in Africa than in the rest of the world, as a result of structural exploitation, over-reliance on primary export orientation, and a new debt crisis.

The above remarks relate to the geographical categories within the world community of nations. When we expand our perspective to look at marginalised and oppressed peoples, along the lines of class and other categories, the picture appears even gloomier as a result of neo-fascistic tendencies in many parts of the world. All over the world, economic austerity and political offensives against workers, marginalised and oppressed peoples continue and worsen.

Women are the hardest hit, together with people of colour, indigenous peoples, migrants and young workers. In many instances, women will suffer multiple oppresions if these categorisations are inclusive (for example, young migrant women workers). In the case of all the above groups the offensive is partly a result of the position of these groups in the labour market, for example in historically worse paid jobs. In the case of women and also disabled workers, the impact of the offensive against public services also has a disproportionate impact. Women, who even in times of boom continued to have the major responsibility for caring for children, sick people and elderly people, are adversely affected by cuts in those services, resulting in them often being forced into even more marginal employment or out of the labour market all together. Disabled people who relied on the availability of certain services to work or live independently are similarly impacted.

This offensive operates on different levels:

• repressive policies, including the tightening of immigration rules, attacks on abortion and contraception services, the abuse of indigenous lands for the extraction of extreme fossil fuel or biofuels against the wishes of those communities, etc;
• the emboldening of the extreme right through hate offensives against those groups, including murders in indigenous communities in Brazil by ranchers, official Islamaphobia and anti-semitism, growth of ‘militant’ mobilisations against abortion clinics, increasing violent attacks against LGB and particularly trans people, and mass shootings;
• diminishing support for the most marginalised sections of working people, in part by an aggrieved working class failing to provide solidarity when feminism, anti-racism, LGBTIQ liberation, immigrant rights are labeled as merely ‘identity’ politics, especially when this entails blaming the loss of jobs and services on migrants, women.

Apart from a very minority category of workers whose wages are very high – which makes them prone to allying with big business – almost all categories of waged workers are targeted by economic austerity. These include sectors that had historically succeeded in winning important rights, whether in the industrial sector, in public services, in the financial sector (banking, insurance) and in the commercial sector. Examples include:

• the new precariousness of working conditions and contracts;
• the facilitation of dismissals in part through technological change;
• stagnation or a fall in the purchasing power of wage-workers and popular sectors in general;
• increased retirement ages, with stagnation or fall in pensions;
• decreased access to and quality of public services;
• the reduction in the number of employees protected by collective agreements;
• attacks on the rights of union members and the rights to organise and strike;
• increased indebtedness of working class households all over the world (through consumer loans, mortgage debts, student debts, tax debts, microcredit for survival – and women represent more than 80% of the 120 million people who use such high-priced services worldwide – and rising peasant debts not only in countries like India where the phenomenon has taken on dramatic proportions but also in northern countries.

Source: Branko Milanovic

• precarious work, especially the increase in part-time work by women in services (cleaning, catering, personal care);
• destruction of public services such as public transport, childcare and healthcare, resulting in an increased unpaid workload for mothers; women’s pensions are structurally very low because of the years not worked (because of the need for care for small children at home);
• discriminatory measures in the unemployment system include less income for “non-head of households,” who are mostly women;
• sexual harassment of women in many sectors and in precarious employment (male power in hiring women, which were unveiled in #MeToo);
• decline in access to abortion and contraception rights, in the United States at both local (city) and state levels; closure of family planning centres; non-reimbursement for contraception, lack of sexual education in schools; rise of anti-abortion religious groups in both the US and Latin America with the extreme example of Brazil (Poland and Ireland represent contrary forces given victories in reproductive rights mobilisations);
• the rise of fundamentalism in India, Bangladesh, with more frequent public punishment of “adulterous” women or young women with non-approved sexual contact; but also revolt of young women against the extremely harsh family regime, e. g. Saudi Arabia;
• calls for women to have more children in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, for nationalist reasons;
• the Russian Federation’s Duma, under pressure from the authorities and the Orthodox Church, decriminalized domestic violence in 2017;
• countries where 40% of serious crimes, primarily against women but also against children, occur in the family environment;
• growth of the sex industry worldwide includes sale of women in Libya, slavery of immigrant women, growing pornography in prostitution, amongst other aspects;
• ongoing inequality of women farmers even in small family farms, as Via Campesina regularly reports;
• violence against women, including femicide, domestic violence, harassment of women on the streets;
• in Italy, under pressure from lobbies of very virulent separated fathers, portrayed as as “masculinists”, fundamentalist components of the Catholic Church and a government formed by a coalition between an extreme right-wing party and the Five Stars movement, a project was launched to reform family law to make divorce much more difficult; and
• in Argentina, in August 2018, parliament rejected the bill that legalized abortion.

All of these social processes combine home-based patriarchal power and a wider attack on the rights of women and the LGBTIQ movement by an authoritarian state. Globally, authoritarian forms of government are being strengthened without, so far, taking the form of military dictatorships. In spite of winning electoral contests, the new rightwing leaders are curtailing fundamental democratic freedoms. The means of the repressive forces have greatly increased, which allows for an increased intrusion into the lives of individuals and organisations. The use of preventive arrests is spreading, even in the “old” bourgeois democracies. Legislative and judicial powers are being reduced in many places to the benefit of executive power.

There is, of course, political resistance to all these trends. The various forms of attacks on workers’ rights, women’s rights, the rights of migrants, and on all categories of the oppressed and oppressed fortunately provoke many struggles all over the world. Feminist mobilisations are the most encouraging, but there are many others. Labour struggles are less important than before in a number of countries, but they are progressing in others such as China and Bangladesh. The new forms of organisation or mobilisation that partly respond to the loss of political weight of the organized workers movement are developing and making it possible to build new blocks of the working classes: there are similarities between the mobilisations of the Argentine piqueteros (2001-2003) and those of the Yellow Vests in France (2018-2019), as well as the 2011 movements of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupiers, or the mobilisations in Greece (2011-15), Turkey (2013), Mexico against the increase in gasoline prices (2017), and those of Nicaragua (2018), Haiti (2018-2019), the Moroccan Rif (2018), Puerto Rico (2019), Hong Kong (2019) and many other places, including 18 African countries, as we see below. There are also regular mobilisations among school children in parts of the world; we are witnessing increasing mobilisation on the issue of climate, the environment and common goods.

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This article was originally published on CADTM.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. 

Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at the Wits University School of Governance in Johannesburg and co-editor of BRICS: An anti-capitalist critique (published by Haymarket, Pluto, Jacana and Aakar).

Source

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Policy Paper #1/2 on South Africa’s Special Economic Zones in Global Context September 2019 By Eric Toussaint, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson and Patrick Bond

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

“Our proposal is for the terrorists to lay down their arms, leave their equipment, destroy the traps they have created, and leave the safe zone we designated, as of tonight,” Turkish President Erdogan said. “If this is done, our Operation Peace Spring will end by itself.”

Erdogan of Turkey has stated he will not order a ceasefire in Syria, even though his NATO partners have asked for it.  Pres. Trump has sent VP Pence to Ankara today to ask for a ceasefire, and to explain the consequences should Erdogan refuse.

Turkey began ‘Operation Spring Peace’ one week ago with the stated goal to eliminate Kurdish terrorists from the border region and to create a ‘safe-zone’ in northeast Syria for Syrian refugees currently in Turkey to return to.  Trump inadvertently gave the green-light to Erdogan in a phone call, after which Trump ordered the US troops in the area to withdraw.  Trump has explained his withdraw order was not a stamp of approval on Turkey’s military incursion into Syria but instead was done to keep the US troops safe.

Once Turkey began the military attack, first by airstrikes and then using ground troops, the international community, including American critics of Trump, began an outcry based on humanitarian concerns of a possible bloodbath of the Kurdish population.  Additionally, the US military and legislators have expressed dismay and regret at having left behind a valuable ally in the fight against ISIS: the Kurdish militia Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who were to be the target of the Turkish invasion into Syria.

The Kurds are a minority in Syria, and while they do have towns and villages in the northeastern corner of Syria, they are still a minority there. During the Syrian conflict which began in 2011, the Kurds of Afrin saw an opportunity to benefit from aligning themselves with the Obama backed ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA), who were Syrian mercenaries supported by Obama and the US Congress.  The FSA was openly Jihadist, following the political ideology of Radical Islam, with the final goal of ‘regime change’ to pave the way for an Islamic government in Syria.  Obama and his right hand in Syria, Republican Senator John McCain, were not themselves adherents of Radical Islam, but used the assets on hand for ‘boots-on-the-ground’, knowing that the US Congress would never approve of a ‘regime change’ project in Syria.  Getting US troops to invade Syria was too complicated, and the Jihadists were local assets that only required funding and weapons, which was done covertly through a CIA program, and then later McCain lobbied the US Congress for funding.  Trump pulled the plug on the CIA funding of the FSA, which had by then become Al Qaeda after the FSA failed to find support among the Syrian population, and was forced to recruit Jihadists from around the world, who came pouring in through Turkey.

The Kurds were fighting the Syrian government to establish a Kurdish ‘state’.  The FSA was fighting to establish an Islamic ‘state’ in Damascus, while the Kurds took advantage of the chaos throughout the country to take their piece of the pie: the northeastern section, which they began to call ‘Rojava’, and later they termed the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (NES).   Their political ideology was extreme socialism and secular.  The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, as were the FSA; however, we have seen in the Kurdish city of Kobani hundreds of the Sunni have changed their religion to American Evangelical Christianity, which is linked to the support of Israel.  A female, former Muslim, convert to the church in Kobani commented, “I don’t mind leaving Islam, but I want to continue to wear my headscarf.”

In 2014 the ISIS attacked Kobani and the Kurds fought back, and eventually became the US ally in the fight to defeat ISIS. The US military used the assets on hand to fight ISIS, and eventually, in a small village in northeast Syria, they were declared defeated in 2019.  It was the SDF who fought alongside the US troops to defeat ISIS, with the US having lost 5 soldiers, compared to about 11,000 Kurds. Many cautioned the SDF and their political wing in NES that the US would eventually abandon them, as they had done with the FSA. The Kurds had confidence their Rojava would remain, and they remained loyal to the US promises and support.

Posters of Abdullah Ocalan are plastered everywhere in Kobani, and throughout NES.  He is the imprisoned leader of the PKK, an internationally recognized terrorist group, responsible for 40,000 deaths in Turkey for over 30 years. The Kurds in Syria claim they are SDF and YPG and are not connected to PKK; however, you will see SDF soldiers with PKK patches on their uniforms, and with the posters of Ocalan everywhere, it is obvious that the Kurds are PKK, and the PKK are Kurds.  This did not bother the US Pentagon, because they had to use the assets on hand to defeat ISIS.

Erdogan continuously complained to the US about their support of Kurdish ‘terrorists’ in northeast Syria, even long after ISIS was defeated.  To Turkey, the SDF is the PKK and had set up a ‘state’, NES, on the Turkish border, and this was unacceptable and reason enough to invade Syria to neutralize the threat to Turkey’s national security.  Now, the Turkish ground troops are face-to-face with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) at Manbij. The land is Syrian, the SAA are all Syrians, as it is mandatory military service in Syria for all males over 18 who are not enrolled in a University.  The SDF has recently agreed with Damascus to align with the SAA to repel the invasion of Turkey. However, the ground troops used by Turkey to invade Syria are not Turkish: they areSyrians who were formerly terrorists, who survived the battles against the Kurds and the US, and escaped to Turkey through Idlib, and fell into the open arms of the Turkish military, who saved them for the invasion of northeast Syria as they were the assets on hand.

Russian security forces are patrolling Manbij and are tasked with keeping the SAA and the former ISIS mercenaries employed by Erdogan from clashing.  The place is a tinder-box ready to blow. In a phone call between Russia and Turkey today, an invitation for Erdogan to meet Putin in Moscow was accepted.

“Everything related to the destiny and future of Syria is a one hundred percent Syrian issue, and the unity of Syrian territory is self-evident and not up for debate or discussion,” President Bashar al-Assad stated in his speech on August 2017.

After more than 8 years of war, the Syrian President’s promise is poised to be fulfilled for the Syrian people.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a Middle East observer. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have reached a groundbreaking deal with the Assad government.

This happened on October 13 evening after the US-led coalition expectedly abandoned their ‘local partners’ in face of Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring and an ‘accident Turkish shelling’ of a US military garrison near Kobani. Turkey is a NATO member state and a key US ally in the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara considers the SDF to be a terrorist group linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. So, it was hard to expect that the US would really fight the Turks on behalf of the Syrian Kurds.

Units of the Syrian Army already deployed in Manbij, Tabqah, Tabqah Dam, Ain Issa and other key areas in eastern Aleppo, western al-Hasakah and southern Raqqah. Russia, which was the main mediator between the SDF and Damascus, also sent its military police to Manbij. Official details of the agreement are yet to be revealed and all the sides involved in the northeastern Syria standoff seem to have own versions of events.

Watch the video here.

The SDF and affiliated Kurdish political organizations say that the deal with the Assad government was a least-evil solution and it was related to the defense sphere only. A political agreement still has to be reached and the sides are going to start negotiations in the coming days. SDF sources see Russia as a guarantor of the agreement and the only power that is able to prevent the further Turkish incursion into northeastern Syria. According to this version, the Syrian Army will be deployed along the Turkish border and its presence there will guarantee Syrian territorial integrity. The areas captured by the Turkish military and pro-Turkish groups will remain a zone of military actions until their liberation. They name the liberation of the Turkish-controlled region of Afrin as one of the points of the agreement. Sources close to Damascus say that the SDF will have to hand over to the government the control of oil fields on the eastern bank of the Euphrates.

In the political sphere, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the only real military political power within the SDF, will seek to get recognition of their self-proclaimed Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria by Damascus. The format of this recognition and a possible Kurdish autonomy will depend on the course of negotiations and the development of the Turkish offensive.

The Syrian government has not released official comments on the deal with the SDF so far. The Syrian Army is also not hurrying up to start a fully-fledged war with Turkey on behalf of the SDF. In these conditions, the best strategy is to block directions of possible Turkish-led advance rather than engage the Turkish Army and Turkish proxies in an open battle. This turns the Turkish advance in northern Syrian into a race against time, whose main goal is to capture as much area as possible, while the Syrian Army has not come. The situation in Manbij is a demonstration of this approach:

On October 14, the Syrian National Army, a coalition of Turkish-backed armed groups, officially announced the start of advance on Manbij. However, no real advance happened, because the Syrian Army and the Russians came.

The Turkish behavior demonstrates that Anakra knows the rules of this game. On October 15, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the operation was ongoing successfully and Turkish forces ‘liberated’ 1,000km2. Erdogan added that his country aims to clear northern Syria of ‘terrorists’ (i.e. Kurdish armed groups) stretching from Manbij to the Iraqi-Turkish border. Nonetheless, this is just an official rhetoric that should not fully comply with the real actions. Turkey will likely gain control of the area between Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and the M4 highway south of these towns. What really matters is who will get control of the city of Ayn al-Arab (Kobani). In the current conditions, Ayn al-Arab is the only area, where clashes between the Syrian Army and Turkish-led forces can start if they reach it simultaneously. The fate of the town will likely be determined by some kind of behind the scenes deal among Ankara, Moscow and Damascus. At the same time, all the sides will continue to employ their formal rhetoric as if such a deal has never existed.

In own turn, US President Donald Trump used the Turkish operation to deliver his repeatedly delayed promise to withdraw American troops from the war-torn country, at least formally. US forces indeed abandoned their military garrisons in northern Syria about 1,000 personnel are withdrawing. However, the reduced contingent of about 150 troops will remain in place in the al-Tanf area as a part of Trump’s anti-Iranian strategy in the region. The US does not want the Damascus-Baghdad highway to be used by Iran to supply its allies in Syria and Lebanon. Additionally, the US-Israeli bloc uses the al-Tanf base to project its power on the Syrian-Iraqi border and monitor supposed Iranian operations in the area.

Another factor behind the US move is the need to improve its relations with Turkey. US military support to Kurdish armed groups in Syria used to be a factor of constant tension in the relations between Washington and Ankara. Now, it is removed. A new round of anti-Turkish sanctions announced by President Trump is mostly a formal move aimed at the US internal audience.

Meanwhile, the United States and Russia blocked attempts of the UN Security Council to condemn Turkey’s military action in northeastern Syria. If this was really a part of some unpublicized coordination, key powers involved in the conflict may be on the edge of reaching a long-expected wide political deal on settling the conflict in Syria.

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The smoothness with which the US’ “sudden” withdrawal played out and the Pentagon’s decision not to militantly enforce the so-called “deconfliction line” along the Euphrates River after the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) triumphantly crossed it en route to protecting their new Kurdish “allies” strongly suggest that these were premeditated decisions indirectly coordinated with Russia in advance as part of the “New Detente” whereby Moscow’s reciprocal “compromise” would be in “convincing” Damascus to request Iran’s dignified but “phased withdrawal” next on the “face-saving” basis that its anti-terrorist assistance is no longer required.

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The conflict within the U.S. ruling class about the Turkish invasion of northern Syria has created some confusion about events there. The latest new development — an alliance of Kurdish-based forces with the Syrian national army to defend the border from the Turkish army — may increase that confusion. To clarify the situation as best as possible, we need to state some basic positions and underline some basic facts.

First of all, U.S. imperialism never had, never has and never will have any legitimate “humanitarian” reason to station troops anywhere in Syria. Washington places troops in areas for strategic advantage and/or for economic domination. The reason U.S. troops have been in Syria and elsewhere in the region is for U.S. oil monopolies to control and exploit the natural resources — mainly fossil fuels, oil and gas — so the capitalist owners of these companies can get richer.

For the last eight years, U.S. arms and political influence, and those of other NATO countries, have fed a brutal war that has torn apart Syria, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Syrian people. This war has also made as many as 10 million Syrians refugees, many within Syria or in neighboring countries and some in Europe. The U.S. goal was to remove the sovereign Syrian government and replace it with a puppet of Western imperialist powers.

In Libya, for example, in 2011 the imperialists succeeded in removing a legitimate government and replaced it with an unstable horror.

Nothing good has come or will come from the presence of U.S. troops, nor from political domination by U.S. imperialism. No one should believe that the racist, misogynist and xenophobic U.S. president has somehow become a peacemaker. Apparently as an electoral strategy, he has ordered the removal of a handful of U.S. troops from northern Syria. Simultaneously the Pentagon is sending 1,800 troops to the Saudi Arabian monarchy to defend the oil fields and continue the genocidal war in Yemen.

Turkey’s war crimes

Second, by sending troops to and arming puppet groups in northern Syria, the reactionary regime of President Recep Erdogan in Ankara, Turkey, is committing a war crime. This invasion is naked aggression against Turkey’s neighbor, Syria, the latest of many crimes committed against Syria in the last eight years. This aggression will cause additional suffering to the people of northeastern Syria, who are mainly Kurdish, but whose makeup reflects the many ethnic and religious groups that inhabit the whole of Syria.

Erdogan persecutes Turkey’s own Kurdish population, who are estimated to be 14 to 20 million of Turkey’s 80 million people. The Ankara regime has been using its army, especially in the Kurdish regions, in an attempt to crush the Kurdish people’s movement. Erdogan’s government persecutes opposition political parties and journalists throughout Turkey as it oppresses Turkey’s working class.

That Erdogan has taken some steps in the recent past that put him at odds with either the U.S. or the European Union — buying arms from Russia, participating in conferences with Russia and Iran to settle the war in Syria — should mislead no one into thinking the Turkish president represents any progressive tendency worldwide. Thieves, even those in the same gang, can have a falling out.

We do not at this time know the specifics of the agreement between the Kurdish-based fighters in northern Syria and the legitimate Syrian government, nor can we foresee how it will play out. We applaud, however, any alliance that confronts a local hegemonic power like Turkey and, even more importantly, excludes the imperialist regimes of Europe and the United States, who are the primary oppressors of humanity worldwide.

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This article was originally published on Workers World.

Sara Flounders has traveled twice to Syria in solidarity delegations during the U.S. war against that country. She is co-director of the International Action Center and helps coordinate the United National Antiwar Coalition, the Hands Off Syria Campaign, and the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

First published by Global Research on September 4, 2018

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The Irish scientist John Tyndall, one of the most distinguished physicists in modern history, provided evidence in 1861 that human-generated gases such as carbon dioxide and ethylene transmit enormous volumes of heat. Tyndall wrote of “the astonishment with which I saw the foregoing effects” of gases capable of trapping heat then released into the earth’s atmosphere, remaining there.

While Tyndall was unearthing these discoveries in the early 1860s, the Industrial Age had already taken off 100 years before. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain around 1760, was one of the defining moments in human history: the gradual shift away from “old-fashioned” manual devices towards machines and fossil fuel powered engines. It heralded the era of mass burning of coal, later gas and oil, which continues apace to current times. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution almost 260 years ago, global carbon emissions have increased by over 260%.

Indeed, it was recently discovered that the planet has in fact been warming for about 180 years, dating to the 1830s, due to human exploitation of fossil fuels. A decade before this, in the 1820s, an eminent French physicist Joseph Fourier – a scientific adviser and companion of Napoleon – had already deduced that something unforeseen was occurring within the globe’s atmosphere. Fourier, noting the earth’s distance from the sun, calculated that our world should have been much colder than it was in reality.

He concluded that the planet’s atmosphere had the ability to trap great volumes of heat, in a similar manner to a human-designed greenhouse. Fourier was christened as the discoverer of the “greenhouse effect”, a term coined later for the atmosphere’s absorption of largely human-engineered carbon emissions. The warning signs regarding the climate were being written from a very early stage. Even before Fourier was outlining his groundbreaking analysis, famous Industrial Revolution inventions had for years been spewing out carbon emissions – such as the steamboat (created 1787) and steam locomotive (created 1804), run through heavy consumption of coal.

Come the end of the 19th century Sweden’s renowned physicist, Svante Arrhenius (image on the right), was the first person to estimate the impact of carbon dioxide upon the planet. In early 1896 Arrhenius noted that the burning of fossil fuels, like coal, contribute significantly to world carbon emission levels, therefore leading to a heating globe. With regard rising greenhouse gases, Arrhenius wrote that the results would be felt “nearly the same over the whole earth”, but that “the effect will be less there [in the Southern hemisphere] than in the Northern Hemisphere”. He accurately estimated that, “if the quantity in carbonic acid [carbon dioxide] increases… the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression”.

Arrhenius further compiled the world’s total coal production levels in the late 19th century, which he wrote were a seemingly massive “500 millions of tons per annum” (global coal production has recently been around 7,000 million tons each year). Arrhenius’ work was publicly available from 1896 onwards: That year his paper was published first in German, then quickly reprinted in English with the long-established London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science.

It may have been clear to anyone who read Arrhenius’ findings that the world would continue heating, yet full-steam-ahead policies were continued by business industries. Some of the technological advancements were heavily reliant upon extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

A decade before, in 1885, the German engineer Karl Benz (image on the left) had developed the petrol (gasoline) powered automobile, one of the most significant creations in the human world. Yet, if truth be told, also among the most harmful. The reality is that cars, along with other vehicles like trucks, are today the largest contributors to carbon emissions in America. The US is the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter, but in overall history the country is by far the largest carbon producer, with the highest per capita emission rates today among the major powers.

Along with other policies, Donald Trump‘s business-led administration is currently dismantling emission regulations on vehicles, as efforts to curb such gases are impacting profits. One can again only marvel at the corporate desire to burn up the planet as quickly as possible.

There are over 260 million vehicles in America and more than a billion around the world, releasing gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide into the environment each year. The transformation to electric vehicles has been painfully limited (three million in use globally). Electric cars are far less lucrative to fossil fuel reliant corporations like Volkswagen and Nissan – who have gone so far as to falsify emission levels in their recent models, such is their dedication to profits.

As the 19th century moved into the 20th, emerging were further evidence-supported works regarding a heating planet. In 1938 the English inventor and engineer, Guy Stewart Callendar, believed that almost all the carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuel consumption remained within the earth’s atmosphere. Callendar provided evidence that greenhouse emissions were behind the gradual rise in temperatures of recent decades, and would continue into the future.

In the late 1950s, warnings of a warming world were becoming increasingly pointed, for example with regard the work of American scientists Roger Revelle and Hans Suess. Their 1957 study highlighted that

“human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past, nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries, we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years”.

The Revelle-Suess paper warned that,

“Rapid changes in the amount of carbon dioxide produced by volcanoes… or as, in our case, in the rate of combustion of fossil fuels, may therefore cause considerable departures from average conditions”.

They further noted,

“In contemplating the probably large increase of CO2 production by fossil fuel combustion in coming decades, we conclude that a total increase of 20% to 40% in atmospheric CO2 can be anticipated”.

The implications of which are being increasingly felt around the world today.

As we may see, the consequences of a changing climate were becoming more pointed by at least 1957. Yet, once again, such scientific findings – with increasingly blunt language being used – were overlooked or ignored by elite figures and mainstream commentators. Governments followed suit. The public, as a result, remained unaware of the looming planetary crisis, with business-as-usual policies continuing unhindered.

In 1961 another American scientist, Charles Keeling, produced evidence-based data demonstrating that global emissions were undoubtedly rising, due to fossil fuel consumption. His graph, the “Keeling Curve”, has revealed rapidly increasing emissions in the elapsing five decades, a far steeper climb than the 130-year warming period prior to his study.

Keeling’s work even prompted America’s National Science Foundation to issue public warnings about global warming in 1963, which were presented to America’s new leader Lyndon B. Johnson late that year. In November 1965, president Johnson admitted that “our affluence spews out vast quantities of wastes… Pollution now is one of the most pervasive problems of our society”. It was a commendable statement that would be anathema to Trump for instance, but words without weight behind them. Indeed, Johnson failed to mention that the planet itself was warming.

Had Johnson seriously acted upon the scientific analyses forwarded to him, much of the threat enveloping the earth today could have been reduced. It instead appears that other things were more important, such as escalating America’s war on the other side of the world against Vietnam. Indeed, successive US presidents to the present day have either been unwilling, or uninterested, in seriously tackling climate change. Were America to have taken an early stand against this issue much of the world may have followed suit.

In the early 1970s John Sawyer, an English meteorologist, even predicted with accuracy the planet’s rate of heating by the year 2000. Sawyer’s work was published in a long-running scientific publication called Nature, yet as with the above works, it failed to penetrate the mainstream conscience, quickly entering obscurity.

In 2008, about 180 years after Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect, slightly more than half of Americans and Britons still did not believe that climate change was occurring due to human activity. It was a particularly telling poll result, considering America and Britain supposedly possess two of the most advanced educational systems in the world.

To the present day, large swathes of elite power shun alerting public attention towards climate change. This planet-threatening issue continues receiving scant coverage in the mainstream media, and government leaders avoid discussing it publicly, particularly those governing the rich states responsible for emitting the highest emissions. Addressing climate change goes against many of the requirements of capitalist societies. In America, Britain and across the world, big business interests dictate much of government and media policy, while controlling increasing numbers of universities.

This disregard for the environment is captured perfectly by the Republican Party in the US. It is hardly a traditional party, but a corporate-controlled organization intent on greatly enriching its core base. Last November, it was reported that less than a third of Republican Party voters believe humans are causing climate change. About 75% of Republican voters are comprised of white Christians, among them significant numbers of evangelicals.

During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries almost all the candidates were climate change deniers. This included the eventual victor Trump who, since assuming the presidency, has pursued savage environmental policies that will inflict further harm on the earth. Trump’s climate actions have received remarkably little criticism from power centers, though much condemnation arrives his way for being an alleged “Russian stooge”, amid other unsubstantiated claims.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The foreign policy elite is in an uproar. They claim “we have abandoned our allies”. They question “how can America be trusted?” They say the decision to withdraw from northern Syria was a “gift”  to Russia, Iran, and Assad…. even ISIS. It is true that the policy of US/NATO interventionism is failing. But that has been true since the invasion of Iraq or earlier.  After the disastrous invasions and attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and the 8 year undeclared war on Syria,  isn’t it time to  question the foreign policy elite? 

If one believes in restoring international law and the UN Charter,  it is GOOD that US military forces have been withdrawn from  northern Syria. Here are some facts and history which explain why.

Basic fact: It’s not our country and US troops were never authorized by the sovereign government. Whether or not Washington likes Damascus is irrelevant. Under international law those troops have no right to be there. Even the overflights of Syria by the US air coalition violate international agreements. It’s up to  Syrians to defend their country against invading Turkey. If they choose to get support from another country, that is their right.

Another fact: President Obama was correct when he said that “putting boots on the ground” in Syria would be a “profound mistake”.  Later he said,  “We have a very specific objective, one that will not lead into boots on the ground or anything like that.” But the hawks prevailed.  There were not only “boots on the ground”, there was a shifting rationale why they had to be there.

The US and allies have done all they could, short of direct invasion, to overthrow the Syrian government. They have spent tens of BILLIONS of dollars in weapons, training, equipment, recruitment, etc.. This is in violation of international law. More than one hundred thousand Syrians have died defending their country against a foreign sponsored army of mercenaries and foreign fighters.

An astonishing fact: The US encouraged the emergence of the Islamic State. Why? Because it put pressure on Damascus and because it justified the entry of the US. While the US carpet bombed Raqqa, it looked the other way as hundreds of trucks conveyed oil from eastern Syria into Turkey to fund the Islamic State. The US air coalition attacked the Syrian Arab Army in the midst of a critical battle against ISIS near Deir Ezzor. In a secretly recorded conversation in New York with Syrian “activists”, John Kerry admitted they were watching ISIS and hoping to use it to pressure Damascus. In other words, US foreign policy was duplicitous and used terrorism as a tool. This is well documented in the book “The Management of Savagery”.

After the US backed “Free Syrian Army” failed, the US looked for another means to destabilize Syria. They started to fund  the Syrian Kurdish militias known as the Peoples Protection Unit (YPG /YPJ). They gave the militias a new name, Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and encouraged the secessionist tendency. Meanwhile in Turkey, which has the largest Kurdish community,  most Kurds want to have their rights within Turkey and have formed a political party (Peoples Democratic Party – HDP) which unites progressives of all ethnicities.  In the 2015 Turkish election this party emerged as the third most popular party and stopped Erdogan’s election domination.  Currently the HDP is campaigning against Turkey’s invasion of Syria. As of 13 October the Syrian Kurdish militias have come to an agreement to work with Damascus to combat the Turkish invasion. The agreement specifies that the Syrian Arab Army will control and defend the entire area from Jarablus on the Euphrates River to the far eastern border with Iraq.

Advocates of US intervention claim that the Kurds were fighting and dying “for us”. That is not true. They were defending their own community.  To the extent that they accepted and welcomed US air support, equipment, weaponry, etc. it was for their own benefit. There were two parties trying to use each other.

Whenever the US attacks or occupies a country it needs a rationalization. In 1991 there were false claims about incubators being stolen by Iraqi troops in Kuwait. In 2003 there were false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2011 there were false claims of civilians being threatened by Libyan troops in Benghazi. All these claims were subsequently found to be exaggerated or entirely false.

One of the main justifications for continuing US presence in Syria is “keeping our word” and not “abandoning” the Kurdish forces. This is a favorite rationalization for war.  In Cuba, the CIA trained Cuban exiles that attacked Playa Giron “were counting on us”. Fortunately, JFK resisted the pressure and said “No”.  In Vietnam, the US continued the war for a decade because we could not let down our “ally”, the government of Saigon. Millions of Vietnamese were killed plus 55,000 US troops because we could not “abandon” a government that in reality was a proxy.

In the Democratic Debates (15 October) Joe Biden said that the  withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria was “the most shameful thing any president has done in modern history in terms of foreign policy.” This is absurd. Over one million died in Iraq including 4500 and at least 100,000 severely injured US soldiers. Joe Biden was an influential supporter of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Later, as Vice President, he supported the overthrow of the Libyan government. The country is still in chaos with tens of thousands dead.  These two countries were devastated by US actions. It is evidence of shameless unaccountability in media and politics that Joe Biden is a serious candidate for President after he destroyed so many lives at a cost of trillions.  In the same Democratic debates Tulsi Gabbard was honest and accurate as she said that the plight of the Kurds in northern Syria is “yet another consequence of the regime change war we’ve been waging in Syria”.

Despite the howls of indignation and disinformation,  withdrawing US troops from northern Syria is a step in the right direction.

 

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Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who has visited Syria several times since 2014. He lives in the SF Bay Area and can be reached at [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The intimate human experience of time standing still is universal, although rare.  When we undergo it, we are stunned.  Silence seems to enclose us. It is the correlative to the more common experience of time passing at different speeds, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, despite clocks.  These universal experiences do not accord with the teleology that underlies the modern world with its scientific principle that leads to entropic death triumphant. They are therefore, as John Berger, the English writer and art critic, writes,

“dismissed as subjective, because time, according to the nineteenth-century view, is objective, incontestable and indifferent; to its indifference there are no limits.” 

As a result of living within this scientific and technical presupposition that the background ticking of the clock is the only truth and time is a one-way street, we are now living inside a hopeless mind-frame of a scientific theocracy that says all will end in entropy.  This is nihilism; for at the end of this clock time is nothingness, the infinite void.  This is the unstated “future,” but a future that is also now, a noxious injection that surreptitiously poisons people at the well of their lives where cracks in the consensual reality open and other truths fly in, or as Emily Dickinson said,

“’Hope’ is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops – at all”.

The one-dimensional finality of the view of time as death triumphant is the nihilistic future Nietzsche said was coming, and it is here.  And being here, it tries to reduce any experience that transports us beyond time to personal lunacy and worthy only of dismissal. It reduces human subjectivity and transcendent joy and despondent suffering to the ravings of a madman. Facts are facts says this unstated premise, and if you don’t get that, you are a joker and will be rendered invisible.

In the new movie “Joker,” the suffering Arthur Fleck, the eponymous Joker, is abandoned by a cruel American society whose capitalist order cares not a whit for its regular people, and in a penultimate scene when Arthur is appearing on a late night television show where the snide and condescending host mocks him and his attempt at comedy, Joker says to the host:

Comedy is subjective, Murray. Isn’t that what they say? All of you, the system that knows so much, you decide what’s right or wrong. The same way that you decide what’s funny or not.

In that quote lies our current fate, the dark night that has descended on our world since Nietzsche issued his warning. The system that knows and controls so much decides human truth and what is good and evil, always of course, deciding in its own favor, even to suggest that all is woe and all hope is gone while heading to the bank with its ill-begotten lucre.

No wonder all the media, mainstream and alternative, are today filled with headlines and titles screaming about our impending extinction, doomsday, and the apocalypse. The end days are near.  Just as our fictitious “telling of time” with advanced technology has sped up since the simplest clock and speed has devoured space, so too have all the admonitions to prepare for the end of the world, as if you could.  Just pack your suitcase and you’re off.  These warning are often accompanied by assertions that humans, having contaminated the planet, don’t deserve to survive; that humans are vermin; and that, anyway, it’s too little too late, we don’t have time.  Extinction will be arriving shortly, even if we protest its arrival.  It’s hopeless, so don’t have children, or, if you have them already, teach them that “life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.”  A one-way trip to dusty death where the trains run on time and the last stop is Nowhere.

Such political commentary, while often based on obvious problems caused by systemic structures of capitalist exploitation and technological hubris, implicitly rejects millennia of human experience and the testimony of the world’s great art and spiritual experience.  It rests upon a metaphysical assumption disguised as science that brackets out any word to the contrary.  It is the triumph of technical reason over the revelation of hope that is rooted in love, sexuality, and the human body, not abstractions.

“Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology,” writes Berger in his brilliant essay, “That Which Is Held.”

He adds:

What is ahistorical is the need to hope.  And the act of hoping is inseparable from the energy of love, from that which ‘holds,’ from that which is art’s constant example.

Such as the painting of a plaid suitcase by a little-known artist that hangs in my mental museum.  My father once went on vacation, and when he arrived at his destination and opened this suitcase, he found that it is was empty.  He had forgotten to pack and was overcome with joy at the realization. He wanted for nothing.  This was his masterpiece, created when he wasn’t looking.

Just yesterday, I was being thought by these thoughts as I took an early morning walk by the neighboring lake.  A group of geese, like battleships on the sea, greeted me with their honking, and as I dawdled along, they dove to show me their white asses, as if they were college boys out on a drunken lark, mooning anyone who passed.  It seemed as if I were being mocked for allowing these thoughts to drift into my mind, guests that I did not summon but came uninvited.  Many days I feel as though I am visited by words and images that transport me into reveries of time lost and time found and time beyond time. Rilke captures a bit of this with these words:

O longing for places that were not

Cherished enough in that fleeting hour

How I long to make good from far

The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

Who, among us, has not heard such words whispering into our silences?

Then I stopped by a swampy area at the end of the lake and took a look through the gently swaying bushes. A blue heron stood stock still on the far side, as if it were a statue or a silhouetted profile on an ancient Greek vase.  I froze and watched intently, lost in the sight of the bird’s eerie stillness.  For an instant I was that blue heron.  Its immobility and my stop-time staring seemed to fuse us in the way one is transported into a cataleptic state when watching dust motes in a flash of sunlight or unexpectedly seeing the full moon hanging on the world’s edge when stepping outdoors with night coming on.  It seems at these moments that a crack opens in the conventional reality machine that runs the world and one shivers with an erotic happiness that transcends description. Berger calls these “enclaves of the beyond.”

When I finally shook myself loose from being the heron, I walked on by myself but with many voices whispering in my ears.  Kris Kristofferson, whom I had recently seen in a documentary on country music, was singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” which took me back to a night years ago when a woman I knew played the song over and over for me as she drank wine in her low-cut dress, coming on to me, even as my then wife sat with us.

There is an infinite sadness in this memory, the loneliness of her yearning, not just for sex but for love, for a relationship, for tenderness, for “that which is held,” and while I remember the night vividly, I sadly can’t remember her name and she slips into the penumbra of the dreamy past. But vividly alive, present.  She walks with me as I head down the road, where the sign reads: Rough Road Ahead.  The words live:

Then somewhere near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away/She was lookin’ for the love I hope she’ll find.

Just a moment of time out of mind.  A moment the time-keepers can’t imagine.

We know it.  We live it. We use and are used by our memories and forgetteries in equal measure, thinking we control the flow of life, which we don’t.

There is an experience that lovers, writers, singers, and athletes have. Everyone has it at least once in a lifetime, or so I hope. It is called by some “being in the zone,” by others “being unconscious,” by others “ecstasy” and “inspiration”; in all cases it transcends clocks and the underlying bias of our age.  It is hope incarnate. It is time out of mind. By discounting it, we embrace hopelessness, nihilism.

Living in the age of abstractions, we tend to abandon the body, the earth, and the chance that we might redeem this sordid era.  By remembering that hope lies in the shadows, in the unexpected places and faces that flash through our times even when we are induced to believe we are only dreaming, we have a chance. But only if we reject the belief that entropy is time’s arrow.  Therein lies the real danger that will result in our forgetting of how instantly time can stand still in the ultimate sense, as it did for the Japanese victims of America’s murderous rage on August 6, 1945.  Galway Kinnell, in his poem “The Fundamental Project of Technology” reminds us to remember:

The children go away. By nature they do. And by memory,
in scorched uniforms, holding tiny crushed lunch tins.
All the ecstasy-groans of each night call them back, satori
their ghostliness back into the ashes, in the momentary shrines,
the thankfulness of arms, from which they will go
again and again, until the day flashes and no one lives
to look back and say, a flash, a white flash sparkled.

Where was the lightning before it flashed?  To us it wasn’t.  Its flashing was it.  It was its act. But the nuclear weapons that we once used and are now preparing to use already exist and if they flash again all time will be extinguished and we will be gone with it.

The road ahead is rough indeed.  A despairing teleology will not save us.  We need to see it for the trap that it is.

Rhythm, melody, and movement: from these life is born and sustained.  They are also integral to art – music, writing, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. – even when they are apparently absent, as with my distorted perception of the seemingly immobile heron. They lie at the heart of spiritual experience, as breath is the inspiration that carries us along.

As I walk up the hill past the lake and my respiration increases, I see Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, “Tall Walking Figure” in my mind’s eye. Its immobility implies movement, just as the ticking of the turning clock down through the ages has implied the earth’s solid resistance to time’s final victory, as the seasons turn and renew themselves timelessly.  Movement and stasis, time and the timeless. Such paradoxical inclusiveness pertains to still-life painting as well.  While seemingly immobile, and defined by some as dead life encompassed by the presence of the absence of movement and change, the essence of all living things, such paintings come to life in the encounter with the living.  Relationship is all. To grasp the paradoxical nature of art – and life – one must approach them as an artist and see the wholeness in broken pieces.  “Everything is broken,” Bob Dylan sings, “take a deep breath, feel like you’re choking.”

It seems that way.  But I am enjoying my walking reveries and so will let John Berger have the final word:

There is no question of looking away from the modern world and its practices.  There is no question of a Pre-Raphaelite flight back to the Middle Ages.  It is rather that Dante advances toward us. And in the specific purgatory of the modern world, created and maintained by corporate capitalism, every injustice is grounded in that unilinear view of time, for which the only relation conceivable is that between cause and effect.  In contrast to this, in defiance of this, the ‘single synchronic act’ is that of loving.

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The decades-long struggle by tens of thousands of Israelis against being uprooted from their homes – some for the second or third time – should be proof enough that Israel is not the western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.

Last week 36,000 Bedouin – all of them Israeli citizens – discovered that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong kind.

Their treatment has painful echoes of the past. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli army outside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state established on their homeland – what the Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.

Israel is regularly criticised for its belligerent occupation, its relentless expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and its repeated and savage military attacks, especially on Gaza.

On rare occasions, analysts also notice Israel’s systematic discrimination against the 1.8 million Palestinians whose ancestors survived the Nakba and live inside Israel, ostensibly as citizens.

But each of these abuses is dealt with in isolation, as though unrelated, rather than as different facets of an overarching project. A pattern is discernible, one driven by an ideology that dehumanises Palestinians everywhere Israel encounters them.

That ideology has a name. Zionism provides the thread that connects the past – the Nakba – with Israel’s current ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the destruction of Gaza, and the state’s concerted efforts to drive Palestinian citizens of Israel out of what is left of their historic lands and into ghettoes.

The logic of Zionism, even if its more naive supporters fail to grasp it, is to replace Palestinians with Jews – what Israel officially terms Judaisation.

The Palestinians’ suffering is not some unfortunate side effect of conflict. It is the very aim of Zionism: to incentivise Palestinians still in place to leave “voluntarily”, to escape further suffocation and misery.

The starkest example of this people replacement strategy is Israel’s long-standing treatment of 250,000 Bedouin who formally have citizenship.

The Bedouin are the poorest group in Israel, living in isolated communities mainly in the vast, semi-arid area of the Negev, the country’s south. Largely out of view, Israel has had a relatively free hand in its efforts to “replace” them.

That was why, for a decade after it had supposedly finished its 1948 ethnic cleansing operations and won recognition in western capitals, Israel continued secretly expelling thousands of Bedouin outside its borders, despite their claim on citizenship.

Meanwhile, other Bedouin in Israel were forced off their ancestral lands to be driven either into confined holding areas or state-planned townships that became the most deprived communities in Israel.

It is hard to cast the Bedouin, simple farmers and pastoralists, as a security threat, as was done with the Palestinians under occupation.

But Israel has a much broader definition of security than simple physical safety. Its security is premised on the maintenance of an absolute demographic dominance by Jews.

The Bedouin may be peaceable but their numbers pose a major demographic threat and their pastoral way of life obstructs the fate intended for them – penning them up tightly inside ghettoes.

Most of the Bedouin have title deeds to their lands that long predate Israel’s creation. But Israel has refused to honour these claims and many tens of thousands have been criminalised by the state, their villages denied legal recognition.

For decades they have been forced to live in tin shacks or tents because the authorities refuse to approve proper homes and they are denied public services like schools, water and electricity.

The Bedouin have one option if they wish to live within the law: they must abandon their ancestral lands and their way of life to relocate to one of the poor townships.

Many of the Bedouin have resisted, clinging on to their historic lands despite the dire conditions imposed on them.

One such unrecognised village, Al Araqib, has been used to set an example. Israeli forces have demolished the makeshift homes there more than 160 times in less than a decade. In August, an Israeli court approved the state billing six of the villagers $370,000 (Dh1.6 million) for the repeated evictions.

Al Araqib’s 70-year-old leader, Sheikh Sayah Abu Madhim, recently spent months in jail after his conviction for trespassing, even though his tent is a stone’s throw from the cemetery where his ancestors are buried.

Now the Israel authorities are losing patience with the Bedouin.

Last January, plans were unveiled for the urgent and forcible eviction of nearly 40,000 Bedouin from their homes in unrecognised villages under the guise of “economic development” projects. It will be the largest expulsion in decades.

“Development”, like “security”, has a different connotation in Israel. It really means Jewish development, or Judaisation – not development for Palestinians.

The projects include a new highway, a high-voltage power line, a weapons testing facility, a military live-fire zone and a phosphate mine.

It was revealed last week that the families would be forced into displacement centres in the townships, living in temporary accommodation for years as their ultimate fate is decided. Already these sites are being compared to the refugee camps established for Palestinians in the wake of the Nakba.

The barely concealed aim is to impose on the Bedouin such awful conditions that they will eventually agree to be confined for good in the townships on Israel’s terms.

Six leading United Nations human rights experts sent a letter to Israel in the summer protesting the grave violations of the Bedouin families’ rights in international law and arguing that alternative approaches were possible.

Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, notes that Israel has been forcibly evicting the Bedouin over seven decades, treating them not as human beings but as pawns in its never-ending battle to replace them with Jewish settlers.

The Bedouin’s living space has endlessly shrunk and their way of life has been crushed.

This contrasts starkly with the rapid expansion of Jewish towns and single-family farming ranches on the land from which the Bedouin are being evicted.

It is hard not to conclude that what is taking place is an administrative version of the ethnic cleansing Israeli officials conduct more flagrantly in the occupied territories on so-called security grounds.

These interminable expulsions look less like a necessary, considered policy and more like an ugly, ideological nervous tic.

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

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

First published on Global Research on May 18, 2019.

“Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and they own it and we want it” — (Anonymous Trump official)

Introduction

US hostility and efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government forms parts of a long and inglorious history of US intervention in Latin America going back to the second decade of the 19th century.

In 1823 US President Monroe declared, in his name, the ‘Monroe Doctrine” – the US right to keep Europeans out of the region, but the right of the US to intervene in pursuit of its economic, political and military interests.

We will proceed to outline the historical phases of US political and military intervention on behalf of US corporate and banking interests in the region and the Latin American political and social movements which opposed it.

The first period runs from the late 19th century to the 1930’s, and includes Marine invasions , the installation of US client dictatorships and the resistance of popular revolutions led by several revolutionary leaders in El Salvador, (Farabundo Marti), Nicaragua, (Augusto Sandino), Cuba (Jose Marti) and Mexico [Lazaro Cárdenas].

We will then discuss the Post-WWII US interventions, the overthrow of popular governments and the repression of social movements, including Guatemala (1954), Chile coup (1973), US invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1982),and Panama (1989).

We will then exam US efforts to overthrow the Venezuela government (1998 to the present).

US Policy to Latin America: Democracy, Dictatorship and Social Movements

US General Smedley Butler summarized his 33 years in the military as a ‘muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers . . . I helped Mexico safe for American oil interest in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for National City Bank to collect revenue . . . I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the . . . House of Brown Brothers in 1902 – 1912. I brought a light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interest in 2016. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903 . . . looking back on it, I could have given Al Capone a few hints’!

During the first 40 years of the 20th century the US invaded Cuba , converted it into a quasi-colony and repudiated its hero of independence Jose Marti; it provided advisers and military support to El Salvador’s dictator, assassinated its revolutionary leader Farabundo Marti and murdered 30,000 landless peasants seeking land reform. The US intervened in Nicaragua, fought against its patriotic leader Augusto Sandino and installed a dictatorial dynasty led by the Somoza regime until it was overthrown in 1979. The US intervened in Cuba to install a military dictatorship in 1933 to suppress an uprising of sugar workers. Between 1952 – 1958 Washington armed the Batista dictatorship to destroy the revolutionary July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro. In the late 1930s the US threatened to invade Mexico when President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the US oil companies and redistributed land to millions of landless peasants.

With the defeat of fascism (1941-45), there was an upsurge of social democratic governments in Latin America. But the US objected. In 1954 the US overthrew the elected Guatemala president Jacobo Arbenz for expropriating the banana plantations of United Fruit Company. It backed a military coup in Brazil in 1964; the military remained in power for 20 years. In 1963 the US overthrew the Dominican Republic’s democratically elected government of Juan Bosch and invaded in 1965 to prevent a popular uprising. In 1973 the US supported a military coup overthrowing democratic socialist president Salvador Allende and backed the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet for nearly 20 years.

Subsequently, the US intervened and occupied Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.

US propped up rightwing regimes throughout the region which backed US banking and corporate oligarchs which exploited resources, workers and peasants.

But by the early 1990’s powerful social movements led by workers, peasants, middle class public employees/doctors and teachers challenged the alliance of domestic and US elite rulers. In Brazil the 300,000 strong rural workers movement (MST) succeeded in expropriating large fallow estates; in Bolivia indigenous miners and peasants including coca farmers overthrew the oligarchy. In Argentina general strikes and mass movements of unemployed workers overthrew corrupt rulers allied with City Bank. The success of the popular nationalist and populist movements led to democratic elections won by progressive and leftist Presidents throughout Latin America, especially Venezuela.

Venezuela: Democratic Election, Social Reforms and the Election of President Chavez

In 1989 the US backed President of Venezuela imposed austerity programs that provoked popular demonstrations which led to the government ordering the police and military to repress the demonstrators: several thousand were killed and wounded. Hugo Chavez, a military official, rebelled and supported the popular uprising. He was captured, arrested, later freed and ran for presidential office.. He was elected by a wide margin in 1999 on a program of social reforms, economic nationalism, an end of corruption and political independence.

Washington began a hostile campaign to pressure President Chavez to accept Washington’s (President Bush) global war agenda in Afghanistan and around the world. Chavez refused to submit. He declared, “You don’t fight terror with terror”. By late 2001 the US Ambassador met with the business elite and a sector of the military to oust President elect Chavez via a coup in April 2002. The coup lasted 24 hours ..Over a million people, mostly slum dwellers, marched to the Presidential palace, backed by military loyalists .They defeated the coup and restored President Chavez to power. He proceeded to win a dozen democratic elections and referendums over the following decade.

President Chavez succeeded in large part because of his comprehensive program of socio-economic reforms favoring the workers, unemployed and middle class.

Over 2 million houses and apartments were built and distributed free to the popular classes; hundreds of clinics and hospitals provided free health care in the populer neighborhoods; universities, training schools and medical centers for low income students were built with free tuition.

Thousands in neighborhood community centers and ‘local collectives’ discussed and voted on social and political issues – including criticism and recall of local politicians, even elected Chavez’ officials.

Between 1998 and 2012, President Chavez won four straight Presidential elections, several congressional majorities and two national referendums, garnering between 56% and over 60% of the popular vote. After Chavez died President Maduro won elections in 2013 and 2018 but by a narrower margin. Democracy flourished, elections were free and open to all parties.

As a result of the inability of US backed candidates to win elections, Washington resorted to violent street riots, and appealed to the military to revolt and reverse the electoral results. The US applied sanctions beginning with President Obama and deepen with President Trump. The US seized billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets, and oil refineries in the US. The US selected a (non-elected) new President (Guaido) who was directed to subvert the military to revolt and seize power.

They failed: about one hundred soldiers out of 267,000 and a few thousand rightwing supporters heeded the call. The “opposition” revolt was a failure.

US failures were predictable as the mass of voter defended their socio-economic gains; their control of local power; their dignity and respect. Over 80% of the population including the majority of the opposition – rejected a US invasion.

US sanctions contributed to hyper-inflation and the death of 40,000 Venezuelan citizens due to the scarcity of medical products.

Conclusion

The US and the CIA followed in the footsteps of the past century seeking to overthrow the Venezuelan government and seize control of its oil and mineral resources. As in the past the US sought to impose a submissive dictatorship which would repress the popular movements and subvert the democratic electoral processes. Washington sought to impose a electoral apparatus which would ensure the election of submissive rulers as it did in the past and as it has done in recent times in Paraguay, Brazil and Honduras.

So far Washington has failed, in great part because of the peoples’ defense of their historical gains. Most poor and working people are aware that a US invasion and occupation will lead to mass killing and the destruction of sovereignty and dignity.

The people are aware of US aggression as well as the mistakes of the government. They are demanding corrections and rectifications .The government of President Maduro favors a dialogue with the non-violent opposition; Venezuelans are developing economic ties with Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Bolivia, Mexico and other independent countries.

Latin America has experienced decades of US exploitation and domination; but it has also created a history of successful popular resistance including revolutions in Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba; successful social movements and voting outcomes in recent years in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela.

President Trump and his murderous cohort of Pompeo, Bolton and Abrams have declared war against the Venezuelan people but they have thus far been defeated.

The struggle continues.

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Award winning author Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

On both sides of the political aisle, workforce-training reforms are being touted as the be-all, end-all of America’s public education system.

Right-wing “school choice” proponents, such as President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, push corporate charter school programs with workforce-training curriculums.

Left-wing “community schooling” advocates, such as Democratic Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Julián Castro, push “lifelong-learning” programs with school-to-work curriculums. Both “conservatives” and “liberals” concur: the purpose of public education is workforce development.

It’s nice to know that, in this divisive era of Trump outrage, America’s political representatives can still reach across the aisle to agree on something. Too bad this bipartisan movement will reduce the US schooling system to a corporate-government bureaucracy that deploys Big Data to train students to fill labor quotas prescribed by workforce-planning algorithms.

Career-Aptitude Pigeonholes

In this new age of rapidly advancing technologies that are automating “low-skill” jobs, many parents are understandably concerned that their children’s schooling will fail to prepare them to survive in a hi-tech future where the economy is driven by computers. However, parents should be skeptical of hyped-up “career pathways” curriculums that train students in hi-tech skills prescribed for job placement in the fields of “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” (STEM). While this polytechnical training might offer quick shortcuts to hi-tech jobs, such vocational tech-training pigeonholes the student into a predetermined job with limited upward mobility.

Such “cradle-to-career” training is based on three of the “six basic functions” of schooling systematized by Harvard Professor of Education, Alexander Inglis, who believed that public schools are instruments of Statecraft and social engineering. In “Against School,” Inglis’s authoritarian “principles of education” are paraphrased by the renowned New York State Teacher of the Year (1991), John Taylor Gatto:

3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. . . .
4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits—and not one step further. . . .
5. The propaedeutic function. The social system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

By pipelining students directly from the classroom to the jobsite, career-pathways curriculums diagnose each student’s social role by consigning him or her to a job caste that is directed by Big Business partnering with publicly funded school-to-work programs. Furthermore, to efficiently determine each student’s socioeconomic role, the cradle-to-career “conveyor belt” differentiates the student body into a hierarchy of managers and wage slaves who are trained with minimal job competences so that the chain of economic command is not destabilized by social ambitions.

Simply put, career-pathways do not teach students how to choose their own careers and social roles; rather, they teach students job-specific skills for limited employment openings which are predetermined by the market projections of the politically connected corporations that partner with government-funded schools.

Psychometric Learning Analytics for “Personalized” Job Training

Rather than applaud school-to-work curriculums that train students to keep up with the evolution of a hi-tech economy, perhaps schoolboards should be disconcerted about the encroachment of the Big Tech economy on schools and learning. With growing popularity, Big Data is becoming an integral component of career-pathways training through “adaptive-learning” computers that literally reduce students to numbers. By data-mining a student’s responses to digital lessons, adaptive-learning software (such as Dreambox, Alta, and Brightspace Leap™) can tabulate student-learning algorithms which diagnose students as mentally “fit” or “unfit” for certain jobs. The result is a psychometrical “bell curve” system that pathologizes a student’s workforce “competences” based on his or her “cognitive-behavioral” algorithms.

Such data-mining of student psychometrics might be an efficient way to distribute job placement through workforce-schooling programs. Nonetheless, acclaimed education theorist Alfie Kohn documents that the psychological conditioning methods of schooling advocated by “economists and a diehard group of orthodox behaviorists (who have restyled themselves ‘behavior analysts’)” usually “backfire” and “undermine the very thing we’re trying to promote.” Indeed, workforce-schooling psychometrics are “undermined” when “personalized” student-learning profiles “backfire” by socially engineering the student body into a workforce caste hierarchy with limited job opportunities that restrict upward mobility.

A Post-Humanism?

If parents are worried that their children may get run over by the hi-speed, hi-tech automation economy on the horizons, their attempts to reform education so that students can “compete” with the new computerized economy may actually exacerbate the problem. Rather than encourage school-to-work curriculums that train students to “interface” with a techno-automated workforce, perhaps it is more important to teach the humanities of philosophy, history, and the arts so that the next generations can make humane decisions which ensure that technological evolution serves the inalienable rights of human dignity and conscience.

We are at a crossroads here: the “career pathways” to a technocratic economy, or the “classical way” to a moral economy based on the “categorical-imperative” values of human dignity and conscience. I am not saying that technological advancement cannot progress alongside the preservation of human values. But in a computer-automated economy driven by Big Data, algorithms must be programmed with certain values; and without the preservation of humane values in the minds of students, there will be nothing to ensure that human morality is programmed into the algorithms that plan the workforces of the future. If we amputate the arts and humanities from the “new education,” which worships the supposed infallibility of data, what will it profit our children to gain the world of hi-tech jobs only to lose their humanity?

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John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over seven years. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (TrineDay Books); and he is a contributor to the Centre for Research on Globalization, OpEdNews, the Intrepid Report, the Dissident Voice, Blacklisted News, the Activist Post, News With Views, The Saker, and Natural News. His website is https://www.schoolworldorder.info/

The Environmental Protection Agency today released two scientific analyses of paraquat that detail the weed killer’s lethal risks to humans and wildlife but discount its strong links to Parkinson’s disease.

The agency opened a 60-day comment period on the assessments, which are part of a reapproval review for the pesticide. Paraquat is banned across much of the world but used widely and in growing amounts in the United States. By law all pesticides must be reapproved by the EPA every 15 years.

“A pesticide this toxic has no place near our food or the people who help to grow and harvest it,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The EPA should follow the lead of nearly every other major agricultural country in the world and ban this dangerous stuff for good.”

The EPA’s analysis discounted considerable evidence that paraquat has been shown to more than double the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease in farmworkers and others suffering occupational exposure.

A separate environmental analysis estimated that approved uses of the pesticide could expose small mammals like chipmunks and bats to more than 600 times the levels known to cause reproductive harm. The analysis found that small songbirds are potentially being exposed to more than 50 times the concentration known to cause death.

Paraquat is one of only two pesticides still used in the United States that is either banned or being phased out in the European Union, China and Brazil. From 1990 to 2014 there have been 27 deaths and more than 200 incidents of harmful exposure involving paraquat in the United States. There has also been at least one death from paraquat ingestion in the United States each year since 2012.

Despite this paraquat use in the United States is higher than it’s been in the past 25 years, with use rising nearly 200 percent since 2009. The increase has been triggered by its use on superweeds that have developed resistance to glyphosate, commonly sold as Bayer’s Roundup.

U.S. farmers currently use more than 8 million pounds of paraquat each year, including on peanuts, citrus, wheat, soy, corn, almonds, artichokes, garlic, pears, strawberries, grapes and sweet potatoes.

“It only takes a teaspoon of paraquat to kill a person, so it’s clear 8 million pounds of this stuff is doing extreme harm to our health and the environment,” said Donley.

In July U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation to ban paraquat.

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You cannot get away from it, at least in print or in Google land. African swine fever is doing its rounds, cutting through the swine population of Asia with remorseless dedication.  Since its deadly debut in China last year, it has done away with some 25 percent of the globe’s pig population.  The symptoms are dramatic and lethal (mortality rates range from 95 to 100 percent), with the infected animal haemorrhaging and perishing between a period of five to fifteen days.  This decline has sparked all manner of comment: a feared deprivation of pork dishes, a spark of hope in exports of pork untouched by the disease and alternative meat supplies, and the more serious issue of food security.

In China itself, the decline of pork is causing a strain of desperation, though it is always marked by reassurance and stiff-upper lip confidence.  Pork supplies, both domestically and internationally, had been seen to be something of an essential in Chinese food security.  In September, the country’s pig population, numbering some 440 million animals, had shrunk by 41.1 percent.  While figures coming out of various Chinese ministries should be viewed with a healthy dose of scepticism, the numbers from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs have caused a stir.  Such contractions are perpetuating and will continue to perpetuate a loss in the global consumption of protein.

On Monday, China’s Premier, Li Keqiang did something uncharacteristic for the politburo: he ventured to a roadside stall to test the vox populi on the subject of rising pork prices.  Not that the episode lacked its fair share of choreographic sense.  The owner was suitably stoic; it simply would not do to panic.  “Our prices have also risen a bit accordingly.  The effect on business hasn’t been too big.”  Bravely dishonest for party and country, perhaps?

The disastrous wasting of domestic herds, one that sees no ebbing, has caused a spike in imports in pork.  The PRC saw some 1.3 million tonnes coming into the country in the first three quarters this year.

Other countries are also showing a certain fear in the face of rumour and speculation.  In Europe, the fever is being held at bay, though pork consumers are seeing prices rise.  But in Asian countries, the response is graver, and slightly panicked.  South Korea, for instance, is mobilising snipers and civilians in an effort to shore up its border with North Korea.  Drones equipped with thermal vision will also be deployed.  All of this is in aid of one thing: targeting infected pigs near the line of civilian control.  The South China Morning Post is positively apocalyptic. “The intensified measures aim to exterminate feral pigs in areas including Incheon, Seoul, Goseong and Bukhan River.”

As far as North Korea is concerned, the concern is that the fever is doing its worst, though official figures suggest the opposite.  The North Korean agriculture ministry claimed in a May 30 report to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) that animal deaths had been modest, with only 22 recorded on a cooperative farm some 260km north of Pyongyang.

For those in the Asia-Pacific region as yet untouched by ASF, nerves are catching.  Countries like Australia have demonstrated that terror characteristic of island mentalities: Be wary of what you import and what you let in.  Biosecurity is a tic of the Australian policy mindset, though it does not come without its ironies: the Australian scientific and agricultural sector has been arguably more devastating and disastrous for the country’s ecology than any malicious or accidental introduction.

Be that as it may, Australia’s $5 billion pork industry is nothing to sneeze at, keeping something in the order of 36,000 people busy.  But off Australian shores, the fear is that the fever is making its marauding march, with news that East Timor had become the tenth Asian nation to be added to the list.  Customs officials are proving edgier than usual, and the federal Agricultural Minister Bridget McKenzie is getting a tad judgmental.

“People are still disregarding our biosecurity laws.  We can send them home, we can slap significant fines on them and I’ll be encouraging our biosecurity officials to be doing exactly that with those offenders.”

On Saturday, a Vietnamese woman was sent packing after arriving at Sydney Airport with quail, squid and raw pork.  The unfortunate had her visa cancelled, the result of amendments made in April.  As the Department of Agriculture described it,

“International visitors who are believed to have contravened particular provisions of the Biosecurity Act 2015 can have their visitor visa cancelled for up to three years.”

The biosecurity and vet gate keepers have their eye on one aspect of Australia’s pig population.  The 2.5 million domestic population might well be one thing, but imagine, fears Chief Veterinary Officer Dr Mark Schipp, the prospect of 15 million feral pigs being infected.  (This figure, it should be said, varies – another estimate puts the number at 24 million.)  But where crisis presents itself, there are salivating opportunities.  Australian Pork Limited chief executive Margo Andrae is one who is drooling at the prospect that Australia can “increase production and prices to fill gaps that other markets can’t supply.”

What then, to do?  From a thriving epidemic, ASF has become an enthusiastic pandemic. It is cutting through protein consumption and posing a risk to food supply, but as yet, there are no cures nor vaccines.  The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has also noted that the disease’s impact is complicated by “the range of pig production systems coexisting in the different countries.”  Such instances, if they do at least conjure up a world without pork, may well encourage a world less reliant on the staple.  But till then, individuals such as Dr Hirofumi Kugita of the OIE are punting for the border control and biosecurity obsessives.

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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]

On May 16th 2016, over a month before the 2016 EU referendum, Nigel Farage said – “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.”

On the night of the EU referendum itself, Sky News reported that they had an exclusive –

“We now expect that the United Kingdom will remain part of the European Union. It’s 52 per cent Remain, 48 per cent Leave.”

At 10:52 p.m., the pound rose above $1.50 and reached its highest mark in six months. What no-one knew except for a privileged few, was that the pollsters had sold hedge funds critical, advance information, including data that would have been illegal for them to give the public. Within hours of the actual result, Sterling had crashed to $1.32 making hundreds of millions in short bet profits against billions laid down for an unexpected Leave result. Farage is also allegedly in that privileged few. The crisis has since seen even greater speculator profits being made as the Brexit chaos unfolded.

The result that followed in the early hours stunned many and amazingly it turned out to be 52/48 for Leave.

Nigel Farage celebrated that morning by saying:

“We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against the big merchant banks, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption and deceit, and today honesty, decency and belief in nation, I think now is going to win. And we will have done it without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired. We’d have done it by damned hard work on the ground.”

Farage stood accused of falsely conceding on the night of the referendum sending the pound to soar (as confidence grew of a Remain result) and then crash (with the actual result). Like all insider dealing, proof for a conviction is, at best, hard to obtain. The ‘Brexit Big Short‘ as it has become known within the banking and hedge-fund industry is legendary. And just like the massive scandal of bailing out the banks and making the poorest pay for it under the guise of austerity, itself, nothing more than the retaliatory mask of a class-war – the Brexit Big Short demonstrates that some are inoculated from the biggest of crimes.

A lot has happened since June 2016. We have seen a significant move to hard right-wing politics within the Conservatives with Farage now leading the Brexit Party in anticipation of a snap election.

For all of Farage’s finger-pointing that the EU was corrupt and anti-democratic and against the ordinary people of Britain, it is interesting to see where he now stands aside from the sweet-talking rhetoric of ‘sunny uplands’.

The Brexit Party chairman himself, Richard Tice, is now facing calls to “urgently” address concerns about his family’s links to offshore tax havens, after an investigation by openDemocracy this week that reveals that two offshore firms own large shareholdings in his family’s business.

“The Brexit Party MEP has also been urged to stand down from the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, which oversees EU tax policy, until the matter is fully investigated.”

Tice, a co-founder of Arron Banks’s Leave.EU, says he has no knowledge of who runs two offshore companies that have held shares for over 25 years in his family business, Sunley Family Limited, and which now own a combined 42% stake. Of course, Tice denies any financial interests of the offshore companies.

Accusations of money laundering, fraud, fake news, cash-for-access, disinformation and electoral manipulation through social media have been rife with the hub of the Leave campaign. The names synonymous with this villainous and unprincipled lot roll off the tongue with ease – the IEA, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Aggregate IG, ERG, Bannon, Legatum, TaxPayers Alliance and many individuals with nothing more on their minds than making their fortunes out of the mess they created.

Byline Times has published some home-truths about Nigel Farage’s party of the ‘common people’ by simply looking at its candidates a little more closely.

“Out of these 20 profiled candidates, 18 are company directors, 8 are bankers, 5 work in derivatives and hedge funds, ranking them among a metropolitan and business elite which the Brexit Party rhetoric repeatedly condemns. Many of these candidates are involved with hedge funds or derivatives, sectors of the financial industry were the ones who profited from the Brexit turmoil, by betting on Sterling’s collapse and downturns in British firms. These organisations are known to oppose EU attempts to regulate the hedge fund industry.”

And as Byline also mentions, two of the candidates are directors of Leave Means Leave, the organisation promoting a hard  (WTO) Brexit.  Another is a director of the Leave group Veterans for Britain which received donations from Arron Banks and from Leave.eu.   Others have links to far-right groups which are already fomenting tensions, such as the American right-wing youth group, Turning Point; the website Westmonster, and UK organisations such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance (with all of its dodgy, undisclosed and ‘opaque’ funding).

Turning Point is a very nasty right-wing American outfit that spits its bile out – “With numerous right-wing and religious links to Donald Trump. The scandal-hit group has been plagued by incidents of racism and allegations of illegal campaign spending since its launch.”  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

We should not forget who Farage is dallying with either. It only emerged a few months ago that he discussed the idea of fronting a global alliance of populist and far-right politicians being put together by the controversial former White House strategist Steve Bannon. Farage is even on camera as saying he would be keen to take the role of forming a group based around populism and “economic nationalism” that would align themselves with some of the worst authoritarians in politics today.

These people – Farage, Tice, Banks, et al – are the very public face of what’s gone wrong in Britain. It’s a con, a lie – one huge deception that somehow they are the representatives of the 17.4 million that voted to leave the EU.

No-one voted in the EU referendum for the Britain of today. In the 1980s – 86 per cent of the adult population were proud to be British. Today, no less than 90 per cent of the adult population feels that Brexit represents little more than a national humiliation and 45 per cent of Britain’s young (18-24) are no longer proud of their home nation. Another 34 per cent say they no longer care one way or the other and 10 per cent are actively embarrassed to call themselves English. That is what Brexit has brought us.

As Jonathan Lis, Deputy Director of the think tank British Influence quite rightly puts it because this is exactly what has happened:

“What was billed as a way for people to take back control of democracy has become a systematic attack on every institution which underpins it.”

And the very people doing that damage are Farage, Tice, Banks and so on.

The Brexit being offered today does not look remotely like anything sold to the public. And don’t think that people can’t operate such huge con-games. From the Parmalat boss who stole 800 million euros before Europe’s largest bankruptcy to Enron, the world’s biggest fraud, con-artists have managed to hoodwink even the most privileged and powerful – let alone ‘ordinary people.’

As Farage himself quite rightly said in 2012, reiterated in 2014 and 2016 –

“I think frankly when it comes to chaos you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

He is right on that.

On some level, I feel sure that Nigel Farage really did and maybe still does believe in leaving the EU to take back national sovereignty – but I also feel that not even he expected his wet dream to become reality, and as they say – “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Farage and his fellow hedge-fund banker boy travellers also know that Brexit is a con trick.

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President Donald Trump has given the orders to begin a “deliberate withdrawal” of his troops and end the occupation of north-east Syria (NES). This is accelerating the race between the Turkish and the Syrian forces to control NES.

Turkey is in a rush to establish its 30-35km wide safe zone on the borders with Syria in the US-occupied north-east territory, currently under the control of the Syrian Kurdish separatists. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is aware of the pressure his US ally, President Donald Trump is under for approving this operation, an operation which has made Trump even more unpopular among the US and western élites.

Trump took it upon himself to unilaterally take control of an area in Syria bigger than Switzerland. Uninvited by the central government, he had established over a dozen military and air bases in the country and kept them there notwithstanding the defeat of ISIS. Trump has now agreed to pull back some US troops, allowing Turkey and its Syrian proxies to move into this part of Syrian territory. The US President and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin blocked an EU-drafted resolution condemning the Turkish offensive. Now, the winners in this operation are much more numerous than the losers and it would be a mistake to suppose that only Turkey is gaining from this operation. All winners have their own objectives and perspectives to assess how they can benefit from the Turkish invasion.

By deciding to pull out 1,000 men from NES, Trump is reshuffling the cards, moving the burden away from his administration and dropping it into the hands of Russia, Turkey and Syria (and their allies). There is a serious need for Russia to move fast and bring concerned players around the table to organise a situation that could turn more chaotic and lead to even more confrontation.

The biggest losers are the Kurds: the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)- which were classified as terrorist organisations by the US (since 1997), by the European Union (since 2002), and by NATO, Turkey, and some other countries.

The Kurds in the Levant

The Kurds are now in south-east Turkey, north-east Syria, the north of Iraq, north-west Iran, and south-west Armenia. With an estimated population of 30 million, they may be the largest stateless minority in the world. More than half of the Kurds live in Turkey; it is thus less than accurate to call the Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds “ethnic cleansing”.

The 1923 Lausanne Peace treaty with the Republic of Turkey denied the Kurds the realisation of their dream for an independent “Kurdistan” state of their own. The Kurds staged many rebellions but all failed to achieve their aspirations for a state. These include the Sheikh Said rebellion (1925), the Ararat (1930) revolution led by the Armenian Ziylan Bey, one of the most famous rebels of the mountains (the Iraqi Mustafa Barzani crossed the borders to join the rebellion), and the Sayid Riza 1937-1938 Kurdish-Alevi Dersim genocide (known today as Tenceli). The latter operation was carried out under the orders of Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and is recognised by President Erdogan as a “massacre”.

In 1974, Abdullah Ocalan formed a Maoist proletarian movement, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and focussed on Turkish targets within the country. Thus far at least 40,000 people have been killed in this conflict without the Kurds achieving their goal of a state. Ocalan and some 3,000 PKK militants are festering in jail. The US, the EU and many other countries categorize the PKK as a terrorist group. “The PKK is on the terror list of the EU and delisting it is not on the cards,” said EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini last March.

When the war in Syria began in 2011, the Syrian Kurds were neutral but provided many besieged Syrian cities with much-needed supplies. But everything changed on September 2014 when the “Islamic State” (IS, ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) attacked the Kurdish town of Ayn al-Arab, known to the Kurds as Kobane.

Although Turkey refused (in order to avoid a domestic uprising) to allow Turkish Kurds to cross the borders to help their Syrian brothers, it opened the borders for Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga to walk in just when the city was about to fall. The Peshmerga had the task of providing laser designators to guide US jets against ISIS targets. The town was destroyed but ISIS failed to occupy it and withdrew in January 2015.

In October 2015 the US-led coalition formed, trained and armed the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) under Kurdish command and alongside local Arab militias. The Kurds hoped their dream would finally materialise since the prospect of dividing Iraq and Syria now seemed realistic. A Kurdish state seemed attainable, and the name of “Rojava” (Rojavayê Kurdistanê‎), one of the four parts of Greater Kurdistan, was chosen. This territory extends from the city of Afrin in the north-west to al-Hasaka in the north-east.

In August 2016, Turkey inserted its own troops into Syria with the help of Syrian proxies and captured the border town of Jarablus. This disturbed the Kurds’ plans. Almost two years later, Turkey conquered the Kurdish city of Afrin, curtailing the map of Rojava and displacing tens of thousands of Kurds.

The Kurds preferred to hand Afrin to Turkey rather than allow the Syrian army to defend the city. Intensive negotiations were held between Kurdish leaders and the Syrian government in Damascus, the Russian military base of Hmaymeem, and other locations. The Kurds refused to hand over the billions of dollars they had accumulated from Syrian agriculture and refused to join Syria’s National Defence Forces. They wanted both full autonomy and at the same time, they wanted the Syrian Army to serve as their border guards. They preferred to fight and lose the battle rather than handing Syrian territory back to Syrian government control. The Kurds opted for Turkish occupation. This has proved to be their first major mistake.

In September 2015, when Russia was persuaded to move its air force into Syria, coordination with the US was necessary to avoid clashes. Any area east of the Euphrates River was considered subject to US operations and control. The west of the river was controlled by Russian forces. After defeating ISIS, the Syrian army tried, with its allies, to cross the Euphrates in order to eliminate ISIS from the oil and gas-rich wells north of Deir-ezzour before the arrival of US-backed forces. The Syrian troops were decimated by US forces. Over 200 men were killed, showing that the US was not ready to give up what it considered its “zone of influence,” with its considerable accompanying material advantages.

Clearly, the US had the intention of staying and occupying an area that represents slightly less than the third of Syria, an area particularly rich in agriculture and in energy resources.

Then Kurdish Iraqi leader Masoud Barzani’s hasty and failed attempt to declare his independent state in Iraq finally put an end to the Kurdish dream of uniting Rojava with Iraqi Kurdistan.

With the arrival of Donald Trump, the newly appointed President came a promise to bring the US forces home from the Middle East. Trump described north-east Syria as “a land of death and sand ”. He intended to pull out unless the area could bring him revenues. Arab states who were heavily involved in the war in Syria, financing jihadists and rebels, had lost their appetite to supply monies and arms. They were no longer ready to pay Trump for keeping his troops there.

Trump stated that the Syrian Kurds “were not great fighters” and needed his jets to clear the way before attacking ISIS. Thus he minimised their role and their losses in defeating ISIS in the capital of the “Caliphate” in Raqqah.

The Kurds never imagined the US would betray them, despite their previous experience in 1975. That was their second big mistake. Kurdish military leaders tried, to no avail, to convince Kurdish political leaders to open a serious dialogue with Damascus. But in fact the Kurds suspended negotiations and once again seemed to prefer facing a Turkish attack rather than working with the Syrian government. They put their hopes in the support of the international community and the mainstream media. The media and public personalities have indeed offered the Kurds abundant verbal support. But that will certainly not be enough to stop the Turkish attack that is now advancing rapidly in the designated area.

Trump looks on the Kurds as mercenaries he has bought and paid for. Since their services are no longer required, he is now ready to withdraw US forces to win favour with Turkey. The Kurds are expendable now that their manpower is not needed by Trump.

The Kurds, however, insisted for years on acting as human shields for Trump’s soldiers in al-Hasaka and Qamishli. And they believe that social media together with a media campaign can reverse Trump’s decision. But they are now left with no allies on the ground, and not even the mountains will protect them. Their wrong choices – in surrendering territory that did not belong to them- have made them today’s biggest losers. The US short notice announcement of a sudden withdrawal gave a cold shower to the Kurds who have now asked Damascus to move in to protect them from the Turkish advance. It was certainly high time to wake up to what is, at this stage, the only available option.

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Featured image is from the author

This week, the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will again be held in Washington, DC, with back-slapping now that the Bretton Woods twins have reached age 75 (they were founded at a New Hampshire hotel in 1944). And with more passion than in recent years, there will be protests, especially climate activists on Friday at noon with a strong set of messages, to “end all funding for fossil fuels!”

One voice will be especially loud: Trevor Ngwane’s. A leading activist from Soweto, he was last at a Washington protest in April 2000, amidst 30,000 demonstrators. That week, he co-starred – along with World Bank board chairperson Trevor Manuel – in a documentary, Two Trevors Go to Washington. (Regrettably, young Trevor Noah was still in a Johannesburg high school and not in that particular film; but with his attitude, would have fit in just fine on that picket line.)

The latter Trevor was South Africa’s finance minister from 1996-2009 and in the process, turned the economy into a neoliberal wasteland, as manufacturing fell from 24 to 13 percent of national output and commodity export-dependency rose. On the ground, Manuel’s policies ensured the apartheid era’s world-leading inequality worsened, along with poverty. The main unemployment rate nearly doubled from 16 to 29 percent, and foreign debt soared from $25 billion to $70 billion during his reign – and is now $180 billion. Manuel was always treated with the greatest regard inside the Bank and IMF.

An example of the kinds of dubious deals Manuel and his successor Pravin Gordhan arranged with international financiers was the Medupi coal-fired power-plant, which at 4800MW is the largest under construction on earth today. There was widespread corruption on the project by Hitachi – which in 2015 was prosecuted and fined $19 million under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribing South Africa’s ruling party – and many other contractors. This was all well known by World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who nevertheless arranged his institution’s largest-ever project loan for Medupi: $3.75 billion.

But it’s a kind of “Odious Debt,” one so awful that Medupi is the reason in late 2017, 16 months before Donald Trump named him World Bank President, David Malpass admitted South Africa was the exemplary case of fraudulent relations with the lender. Correctly, he insulted Bank loan officers while testifying to the U.S. Congress:

“They’re often corrupt in their lending practices, and they don’t get the benefit to the actual people in the countries. They get the benefit to the people who fly in on a first-class airplane ticket to give advice to the government officials in the country, that flow of money is large, but not so much the actual benefit to normal people within poor countries.”

This description perfectly fits Medupi and a sister power plant (Kusile), which are driving Eskom’s finances to the brink, due to eight-year production delays, incompetent design and massive cost over-runs, in turn threatening South Africa’s credit-worthiness, as well as security of power supply. (On October 16, power was turned off in a “Stage 2 load-shedding” disruption due to a broken conveyor belt at Medupi.) Even in their half-built state, the climate implications from CO2 emissions and the consumption of scarce water for cooling the reactors are horrendous.

But merely in financial terms, even leading bourgeois representatives from Anglo American Corporation’s main think tank now contemplate just shutting the two white-elephant plants and walking away. Progressive writers in South Africa’s main ezines – Kevin Bloom in Daily Maverick and Jonathan Cannard in the Mail&Guardian – argue the Bank should be compelled to face lender liability, and write off the debt.

Instead, refusing to learn, the Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) subsidiary has just made a $2 million investment in another South African fossil-dependent project: a major new gas terminal on the coast; its partner,Transnet, is one of the most corrupt institutions in Africa. The arrogance is stunning given that the IFC lost its U.S. diplomatic immunity in a Supreme Court case just six months ago.

As local environmental justice, community-feminist and anti-poverty activists contemplate how to punish the World Bank for its proclivity to finance one absurd project after the other, all the while churning out neoliberal research,South Africa appears as a microcosm of what’s gone wrong with Bretton Woods pro-corporate neoliberal malgovernance, more generally, these last 75 years.

The multilateral cul-de-sac

Multilateralism has surfed the up-swells and down the troughs of globalisation. In the latter case, the League of Nations faded away during the 1930s as a relevant force for peace, once the waves of Great Depression ripped Western economic interests apart. Today, multilateralism also seems to have entered the final, life-support stage of its 21^st-century crisis, in part because of the overwhelming power of multinational corporations, and in part because of fast-rising reactionary nationalisms.

As the 2019 G7 summit confirmed, the world cannot contend with the bully-boy ascendance of Donald Trump and other right-wing critics of ‘globalism’ (an anti-Semitic smear), who spew ever more toxic nativist-populist hatred while ignoring their countries’ historic responsibilities to solve problems that their corporations mainly created. As a result, concluded the founder of world-systems theory, the late Immanuel Wallerstein, the 2018 G7 meeting was simply farcical:

“Trump may have done us all the favour of destroying this last major remnant of the era of Western domination of the world-system.” 

Even at the G20, which is the economic grouping responsible for three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions and hence the site where addressing climate catastrophe is most urgent, the 2017-19 hosts in Hamburg, Buenos Aires and Osaka were cowed by Trump.

As a result, the world’s most important climate, trade and financial arrangements are increasingly ineffectual and discredited. Notwithstanding a decade-old network of five ‘middle powers’ (better termed ‘subimperialists’), the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, the South is much less capable of giving the world’s oppressed a chance to make inputs and win long-overdue concessions.

Those expecting progressive change through the BRICS’ collective financial and trade statecraft are disappointed, especially as the world spins out of control economically. “BRICS should be much stronger by now,” one of its founders, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva told Asia Times recently.

“I imagined a more aggressive BRICS, more proactive and more creative.”

Instead, global-scale neoliberalism remains dominant. The ill-conceived United Nations (UN) collaboration deal with the plutocratic Davos World Economic Forum in June 2019 followed persistent ‘bluewashing’ concerns about the UN’s discredited Global Compact with some of the world’s least ethical firms, growing corporate manipulation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and sabotage of multilateral environmental and human rights governance.

Another sign of ever-worsening degeneracy is personal. Thanks to unashamed cronyism, all the major multilateral economic organisations with the exception of the near-impotent World Trade Organisation (WTO) are run by Westerners: the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements and the United Nations itself.

The only exception, Brazilian WTO leader Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo, has notoriously pandered to the West, although to be fair, he is now openly expressing frustration as Trump ratchets up protectionism and as US trade representative Robert Lighthizer obstructs appointments to his crucial Appellate Body.

“The dispute resolution mechanism is in crisis,” according to neoliberal Peterson Institute scholars, a paralysis which “runs the risk of returning the world trading system to a power-based free-for-all, allowing big players to act unilaterally and use retaliation to get their way.”

That is exactly how Trump and Xi Jinping are handling their trade dispute.

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is following Trump’s anti-multilateral lead, quickly renouncing ‘special and differential treatment’ provisions for poor and middle-income countries at the WTO – although it is sacred to other BRICS members, especially India. But Brasilia’s divorce began much earlier, complains Third World Network’s Ravi Kanth, because although the developing-country bloc inside the WTO now “exists on paper, it remains paralysed after Azevêdo became director-general in September 2013.”

Bolsonaro also cancelled Brazil’s hosting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summitlater this year, forcing its move to Chile. Deploying bogus anti-colonial rhetoric, he turned his nose up at the G20’s tokenistic $20 million grant to control the Amazon’s conflagration. Moreover, Bolsonaro could well wreck the BRICSwhen he hosts the other four leaders in November.

In any case, the BRICS have already failed miserably when attempting to reform global finance, for example by complaining about – but failing to contest – the IMF and Bank leaders, chosen by Europeans and the US in the 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2019 ‘elections.’ At the same time, four of the BRICS bought expensive voting-power increases in the IMF (e.g. China rising 37 per cent), but at the expense of countries like Nigeria and Venezuela (which in 2015 both lost 41 per cent of their votes, while even South Africa’s IMF ‘voice’ softened by 21 per cent).

The BRICS’ supposed alternative to the IMF, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, was founded in 2014 with a notional $100 billion. It actually gives Washington even more power, by leveraging most of its loans on the condition that the borrower accept an IMF structural adjustment program. The BRICS New Development Bank’s first five years of lending confirm that it is as rife with corruption, non-consultation, climate damage and inappropriate currency denominations as the World Bank, and even more unfriendly to gender equity.

Likewise, there is no BRICS alternative to Western domination in trade or climate multilateralism. At the WTO, the BRICS were fatally divided, leading to the 2015 destruction of food sovereignty options during the Nairobi summit. And as for climate, the Brazil-South Africa-India-China (BASIC) leaders’ close alignment with Barack Obama at the Copenhagen UNFCCC summit in 2009 held firm through the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

But that won’t solve our existential crisis, for the BASIC countries are absolute CO2 emitters at levels even higher than the West (and in South Africa’s case higher per capita than any country in Western Europe). So Paris’ fatal weaknesses suit them fine.

More recently, new causes of global governance illegitimacy appear similar to the centrifugal forces tearing Europe apart. The political commitments of climate-denialist, ‘paleo-conservative’ xenophobes like Trump are different to other Washington philosophies imposed on the world, including the 1980s-90s’ Reagan-Bush-Clinton era of neoliberalism (stretching with Thatcher and Blair into Britain and Kohl and Schroeder into Europe), George W. Bush’s 2000s neoconservatism and Obama’s 2010s fusion of these two US-centric ideologies.

With just a couple of exceptions (discussed below), an earlier generation of global-scale social-democratic hopes – fostered by serious multilateralists from 1970s traditions, e.g. Willy Brandt and Gro Harlem Brundtland – were dashed by the early 1980s, thanks to the role the Bretton Woods Institutions played in fracturing the world’s progressive potentials on behalf of international financiers. The poorest countries went through a ‘lost’ decade or more of austerity. The 1995-2002 middle-income countries’ rolling crises meant local elites allowed the same inappropriate neoliberal regime to be imposed by Washington even more deeply and dangerously in Mexico, East Asia, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey.

Then it was the turn of the West’s ‘labour aristocracy,’ a core group of working-class people dethroned, for they lost their once-solid manufacturing jobs to machines and overseas outsourcing, and were reduced to taking underpaid and under-valued service-based jobs and relying upon fast-degenerating public services. In 2008-09 they too witnessed a replay of brutal 1980s-90s Bretton Woods power plays, once their elites agreed upon a multilateral ‘solution’ to the world financial meltdown: a coordinated central bank bailout for the largest Western financial institutions.

This generosity was confirmed by the 2010s’ official prioritisation – by the IMF, European Central Bank and European Union (EU) – of the Frankfurt, New York, London, Paris and Rome bankers’ interests, which were near-fatally exposed to Greece and other peripheral European borrowers. By 2016, neo-fascist political parties were thriving there, while the most resentful within the British and U.S. working classes chose xenophobic backlash in the form of Brexit and Trump.

Self-destructive IMF and World Bank ideology and financing

The crucial break point for multilateral potential was the 1980s world debt crisis, during which neoliberal ideology stretched the Third World so far that the likes of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Cuba’s Fidel Castro even proposed a ‘debtors’ cartel’ – but could not find a sufficient critical mass of other brave leaders even in a Latin America suffering sustained IMF rioting, to the relief of international elites.

At one point in 1983, World Bank president William Clausen quite bluntly explained the balance of forces: “We must ask ourselves: How much pressure can these nations be expected to bear? How far can the poorest peoples be pushed into further reducing their meagre standards of living? How resilient are the political systems and institutions in these countries in the face of steadily worsening conditions?”

Clausen’s power came from the 1979-80 ‘Volcker Shock’: soaring interest rates catalysed by US Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s decision to restore the Dollar’s power, in turn causing the Third World Debt Crisis. Clausen and all his successors abused that power to impose the Washington Consensus’s ten policy commandments. The term came from John Williamson of that city’s Institute of International Finance, representing the world’s major banks:

1. Budget deficits … should be small enough to be financed without recourse to the inflation tax.
2. Public expenditure should be redirected from politically sensitive areas that receive more resources than their economic return can justify…
3. Tax reform… so as to broaden the tax base and cut marginal tax rates.
4. Financial liberalisation, involving an ultimate objective of market-determined interest rates.
5. A unified exchange rate at a level sufficiently competitive to induce a rapid growth in non-traditional exports.
6. Quantitative trade restrictions to be rapidly replaced by tariffs, which would be progressively reduced until a uniform low rate of 10 to 20 per cent was achieved.
7. Abolition of barriers impeding the entry of foreign direct investment.
8. Privatisation of state enterprises.
9. Abolition of regulations that impede the entry of new firms or restrict competition.
10. The provision of secure property rights…

Needless to say, the victims were mainly women, youth, the elderly and people of colour. The IMF’s flows of annual loans that, thanks to conditionality, locked these policies into place, were initially less than $15 billion before the Volcker Shock, then soared to $40 billion by the late 1980s, jumped as high as $100 billion by the early 2000s, and exceeded $140 billion by the early 2010s (see Fig 1). The World Bank had similar bursts.

Fig 1. IMF loans, 1970-2015

Source: Reinhart and Trebesch, 2015, p.24.

Added to the neoliberal agenda were trillions worth of ‘illicit financial flows’ manoeuvred into offshore financial centres, leaving governments with rising budget deficits and their social sectors experiencing permanent cost-cutting pressures. IMF economists Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri admitted in 2016 that as a result,

“The increase in inequality engendered by financial openness and austerity might itself undercut growth, the very thing that the neoliberal agenda is intent on boosting. There is now strong evidence that inequality can significantly lower both the level and the durability of growth.”

But notwithstanding that admission, most subsequent Article IV consultations offered advice that amplified inequality, Oxfam researchers discovered.

The IMF also made a similar confession about its role in patriarchy, namely that “some policies recommended by staff… may… exacerbate gender inequality” – but again, when it came to a correction, the IMF “missed the forest for the policy trees,” explains Emma Bürgisser of the Bretton Woods Project.

“Almost every macroeconomic policy the IMF regularly prescribes carries harmful gendered impacts, including labour flexibilisation, privatisation, regressive taxation, trade liberalisation and targeting social protection and pensions.”

Activists try to undo destruction

In turn the predatory debt, precarious work and privatisation of so many aspects of life experienced by the world’s citizenries calls forth two kinds of responses: appeals to global governance to sort out problems national states have shied away from, and popular revolt. There are both good and bad versions of these top-down and bottom-up responses, as we have seen, with cases such as the Montreal Protocol and Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria as top-down successes, but the latter owes more to bottom-up pressures.

Since the urgency of the situation required a global response, the 1987 Montreal Protocol was supported by even the reactionary Ronald Reagan administration. It committed national states to ensure their corporations (e.g. Dow Chemical and General Electric) stop producing and emitting CFCs within nine years. The ban worked and the problem is receding (aside from recent Chinese corporate cheating on hydro-CFCs).

At present, a Montreal Protocol-type ban on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions is presumed unthinkable, notwithstanding the impending eco-social catastrophe. A solution as forceful as the Montreal Protocol is needed for GHGs, but the weakness of multilateralism and the pro-corporate balance of forces makes it unlikely within the UNFCCC – unless the world’s rising youth and other climate activists ramp up the civil disobedience and divestment advocacy that is now beginning to worry fossil fuel financiers.

In that spirit, there was one other more recent multilateral solution to a world crisis, AIDS, which shows how to shift the balance of forces not through elites’ top-down meetings of minds (although within the World Health Organisation and UN AIDS, there were a few bureaucratic allies) – but instead, bottom-up, through militant activism.

Because of groups like South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (led by visionaries Zackie Achmat and Vuyiseka Dubula), the US AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (‘ActUp’) and the health NGO Medicins sans Frontiers, a persuasive case emerged in the 1990s – and gained confirmation in 2001 – to exempt copyrighted AIDS medicines within the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property System. Generics were permitted, not made in the US and Germany, but instead in many Southern countries. This resulted in more than a decade’s rise in life expectancy, in South and North alike.

Anti-neoliberal protests help shift the balance of forces, including many millions in the Third World who objected to structural adjustment, or “IMF Riots.” In the main study of these protests, David Seddon and John Walton in 1994 remarked on how not just poor and working-class people, but larger coalitions of society rose up: “Once mass discontent is made evident by these coalitions, political parties may take up the anti-austerity cause in successful bids for national office (e.g. Peru, Dominican Republic). In several countries, austerity protests initiated political crises that sooner (e.g. Sudan, Turkey) or later (e.g. Philippines, Haiti, Poland) toppled the national government.”

Since then, there have been scores more countries – especially in Africa – whose unpatriotic leaders were tossed out of power or drew sustained dissent as they imposed the BWIs’ logic.

Solidarity activism in the North is vital, such as demonstrations at IMF and Bank official events. Major protests included the 1988 Berlin Annual Meetings (which attracted tens of thousands of protestors), the 2000 Spring Meetings in Washington (30,000) and 2000 Prague Annual Meetings (50,000), as well as even the Oslo 2002 Bank research conference on development economics (10,000). One of the main activist challenges to Bretton Woods power was the early 2000s “World Bank bonds boycott” which – at the peak of the global justice movement’s mobilisations – compelled cities as large and financially potent as San Francisco to divest from Bank securities. (Trevor Ngwane and another South African, the poet Dennis Brutus, joined then-U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders to launch the boycott in 2000.)

This led to a ‘fix it or nix it’ debate, in which reforms of the Bank and IMF were so slow that TransNational Institute scholar Susan George fumed in 2000,

“These institutions have had their chance. Anytime anyone asks, ‘And what would you put in its place?’ I am tempted to respond, ‘And what would you put in the place of cancer?’” Added Kenyan activist Njoki Njehu, the leading Washington protest organiser at the Bank/Fund Spring Meetings that year, “The IMF and the World Bank increase poverty. The consensus is that the IMF and World Bank cannot be reformed. They have to be abolished.”

It’s a debate that needs kick-starting once again. The 75^th anniversary is a good time to ask whether such out-dated ideologies and their enforcers deserve to be retired, not (as the right-wing populist protectionists argue) so as to close the door on global governance, but to open it much wider in a way that serves people and planet, not multinational corporate profits. At the same time, by posing the question of abolition, we should also recall instances where impressive reforms were won at the multilateral scale.  

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A version of this article was originally published in Bretton Woods Project Observer, October 2019.

Patrick Bond teaches political economy at Wits University in Johannesburg: [email protected] 

Featured image is from Atlanta Black Star

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Scotland Edges Closer to Independence Amid Brexit Chaos

By Johanna Ross, October 16, 2019

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Sunday that she would be setting a date for a second referendum on Scottish independence within ‘a matter of weeks’. Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show she said that she would seek a section 30 order this year, after the latest poll on Scottish independence revealed support is now as high as 50 percent – a five-point increase in the same poll carried out last year.

$35 Billion: UK Faces Huge Loss from Electric Vehicle Adoption

By Jon LeSage, October 15, 2019

The government faces other hits on tax revenue. The UK will be seeing a drop of about 20 billion pounds a year ($24.5 billion) from the government’s new policy of freezing tax duties to help people struggling with the cost of living, the IFS said. There’s also concern that another 1 billion pounds ($1.229 billion) could be lost if Prime Minister Boris Johnson follows through on his commitment to cut duties by 2 pence per liter of fuel.

Johnson’s Queen’s Speech – ‘Pre-election Propaganda’ It Can’t Deliver

By True Publica, October 15, 2019

Trashed in lightning speed this year, the only thing that most people were concerned about in the Queen’s speech was if there was any news on Brexit. As we already know – Johnson’s Brexit plan, to Leave on October 31st, leaves the UK economy £50bn worse off and every household in the country about £2,000 worse off to pay for it. It’s not as if the experts haven’t hit their calculators hard enough in the last few weeks and told them so. They even said that the best scenario possible was a hit to the economy of £16 billion.

Brexit, Environmental Law and the Level Playing Field

By Molly Scott Cato MEP, October 15, 2019

Given that the inspiration for Brexit amongst many corporate interests was precisely ripping up the ‘red tape’ that has protected our countryside, waterways, and natural habitats for decades, to have no route to independent legal redress would be a source of considerable concern.

The Dangers of a US-UK Trade Deal as TTIP in EU Re-emerges: Leaked Government Paper

By True Publica, October 09, 2019

The warnings given to government about Brexit have come thick and fast, especially in the last 12 months where time has allowed more in-depth analysis of the likely effects of Brexit – deal or no-deal. These warnings have come from the most respected organisations and institutions in Britain such as the – Confederation of British Industry, Department for International Trade, Bank of England, The Office for Budget responsibility, and Centre of Economic Performance. Then there have been industry sectors such as financial services, motor, agricultural and even the UK Warehousing Association that have issued warnings of the scale of problems that various forms of Brexit brings.

British Unions Vote to Boycott Israel

By Glen Davies, October 09, 2019

The motion affirmed the collective rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to return to their homes, called for a stop to the British arms trade with Israel, and reaffirmed the union movement’s call to boycott companies complicit with the Israeli settlement industry.

Brexit: Boris Johnson Moves to Scrap Environment and GMO Safeguards to Get Deal with Trump

By GMWatch, October 08, 2019

The Minister heading up the Department for International Trade, Liz Truss, is known to have had “off the record” meetings about weakening UK regulations with some of the right-wing US pressure groups that have driven Trump’s radical programme of deregulation.  And last week at a Conservative party conference fringe event, Truss said that while she is “proud” of Britain’s high environmental standards, she wants to take “a much more free-market approach”. Since then she has tweeted that scrapping EU protections is “vital for giving us the freedom and flexibility to strike new trade deals and become more competitive”.

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In Krutaya Balka, a village north of Donetsk which is routinely attacked by Ukrainian forces with shelling and heavy machine gun fire, I meet a man standing outside his home, where he lives with his wife, roughly 600 metres from the front line.

To my question about where his home has been damaged he laughs, “Many times. Which house hasn’t been? The roof, the wall… from mortar fire and heavy machine gun fire.”

His replies are in line with the others I’ve spoken with: things got worse after Zelensky became president; the attacks are daily; where would he leave to? He is in favour of joining Russia.

“We should go to Ukraine, which damaged my house? I’m Russian, this is Russian land. Everyone who knows history knows this. Of course I want to join Russia! In earlier times, before the war, I didn’t care either way. But after all Ukraine did what it has done, absolutely I want to be a part of Russia. I can’t imagine being back in Ukraine. Anyway, most of the people here would be killed as ‘separatists’. A known Ukrainian politician (Boris Filatov) said: ‘At the beginning, give them what they want, later hang them.’

I ask if he has anything to say to a Western audience. At first he says there’s no point, people already know, the West gives money to Ukraine…

“The snipers use US rifles, if they gave less money it would be better.”

But later in our conversation he adds:

“Going back to the question of a message to the West…You remember WW2. Why do you support Nazis if you remember WW2? Why do you now support Nazis. Openly Nazis. They wear swastikas. Why is Europe silent? Everyone comes here and agrees with me, but nothing changes. OSCE shouts, but when they are under fire, they are silent, they don’t say that Ukraine attacks them.”

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Featured image is from Stars and Stripes

Singer and rap artist M.I.A. visited Julian Assange at Belmarsh Prison on Saturday, calling for his freedom. The WikiLeaks publisher and journalist faces extradition to the United States under the Espionage Act, with charges that carry a 175-year prison term.

M.I.A.’s visit followed a brief court hearing Friday at Westminster Magistrates Court. Assange appeared via remote video-link to hear Judge Tam Ikram confirm his remand at the maximum-security prison while a US extradition request is heard. He will appear in court again on October 21.

Speaking at a press conference outside Belmarsh late Saturday afternoon, M.I.A.—Sri Lankan-born Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam—condemned Assange’s tormentors, indicting the US and UK governments, the courts and the corporate media. M.I.A. is a long-time friend and supporter of Assange.

M.I.A. speaking to reporters outside Belmarsh Prison

Asked about Assange’s condition, she replied, “I think when you know there are people outside who are criminals, and you are inside for advocating peace, while people that profit from war are outside, and celebrated and given Nobel peace prizes, that hurts. I think that’s hard for anyone.”

Former US President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel prize in 2009, as his administration escalated US military operations across the globe, including a drone assassination program he personally supervised.

M.I.A. explained that she and Julian had discussed conditions “for everyone” inside the prison “and the concept of freedom and what that really means.”

A WSWS reporter asked M.I.A. to comment on the UK government’s assertion that it “does not participate in or condone the use of torture.” The UK government last week rejected UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer’s findings (published May 31) that Assange is the victim of unprecedented state persecution and “psychological torture.”

She responded,

“I’ve been trying to get a yoga book to him for a month now and I come here every week trying to hand it in and it’s been impossible… To me that’s a very extreme method they are using where you’re denying even reading books. I wasn’t able to take in sketchbooks where he could write thoughts or draw and I haven’t been able to take puzzles which might help stimulate the mind.

“I first thought that maybe all prisoners were treated like that, where they’re not able to have some sort of dignity and own the space between their ears and have that mental freedom… I can sympathise with people who feel that he’s been treated unfairly… I think there is an element of discrimination.”

Asked for her opinion on media coverage of Assange, M.I.A. said,

“I think there should be more, given that now we know the truth and that the debate is about extradition to the US. It’s no longer about all the other things people have accused him of. Now it’s about truth—and that’s something people have to uphold and fight for especially in these years.”

M.I.A. replied forthrightly to a question about bogus sexual misconduct allegations against Assange in Sweden:

“It’s now really about extraditing Julian to the US. I wish there was more emphasis given to that truth and people really making a statement about that.

“The basic bottom line is he’s in there because he exposed some war crimes and he just campaigned for peace. This cannot be the example. We can’t make that an example to society where we penalise people for that and not a single person has been convicted for the financial crisis of 2008. Nobody has been convicted for the war crimes before then of the Bush era, no one’s been convicted from the Obama era and everything the Democrats did. Nothing has happened legally, so why trust the legal system, that hasn’t come through on any of those things?”

M.I.A.’s press conference was boycotted by the major news networks and the BBC, despite having been widely advertised. Only Sputnik and Ruptly published live footage. A Press Association report was picked up by the Independent and the Belfast Telegraph, while the Daily Mail carried a report that recycled false and defamatory statements about Assange. Its headline set the tone, “Singer MIA becomes Julian Assange’s latest celebrity supporter…”

M.I.A. has defended Assange for years and is herself an outspoken opponent of imperialist war and oppression. In November 2013, she opened her concert in New York City with a 10-minute address from Assange, via video livestream. Assange used his appearance to champion the cause of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. He warned of the dangers of the National Security Agency’s spying operations and urged M.I.A’s fans to become politically aware and active in seeking to change the world for the better.

On Saturday, M.I.A. explained,

“I support Julian because I think someone like this is valuable to society because of his knowledge about so many different things.

“I try not to be prejudiced in a time where things change and evolve at such a fast rate. People’s values are changing, people’s beliefs are changing, the political climate is changing, the social climate is changing, the financial situation is changing—and throughout all of this change, we’re so constricting this man.”

M.I.A. concluded her press conference by urging attendance at an event for Assange being staged with fellow rap artist Lowkey outside the UK Home Office on November 5. The free event follows last month’s live performance outside the same building by Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters that saw hundreds gather to show their support for the WikiLeaks founder.

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The administration of the Kurdish-controlled regions in north-eastern Syria announced on Sunday that they had reached an agreement with the central Syrian government in Damascus to deploy Syrian troops along areas of the border region with Turkey to help repel the Turkish aggression.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan legitimized Turkey’s operations in Syria because of so-called security concerns, particularly from the Islamic State and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian branch of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). However, with the YPG finally allowing Syrian troops to enter their controlled areas, what options does Erdoğan have left?

Turkish officials have endlessly said that the establishment of a “safe zone” that penetrates 30km into Syria is for the purpose of expelling the YPG from this region and to facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. With the Syrian Army soon to control the area with the withdrawal of the YPG, Erdoğan’s “safe zone” has now been achieved, thus illegitimating his operation once Syrian government control has been established.

Turkey assured that its operation was only against terrorism and not territorial expansionism with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu stating in an interview that

“Russia is concerned about some sensitive issues, such as territorial integrity and the unity of the country. We are also worried. If we look at all the joint statements of Turkey, Russia and Iran, we emphasize it.”

Although Turkish leaders assure that the purpose of the operation is not for annexation, this has not eased the belief among Syrians that Turkey plans to permanently occupy the area, as they remember the illegal 1939 Turkish annexation of Hatay and the invasion of neighboring Cyprus in 1974, with the status of the occupied Turkish-controlled northern regions of the island remaining doggedly unresolved by Ankara.

Therefore, with patient diplomacy with the political branches of the YPG, the Syrian government has trapped Erdoğan into leaving all Syrian territory since terrorism cannot be cited as a reason, a reason they heavily focused on. If Turkey does not withdraw from the occupied territories, it will surely become an international issue involving all major countries.

Such a situation will not be easy for Washington. In fact, the major factor for Ankara’s split from the U.S. is because of the American support for the YPG, despite contradictorily recognizing the PKK as a terrorist organization. Although Ankara is a NATO member, Turkey has been strengthening relations with Russia, a source of American anger against its supposed NATO ally.

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened the complete destruction of the Turkish economy last week if Ankara exceeded its operation targets. With the U.S. putting a direct threat against Turkey, it is unlikely for Ankara to submit to Washington’s demands, which will inevitably create another source of division between Ankara and Washington.

This is especially crucial as Çavuşoğlu boldly stated that

“We are not afraid to remain isolated if the truth is on our side, since we are destined to fight terrorism.”

It would suggest that if Turkey is willing to be isolated over fighting the YPG, then it would be willing to be isolated for the goal of territorial expansionism, a suggestion that can be legitimized if the Turkish military does not withdraw after Syrian government administration is achieved in the border region.

For its part, Moscow understands Turkey’s concerns about its safety but advocates that Ankara respect its agreements with Damascus. With Russian and Turkish relations strengthening in the economic, military and diplomatic fields, Erdoğan’s next move can also affect the image of Russia, who is also a close ally of Syria, having defended the country from terrorism since September 2015.

As Russia has consistently adhered to international norms and laws, and strongly advocates that all states should follow such norms and laws, any refusal of the Turkish military and its proxies to withdraw from Syrian territory could be a source of resentment from Moscow. Russia has invested heavily into flourishing its relations with Turkey after its Black Sea neighbour downed a Russian jet in Syria, leading to the murder of the pilot by Turkish-backed forces.

However, any chance for Washington to reconcile with Ankara is all but over with the imposition of sanctions on Monday. These measures have been considered ineffective by Republican senator Lindsey Graham and Democrat Chris van Hollen who want wider sanctions against Turkey and to cut military support, despite being NATO allies. This is in a supposed effort to stop Turkey’s widespread human rights abuses and the release of ISIS terrorists.

Therefore, Erdoğan’s next decision towards Syria will heavily impact the future of not only the region, but his relations with the U.S. and Russia. With murmurings existing for years now whether Turkey should leave the NATO alliance, these sanctions against Turkey, a country already in a deep economic crisis, will only bring this question to the forefront of debate.

Although the U.S. cites human right abuses as the reason for the sanctions, an allegation that cannot be taken seriously considering their own long list of war crimes, it is likely Trump is ‘punishing’ Erdoğan for his insistence and defiance in buying the Russian S-400 system. This means that the souring relations between Washington and Ankara provides the perfect moment for Russian President Vladimir Putin to consolidate his country’s relations with Turkey.

Turkey has the second largest military in NATO, but more importantly has sovereignty over the imperative waterways of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles that gives Russia access to the Mediterranean from its Black Sea ports. Whether Putin will be able to convince Turkey, a fellow Eurasian country and Black Sea neighbour of Russia’s, to leave the NATO alliance is to be seen. But, if he can convince Turkey to leave, this would not only be a powerful military blow to NATO, but a strategic one as they will lose any challenge they could pose against Russia in the Black Sea.

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Paul Antonopoulos is director of the Multipolarity research centre.

Featured image is from InfoRos

President Lenin Moreno betrayed ordinary Ecuadorians by abandoning his pledge to continue progressive policies of his predecessor Rafeal Correa.

Instead he instituted force-fed austerity, enforced with police state harshness, and sold Julian Assange to the US and UK for a loan shark of last resort $4.2 billion IMF loan — requiring corporate-friendly policies at the expense of beneficial social justice continuity, abandoned by his regime.

Days of police state violence against legitimate protesters from early October through Sunday left at least 10 dead, around 2,000 injured, and over 1,000 arrested — ignited by a Moreno decree to end longstanding fuel subsidies, doubling prices overnight in deference to an IMF diktat.

Following weekend talks with indigenous and other protest leaders, he cancelled his unacceptable order, saying:

“With this agreement, the mobilizations…across Ecuador are terminated, and we commit ourselves to restoring peace in the country.”

It all depends on fulfilling his campaign pledges, requiring much more than reinstating fuel subsidies.

As long as neoliberal harshness continues, mass outrage could erupt again any time ahead.

Moreno surrendered to IMF financial terrorism. It obligates borrower nations to sell their soul for blood money.

It assures debt bondage, requiring new loans to service old ones, structural adjustment harshness against millions most vulnerable, and policies favoring Western and internal monied interests at the expense of governance for everyone equitably.

Nations in bed with the predatory IMF are required to let bankers and other dominant corporate interests strip mine their material wealth and resources, tolerate no democratic values, abandon social justice, and exploit working class people as serfs.

An elite few benefit at the expense of most others, entrapped nations controlled by Western monied interests, their sovereign independence lost to a higher power.

IMF diktats mandate no public sphere, unrestrained corporate empowerment, elimination of social spending, and earmarking state resources for predatory profit-making, national security and internal control.

It’s war by other means on ordinary people in affected countries, transformed into dystopian backwaters, Western and internal privileged interests benefitting from exploitive harshness.

IMF debt bondage assures mass unemployment, underemployment, and impoverishment, loss of essential to life social services, and economic decline.

Years after agreeing to onerous terms for IMF loans, borrower nations are worse off, deeper in debt, their ordinary people paying the biggest price.

Yet Article I of the IMF Articles of Agreement states the following:

Its loans to nations are intended to “facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy.”

There’s more, claiming IMF policies are to “give confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.”

Claiming loans aim to “promot(e) and maint(ain) high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy” is mass deception.

So is saying “(i)n difficult economic times, (the IMF) helps countries…protect the most vulnerable in a crisis.”

Its agenda is polar opposite, force-feeding deprivation on vulnerable millions so privileged interests can benefit from their immiseration.

It works the same way everywhere under IMF mandates, including mass impoverishment, public wealth transferred to private hands, out-of-control corruption and cronyism, and nations transformed into dystopian shells to benefit monied interests exclusively.

What’s ahead for Ecuador after Moreno reinstated fuel subsidies remains to be seen.

He capitulated to Western interests. Ordinary Ecuadorians want him replaced by equitable rule — not likely coming while he’s in office.

As long as neoliberal harshness continues, mass outrage could erupt again any time.

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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.

The so-called US Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 was unanimously adopted by House and Senate committees.

On Tuesday, House members unanimously passed the measure, Senate adoption virtually certain, perhaps by unanimous voice vote.

The measure ignored made-in-the-USA color revolution-style violence and chaos, ongoing in Hong Kong for months, US officials actively collaborating with its leaders.

The measure falsely calls demonstrations “peaceful.” It turned truth on its head, claiming the bill “support(s) the democratic aspirations of the people of Hong Kong” — a notion US officials tolerate nowhere, especially not domestically.

It calls for imposing “punitive measures against government officials in Hong Kong or mainland China who are responsible for suppressing basic freedoms in Hong Kong (sic).”

A second unanimously adopted House measure, the so-called Hong Kong Act, bars US exports of military and crowd-control items to city authorities.

A third measure recognizes US/Hong Kong relations, denouncing Beijing’s “interference” in its affairs, along with supporting ongoing (violent, chaotic) protests — ignoring US dirty hands all over them.

A fourth bill commended Canada for detaining Huawei’s chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou — following her unlawful arrest in Vancouver last December.

The unacceptable measures are the latest examples of how the US illegally meddles in the internal affairs of other nations, a flagrant breach of international and constitutional law.

In response, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang denounced the measures, saying they’ll

“not only harm the interests of China and the China-US relations, but also severely undermine the interests of the United States,” adding:

“Hong Kong belongs to China and its affairs are purely China’s domestic affairs that brook no foreign interference.”

“We advise the US side to get a clear understanding of the situation, rein in on the brink of the precipice immediately, and cease to promote the subsequent deliberation of the act and interfere in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs immediately.”

Beijing intends “strong countermeasures to firmly safeguard its sovereignty, safety and developmental interests” if US anti-China bills are adopted by the Senate and signed into law by Trump.

Geng noted that US House members ignored “serious crimes such as arson, damaging shops and violent assaults” committed by protesters.

On Wednesday, China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet slammed passage of unacceptable House measures, accusing the US of “stir(ring) the pot and…fan(ing) the flames of (violent) protests…providing oxygen to the worst political and militant elements within the protest movement.”

Hong Kong official Junius Ho Kwan-yiu denounced Washington’s double-standard and flagrant interference in the city’s affairs.

Academic Tian Feilong said US legislation has no international legal standing, examples of unacceptable US hegemonic actions.

“US politicians want…to keep (the anti-China) fire burning.” They want US-orchestrated violence and chaos in Hong Kong continued, Tian adding:

When Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam “tries to solve economic problems, and especially when those violent radical protesters and rioters are losing support, the US moves to provide more support to anti-government forces by passing (legislation).”

Without it and other US pot-stirring, the turmoil (might) die out” as protester energy wanes, signs appearing before House members acted on Wednesday, the Senate likely to follow in short order.

On Tuesday, China’s Global Times said

“(r)ioters…use(d) knives and a home-made explosive device in their attacks on police officers during last weekend’s illegal assembly, which further angered ordinary Hong Kong people.”

Unacceptable US legislation will likely encourage more of the same — commonplace tactics during illegal US color revolution attempts against sovereign states.

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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.

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger, food insecurity, and overall deprivation affect million of households in the world’s richest country USA.

Why? It’s because both right wings of its war party devote most of the nation’s discretionary income for militarism, maintaining the Pentagon’s global empire of bases, and endless aggression in multiple theaters — along with bailouts for and handouts to corporate America.

In the new millennium alone, countless trillions of dollars went for the above interests, combined with tax cuts for the rich, while food stamps and other social justice programs are fast eroding to help pay for them as the national debt soars by over $1 trillion annually.

Most US households with one or more working members have little or no savings — leaving them vulnerable to hunger and homelessness from one or more missed paychecks.

According to Feeding America, 79% of US households the organization aids rely on “inexpensive unhealthy food to feed their families,” 84% of households with children functioning this way.

The vast majority of Feeding America (FA) client households face unacceptable choices — 69% forced at times to choose between food and utilities, 66% between food and medical care, 31% between food and education.

Force-fed neoliberal harshness by Republicans and undemocratic Dems contributed to 58% of FA’s client households having one or more members with high blood pressure, 33% affected by diabetes — these numbers much higher among households with seniors, 77% and 47% respectively.

Nearly half of FA client households have one or members in “fair or poor health.”

Because of unemployment or poverty wages, one in six FA client households “experienced a foreclosure or eviction in the past five years.”

The vast majority of FA client households are food insecure (84%) — without access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food, at times going hungry.

According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million Americans, including over 11 million children — the numbers likely way understated.

Feeding America explained that impoverished households and others above the poverty line experience food insecurity for inadequate ability to buy what’s needed, adding:

“Food insecurity does not exist in isolation, as low-income families are affected by multiple, overlapping issues like lack of affordable housing, social isolation, chronic or acute health problems, high medical costs, and low wages.”

“Taken together, these issues are important social determinants of health” and well-being — fast deteriorating in the United States of I Don’t Care, the world’s richest country with the greatest wealth disparity among developed nations.

The state of the nation is shameful, serving its privileged class exclusively, exploiting most others to benefit its well-off members.

Food insecurity and hunger impact virtually “every community in the United States,” said FA.

Do Something.org discussed “11 facts about hunger in the US,” saying the following:

Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually.

At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide problem.

Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate help.

“1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from.”

“22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at school, but as many as 3 million children still aren’t getting the breakfast they need.”

Food insecure children are at greater risk to develop physical and emotional health issues. They perform poorly academically and in physical activities.

Food insecurity affects both urban and rural areas nationwide.

People of color (Blacks and Latinos) are disproportionately affected by hunger and food insecurity.

The states with the highest rates of food insecurity are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, and Oklahoma.

“(H)ouseholds with children ha(ve) a substantially higher rate of food insecurity” and hunger, said Do Something.org.

US Census data show around half of US households are impoverished or bordering it — a permanent underclass in the world’s richest country, young children and the elderly most affected.

Poverty, homelessness, hunger, food insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, and overall deprivation affect countless millions of Americans.

It’s the shame of the nation — a let ‘em eat cake society, uncaring about the vast majority of its citizens.

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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.

It is a strange experience witnessing The Donald fumble his way through foreign policy, which he knows almost nothing about.

In the awkward press conference below, Trump stumbles his way through history. His explanation for abandoning the Kurds? They didn’t help “us” win the Second World War.  

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Undoubtedly, there were Kurds fighting during that completely avoidable carnage that killed more than 70 million people, 25 million of that debated number in Russia alone. Trump does not know if soldiers of Kurdish ancestry died at Normandy. The stable ignoramus is famous for not doing his homework and talking off the top of his coiffured head. 

Moreover, the United States did not single-handedly “win” the Second World War—that achievement should be credited to Stalin and the Soviet Union. Ditto Syria. It was Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah that beat back the CIA and Saudi Arabia’s murderous jihadi proxies, not Trump and his neocons. 

Abel Cohen writes: 

America shouldn’t mythologize a war against the Nazis we didn’t wage until the last minute. Like Truman said: “If Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” America waited as long as it could to join the war—and ended it by firing the first shots of the next one.

Truman’s final homicidal act was to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and traumatizing millions of others. He then inaugurated the Cold War, founded the national security state, and set the stage for the military-industrial complex which, incidentally, Trump mentioned during his press conference. Since taking office, Trump has acted as salesman-of-the-month for the MIC, selling death merchandise far and wide. This is just about the only growth industry in a crumbling America. 

The Kurds probably knew Trump would betray and leave them at the mercy—and, if news reports are accurate, mercy is in short supply—of Turkey with its resurgent form of Sunni Islam exploited by President Tayyip Erdogan. 

“Uniting around our common Islamic identity is the only way to solve the Kurdish problem,” a leader of Justice and Development party told The Economist. “Islam bound us in Ottoman times and during the war of independence, why not today?”

Left out of the discussion is the fact two-thirds of Kurds follow the Shafi‘i madhhab, which distinguishes them from Arabs and Turks in the region who are primarily Hanafi. In Islam, like any religion, divergent sects rarely make peace. For example, consider the death count attributed to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe (instrumentally, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, responsible for more than 30,000 dead in France).

Erdogan’s solution to the “Kurdish problem” is to invade Syria and Iraq and kill as many Kurds as possible. 

Trump’s response is to move US troops—illegally in Syria in violation of its national sovereignty—out of harm’s way, which is, of course, the sensible thing to do, never mind the ranting criticism of neocons and their Republican and Democrat fellow travelers. 

However, it is impossible to hold this president to anything. He changes with the wind, following the weathervane of his outsized ego. 

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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Bullet

On October 14, units of the Syrian Army started entering areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria.

The terms and conditions of the deal made by the SDF and Damascus are yet to be revealed, but government troops already deployed in Tabqah, Tabqah Airport, Tabqah Dam, Ayn Issa and Tal Tamir, and in the Manbij area. Syrian Army troops also moved towards the border town of Kobani. However, the situation there remains unclear. According to pro-Kurdish sources, US troops deployed there have attempted to prevent Syrian troops from entering the town by blocking the Qaraqozak bridge.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper officially stated that the US did not sign up to fight the Turks for the SDF. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Washington would help the SDF in implementation of its deal with Damascus.

Watch the video here.

The US is not planning to fully withdraw its troops from the country. According to Esper, the US military presence will remain in Syria, especially in al-Tanf. Additionally, there is no timeline for the announced withdrawal of 1,000 troops.

Turkey reacted to the Damascus-SDF deal by increasing its military efforts against the SDF around Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain. Furthermore, Turkish-led forces launched an advance towards Ain Assa and Manbij, where they clashes with detachments of the Syrian Army. According to pro-Turkish sources, Turkish-backed militants captured a T-55 battle tank belonging to the Syrian Army near Manbij.

The military situation in northeastern Syria may escalate even further if the Turkish Armed Forces and Turkish-backed militants continue their advance into the areas where the Syrian Army is already deployed. At the same time, Ankara’s attempts to capture Manbij will likely only strengthen the military and political cooperation between the SDF and Damascus.

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Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Sunday that she would be setting a date for a second referendum on Scottish independence within ‘a matter of weeks’. Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show she said that she would seek a section 30 order this year, after the latest poll on Scottish independence revealed support is now as high as 50 percent – a five-point increase in the same poll carried out last year.

Momentum for a second vote on Scottish independence has been building steadily since the Brexit vote in June 2016, as Scots voted to remain in the European Union, in contrast to the nationwide result that the UK should leave. Since then the governing party in Scotland, the SNP, has argued that Scottish interests in relation to the country’s future relationship with the EU have been ignored by Westminster. Not just that, but Scots feel betrayed. During the run up to the independence referendum in 2014, they were told by the Unionists that if Scotland was to leave the UK, then its future in the EU could not be guaranteed. Just a few years later Scotland is being taken out of the EU against its own will.

Feelings of resentment at how Scotland was being treated during the Brexit negotiations were exacerbated by the appointment of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in July, as he is widely disliked north of the border and seen to be embody elitist Conservative values which clash with those held by many Scots. His visit to Edinburgh not long after he had secured the post spoke volumes: not only did he not interact with any of the locals, but he made a point of exiting the First Minister’s residence through the back door so as to avoid any heckling from the crowd of protestors outside. As Martin Kettle wrote in The Guardian back then,

‘Johnson is a man who doesn’t care about Scotland, at the head of a movement that doesn’t care about Scotland either’.

Indeed, it almost seems that Scottish independence is a price Johnson is willing to pay to achieve his ‘come what may’ Brexit as there has been no real acknowledgement from him of the impending constitutional crisis that Scottish independence would represent. In a bid to ensure that Brexit goes ahead, Scotland has been left at the wayside, and very much feels it. To add insult to injury, it’s not clear at this stage whether Boris Johnson will allow a second referendum on independence. Already there have been signals that he won’t, having said that he would refuse to grant permission to the Scottish government – the section 30 order it is seeking – to hold another such vote.

Refusing to hold another vote could backfire on the UK government however. Nationalists are losing patience, with more and more independence supporters taking to the streets at weekend rallies to demand a second referendum. For many it is long overdue and they blame Nicola Sturgeon for not calling one earlier. If Johnson were now to deny it, it would only add fuel to the fire in what is already a volatile situation. Protests until now have been peaceful and positive, but who knows what could happen if Westminster were to obstruct a second vote. Scotland could end up embarking on a similar path to the Catalonians.

In what is becoming an increasingly precarious situation, some analysts have gone as far to draw comparisons with the collapse of former Yugoslavia. What may have been considered impossible just a few years ago cannot be ruled out now. Brexit has tested the boundaries and pushed the UK’s legal and political systems to the limit.  The rules of the game, though unwritten, were always understood and adhered to in the past. Now the fact that the UK does not have a written constitution is being exploited in a way like never before.

And feelings of discontent are not reserved to Scotland alone. Indeed, it is now being suggested that along with the secession of Scotland could come that of Wales. In Wales the rise of nationalism has been arguably even more dramatic.  Previous polls conducted around the time of the Scottish independence vote showed support for Welsh independence at no more than 3 percent. Recent polls show this has skyrocketed to as much as 40 percent, with Brexit being a primary factor. What is even more interesting is the distribution of Remain and Leave voters across Wales. Research has shown that the areas in support of remaining in the EU are dominated by native Welsh, whereas those in favour of Brexit are largely ethnic English. Such a division has the potential to deepen as native Welsh blame their fate on English settlers.

As the final attempts to achieve a Brexit deal are being made this week, Boris Johnson would be wise to take into account the repercussions for the UK constitution of leaving the EU without a withdrawal agreement. All the signs show however that this is one Prime Minister for whom EU withdrawal must happen, whatever the cost may be to the 300 year old Union. And his heavy-handed approach to Brexit may well be repeated when it comes to Scottish Nationalism. The battle for independence it seems has only just begun.

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Johanna Ross is a journalist.

Featured image is from Jane Barlow/PA Wire

Climate change is real. However, serious scientific evidence is pointing to a very different causality than most discuss. Climate is a huge subject, an immensely complex one. There is controversy around whether we must implement drastic new taxes on fuels or other measures to reduce or “capture” CO2 to reduce Man-Made Global Warming. So far however, there are strong indications we are ignoring what might be a far greater factor in our climate and in increasing occurrence of severe weather around the world, from hurricanes to volcanic eruptions to earthquakes to severe cold, severe warm and severe rainfall. One causal factor being ignored in all the discussion is what influence solar activity has on our climate. We might well be ignoring this to our peril.

Sunspots and solar minimum

Pretty much everything in nature moves in some form of cycle, whether it is the Earth around the Sun or the moon around the Earth. Those cycles have been known for ages to influence the ocean tides or growing seasons. What is less known is the fact that there are cycles to solar eruptions, giant electromagnetic storms often called sunspots. It has been measured over time that solar cycles have short cycles of approximately 11 years.

According to the US NASA,

“The solar cycle is the cycle that the Sun’s magnetic field goes through approximately every 11 years…The solar cycle affects activity on the surface of the Sun, such as sunspots which are caused by the Sun’s magnetic fields.”

These shorter 11 year cycles take place within longer cycles of around 90 to 100 years, 200 years or longer.

Astrophysicists measure such cycles from the number of sunspots daily by year. It takes eleven years to proceed from minimum solar eruption year to a peak and down to the next minimum–think sine waves. That means the number of solar eruptions is at a minimum before beginning the next cycle of 11 year rise and fall. The relevant point for us on earth is that those giant solar eruptions, as well as the relative absence of same, have huge impact on our earth and on climate. The sunspot activity has been noted and measured for about 350 years.

What is less well understood but empirically measured are the larger longer wave cycles of sunspot rise and decline. In 2019 we are at the apparent bottom of what is called Cycle 24. If the present spotless pattern continues to year-end 2019 it could be perhaps the deepest Solar Minimum of a century. Notable here is that the peak number of sunspots has been declining with each cycle since Cycle 22 that began in around 1986. Some scientists predict that Cycle 25 in 2020 will begin a series of even more unusually low sunspot activity lasting perhaps into 2055 or even longer. If so, it will have significant influence on our climate and weather.

The year 2019 will be marked as solar minimum year, before Cycle 25 begins, to run until about 2030. What is notable about this is the fact that NASA’s forecast for the next solar Cycle 25 predicts that it will be the weakest of the last 200 years. That means weakest sunspot activity since early 1800. Notably, that period is known to astrophysicists as the Dalton Minimum, lasting from about 1790 to about 1820. It is referred to as a Grand Solar Minimum, the low of a 200 year cycle atop the 11 year cycles. Notable during the Dalton Minimum era were significant volcanic eruptions, the most notable of the past centuries being the highly explosive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest in known history. Scientists have postulated a link between the eruption of huge volumes of volcanic ash high above the atmosphere and cloud creation that blocks the sun, leading to cooler oceans. Notably 1816 became known as the “year without a summer” due to the impact of Tambora on North American and European weather. In the Northern Hemisphere, crops failed and livestock died, resulting in the worst famine of the century. 

The point to be noted is that the frequency and intensity of sunspot activity has proven profound influence on Earth weather, atmosphere, ocean temperature, Gulf Stream flows and more. It is also notable that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control dismisses such solar influence as not significant. That is a huge mistake by all serious evidence.

While governments and the UN have funneled billions of dollars to computer modelers to create various models of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since the 1970s, far too little attention has been given to the effect of our sun on earth climate. The ancient Inca or Maya cultures had a better respect for the energy and influence of the sun than we seem to have. At a minimum, in the interest of science, if not survival, we need to remedy this.

2019: Solar Cycle 24 Minimum

This year 2019 has been notable in its low sunspot occurrence. The sun continues to be very quiet. As of October 11, the sun has been without sunspots on 207 days so far during 2019 or 73% of the time, the highest percentage since 2008. One feature of such decreasing solar activity is the weakening of the ambient solar wind and its magnetic field. That allows more cosmic rays to penetrate the earth. Intensification of cosmic rays affects Earth’s cloud cover and climate.

Some scientists have correlated volcanic and earthquake activity with increased periods of galactic cosmic ray penetration. For most of 2019 as just one example, the Shiveluch (Kamchatka) volcano in Russia has been regularly ejecting huge volumes of volcanic ash particulates into the stratosphere as high as 70,000 feet and cooling the planet. Other volcanic eruptions or earthquakes during recent months have taken place from Chile, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, Puerto Rico and Washington State and California to name a few.

According to Prof. Masayuki Hyodo of the Research Center for Inland Seas, Kobe University, “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has discussed the impact of cloud cover on climate in their evaluations, but this phenomenon has never been considered in climate predictions due to the insufficient physical understanding of it.” He stresses, “When galactic cosmic rays increase, so do low clouds, and when cosmic rays decrease clouds do as well, so climate warming may be caused by an opposite-umbrella effect.” Galactic cosmic ray penetration decreases during periods of high sunspot eruptions.

Likely Effects on Climate

If astrophysicists’ predictions are accurate, and we soon will know, we are in for a long series of extreme weather events and climate changes globally over the coming decades until perhaps 2055, owing to the onset of what is being called a new Grand Solar Minimum beginning around 2020, the conjuncture of an 11-year series of declines in sunspot numbers with longer wave 100 year or longer cycles. If this is so, the extreme weather events from volcanoes, ultra-severe cold waves across the Midwest USA growing regions, severe heat in other places, volcanoes and earthquakes, could be a pre-taste of what is coming. Along with that could come shortened growing seasons around the world and harvest failures.

Among the issues scientists believe we likely will experience during this period of an emerging Grand Solar Minimum, if accurate, will be a further slowing of the Atlantic Conveyor or Gulf Stream, a dramatic decline in the Total Solar Irradiance, or solar power incident on the Earth’s upper atmosphere over the coming decades.

One of the most respected astrophysicists studying solar cycles is Professor Valentina Zharkova, an astrophysicist who teaches mathematics at Northumbria University in the UK. Zharkova was one of only 2 scientists out of 150 who accurately predicted that Solar Cycle 24 would be weaker than Cycle 23. At a conference of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in October, 2018, Zharkova presented findings that suggest in 2020 a “Super Grand Solar Minimum” period could begin. Until now her models have run at a 93-97% accuracy. Grand Solar Minimums are prolonged periods of reduced solar activity, and in the past have gone hand-in-hand with times of global cooling.

Whether Prof Zharkova is right or not is not the issue, so much as the fact that we tend to block the possible influences of the sun on Earth climate at all. Increasing evidence from independent scientists such as Zharkova suggest that we need to invest far more resources into understanding better our sun and its effects on our climate long-term if we are to avoid major climate catastrophe in coming years. Climate Change is real, but far more complex than we are imagining.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

“Mommy, am I gonna die?”— 4-year-old Ava Ellis after being inadvertently shot in the leg by a police officer who was aiming for the girl’s boxer-terrier dog, Patches

“‘Am I going to get shot again.’”—2-year-old survivor of a police shooting that left his three siblings, ages 1, 4 and 5, with a bullet in the brain, a fractured skull and gun wounds to the face

Children learn what they live.

As family counselor Dorothy Law Nolte wisely observed,

“If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. If children live with hostility, they learn to fight. If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.”

And if children live with terror, trauma and violence—forced to watch helplessly as their loved ones are executed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later—will they in turn learn to terrorize, traumatize and inflict violence on the world around them?

I’m not willing to risk it. Are you?

It’s difficult enough raising a child in a world ravaged by war, disease, poverty and hate, but when you add the toxic stress of the police state into the mix, it becomes near impossible to protect children from the growing unease that some of the monsters of our age come dressed in government uniforms.

Case in point: in Hugo, Oklahoma, plain clothes police officers opened fire on a pickup truck parked in front of a food bank, heedless of the damage such a hail of bullets—26 shots were fired—could have on those in the vicinity. Three of the four children inside the parked vehicle were shot: a 4-year-old girl was shot in the head and ended up with a bullet in the brain; a 5-year-old boy received a skull fracture; and a 1-year-old girl had deep cuts on her face from gunfire or shattered window glass. Only the 2-year-old was spared any physical harm, although the terror will likely linger for a long time.

“They are terrified to go anywhere or hear anything,” the family attorney said. “The two-year-old keeps asking about ‘Am I going to get shot again.’”

The reason for the use of such excessive force?

Police were searching for a suspect in a weeks-old robbery of a pizza parlor that netted $400.

While the two officers involved in the shooting are pulling paid leave at taxpayer expense, the children’s mother is struggling to figure out how to care for her wounded family and pay the medical expenses, including the cost to transport each child in a separate medical helicopter to a nearby hospital: $75,000 for one child’s transport alone.

This may be the worst use of excessive force on innocent children to date. Unfortunately, it is one of many in a steady stream of cases that speak to the need for police to de-escalate their tactics and stop resorting to excessive force when less lethal means are available to them.

For instance, in Cleveland, police shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was seen playing on a playground with a pellet gun. Surveillance footage shows police shooting the boy two seconds after getting out of a moving patrol car. Incredibly, the shooting was deemed “reasonable” and “justified” by two law enforcement experts who concluded that the police use of force “did not violate Tamir’s constitutional rights.”

Screenshot from Reason

In Detroit, 7-year-old Aiyana Jones was killed after a Detroit SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops were in the wrong apartment.

In Georgia, a SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving the child with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

Also in Georgia, 10-year-old Dakota Corbitt was shot by a police officer who aimed for an inquisitive dog, missed, and hit the young boy instead.

In Ohio, police shot 4-year-old Ava Ellis in the leg, shattering the bone, after being dispatched to assist the girl’s mother, who had cut her arm and was in need of a paramedic. Cops claimed that the family pet charged the officer who was approaching the house, causing him to fire his gun and accidentally hit the little girl.

In California, 13-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a police officer who mistook the boy’s toy gun for an assault rifle. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest.

These children are more than grim statistics on a police blotter. They are the heartbreaking casualties of the government’s endless, deadly wars on terror, on drugs, and on the American people themselves.

Then you have the growing number of incidents involving children who are forced to watch helplessly as trigger-happy police open fire on loved ones and community members alike.

In Texas, an 8-year-old boy watched as police—dispatched to do a welfare check on a home with its windows open—shot and killed his aunt through her bedroom window while she was playing video games with him.

In Minnesota, a 4-year-old girl watched from the backseat of a car as cops shot and killed her mother’s boyfriend, Philando Castile, a school cafeteria supervisor, during a routine traffic stop merely because Castile disclosed that he had a gun in his possession, for which he had a lawful conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times as he was reaching for his license and registration.

In Arizona, a 7-year-old girl watched panic-stricken as a state trooper pointed his gun at her and her father during a traffic stop and reportedly threatened to shoot her father in the back (twice) based on the mistaken belief that they were driving a stolen rental car.

In Oklahoma, a 5-year-old boy watched as a police officer used a high-powered rifle to shoot his dog Opie multiple times in his family’s backyard while other children were also present. The police officer was mistakenly attempting to deliver a warrant on a 10-year-old case for someone who hadn’t lived at that address in a decade.

A Minnesota SWAT team actually burst into one family’s house, shot the family’s dog, handcuffed the children and forced them to “sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour.” They later claimed it was the wrong house.

More than 80% of American communities have their own SWAT teams, with more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually some small amount of drugs.

A child doesn’t even have to be directly exposed to a police shooting to learn the police state’s lessons in compliance and terror, which are being meted out with every SWAT team raid, roadside strip search, and school drill.

Indeed, there can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying instructions).

For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).

Cops have even gone so far as to fire blanks during school active shooter drills around the country. Teachers at one elementary school in Indiana were actually shot “execution style” with plastic pellets. Students at a high school in Florida were so terrified after administrators tricked them into believing that a shooter drill was, in fact, an actual attack that some of them began texting their parents “goodbye.”

Better safe than sorry is the rationale offered to those who worry that these drills are terrorizing and traumatizing young children. As journalist Dahlia Lithwick points out:

“I don’t recall any serious national public dialogue about lockdown protocols or how they became the norm. It seems simply to have begun, modeling itself on the lockdowns that occur during prison riots, and then spread until school lockdowns and lockdown drills are as common for our children as fire drills, and as routine as duck-and-cover drills were in the 1950s.”

These drills have, indeed, become routine.

As the New York Times reports:

“Most states have passed laws requiring schools to devise safety plans, and several states, including Michigan, Kentucky and North Dakota, specifically require lockdown drills. Some drills are as simple as a principal making an announcement and students sitting quietly in a darkened classroom. At other schools, police officers and school officials playact a shooting, stalking through the halls like gunmen and testing whether doors have been locked.”

Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.

What is particularly chilling is how effective these lessons in compliance are in indoctrinating young people to accept their role in the police state, either as criminals or prison guards.

If these exercises are intended to instill fear, paranoia and compliance into young people, they’re working.

As Joe Pinsker writes for The Atlantic:

These lockdowns can be scarring, causing some kids to cry and wet themselves. Others have written letters bidding their family goodbye or drafted wills that specify what to do with their belongings. And 57 percent of teens worry that a shooting will happen at their school, according to a Pew Research Center survey from last year. Though many children are no strangers to violence in their homes and communities, the pervasiveness of lockdowns and school-shooting drills in the U.S. has created a culture of fear that touches nearly every child across the country.

Sociologist Alice Goffman understands how far-reaching the impact of such “exercises” can be on young people. For six years, Goffman lived in a low-income urban neighborhood, documenting the impact such an environment—a microcosm of the police state—has on its residents. Her account of neighborhood children playing cops and robbers speaks volumes about how constant exposure to pat downs, strip searches, surveillance and arrests can result in a populace that meekly allows itself to be prodded, poked and stripped.

As journalist Malcolm Gladwell writing for the New Yorker reports:

Goffman sometimes saw young children playing the age-old game of cops and robbers in the street, only the child acting the part of the robber wouldn’t even bother to run away: I saw children give up running and simply stick their hands behind their back, as if in handcuffs; push their body up against a car without being asked; or lie flat on the ground and put their hands over their head. The children yelled, “I’m going to lock you up! I’m going to lock you up, and you ain’t never coming home!” I once saw a six-year-old pull another child’s pants down to do a “cavity search.”

Clearly, our children are getting the message, but it’s not the message that was intended by those who fomented a revolution and wrote our founding documents. Their philosophy was that the police work for us, and “we the people” are the masters, and they are to be our servants.

Now that philosophy has been turned on its head, fueled by our fears (some legitimate, some hyped along by the government and its media mouthpieces) about the terrors and terrorists that lurk among us.

What are we to tell our nation’s children about the role of police in their lives?

Do we parrot the government line that police officers are community helpers who are to be trusted and obeyed at all times? Do we caution them to steer clear of a police officer, warning them that any interactions could have disastrous consequences? Or is there some happy medium between the two that, while being neither fairy tale nor horror story, can serve as a cautionary tale for young people who will encounter police at virtually every turn?

Certainly, it’s getting harder by the day to insist that we live in a nation that values freedom and which is governed by the rule of law.

Yet unless something changes and soon, there will soon be nothing left to teach young people about freedom as we have known it beyond remembered stories of the “good old days.”

For starters, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s time to take a hard look at the greatest perpetrators of violence in our culture—the U.S. government and its agents—and do something about it: de-militarize the police, prohibit the Pentagon from distributing military weapons to domestic police agencies, train the police in de-escalation techniques, stop insulating police officers from charges of misconduct and wrongdoing, and require police to take precautionary steps before engaging in violence in the presence of young people.

We must stop the carnage.

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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].

If Great Britain keeps its commitment to switch over its vehicles to electric by 2050, the government will see a whopping loss of 28 billion pounds ($35 billion) paid by motorists driving traditional gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.

That comes from a study released Friday by London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies examining the impact of the UK’s net-zero greenhouse gas emissions law adopted in June and signed by previous Prime Minister Theresa May. England became the first G7 country to set the goal of reaching zero net emissions by 2050.

Fuel duties on petrol-powered vehicles make up almost 4 percent of total government receipts — and all of that will disappear unless urgent action is taken, according to think tank IFS’ study. The government may need to take a new approach to taxing motorists as all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles become the norm, the study advises.

The UK’s mission to switch over to EVs and renewable energy by 2050 represents “a huge long-run fiscal challenge” for the government, according to the study.

The government faces other hits on tax revenue. The UK will be seeing a drop of about 20 billion pounds a year ($24.5 billion) from the government’s new policy of freezing tax duties to help people struggling with the cost of living, the IFS said. There’s also concern that another 1 billion pounds ($1.229 billion) could be lost if Prime Minister Boris Johnson follows through on his commitment to cut duties by 2 pence per liter of fuel.

“The government should set out its long-term plan for taxing driving, before it finds itself with virtually no revenues from driving and no way to correct for the costs -– most importantly congestion –- that driving imposes on others,” said Rebekah Stroud, an IFS economist who co-authored the report.

Duty on unleaded gasoline and diesel has remained frozen at 57.95 pence per liter since 2011, accounting for 1.3 percent of England’s GDP. The fuel recently has been costing 126.9 pence per liter, of which 57.95 pence is duty — about 45 percent of the total fuel cost.

The think tank recommends implementing taxes on EVs soon, as car owners are becoming used to avoiding these duties on their fuel. New motoring taxes should reflect distance driven and vary according to when and where the trips take place in the vehicle. A flat-rate tax per mile driven could be another taxation model used, according to the study.

Prime Minister Johnson used his platform at the Conservative Party conference last week to advocate for continuing support in the net-zero emissions mandate by mid-century. Johnson has a strategy to be put into place advocating investments made in EV production, energy reduction in all new homes, and the planting of one million trees to combat climate change.

The Tory party has a much larger policy question to address first — what to do about Brexit. The UK is due to leave the European Union at the end of this month.

The new prime minister isn’t interested in hearing arguments made by protesters warning of imminent disaster from climate change. Thousands of climate change protestors blocked London’s roads and bridges on Oct. 8 to launch a two-week long demonstration. That led to the Metro police arresting 280 activists.

Johnson was perturbed to see tents pitched just yards away from the front door at No. 10. He labelled them “uncooperative crusties and protesters.”

He had more to say about them, branding them “importunate nose-ringed climate change protesters.”

Electric vehicle sales have been gaining traction in England, with September sales reaching 12,883 — which is 97.7 percent more than a year ago and the best month ever on record. Battery electric vehicles are seeing more of the gain — at 25,097 this year, up 122 percent year-over-year. At 22,773 units sold this year, plug-in hybrids were down 29.2 percent year-over-year.

The Tesla Model 3 has been shining in the UK market, with over 2,000 deliveries in August. It was the top-selling model of any kind in London for the second month in a row as of the end of September.

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Jon LeSage is a California-based journalist covering clean vehicles, alternative energy, and economic and regulatory trends shaping the automotive, transportation, and mobility sectors.

Trump, House and Senate officials threatened sanctions on Turkey for its cross-border offensive in Syria.

On Monday, Trump OK’d their imposition by the US Treasury — despite green lighting Turkish aggression before launched, withdrawing US troops from northeast Syrian areas Ankara is attacking.

Separately, his UN envoy vetoed a Security Council resolution and rejected a next-day statement, condemning Turkish aggression.

He betrayed Kurdish YPG fighters — used by the Pentagon and CIA as proxy foot soldiers against Damascus.

Now they’re allying with government forces to try preventing Turkish troops from seizing more Syrian territory in areas bordering both countries.

Erdogan wants as much as he can control, notably Syrian oil-producing areas he long coveted.

Most likely, Kurdish fighters will be integrated into the Syrian Arab Army against the common Turkish foe, Damascus gaining control over US heavy weapons and equipment supplied them.

Pentagon, UK, and French forces in northern Syria, along with private military contractors (PMCs), are being moved to neighboring Iraqi and perhaps Jordanian areas bordering Syria.

Overall, the US is increasing its regional military footprint by deploying thousands of troops and heavy weapons to Saudi Arabia, elevating the risk of further hostilities in a part of the world already boiling from US aggression in multiple theaters.

Congressional sanctions were threatened on Turkey, not imposed so far. Rhetoric isn’t policy.

Trump said he’ll “soon be issuing an Executive Order authorizing the imposition of sanctions against current and former officials of the Government of Turkey and any persons contributing to Turkey’s destabilizing actions in northeast Syria.” More below on his Monday remarks.

On the same day, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on Turkey’s war and energy and natural resources ministries, including their leadership.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said further sanctions may follow “as necessary.” Secondary sanctions may be imposed on “persons that engage in certain transactions with persons designated today.”

“(A)ny foreign financial institution that knowingly facilitates any significant financial transactions for or on behalf of the persons designated today could be subject to US correspondent or payable through account sanctions.”

“(T)oday’s action does not (intend to) disrupt Turkey’s ability to meet its energy needs.”

Assets and property of sanctioned Turkish officials in the US, if any, are “blocked.”

Trump ordered tariffs on Turkish steel imports raised to 50%, their level last spring before reducing them, a slap on the wrist action.

He’s suspending talks with Ankara on a “$100 billion dollar trade deal” — a temporary measure unless the bilateral breach widens further.

He accused Turkey of “serious human rights abuses, obstructing a ceasefire, preventing displaced persons from returning home, forcibly repatriating refugees, or threatening the peace, security, or stability in Syria.”

He ignored these and countless other hostile US actions against the Syrian Arab Republic — launched by Obama, escalated on DJT’s watch.

Notably they include mass slaughter and destruction in Raqqa, terror-bombing vital infrastructure, causing hundreds of thousands of Syrian deaths since 2011, the severest refugee crisis since WW II, and other high crimes of war and against humanity.

Turkish aggression in northern Syria is minor by comparison to the US rape and destruction of one country after another in the Middle East and elsewhere.

All forms of aggression are the highest of high crimes, far exceeding others — especially when entire populations of targeted countries are affected, notably in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, along with all-out US economic terrorism against Iran and Venezuela, war by other means.

Trump falsely claimed he’s “worked tirelessly to preserve the safety and security of the United States and its citizens.” Endless US wars with more likely threaten everyone everywhere.

He turned truth on its head, claiming the US and allies “liberated 100 percent of ISIS’ ruthless territorial caliphate.”

He’s a geopolitical know-nothing, aware only of what his handlers tell him and Fox News rubbish, his favorite TV channel.

He may not know that the US created ISIS, al-Qaeda, its al-Nusra offshoot, and likeminded jihadist groups, using them as imperial foot soldiers, training them on Pentagon bases, arming, funding and directing them, the CIA involved in what’s going on.

Saying “Turkey must…prioritize the protection of civilians” ignores their rape and slaughter by US, NATO, and Israeli forces in all their wars of aggression.

His other high-minded rhetoric belies US-led Western/Israeli contempt for ordinary people domestically and abroad.

Turkish aggression isn’t “precipitating a humanitarian crisis” in Syria. It’s escalating what the Obama regime began, continued by Trump.

Nor will Ankara’s actions facilitate an ISIS resurgence, what the US has full control over, their fighters used where the Pentagon and CIA want them deployed.

Trump said US forces withdrawn from northern Syria will “remain in the region,” including in southern Syrian territory bordering Iraq and Jordan.

“I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path,” he roared — what he clearly won’t do short of a rupture in bilateral relations, possible ahead, but hasn’t occurred.

The Trump regime has done more to encourage Turkish aggression than oppose it.

Betraying Kurdish YPG fighters is further proof US ruling authorities can never be trusted — time and again abandoning allies to other priorities.

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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.

Founded in 1946 as a fledgling enterprise, today’s NBA is big business.

Winning is all about big bucks for management and players, along with growing valuation of NBA franchises, on average worth nearly $2 billion.

The most highly valued are NY Knicks and LA Lakers worth $4 billion and $3.7 billion respectively, nine franchises worth over $2 billion.”

All franchises combined are threefold more valuable than five years ago — their last season’s revenue around $8 billion, yet half of what NFL teams earn.

Television is the NBA’s most significant revenue generator, $24 billion alone from ESPN and TNT, more from local contracts, followed by merchandising, ticket sales, sponsorships, concessions, and other revenue sources.

The NBA was the first professional league to earn a significant amount of its revenues from merchandising, marquee players cashing in big on their own prominence.

In the past decade, average franchise valuations tripled. Post-WW II, major league baseball was most popular. Today its popularity is third after pro football and basketball.

NBA popularity is global. Decades earlier, nearly all players were American. Today around one-fourth are nationals of 37 other countries.

According to Forbes, NBA revenues generated outside the US are growing at double-digit rates annually.

The league doesn’t disclose amounts by countries. It did indicate $150 million came from China in 2012, likely much more last season.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the “Houston Rockets were China’s team” — before general manager Daryl Morey’s unacceptable tweet (now deleted), expressing support for months of violent Hong Kong protests saying: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

Perhaps Morey doesn’t know that US dirty hands all over what’s going on in the city, violence and disruption targeting Beijing, aiming to weaken and destabilize the country — how the US operates against all nations it doesn’t control.

Morey’s offense was compounded by NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s defense of his free expression right. An NBA statement said the following:

“We recognize that the views expressed by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey have deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.”

“(T)he values of the league support individuals…sharing their views on matters important to them.”

“We have great respect for the history and culture of China and hope that sports and the NBA can be used as a unifying force to bridge cultural divides and bring people together.”

Morey’s damage control remarks haven’t softened outrage in China so far, tweeting:

“I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”

“I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention. My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA.”

China accounts for around 10% of league revenues, its market potential estimated to reach 20% by 2030, why the NBA and team owners are greatly concerned about the fallout from Morey’s offensive tweet.

A second Adam Silver statement fueled more backlash, saying:

“The NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say. We simply could not operate that way.”

“I do know there are consequences from freedom of speech. We will have to live with those consequences. For those who question our motivation, this is about far more than growing our business.”

China is justifiably furious over remarks by Morey and Silver. A statement by its Houston consulate expressed “strong dissatisfaction,” adding:

“Anybody with conscience would support the efforts made by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to safeguard Hong Kong’s social stability.”

Beijing cancelled broadcasts of NBA pre-season games. Sponsors began cutting ties with the Rockets, what could affect other teams, perhaps the entire league.

Li-Ling Sportswear suspended ties to the NBA. The Chinese Basketball Association canceled planned exhibition games with NBA G League affiliates of both the Rockets and Dallas Mavericks.

Regular season Houston Rockets games won’t be televised in China — last season reaching an audience exceeding 600 million viewers for all NBA games.

Tencent Sports suspended live telecasts, last season reaching nearly 500 million viewers.

As of Friday, 11 NBA Chinese partners suspended ties to the league.

CTrip, China’s largest online travel website “dropped all NBA-related tickets and travel products” from its platform, a statement said.

Mengniu Dairy, Dicos fast foods, Changhong Electric, Master Kong beverages, eHi Car (rental) Services, appliance maker Meiling, financial services firm Xiaoying Technology, Luckin Coffee, and other Chinese firms suspended ties to the NBA.

Chinese social media users called for boycotting league events. Media access for visiting NBA teams playing exhibition games was cancelled.

On October 7, Bloomberg News headlined: NBA China Woes Threaten Billions of Dollars, Decades’ Work,” saying:

Efforts since the 1980s to build league ties to China are “in jeopardy,” saying NBA games “drew 800 million total viewers in China last year.”

League games are big business, China the NBA’s second most important market after the US.

Trump’s war on China by other means over major unresolved structural issues, including scores of its enterprises blacklisted, complicates things further.

Morey’s tweet landed the Houston rockets “in China’s doghouse,” said the WSJ. The fallout impacted the entire league.

Yahoo Sports said several teams are planning “for a scenario in which the cap for the 2020-21 season could drop between 10 and 15 percent due to the current situation between the NBA and China.”

An open letter by hardline congressional members called on NBA officials to suspend ties to China until “government-controlled broadcasters and government-controlled commercial sponsors end their boycott of the NBA activities and the selective treatment of the Houston Rockets.”

For now, it’s unclear how or when what’s going on will be resolved.

*

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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.

This coming October 22nd will mark 7 years since the Global Research News Hour radio program made its debut not only on the Global Research website but also on the public airwaves as a community radio program.

To date, we have continued to broadcast the show on a weekly basis, inviting expert speakers to highlight many of the important topics that get under-addressed or by-passed completely in other fora. These include probing analysis into 5G technology and its health risks, the very real threat of nuclear war as a danger to human and all life, climate disruption and the environmental movement, ISIS and the White Helmets, US-NATO involvement in the wars on Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the role of foundation-funded non-profits in reinforcing propaganda narratives, ‘responsibility to protect’ as an imperial construct, and much, much more.

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Christianity in its present form came into being after the eleventh century “Great Schism”(1054 AD) between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church. Before that, it used to be an exclusively Byzantine affair and most of Western Europe followed pagan customs. The reason why Catholic historians fabricated the history of ancient Roman civilization was to dissociate Christianity from its Byzantine heritage.

The theory that Christianity spread into Europe, and also in Russia, from the Byzantine Empire is validated by the fact that early Middle Ages – from 5^th to 10^th century, when the Byzantine Empire reached its zenith and a split occurred between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches in 1054 – are referred to as Dark Ages, whereas the period between 8^th century BC and 6^th century AD is rather ironically called Classical Antiquity.

There appears to be clear historical bias because in descending order, as we go back in time, the reliability of information reduces proportionally. Thus, the 11^th century recorded history of the Roman Catholic Church is comparatively credible, whereas Before Christ folklore transmitted mainly through oral traditions of fabulists is simply implausible.

Historically, on Christmas Day 800 AD, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, forming the political and religious foundations of Christendom and establishing in earnest the French monarchy’s longstanding historical association with the Roman Catholic Church.

Thus, ninth century appears to be a watershed moment of increasing proselytization of Europe to Christianity, which obviously had its impact in Britain and Germany later. After that, the influence of the Byzantine Empire, lasting from 4^th to 15^th centuries, waned and a rival power center emerged in the form of Roman Catholic Church patronized by kings of Franks and Lombards in Italy.

Evidently, Christianization of Eastern Europe and Russia is attributed to the Byzantine Empire and Western Europe to the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, the history of ancient Romans, whose empire purportedly fell in 476 AD to Germanic tribes, is nothing more than folklore and the history of the Roman Catholic Church in earnest began after the coronation of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor.

The title of Holy Roman Emperor remained with the Carolingian family of Charlemagne, the ruler of Franks, up to 840, and then it passed on to Germans when Otto I was declared Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 962. Thus, the Frankish Empire constituted the Holy Roman Empire during the early 9^th century, and then the title was assumed by the Germanic Empire for the next eight centuries.

The Germanic decentralized phase of the Holy Roman Empire never reached the glory of the Frankish Empire under Charlemagne and his successor Louis the Pious. They adopted Latin as the official language of the Empire to forge a political identity distinct from the Byzantine Greeks.

Carolingians jointly ruled over Franks and Lombards in Italy, thus the Roman Catholic Church was under their suzerainty, which at the time was nothing more than a diocese of the Eastern Orthodox Church. During the period of the Byzantine Papacy from 6^th to 8^th centuries, the title of the Pope was equivalent to the bishop of Rome.

Although according to oral traditions, the Roman Catholic Church was founded by the apostles of Jesus, St. Peter and Paul, and was recognized by Byzantine Emperor Constantine, it’s not proved by credible history and many secular historians doubt the assertion.

In the medieval era, the theological creed of the Eastern Orthodox Church was vilified as Arian heresy by the Roman Catholic Church to establish a monopoly over Christian faith in Western Europe. Arius was a theologian of the Antioch school in Hatay province of modern Turkey in 270 AD. Most of the Germanic tribes who in the following centuries invaded the Roman Empire had adopted Christianity in its Arian form, which later transformed into German Protestantism.

It is generally claimed that Byzantine Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and reorganized the Empire from 324 to 337 AD. Moreover, it is also alleged, albeit mistakenly, that under the reign of Heraclius (610–641), three centuries later, the Empire adopted Greek for official use in place of Latin.

Fact of the matter, however, is the Byzantine Empire wasn’t a monolith, as it had myriad dynasties of usurpers from Macedonia, Armenia etc. which spoke several East European dialects, but Latin was never introduced into the Byzantine Empire. In fact, the Byzantine Empire appears to be a continuation of Alexander’s Hellenistic Empire, as both had their arch-foes in the ancient kingdoms of Persia – Achaemenids and Sassanids.

The Justinian dynasty is generally regarded as the Golden Age of the Byzantine Empire that lasted from 518 to 602 AD. During the reign of Justinian I (527–565), the Empire reached its greatest extent after reconquering much of the western Mediterranean coast, North Africa, Italy, and Rome itself, which it held for two more centuries.

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

Last Friday a 155 mm artillery shell landed 300 metres from a US command post near the Syrian bordering city of Ayn al-Arab (known by the Syrian Kurds as “Kobane”) during an ongoing operation carried out by Turkey – a NATO and a US ally. This operation aimed to dislodge, at a distance of 30-35 kilometres from the border, the US-backed Kurdish militants known as the YPG, the Syrian branch of the US-EU-NATO designated terrorist group, the “Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The Turkish troops backed by Syrian proxies had rapidly advanced in the first week of the military operation into US-occupied Syrian territory, cutting the main roads and attempting to isolate their enemies.

These two swift events were enough to ring the alarm bells and straightaway pushed the US administration to announce, via the Secretary of Defence Mark Esper, the withdrawal of approximately 1,000 US troops from north-east Syria (NES). The killing of any US soldier in Syria would effectively have been a nail in the coffin of the US President Donald Trump’s electoral campaign in 2020. France and Britain, who maintain Special Forces in NES, will follow the US forces out of Syria.

The Syrian forces were given orders to deploy in NES following a deal between Russia and Turkey, and between Russia and the Syrian officials, to guarantee the safety of the separatist Syrian Kurds.

The Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed to guarantee the safety of the Kurds as long as these become part of the National Security Forces. No other conditions were put forward by the Kurds, who have lost momentum with the sudden US withdrawal. Damascus promised there will be no revenge or resentment measures towards the Kurds who have, for years, acted as human shields to protect the US occupation forces which remained in Syria notwithstanding the defeat of ISIS.

The Russian-Kurdish deal consists of the deployment of the Syrian army on all borders with Turkey and the return of all sources of energy (gas and oil) to the Syrian government-controlled forces. These sources of energy are vital to the Syrian government, which has been suffering under heavy US-EU sanctions. Any delivery of oil was blocked, except the crude oil from Iran, whose supertanker managed to breach the siege.

The initial agreement between the Kurds and Damascus (via Russia) consists in the ending of the self-administration of NES, the integration of the Syrian Kurds under the command of the Syrian Army, and the pursuit and destruction of all ISIS forces.

A US withdrawal from the al-Tanaf border crossing between Iraq and Syria is also expected when a solution is found for the 64,000 refugees at the Rukhba camp.

All motivation and benefits offered to the US to maintain occupation forces in Syria have ceased: the “Iranian danger” is no longer on the table following the re-opening of al-Qaem border crossing. Therefore, to maintain US forces on the borders when no more “adverse” forces will remain in the country will needlessly cost Trump more money and engage responsibility uselessly.

Clearly the motive to keep US forces in Syria until a new constitution is agreed no longer interests or concerns the US. Trump is leaving this problem to Russia and Turkey to sort out (with the support of Iran!) with President Assad.

Imposing sanctions on Syria is meaningless now and preventing the Arabs’ rapprochement no longer holds any justification. All Arab countries – with the exception of Qatar – expressed solidarity with President Assad and condemned the Turkish invasion. The return of the Arabs will construct a robust base for the reconstruction of Syria. The Syrian market is attractive to Arab countries, and this commercial contact will bring also their influence back to the Levant. President Assad doesn’t mind closing the pages of war and starting a new and positive relationship with the Middle Eastern countries, and he will allow these to enjoy some influence, as was the case before 2011.

Sanctions on Iran have lost their meaning and purpose when al-Tanaf regains its activity, with al-Qaem. Iranian goods will find their way into the Syrian market and vice versa. The Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus-Lebanon road is expected to regain strength and significance.

Trump announced his withdrawal without informing his allies. The US-EU partnership on the ground has fallen apart. US credibility is at its lowest level following its attitude towards the Kurds who had defended the Trump forces in exchange for a State, “Rojava”.

The US sanctions on Turkey were simple words without foundation. Trump threatened to impose sanctions on Turkey if it crossed the red line, beyond 35 kilometres- only to call for a total withdrawal two days later.

The US elite’s attempt to demonise Russia has fallen apart: Moscow is the saviour of the Kurds, betrayed by the US. The supporters of the Kurds were fanatically supporting the Kurds and asking to avoid their extermination by Turkey: now they can no longer turn their guns and pens against Russia. Here comes Russia, with Assad moving in to save them.

The Kremlin is gaining ground in the Middle East, perfecting its diplomacy in a very complicated area of the world:  the US is running away from it. Moscow took in its arms these same Kurds who had chosen to stay for years in US arms. President Vladimir Putin has skilfully managed to establish a good relationship with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Assad and Israel, with Hezbollah, and with the Syrian rebels: even with Turkey.

There are many winners in Syria today, and these include Trump- who is running away to avoid human casualties (as he promised in his campaign). The Kurds are the only real losers as they have lost 11,000 people for a State they only dreamt would materialise one day. Although they bet disastrously on the wrong (American) horse, in the end, they saved their lives by switching mentors.

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A recent journal article about GM mosquitoes has caused quite a stir. It showed that some of the male mosquitoes that Oxitec Ltd released experimentally in Brazil had successfully interbred with the local mosquito population, and that their hybrid offspring were now spreading and propagating beyond the release area. This despite Oxitec claiming its mosquitoes had a lethal gene that made them “self-limiting“.

The paper came under immediate attack. No surprise there, you might think, as many studies drawing attention to problems with GMOs have come under ferocious attack following publication. Often this involves demands for retraction and the deluging of journal editors with irate correspondence – campaigns of attack for which there is good evidence of corporate orchestration.

But this time there’s a difference because the attacks by Oxitec, the company behind the GM mosquitoes, have since been joined by one of the paper’s co-authors, biochemist Margareth Capurro from the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Indeed, according to an article for Science, Dissent splits authors of provocative transgenic mosquito study, Capurro isn’t just complaining about the paper – she and “several co-authors have reportedly requested that it be retracted”.

So who are the paper’s authors and why are they apparently at war with each other? The study was conducted by a Yale University team led by population geneticist Jeffrey Powell, who collaborated with Brazilian researchers to collect and analyze DNA from mosquitoes before, during, and after the release of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes. Powell’s collaborators included Capurro and colleagues at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and these appear to be the authors demanding the retraction.

It’s worth mentioning though that these Brazilian co-authors are not as independent of Oxitec as one might assume. Capurro and her colleagues had an agreement with Oxitec to monitor the effects of the Brazilian release. Indeed, Capurro seems to have been collaborating with Oxitec for years. She is the coordinator for the evaluation of all the field releases of Oxitec GM mosquitoes in Brazil. And she has co-authored papers with multiple Oxitec affiliates.

It is also worth noting that Capurro is the “principal investigator” for a completely separate project, not involving Oxitec, to produce transgenic mosquitoes. A press release notes that the project Capurro is leading “has already inspired the creation of several biofactories to produce transgenic insects around the world.” In other words, Capurro’s research centres almost entirely on projects that are completely dependent on public acceptance of GM mosquito releases.

So what are Capurro’s reasons for objecting to her own paper? Although she only seems to have engaged with the journal Science about this through her lawyer, she has spoken “exclusively” and in some detail about why she wants a retraction to the Brazilian science publication Questão de Ciência (A Question of Science).

Here Capurro distances herself from the paper by placing the blame for its contentious content entirely on the lead author, Jeffrey Powell, claiming “not to have been part of – and least of all approved – the final version of the manuscript”. This is somewhat surprising as the submission process normally demands an assertion from the submitting author that all co-authors have seen and approved the final manuscript.

Capurro’s main complaint about the published paper is that there is nothing unexpected about its results, even though the study shows that many offspring of the GM mosquitoes survived and are spreading and propagating. According to the paper, between 10-60 percent of the mosquitoes in the region concerned inherited parts of the genome of the mosquitoes released in the trials. These findings are also confirmed in neighbouring regions where no such trials were conducted.

Capurro doesn’t dispute these findings but argues instead that “it was already known that up to 4% of the males escaped the lethal gene and developed into adults. Some degree of mating with the local population with healthy offspring was completely anticipated and poses no surprise.” In other words, nothing to see here – no reason for concern. This was all entirely to be expected.

Except this is not what Oxitec has been telling the world. Take for instance this statement on their website explaining “Our Science” and specifically their lethal gene: “The self-limiting gene is at the heart of our method of insect control. When our male insects are released and reproduce with wild females, *all* of their offspring inherit a copy of this gene” (our emphasis).

Similarly, as Christophe Boëte, who works on host-parasite interactions with a particular focus on vector-borne diseases, has pointed out, even in the scientific literature the Oxitec mosquito (OX513A) has been presented as “sterile”. He gives the example of a paper by Lacroix et al, which in its title describes the OX513A mosquito as a “Genetically Engineered Sterile Male Aedes aegypti” and in its text describes it as “an engineered ‘genetically sterile’ (OX513A)” strain.

If this is how Oxitec’s mosquitoes have been described in the scientific literature, then it seems plausible that people living in the areas where these field releases have been taking place have also been given the impression that Oxitec’s mosquitoes are incapable of successfully reproducing.

And there is clear evidence that this is indeed the case in a paper published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. It reports on the findings of a survey into local residents’ “awareness and support” for the field release of Oxitec’s OX513A mosquito in two places in Florida. The authors write that because these male mosquitoes’ mating “results in death of offspring in the larval or pupal stage of gestation… outreach activities in the area preceding the survey referred to the mosquitoes as ‘sterile.’”

So local residents were given the impression Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes could NOT produce viable offspring. Indeed, because of this, the survey team themselves included the word “sterile” in the survey that they did with local residents, “because this term had been used in community awareness activities and should have been familiar to those who had heard of the proposed release”.

If this was the impression given to the communities in Florida, then there is little reason to think that the communities in Brazil will have been provided with more accurate information. We know this because after the Powell et al paper was published, the views of a former Brazilian regulator who had written a detailed report on the concerns the project raised were reported in the Brazilian press.

In his report Dr José Maria Gusman Ferraz had called on his fellow regulators to suspend the release of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes until further health and environmental impact studies had been undertaken. And Dr Ferraz specifically noted Oxitec’s failure to make clear the survival rate of their mosquitoes, and the lack of studies on their mating with local mosquito populations. He accused Oxitec of reducing local people to mere guinea pigs who were neither properly informed nor meaningfully consulted about the risks involved.

And Oxitec may not be the only ones failing to properly inform and consult people affected by GM mosquito releases. Just in the last week, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper ran the headline ‘We don’t want to be guinea pigs’: how one African community is fighting genetically modified mosquitoes. The article about a Target Malaria project in Burkina Faso reported how “several villagers anonymously told the Telegraph they had not been made aware of any risks associated with the experiment. ‘They didn’t tell us about the risks, only the advantages,’ a farmer said.”

A film made in Burkina Faso about the Target Malaria project also argues that the project does not have proper consent from the affected communities for its experiment, and it includes interviews with local people who say that they have not been properly informed. These concerns around consultation and consent have also been raised by a group of 43 civil society organisations from Africa and around the world.

The issue of informed consent in relation to such projects is also raised in a recent article by a group of experts specifically interested in fostering public engagement on the environmental release of genetically modified organisms intended to alter wild species. They point to the “unknown risks” involved in GM mosquito releases and directly accuse Oxitec of failing both to adequately assess and properly consult on those risks:

“Given that ‘around 5 per cent or less’ of the GM mosquito population was expected to survive, shouldn’t Oxitec have made plans to assess the risk of gene transfer to wild populations during their initial trials? And shouldn’t the Brazilian government have required such an assessment as part of the regulatory approval process, given their awareness of the risk?

“Instead, with approval from Brazilian authorities, Oxitec released nearly half a million GM mosquitoes every week into shared environments in Jacobina over a two-year period from 2013 to 2015. This was done without the benefit of adequate risk assessment and without proper public consultation.”

But like Oxitec, Dr Capurro argues that neither the survival nor the gene transfer are of any concern. They say the genes transferred by the Oxitec mosquitoes to their surviving offspring are not transgenic. They also claim that as OX513A mosquitoes are a laboratory strain, their offspring will be less fit for survival in the wild, and both attack the Powell et al paper’s claim that the offspring may instead have “hybrid vigour” as mere speculation. But their claims about the impact of gene transfer to wild populations are equally speculative. They’re based on assumptions, not evidence.

Despite this, Oxitec has filed a complaint about the paper with the journal, Scientific Reports. On 17 September, the journal added an editor’s note to the study, promising “a further editorial response” to criticisms raised about the conclusions.

Powell told Science magazine that he stands by the validity of the paper’s data and analysis. He said the paper clearly states that the effects of DNA spread from the Oxitec strain aren’t known and it raises some possible consequences without claiming that they’ve been proven. And indeed, the wording of the paper does seem to be far more cautious than Powell’s critics imply, e.g. “Thus, Jacobina Ae. aegypti are now a mix of three populations. It is *unclear* how this *may* affect disease transmission or affect other efforts to control these dangerous vectors” (our emphases).

We suspect that if the GM mosquito developers’ interests were not involved, objections to Powell et al’s paper would have been far less strident. We are particularly baffled by the extremity of the demands for retraction of the paper, rather than the more proportionate and customary approach, which is to request the journal to publish a correction or clarification. No one has produced any evidence that the Powell paper meets any of the proper criteria for the retraction of a study. These are unreliable findings (involving misconduct or honest error), redundant publication, plagiarism, and unethical research.

The criteria for retraction do not include “failure to further qualify an already qualified hypothetical statement” or “upsetting a GMO developer company and those affiliated with it”. So if the paper does end up being retracted, someone is going to have to come up with some creative reasoning as to why.

In the meantime, the concerns are unlikely to go away about how adequately the uncertainties around these GMO releases are being explored and disclosed, and the extent to which those affected by these experimental releases are being involved in the decision-making about them.

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Featured image is from GMWatch

Once again, the left is rising in Latin America as people revolt against authoritarian regimes, many of whom were put in place by US-supported coups. These regimes have taken International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and are under the thumb of international finance, which is against the interests of people.

After the embattled President of Ecuador claimed that President Nicolas Maduro was the cause of the massive protests against him, Maduro made clear what was occurring in Latin America, saying:

“We have two models: the IMF model which privatizes everything and takes away the people’s rights to health, education and work; and the humanist-progressive model which is emerging in Latin America and has the Bolivarian Revolution at the forefront.”

Maduro’s clear understanding of the conflict is why it has been so important for the US to remove him. His success in defeating ongoing US coup attempts is a model guiding Latin America to a future independent of US domination.

Ecuadorians celebrate the repeal of Decree 883. From Twitter.

Ecuador in Rebellion Against IMF and the US Puppet Moreno

On October 4, Moreno proclaimed the end of a 40-year policy of fuel and petrol subsidies, which had traditionally benefited his country’s working-class population. He also announced a 20 percent decrease in the salary of public employees and initiated plans to privatize pensions. He removed workplace and job security safeguards. Decree 883, known as ‘The Package’, was a series of neoliberal policies demanded by the IMF in return for a $4.2 billion dollar loan. It was preceded by policies for the wealthy including reducing their taxes.

The IMF loan was part of Moreno serving as a puppet and bowing to multiple US demands. Ecuador promised to settle a long dispute with Chevron whose oil drilling and pipelines have polluted the country. Tens of billions of dollars in restitution from Chevron are at stake but Moreno said he is willing to give them up. In fact, the IMF loan is strange in that it was dependent on Ecuador paying external debt obligations, i.e. it was not new funds for Ecuador but new debt to subsidize paying back Wall Street.

In making the announcement, Moreno called the people “Zánganos,” or Drone Bees leading to the uprising of the Drone Bees. The mass protests were called by the Popular Front, a group of unions, and the Unified Workers Federation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). Students and social movements joined protests throughout the nation in Loja, Guayaquil, Cuenca, Ambato, and Riobamba, among other cites as well as Quito, the capital. Moreno claimed without any evidence that the uprising was financed by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Correa.

Protests in Ecuador were relentless with no end in sight. They grew when 20,000 indigenous people marched into Quito. Police responded with violence, tear gas, and mass arrests. An October 4 video circulated on social mediashowed nonviolent protesters killed in the street by the police as well as other police violence. On October 5, Moreno declared a 60-day state of Emergency. Sometimes police had to retreat in the face of mass protests. On October 7, Moreno fled the capital to hide in the Navy base 260 miles away in the conservative stronghold of Guayaquil.

As we wrote this newsletter, unrest in Ecuador was escalating. On Saturday, the nation was put on military lockdown. Law enforcement attacked protesters with pellets and tear gas in the immediate vicinity of the  National Assembly. By Sunday, Moreno decreed a 3:00 pm curfew, which people defied. Then, facing an emergency session in the National Assembly, Moreno backed down. Protesters celebrated when Moreno’s government announced that Decree 883 had been repealed after eleven days of popular mobilizations.

Peter Koenig describes a root cause of the problems:

“Since January 2000, Ecuador’s economy is 100% dollarized, compliments of the IMF (entirely controlled by the US Treasury, by force of an absolute veto). The other two fully dollarized Latin American countries are El Salvador and Panama.”

The US and IMF used the economic crises of the 1990s to dollarize Ecuador’s economy and gain full control over the nation’s riches as Ecuador is the second-largest oil economy in South America. This led to unaffordable goods for Ecuadorians, social unrest and a series of unstable governments until President Correa, who served from 2007 to 17, was elected.

A Center for Economic and Policy Research 2017 report found under Correa Ecuador did well with an average annual GDP growth of 1.5%  compared to 0.6% average for the previous 26 years; a decline of 38% in poverty with extreme poverty reduced by 47%; and a decline in inequality with the Gini coefficient falling substantially. Correa doubled social spending from 4.3% in 2006 to 8.6% in 2016; tripling education spending from 0.7% to 2.1%; and, increasing public investments from 4% of GDP in 2006 to 10% in 2016.

Correa served two terms. A third term would have required a constitutional amendment. Rather than running, Correa endorsed Lenin Moreno who had served as his vice president from 2007-13. He was expected to continue Correa’s policies but instead reversed them.

Moreno was unpopular before announcing ‘The Package’ due to structural poverty increasing from 23.1 percent in June 2017 to 25.5 percent in June 2019 with projections of 30 percent by the end of the year. Injustices like the imprisonment of the popular former Vice President Jorge Glas on dubious charges and his continuous political witch hunt against Rafael Correa and other leaders of the Citizens’ Revolution Party added to his unpopularity. In addition, he has been engulfed in a personal corruption crisis involving an offshore Shell corporation INA, which cast Moreno’s presidency in doubt.

Moreno’s forcible and illegal ejection of Julian Assange from the London embassy in return for payoffs from the US and UK resulted in a national strike in Ecuador in July. This, along with the arrest of Ola Bini, who is being prosecuted falsely as a conspirator with Wikileaks, was unpopular with Ecuadorians.

Will repeal of ‘The Package’ end the protests and the threat to Moreno’s presidency? As we write, the answer to these questions are unclear. The people won a major victory, but the Moreno/IMF infection remains.

Rally in Argentina. By Enfoque Rojo.

Latin Americans Rising Against the Right and US Domination

Latin American countries are rejecting neoliberalism and US domination using multiple strategies to achieve change.

This month the deepening anti-capitalist movement in Bolivia is set to strengthen with the probable re-election of Evo Morales on October 20. Argentina is expected to remove right-wing President Mauricio Macri on October 27 and replace him with Alberto Fernandez. And, Mexico put in place its first progressive, left-of-center government with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on July 1, 2018. Elections are also upcoming in Uruguay on October 27 and in Peru in January. Venezuela may have National Assembly elections in January as well.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales has a 13-point lead in polls as his governing party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) looks to re-election for a third Morales term that will last until 2025. Morales has 38.8 percent, just 1.2 percent short of the 40 percent required for a first-round victory in the upcoming elections. The survey also indicated majority support for the nationalization of gas and strategic industries, 51 percent say that public ownership is positive for the economy. On social programs, 61.7 percent say they are essential for providing dignity to those of low incomes.

Morales has launched a large reforestation plan and put in place a model healthcare program. He is under attack from the United States and segments of Bolivia. Morales leads an independent, sovereign Bolivia that has rejected US dominance, decolonized and displaced neoliberalism. A recent color revolution attempt by the wealthy, with the support of the US and western powers, failed.

Argentina’s first round of voting on August 11 resulted in Fernandez, running with former president Cristina Kirchner, finishing 15 percent ahead of Macri. The surprising landslide brought into question Macri’s ability to govern between now and the election. As a result, the IMF put a $5.4 billion dollar loan on hold part of the $56.3 billion stand-by agreement signed in mid-2018. Fernandez opposed the loan, which required sharp budget cuts affecting public services at a time of increasing poverty.

Under Macri, the economy has gone into crisis with poverty increasing to a record 36.4 percent, a recession accompanied by a 47 percent inflation rate in 2018 and an inflation rate of 25.1 percent during the first seven months of this year. Argentina’s unemployment is at the highest level in 14 years. Poverty was at 19.7 percent when Kirchner left office in 2015. Fernandez has put forward an anti-hunger plan, not dependent on the IMF. Three weeks before the election, thousands of people rallied in Buenos Aires as the Workers Left Front sent a message of opposition to neoliberalism and austerity to the two major political parties.

In Mexico, AMLO won a landslide 53 percent of the vote on July 31 ending decades of right-wing rule. People were fed up with the corruption, impunity, and violence — decades of loss of rights, pillaging and destruction of the nation’s wealth and public enterprises. At his inauguration, AMLO decried 36 years of neoliberalism and public and private corruption, promised a “peaceful and radical” transition with “indigenous people as its priority,” in a government “for the good of all, first the poor.” His fight against neoliberalism is challenged by NAFTA II (or the USMCA), as AMLO is careful not to confront Trump on this. On border policy, AMLO offered migrants home in Mexico and urged investment in Central America.

The Zapatistas have conflicted with AMLO over the exploitation of resources and the use of the military in policing, demanding its autonomy based on indigenous principles but he has sought diplomacy with them. AMLO has also faced massive strikes of tens of thousands of autoworkers, workers at US companies in Mexico and wildcat strikes at the border. AMLO has been a counterweight to US aggression in Latin America standing with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

Peru is in the midst of a crisis. President, Martin Vizcarra, who came into office after a corruption scandal removed his predecessor, dissolved the Congress, a move supported by the left, because it is controlled by far-right politician Keiko Fujimori and was preventing Vizcarra’s anti-corruption campaign. Congress ignored the president’s order and voted to remove him from office instead. The vice president resigned rather than take over and Vizcarra remains in office with the support of the military. He has now called for new congressional elections to be held on January 26. Vizcarra is a conservative battling the oligarchic right. The left, which has been divided, is coalescing around the Popular National Assembly and allying with social movements. The movements want an end to neoliberal policies, a Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution and to break with Washington’s domination.

In Central America, Honduras has been in revolt against the coup government of Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), which for ten years has put in place neoliberalism, repression, and violence. Protests have been ongoing since his coup and fraudulent re-election. This summer, protests intensified with a national strike over austerity and privatization measures required by an IMF loan, leading to a 66-day uprising. The US has trained Honduran police to use repressive measures in an attempt to stop the protests, but their actions feed more protests.

Many have fled Honduras to escape the corruption and violence in caravans. Now, a coalition of civil groups is urging the president’s departure over a scandal ignited by accusations of large-scale drug trafficking to the United States being litigated against the president’s brother Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez. In the trial, several witnesses have declared JOH’s campaign was financed with drug money, and that he took millions in bribes from various Mexican drug lords, including the infamous Joaquin “El-Chapo” Guzman. The Liberal Party joined in calling for his resignation and protests have intensified. The trial may be the end of this cocaine-fueled presidency.

Brazil’s election of Bolsonaro has been marred by scandal now that the corruption of Operation Car Wash has been exposed. Private conversations between the prosecutors and then-judge Sergio Moro, now Super Minister of Justice, show that former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was the “victim of a conspiracy” to prevent him from running against Bolsonaro.  In the secret exchanges, Moro admitted that the corruption case was designed to frame him. Lula has said the US is behind the conspiracy.

Calls to free Lula are increasing and the Supreme Court will be reviewing the case. Lula is demanding his record be cleared and refused a panicked offer from prosecutors that he be freed from jail and put under house arrest. Bolsonaro is also under attack for the Amazon fires, for an increase in police killings, for genocide against the Indigenous and for attacks on public education. Former President Michel Temer acknowledged that the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, the Worker’s Party leader, was a coup d’etat.

Nicaragua survived a 2018  US coup attempt and the revolution continues to thrive after 40 years of independence from US domination after US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza fled. People were very confused about what happened in the 2018 coup attempt as media misinformation was prevalent. A group of us joined produced a reader to help people understand the reality of Nicaragua. Peace is coming back to Nicaragua, even though continued pressure from the US is expected in the form of new illegal sanctions.

Venezuela, which we have reported on intensively for years, has also survived ongoing coup attempts that continue to escalate in the post-John Bolton era of the Trump administration most recently with a threat of warthrough the Organization of American States (OAS). They are prepared for a military attack and have created new alliances to overcome the US economic war. This week, Russia announced it was investing $16.5 billion in Venezuela by the end of 2019.

Russia has provided anti-missile defense systems, is keeping  Navy ships in Venezuela to deter a US blockade and has helped gather intelligence on US actions. With their help, Venezuela has uncovered terrorist plots coming from Colombia and involving  US-puppet Juan Guiado’s team. Guaido has faltered and failed time and again, and now is being investigated for ties to Colombian drug traffickers and corruption.

The non-aligned movement of 120 nations met in Caracas this summer and expressed support for Venezuelan sovereignty.  Venezuela has been a lynchpin for left movements in Latin America. When oil prices were high, it shared its wealth not only with poorest Venezuelans but with other countries seeking to challenge US and oligarch domination. Even in the midst of an escalating economic war with the United States, they continue to provide housing, food, and essentials to their people.

Protesters in Haiti. Twitter.

Caribbean Resistance

In the Caribbean, Cuba is challenged by the US economic war but continues its revolution. Mass protests in Haiti threaten the survival of the government and Puerto Rico’s revolt removed a governor.

Cuba, despite the increasing US economic war, continues to be a bulwark against US imperialism, standing with governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua when they are under attack. Cuba completed a successful transition to a new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and voted on a new constitution developed using a participatory process involving 9 million people through 133,000 citizen meetings. The constitution includes “universal and free health, education, sports and recreation, culture and respect for human dignity.”Cuba is currently facing major economic challenges as the US is blocking their access to oil. Russia and Venezuela are helping Cuba overcome this oil blockade.

Haiti has been in protest since April calling for an end to neoliberal US domination and the resignation of Jovenel Moise. The president has not spoken in public since the beginning of this latest round of protests and this week he named a commission of seven politicians to lead discussions for a solution to end the crisis.

In Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States, massive protests led to Governor Ricardo A. Rosselló resigning on July 22, 2019. People also want the corrupt legislature cleaned out, the Fiscal Control Board, created by Obama, ended and the debt to be audited. Former political prisoner, Luis Rosa, said three things are needed: “decolonization, an end to our colonial status through a constitutional assembly; health care, free for all Puerto Rican citizens; and free public education up through the university level.”

Stephen Sefton wrote a country-by-country review of Latin America and the Caribbean in June describing the decline of the United States in the region and how changes were coming to many nations. He predicted that we are seeing “the last throw of the dice for the US to retain its accustomed power and influence against the relentless fundamental drive for emancipation by the region’s impoverished majority.”

Rafael Correa said, “Neoliberalism is what failed, not socialism of the 21st century, on the contrary, socialism of the 21st century is what has us firmly on our feet, withstanding all of these difficulties.” This hemisphere is a key battleground in the conflict between neoliberalism v Socialism and US dominance v. independence. People are demanding democracy from the bottom up and a fair economy that meets their needs.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. 

The discussion, if one might even call it that, regarding the apparent President Donald Trump decision to withdraw at least some American soldiers from Syria has predictably developed along partisan, ideologically fueled lines. Trump has inevitably muddied the waters by engaging in his usual confusing explanations coupled with piles of invective heaped upon critics. The decision reportedly came after a telephone call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but what exactly was agreed upon and who else might have been present in the room to report back to the intelligence community remains uncertain. Trump clearly believed that he had obtained some assurances regarding limits to any proposed Turkish military action from Erdogan, who almost immediately launched air attacks followed by ground troop incursions against the former U.S. supported Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

It should be observed that the Syrian incursion by the American military, which was initiated by President Barack Obama and his band of lady hawks during the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011, was illegal from the gitgo. Syria did not threaten the United States, quite the contrary. Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was Washington that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003, which later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which were, at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.

When American soldiers first arrived in Syria the U.S. War Powers act was ignored, making the incursion illegal. Nor was there any mandate authorizing military intervention emanating from any supra-national agency like the United Nations. The excuse for the intervention was plausibly enough to destroy ISIS, but the reality was much more complex, with U.S. forces in addition seeking to limit Iranian and Russian presence in Syria while also bringing about regime change. The objectives were from the start unattainable as Iran and Russia were supporting the Syrian Army in doing most of the hard fighting against ISIS while the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was not threatened by a so-called democratic alternative which only existed in the minds of Samantha Powers and Susan Rice.

Unwilling to see large numbers of Americans coming home in caskets, the United States inevitably began to search for proxies to carry out the fighting on the ground and wound up willy-nilly arming, training and otherwise supporting terrorists, to include the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces eventually became the principal tool of the U.S. military, but it must be observed that the Kurds in all likelihood had no illusions about the staying power of their American patrons. They were fighting Syrian forces as well as ISIS because they were seeking to carve out their own homeland of Kurdistan from the ruins of the Syrian state. Their expansion into northern Syria, aided by the U.S., was at the expense of the local population, which was overwhelmingly not Kurdish. Their occupation of that area was not reported honestly in the U.S. media, but other sources suggest that their behavior was often brutal.

So the lament about abandoning one’s Kurdish allies has a kernel of truth, but the Senator Lindsey Graham response, to include sanctioning Turkey, should be considered to be little more than a dangerous misstep that would lead to acquiring a new and more powerful enemy. And, of course, the argument in favor of leaving the Kurds to their fate found its most ridiculous expression from the mouth of Donald Trump himself, who, up until recently had praised the Kurds as friends who had “fought and died for us.” Trump is now observing that “they [the Kurds] didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy.” As President Trump did not serve his country in Vietnam due to alleged bone spurs and his father Fred likewise did not serve in the military, the comment is particularly ironic. Trump’s surname was changed from the original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs present at Normandy they were undoubtedly on the German side.

Trump’s wild responses to criticism do indeed constitute the principal reason why a sound policy to, as he put it, to stop the “stupid, endless wars” should be raising so many flags. His telephone conversation with Erdogan almost immediately produced a warning to the Turks that the United States would “destroy” or even “obliterate the Turkish economy,” presumably if the creation of a buffer zone inside northern Syria would prove to be “off limits” in the opinion of the White House. Trump elaborated that “Turkey has committed to protecting civilians, protecting religious minorities, including Christians, and ensuring no humanitarian crisis takes place—and we will hold them to this commitment,” a pledge that will surely be impossible to honor as the first two days of the Turkish offensive killed over 100, including sixteen Kurdish militiamen.

And the Turks will indeed do what they can to eliminate the Kurdish military capability along its border with Syria, even if it includes creation of a demilitarized zone or perhaps something more than that. It is for them a vital national interest that is completely supported by the Turkish people. Whoever was advising Trump surely did not understand the Turkish mindset regarding the Kurdish threat, which they regard as existential.

By way of background, Turkey has been engaged in suppressing a bloody insurgency, fighting the Kurdish terrorist group the PKK for over thirty years. The Kurds on the Syrian side of the border, the SDF, are undeniably affiliated with the PKK on the Turkish side. The Turkish Army, which is one of the most powerful in NATO, will do whatever is necessary to crush them. Trump should have realized that before he started talking.

And then there is the fact that Turkey is a NATO partner in good standing. Article 5 of the NATO agreement stipulates that if an alliance member is threatened, other members must support it in its defense. Turkey has not made that claim, but it is completely plausible that it should do so.

Is there a way out? There have been some suggestions that the Kurds could make nice with the Damascus government and rely on the protection of the Syrian Army to deter the Turks, an option that they have already begun to exercise. Well maybe, but one has to recall that the Kurds have been trying to defeat that very government up until now and al-Assad may not want to play ball unless there are substantial Kurdish concessions. Or the Turks might be willing to escalate their own offensive to take on the inferior Syrian Army and the Kurds together. Erdogan is just crazy enough to do that.

Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump’s actual record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more soldiers to no good purpose in support of America’s longest war in Afghanistan, has special ops forces in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in Venezuela, continues to support Saudi Arabia and Israel’s bloody attacks on their neighbors and has exited to from treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed conflict less likely. And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting than all of his predecessors. These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to end wars even if one does not consider the economic warfare that is currently taking place through the use of sanctions that is reportedly killing tens of thousands.

So should one take Donald Trump seriously when he says he wants to end the pointless wars? Perhaps not, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he should be judged by his actions, not by his words and, apart from the withdrawal of a handful of soldiers from the actual front lines in Syria, nothing has changed. It is quite possible that nothing will change.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Designer Jehad Naji, 29, pictured here with his wife Haneen Abu Samhadana, had the idea of designing a currency for Palestine after a British journalist asked him about which currency to use during a visit to Gaza.

Naji had to explain to him that there was none and that Palestinians have to use the Israeli shekel (Sanad Abu Latifa)

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A Alemanha, a França, a Itália e outros países que, em trajes de membros da União Europeia, condenam a Turquia pelo ataque à Síria, são, juntamente com a Turquia,  membros da NATO, a qual, quando já estava em curso o ataque, reiterou o seu apoio a Ancara. Fê-lo oficialmente, o Secretário Geral da NATO, Jean Stoltenberg, encontrando-se em 11 de Outubro na Turquia, com o Presidente Erdoğan e com o Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Çavuşoğlu.

“A Turquia está na primeira linha, nesta região muito volátil, nenhum outro Aliado sofreu mais ataques terroristas do que a Turquia, ninguém está mais exposto à violência e à turbulência proveniente do Médio Oriente”, disse Stoltenberg, reconhecendo que a Turquia tem preocupações “legítimas” com a sua própria segurança”. Depois de, diplomaticamente, tê-lo aconselhado a “agir com moderação”, Stoltenberg salientou que a Turquia é “um Aliado valoroso da NATO, importante para a nossa defesa colectiva”, e que a NATO está “fortemente empenhada em defender a sua segurança”. Para esse fim – especificou – a NATO aumentou a sua presença aérea e naval na Turquia e investiu mais de 5 biliões de dólares em bases e infraestruturas militares. Além do mais, colocou um comando importante (não mencionado por Stoltenberg): o LandCom, responsável pela coordenação de todas as forças terrestres da Aliança.

Stoltenberg evidênciou a importância dos “sistemas de defesa antimísseis” inseridos pela NATO para “proteger a fronteira sul da Turquia”, fornecidos em rotação pelos Aliados. A este respeito, o Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Çavuşoğlu agradeceu, em particular, à Itália. Desde Junho de 2016, a Itália instalou na província turca do sudeste, em Kahramanmaraş, o “sistema de defesa aérea” Samp-T, produzido em conjunto com a França. Uma unidade Samp-T compreende um veículo de comando e controlo e seis veículos lançadores, cada um armado com oito mísseis. Situados perto da Síria, eles podem abater qualquer avião no espaço aéreo sírio. Portanto, a sua função, é tudo menos defensiva. Em Julho passado, a Câmara e o Senado, com base na decisão das comissões estrangeiras conjuntas, deliberaram prolongar, até 31 de Dezembro, a presença da unidade de mísseis italiana na Turquia. Stoltenberg também informou que estão em curso negociações entre a Itália e a França, produtores conjuntos do sistema de mísseis Samp-T e a Turquia, que deseja comprá-lo. Neste ponto, com base no decreto anunciado pelo Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Di Maio, para bloquear a exportação de armas para a Turquia, a Itália deveria retirar imediatamente o sistema de mísseis Samp-T do território turco e comprometer-se a não vendê-lo à Turquia.

Continua, assim,  o trágico teatro da política, enquanto na Síria o sangue continua a jorrar. Os que hoje ficam horrorizados com os novos massacres e pedem para bloquear a exportação de armas para a Turquia, são os mesmos que voltaram a cabeça quando o próprio New York Times publicou uma investigação detalhada sobre a rede da CIA, através da qual chegavam à Turquia, também da Croácia, rios de armas para a guerra camuflada na Síria (il manifesto, 27 de Março de 2013 e Réseau Voltaire). Depois de ter demolido a Federação Jugoslava e a Líbia, a NATO tentou a mesma operação na Síria. A força do choque era constituída por um exército agressivo de grupos islâmicos (até há pouco rotulados por Washington como terroristas) provenientes do Afeganistão, da Bósnia, da Chechénia, da Líbia e de outros países. Eles afluíam às províncias turcas de Adana e Hatai, na fronteira com a Síria, onde a CIA tinha aberto centros de formação militar. O comando das operações estava a bordo de navios da NATO, no porto de Alessandretta. Tudo isto é suprimido e a Turquia é apresentada pelo Secretário Geral da NATO como o Aliado “mais exposto à violência e à turbulência do Médio Oriente”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

La Nato dietro l’attacco turco in Siria

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Germania, Francia, Italia e altri paesi, che in veste di membri della Ue condannano la Turchia per l’attacco in Siria, sono insieme alla Turchia membri della Nato, la quale, mentre era già in corso l’attacco,  ha ribadito il suo sostegno ad Ankara. Lo ha fatto ufficialmente il segretario generale della Nato Jean Stoltenberg, incontrando l’11 ottobre  in Turchia il presidente Erdoğan e il ministro degli esteri Çavuşoğlu.

«La Turchia è in prima linea in questa regione molto volatile, nessun altro Alleato ha subito più attacchi terroristici della Turchia, nessun altro è più esposto alla violenza e alla turbolenza  proveniente dal Medioriente», ha esordito Stoltenberg, riconoscendo che la Turchia ha «legittime preoccupazioni per la propria sicurezza». Dopo averle diplomaticamente consigliato di «agire con moderazione», Stoltenberg ha sottolineato che la Turchia è «un forte Alleato Nato, importante per la nostra difesa collettiva», e che la Nato è «fortemente impegnata a difendere la sua sicurezza». A tal fine – ha specificato – la Nato ha accresciuto la sua presenza aerea e navale in Turchia e vi ha investito oltre 5 miliardi di dollari in basi e infrastrutture militari. Oltre a queste, vi ha dislocato un importante comando (non ricordato da Stoltenberg): il LandCom, responsabile del coordinamento di tutte le forze terrestri dell’Alleanza.

Stoltenberg ha evidenziato l’importanza dei «sistemi di difesa missilistica» dispiegati dalla Nato per «proteggere il confine meridionale della Turchia», forniti a rotazione dagli Alleati. A tale proposito il ministro degli esteri Çavuşoğlu ha ringraziato in particolare l’Italia. E’ dal giugno 2016 che l’Italia ha dispiegato nella provincia turca sudorientale di Kahramanmaraş  il «sistema di difesa aerea» Samp-T, coprodotto con la Francia. Una unità Samp-T comprende un veicolo di comando e controllo e sei veicoli lanciatori armati ciascuno di otto missili. Situati a ridosso della Siria, essi possono abbattere qualsiasi velivolo all’interno dello spazio aereo siriano. La loro funzione, quindi, è tutt’altro che difensiva. Lo scorso luglio la Camera e il Senato, in base a quanto deciso dalle commissioni estere congiunte, hanno deliberato di estendere fino al 31 dicembre la presenza dell’unità missilistica italiana in Turchia. Stoltenberg ha inoltre informato che sono in corso colloqui tra Italia e Francia, coproduttrici del sistema missilistico Samp-T, e la Turchia che lo vuole acquistare. A questo punto, in base al decreto annunciato dal ministro degli Esteri Di Maio di bloccare l’export di armamenti verso la Turchia, l’Italia dovrebbe ritirare immediatamente il sistema missilistico Samp-T dal territorio turco e impegnarsi a non venderlo alla Turchia.

Continua così il tragico teatrino della politica, mentre in Siria continua a scorrere sangue. Coloro che oggi inorridiscono di fronte alle nuove stragi e chiedono di bloccare l’export di armi alla Turchia, sono gli stessi che voltavano la testa dall’altra parte quando lo stesso New York Times pubblicava una dettagliata inchiesta sulla rete Cia attraverso cui arrivavano in Turchia, anche dalla Croazia, fiumi di armi per la guerra coperta in Siria (il manifesto, 27 marzo 2013). Dopo aver demolito la Federazione Jugoslava e la Libia, la Nato tentava la stessa operazione in Siria. La forza d’urto era costituita da una raccogliticcia armata di gruppi islamici (fino a poco prima bollati da Washington come terroristi) provenienti da Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cecenia, Libia e altri paesi. Essi affluivano nelle province turche di Adana e Hatai, confinante con la Siria, dove la Cia aveva aperto centri di formazione militare. Il comando delle operazioni era a bordo di navi Nato nel porto di Alessandretta. Tutto questo viene cancellato e la Turchia viene presentata dal segretario generale della Nato come l’Alleato «più esposto alla violenza e alla turbolenza  proveniente dal Medioriente».

Manlio Dinucci

The US and Russian military officers met late last night in Al Farat, a small village north of Manbij, northeast of Aleppo, according to media ‘Al Mayadeen’. 

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The purpose of the meeting was to coordinate military movements in the area. As a result, the US military removed equipment from Manbij to an unknown location.   According to eyewitnesses, who reported to the Russian media ‘Sputnik’, 4 US military vehicles left Manbij traveling toward Al Golan Bridge, which connects Manbij with Ayn al Arab (Kobane). Analysts believe this paves the way for a major Syrian Arab Army (SAA) incursion into Manbij, accompanied by Russian security forces to prevent the city’s fall to the Turkish army inits military campaign, dubbed ‘Operation Peace Spring’.

The proposed military operation will consist of the SAA, and the Russian security forces moving into Manbij with heavy military equipment, to secure the city and establish control after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the US pulled out. Sources have informed ‘Sputnik’, the city is empty of all Kurdish associated with the SDF, and those remaining are Syrian Arab citizens, who are eagerly awaiting the SAA and the Russians to enter Manbij and declare its liberation from occupation by the SDF, and the Kurdish state known as ‘Rojava’.

The Turkish military has adapted their operation, as a result of the US-Russian meeting last night, and will avoid Manbij and neighboring Tel Refat. The SAA received reinforcements at Al Araimah, between Manbij and Al Bab which is under occupation by the Turkish backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), a Syrian mercenary militia who are the ground forces used by Turkey to invade northeastern Syria. Russian Security Forces are patrolling the outskirts of Manbij.

Manbij had a population of nearly 100,000 before 2011, and the population was largely Arab, with Kurdish, Circassian and Chechen minorities.  Manbij was captured by the Kurdish militia, SDF in summer 2016 from the ISIS occupiers, with the help of the US military. Prior to the planned offensive to oust ISIS from Manbij, the US had asked the Turkish to participate; however, Turkey refused because the US has partnered with the Kurdish militia SDF, which is closely aligned with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), and the PKK, who is an internationally recognized terrorist group, responsible for about 40,000 deaths in Turkey spanning 30 years.  The US decided to rely on the SDF alone, and the operation was successful. After Manbij was cleared of ISIS the Kurds began displacing non-Kurds, and settling Kurdish families there, and instituting a non-Syrian governmental structure called ‘Rojava’, which is the name the Kurds have given their ‘autonomous administrative state in northeast Syria’ (NES), with its headquarters in Qamishli.

“Our allies had guaranteed us protection … but suddenly and without warning, they abandoned us in an unjust decision to withdraw their troops from the Turkish border,” the SDF said in a statement.

The SDF and YPG had fought alongside the US military to defeat ISIS from Syria; however, in a surprising betrayal US Pres. Trump suddenly ordered his troops to withdraw, which effectively gave Turkish Pres. Erdogan the green-light to begin an ethnic-cleansing operation against the Kurds in northeast Syria, with the ultimate goal of changing the population into Syrian Arabs, after his proposed ‘safe-zone’ settles Syrian refugees in Turkey there, most of which are Pro-Erdogan and Pro-Muslim Brotherhood.

The Syrian refugees in Turkey are predominately people who were aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood sponsored ‘Arab Spring’ and left Syria because they were opposed to the secular Syrian government.  The FSA was a jihadist militia that had the support of Pres. Obama, NATO and the EU in a bid for ‘regime change’. However, their mission failed after 8 years of war, 500,000 dead, and 10 million displaced.  Turkey was one of the key actors in the US-NATO-EU plan, and was not only the transit point of the international terrorists traveling to fight in Syria, and the safe-haven for Syrian refugees, but was a Muslim Brotherhood governed country, as the AKP party and its leader, Pres. Erdogan was transforming a secular Turkey into an Islamist State.

“Let them have their borders, but I do not think our soldiers should be there for the next 15 years guarding a border between Turkey and Syria when we cannot guard our own borders,” Trump said while addressing the Values Voters Summit’s Faith, Family, and Freedom Gala dinner on Saturday.

While this speech was being delivered, 100,000 Kurdish civilians were fleeing their homes to shelter in schools at Hasseka, south of the battle-zone. Recently, Russian military officials landed in Hasseka airport to negotiate with the SDF in hopes of reconciling the Kurdish autonomous region, NES, with the Syrian central government in Damascus.

Today, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in an interview aired on ‘Face the Nation’ said,

“We also have learned in the last 24 hours that ….. the SDF, are looking to cut a deal if you will with the Syrians and the Russians to- to counter-attack against the Turks in the north.” He added, “We got to see how this plays out. But again we’ve got to take this one step at a time. It’s a very fluid situation it’s changing by the hour.”

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a Middle East Observer.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse