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National Security and Press Freedoms in Australia

July 22nd, 2019 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Pitfalls of Economic Globalization

July 21st, 2019 by Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

This incisive article was first published on June 26, 2015‘

Nations that trade with each other make themselves mutually dependent: if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are based on mutual needs.’ Montesquieu, (Charles Louis de Secondat), (1689-1755)

 ‘An agreement [with the U.S.] to harmonize trade, security, or defence practices would, in the end, require Canada and Mexico to… cede to the United States power over foreign trade and investment, environmental regulation, immigration, and, to a large degree, foreign policy, and even monetary and fiscal policy.’ Roy McLaren (1934-), former Canadian liberal trade minister, (1983)

‘The greatest happiness principle: The greatest happiness of the greatest number of people is the foundation of morals and legislation.’ Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

Professor Rodrigue Tremblay

One of the most important phenomena of the last quarter century, and without a doubt the most significant in the economic field, but also in the political field, has been the rise of economic globalization. This has brought the increased interdependence of national economies and a rise in competition, not only between corporations but also between countries.

This interdependence and competition have increased much more quickly than could have been envisaged, 25 or 30 years ago, with the result that international economic integration today greatly exceeds the realm of international trade to encompass the international mobility of corporations and the integration of financial and money markets. In some areas dominated by technology, especially in the field of digital and information technology, we already live in a world almost without national borders. The consequences of increased globalization are not only economic; they are also political and social.

But globalization also means a greater complexity of economic relations and an increased vulnerability of national economies to shocks from outside. This requires, for a given country, that the net benefits resulting from globalization must be greater than the net losses of any nature arising from such greater complexity and greater vulnerability.

Beside the purely economic costs of complexity, there are social and political costs that arise from such enhanced global economic complexity.

 Indeed, the increased complexity of international economic and financial relations has had the effect of increasing the costs of political transactions and may have impaired the good functioning of domestic democratic systems by reducing the possibility for citizens to be adequately informed about issues that concern them and, if necessary, to be able to raise objections. Socially, it has also meant that the economy is less embedded in a larger social system; it is rather the social system that has been compressed and has become embedded in an increasingly globalized economy.

 A primarily political global project has also been grafted upon economic globalization, mainly under American auspices, with the avowed purpose of weakening and subverting the national consciousness of people in their sovereign nation states, through the promotion of “multiculturalism” within countries and through the equally important aim of dismantling the welfare state system and the social safety net erected after the Second World War in most Western countries, and replace them with an essentially anti-democratic and oligarchic globalist system.

In the end, we shall conclude that the increased complexity of the global economic system over the last quarter century has had a general consequence: it has resulted in increasing the power and incomes of the CEOs of large corporations and of mega banks as never seen before, as well, to the lesser extent, of those of politicians and bureaucrats, at the expense of the less educated segments of the population and the less mobile people generally, thus weakening the democratic spirit and practices in many countries.

I- Main causes of economic globalization

There have been two revolutions behind the phenomenon of economic globalization.

-The first was the digital technology revolution, which can be seen as a new industrial revolution. This appeared with basic innovations that were, among others, the computer, the Internet as a global computer network, and telecommunications satellites, the latter enabling communication almost instantly to the four corners of the planet.

-The second revolution was the collapse, in 1991, of the Soviet empire and its centralized communist economic system. It has been said that this politico-economic revolution heralded the “triumph of (corporate) capitalism” worldwide and its decentralized and scarcely regulated markets.

Over the last quarter century, the rush towards economic globalization has accelerated. Its three main components are:

– Firstly, the globalization of trade relations;

– Secondly, the industrial and technological globalization; and

– Thirdly, the overall financial globalization (financial, banking and monetary).

These three sides of economic globalization have not had the same effect on all people and on every country.

It is therefore necessary to identify the net effects for each of these three components of overall economic globalization. Indeed, it was expected, at least in theory, that the move towards economic globalization would strengthen the economic integration of countries, generate some convergence of national economies by increasing their productivity levels and their economic growth, reducing global poverty, and creating, in addition, a better climate for world peace.

In practice, we can say today that this view was perhaps too optimistic, and we must recognize that the results of economic globalization in the past quarter century have been more complex and less inevitable than some would have believed.

That is because economic globalization and enhanced international competition have resulted in consequences that have certainly been positive for some people, but they have also created perverse effects for certain categories of workers, as well as for governments and their populations, because of the increased international mobility of corporations and of financial and banking institutions, and not just for those that are inherently ‘multinational’ in nature.

In other words, economic globalization has created net winners and net losers, and it would be good to establish a provisional assessment of these results, even if it is only a partial synopsis of a complex phenomenon.

II- The globalization of trade relations

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 marked an acceleration of the movement towards multilateral trade liberalization of the previous decades that had been undertaken under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the latter having been created in 1947.

Indeed, during the last quarter century, world exports have grown at an exponential rate of 6.0 percent in volume, a much faster rate than the average annual rate of growth in world real output, which progressed at the pace of a little less than 4.0 percent between 1990 and 2010. However, we observe that since the financial crisis of 2008-09, there has been a break in world trade growth, global exports growing presently at a pace that approximates overall world economic growth, which ranges from two to four percent annually.

Of the three components of the phenomenon of economic globalization, trade globalization is probably the least deserving of criticism. There is even a fairly broad consensus among economists that, all things considered, its net effects have been more positive than negative.

Consumers have benefited greatly, as a result of lowered prices and better quality for a wider range of imported products and services. The other big winners of the growth in multilateral trade are owners of capital in general (higher yields) and officers of large corporations (increased incomes and revenues).

On the negative side, in many industrialized countries, least skilled workers have faced personal losses due to unemployment and stagnant or falling real wages. The same can be said about some industries that have faced increased international competition and have suffered contractions, relocations and some form of de-industrialization.

Overall, empirical studies on these issues have arrived at the conclusion that the gains reaped by industrialized countries from a better international division of labor have outweighed the losses, and that this has created a win-win situation for most countries.

It would appear that for industrialized countries, the problems arising from enhanced international trade are primarily a problem of distribution of the net gains in order to compensate the losers in proportion to their losses.

In other words, this is a matter of public policy and of social justice. It is thus up to a government, for example, to make sure that workers displaced by international competition are compensated and retrained.

If we consider all countries, the newly industrialized countries of Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, etc.) have profited greatly from increasing trade globalization, and they have also been on the receiving end of industrial globalization, as we will discuss later. Their rates of economic growth and of industrial catching up have simply been all but phenomenal.

III- Industrial and technological globalization

Alongside the globalization of trade relations of the last quarter century, the world has also experienced a similar explosion in foreign direct investment (direct capital inflows and outflows). Thus, the share in GDP of all countries of foreign direct investment has increased from 11 percent on average in 1980 to 34 percent on average in 1998. Since the financial crisis of 2008-09, however, foreign direct investment has also experienced a sharp downturn. It reached a historical high in 2007 of 2,000 billion$. Six years later, in 2013, foreign direct investment had dropped 30 percent from its 2007 peak.

The international mobility of corporations, their technologies and their capital, is much more problematic than trade globalization as such, which is based on the comparative advantages of trading countries, in a general context of international immobility for people between countries and of currency fluctuations to equilibrate each country’s balance of payments.

We cannot put on the same footing free trade, with rules against dumping and unfair competition and fluctuating exchange rates, and the free international movement of corporations, their technologies and their capital when labor is mostly immobile.

In the first case, we are dealing with international trade of goods and services based on comparative advantages in resources, manpower and technology in each country, which encourages specialization in production and which generates economies of scale, productivity gains and increases in living standards in all countries, even if the net gains are not evenly distributed among countries.

On the other hand, when corporations transfer their capital and their technologies from one country to another, this has the potential of modifying the economic comparative advantages of each country. This is a much more problematic component of economic globalization than simply free trade, because it is not impossible then that one country ends up a net loser while another is a net winner of such transfers.

Outsourcing production from one country to another could become a substitute to international trade between countries. The exception is when international trade within a corporation increases both ways. 

A process of deindustrialization can result for the country losing its most productive industries, thus translating into problems of productivity and of economic growth, while national governments are unable to face the challenge properly. As I have alluded to before, this is not inevitable. When industrial globalization translates into more intra-firm trade and if a country’s total exports increase, a country can be a net winner of industrial globalization. For example, if a car manufacturer in a developed country transfers an assembly activity in a low-wage countries but exports from its national base engines and other specialized parts, the country can emerge a net winner from such production outsourcing. This becomes an empirical question. That is why a national government should monitor the situation closely.

It is a fact, however, that industrial globalization has made it increasingly difficult for a national government to pursue its own industrial policy. Indeed, nowadays, most of so-called ‘free trade agreements’ are in fact ‘agreements for the free international movement of corporations’ and have clauses that prevent national governments from actively pursuing an industrial policy to boost a country’s industrial productivity and raise the real wages of its workers. Moreover, these ‘agreements on free movement of companies’ are usually negotiated in secret and are often adopted by blindfolded politicians. It goes without saying that such an industrial disarmament by nations may erode the benefits expected from trade globalization and industrial specialization.

We may have here a reason why popular sentiment, especially in Western countries, is turning against comprehensive de facto ‘trade and investment agreements’ because they are wrought in secrecy, because they gave too much weigh to corporate prerogatives and their gimmicks to avoid paying taxes to local governments, because they have resulted in wage stagnation, unemployment, income inequalities and deindustrialization in many advanced economies, without compensations for the net losers, and because the governments of some large nations cannot resist dangerously mixing economics and politics and pushing smaller nations around.

Industrial globalization can also raise a tax fairness issue and one about income and wealth inequalities between different categories of taxpayers when corporations and the most internationally mobile workers insist on tax cuts from national governments. The latter are thus obliged to increase regressive tax rates on the incomes of ordinary workers and on their consumer spending.

National governments may also be called on to compete downward between themselves when the time comes to formulate some industrial regulations, or implement social policies or environmental preservation policies.

IV- Financial globalization (financial, banking and monetary)

If industrial globalization is problematic in its effects, financial globalization, (financial, banking and monetary), is even more dubious, considering the high level of speculation that surrounds the international movements of finance capital.

International borrowing and lending have been around for a long time. For instance, in the 19th century, savers from rich countries made it possible to fund major infrastructure projects in poorer countries. The inflows and outflows of portfolio capital (bonds, stocks, etc.) benefit both savers and borrowers and encourage trade. Indeed, a country that is a net borrower is also a net importer, and the opposite is true from a lender country’s perspective. Such international borrowing and lending are factors of economic efficiency and should be encouraged.

The international integration of financial markets reflects an objective reality, i.e. the reality that some countries generate external surpluses and other external deficits. The international mobility of savings is in itself a good thing from an economic point of view. What is important is that countries can retain their power to regulate their financial and money markets, and maintain domestic control over their banking sector.

In recent decades, however, mega banks and other financial institutions have exerted enormous political pressure to be exempted from national regulations. In the United States, for example, lobbies have succeeded in having the ‘Glass-Steagall Act’ abolished by the Clinton administration in 1999. That important law had been put in place in 1933 in order to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis of 1929. History will record that the abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act played a major role in paving the way to the financial crisis of 2008-09, a crisis whose harmful effects continue to be felt around the world.

When a nation loses its national sovereignty over financial, banking and monetary regulation, it largely loses the option to rely on price adjustments to correct imbalances in its external accounts, and it must instead rely on quantity adjustments through layoffs, cuts in public spending, tax increases, etc. This is a much more costly way, in terms of welfare, to improve a balance of payments.

For example, when a country suffers a drop in the external demand for its products while placed in the straightjacket of price rigidity, domestic prices and wages cannot move downward to correct an external deficit (and, conversely, cannot move upward to correct an external surplus).

Instead, the country must then resort to implementing so-called ‘austerity policies’ (cuts in public spending, increases in taxes, etc.), the latter having the negative consequences of slowing down domestic demand on top of the drop in international demand. As a result, the economy suffers two blows instead of one. Such an adjustment process to outside economic shocks creates an economic downturn that could translate into an economic recession (a drop in production and employment), hurting more severely some segments of the population than others.

This is a major structural problem within badly structured monetary unions, as it is currently the case in Europe within the euro zone, which encompasses economies with very high productivity levels, such is the case with the German economy, and other less productive economies, such as those of Greece or Portugal.

When no institutional mechanisms have been designed to transfer purchasing power between surplus countries and deficit countries, the rigidities of the single currency, (whatever its microeconomic benefits to businesses and consumers), can result in major macroeconomic problems. For instance, the common currency may be simultaneously undervalued for surplus economies and overvalued for deficit economies. Deficit economies must then rely on austerity measures to lower imports and increase exports, while surplus economies are more or less left outside the adjustment process.

Another severe drawback to financial integration (financial, banking and monetary) is the greater vulnerability of countries to external economic shocks and the transmission of economic and financial crises from one country to another.

The 2008-09 financial crisis is a good example of this phenomenon wherein a financial or a banking crisis originating in one country spreads quickly through financial and money markets from one country to another and affects the entire global economy. Financial crises are often the result of risky banking practices and of poorly regulated international financial and money markets.

Indeed, one of the consequences of increased financial integration has been the increased vulnerability of fragile economies to negative outside influences and a certain globalization of economic and financial crises, in a context where domestic governments are losing many of their instruments of intervention.

V- General conclusions

Is the world a better place today than it was twenty-five years ago? In certain aspects, the answer is yes; in some other aspects, the answer is no.

We can say that the overall economic globalization of the past quarter century has certainly had positive economic effects for several countries and their people, but that such globalization has perhaps gone too far, too fast, in some countries, especially since the global financial crisis of 2008-09.

Indeed, on one hand, trade globalization has resulted globally in economic benefits for consumers, for large corporations, their CEOs and for the most skilled workers. Some newly industrialized economies, such as the Chinese one, have also derived substantial benefits from economic globalization.

On the other hand, industrial globalization has set into motion a process of deindustrialization in many developed countries—especially in Europe—which has hurt small and medium businesses.

It has also concentrated the benefits of economic globalization on the most mobile factors of production (capital, corporations, new technologies) to the detriment of more immobile factors of production (labor, labor organizations and especially less-skilled workers).

Similarly, financial globalization has reduced the national sovereignty of most countries and lowered their governments’ capability to react to economic and social crises. The weakening of nation states and the disarmament of national governments in the face of international corporations and globalized mega banks are also important features or pitfalls of the overall movement towards economic globalization during the last quarter century.

How can we weigh the various elements of economic globalization? Have they benefited primarily an economic elite and left behind a trail of net losers, or have they benefited everybody to various degrees? It depends if we look at things from the viewpoint of a particular country or if we consider the entire world economy, and whether or not there are institutional mechanisms for the net winners of economic globalization to compensate the net losers.

For the global economy as a whole, the move towards economic globalization of the last quarter century has encouraged the spread of economic activity geographically, and it has resulted in a certain convergence of living standards, especially as the newly industrialized countries of Asia are concerned. On the other hand, this was made possible at the cost of a certain deindustrialization in many industrialized countries and of a rise in income and wealth inequalities in many countries. At the level of the particular country, the net economic results of economic globalization are an empirical question.

However, one thing stands out: globalization has profoundly changed the structure of social and political power within each country by strengthening corporate power and their leaders’ influence, and by decreasing the power of workers in general and of labor organizations in particular. There are indications that it has hurt the functioning of democracy in several countries.

One general conclusion in terms of economic policy: in the context of economic globalization, it would appear essential that national governments retain control over their financial and banking sectors, as well as over their monetary policies, if they want to avoid, in times of crisis, that their economies behave like a ship without a captain, without direction on a rough sea.

More generally speaking, because of so many hazards, I am afraid that the all-out economic globalization that is currently being imposed on nations and people alike risks imploding, sooner or later. This is a model that has too many economic and political pitfalls to persist without profound reforms. That is because it de facto transfers the real power in our societies from legitimate elected officials to officers of large corporations and of mega banks, and to owners of capital in general who, in turn, can use it to corrupt the political system to their advantage. —There exists a basic economic and democratic deficit to economic globalization that will not be easily corrected.

* Drawn from a conference by the author at the Humanist Symposium on Human Nature, held in Montreal, Saturday June 6, 2015.
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Video: 5G Apocalypse, The Imminent Dangers

July 21st, 2019 by debunkified

What is 5G? We need to know the dangers of this technology.

A full length documentary by Sacha Stone exposing the 5G existential threat to humanity in a way we never imagined possible!

Scientists, environmental groups, medical doctors and citizens around the world are appealing to all governments to halt telecommunications companies’ deployment of 5G (fifth generation) wireless networks, which they call “an experiment on humanity and the environment that is defined as a crime under international law.”

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Watch the video below.

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Video: US-China Trade War Explained

July 21st, 2019 by Soapbox

President Trump announced a followup of his ongoing trade war directed against China.

In May, he ordered the increase of tariffs on Chinese imports from 10 % to 25%, affecting a commodity flow of 200 billion dollars.

President Trump fails to understand that these trade restrictions directed against China are largely detrimental to the U.S. economy. 

“The Yellow Peril is back” 

“America’s is trying to contain China”

“China is destroying our economy.” China is leading in 5G Technology

It’s a New Cold War. Incisive video by the Soap Box. 

Video

 

 

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Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is in New York this week for high level talks at the UN. He has been confined to a six-block radius. It’s not uncommon for Iranian diplomats along with envoys from North Korea, Syria and Cuba to be confined to a broader radius of 25 miles.

Zarif’s movements, however, are limited to the UN Headquarters in Manhattan, the Iranian Mission to the UN, and the Residence of the Iranian Ambassador. Even with the restrictions placed on him with a limited visa, he has made time for a few interviews to discuss rising tensions with the United States and the Iran Nuclear Deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which President Trump unilaterally withdrew from fourteen months ago.

Last week, I wrote about Iran’s decision to increase uranium stockpiles and uranium enrichment past JCPOA limits. Zarif has stated time and time again that the JCPOA includes legal remedies under paragraph 36 once one side of the agreement starts violating the terms, the other side is “free to start partial implementation”. Zarif has said that this can be reversed within hours.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria, which will air this Sunday on CNN, Zakaria asked “do you think there could be war between the United States and Iran?” Zarif responded

“We will never start a war, we have never started a war… but we will defend ourselves and anybody who starts a war with Iran will not be the one who ends it”.

In other interviews and statements that Zarif has given recently, he has made it clear that although we are not close to a military war between the United States and Iran the US is presently engaging in an economic war by imposing harsh sanctions under its “maximum pressure campaign” and that these sanctions are affecting the most vulnerable members of Iranian society. Medicine and medical treatment are affected by US sanctions putting women, children, and the elderly at risk.

Zakaria wrote a column last week for the Washington Post titled, “Trump is strangling Iran. It’s raising tensions across the Middle East”. In his article he highlighted the incoherence of the Trump administrations strategy towards Iran, noting the White House News Release which stated that “There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms”.

Zakaria also noted the contradiction between Trump saying that he called off military strikes against Iran at the very last minute because he didn’t want to kill 150 Iranians, while simultaneously increasing sanctions which have caused a significant rise in mortality to the tune of over 150 deaths. Zakaria also wrote about the humanitarian crisis that the Trump administration has created in Iran and the geopolitical crisis in the Middle East, without creating a strategy to resolve either issue.

In a series of leaked memos that began about a week ago, UK Ambassador Kim Darroch called the Trump administration dysfunctional and inept. He also alleged that Washington didn’t have a strategy for what would happen following their unilateral withdrawal. In the most recent leaks Darroch says that Trump axed the Iran Nuclear deal to spite Obama. Darroch, who has now resigned as a result of these leaked memos, called Trump’s decision to abandon the international agreement “an act of diplomatic vandalism, seemingly for ideological and personality reasons” because the pact “was Obama’s deal.”

In response to questions about whether Iran will agree to negotiate a brand-new deal with the Trump administration, Zarif has made it clear that Iran is not interested in a new deal. That the JCPOA took twelve years of negotiations, and that it is the best deal that all parties involved can hope for.

In statements made to BBC HardTalk, such as “Once you start accepting illegal demands, there’s no end to it.”  And “If you allow a bully to bully you into accepting one thing, you will encourage him to bully you into accepting other things” Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister is highlighting Iran’s frustration with the current administration, their bully tactics, and the effect they have had on their European allies who are part of the deal. Zarif has said that the “three European countries” make nice statements, but that these statements do not provide relief for Iran. When asked during interviews about what it would take to find a solution for the deadlock, Zarif has said that all Iran wants is for the implementation of whatever was negotiated under the agreement.

Zarif also stated during the BBC interview with Zeinab Badawi that

“President Trump is being advised by people who are not interested in peace but advancing an agenda that they have had”.

Zarif said that although he doesn’t think President Trump wants to go to war that there are those close to Trump who are “crazy for war” and “thirst for war”.

Iranian officials have made it clear that if Iran wanted to build a bomb it could have already done so, but that they are not interested in building a nuclear bomb. Zarif has asked why Europe isn’t concerned with the fact that Israel has 200 nuclear warheads. The IAEA has made fifteen reports, five of which were after Trump’s withdrawal all proving that Iran has been compliant with the JCPOA terms.

The Trump Administration underestimated Iran’s resistance to foreign domination. Bully tactics have failed to bring about the results they anticipated.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. For media inquiries please email [email protected]

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Erdogan, Cyprus and the Future of NATO

July 21st, 2019 by F. William Engdahl

In recent weeks a dramatic escalation of tension around Turkish oil drilling rig presence in the disputed Exclusive Enterprise Zone surrounding EU member state Cyprus is taking place. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is claiming that Turkey has the right to drill not only in the waters off of Northern Cyprus, but also in waters far from there where Greek Cyprus has claimed rights. The actions, moving Turkish oil and gas drilling platforms into the waters, is creating a dramatic new clash in the energy-rich Eastern Mediterranean. The line-up of actors makes for a political Molotov cocktail of clashing interests that potentially pits not only Turkey against Cyprus and Greece, but also Israel and the USA, with Russia and China watching with keen interest.

On June 20, Turkey announced it was sending a second ship to waters off Cyprus to drill for oil and gas. It claims that it has maritime rights owing to its recognition of Turkish Cypriots in the Northeast part of the island facing Turkey. Since the island was divided in 1974, only Turkey has officially recognized Northern Cyprus, which calls itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus with some 36% of the island area. The rest of the island, known as the Republic of Cyprus, is recognized as a sovereign EU member state and is historically close to Greece. In July 2017 UN brokered talks on unifying the island broke down and energy tensions rose.

In 2011 vast oil and especially natural gas fields were discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean near Cyprus and as well off Israel, Lebanon and potentially Egypt. The entire region could contain more than 500 trillion cubic feet of gasThe Eastern Mediterranean since then has become a focus of energy geopolitics and rising tension. When Cyprus granted drilling rights to ENI in February last year, Turkey sent warships to the area, forcing ENI to abandon its drilling. Then in November when Cyprus granted drilling rights in waters southwest of Cyprus to US major ExxonMobil, Erdogan demanded it be abandoned calling the company “pirates.”

In recent weeks Erdogan has escalated the situation by sending several Turkish drilling ships to the waters claimed by the Republic of Cyprus.

Behind the scenes

What is behind the Turkish clear escalation now of its very much disputed claims to drill offshore Cyprus. Why now, over a matter which has been more or less known for more than eight years since large gas reserves were first found? There are several factors that could explain it.

First are the dramatic election defeats of Erdogan in recent months which, for the first time in more than a decade, have put his power in question. It cannot be ruled out that he sees playing tough over Turkish claims on Cyprus could revive his flagging popularity, especially as the Turkish economy has entered a severe recession in recent months. With the growing political uncertainty, Turkey’s economy is being hit with rising unemployment, collapsing domestic demand and a falling Lira. Erdogan is also in an ongoing fight with Washington over Ankara’s insistence to buy Russia’s advanced S-400 air defense systems rather than the US alternative. The fact that Turkey is a NATO country as is Greece adds to the geopolitical brew. On July 17 Washington announced that as a consequence of taking Russia’s S-400 air defense systems, Turkey would not be allowed to purchase the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Turkey and Russia

For years, especially since a failed July 2016 coup that Erdogan blamed on Fethullah Gülen, a CIA asset in exile in Pennsylvania, relations between Erdogan and Washington have been on edge as Washington refuses to extradite Gülen.

Now, after an earlier rupture on Turkish-Russian ties after a Turkish jet shot down a Russian plane inside Syrian airspace, Russia is making major inroads in Turkey to the concern of Washington. In addition to buying Russia’s S-400 defense systems, Erdogan has joined Russia in construction of the TurkishStream gas pipeline from Russia’s Black Sea to Turkey. In November, 2018 Russia’s Putin went to Istanbul to celebrate completion of the first 910 kilometer undersea part of the gas pipeline as it reached Turkish land. A second parallel line would bring Russian gas via Turkey to Greece and potentially on to Serbia, Hungary and other European markets. Putin and Erdogan also held talks at the recent Osaka G20 summit discussing significant increases in mutual trade.

However, the recent Turkish moves to send drilling ships to Cyprus waters all but insures Greece will not agree to buy gas via Turkey’s TurkStream source. Moreover, the fact that Turkey has placed its new Russian S-400 missile batteries in southwestern Turkey covering the airspace and territorial waters of Cyprus and Greece is not adding to warm relations with either Turkey or Russia from the side of Greece.

On July 16 as the EU announced sanctions on Turkey for its unauthorized drilling ships off Cyprus, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu responded: “Calling the EU’s decision sanctions means taking it seriously. You shouldn’t do that; the decision was made to satisfy Greek Cypriots. These things don’t have any effect on us.” As he spoke, Ankara announced sending a fourth exploration ship to the eastern Mediterranean. Not one to be modest, Erdogan’s Foreign Minister claims Turkey has equal rights as the Greek Cyprus government to drill including waters 200 miles from the Cyprus coast, even asserting right to part of the Mediterranean that cuts into Greece’s exclusive economic zone. It is supporting that with drones, F-16 fighters, and warships to escort the drilling ships it has off Cyprus.

NATO Future

This all raises the question of whether Erdogan is going into a major new chapter of Turkish geopolitics and preparing to exit NATO in favor of the China-Russia-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Not only does Turkey seem to be willing to deepen its military ties with Moscow. In a recent trip to Beijing on July 2, Erdogan refused to criticize the Chinese for their alleged internment of more than 1 million ethnic Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province. Previously Turkey, which considers the Uyghurs ethnically Turks, referring to Xinjiang as East Turkestan, was one of the only Muslim countries denouncing the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs. This time Erdogan surprisingly took a soft tone, telling media in China, “I believe we can find a solution to the issue taking into account the sensitivities of both sides.” The clear purpose of the Erdogan Beijing trip was to gain economic support for Turkey’s weakening economy, hard hit in recent months by US sanctions. Chinese companies are already engaged in construction of part of a new Istanbul-Ankara high-speed rail line as well as a new Istanbul airport.

Turkey has often played both sides, east and west, in an effort to win the best advantage. The question is whether now Erdogan is shifting towards a definite alliance with China and Russia, risking its status in NATO. If so, the current dispute over Cyprus oil and gas drilling could be a minor affair on the road to a geopolitical tectonic shift that would pose major challenges not just for the EU, but also for Washington.

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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.

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seeds_2.jpg

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.

We humans are rather curious creatures, I’ll admit. So many sides to our nature, so many colours to our emotions, so many journeys of our imaginations. But the question must arise, do we learn any more about these traits by making ourselves the perpetual object of our own fascination?

One would certainly assume so based upon the cult of the ‘selfie’ which rages around the world at this particular juncture of human evolution. I am tempted to say ‘devolution’, but going backwards would at least stand the chance of putting us in touch with something tangible, earthy even – whereas to live life as a virtual reality experience with one’s own photographic image as the central point of attraction – fails to provoke my sense of admiration for the human race. 

The cult of the selfie has gone so far that reports are now emerging that addicts often put themselves in positions of real danger in order to get the perfect shot. A number have already died as a result of the dare-devil approach to getting the perfect selfie.

If I was to take a relaxed and laid-back view of all this, I might say “OK, sure, we all need to get our kicks in some form or other, just let it be – let people have fun with their cameras on poles; apart from the excesses we hear about it’s pretty harmless fun isn’t it?”

It would be simple enough to go along with such a prognosis were it not for the fact that the whole thing is surely telling us something more than just what the crazy craze of the moment is. It is telling us something quite profound about an advanced preoccupation with superficiality per se.

A kind of ego flattering sport whose popularity has presently reached the point of pandemic. 

Is this just a kick-back against a sense of loneliness and sense of insignificance in a world that appears indifferent to the fate of the individual? Is it a wish to be noticed in an age of hyper inflated promotion of the engineered stars of stage, screen, video, social media et al? A range of elevated self importance that runs from TV chef to porn star to political poser? 

Whatever the cause, its ubiquitous nature is undeniable and has added yet more techno baggage to the 21st century tourist’s arsenal of seemingly indispensable smart gismos. If one isn’t squinting into the illuminated screen of a smart phone while walking through a beautiful landscape, one is posing against the same background smiling cheesily for a selfie. While a discourse with nature herself, the source of all our deepest and most practical needs, is shunned. Left out of the picture, except to the extent that she forms the backdrop to the vanity inflated self.

Here lies a clue to this infliction. Modern day living has contrived to be a virtual reality form of existence, one which has alienated human beings from their roots. The ability to find a deep appreciation for beauty, quiet and the actual power of landscape has been smothered by an electro-smog of self satisfying surface pursuits; the sum total of which have formed a veritable barrier against true instincts, perceptions and genuinely life satisfying experiences.

This is a dangerous state of affairs, because we need these qualities to be at the forefront of our daily lives in order to gain/regain a true sense of equilibrium and balance. To find in ourselves that which gives us the courage and vision we need to negotiate and ultimately to vanquish the miasma of deceptions, twisted truths and outright lies legion at this time.

Those who feel the necessity to surround themselves with stimulants for the nourishment of their superficial selves cannot resist slavery to the controlling powers that be. Cannot resist becoming pawns to the carefully planned sales promotions that make such people feel they ‘must have’ the latest, most advance, most essential addition to the range. It is an addiction which includes uncritical acceptance of the disinformation that forms the great majority of what appears on mainstream television, newspapers, glossy journals and all channels of communication that maintain a wall of conscious-blocking visual and printed fake news and views 24/7.

It’s only a small step from here to open armed acceptance of life in a ‘Smart City’. A life where electromagnetic microwaves come with the very air you breathe. No choice. A place where ‘being monitored’ and ‘monitoring’ form a framework around the chief activities of the day – and no doubt night. A place designed and built for technology addicts, one might surmise. But actually a sinister prison camp for the imposition of a cyborgian programme of control.

It’s a place where no trees will be present because they interrupt the 5G signals which are the controlling motor of everything that happens in this arid world of concrete, glass and microwave radiation. Woe betide you if you should lose your  personal chip which gives access to everything you need including your own self autonomous self driving car and the ability to unlock the front door of your home. In a smart city, should you lose or destroy your chip, permission will have to be sought from Big Brother to get back into your house, turn on the lights and open the refrigerator.

The ‘internet of everything’ which is to be the techno-hub of the 5G Smart City, ensures citizens cannot act outside the authority of the centralised computer master control.

Orwellian fantasy? No, already existing reality in its first stages.

But all this will, I presume be a source of frisson to those who willingly accept a fate controlled by anyone other than themselves. Who find such a techno-psychotic existence a direct extension of their fascination with all that comes under the word ‘superficial’. And that brings us full circle back to the exponents of narcissistic selfies, who roam the world with with camera triggered extension pods so as to photograph themselves against exotic backgrounds and famous works of architecture as though they were just empty cut-outs for a theatre set.  After all, for selfie exponents, the only thing of real importance is themselves. 

It is a remarkable seductive trait that leads to the  entrapment of the spirit and soul of man. The master stroke in all this is that it all appears to be oh so normal – and those who do not conform are regarded with incredulity and relegated to the old pastures rare breeds museum for special research into their strange individualistic traits.

The rare breeds, however, turn out to have strong genes and resistant immune systems. They never abandoned nature in favour of the arid virtual 5G powered smartscape.  Instead they organised resistance and were supported by energies that were not recognised or understood by adherents of the smartscape.

They kept alive the torch of justice and truth and they grew in number in spite of the dystopian landscape around them. They retained the collective name ‘humanity’ and the warm feelings that underpin that name – the state we call ‘human’. And in the course of time, they came to nurture back to health the planet that nourished them and to rescue those drowning in the narcissistic electro- magnetic soup of their naive choosing. They heeded the cries of desperation of these prisoners – to find a way back out of their oh so ordinary self imposed toxic prison. It was only the irredeemable selfie who never made it back to real life. The rest experienced the flowering of a self they never knew existed. An unselfish self.

How successfully this unselfish self had been kept at bay by the distractions and fakery of the now defunct soulless smartscapes of yesteryear. As has been noted many times over the millennia, the only real learning is learning by experience.

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Julian Rose is an international activist, writer, organic farming pioneer and actor.  In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi. He is the author of two acclaimed titles: Changing Course for Life and In Defence of Life. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is now available from Amazon and Dixi Books. Julian is a long time exponent of yoga/meditation. See his web site for more information www.julianrose.info

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Video: “MH17 – Call for Justice”

July 21st, 2019 by Bonanza Media

Bonanza media investigative team of independent journalists take exclusive interviews with one of the suspects of downing the MH17, Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, the colonel who collected the black boxes and much more. 

Documentary directed by Yana Yerlashova

Eye opening testimonies from witnesses and irrefutable evidence from experts.

Exclusive footage shot in Malaysia, The Netherlands and at the crash area in Ukraine.

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Featured image is from Ian56 

Anniversaries are occasions to distort records.  The intoxicated recounting of the past faces a record in need of correction.  Couples long married hide their differences before guests.  Creases are covered; the make-up is applied generously.  Defects become virtues, if, indeed they were ever there to begin with.  In historical commemoration, the same is true.  The moon landing anniversary his weekend was given a vigorous clean-up, with the Cold War finding a back seat when it was, in fact, the main driver. 

The moon project was a fundamental political poke, soaked by competitive drives.  The science was the instrumental ballast and has come to provide the heavy cosmetics to romanticise what is, at best, an effigy.  When President John F. Kennedy proclaimed his wish for the United States to land a man on the moon and safely return him by the end of the 1960s, he was google-eyed by Cold War syndrome.  The Soviets had been making advances in the space race, and paranoia at Red exploits was catching.  A godless state had launched the nerve wracking Sputnik in 1957 and in 1961 put Yuri Gagarin into space.   

While the Soviet Union is only mentioned once in his speech at Rice University, the competitive dig, the putdown, did come.  Balance had to be restored.  “Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were ‘made in the United States of America’ and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.” When he mentions being “behind for some time in manned flight”, there is little doubt who the bogeyman to beat is. We do not, he said reassuringly to his audience, “intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.”   

Combating the Soviet Union, and communism more broadly, was simply one aspect of an aggrandised fist fight, to be fought on the ground, the seas, and in space.  While it has become a charming conceit to suggest that JFK had intended to take the brakes off US commitments to stemming the Communist contagion in Vietnam, his administration saw a spike in the deployment of resources and advisors to the South.  He had to be seen to be aggressive in all theatres of endeavour. 

Domestically, selling the moon mission was not popular, and the post-landing effort to scrub away voices of opposition in the historical record has been vigorous.  Space historian Roger Launius notes the sentiment at the time. 

“Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969.” 

In 1964, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni published the despairing, blistering work that deserves a good dive into.  The Moon-Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race notes scientific opposition to the space program, at least in so far as it was not balanced.  The space race, with its immortalisation of gadgets, glorified “rocket-powered jumps” and “extrovert activism”, had been “used as an escape”.  The obsession with the moon delayed “facing ourselves, as Americans and citizens of the earth.”

Earthly concerns were considered more pressing.  Civil rights leaders in the United States feared a loss of focus.  While a million people gathered along Florida’s Space Coast to watch the launch of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, some 500 protestors, mostly African-American and led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, paid a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre.  He had in tow a wooden wagon and two mules, a deliciously confronting contrast between the Saturn V rocket and the impecunious life.

“$12 a day to feed an astronaut, we could feed a child for $8,” read the protest signs.

NASA administrator Thomas Paine ventured out to meet Abernathy, subsequently recounting the concerns of the reverend. 

“The money for the space program, he stated, should be spent to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the shelterless.”  

Behind the project lay other dark forces whose roles have been obscured by propagandists of a romantic lunar narrative.  The amoral genius that was Wernher von Braun, given the moniker of Missileman, was an illustration that science might well lack an ethical compass, even if it worked.  Tom Lehrer’s lines from 1967 were hitting in their aptness:

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.”

Kennedy was himself keen to justify the reason for going to the moon not because it made sense for humans to do so but because it was hard.  His Rice University address couples banalities, the human urge to engage and achieve the impossible expounded.  “Why climb the highest mountain?” he rhetorically poses.  Or fly the Atlantic?  “Why does Rice play Texas?”  Going to the moon was a goal that would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”  

What mattered was getting the job done with a kind of mechanistic fanaticism: working labourers to death in Mittelbau-Dora in making V-2 rockets to target civilians during the Second World War was as worthy as beating the Soviets in the space game.  In Disney’s 1955 television production Man and the Moon, von Braun, the then director of development at the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency, spoke of a nuclear-powered space station that would propel Americans to the moon.     

A decade before, von Braun was part of a scooping operation conducted by US personnel to nab the best and brightest of German science, a process that did much to ensure a good deal of whitewashing of industrialised murder.  In the gathering were the signs of the Cold War to come; the Soviets conducted their own version of Operation Paperclip, plundering the brainboxes of Teutonic engineering.  To the victors went the corrupted spoils. 

Von Braun was treated and feted, plied with generous budgets and resources.  The missiles duly came.  He led a team that developed Redstone, the first US ballistic missile capable of propelling a nuclear warhead to distances of 250 miles.  Then came the Jupiter-C in 1958, which shot the first US satellite, Explorer 1, into space.  The famed Saturn V rocket was created while von Braun was director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre.  The line between concentration camp and the moon landing was established, as was the role of the smooth scientist communicator trading on human wonder.

Colossal human stupidity, and moral shakiness, tend to find ways into the grandiose and the grand.  As a species, hubris has proven a common trait.  Technological mastery comes torrentially more easily than luminous ethical insight. France’s courtly Charles De Gaulle was reflective on this point: humans might well have mastered the way of getting to the moon but it could hardly be said to be far. “The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us.”  Humankind has yet to master its more terrestrial problems.  Any future exploration and colonisation is bound to see humans bringing their own complement of problems to the frontiers of space.  Facing ourselves continues to be a delayed enterprise of arrested development.

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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]

President Putin told Oliver Stone in an interview that he doesn’t believe that the British authorities were responsible for poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, with this revelation representing a 180 on Russia’s previously articulated official position on the matter and raising countless questions about why the country’s leader would wait nearly a year and a half before sharing this new narrative after his top government officials and publicly financed international media outlets went all out saying the opposite.

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The Alt-Media Community is dumbfounded after President Putin told Oliver Stone in an interview that he doesn’t think that the British authorities were responsible for poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter. So as not to be accused of “cherry-picking” the facts, here’s the full context of exactly what he said as published on the Kremlin’s official website (the most relevant exchange is bolded for emphasis):

“Oliver Stone: Russian bombs in Syria. What has happened to Skripal? Where is he?

Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. He is a spy, after all. He is always in hiding.

Oliver Stone: They say he was going to come back to Russia. He had some information.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, I have been told that he wants to make a written request to come back.

Oliver Stone: He knew still and he wanted to come back. He had information that he could give to the world press here in Russia.

Vladimir Putin: I doubt it. He has broken the ranks already. What kind of information can he possess?

Oliver Stone: Who poisoned him? They say English secret services did not want Sergei Skripal to come back to Russia?

Vladimir Putin: To be honest, I do not quite believe this. I do not believe this is the case.

Oliver Stone: Makes sense. You do not agree with me?

Vladimir Putin: If they had wanted to poison him, they would have done so.

Oliver Stone: Ok, that makes sense. I don’t know. Who did then?

Vladimir Putin: After all, this is not a hard thing to do in today’s world. In fact, a fraction of a milligram would have been enough to do the job. And if they had him in their hands, there was nothing complicated about it. No, this does not make sense. Maybe they just wanted to provoke a scandal.

Oliver Stone: I think it is more complicated. You know, you think I am much too much of a conspiracy guy.”

As is clearly seen from the above, President Putin doesn’t think that British intelligence had anything to do with this affair, despite his country’s previously articulated official position on the matter being the opposite, and his top government officials and publicly financed international media outlets going all out to support the original narrative for nearly a year and a half.

The Russian Ambassador to the UN originally accused the UK and its allies of orchestrating the attack, which is now known to have been partially false after President Putin absolved the British authorities of any responsibility for what happened while nevertheless still leaving open the possibility that an unnamed third party (probably implying the US) was behind this dangerous conspiracy.

The Russian spy chief also ran with the original version of events, which he described as “a grotesque provocation crudely concocted by U.S. and British security services”, but he too is partially discredited by none other than President Putin himself. All of this raises countless questions about why the Russian leader waited nearly a year and a half before sharing this new narrative.

Only President Putin himself can of course account for why he let so many people, both in the Alt-Media Community and more importantly at the highest levels of his own government, put their professional reputations on the line alleging that the British authorities had something to do with Skripal’s poisoning, but considering the current international context, there might be a logical reason why he changed his tune.

Russia is presently trying to negotiate a “New Detente” with the US — the odds of which are being bolstered by his political breakthroughs with France and Italy, as well as his country’s recent “balancing” of Chinese influence in Africa — and it would tremendously help Moscow if it was able to get London on its side during this very sensitive diplomatic time.

Boris Johnson will probably end up being the UK’s next Prime Minister, which brings with it the opportunity of resetting bilateral relations, which might be why President Putin said last month that “we need to turn this page connected with spies and assassination attempts”. With this in mind, that might explain why he decided to do a 180 on the Skripal case and say that the British government didn’t have anything to do with it.

In President Putin’s strategic calculations, the reputations of his top government officials and publicly funded international media are worth risking in pursuit of bringing the UK onboard Russia’s “New Detente” with the West, believing that they can always be repaired in the event that this narrative gambit succeeds. If it doesn’t, however, then Russia might have just dealt major self-inflicted damage to its soft power for nothing at all.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Mark Esper, New US Pentagon Chief, Vested Interest in War and Conflict

July 21st, 2019 by Strategic Culture Foundation

Mark Esper is expected to be confirmed in coming days as the new US Secretary of Defense. His appointment is awaiting final Congressional approval after customary hearings this week before senators. The 55-year-old nominee put forward by President Trump was previously a decorated Lieutenant Colonel and has served in government office during the GW Bush administration.

But what stands out as his most conspicuous past occupation is working for seven years as a senior lobbyist for Raytheon, the US’ third biggest military manufacturing company. The firm specializes in missile-defense systems, including the Patriot, Iron Dome and the Aegis Ashore system (the latter in partnership with Lockheed Martin).

As Defense Secretary, Esper will be the most senior civilian executive member of the US government, next to the president, on overseeing military policy, including decisions about declaring war and deployment of American armed forces around the globe. His military counterpart at the Pentagon is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, currently held by Marine General Joseph Dunford who is expected to be replaced soon by General Mark Milley (also in the process of senate hearings).

Esper’s confirmation hearings this week were pretty much a rubber-stamp procedure, receiving lame questioning from senators about his credentials and viewpoints. The only exception was Senator Elizabeth Warren, who slammed the potential “conflict of interest” due to his past lobbying service for Raytheon. She said it “smacks of corruption”. Other than her solitary objection, Esper was treated with kid gloves by other senators and his appointment is expected to be whistled through by next week. During hearings, the former lobbyist even pointedly refused to recuse himself of any matters involving Raytheon if he becomes the defense boss.

As Rolling Stone magazine quipped on Esper’s nomination, “it is as swampy as you’d expect”.

“President Trump’s Cabinet is already rife with corruption, stocked full of former lobbyists and other private industry power players who don’t seem to mind leveraging their government positions to enrich themselves personally. Esper should fit right in,” wrote Rolling Stone.

The linkage between officials in US government, the Pentagon and private manufacturers is a notorious example of “revolving door”. It is not unusual, or even remarkable, that individuals go from one sector to another and vice versa. That crony relationship is fundamental to the functioning of the “military-industrial complex” which dominates the entire American economy and the fiscal budget ($730 billion annually – half the total discretionary public spend by federal government).

Nevertheless, Esper is a particularly brazen embodiment of the revolving-door’s seamless connection.

Raytheon is a $25 billion company whose business is all about selling missile-defense systems. Its products have been deployed in dozens of countries, including in the Middle East, as well as Japan, Romania and, as of next year, Poland. It is in Raytheon’s vital vested interest to capitalize on alleged security threats from Iran, Russia, China and North Korea in order to sell “defense” systems to nations that then perceive a “threat” and need to be “protected”.

It is a certainty that Esper shares the same worldview, not just for engrained ideological reasons, but also because of his own personal motives for self-aggrandizement as a former employee of Raytheon and quite possibly as a future board member when he retires from the Pentagon. The issue is not just merely about corruption and ethics, huge that those concerns are. It is also about how US foreign policy and military decisions are formulated and executed, including decisions on matters of conflict and ultimately war. The insidiousness is almost farcical, if the implications weren’t so disturbing, worthy of satire from the genre of Dr Strangelove or Catch 22.

How is Esper’s advice to the president about tensions with Russia, Iran, China or North Korea, or any other alleged adversary, supposed to be independent, credible or objective? Esper is a de facto lobbyist for the military-industrial complex sitting in the Oval Office and Situation Room. Tensions, conflict and war are meat and potatoes to this person.

During senate hearings this week, Esper openly revealed his dubious quality of thinking and the kind of policies he will pursue as Pentagon chief. He told credulous senators that Russia was to blame for the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That equates to more Raytheon profits from selling defense systems in Europe. Also, in a clumsy inadvertent admission he advised that the US needs to get out of the INF in order to develop medium-range missiles to “counter China”. The latter admission explains the cynical purpose for why the Trump administration unilaterally ditched the INF earlier this year. It is not about alleged Russian breaches of the treaty; the real reason is for the US to obtain a freer hand to confront China.

It is ludicrous how blatant a so-called democratic nation (the self-declared “leader of the free world”) is in actuality an oligarchic corporate state whose international relations are conducted on the basis of making obscene profits from conflict and war.

Little wonder then that bilateral relations between the US and Russia are in such dire condition. Trump’s soon-to-be top military advisor Mark Esper is not going to make bilateral relations any better, that’s for sure.

Also at a precarious time of possible war with Iran, the last person Trump should consult is someone whose corporate cronies are craving for more weapons sales.

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The Trump administration is reportedly diverting over US $40 million of aid destined for Central America to the Venezuelan opposition.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a memo from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was handed to Congress on July 11 notifying that $41.9 million were being handed to self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido and his team, arguing that there is an “exigent” crisis involving US “national interest.”

The LA Times report adds that the money is destined for salaries, airfare, “good governance” training, propaganda, technical assistance for holding elections and other “democracy-building” projects.

The funds were reportedly destined for Guatemala and Honduras. Poverty, insecurity and political instability have seen a growing flux of Central American migrants towards the US in recent years. President Trump has threatened to cut all aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador if those countries fail to stop the flow of migrants towards Mexico and the US.

Opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself “interim president” on January 23, receiving the prompt backing of Washington and allied regional governments. In the six months since he has led several attempts to oust the Maduro government, which included a humanitarian aid “showdown” on February 23 and an attempted military putsch on April 30.

Guaido has been mired in a corruption scandal after international funds meant to support soldiers who heeded his call to desert were allegedly embezzled by his envoys in Colombia.

The latest revelations of US financial support comes on the heels of the European Union announcing and threatening new sanctions against the Caribbean country.

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini said on Tuesday that the bloc is readying sanctions against security officials “involved in torture and other serious violations of human rights.” Retired Navy Officer Rafael Acosta died in state custody on June 29. He was allegedly subjected to torture, having been arrested accused of involvement in a coup plot.

Mogherini went on to add that the European Union would impose more sanctions if it failed to see “concrete results” from the current government-opposition talks.

The European Parliament likewise approved a resolution on Thursday morning backing sanctions against security officials and demanding results from ongoing negotiations, as well as reiterating support for “legitimate interim president Juan Guaido.”

The European Union has imposed sanctions against a host of high-ranking Venezuelan officials, as well as blocked sales of arms and other inputs. Several assets held in European territories have also been frozen, including bank accounts and gold deposits. For its part, Washington has imposed unilateral measures against individuals and several sectors of the Venezuelan economy, chief among them the oil industry.

Caracas reacted promptly to the EU announcement, with Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza criticizing Mogherini’s “meddling” in Venezuelan affairs.

“[Mogherini] is proffering unacceptable threats, at a time when [understanding] is vital for the dialogue between the people in Venezuela,” he wrote on Twitter.

Arreaza held a meeting with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday in New York, in which Guterres offered his backing for the current dialogue process.

The Venezuelan government and opposition are currently engaged in Norway-mediated talks in Barbados. After two rounds of negotiations held in Oslo in May, the delegations restarted the process in the Caribbean island last week, before beginning another round on Monday.

No details have been disclosed about the content of the talks, with the Norwegian government praising both sides for their commitment. There have been unconfirmed reports that the issue of early elections is being left for last in the discussions.

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Piracy or War?

July 21st, 2019 by Christopher Black

Article 22 of the Convention On The High Seas of 1958, states:

‘1. Except where acts of interference derive from powers conferred by treaty, a warship which encounters a foreign merchant ship on the high seas is not justified in boarding her unless there is reasonable ground for suspecting:

  1. (a)  That the ship is engaged in piracy; or

  2. (b)  That the ship is engaged in the slave trade; or

  3. (c)  That though flying a foreign flag or refusing to show its flag, the ship is, in reality, of the same nationality as the warship.’

It goes on to state that the naval vessels of one nation can stop the ship of a foreign nation if that ship has violated any laws or regulations of the nation to which the naval vessel belongs if it is found in that nation’s territorial waters.

It is clear that in the case of the boarding and detention of the Iranian oil tanker Grace 1, registered in Panama, as many ships are, off the Spanish coast, near Gibraltar, that Britain had no legal right to order its marines to board the Iranian ship which was either in international waters as the Iranians claim or in Spanish waters near Gibraltar. It is in flagrant violation of the Convention on the High seas to which it is a party and which therefore is also a part of the domestic law of the United Kingdom.

The pretext offered by the British for this act of war against Iran, and Syria if their claim is to be believed that the oil was being delivered to Syria, in violation of a claimed European Union embargo against Syria, is manifestly bogus since the European Union has no legal right to impose “sanctions” or any type of embargo, or naval blockade against Syria or any other nation. That right remains in the sole jurisdiction of the United Nations Security Council which has not authorized any such blockade. The EU edicts against Syria are therefore illegal and in international law do not exist.

The EU itself claims to justify its illegal oil embargo of Syria on Security Council Resolution 2254, and the 2012 Geneva Communique, both of which have the objective of seeking a peaceful political solution in Syria and do not give any EU states individually or the EU as a whole, the right to impose sanctions or any other type of warfare on Syria nor the right to enforce them against other nations such as Iran. Therefore, the British had no justification whatsoever for their actions.

The question then becomes was this an act of piracy or an act of war and the answer is, act of war, for it is not considered piracy under the Convention if a naval vessel of one nation boards and seizes the ship of another nation. Piracy exists where the boarding is for private purposes by private individuals acting in their own interest.

Article 15 of the Convention states,

(1) Any illegal acts of violence, detention or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed:

(a) On the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft;

(b) Against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

So the British action cannot be called “piracy” in a legal sense, though the term does fit the sense of what they have done and the Iranians like to use the term in their protestations against the British action. It is instead an act of war against Iran by Britain and in reality by the United States of America since it was admitted by the Brtish government that the seizure was conducted on orders from Washington as the Iranian foreign minister, Mr. Zarif, stated on July 17th

“The UK by confiscating our ship is helping the US in imposing its illegal oil sanctions against Iran.”

Spain’s acting foreign minister, Josep Borrell, said Gibraltar had seized Grace 1 in response to a request from the US to Britain. El Pais reported that Borrell, from the Socialist Party (PSOE) said the US intelligence implied that the supertanker was in British territorial waters. The Spanish have formally complained of a British incursion into Spanish waters, but in reality they went along with the illegal action and also cited the illegal EU oil embargo on Syria.

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Syria News

Korea: In the Era of Peace, Dissolve the UN Command, A Relic of the Cold War

July 21st, 2019 by Peoples' Party of South Korea

On July 7, 1950, the United Nations Security Council recommended the creation of a US-led the unified command, but the United States referred to it as the United Nations Command using the name of the United Nations.

As the UN Secretary-General has confirmed twice, the United Nations Command in Korea is not a subsidiary organ of the United Nations.

However, the United Nations Command has the authority to start a war on the Korean peninsula without a UN Security Council resolution, to take over North Korean region, and to use Japanese bases and services without consulting with the Japanese government.

Therefore, the United Nations Command in Korea is a dangerous war apparatus that can threaten the peace on the Korean peninsula and the peace constitution of Japan away from the armistice agreement.

The United Nations Command, which has been acting like an organ of the United Nations, in Korea has long been criticized by the international community, and as a result, the resolution to dissolve the UNC passed at the 30th United Nations General Assembly in 1975.

Headquarters of the United Nations Command and ROK-US Combined Forces Command in 2009. (Source: Flickr: Secretary of State visits CFC’s White House, UNC – CFC – USFK)

Even before the conclusion of the peace treaty, the UNC is an organization that should have already been dissolved.

However, there is a movement, against the era of peace on the Korean Peninsula, to strengthen the UNC.

It also creates direct obstacles such as controlling military and economic cooperation projects between South and North Korea.

This is contrary to the wishes of the citizens of Korea, Japan and other member states of the United Nations, and we strongly demand the dissolution of the United Nations Command in Korea.

  1. The US government should dissolve the United Nations Command in South Korea.
  2. The US government, through the United Nations Command in Korea, should not interfere with inter – Korean cooperation projects.
  3. The UN should stop the United Nations Command the use of the name “the United Nations”.
  4. The United Nations should force the United States to implement its 1975 resolution to dissolve the UNC.

The participation of other personal or peace organizations would also be highly appreciated.

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Featured image: Members of the United Nations Command Honor Guard Company. (Public Domain)

Aleppo is currently engaged in massive rebuilding, reconstruction, and returning to its former beauty. Despite the wretched and illicit ‘sanctions‘ imposed by the same colonial states which have funded and armed terrorists and then criminally bombed the country, the city is engaged in the resurrection of beauty and creativity.  

In al-Sheikh Najjar Industrial City, almost 600 factories have restarted production, and another 250 are undergoing rehabilitation:

The number of the facilities which have been put into service again and started production in al-Sheikh Najjar Industrial City in Aleppo reached up to 565 facilities and currently 250 other facilities are being rehabilitated to put them back into service.

Industry Ministry Eng. Mohammad Maan Zain al-Abdin Jazbieh toured al-Sheikh Najjar Industrial City and inspected the reality of the work of facilities in it and the stages of production at them.

Director General of the General Establishment for Cement and Building Materials Dr. Ayman Nabhan, in a statement to SANA, said ” Certain parts of the Arab Cement Company on which heavy damages were inflicted at the hands of terrorists  and which went out of service are now being rehabilitated.”

Director-General of Homs Dairy Company,  Eng. Mohammad Hammad said that the production will be resumed at the diary factory in Aleppo over the coming months after repairing the machines which have been destroyed at the hands of terrorists.

Head of al-Sheikh Najjar Industrial City Hazem Ajjan,  said in a similar statement that the industrial water will be put into service again as the processes of pumping started to Aleppo and from it to the industrial city.
He added that the project of the fairgrounds will be also launched at the industrial city and it will be carried out soon.

In a statement to journalists, Industry Minister said that the industrialists have started to invest their facilities in a notable way, and they receive all the required support and attention by the Government.

He added that the facilities which have been put back into service enjoy a diversity of their products in the textile, chemical and food sectors. (SANA)

Syrians are rebuilding the souks, torched by degenerate FSA terrorists in February 2013.

Especially uplifting to the human soul and psyche are the projects done by the students under the guidance of the Architectural Engineering Faculty of Aleppo University; on 15 January 2013, mortars fired on the University by FSA moderates martyred 82 students.

Architectural Engineering students show their projects.

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Selected Articles: Israel’s Choice for U.S. President

July 21st, 2019 by Global Research News

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How Corporate Media Are Fueling a New Iran Nuclear Crisis

By Gareth Porter, July 21, 2019

Iran has responded to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal by resuming the stockpiling of low enriched uranium, removing the cap on the level of uranium enrichment and resuming work at the Arak nuclear reactor, while making it very clear that those steps would be immediately reversed if the United States agreed to full compliance.

Consortium News Website Taken Down by a Malware Attack after Streaming Program Defending Julian Assange

By Kevin Reed, July 21, 2019

Consortium News—a news website devoted to investigative journalism founded by the late Robert Parry and which has steadfastly defended WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange—was the target of a malware attack last Monday that took down the site for more than five hours.

Israel’s Choice for U.S. President

By Philip Giraldi, July 19, 2019

The real danger is what comes after Trump, in 2024. The preferred candidate by Israel and its lobby, and therefore the prohibitive favorite, is Trump’s former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley. If you think Trump is blindly and blatantly pro-Israel at the expense of American interests, just wait until you see Haley’s naked self-interest at work.

Nicaragua 1979-2019. History of the Sandinista Revolution

By Eric Toussaint and Nathan Legrand, July 19, 2019

The Nicaraguan government’s violent repression against demonstrators protesting its brutal neoliberal policies, resulting in more than 300 people being killed by regime forces since April 2018, is only one of the reasons why various leftist social movements have condemned the Nicaraguan regime led by President Daniel Ortega and Vice-President Rosario Murillo.

Sudan’s Agreement on Political Declaration Leaves Many Unanswered Questions

By Abayomi Azikiwe, July 19, 2019

An agreement on the Political Declaration signed by the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the leadership of the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) on July 17 postpones firm decisions on key aspects of a comprehensive program which will determine the pace under which the Republic of Sudan can become a stable productive nation-state in Africa.

Rural America and the 5G Digital Divide. Telecoms Expanding Their “Toxic Infrastructure”

By Renee Parsons, July 19, 2019

While there is considerable telecom hubris regarding the 5G rollout and increasing speculation that the next generation of wireless is not yet ready for Prime Time, the industry continues to make promises to Rural America that it has no intention of fulfilling. Decades-long promises to deliver digital Utopia to rural America by T-MobileVerizon and AT&T have never materialized.

From Mad Cow Disease to Agrochemicals: Time to Put Public Need Ahead of Private Greed

By Rosemary Mason and Colin Todhunter, July 19, 2019

In 1987, an epidemic of a fatal neurological disease in cows suddenly appeared in Britain. Cows became uncoordinated, staggered around, collapsed and finally died. The disease was called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) because there were holes in the brain where prion protein cells became folded, had linked up and then split to cover the surface of the brain. There were more than 1,300 cases of BSE spread over 6,000 farms.

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During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s the Islamic Republic of Iran deployed the slogan “Karbala, Karbala we are coming” (كربلا كربلا ما دارييم مياييم) to “defend the value of Islam”. In Syria the battle cry “Zeinab shall not be abducted twice” helped mobilise Shia allies and rally thousands of men to fight the Sunni Takfiri of al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State” (ISIS). Today, despite the existential battle between Iran and the US, the “Islamic Republic” no longer uses religious slogans, but is instead rallying support on a national basis. Even Iranians who disagree with the present regime are supporting their country in the face of the aggressive posture of the US. Iranian pragmatists were disappointed by the US’s unlawful revocation of the JCPOA nuclear deal. Severe sanctions are being imposed on the Iranian people because Trump ditched the deal to please Netanyahu and to spite his predecessor Obama. In the face of these sanctions, the Islamic Republic refuses to bow to US dictates. Unlike other Middle Eastern countries who willingly submit to Trump’s blackmail and bullying, Iran says “NO” to the superpower. Why? How can Iran do what Saudi Arabia and other regional powers could do but will not? 

Iran manufactures its own tanksmissiles,submarines and is a member of the global club of nuclear science capable countries.

Iran has strong allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Yemen and can rely on them to take part in any war imposed on Tehran, even one imposed by the US.

Iran has democratically elected members of the parliament and a President who serves a four-year mandate and has the right for a single term renewal if he wins via the ballot, unlike Arab states who have presidents for life or inherited monarchies. Christians and Jews are recognised minorities in Iran; the Jews have a member of the Parliament, Siamak Moreh, and feel “safe and respected”. They number around 15,000 out of 85 million Iranians and have more than 25 synagogues.

Iran has faced US sanctions for over 40 years without bowing to US demands. It has confronted the US in many arenas around the Middle East and recently shot down a drone to send the clear message that it is ready to face war and its consequences, if war is imposed on it. Iran is ready to pay the price of defending its air, water and lands; it will not compromise on any violations of its sovereignty even by a superpower like the US. Iran is sending a message to the US, its main ally Israel, and to all Middle Eastern countries: it will retaliate harshly against any aggression.

Iran is not afraid of regime-change attempts because its electoral system is in the hands of the people, and, if hit internally, Iran has the capacity to hit back anywhere its allies are deployed, against its regional enemies wherever they are deployed.

Iran’s situation should not be unique or surprising. It is natural to have democratic institutions. It is normal for a country to have allies ready to stand by and lend support when needed. It is ordinary for any country to use force, when needed, to defend its sovereignty and protect its borders. Citizens support their government and armed forces when they defend the country against aggression and when their rulers take tough and courageous decisions.

There are no voices in Iran calling for the fall of the current regime despite the US “maximum pressure”. The Iranian President responded with “maximum patience” for 14 months before taking the first legal step to partially withdraw from the nuclear deal. Rouhani then moved towards a “confrontational strategy” and has ended up adopting a “strategy of equal response” against any attack. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has no need of religious slogans this time because Iranians are united, regardless of ethnicity, behind their leaders and against the US. Trump has managed to unite the pragmatists and the radicals under one flag, against him.

Europe rushed to play a mediation role in a failed attempt to ease tensions between the US and Iran. European leaders have little leverage against President Trump because they are far from united, even if they are signatories of the JCPOA nuclear deal and are therefore bound to respect it. Iran imposed on Europe the devising of a new payment system, INSTEX, notwithstanding its lack of effectiveness. INSTEX shows the will of European leaders to accommodate Iran in order to stop its production of nuclear bombs. That is a substantial European effort.

Iran will not give up on its allies neither would they because they are at the forefront of its national security and the defenders of its values and existence. Without them a confrontational policy towards US hegemony would not be possible. The harsh sanctions on Iran have hurt its allies but have not deteriorated or even affected their military capabilities.

Iran will not give up on its missile capabilities because they are its only defensive mechanism and potential. Iran is ready to go to war; it will not abandon its missile production and development. It has delivered many of these missile capabilities to allies in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Iran will not submit to the blackmail by which Trump extorts hundreds of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries by forcing them to buy US weapons and spare parts. Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, pay handsome ransoms to limit the damage of Trump’s bullying.

If all these Middle Eastern countries were to stand up against the “neighbourhood bully” as Iran has done, and invest a fraction of what they are paying Trump in the region’s development and prosperity, the US would be incapable of racketeering Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates.

And last but not least, Iran rejects the plan Trump is attempting to impose on the Palestinians: a demand that they sell their territories for a handful of dollars. Many Middle Eastern countries have adopted the childish plan of an amateur – Jared Kushner, who holds power only because he is the US President’s son-in-law – who believed he could achieve what many experienced presidents and diplomats failed to do over decades. Iran, together with Iraq, Lebanon and Kuwait, has rejected the “Deal of the Century”.

Trump admits that he understands only “the language of figures and money”. Iran’s response to the US blackmail strategy embodies the perception that this world only respects and understands those who manifest strength and refuse to submit to coercion, and its conscience is only awakened by those who have the will to resist.

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The U.S. news media’s coverage of the Iran nuclear issue has been woefully off-kilter for many years. Now, however, those same outlets are contributing to the serious crisis building between Washington and Tehran.

Iran has responded to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal by resuming the stockpiling of low enriched uranium, removing the cap on the level of uranium enrichment and resuming work at the Arak nuclear reactor, while making it very clear that those steps would be immediately reversed if the United States agreed to full compliance.

The major fact about Iranian nuclear policy before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was negotiated should shape public understanding of the current conflict: For more than three years, from 2012 to 2015, Iran could have enriched enough uranium at 20% enrichment level for one or more nuclear weapons, but it chose not to do so. Instead, it used the U.S.’s knowledge of that capability as leverage against the U.S. in negotiating what eventually became the JCPOA.

The real nuclear crisis facing the United States is not that of an Iranian regime threatening a nuclear conflict. Rather, it’s a U.S. government policy that rejects the 2015 compromise and seeks to provoke Iran even further.

Yet that’s not the way The New York Times and other news media have covered the story. From the start of the current phase of the conflict, corporate media coverage has overwhelmingly emphasized a presumed new Iranian threat to “break out” in order to obtain the enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.

A July 1 Times story by Rick Gladstone about Iran’s breach of the JCPOA cap on uranium stockpile stated that Iran’s latest move “does not by itself give the country the material to produce a nuclear weapon. … But it is the strongest signal yet that Iran is moving to restore the far larger stockpile that took the United States and five other nations years to persuade Tehran to send abroad.”

In his article, Gladstone went on to challenge Iran’s assertion of its legal right to withdraw from some commitments in the JCPOA a year after Trump had unilaterally withdrawn from the agreement. Iranian leaders, he said, “have sought to justify these steps as a response to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the nuclear accord last year and its reimposition of sanctions.” He claimed that “[W]estern experts on the agreement” had disputed Iran’s reasoning.” But Gladstone cited only one “expert,” Henry Rome of the Eurasia Group, who called the Iranian claim “a unilateral interpretation from the Iranian side of what the nuclear deal means….”

Rome is evidently unfamiliar, however, with the fundamental principle of international law that grants a party to an agreement the inherent right to reduce or terminate the fulfillment of an agreement if there is a “material breach” by another party. In response to an email query for this story, Dr. Richard Falk, a leading scholar on international law, responded to Rome’s statement by commenting, “The U.S. repudiation of the agreement and reimposition of sanctions constitutes without any reasonable doubt, a material breach of the Nuclear Agreement, which relieves Iran of any legal obligations with respect to complying with the treaty.”

David Sanger, who for two decades has served as chief national security correspondent for The New York Times, wrote a story published July 1 that led with the assertion that Iran had “violated a key provision” of the 2015 nuclear deal. Sanger thus ignored the distinction between a response to complete renunciation of the entire deal by the Trump administration and a violation of it. Sanger also called the announcement by foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran’s intention to increase the level of purity of enrichment “a provocative action” that “could move the country closer to possessing fuel that with further processing could be used in a weapon.”

Sanger acknowledged Iran has “consistently denied that it has any intention of making a nuclear weapon,” but asserted, “[A] trove of nuclear-related documents, spirited out of a Tehran warehouse by Israeli agents last year, showed extensive work before 2003 to design a nuclear warhead.”

But the alleged Mossad theft in 2018 of half a ton of purported top-secret Iranian nuclear weapons archive documents from an unguarded shack in Tehran was a highly implausible tale. No evidence was offered to prove that the entire story—and the new documents shown by the Israelis—were not completely fraudulent.

The Associated Press ran a story on May 16 with a lede declaring, “Iran made a veiled threat this week to enrich uranium stocks closer to weapon-grade levels….” Iran had denied that it had ever sought nuclear weapons, the story said, but “Western officials and experts say that prior to the nuclear deal, Iran had a breakout capability of just a few months if it were to decide to build a bomb.”

The Washington Post published its version of the Iranian “breakout capability” threat story July 3. Reporting Iran’s plans to enrich uranium to 20%, the Post explained, “Such a move would mean that Iran could jump to producing weapons-grade uranium more quickly.”

Furthermore, the Post reported, “Experts estimate that before the nuclear deal, the amount of time that Iran needed to accumulate enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb was two or three months.” The JCPOA, on the other hand, “was designed to increase that breakout period to about a year.”

National Public Radio chimed in with its own contribution to the breakout narrative on July 10, quoting John Negroponte, a former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, declaring, “Iran’s newly-announced levels appear modest at the moment, but would become more concerning if there were further increases. Such steps would imply a willingness on Iran’s part to go all the way to construction of a bomb.”

The media narrative about Iran’s resuming uranium enrichment thus suggests that what Americans should be worried about primarily is not the provocative character of the Trump administration’s Iran policy but the threat that Iran will move toward a “breakout” strategy vis-à-vis its nuclear weapons capability.

Iran’s enrichment diplomacy 

The real history of Iran’s uranium enrichment strategy shows, however, that that nation was always aimed at rolling back U.S. financial sanctions and compelling the United States to acknowledge legitimate Iranian interests in the region rather than to fuel a race for a nuclear bomb.

Iran began enriching uranium to 20% in February 2010 for the first time to provide fuel plates for its Tehran Research Reactor, which produces isotopes for cancer treatment. But its overarching objective was to put pressure on the Obama administration, which was seeking to on coerce Iran to give up its nuclear program altogether.

In 2012, Iran began an new phase of diplomatic pressure on the Obama administration by making very large additions to its capabilities for enrichment at 20% while still avoiding converting those capabilities to a higher stockpile of 20% enrichment uranium. Meanwhile, Iran’s government signaled to the United States that it had the option of reversing the increase through an agreement.

The number of centrifuges at the two Iranian enrichment facilities, where 20% enrichment was being carried out, stood at 696 in May 2012. By that August, it had increased to 2,140, according the International Atomic Energy Agency’s August 30, 2012 report. Furthermore, its total production of 20% enriched uranium increased from 143 kg in May to 189.4 kg in August.

But the same IAEA report revealed that Iran’s stockpile of 20% enriched uranium had actually fallen during that period from 101 kg to 91.4 kg. The reason for that seemingly contradictory result was that between May and August 2012, Iran had increased the amount of the 20% enriched uranium it had produced to powder for fuel plates for its Tehran medical reactor instead of adding it to the stockpile. That meant that the enriched uranium was in a form that could not be reconverted easily or quickly to weapons-grade enriched uranium.

Behind that reduction was an even bigger political decision: None of the 1,440 centrifuges added to Iran’s two enrichment facilities during that period was put into operation, as the IAEA report showed.

This all amounted to a clear signal to the Obama administration that Iran was ready to negotiate strict limits on its enrichment if the United States abandoned its zero-enrichment demand. “They are creating tremendous capacity,” a senior U.S. official told The New York Times, “but they are not using it.” The official acknowledged, moreover, that Iran’s enrichment diplomacy gave it “leverage” on U.S. policy.

The widely accepted notion that Iran was prevented only by U.S. pressure from making a breakout bid for a nuclear weapon and that Iran is now once again threatening to do so is central to the present toxic political atmosphere surrounding the Iran nuclear issue.

In fact, by mid-2012 Iran already had what was called a “breakout” capability but chose to use instead to induce the United States to negotiate seriously with Iran.

As the IAEA documented in its August 2012 report, Iran already had produced 189 kg of 20% enriched uranium, which was close to the minimum estimate of what experts believe it would take to produce the 25 kg of 90% enriched uranium needed for a single nuclear weapon. And had Iran actually used the additional 1,440 centrifuges available, Iran could have tripled its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium within a matter of months.

A media crisis on the Iran nuclear issue 

From mid-2012 until the JCOPOA was completed in mid-2015, Iran chose to pursue an agreement with the United States instead of exploiting its capabilities for a breakout. But that pivotal episode in Iran’s past enrichment diplomacy has been ignored by the corporate media. Now the media are once again portraying Iran primarily as the aggressor in the breakout narrative despite the clearly expressed Iranian readiness to reverse the process.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is already preparing for a new confrontation with Iran over its resumption of enrichment even as it planned to add still more onerous sanctions. Hidden near the bottom of its story, The New York Times revealed on July 1 that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies were “beginning to review what steps to take if the president determined that Iran was getting too close to producing a bomb.”

The new nuclear crisis with Iran is being stoked by the corporate media’s collective failure to convey the reality of the situation to the public. Thus, the Trump administration and the media have, to date, successfully made the Iranian government the focus of scrutiny that the public would be well-served to turn on them as well.

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Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to TAC. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter.

Featured image: Screen shot of a recent Fox Business report about U.S.-Iran relations. (Source: Fox Business via Youtube)


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

Wouldn’t you think the corporate media would be interested in the US embassy’s reaction to the appointment of a new Canadian foreign minister? Especially if that reaction was to claim Ottawa had decided to adopt an “America First” foreign policy? Wouldn’t some big newspaper or TV station, dedicated to telling the truth about what our governments, corporations and other institutions are doing, find it noteworthy enough to report the existence of an embassy memo claiming Justin Trudeau appointed Chrystia Freeland foreign minister in order to promote the interests of President Donald Trump?

Surprise, surprise, no!

The reason? The best this long-time observer of Canadian foreign policy can come up with? Embarrassment.

At the start of the month Communist Party researcher Jay Watts disclosed a dispatch from the US embassy in Ottawa to the State Department in Washington entitled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.” Uncovered through a freedom of information request, the largely redacted cable also notes that Justin Trudeau’s government would be “Prioritizing U.S. Relations, ASAP.”

The March 2017 cable was authored just weeks after Freeland was appointed foreign affairs minister. US officials concluded that Trudeau promoted Freeland “in large part because of her strong U.S. contacts” and that her “number one priority” was working closely with Washington.

The Grayzone’s Ben Norton wrote an article based on the cable. Appropriately, the New York based journalist linked the memo to Canadian policy on Venezuela, Syria, Russia, Nicaragua, Iran and elsewhere. A number of left-wing websites reposted Norton’s article and RT International invited me on to discuss the memo, but there was no other mention of the dispatch .

While the blackout was media wide, most striking was the lack of reaction by one of the most left-wing commentators afforded space in a corporate daily. In December Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick described Freeland as “likely winner of Canadian of the Year, should that prize exist.” In a number of previous columns she called Freeland “Canada’s famously feminist Foreign Minister”, a “brilliant and wonderful Liberal candidate” and lauded “a stark, extraordinary speech [Freeland delivered] in Washington on Wednesday after receiving a diplomat of the year award at the Foreign Policy forum.”

While she praises Freeland, Mallick is hostile to Donald Trump. I emailed Mallick to ask if she’d seen the cable, whether she planned to write about it and if she considered it ironic that US officials thought her “Canadian of the Year” was pursuing an ‘America First’ policy. She didn’t respond to two emails, but on Tuesday she praised Freeland again.

Clearly the media establishment understands that covering the memo would embarrass Freeland and the broader foreign policy establishment. Most Canadians don’t want Ottawa following US policy, particularly with a widely disliked individual as president.

For Freeland and the foreign policy power structure there are few ways to discuss a relatively straightforward memo that would not embarrass them and reveal the lie at the heart of the ‘Canada is a force for good’ mythology that is this country’s foreign policy self-image. So the best tactic is to take no notice.

But that’s not the case with many other international issues in which Ottawa is pursuing aggressive, inhumane, policy. In the case of Venezuela, for instance, the media can detail important elements of Canada’s campaign to oust the government since they’ve spent years demonizing it. In fact, Canada’s naked imperialism in Venezuela is often portrayed as benevolence!

While the dearth of coverage of the ‘America first’ Canadian foreign policy memo is outrageous, it isn’t surprising. In A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation I detail extreme media bias in favor of power on topics ranging from Palestine to East Timor, investment agreements to the mining industry. The suppression of critical information regarding Canada’s role in Haiti over the past decade and a half is particularly stark. Below are three examples:

  • On Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, 2003, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized an international gathering to consider overthrowing Haiti’s government. At the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” Canadian, French and US officials discussed ousting elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, putting Haiti under UN trusteeship and re-creating the disbanded Haitian army. A year later the US, France and Canada invaded Haiti to overthrow Aristide’s government. Still, the dominant media all but ignored the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti”, even though information about it is easily accessible online and solidarity activists across the country referenced it repeatedly. A Canadian Newsstand search found not one single English-language report about the meeting (except for mentions of it by me and two other Haiti solidarity activists in opinion pieces).
  • The media largely refused to print or broadcast a 2011 Canadian Press story demonstrating that Ottawa militarized its response to the horrible 2010 earthquake to control Haiti’s traumatized and suffering population. According to an internal file the Canadian Press uncovered through an access to information request, Canadian officials worried that “political fragility has increased the risks of a popular uprising, and has fed the rumour that ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently in exile in South Africa, wants to organize a return to power.” The government documents also explain the importance of strengthening the Haitian authorities’ ability “to contain the risks of a popular uprising.” While 2,000 Canadian troops were deployed (alongside 10,000 US soldiers), a half-dozen Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Teams in cities across the country were readied but never sent.
  • On February 15, 2019, the Haiti Information Project photographed heavily-armed Canadian troops patrolling the Port-au-Prince airport in the midst of a general strike calling for the president to resign. I wrote a story about the deployment, wondering what they were doing in the country (The Haiti Information Project suggested they may have helped family members of President Jovenel Moïse’s unpopular government flee the country.) I was in contact with reporters at the Ottawa Citizen and National Post about the photos, but no media reported the Canadian special forces presence in Haiti.

The dominant media’s coverage of Canadian foreign policy is heavily biased in favor of power. It highlights the importance of following, sharing, contributing to and funding left and independent media.

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The Dark Side of the Moon Landings

July 21st, 2019 by Dr. Stuart Parkinson

The 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing gives us an opportunity to reflect on that achievement and also to consider the value to society – or otherwise – of space missions in general. While landing people on the Moon was undoubtedly an impressive technical achievement, and helped humanity to appreciate how unique the Earth is, the problematic issues – especially of human space-flight – are being side-lined and forgotten.

Let’s start by considering robotic space-flight. It’s generally straightforward to identify the benefits of this type of space mission. Satellites have become essential for telecommunications and monitoring the state of the Earth’s environment, while missions beyond Earth’s orbit have helped our understanding of the Sun and other planets. This latter knowledge has been useful, for example, in helping us to predict the effect of solar changes on our weather and improving our comprehension of the greenhouse effect. But with human space-flight, the benefits are harder to identify, while the negative elements are rather more obvious.

Let’s look first at the military connection. The Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union – which of course included the Apollo missions to the Moon and other early human missions – was driven far more by superpower rivalry than it was by exploration or science. And this link was strongest in rocket technology. Both nations were developing inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to carry their nuclear warheads, but the failure rate during testing was high. Human space missions – including the Russian Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz and the American Mercury, Gemini and Apollo – became a vital testing ground for this rapidly developing technology. [1, 2]  To this day, ballistic missiles remain the main delivery systems for nuclear warheads, creating a constant threat of nuclear catastrophe. Indeed, the lead contractor for NASA’s newest crewed spacecraft – the Orion MPCV – is Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military corporation. [3]  One wonders to what extent current research and development in human space-flight will be used to help, for example, set up Trump’s recently announced ‘Space Force’ with all the potential it holds for weaponsing space. [4]  Indeed, with the US taking a leading role in dismantling a host of arms control agreements and ramping up military spending, there is a real potential for the current international arms race to spread beyond planet Earth.

A second concern about human space-flight is the huge cost. The NASA estimate for the whole Apollo programme is over $200 billion in today’s money [5] – for a programme lasting only a decade, and which resulted in just 6 successful Moon landings. At its peak, NASA was spending 4.4% of the federal budget, which is very large for a ‘blue skies’ programme. At the same time, the US government was facing huge criticism from the civil rights movement and fighting the Vietnam War. It’s hard to accept that resources were being prioritised appropriately. NASA’s annual budget was cut considerably in the wake of Apollo. Hence the next major human programme, the Space Shuttle, took 30 years to spend a similar amount. [6]  This included 135 missions – but these only reached Earth’s orbit. Predicted costs for newer space-craft are estimated to be a lot lower, but such predictions are notoriously unreliable in this field. In any case, it will still be much more expensive to put a human into space than a robot. Humans are very fragile, and need lots of technology to keep them safe. Robots are getting smaller and more intelligent by the year, so the argument for using a human to carry out complex tasks is getting weaker and weaker. Indeed, space scientists generally prefer robotic missions as, for the price of a human trip into orbit, they could fund two or three missions further with much more ambitious goals. [7]  The main benefits of space technology that I mentioned earlier are dominated by robotic technology, but the US government is shifting spending away from essential Earth observation work towards human space missions, including those with military applications. [8]  Indeed, with so many urgent and important applications of science lacking funds here on Earth – from global climate change to poverty eradication – it’s not hard to think of more useful ways to spend the money currently directed to human space-flight.

The final concern is the environmental impacts. Prof Mike Berners-Lee of Lancaster University calculated that, before it was retired from service in 2011, the carbon emissions of one Space Shuttle flight was at least 4,600 tonnes. [9]  That’s about the same amount of pollution as driving 230 times around the Earth in a small car – or over 9 million kilometres. [10]  Given the International Space Station orbits the Earth at an altitude of only 350km, that is one very polluting commute! Newer space-craft are significantly more efficient, but are still very polluting. For example, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy – which had its first successful test-flight last year and is designed to carry humans into orbit, to the Moon and beyond – emits about 1,200 tonnes per launch. [11]  That’s similar to driving a small car 60 times around the Earth. And this estimate does not include the warming effects of water vapour and black carbon in the upper atmosphere, nor the carbon footprint of the space-craft itself or the launch infrastructure. Even the Virgin Galactic craft – which is only planned to take tourists to the edge of space – would create significant pollution problems due to its emissions of black carbon into the stratosphere. [12]  Indeed, it is hard to see any justification for space tourism – which will just be a plaything for the wealthy – in a society which needs to rapidly reach net zero carbon emissions.

So the excitement over the 50th anniversary should be tempered by a healthy dose of realism. While the Moon landings were an impressive technical achievement, the current enthusiasm for human space-flight threatens to divert much needed scientific and technical resources away from where it’s really needed. Human colonisation of space will be very risky, polluting, expensive and potentially expand the growing international arms race into space. It should not be a priority while we have so many urgent environmental and social problems to solve here on Earth.

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Dr Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, and holds a PhD in climate science.

Notes

1. Wikipedia (2019a). Intercontinental ballistic missile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile

2. Wikipedia (2019b). Space Race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race

3. Wikipedia (2019c). Orion (spacecraft). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

4. The Guardian (2018). Space Force: all you need to know about Trump’s bold new interstellar plan. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/10/space-force-everything-you-need-to-know

5. In 2009, NASA estimated the total cost of the Apollo programme to be $170 bn in 2005 dollars. Extreme Tech (2014). The Apollo 11 moon landing, 45 years on. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-landing-45-years-looking-back-at-mankinds-giant-leap

6. Space (2011). NASA’s Shuttle Program Cost $209 Billion — Was it Worth It? https://www.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-promises-209-billion.html

7. Phys.org (2005). Manned vs. Unmanned Space Exploration. https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration.html

8. Reynolds L (2017). Trump’s climate cuts endanger essential Earth Observation research. Responsible Science blog. https://www.sgr.org.uk/index.php/resources/trump-s-climate-cuts-endanger-essential-earth-observation-research

9. Measured as tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Figures from p.155 of: Berners-Lee M (2010). How bad are bananas? The carbon footprint of everything. Profile books.

10. Calculated using figures from p.117 of Berners-Lee (2010) – as note 9.

11. The Falcon Heavy rocket uses three Falcon 9 boosters in its first stage, each carrying 125 tonnes of kerosene rocket fuel. The emission factor for kerosene is approximately 3.2 tCO2e/t. Key figures from:
Wikipedia (2019d). Falcon Heavy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy

12. Chapman P (2016). Flights from sense: how space tourism could alter the climate. SGR Newsletter, no.44. https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/flights-sense-how-space-tourism-could-alter-climate-february-2016

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Consortium News—a news website devoted to investigative journalism founded by the late Robert Parry and which has steadfastly defended WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange—was the target of a malware attack last Monday that took down the site for more than five hours.

That the site was rendered inoperable was initially reported in a Consortium News Twitter post,

“Our website is completely down. Our media host said we have been attacked by malware. They actually tried to blame ‘the Russians’! Every article published since 2011 now gets a 404 Not Found. They are working on it. Problem started slowly on Friday first day of CN Live!”

A report published after the site was restored explained that the malicious attack shut down Consortium News “days after the premiere episode of the outlet’s live-streamed show, CN Live!” and “followed on the heels of the suspension of pro-Assange account Unity4J from Twitter.”

On July 11, the Unity4J account—a Twitter feed dedicated to circulating information and advocacy for Julian Assange, who remains incarcerated at London’s Belmarsh Prison while awaiting extradition to the US—was arbitrarily suspended by Twitter. After one week of being taken down, the account was abruptly restored on Thursday with no explanation provided by Twitter for their act of censorship.

The Consortium News report identified the attack on their website with the Twitter censorship because they had conducted Unity4J online vigils over the previous months. Consortium News and other independent news outlets denounced the Unity4J ban along with the rock musician Roger Waters who called Julian Assange a “great hero of freedom of the press” and attacked Twitter as “Big Brother” and “an arm of the Thought Police” and “an arm of the forces of oppression.”

ConsortiumNews.com was founded in 1995 by Robert Parry, a former journalist for the Associated Press who became distressed by “the propaganda that had come to pervade American journalism.” Parry was a reporter who helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal to the public in the mid-1980s and subsequently—after the founding of Consortium News—wrote to expose the war crimes and lies of successive US administrations both Democratic and Republican.

The timing of the attack on the Consortium News website shows—whoever was behind the malware assault—that the forces of reaction are seeking to silence anyone who wishes to tell the truth about the ongoing criminal persecution of both Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Manning is currently locked up in a federal prison in Virginia and being fined $1,000 per day for refusing to testify before a grand jury empaneled for the purpose of bringing further frame-up charges against Assange.

Significantly, the inaugural episode of Consortium News’ CN Live! video broadcast included a 26-minute segment on Julian Assange that was mostly an interview with the UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer. Melzer spoke about the inhumane conditions of imprisonment facing Assange and explained in detail the political reasons why the WikiLeaks publisher has been tortured and denied his legal rights.

In his interview, Melzer denounced the US, British, Swedish and Ecuadorian governments for their “mistreatment and misuse of judicial powers against a single individual” as well as the so-called human rights advocates who have refused to come to Assange’s defense.

Melzer said,

“This is the first time in twenty years that I see democratic states ganging up and isolating a single individual and systematically violating his fair trial guarantees, his human rights in every aspect and even ill-treatment mobbing that amounts to psychological torture cumulatively. That’s very serious.”

When asked by CN Live! Editor Joe Lauria if Assange has any chance of a fair trial in the US, Melzer replied,

“The public prejudice against Assange is monumental in the United States. He is being perceived as public enemy number one. He has been described as a public enemy by the current Secretary of State and former CIA director. Other public figures have called for his assassination.”

“So, you have this environment and you send him to a court where to my knowledge no national security defendant has ever been acquitted—I think it’s the same court and the same judge who has been responsible for the trial against Chelsea Manning where she has been sentenced to thirty-five years originally, which is a draconian punishment … where are the investigations and prosecutions of all the other crimes and activities that have been exposed by this whistle-blower and by WikiLeaks? If you don’t prosecute the war crimes, then clearly you don’t have equality before the law, clearly there is no chance of having a fair trial, clearly then prosecution becomes persecution.”

Consortium News also reported that the Twitter accounts and websites of activists associated with Unity4J had also been suspended and hacked around the same time. The report said,

“Aaron Kesel, who also writes as an independent journalist, said in an interview that they were locked out of their accounts within minutes of publishing an article covering the Catalonian public’s celebration of Assange’s birthday. Activist Post, the site on which the article was published, was likewise reportedly hacked in recent weeks.”

There is no doubt that international public access to this kind of independent reporting is of great concern to the military-intelligence state behind the persecution of Assange and Manning. It is the exposure of these important facts that is behind the ongoing online censorship of socialist and oppositional websites that has been identified by the World Socialist Web Site going back to the spring and summer of 2017.

The coordinated attacks on defenders of free speech and those fighting for the freedom of Assange and Manning is a sign that the apparatus of the state repression fears that mass support is building against this unprecedented international conspiracy against the truth. At the same time, it is a warning that the drive to silence and punish them for exposing the crimes of US imperialism is being extended to others in an effort to browbeat anyone who dares take up the fight for his defense and freedom.

The international working class will not be intimidated by these tactics. The demand for the freedom of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning must be expanded on a world scale and taken up in every country, workplace, neighborhood and school. As has been shown by striking workers, peasants and students in Ecuador, the fight for the rights of Julian Assange is key to the struggle of the working class for socialism and against the entire capitalist system.

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“Global Order” Equals the “New Fascism”

July 21st, 2019 by Mark Taliano

Globalizing “neoliberal” diktats are imposing death and poverty as transnational oligarchies bleed “countries” of their wealth and resources. Western politicians are perception management fronts. “Austerity” = corporate bailouts. Nomenclature is weaponized.

People, the new “wretched of the earth” are increasingly caged, shackled, disappeared, lost at sea. Racism and fascism, outgrowths of fabricated supremacist ideologies, are becoming the “new normal” as socially-oriented, democratic political economies at home and abroad are undermined and destroyed. “Neoliberalism” and democracy run in opposite directions.

The same  dystopia that the transnational oligarchy and its Imperial terror forces impose on prey nations is also being imposed on domestic “First World” populations as well-paying jobs are off-shored, healthcare is “privatized”, middle classes evaporate,  the public sphere is plundered, regulations that are detrimental to corporate conglomerates are erased, and the masses are disempowered.  Vast flows of public monies are transferred to War Inc. which further devastates people and the planet.  Root causes of the dystopia are taboo topics.

— Mark Taliano, July 19, 2019

***

The current “neoliberal” bailed-out “free market” diseconomy, imposed globally by military war crimes, erases nation-state sovereignty and self-determination in favour of supranational totalitarian predation.

Freedom of thought and expression are erased beneath the amorphous predation of this neo-con “global order”. The truth must not emerge, because the truth is entirely toxic to humanity and the habitable planet. Canada’s support for Nazism and al Qaeda are hallmarks of the cancer infecting us. But the cancer must be hidden. This is the new “Nazism”, (cloaked in humanitarianism), but it is arguably far more devastating than the old ”Nazism”.

Hallmarks of the system include decimation and plunder of the public sphere, “privatization” and deregulation, factors which led directly to the 2008/09 crash, the public bailouts of corporate monopolies — including banks[1]and car manufacturing — skyrocketing public debt, and the on-going  economic dystopia of precarious employment, off-shoring of well-paying jobs, rising poverty, and increasing wealth concentrated in the and hands of an oligarchic (extreme) minority.

Predation of the public sphere includes the public bailouts of auto manufacturers and banks. But the corporate monopolies know no loyalties, and they are protected by supranational “free” trade agreements.  Hence, whereas the Canadian auto industry received almost $4 billion in bailouts[2] in 2009, they are now relocating to cheaper pastures[3]. Civic responsibility and neoliberalism are completely divorced from each other.

Overseas, neoliberalism imposes itself through war and terrorism. Canada and its allies support neo-Nazis[4], al Qaeda and ISIS[5], but the war propaganda and the apparatus of Lies Inc., to which the colonial media, spawn of concentrated media ownership, owes its fidelity, hides the truth to all but the well-informed. War propaganda is the norm, not the exception.

This failed economic model perpetuates itself domestically and globally with vast and increasing inflows of public monies.  Hence, the over $32 billion that Canada spends on “Defence” spending to the detriment of spending that addresses real world needs.

Public Accounts of Canada, 2017-2018. Statement of Expenses. Courtesy Tamara Lorincz.

The “global order” preached by Canada and its allies, is the new Fascism, globalized, parasitical, mass murdering, and mindless.

Canada can remain a vassal to the worst of the worst, relinquishing all of its sovereignty, or it can take steps towards a better future.  Leaving NATO would be the first best step.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net.

Notes

[1] Prof. Chossudovsky, “The Banker Bailouts – Michel Chossudovsky on Economics 101” The Corbett Report. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx76RmNpAVM) Accessed 12 April, 2018.

[2] Mark Mike, “How much did the 2009 automotive bailout cost taxpayers?” Taxpayer.com. November 2015. (https://www.taxpayer.com/media/CTF-AutoBailoutReport-2015.pdf) Accessed 4 December, 2018.

[3] Council of Canadians Media Release, “Oshawa Plant Closing Just Another Symptom of Bad Free Trade Agreements, says Council of Canadians.” 28 November, 2018.( https://canadians.org/media/oshawa-plant-closing-just-another-symptom-bad-free-trade-agreements-says-council-canadians?fbclid=IwAR2Kop8Cjp9BmCHJ6xCevKdt_lfbi4_VIfqenqK8accSjJI7yAf9tplmFhg#.XAaP1ZVwzgY.facebook) Accessed 4 December, 2018.

[4] Stephen Lendman, “Ukraine: US-installed Fascist Tyranny in Europe’s Heartland.” Global Research. 4 December, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-us-installed-fascist-tyranny-in-europes-heartland/5661763) Accessed 12 April, 2018.

[5] Mark Taliano, “Empire’s Currency: The Lie.” Global Research. 17 November, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/empires-currency-lie/5660161) Accessed 4 December, 2018.


Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

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Is Trump Psychologically Deranged?

July 20th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Iran denies it, but if true it’s an act of premeditated aggression against a nonbelligerent country threatening no one — occurring 7,239 miles distant from the US.

More on his claim and Iran’s response below.

***

What do all his statements on major issues and actions say about his mental stability and fitness to lead?

Duty to Warn is “an association of mental health professionals and other concerned citizens who advocate Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he is psychologically unfit for office.”

According to Psychology Today, over 60,000 mental health professionals signed a Duty to Warn petition, stating the following:

“We, the undersigned mental health professionals, believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.”

“And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ ”

At the same time, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s so-called Goldwater Rule, it’s unethical for psychiatrists to judge a public figure psychologically whom they haven’t examined face-to-face.

Yet the mental health professionals who signed the Duty to Warn petition did it believing Trump represents a danger to society. Therefore, they had an obligation to override the Goldwater Rule.

Trump’s actions since taking office clearly are cause for great concern. He escalated Bush/Cheney-Obama wars while waging all-out war by other means on nonbelligerent Iran and Venezuela — wanting their economies crushed, their people immiserated, perhaps heading for direct or proxy hot war on one or both countries.

All politicians lie. It goes with the territory. When it comes to lies and deception, Trump resembles Star Trek — going where no US leader went before.

He fails the Pinocchio test time and again in public remarks. On issues mattering most, almost nothing he says is credible — most often saying one thing and doing something entirely different.

He’s so conditioned to dissembling he consistently co-mingles facts and fiction — perhaps no longer able to distinguish between them.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), on environmental issues alone, his “torrent of misleading statements and flat-out lies has an army of journalists working 24/7 to set the record straight.”

The same is true for virtually all policy issues on his plate. Almost nothing he says can be believed.

On Thursday, Trump said the USS Boxer warship downed an Iranian drone, falsely accusing Tehran of a “provocative and hostile” act, threatening the ship, adding:

“The United States reserves the right to defend our personnel, facilities and interests, and calls upon all nations to condemn Iran’s attempts to disrupt freedom of navigation and global commerce (sic).”

A Pentagon statement said:

“A fixed-wing unmanned aerial system approached Boxer and closed within a threatening range (sic).”

“The ship took defensive action against the UAS to ensure the safety of the ship and its crew.”

According to Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi:

“We have not lost any drone in the Strait of Hormuz nor anywhere else,” adding:

The “USS Boxer (may have) shot down (a Pentagon) UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) by mistake!”

On Friday, Iran’s Tasnim News Agency reported that all Iranian drones returned safely to their base, none downed in flight.

In New York for a UN Economic and Social Council ministerial meeting, Iran’s Foreign Minster Zarif said

“(w)e have no information about losing a drone…”

He re-tweeted a map posted in June on his page, showing how far distant the US is from Iran, captioning it: “Reminder.”

The US is consistently and repeatedly involved in hostile actions in parts of the world not its own, what its belligerent imperial agenda is all about.

Trump’s claim about downing an Iranian drone came hours after the IRGC navy seized a vessel in the Hormuz Strait it claimed was involved in oil smuggling, according to a statement.

Separately, Zarif said

“(t)he issue of regional security and the necessity of preventing US-warmongering measures and the economic war that the United States has begun against the Iranian people, as in fact the economic terrorism is contrary to Security Council Resolution 2231, and the United Nations’ responsibilities in this regard was discussed.”

He also said he “spoke with the representatives of the congress (at the UN), and I will do it again, but I do not tell with whom I will talk, and I leave it to them to announce.

GOP Senator Rand Paul may have been one he met informally. He opposes US military action against Iran. According to unnamed US officials, he proposed extending an olive branch to Zarif to reduce tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Politico reported that “Trump signed off on the idea.” DJT claimed otherwise, saying he didn’t ask Paul to serve as a US back channel emissary to Iran.

Zarif, President Rouhani, and other Iranian officials stressed that talks with the Trump regime depend on it returning to the JCPOA and lifting illegal sanctions on the country.

Nor will there be a new JCPOA deal. “We have” one, Zarif stressed, adopted unanimously by Security Council members, making it binding international law.

Whatever happens ahead,

“(w)e will survive. We will prosper long after (Trump) is gone,” said Zarif, adding: “7,000 years of proof” of Iran’s survivability. “Our time slots are in millennia.”

Showing unrelenting hostility toward the Islamic Republic, Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned five Iranians and seven of the nation’s enterprises on Thursday — related to its legitimate nuclear activities.

Note: A report by Toronto-based Global News said “Trump name(ed) Rand Paul as new Iran point person over a round of golf” last weekend, citing unspecified reports.

If true, Trump falsely claimed otherwise. If Paul is involved in talks with Iran, it’s a step back from possible war.

While meeting with reporters in New York, Zarif said “I don’t meet with emissaries” — making it unclear if he’ll deal with Paul, acting as a Trump regime representative.

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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.

Endangered Species Mural Project

July 20th, 2019 by Center For Biological Diversity

Just as nature inspires art, art inspires actions to defend wild places and the wild creatures that live in them. With this in mind, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Endangered Species Mural Project works with artists, scientists, and organizers to bring endangered wildlife onto the streets of cities and towns around the country. These murals are imagined as tools to help celebrate local endangered species within communities, and to encourage people to make connections between conservation and community strength. Spearheaded by Portland artist Roger Peet, the mural project promotes an affinity for the natural world and the diverse species that help define it.

Carolina northern flying squirrel mural by Roger Peet and Tricia Tripp

Mural of two Southwest species, the Sonoran pronghorn and the Yuma clapper rail, in Yuma, Ariz., by artist Roger Peet and Phoenix-based muralist Lucinda Hinojos, with help from students at Arizona Western College.

Marbled murrelet, Endangered Species Mural Project

This 256-foot-long mural in Arcata, Calif., by Lucas Thornton, celebrates the endangered marbled murrelet, an ancient seabird from the Pacific Northwest that flies inland 50 miles to nest among deep moss in old-growth forest canopy. .

Austin blind salamander, Endangered Species Mural Project

Mural of the Austin blind salamander, a small amphibian whose habitat is found entirely within the Austin city limits and is threatened by pollution and development. The mural was painted by project coordinator Roger Peet with help from students at Austin Discovery School in Austin, Tex.

borderlands species, Endangered Species Mural Project

This mural showcases the ocelot, Aplomado falcon, Mexican gray wolf, Chiricahua leopard frog and Sneed’s pincushion cactus — five endangered species that share habitat along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Taylor's checkerspot butterfly, Endangered Species Mural Project

The Taylor’s checkerspot is an endangered butterfly once found widely in prairies in Oregon and Washington, but now restricted to a few dwindling populations and at an extreme risk of going extinct. This mural in Cottage Grove, Ore., was done by Roger Peet.

Grizzly bear murals

One of a series of grizzly bear murals in Oakland, Calif., by Roger Peet and Fernando “Rush” Santos.

Carolina northern flying squirrel mural by Roger Peet and Tricia Tripp

Carolina northern flying squirrel mural in Asheville, N.C., by Roger Peet and Tricia Tripp.

Streaked horned lark mural

Streaked horned lark mural in Portland, Ore., by Roger Peet. Photo by Olivia Conner.

Sockeye salmon mural

Sockeye salmon mural in Portland, Ore., by Roger Peet. Photo by Jerry McCarthy, Port of Portland.

Dakota skipper mural

Dakota skipper mural at Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock., N.D., by Roger Peet.

White fringeless orchid mural

White fringeless orchid mural in Berea, Ky., by Roger Peet and Trish Tripp.

Southeast freshwater mussels mural

Southeast freshwater mussels mural in Knoxville, Tenn., by Roger Peet, Merrilee Challiss and Trish Tripp.

Jaguar mural

Jaguar mural in Tucson, Ariz., by Kati Astraeir.

Yellow-billed cuckoo mural

Yellow-billed cuckoo mural in Los Angeles, Calif., led by Jess X. Chen.

Whale mural

Whale mural by Icy & Sot (working in coordination with Roger Peet) in Los Angeles, California. Photo   Jess X. Chen.

Watercress darter mural

Watercress darter mural in Birmingham, Ala., by Roger Peet and Birmingham artists Merrilee Challiss and Creighton Tynes. Photo by Kyle Crider.

Monarch butterfly mural

Monarch butterfly mural in Minneapolis, Minn., by Roger Peet and Barry Newman.

Montana arctic grayling mural

Arctic grayling mural by Roger Peet in Butte, Mont.

Mountain caribou mural

Mountain caribou mural in Sandpoint, Idaho. Mural artists Mazatl and Joy Mallari (from the Justseeds Artists Cooperative) worked with Roger Peet.

Message From the Artist

“Everywhere on Earth is unique, with qualities that distinguish it from other places both near and far. One of those qualities is biodiversity — the plants and animals that call a place home and may not be found anywhere else. Those species embody an area’s natural history and contribute to what makes it irreplaceable — and they also have something to say about the future, as many are in danger of going extinct. When we lose species, the places we inhabit and the lives we live become poorer and shallower  as a result. To help bring these species into the light, we decided to paint them on the walls.

“The goal of this project is to foster connections between people and the other forms of life that surround them. Whether that’s a fish in a river, a butterfly flitting from plant to plant, or a caribou chewing lichen from a tree, we’re bringing together artists and communities to create big, bold images that will become part of the neighborhoods where they’re created, making it a little easier for people to care about the species struggling to survive in their midst.”

Roger Peet is a Portland-based artist who is coordinating this project in association with the Center for Biological Diversity.

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Global Research Editor’s Note 

The Pentagon ban on the sale of F-35 stealth fighter jets to Turkey, which is presented as a penalty for not conforming to US demands, is ultimately a slap in the face for Lockheed Martin which produces the F-35.  

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed last month that Turkey was expecting the delivery of 100 US F-35 stealth fighter jets.  Each of these planes costs more than $100 million.

The delivery has now been cancelled. The penalty imposed on Ankara is incurred by America’s weapons industry: a $10 billion lost sale. 
.

(M. Ch. Global Research Editor)

***

In response to delivery of Russian S-400 equipment to Turkey days earlier, a White House press release said the following:

“…Turkey’s decision to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems renders its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible” — despite Ankara’s partnership in the program.

Its defense contractors produce around 900 F-35 parts. Turkey earlier made a downpayment for planes it contracted to buy. The Pentagon has been training its pilots to fly them.

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said expelling its military from the F-35 program “is incompatible with the spirit of alliance and does not rely on any legitimate justification,” adding:

The unacceptable move may greatly damage bilateral relations. Without elaboration, a Pentagon statement said Turkey’s purchase won’t harm NATO.

US war department deputy undersecretary for policy David Trachtenberg said upcoming NATO exercises in Georgia will include Turkish forces as planned. It’s unclear if F-35s will be involved.

Ankara is officially “suspended” from the program, reinstatement to come if it abandons S-400s, what’s highly unlikely.

Turkish pilots and other personnel involved in the F-35 program will leave the US at end of July, according to former Textron Systems CEO Ellen Lord, serving as Pentagon acquisition chief.

Moving the program’s supply chain to other suppliers will cost up to $600 million, according to Lord, perhaps double or triple this amount, given enormous Pentagon waste, fraud and abuse, massive cost overruns standard practice, accountability never forthcoming.

The White House statement expressed Trump regime sour grapes over Turkey’s refusal to bend to its will on this issue — what the US demands from all other countries, clearly from NATO members.

Some congressional members demand imposition of sanctions on Turkey — for exercising its sovereign right.

Last Sunday, Pompeo said the (hostile to Russia, Iran, and North Korea) Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) “requires that there be sanctions (on Turkey), and I’m confident that we will comply with the law and President Trump will comply with the law.”

If stiff sanctions are imposed, US/Turkish relations will deteriorate further. They’re already greatly strained over other issues, including US support for Kurdish YPG fighters in northern Syria, Ankara falsely calls terrorists.

Turkey is the first ever NATO member to buy sophisticated Russian weaponry – infuriating Washington for defying its will, along with losing major multi-billion orders for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, producers of Patriot missiles and F-35s respectively.

Russia’s sophisticated S-400 air defense system reportedly can track and down the West’s most advanced warplanes, including US stealth F-35s.

Is that reason enough to ban Turkey from purchasing the planes? It chose Russia’s state-of-the-art S-400s over less capable US Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) missiles.

S-400s operated by Russia, not Turkey, threaten US air superiority though are only intended for defensive purposes.

The Russian Federation never attacked another country preemptively. It threatens none now.

Its summer 2008 intervention in South Ossetia countered US-orchestrated Georgian aggression against Russian nationals, its forces deployed to protect them.

On July 12, acting Trump regime war secretary Mark Esper told his Turkish counterpart that Ankara “can either have the S-400 or the F-35. You cannot have both,” adding:

“Acquisition of the S-400 fundamentally undermines the capabilities of the F-35 and our ability to maintain that overmatch in the skies going forward.”

S-400s operated by Turkey do nothing of the kind — unless the US attacks the country militarily, a NATO member, clearly ruling out the likelihood.

Expelling Turkey from the F-35 program perhaps will get President Erdogan to buy Russian Su-35s, a likely superior choice given the problem-plagued US warplane, more advanced on the drawing board than in operation.

On Thursday, a Turkish military source said “(i)t is still premature to talk about (the country) purchas(ing) Russian Su-35 fighters. Our president will assess this important topic. He will also make a statement.”

CEO of Su-35 producer Rostec Sergey Chemezov said the company is ready to supply Turkey with these aircraft if its leadership wishes to buy them

According to Aviation Today, the F-35 program was almost cancelled in 2011 because of “the bloated, over-budget and” failure to stay on schedule.

Cost of the program is estimated at around $1.5 trillion over its multi-decade lifetime. Given dubious Pentagon accounting, it could be hundreds of billions of dollars more, maybe double the above estimate.

According to documents obtained by Defense News, the aircraft is still plagued by unresolved problems, some major, putting pilots at risk, and compromising its effectiveness.

By the Pentagon’s own admission, the program is “troubled” by production problems, excessive cost, delivery delays, and unresolved technical challenges.

Recently stepped down acting US war secretary Patrick Shanahan expressed frustration about the program, calling it “f…ed up.”

It may turn out to be the greatest weapons boondoggle in world history by far, perhaps never fully fulfilling its promise — while Russian super-weapons maintain superiority over the West’s best at far less cost.

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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 American Herald Tribune

The US boasted of downing an Iranian drone over the Strait of Hormuz, admittedly in international waters, just miles off Iran’s coast, and thousands of miles from Washington.

It claims the drone was “threatening” a US amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer.

The Washington Post in its article, “Trump says the U.S. Navy downed an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz,” would claim:

A U.S. naval ship downed an Iranian drone that flew too close and ignored multiple calls to turn away, President Trump said Thursday, as tensions between the United States and Iran appeared to be rising once again in the Persian Gulf region. 

Speaking at the White House, Trump said the drone came within 1,000 yards of the USS Boxer in the Strait of Hormuz before the crew “took defensive action” and “immediately destroyed” it.

An AP article titled, “US warship downs Iranian drone in Hormuz Strait,” noted that (emphasis added):

The Pentagon said the incident happened at 10 am local time on Thursday in international waters while the Boxer was transiting the waterway to enter the Persian Gulf. The Boxer is one of several US naval ships in the area, including the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been operating in the nearby North Arabian Sea for weeks.

The claims come nearly a month after Iran shot down a US drone – an RQ-4A Global Hawk – operating near Iranian shores, also in the Strait of Hormuz.

At the time, the US condemned Iran’s move claiming it had downed the drone over international waters. Now – the US openly claims it has shot down an Iranian drone over international waters. The overt hypocrisy is intentional. The US has been attempting to goad Tehran into an armed conflict for years with US policy papers openly admitting as much.

A 2009 Brookings Institution paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran,” would openly admit (emphasis added):

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it.  

Apparently, the US is no longer concerned about whether or not the world recognizes this game and is doing everything in its power to goad Iran into miscalculating and granting the US justification for a long-desired and much larger conflict with Tehran.

Did the Iranian Drone Really Threaten the USS Boxer? Was it Even an Iranian Drone? 

As with most deliberate provocations – the recent US claims of downing an Iranian drone came with minimum details and no evidence at all. Not even the type of drone was mentioned by the Washington Post or AP.

Claims that the drone came within 1,000 yards of the ship and was disabled through electronic jamming indicates it was most likely an off-the-shelf drone used for photography and in no way posed a threat to the USS Boxer.

Iranian media – for its part – claims the US most likely shot down their own drone, and denies Iran was operating any of its own drones in the area at the time. Iran’s PressTV in an article titled, “US may have shot down own drone in Persian Gulf, Iran says of Trump’s claim,” would claim:

Iran has rejected US President Donald Trump’s claim that a US warship had shot down an Iranian Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) in the Strait of Hormuz. 

“We have not lost any drone in the Strait of Hormuz nor anywhere else,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araqchi said in a tweet on Friday. 

“I am worried that USS Boxer has shot down their own UAS by mistake!”

What is certain is that even if it were an Iranian drone, it couldn’t have posed more of a threat to the USS Boxer than America’s military presence in the Middle East poses to its inhabitants – a region where the US has repeatedly bombed, invaded, currently occupies or is waging war by proxy against multiple nations including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and indeed – Iran itself.

Beyond the Middle East the US has left Libya desolate and is currently occupying the Central Asian nation of Afghanistan – a military campaign that has lasted now nearly 2 decades and is unfolding along Iran’s eastern border while the US continues to maintain a military presence in Iraq on Iran’s western border.

The US currently maintains crippling sanctions against Iran, admittedly sponsors terrorist groups operating within Iran, and has repeatedly threatened to overthrow the Iranian government through open military intervention, US-sponsored “color revolutions,” as well as economic and covert military means.

The UK – equally committed to Washington’s desire to overthrow the Iranian government – has even recently hijacked an Iranian tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar.

Under ordinary circumstances, a military drone approaching a ship of any kind from any nation in international waters – allegedly as close as 1,000 yards – would be considered a provocation. But Iranian drones – if this was indeed the case – approaching a US warship plying the waters of a region utterly ravaged by US military aggression can at best be considered scrutiny the US has earned itself through its own destructive foreign policy – a foreign policy that fully intends to visit the same destruction brought upon nations like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan – upon Iran as well.

Iran surely has the right to defend itself – to track US warships as they pass just miles from its own shores – whether in “international waters” or not. And if Iran is not allowed to fire on US drones over these same “international waters,” what gave the US the right to do so?

There is a much easier solution for the US if its goal really is to ensure the safety of its vessels travelling the globe – stop provoking conflict, thus eliminating the chances of its vessels becoming targets during such conflict.

Of course, the US will not do this. It will continue pursuing hegemonic foreign policy until it is economically and militarily no longer able to do so. For Iran – the trick will be avoiding provocations designed to trigger a war the US still believes it can win until global dynamics change enough to ensure whatever war the US triggers it will have no chance of winning.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

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Farmers can keep spraying fruits and vegetables with a pesticide shown to harm a child’s brain even at low levels of exposure, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency said today.

With a court deadline looming, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced his decision to allow chlorpyrifos to continue to be used on conventionally grown food crops, like peaches, cherries, apples, oranges and corn. The chemical is not allowed for use on organic produce.

In April, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the EPA must decide by mid-July whether to reverse the Trump administration’s overturn of a scheduled ban on chlorpyrifos. The ban had been strongly supported by EPA scientists.

“Siding with pesticide corporations over the health and well-being of kids is the new normal at the EPA,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Today’s decision underscores the sad truth that as long as the Trump administration is in charge, this EPA will favor the interests of the chemical lobby over children’s safety.”

Evidence is overwhelming that even small doses of chlorpyrifos can damage parts of the brain that control language, memory, behavior and emotion. Multiple independent studies have documented the fact that exposure to chlorpyrifos impairs children’s IQs. EPA scientists’ assessments of those studies concluded that the levels of the pesticide currently found on food and in drinking water are unsafe.

The EPA’s calculations suggest that babies, children and pregnant women all consume much more chlorpyrifos than is safe. They estimate that typical exposures for babies are five times greater than the EPA’s proposed “safe” intake, and 11 to 15 times higher for toddlers and older children. A typical exposure for a pregnant woman is five times higher than it ought to be to protect her developing fetus.

The EPA was poised to ban the pesticide in 2017. But after the 2016 election Dow Chemical, which manufactures chlorpyrifos, set forth on an aggressive campaign to pressure the incoming Trump administration to block that decision. Dow donated $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration festivities and its CEO met privately with then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Soon after, Pruitt ignored his agency’s own scientists and aborted the scheduled ban.

Besides produce, there are other dietary routes that make exposure to chlorpyrifos particularly worrisome for parents. Recent tests commissioned by the Organic Center found the insecticide in nearly 60 percent of conventional milk samples tested.

“If the Trump administration had followed the advice of its scientists, chlorpyrifos likely would not be in the food and milk kids eat and drink today,” said Cook. “This is another example of what happens when the wrong people are put in vital positions with enormous importance to public health.”

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The heavily Russian-influenced government in the Central African Republic is recommending the closure of four Chinese-run gold mines over environmental concerns, making it possible that these firms could be replaced with Russian ones and potentially creating a model whereby Moscow can begin to “balance” Beijing in Africa as part of its efforts to negotiate a “New Detente” with the West.

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Sputnik reported that the heavily Russian-influenced government in the Central African Republic (CAR), the pivotal component of its recently completed “African Transversal” linking the Atlantic Coast with the Red Sea one, is recommending the closure of four Chinese-run gold mines over environmental concerns. Russia is the most important foreign actor in the country since its low-level “Democratic Security” intervention over the past year and a half saved the state in a similar, albeit much less dramatic and publicized, manner as its much larger one saved Syria almost four years ago. In fact, Moscow’s “Democratic Security” model has the potential to spread all over the continent because of how attractive it is to Africa’s many “national democracies” (also known as “autocracies” in the Western political parlance), most of which are dependent on the military-intelligence wing of their “deep states” for ensuring stability, so much so that “The US Is More Afraid Of Losing Africa To Russia Than To China” nowadays.

The success of Russia’s “Democratic Security” interventions is due to their low-cost in using a combination of military advisors, “mercenaries”, and arms sales to counter Hybrid War threats, all in exchange for what usually amounts to profitable extraction agreements in resource-rich states. The military inroads that Moscow makes enables it to gain access to the strategic core of the state, from where it expands its influence along the economic vector prior to reaching more comprehensive agreements with the said partner state. The upcoming Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi on 24 October will likely represent the official announcement of Russia’s “African Pivot”, during which time all of the work that it’s been undertaking behind the scenes over the past few years will become public and presented as part of the non-Western diversification strategy that it’s been pursing since the implementation of the West’s anti-Russian sanctions in 2014. Almost counterintuitively, Russia isn’t doing this to spite the West, but rather to make itself valuable enough to negotiate a “New Detente” with it.

To explain, the ongoing New Cold War can be simplified as the global competition between the fading US-led unipolar world order and the rising Chinese-led multipolar one, with Russia conceivably leading a “new non-aligned movement” (Neo-NAM) that fulfills its desire to become the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia and thus enables it to decisively manage this worldwide rivalry. Russia’s “Pivot to Africa” via its “Democratic Security” interventions can be seen through this prism in that Moscow is ensuring the security of Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) projects against Western Hybrid War threats simultaneously with offering these same host states an alternative to what some have criticized as China’s environmentally destructive investments such as the four gold mines that have caused such a scandal in the CAR. In the zero-sum game that the West believes that it’s engaged in with China, the replacement of Chinese investments with Russian ones by the heavily Russian-influenced countries requesting Moscow’s “Democratic Security” interventions is a relative win.

Should the CAR continue to set the precedent for what to expect from Russia’s “Pivot to Africa” — and there’s no reasonable argument why it wouldn’t since it foreshadowed the “Democratic Security” interventions that it’s commenced in SudanMali, and reportedly even in Libya as well — then the emerging model is that newly Russian-aligned countries might replace the most environmentally controversial Chinese investments with Russian ones as part of Moscow’s efforts to prove its strategic worth to the West in the context of negotiating a “New Detente”. That’s not to imply whatsoever that Russia is “anti-Chinese”, but just that it is first and foremost advancing its own national interests as it understands them, which naturally involves maximizing the profits that its companies receive in the resource-rich “Global South” countries that the Russian military is carrying out “Democratic Security” interventions, which could in turn stabilize the Eurasian Great Power’s macroeconomic situation if it ultimately results in the gradual lifting of sanctions as part of a “New Detente”.

Of course, the real indicator of whether or not this model is being implemented will be if the heavily Russian-influenced CAR replaces the four Chinese gold extraction companies with Russian ones, in which case other states might eventually follow suit (even those that haven’t requested Moscow’s “Democratic Security” interventions) if they believe that the advantages of “hitching their wagon” to what might ultimately become a Russian-led Neo-NAM outweigh the costs of curtailing some BRI connections with China. Reverting to Western economic influence is out of the question for an increasingly growing number of sovereignty-minded African states, but many of them are dissatisfied with some of the conditions associated with Chinese projects, which is why Russia is appearing so attractive as a “third choice” for satisfying their military, economic, and strategic needs. If taken to its full extent, then the best-case scenario could see Russia “moderating” the US-Chinese rivalry in Africa and helping its many countries get a better deal by “balancing” between all three of them.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

After months of experts raising alarm over the nuclear power industry pressuring U.S. regulators to roll back safety policies, staffers at the federal agency that monitors reactors sparked concerns Tuesday with official recommendations that include scaling back required inspections to save money.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has spent months reviewing its enforcement policies—and, as part of that process, sought input from industry groups, as Common Dreams detailed in March. In response, the industry representatives requested shifting to more “self-assessments,” limiting public disclosures for “lower-level” problems at plants, and easing the “burden of radiation-protection and emergency-preparedness inspections.”

According to The Associated Press, which first reported on NRC staffers’ suggestions:

The recommendations, made public Tuesday, include reducing the time and scope of some annual inspections at the nation’s 90-plus nuclear power plants. Some other inspections would be cut from every two years to every three years.

Some of the staff’s recommendations would require a vote by the commission, which has a majority of members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, who has urged agencies to reduce regulatory requirements for industries.

The NRC document that outlines the recommendations reportedly acknowledges that staffers disagree about the inspection reductions but claims that cutting back “improves efficiency while still helping to ensure reasonable assurance of adequate protection to the public.”

Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear power expert Edwin Lyman, however, charged that the suggestion to decrease federal oversight of nuclear power plants “completely ignores the cause-and-effect relationship between inspections and good performances.”

Democratic NRC member Jeff Baran also criticized the staff recommendations. He argued that the agency “shouldn’t perform fewer inspections or weaken its safety oversight to save money” and called for a public debate before any changes are made to existing policy.

“It affects every power reactor in the country,” he said. “We should absolutely hear from a broad range of stakeholders before making any far-reaching changes to NRC’s safety oversight program.”

Before the recommendations were released Tuesday, Democrats from the House Appropriations as well as Energy and Commerce committees expressed concerns about potential rollbacks of safety standards in a letter (pdf) to NRC Chairwoman Kristine Svinicki Monday.

The lawmakers wrote:

To ensure nuclear power provides safe, reliable, emissions-free energy, it is imperative for the NRC to uphold strong regulatory standards. That is why we are disturbed by the consideration of these far-reaching changes to the NRC’s regulatory regime without first actively conducting robust public outreach and engagement. It would be a mistake to attempt to make nuclear power more cost competitive by weakening NRC’s vital safety oversight. Cutting corners on such critical safety measures may eventually lead to a disaster that could be detrimental to the future of the domestic nuclear industry.

The AP‘s report on agency staffers’ official recommendations provoked further alarm from lawmakers and the public. Some people on Twitter decried the inspection proposal as “an insanely bad move” and “beyond nuts,” and referenced the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which is considered the world’s worst ever nuclear power plant accident.

Democratic Pennsylvania state Rep. Peter Schweyer tweeted that he would “happily” share his HBO password with the NRC “so they can catch up on” the network’s recently released series about Chernobyl.

U.S. Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.) wrote in a tweet that considering how many millions of Americans live in close proximity to nuclear power plants, the agency “needs to do more—not less—to ensure nuclear reactor safety.”

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Israel’s Choice for U.S. President

July 19th, 2019 by Philip Giraldi

In late June, President Donald Trump flailed away with his own particular brand of nondiplomacy at the G20 Summit in Japan, but it is worthwhile noting on the plus side that his administration is so inept that it could not even plan and execute a proper coup in Venezuela. Nor has it been able to concoct sufficient lies about Iran effective enough to create a casus belli and unleash the B-52s. There is a certain comfort in knowing that the United States is now governed by the Three Stooges—“Larry” Trump, “Moe” Pompeo, and “Curly” Bolton—which means that starting new wars might just be beyond their cognitive ability to make mischief.

The real irony is that stupidity is both bipartisan and contagious in the federal government. The Democrats have not quite figured out that instead of playing identity politics, talking about reparations, gay rights, “undocumented migrants,” and free college, they should instead be discussing more important issues, notably the impending nuclear holocaust being stumbled into by the Trumpsters, which just might bring to an end life on this planet as we know it.

A college friend recently asked me what my nightmare scenario for a totally dysfunctional foreign and national security policy might be. I responded without thinking that it really is all about war and peace, that the worst case would be the impeachment of a bumbling Trump and his replacement by a much more capable and vicious Vice President Mike Pence, who actually wants to end the world so he can be raptured up to heaven.

But my answer was wrong. Trump is unlikely to be impeached by a Senate in which the GOP holds a majority, so Pence’s ascent to the throne is not currently plausible unless the president suffers a cardiac arrest after ingesting too many cheeseburgers. The real danger is what comes after Trump, in 2024. The preferred candidate by Israel and its lobby, and therefore the prohibitive favorite, is Trump’s former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley. If you think Trump is blindly and blatantly pro-Israel at the expense of American interests, just wait until you see Haley’s naked self-interest at work.

Haley resigned from her position at the UN last October. Like many others in the foreign policy establishment, she was all for Israel because she understood that leaning that way provided instant access to money and plenty of positive press coverage. Completely ignorant of possible consequences, she declared that Washington was “locked and loaded,” prepared to exercise lethal military options against Syria and its Russian and Iranian allies, seen as enemies by Israel. Immediately upon taking office at the United Nations she complained that “nowhere has the UN’s failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel” and vowed that the “days of Israel bashing are over.” Not surprisingly, she was greeted by rounds of applause and cheering when she spoke at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) last March, saying, “When I come to AIPAC I am with friends.”

Haley’s embrace of Israeli points of view was unrelenting, including blocking any investigation of the Israeli army’s slaughter of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza. She also led the effort to cut funds going to the agency providing critical food and medical assistance to millions of Palestinian refugees. In February 2017, she blocked the appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to a diplomatic position at the United Nations because he was a Palestinian. In a congressional hearing she was asked about the decision:

“Is it this administration’s position that support for Israel and support for the appointment of a well-qualified individual of Palestinian nationality to an appointment at the UN are mutually exclusive?”

Haley responded yes, that the administration is “supporting Israel” by blocking every Palestinian.

Not surprisingly, Haley consistently took a hard line against Iran, aggressively supporting Trump’s abrogation of the agreement to control its nuclear weapons, and she famously warned that Washington would be “taking names” of countries that don’t support its agenda in the Middle East. If Haley were a recruited agent of influence for the Israeli Mossad she could not have been more cooperative than she apparently was voluntarily.

When Haley resigned, The New York Times predictably produced an astonishing editorial headlined “Nikki Haley Will Be Missed.” Other praise of her upon her impending departure from the UN was related to whom exactly she managed to please while she was in office. The ubiquitous neocon-in-chief Bill Kristol has long been promoting Haley for president. One leading member of Kristol’s neocon chorus, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tweeted, “Thank you @nikkihaley for your remarkable service. We look forward to welcoming you back to public service as president of the United States.” Dubowitz is a Canadian Jew, and it would be nice if he could be deported to a remote Internet-free spot on Baffin Island where he can cease interfering in American politics, but that would mean putting an end to the $560,000 in salary and benefits that he enjoys for being one of Israel’s most reliable Fifth Column traitors in the United States.

Nikki was also praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I would like to thank Ambassador @nikkihaley, who led the uncompromising struggle against hypocrisy at the UN, and on behalf of the truth and justice of our country. Best of luck!”

The Israeli Army itself had nice things to say, tweeting,

“Thank you @nikkihaley for your service in the @UN and unwavering support for Israel and the truth. The soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces salute you!”

It should surprise no one that Haley has recently been in Israel as the guest of the GOP’s leading donors, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. Ha’aretz enthused over how she “. . . has a wonderful laugh. It’s warm, rounded, and the perfect length to fill the distance between you and her. Haley’s chuckle makes you feel for a moment that you genuinely amuse her, in a good way, so much so that you forget that the laugh came instead of the question you just asked her. When she runs for president, as she no doubt will one day, expect her to deploy that laugh a lot. It’s a valuable political tool. My question at which Haley laughed was ‘does the path to the White House pass through Jerusalem?’ She was in town as the guest of honor at the Israel Hayom Forum for U.S.-Israel Relations, and though I didn’t get an answer, Haley’s willingness to endure the five hours of the ‘forum’ reflected, if not the durability of U.S.-Israel relations, then certainly her relentlessness and professionalism as a politician. . . . Everything about Haley throughout the grueling evening, at least when on public display, showed her meticulous planning and determination, starting with her attire. Her long—and long-sleeved— dress on a sweltering Jerusalem summer evening contrasted with the much shorter dresses all around and drew approval from ultra-Orthodox men. ‘Wow, she really understands tzniess,’ one of them whispered to me, using the Yiddish word for modesty.”

So, Israel is just waiting for President Nikki to arrive and the line about the “path to the White House” running through Jerusalem is the kind of double entendre banter that close friends regularly exchange when discussing something that they know to be true.

It seems inevitable that we Americans go from one lover of Israel to another at the White House due largely to the impact of the narrative contrived through Zionist manipulation of the media and the direct corruption of the government itself by Jewish money. But even by that low standard, Haley is something else. She is a true believer with a fanatical gleam in her eye, just like Pence and Pompeo are in their dispensationalism, and that is very, very scary. Having her at the helm should be anyone’s worst foreign policy nightmare.

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This article was originally published on American Free Press.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.

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An agreement on the Political Declaration signed by the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the leadership of the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) on July 17 postpones firm decisions on key aspects of a comprehensive program which will determine the pace under which the Republic of Sudan can become a stable productive nation-state in Africa.

Discussions between the TMC and FFC have stalled on numerous occasions since the overthrow of former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on April 11.

Various issues including the composition of a sovereign council and its role in the interim period remained one of the points of contention holding up the initialing of the pact. From the published text of the signed agreement, the TMC will chair the sovereign council for the first 21 months of its existence.

A civilian chair will then takeover for another 18 months prior to the holding of multi-party elections. Therefore, the transitional process will continue for more than three years.

Other aspects of the proposed structure of the interim authority are still not resolved. Further talks slated between the TMC and FFC are required to move the process towards the creation of a legislative body which can debate and decide upon domestic and foreign policy issues.

Altogether there are three structures which require unanimity among the TMC and FFC opposition coalition. The sovereign council is just one of the pillars of a much broader compositional arrangement.

The two others are legislative and government councils where no firm agreements on participation and make up have been reached. In addition, the political declaration calls for the formation of an investigative body to determine responsibility for the massacre of civilians on June 3 when thousands of demonstrators representing the FFC were forcefully removed from the center of Khartoum through the barrels of guns.

Sudan demonstrators celebrate signing of political declaration on July 17, 2019

FFC spokespersons have claimed that over 100 people were killed during the crackdown. The TMC has put forward conflicting figures saying the death toll was far less than what the FFC has stated.

In an article published by the Sudan Tribune on the signing of the document, the news agency says:

“The parties in the upcoming days will deal with the constitutional document which defines the attributions and powers of the three organs of the transitional authority. The FFC recently voiced its opposition to the absolute political immunity given to the TMC members in a draft text released by the joint mediation. Different proposals have been made to make it reversible in case of involvement in human rights violations, killing or other crimes.”

Whether this document can lead to a lasting peace inside the country of 41 million people still remains to be seen. Demonstrations erupted in December with the sharp rise in the cost of bread and other commodities.

Although Sudan is an emerging oil-rich state the partitioning of the country in 2011, once Africa’s largest geographically, has resulted in a decline in the national economy. The neighboring Republic of South Sudan is also in turmoil with the two leading factions of the ruling party unable to reach a workable solution to the dispute which resulted in a civil war beginning in December 2013.

Over the last five years the price of oil has fluctuated on the international market. In desperation the National Congress Party (NCP) administration headed by the ousted President al-Bashir solidified an alliance with the Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates monarchies leading to the participation of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the United States engineered genocidal war against the people of Yemen.

An estimated 70,000 people have died in Yemen since March 2015. Pentagon weapons and military technology are utilized in the war aimed at suppressing the Ansurallah Movement and its allies in the least developed state in the Middle East. A humanitarian crisis including the widespread outbreak of cholera has been declared the worst of such disasters in the world.

Revolutionary Front and Communist Party Reject TMC-FFC Deal

Two political forces in Sudanese society have refused to endorse the July 17 agreement between the TMC and the FFC. The Sudanese Revolutionary Front (SRF) and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) both claim that the agreement is inadequate and does not resolve the fundamental problems facing the people of the country.

Sudanese Communist Party publication

The SRF is an alliance among the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army North (SPLM/A-N), based in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states while the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and two factions of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army emanate from the western Darfur region. These groups are engaged in armed actions against the Sudanese military in the above-mentioned regions of the country.

Sudan Tribune in an article published July 17 reports on the position of the SRF in relationship to the TMC-FFC agreement noting:

“[S]pokesman Mohamed Zakaria Farajalla said on Wednesday that the Front was surprised by the initialization of the agreement between the two parties while it was engaged in consultations meetings with a delegation of their allies in the FFC in the Ethiopian capital on ways to achieve peace. He said that the agreement reached by the FFC political and armed groups in Addis Ababa provides to include the SRF vision in the political and constitutional agreements with the Military Council.”

This report goes on to reveal that the SRF will not be bound by the accord. SRF spokesperson considers the organization as part of the FFC and therefore betrayed by the political leadership in Khartoum.

This same Sudan Tribune article goes on to quote Mohamed Zakaria Farajalla who emphasized that:

“It is not understandable that the deliberations of Addis Ababa meeting are in their final stage and the FFC negotiating team inside the country concludes the agreement without waiting for the outcome of Addis meetings to be included in the agreement. This approach is flawed and unacceptable and will complicate the national process. As the Sudanese Revolutionary Front, we affirm that we are not a party to the agreement and we have the right to take what we see as appropriate steps to achieve peace and democratic transition.”

The Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) has also issued a statement based upon the deliberations of its Central Committee related to the contours of the July 17 agreement. The SCP is concerned about the current and future role of the military as well as Sudanese foreign policy specifically related to the war in Yemen and the continuing alliance with the Gulf Monarchies which are bankrolling the TMC regime to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Concluding its evaluation of the TMC-FFC deal, the SCP declared:

“[W]e reaffirm our rejection of this agreement and to uphold the forces of freedom and change and to continue the struggle and peaceful mass escalation in various forms until the goals of the revolution and the total conflict of civil and democratic governance are achieved.”

Prospects for Peace and Security

Another unsettling development in the Sudanese situation was the announcement on July 11 that an attempted military coup by personnel opposed to the then pending TMC-FFC settlement had been thwarted resulting in the arrest of 12 officers from the SAF and the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS). TMC Security Committee Chair Gamal Omer Ibrahim announced to the press that five of the officers involved in the failed putsch were in retirement.

The apparent disgruntled elements within the military and intelligence services appear to be in a minority. However, these events contribute to the uncertainty of the political situation when viewed in conjunction with the current rejection of the July 17 agreement by the SRF and the SCP.

Consequently, the role of the African Union (AU) mediators in the persons of the Mauritanian diplomat Mohammad Alhassan Lebatt and his Ethiopian counterpart Mahmood Derair are essential in maintaining lines of communications among the various parties within the Sudanese political context. SRF groups want to solidify any sustainable agreement through the signing of a peace treaty with the Khartoum government.

Important observations made by the SCP must be taken into serious consideration by the TMC and FFC leadership. A lasting peace cannot be secured until the majority of the Sudanese people have a stake in the political and economic future of the country.

A lasting peace agreement in Sudan is important to the rest of the AU member-nations. Further conflict and unrest in this strategically important state will inevitably spill over into contiguous countries who themselves are facing similar challenging which impede the unity and development of the continent.

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

All images in this article are from the author

While there is considerable telecom hubris regarding the 5G rollout and increasing speculation that the next generation of wireless is not yet ready for Prime Time, the industry continues to make promises to Rural America that it has no intention of fulfilling. Decades-long promises to deliver digital Utopia to rural America by T-MobileVerizon and AT&T have never materialized.  

Despite much bravado, the biggest telecom carriers have never shown the willingness to fund the necessary infrastructure nor do they possess the necessary infrastructure to bridge the digital divide – despite $22 billion in government subsidies and grants over the last five years specifically to provide wireless coverage to rural America.  At the same time, the incompetence at the FCC has been staggering – as an unreliable, albeit compromised, Commission that has consistently failed to provide accurate, reliable maps to identify broadband availability for rural America.

Whether 5G will measure up to its hype of performance and expectations remains a question since there is a different market today than when 4G came on line in 2010.   At that time, there was room for improved cell service, more apps, video streaming and new subscribers.  Today there is little new subscriber growth except in the chronically underserved areas of rural America which has been neglected by the telecom industry and FCC for decades.  The challenge for 5G is to create a market demand, to devise new gimmicks to finagle higher revenues out of current subscribers and most especially to expand their toxic infrastructure to rural America.  The market is much more aware than it was in 2010 as customers are no longer lining up around the corner to purchase the newest thingamajig.

As universal wireless coverage remains a myth in rural America, the Digital Divide is alive and well after decades of neglect by those telecoms who now see rural customers as their cash cow.

With the digital world of personal computers and cell phones a reality for the last three decades,  broadband service to rural America has continued to play second fiddle in favor of upgrades to more affluent urban customers and the telecom industry’s bottom line.

Unlike the national commitment to provide rural electrification in the 1920’s as a major accomplishment, there has been no such Federal commitment to bring geographically challenged citizens into the digital age nor has Congress demanded that the telecom industry do whatever it takes to end the Digital Divide.

The fact that rural America was the topic of three previous Commerce committee hearings is indicative of how closing the Digital Divide is considered mandatory for a successful 5G rollout.  As the National Security Council power point suggested “by initially focusing on rural broadband, the network would guarantee a revenue stream while further business models develop,.“  In other words, the telecom industry is banking on rural America, in its desperation for wireless service, to subscribe (probably at premium rates) after decades of neglect.

In 2017, the USDA reported that 29% of American farms had no internet access. The FCC says that 14 million rural Americans and 1.2 million Americans living on tribal lands do not have 4G LTE on their phones, and that 30 million rural residents do not have broadband service compared to 2% of urban residents.  It’s beginning to sound like a Third World country.

Despite an FCC $4.5 billion annual subsidy to carriers to provide broadband service in rural areas, the FCC reports that ‘over 24 million Americans do not have access to high-speed internet service, the bulk of them in rural area”while a  Microsoft Study found that  “162 million people across the US do not have internet service at broadband speeds.

At the same time, only three cable companies have access to 70% of the market in a sweetheart deal to hike rates as they avoid competition and the FCC looks the other way.  The FCC believes that it would cost $40 billion to bring broadband access to 98% of the country with expansion in rural America even more expensive.  While the FCC has pledged a $2 billion, ten year plan to identify rural wireless locations, only 4 million rural American businesses and homes will be targeted, a mere drop in the bucket.

Which brings us to rural mapping: Since the advent of the digital age, there have been no accurate maps identifying where broadband service is available in rural America and where it is not available.  The FCC has a long history of promulgating unreliable and unverified carrier-provided numbers as the Commission has repeatedly ‘bungled efforts to produce accurate broadband maps” that would have facilitated rural coverage.

During the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on April 10th regarding broadband mapping, critical testimony questioned whether the FCC and/or the telecom industry have either the commitment or the proficiency to provide 5G to rural America.  Members of the Committee shared concerns that 5G might put rural America further behind the curve so as to never catch up with the rest of the country.  Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss) opened the hearing with

To close the digital divide, we need to have accurate broadband maps that tell us where broadband is available and where it is not available. This is critical because maps are used to inform federal agencies about where to direct broadband support. Flawed and inaccurate maps ultimately waste resources and stifle opportunities for economic development in our rural and underserved communities.”

Tim Donovan of the Competitive Carriers Association told the committee that the FCC had falsely claimed in a December report that “approximately 100% of the American population lives in geographical areas covered by mobile LTE with a minimum 5Mbps speed”as an example of the Commission peddling false data.

Mike McCormick, President of the Mississippi Farm Bureau with 200,000 family members quoted from the FCC’s 2018 report that 72% of Mississippi resident had broadband coverage while data from a comparable  Microsoft study found that only 487,000 citizens or 16% had broadband service.  Further, the FCC reported that 41% of Jefferson County residents had broadband usage while the Microsoft study found that only 5.6% Jefferson County residents had usage.  McCormick told the committee he was ‘very confident”in disputing the FCC figures.

In discussing variable terrain and foliage in rural areas that has delayed installation of necessary cellular infrastructure, McCormick mentioned that “pine needles are some of the bigger deflectors of broadband signal because they are the exact same size of band width” as an example of challenges in rural America. Who knew pine needles could be a factor to 5G?

McCormick went on to explain that in February 2018, the FCC released a map showing areas eligible to receive FCC Mobility Fund Phase II funding for deployment of 4G LTE service which provides $4.53 billion over ten years for telecom carriers to bring mobile and broadband service to rural and underserved areas.  The Mississippi map showed that 98% of the state was already receiving mobile broadband service which the Farm Bureau disputed, ultimately filing a waiver request with the FCC to challenge the map’s accuracy.

The short of the story is that while the Farm Bureau collaborated with the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC) to fulfill FCC requirements, the final conclusion was that not one of their speed tests processed through the PSC program was approved by the FCC for challenge.  In other words, no ‘average’ member of the public would have been able to successfully challenge the integrity of the FCC maps.

Chair Wicker (R-Miss) responded

Here’s where you were not a failure Mr. McCormick…we determined that the challenge process is unworkable and frankly worthless. The map is inaccurate and almost impossible using that challenge process to demonstrate this. It needs to be fixed and no program should go forward unless we are satisfied in the Congress that the process is going to touch areas that need it.”

There was unanimous agreement among Members of the Committee and the witness panel that “the maps are fake news and not reliable.”  Sen. Roy Blount (R-Missouri) who reported that 51% of rural Missouri is without broadband coverage, inquired “Does anyone believe that the maps are worth relying on?” No one responded affirmatively.

Jonathan Spalter of the US Telecom Association informed the Committee that the ‘our 5G future will be built and based on our ability to pull the fiber ubiquitously, extensively and quickly” and further dropped a bomb on the Committee that the “final last mile of any 5G wireless network is built and based on the fiber based backhaul opportunities that exists through the wireline businesses..upon which 5G wireless networks ultimately rely.

Chair Wicker used the analogy that when electricity came to rural Mississippi,

we ran the power out to the end of the dirt road.  Are you saying that, as a general rule, we are going to have to, big time, run fiber out to the end of the dirt roadSen. Blount has touched on a very, very important subject that we’ll need a lot more discussion about.”

Spalter confirmed Wicker’s understanding. Clearly, the concern about providing 5G to rural America had just hit a seemingly insurmountable roadblock that given the diversity of rural terrain obstacles, laying fiber cables would be mandatory as Spalter had described.

NTSA

Previously, both T-Mobile and Sprint promised, if allowed to merge,5G networks to 85% of rural areas in three years, and 90% of rural areas in six years but that was before the issue of how installing miles and miles of fiber optics might affect that promise.  Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of NTSA, the rural broadband association representing 850 rural telecom companies, responded that the T-Mobile/Sprint promise

would require huge amounts of fiber backhaul that neither company currently possesses, as small cells must be placed very close to the customer (often within 300 to 500 feet) to reach the higher speeds contemplated by 5G making the technology particularly impractical (and very expensive) for most rural applications anytime soon.”

In October, 2018, NTSA opposed the merger citing T-Mobile as the owner of ‘valuable spectrum for many years’ that“had ample time to build out the rural areas or enter into a joint venture.”In other words, the telecom industry is already well aware of the necessity to “pull wire” in order to install 5G infrastructure throughout rural America.

The question for the telecom industry is that if the economics of 4G did not dramatically increase subscribers in rural America, how will the very expensive and much more controversial 5G provide a sufficient customer base to guarantee a return on the telecom industry’s $275 billion investment?

To be continued….

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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

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The “squad” condemns Trump for his white nationalism, not understanding that as a white supremacist settler-colonial state, white nationalism is “American” nationalism.

“Biden as a neoliberal white supremacist imperialist was always clear where he stood.”

The story of Trump’s white nationalist tweets is still the object of intense discussion with the Democrats denouncing him and the Republicans giving support to his worldview as normal and consistent with “American values.” Even so, Joe Biden refused to condemn Trump’s Department of Justice for not prosecuting the cop who applied a death choke on Eric Garner in New York.

So even before Democrats were able to realize some political advantage by juxtaposing the supposed difference between themselves and the Republicans, Biden upended that by providing a refreshing dose of reality. His endorsement of impunity for killer cops reminded the public of the racial opportunism that the Democrats have turned into a science over the last few decades.

Exploiting the less subtle expressions of white supremacist thought and practice from Republicans, the Democrats have pulled off an amazing feat – advancing a neoliberal, white supremacist program of austerity, mass incarceration, economic devastation, gentrification, and generalized state violence against the Black working class while projecting themselves as the friend of Black people.

But reality has an inconvenient way of imposing itself, even when the tendency is to try and avoid it.

While the new racial warriors running for office in the Democrat Party fell over themselves condemning the Trump administration for not prosecuting Eric Garner’s killer and excoriating Trump for his racist tweets, Biden’s non-condemnation was a sober reminder of the complexities of race and racist politics in the U.S.

“The Democrats have advanced a neoliberal, white supremacist program while projecting themselves as the friend of Black people.”

There is no doubt that the young Black opportunists helping to run Biden’s campaign probably wanted their man to forcefully condemn the Trump administration, but they faced a dilemma. They knew that his condemnation could very well open him up to the charge of hypocrisy by his opponents. They remember thatthe Obama administration – which Biden was obviously a part of – only prosecuted onekiller cop in the entirety of its eight-year reign.

And so here we are. The “squad” condemns Trump for his white nationalism, not understanding that as a white supremacist settler-colonial state, white nationalism is “American” nationalism.Until there is break with that history and reality, and with Biden, who like Trump either understands that reality better or is more honest than the squad.

Biden as a neoliberal white supremacist imperialist was always clear where he stood. His voting record and policy support for war on Iraq; the dismembering of Syria; the U.S./ NATO attack on Libya that turned the most prosperous nation on the African continent into a real “shithole country;” and support for Trump’s campaign to buttress the white minority oligarchy in Venezuela by implementing a regime change program was not much different than that from Trump. Most of the Democratic Party supported these policies.

“The Obama administration only prosecuted one killer cop in the entirety of its eight-year reign.”

This all begs the question: how do we then define a “racist” and white nationalist? Is it only through the easy and obvious markers, like the marchers in Charlottesville or Trump’s latest tweet? Or is it also reflected in institutions and structural relationships?

I am sorry, but there are more white nationalists in the U.S. than folks want to admit. Not acknowledging the U.S. as a white supremacist settler-state translates into a fundamental error. AOC along with other liberals and most of the Eurocentric left are not calling for a break in the history of the U.S. state. They are not calling for authentic de-colonization. By not doing so, they are embracing the perspective of the invader.

Really, what is this “America” that the squad loves and claim to be a part of? AOC’s family is from the colony of Puerto Rico. Tlaib’s America is probably the most Islamophobic country on the planet. Omar’s native land of Somalia became one of the first of the so-called “failed states,” those states where U.S. and Western imperialism plunders and then pretends that the state failed as a result of its internal weaknesses. Pressley, as an African American, is part of a captive population subjected to 243 years of enslavement, 100 years of post-slavery apartheid, and 54 years of benign neglect.

“Not acknowledging the U.S. as a white supremacist settler-state translates into a fundamental error.”

These are the practices and policies of a state and society committed to upholding white colonial/capitalist power. The squad must understand that if one’s people are part of the working class and nationally oppressed, you don’t beg to become part of that de-humanizing and degrading machine.  You don’t call for integration or for the recognition of your rights, which is not going to happen. No! You fight and struggle for your inherent dignity, understanding that human rights are not going to be granted by the oppressor.They have to be won through ferocious struggle.

The Trump forces are laying out the terms of struggle in stark, unambiguous terms. However, the mistake being made by liberals and some left social critics is framing this struggle as a fight between two contending visions of “America”: the white nationalist bad America versus the mythological liberal trope of the kind, inclusive, tolerant, justice-seeking America.

This latter construction is an ideological mystification that only props up liberal hegemony and blunts revolutionary consciousness. From the point of view of the conscious, colonized victims of this state and society, the distance between Trump’s “Make American Great Again” and Obama’s U.S. exceptionalism is minimal.It is the same brutal, violent, oppressive reality that has made the U.S. the enemy of collective humanity on the planet.

“The distance between Trump’s ‘Make American Great Again’ and Obama’s U.S. exceptionalism is minimal.”

Absent the sanctimonious moralizing of liberals, there is an ideological consistency from the “doctrine of discovery” to “manifest destiny” to the Monroe Doctrine to the “full spectrum dominance” that justified and rationalized the naked brutality and genocidal policies of white colonial power.The ideological resonance of the latest incantation of white supremacy in the form of “theresponsibility to protect” – the contemporary version of the ‘white man’s burden” – testifies to the resiliency of the inculcated assumptions of white supremacy and lawless privilege.

If the squad really had some politics and a worldview that transcended liberalism, they would have utilized the Trump tweets as a “teachable” moment to highlight this contradictory reality of the U.S.

Of course, that did not happen because liberal respectability politics and obsequious pandering is all that we can expect when liberalism is in command. What this latest racial flare-up will be reduced to is the boring trope of racism as an individualized set of psychological dispositions that only decries the bad and obvious racists. Unfortunately, the squad’s embracing of the Obama-like, “we are the world” liberalism obscures and distorts the uninterrupted oppressive nature of the settler-state and its core value of white privilege, institutional violence and belief in the natural superiority of the white West. This will only enhance the ideological power of the Trumpian forces.

“The squad’s embracing of the Obama-like, ‘we are the world’ liberalism obscures and distorts the uninterrupted oppressive nature of the settler-state.”

When Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the message was clear: the white counter-revolutionary process of President Nixon against left forces – and particularly against the Black Liberation Movement – was going to be intensified not only in the U.S. but globally. Unlike under Trump, the message was subtler, but it was still clear: white power was ready to take center stage again. Thanks to concessions from Democrat and Republican administrations all the way through the Obama years, the ideology and strategy has culminated in the Trump administration.

The radical transformation of the social, political, and economic foundation of the U.S., in short, a social revolution, is the only solution to the disease of white supremacy. The final contours of what the U.S. might be will only result from the horrific fight that must be waged to dislodge the power of the white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy. What is certain – and what the squad and all of their supporters must understand – is that appeals to morality and undignified attempts to ingratiate oneself into this barbarism will only further embolden the extreme right represented by Trump and the even more insidious neoliberal white supremacist right of Biden, Obama and Pelosi.

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This article was originally published on Black Agenda Report.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded theSerena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

Featured image is from BAR 

The World Is Dedollarizing

July 19th, 2019 by Peter Koenig

What if tomorrow nobody but the United States would use the US-dollar? Every country, or society would use their own currency for internal and international trade, their own economy-based, non-fiat currency. It could be traditional currencies or new government controlled crypto-currencies, but a country’s own sovereign money. No longer the US-dollar. No longer the dollar’s foster child, the Euro. No longer international monetary transactions controlled by US banks and – by the US-dollar controlled international transfer system, SWIFT, the system that allows and facilitates US financial and economic sanctions of all kinds – confiscation of foreign funds, stopping trades between countries, blackmailing ‘unwilling’ nations into submission. What would happen? – Well, the short answer is that we would certainly be a step close to world peace, away from US (financial) hegemony, towards nation states’ sovereignty, towards a world geopolitical structure of more equality.

We are not there yet. But graffities are all over the walls signaling that we are moving quite rapidly in that direction. And Trump knows it and his handlers know it – which is why the onslaught of financial crime – sanctions – trade wars – foreign assets and reserves confiscations, or outright theft – all in the name of “Make America Great Again”, is accelerating exponentially and with impunity. What is surprising is that the Anglo-Saxon hegemons do not seem to understand that all the threats, sanctions, trade barriers, are provoking the contrary to what should contribute to American Greatness. Economic sanctions, in whatever form, are effective only as long as the world uses the US dollar for trading and as reserve currency.

Once the world gets sick and tired of the grotesque dictate of Washington and the sanction schemes for those who do no longer want to go along with the oppressive rules of the US, they will be eager to jump on another boat, or boats – abandoning the dollar and valuing their own currencies. Meaning trading with each other in their own currencies – and that outside of the US banking system which so far even controls trading in local currencies, as long as funds have to be transferred from one nation to another via SWIFT.

Many countries have also realized that the dollar is increasingly serving to manipulate the value of their economy. The US-dollar, a fiat currency, by its sheer money mass, may bend national economies up or down, depending in which direction the country is favored by the hegemon. Let’s put the absurdity of this phenomenon in perspective.

Today, the dollar is based not even on hot air and is worth less than the paper it is printed on. The US GDP is US$ 21.1 trillion in 2019 (World Bank estimate), with current debt of 22.0 trillion, or about 105% of GDP. The world GDP is projected for 2019 at US$ 88.1 trillion (World Bank). According to Forbes, about US$ 210 trillion are “unfunded liabilities” (net present value of future projected but unfunded obligations (75 years), mainly social security, Medicaid and accumulated interest on debt), a figure about 10 times the US GDP, or two and a half times the world’s economic output.

This figure keeps growing, as interest on debt is compounded, forming part of what would be called in business terms ‘debt service’ (interest and debt amortization), but is never ‘paid back’. In addition, there are about one to two quadrillion dollars (nobody knows the exact amount) of so-called derivatives floating around the globe. Aderivative is a financial instrument which creates its value from the speculative difference of underlying assets, most commonly derived from such inter-banking and stock exchange oddities, like ‘futures’, ‘options’, ‘forwards’ and ‘swaps’.

This monstrous debt is partly owned in the form of treasury bonds as foreign exchange reserves by countries around the world. The bulk of it is owed by the US to itself – with no plans to ever “pay it back” – but rather create more money, more debt, with which to pay for the non-stop wars, weapon manufacturing and lie-propaganda to keep the populace quiet and in lockstep.

This amounts to a humongous worldwide dollar-based pyramid system. Imagine, this debt comes crashing down, for example because one or several big (Wall Street) banks are on the brink of bankruptcy, so, they claim their outstanding derivatives, paper gold (another banking absurdity) and other debt from smaller banks. It would generate a chain reaction that might bring down the whole dollar-dependent world economy. It would create an exponential “Lehman Brothers 2008” on global scale.

The world is increasingly aware of this real threat, an economy built on a house of cards – and countries want to get out of the trap, out of the fangs of the US-dollar. It’s not easy with all the dollar-denominated reserves and assets invested abroad, all over the globe. A solution may be gradually divesting them (US-dollar liquidity and investments) and moving into non-dollar dependent currencies, like the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble, or a basket of eastern currencies that are delinked from the dollar and its international payment scheme, the SWIFT system. Beware of the Euro, it’s the foster child of the US-dollar!

There are increasingly blockchain technology alternatives available. China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela are already experimenting with government-controlled cryptocurrencies to build new payment and transfer systems outside the US-dollar domain to circumvent sanctions. India may or may not join this club – whenever the Modi Government decides which way to bend – east or west. The logic would suggest that India orients herself to the east, as India is a significant part of the huge Eurasian economic market and landmass.

India is already an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – an association of countries that are developing peaceful strategies for trade, monetary security and defense, comprising China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most Central Asian countries and with Iran waiting in the wings to become a full-fledged member. As such, SCO accounts for about half of the world population and a third of the world’s economic output. The east has no need for the west to survive. No wonder that western media hardly mention the SCO which means that the western average public at large has no clue what the SCO stands for, and who are its members.

Government-controlled and regulated blockchain technology may become key to counter US coercive financial power and to resist sanctions. Any country is welcome to join this new alliance of countries and new but fast-growing approach to alternative trading – and to finding back to national political and financial sovereignty.

In the same vein of dedollarization are Indian “barter banks”. They are, for example, trading Indian tea for Iranian oil. Such arrangements for goods to be exchanged against Iranian petrol are carried out through Indian “barter banks”, where currencies, i.e. Iranian rials and Indian rupees, are handled by the same bank. Exchange of goods is based on a list of highest monetary volume Indian trade items, against Iranian hydrocarbon products, for example, Iran’s large import of Indian tea. No monetary transaction takes place outside of India, therefore, US sanctions may be circumvented, since no US bank or US Treasury interference can stop the bilateral trade activities.

At this point, it might be appropriate to mention Facebook’s attempt to introduce a globe-spanning cryptocurrency, the Lira. Little is known on how exactly it will (or may) function, except that it would cater to billions of facebook members around the world. According to Facebook, there are 2.38 billion active members. Imagine, if only two thirds – about 1.6 billion – opened a Libra account with Facebook, the floodgate of libras around the world would be open. Libra is or would be a privately-owned cryptocurrency – and – coming from Facebook – could be destined to replace the dollar by the same people who are now abusing the world with the US-dollar. It may be projected as the antidote to government-controlled cryptocurrencies, thus, circumventing the impact of dedollarization. Beware of the Libra!

Despite US and EU sanctions, German investments in Russia are breaking a 10-year record in 2019, by German business pouring more than €1.7 billion into the Russian economy in the first three months of 2019. According to the Russian-German Chamber of Commerce, the volume of German companies’ investments in Russia is up by 33% – by € 400 million – since last year, when total investments reached € 3.2 billion, the largest since 2008. Despite sanctions which amounted to about € 1 billion combined for 140 German companies surveyed and registered with the Chamber of Commerce, and despite western anti-Russia pressure, Russia-German trade has increased by 8.4 percent and reached nearly € 62 billion in 2018.

In addition, notwithstanding US protests and threats with sanctions, Moscow and Berlin continue their Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project which is expected to be finished before the end of 2019. Not only is the proximity of Russian gas a natural and logical supply source for Germany and Europe, it will also bring Europe independence form the bullying sales methods of the United States. And payments will not be made in US dollars. In the long-run, the benefits of German-Russian business and economic relations will far outweigh the illegal US sanctions. Once this awareness has sunk in, there is nothing to stop Russian-German business associations to flourish, and to attract other EU-Russian business relations – all outside of the dollar-dominated banking and transfer system.

President Trump’s trade war with China will eventually also have a dedollarization effect, as China will seek – and already has acquired – other trading partners, mostly Asian, Asian-Pacific and European – with whom China will deal in other than dollar-denominated contracts and outside the SWIFT transfer system, for example using the Chinese International Payment System (CIPS) which, by the way, is open for international trade by any country across the globe.

This will not only circumvent punishing tariffs on China’s exports (and make US customers of Chinese goods furious, as their Chinese merchandise is no longer available at affordable prices, or no longer available at all), but this strategy will also enhance the Chinese Yuan on international markets and boost the Yuan even further as a reliable reserve currency – ever outranking the US-dollar. In fact, in the last 20 years, dollar-denominated assets in international reserve coffers have declined from more than 90% to below 60% and will rapidly decline further as Washington’s coercive financial policies prevail. Dollar reserves are rapidly replaced by reserves in Yuan and gold, and that even in such staunch supporters of the west as is Australia.

Washington also has launched a counter-productive financial war against Turkey, because Turkey is associating and creating friendly relations with Russia, Iran and China – and, foremost, because Turkey, a NATO stronghold, is purchasing the Russian S-400 cutting-edge air defense system – a new military alliance which the US cannot accept. As a result, the US is sabotaging the Turkish currency, the Lira which has lost 40% since January 2018.

Turkey will certainly do whatever it can to get out from under the boot of the US-dollar stranglehold and currency sanctions – and further ally itself with the East. This amounts to a double loss for the US. Turkey will most likely abandon all trading in US dollars and align her currency with, for example, the Chinese Yuan and the Russian ruble, and, to the detriment of the Atlantic alliance, Turkey may very likely exit NATO. Abandoning NATO will be a major disaster for the US, as Turkey is both strategically, as well as in terms of NATO military power one of the strongest – if not the strongest – nation of the 29 NATO members, outside of the US.

If Turkey exits NATO, the entire European NATO alliance will be shaken and questioned. Other countries, long wary of NATO and of storing NATO’s nuclear weapons on their soils, especially Italy and Germany, may also consider exiting NATO. In both Germany and Italy, a majority of the people is against NATO and especially against the Pentagon waging wars form their NATO bases in their territories in Germany in Italy.

To stem against this trend, the former German Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, from the conservative German CDU party, is being groomed to become Jean-Claude Juncker’s successor as President of the European Commission. Mr. Juncker served since 2014. Ms. Von der Leyen was voted in tonight, 17 July, with a narrow margin of 9 votes. She is a staunch supporter of NATO. Her role is to keep NATO as an integral part of the EU. In fact, as it stands today, NATO is running the EU. This may change, once people stand up against NATO, against the US vassal, the EU Administration in Brussels, and claim their democratic rights as citizens of their nation states.

Europeans sense that these Pentagon initiated and ongoing wars and conflicts, supported by Washington’s European puppet allies, may escalate into a nuclear war, their countries’ NATO bases will be the first ones to be targeted, sinking Europe for the 3rdtime in 100 year into a world war. However, this one may be all-destructive nuclear – and nobody knows or is able to predict the damage and destruction of such a catastrophe, nor the time of recovery of Mother Earth from an atomic calamity.

So, let’s hope Turkey exits NATO. It would be giant step towards peace and a healthy answer to Washington’s blackmail and sabotage against Turkey’s currency. The US currency sanctions are, in the long run, a blessing. It gives Turkey a good argument to abandon the US dollar and gradually shift towards association with eastern moneys, mainly the Chinese Yuan, thereby putting another nail in the US-dollar’s coffin.

However, the hardest blow for Washington will be when Turkey exits NATO. Such a move will come sooner or later, notwithstanding Ms. Von der Leyen’s battle cries for NATO. The breaking up of NATO will annihilate the western power structure in Europe and throughout the world, where the US still maintains more than 800 military bases. On the other hand, the disbanding of NATO will increase the world’s security, especially in Europe – for all the consequences such an exit will bear. Exiting NATO and economically exiting the US-dollar orbit is a further step towards dedollarization, and a blow to US financial and military hegemony.

Finally, investments of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, will be mostly made in Yuan and local currencies of the countries involved and incorporated in one or more of the several BRI land and maritime routes that eventually will span the globe. Some US-dollar investments may serve the People’s Bank of China, China’s Central Bank, as a dollar-divesting tool of China’s huge dollar reserves which currently stands at close to two trillion dollars.

The BRI promises to become the next economic revolution, a non-dollar economic development scheme, over the coming decades, maybe century, connecting peoples and countries – cultures, research and teaching without, however, forcing uniformity, but promoting cultural diversity and human equality – and all of it outside the dollar dynasty, breaking the nefarious dollar hegemony.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

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 21st Century; 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.

Nigerian Political Prisoner Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky

July 19th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Nigerian rule is tyrannical, headed by military dictator/turned politician Muhannadu Buhari and his so-called All Progressives Congress party (APC).

His February re-electoral triumph was dubious at best, critics citing voter-suppression and vote-buying.

Political violence occurred in the run-up to the election and its aftermath, soldiers and police responsible for human and civil rights abuses.

According to human rights activist Anietie Ewang, Buhari’s earlier tenure was marked by “political violence, as well as lack of accountability for rights abuses.”

He’s a 1980 US Army War College graduate, usurping power in a 1983 military coup, ousting President Shehu Shegari.

His brutality includes arbitrary arrests and imprisonments for political reasons, notably targeting human rights activists, academics, students, independent journalists, and clerics like Zakzaky opposed to his despotic rule. More on him below.

Serving US-led Western interests, his own, and his cronies, Buhari enforced severe neoliberal harshness on impoverished Nigerians earlier and currently, following IMF diktats.

Oil-rich Nigeria has the world’s 10th largest reserves, second only to Libya among African nations.

The country’s other valued resources include natural gas, tin, iron ore, coal,  limestone, niobium, lead, zinc and arable land.

Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky founded the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN). It represents the country’s minority Shia Muslims.

He’s been brutally mistreated by Nigerian regimes since the 1980s. In December 2015, soldiers stormed his home, seriously injured him, arrested and imprisoned him and his wife, while killing hundreds of his followers.

His IMN called it a massacre. Zakzaky and his wife remain imprisoned under deplorable conditions — despite ordered release by Nigeria’s High Court in December 2016.

His severe mistreatment violates international law and Nigeria’s Constitution, upholding the right to freedom for the country’s people.

Throughout most of his illegal detention, Zakzaky and his wife have been denied proper medical treatment, despite their failing health.

Earlier this year, he suffered a debilitating stroke. Releasing him for vital medical care is essential to save him, his condition steadily deteriorating.

Weeks earlier for the first since his December 2015 imprisonment, foreign doctors were allowed to examine him.

The diagnosed him with severe lead and cadmium poisoning, left ventricular hypertrophy, malignant hypertension, spondylitis, anophthalmia in one eye, open-angle glaucoma in the other, PTSD from protracted trauma, and other debilitating effects of stroke.

For each of these conditions, Zakzaky requires hospitalization and expert medical care. His wife Zeenah suffers from severe osteoarthritis.

She’s wheelchair bound for transport, no longer ambulatory. She also suffers from hypertension, hyperthyroidism, gastrointestinal ailments, and other health issues.

They’re slowly perishing painfully and will die if not released and able to get proper medical care.

Days earlier, Zakzaky reportedly  suffered a second stroke. The deplorable mistreatment he and his wife are enduring amount to slow torture.

The repressive Buhari regime hasn’t yielded to Nigeria’s High Court release order, nor calls by the country’s parliamentarians, and human right activists domestically and abroad, urging the release of Zakzaky and his wife.

Their imprisonment is unconstitutional and unlawful under international law. Given their precarious state, they could perish in days or weeks if remain behind bars.

A Final Comment

I added my name to an “Urgent Medical Treatment for Sheikh Zakzaky” petition — sent to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, knowing he’s a pro-Western imperial tool, largely indifferent to doing the right things.

I was requested to add my name and did, supporting the release of Zakzaky and his wife for the urgent medical care they need.

The petition said the following:

“Mr. Secretary General,

We write to demand that Sheikh Zakzaky and his wife Mallima Zeenah be allowed to leave the country for urgent medical treatment.

In the last few days, Sheikh Zakzaky’s health has further deteriorated. Last month doctors examining the leader of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria have renewed pleas for him to be released in order to access medical treatment after finding high levels of lead toxicity in his body.

The continued detention of both of these figures as well as hundreds of others has been a huge stain on the reputation of Nigerian government.

The health of Sheikh Zakzaky and Mallima Zeenah health continues to severely deteriorate as a result of injuries THAT APPEAR TO BE inflicted by THE Nigerian authorities.

By not allowing them to get the medical treatment they need, the Nigerian President is adding further evidence of his government’s inhumanity and cruelty.

As you know the Nigerian people struggle peacefully to attain their own sovereignty for years and are expecting the organizations linked to Human Rights to help them.

During these years they have been permanently oppressed as they were and still are demanding to have access to their basic citizenship rights.

As the UN has been mainly established to provide peace and security across the globe and according to the article 21 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes the people’s will as the basis and source of governing power, the demand of Nigerian citizens on having a democratically elected government in which the majority rules the country is a very elementary request.

Why this primary demand for achieving the minimum social rights should face the government’s atrocities including imprisonment, torture, and assassination?

According to the UDHR’s articles 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 29, the behavior of this autocratic regime toward his own people including; destruction of the hussainiyas and the mosques, preventing the Nigerian people who are mostly Muslims from establishing both Friday and congregational prayers, suspension of citizenship and deportation of opponents of Nigerian undemocratic and totalitarian government, is considered as a crime and UN is responsible to condemn those acts which violate international laws.

You know well that these mentioned crimes don’t match with the essence of Human Rights.

The silence of world powers and the so-called defenders of Human Rights toward these anti-human crimes, is not surprising as the authorities of Nigerian tyrannical regime are acting under their support and they are allowed once the West’s interests are achieved!

But as the one who should unveil the criminals and has to intervene and to protest against the oppressors, your silence is significant and shocking.

Remember that you’re responsible for maintaining a peaceful and secure world and as the person in charge of performing the UDHR content, you’re condemned in the presence of free consciences and human history.

According to the religious teachings and the unchangeable divine traditions; whatever you, other international officials and those so-called defenders of Human Rights, accomplish your legal, human and moral duty or not, the oppressed nations particularly the Yemeni, Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan and Nigerian peoples will win as they have decided to be free and not to accept any type of injustice and they stand on this issue.

But that is a historical privilege for you to be honored by supporting them, thus we undersigned, ask your Excellency to carry out the following issues as soon as possible:

1. Launching urgent measures in order to stop the actions which oppose the international standards and violate the UDHR’s article 25 regarding the sensitive health situation of his eminence Sheikh Zakzaky;

2. Providing necessary and ensuring arrangements to establish the democracy and to implement the UDHR’s article 21 by making possible a referendum through which every single Nigerian citizen has one vote;

3. Initiating emergency measures to stop the tyranny of Nigerian dictatorial regime which threatens the security and freedom of people and jail, torture and assassinate them;

4. Immediate release of political prisoners and investigation about Nigerian Government’s unaccountable crimes in competent international courts.”

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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 The Iran Project

The first part of this article documenting the development of BSE in Britain was written by Rosemary Mason and is taken from her new report ‘Why didn’t the UK media report the documentary on Mad Cow Disease?’ It is fully referenced and cites sources and evidence in support of her claims. Additional reporting for the second part of the article was provided by Colin Todhunter.

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Mad cow disease is a fatal epidemic neurological syndrome created by the agricultural industry, farmers and food processors.

In 1987, an epidemic of a fatal neurological disease in cows suddenly appeared in Britain. Cows became uncoordinated, staggered around, collapsed and finally died. The disease was called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) because there were holes in the brain where prion protein cells became folded, had linked up and then split to cover the surface of the brain. There were more than 1,300 cases of BSE spread over 6,000 farms.

For at least 40 years, infected slaughterhouse carcasses had been rendered down and recycled into animal feed. Not wanting to waste anything, pressure cooking of the spinal cord and brain produced a sludge known as ‘mechanically-recovered meat’. The regulators allowed it to go into meat products. This processed meat and bone meal was turned into a coarse powder and was fed back to cows. Cows are herbivores and this way they were turned into cannibals.

By 1990, BSE had spread into 14 other species, including cats. Politicians, the food industry, media, the government, farmers and vets said BSE couldn’t jump species to affect humans and it was safe to eat beef. Advertisements were taken out in newspapers and politicians were shown eating steak tartare in the Houses of Parliament to boost the sales of beef. At an agricultural show, the Agriculture Minister John Gummer was seen offering a beef burger to his daughter.

In 1995, the first human under 40 contracted what became known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (new vCJD, related to BSE and belonging to the same family of diseases). By March 1996, there were five cases and the government was forced to alter its advice. Kevin Maguire, a journalist, was lunching with someone in Westminster who said that scientists had discovered that ‘mad cow disease’ could jump species and had been found in humans.

Maguire said that it was a scandal in an effort to get every penny out of a carcass. His newspaper, ‘The Mirror’, was the first to break the news to the public, saying that humans could catch mad cow disease from eating infected beef and that the government was about to do a U-turn by finally accepting that the brain wasting disease may have been passed to people. This U-turn by ministers – who for 10 years had insisted it was impossible – was a devastating indictment of the British government and probably one of the worst examples of government since the war.

During 1996, 10 more cases of new vCJD in people under 40 were diagnosed. All died within 13 months and there was no cure. In 2005, the authorities thought the disease was over, but in 2009, a case was discovered in a 30-year-old man. Another case appeared four years later. Today, people are living with uncertainty, not knowing if they are incubating new vCJD.

The parents of children who had died from new vCJD said “We trusted government advice.” Each Christmas one mother had sent an e-mail to those she thought responsible with a photograph of her daughter and said your actions have deprived me of my daughter. Another parent from Scotland who had lost his 30-year-old son to the disease had tattooed on his arm the name of his son followed by: ‘murdered by greed and corruption’.

In the documentary ‘Mad Cow Disease: The Great British Beef Scandal’, first broadcast on BBC 2 on 11 July 2019, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London, said:

“New Variant CJD is not a natural disease. It is an epidemic we have created. If the agricultural industry hadn’t decided to feed cattle with meat and bone meal, if the food processors hadn’t decided to scrape every last bit of flesh off the carcass, and if MAFF [govt ministry] hadn’t prioritised farming over food safety, all of the people who died would still be alive. This is the tragedy.”

The following is taken from a publication compiled by the European Environment Agency, ‘Late lessons from early warnings’ (Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone):

“Many of the UK policy makers who were directly responsible for taking policy decisions on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) prior to March 1996 claim that, at the time, their approach exemplified the application of an ultra-precautionary approach and of rigorous science-based policy-making. We argue that these claims are not convincing because government policies were not genuinely precautionary and did not properly take into account the implications of the available scientific evidence.

“… It is, however, essential to appreciate that UK public policy making was handicapped by a fundamental tension. The department responsible for dealing with BSE has been the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), and it was expected simultaneously to promote the economic interests of farmers and the food industry whilst also protecting public health from food-borne hazards. The evidence cited here suggests that because MAFF was expected simultaneously to meet two contradictory objectives it failed to meet either.”

The UK introduced legislation banning the use of contaminated ruminant protein for use in ruminant feed in 1988. By then, a million cows had entered the food chain. At the height of the scandal, British beef had lost around 60% of sales. Prior to the ban, microbiologist Stephen Dealler challenged the government’s claim over safety and was moved from his research lab.

However, Britain continued to export meat and bone meal to Europe. The European Commission asked the UK to introduce an export ban on feedstuffs, but the UK refused to do so. It was not until 1996 that the EC banned these exports.

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From mad cows to GMOs and pesticides

Where glyphosate (and other agrochemicals) and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are concerned, we again see commercial interests being prioritised and the public interest sidelined. Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup was originally sprayed on crops in 1980 and on grazing land in 1985 (recommended by Monsanto scientists). GMOs entered the commercial market in the US in the 1990s. As shown in the report mentioned in the introduction to this article, the authorities did not heed the advice of key scientists and went ahead regardless.

Readers are urged to consult the report as it documents the duplicity that underpins the agrochemical/GMO agritech sector and describes how science and regulatory processes have been corrupted. In Britain, the government is saying that GM crops and Roundup are safe and intends to introduce these crops after Brexit.

Of course, heavily compromised industry-funded scientists and other lobbyists say the science is decided on GM and that glyphosate is safe. They say anyone who rejects this is anti-science and doesn’t care about world hunger because we can only feed the world by rolling out more GM crops and more agrochemicals. But this is little more than propaganda and emotional blackmail, part of an industry strategy designed to tug at the heartstrings of public opinion and sway the policy agenda.

We need to turn to author Andre Leu who has outlined major deficiencies in pesticide safety protocols. He offers a more realistic appraisal:

“… it is a gross misrepresentation to say that any of the current published toxicology studies can be used to say that any of the thousands of pesticide products used in the world do not cause cancer or other diseases… there is no evidence that pesticides are safe.”

Washington State University researchers recently found a variety of diseases and other health problems in the second- and third-generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate. In the first study of its kind, the researchers saw descendants of exposed rats developing prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, obesity and birth abnormalities. The study’s authors say:

“The ability of glyphosate and other environmental toxicants to impact our future generations needs to be considered and is potentially as important as the direct exposure toxicology done today for risk assessment.”

And where GMOs are concerned, they are little more than a flawed technological panacea that ignores the structural causes of malnutrition and hunger.

An increasing number of prominent reports and voices are now arguing that we do not need toxic chemicals to feed the world and that if we maintain our economic and agricultural course we are headed for disaster. FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva recently called for healthier and more sustainable food systems and said agroecology can contribute to such a transformation.

Moreover, the new report from the UN  High Level Panel of Food Experts on Food Security and Nutrition – Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition – argues that food systems are at a crossroads and profound transformation is needed. Many high-profile reports and figures have been saying similar things for years.

It is therefore disconcerting that the British government seems oblivious to the need of the hour and remains intent on pursuing an obsolete neoliberal, water-polluting, soil degrading, health destroying, unsustainable model of food and agriculture at the behest of corporate interests.

Mad cow disease did not just suddenly appear from nowhere. It was created by humans, particularly the farming industry and food processors. The British government kept on maintaining that eating beef was perfectly safe. A scientist who spoke out was silenced. The interests of the beef industry were paramount.

Evidence suggests there could soon be a second wave of cases affecting humans. It will be among people with a genetic predisposition towards longer incubation periods than the first patients had. This genetic predisposition is shared by half the British population. Some 177 people (as of June 2014) have contracted and died of vCJD.

That number is dwarfed when it comes to the spiralling rates of disease and illness that we now see among the British population. This too hasn’t happened for no reason. We see clear trends between the rising use of agrochemicals (especially glyphosate) and rising rates of morbidity, while much of the media and policy makers remain silent on this connection.

From the ‘great British beef scandal’ of the 1980s to ongoing pesticide issue, the profit motives of rich corporations continue to trump the public interest.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

The Sidama Region and Ethiopia’s “Perfect Storm”

July 19th, 2019 by Andrew Korybko

The last-minute compromise deal by the Sidama Liberation Movement and the Ethiopian government to delay the former’s planned declaration of a new regional state until an upcoming referendum in December doesn’t solve the deeper problem of the country’s contentious internal borders but instead means that this issue will play a leading role in the “perfect storm” that’s brewing ahead of next year’s general elections.

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Ethiopia narrowly averted its second possible collapse in less than as many months after the last-minute compromise deal between the Sidama Liberation Movement and the federal government, which followed the potentially existential crisis that was barely avoided after last month’s failed coup attempt in the Amhara Region.

At that time, a radical nationalist figure tried to violently seize control of the country’s historic heartland in a bid to put a stop to PM Abiy’s far-reaching reforms, which could have plunged the East African nation of over 100 million people back into civil war had he succeeded. The root cause of that dramatic event was the rogue security chief’s extreme dissatisfaction with the new leader’s tacit moves towards transforming the state into the federation that it’s constitutionally supposed to have been this entire time, which implies an eventual change of Ethiopia’s contentious internal borders beforehand if this outcome is to be sustainable.

It’s these interlinked reforms that strike fear in the hearts of the country’s myriad ethno-nationalists because of the impossibility of perfectly executing them without one or another group claiming that this was at their expense. Although he didn’t mean to, the “Ethiopian Gorbachev” opened up the Pandora’s Box of ethno-regionalist tensions that had previously been held shut by his predecessors’ firm hand, and in accordance with the precepts of Hybrid War, it seems as though he’s losing control of these pre-existing identity conflicts and has inadvertently sparked a self-sustaining cycle of unrest as a result. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course, since his strategic calculation last year to remove the terrorist designation from several armed opposition groups was designed to preclude any real possibility of that scenario transpiring in this ultra-sensitive context, but Ethiopia’s administrative-territorial contentions are apparently too serious of a concern to smooth over.

This brings the analysis around to discussing the latest developments in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR). The Sidama people, who constitute an important plurality in this highly diverse part of the country and are based around its capital city, wanted to declare their own separate regional state in accordance with Article 47.3 of the Ethiopian Constitution. That entails holding a referendum within one year of a “two-thirds majority of the members of the Council of the Nation, Nationality or People concerned” approving this demand and presenting it to the State Council. The Sidama Liberation Movement says that they did this last year but that the government ignored them, hence why they wanted to go ahead with their unilateral declaration on Thursday prior to them agreeing to the National Election Board’s promise to hold their sought-after referendum in December.

That doesn’t solve the larger problem of Ethiopia’s administrative-territorial problems but merely delays the initiation of its settlement until the end of the year, which is nevertheless important because tackling it now so soon after the Amhara coup attempt could have risked exacerbating ethno-regionalist tensions between the Amhara & Tigray, Oromo & Somali, and other much larger nationalities within the country who have already been engaged in so many violent clashes over their titular regions’ borders that the East African state now has the world’s largest internally displaced population. Had the last-minute compromise not been struck, then the much larger ethnic groups could have followed the smaller Sidamas’ footsteps by unilaterally revising the disputed borders with their neighbors and immediately worsening Ethiopia’s many local conflicts to the point of once again threatening to plunge the country into civil war.

Even in the “best-case scenario” that peace prevails until the Sidamas’ December referendum, this worst-case scenario could simply return because the root problem hasn’t been addressed, though the government will probably be forced to finally tackle it next year due to Article 48’s two clauses about the process that must be followed for changing state borders in the event that the vote is a success. That would expectedly set into motion the aforementioned course of events that was only delayed by the last-minute compromise, but it still buys the authorities precious time to finalize their plans for dealing with it. Having said that, it’s very dangerous that this development is occurring in the run-up to next year’s first free and fair elections because it risks making the issue of administrative-territorial reform the cause around which all ethnic parties will rally.

Ethiopia is a cosmopolitan country of over 80 ethnic groups where no single one commands a statistical majority, so it’s entirely possible that the devolution process could quickly spiral out of control and ultimately lead to the state’s dissolution if Hobbesian conflicts break out between its many different people throughout the course of its transformation into an “Identity Federation“. The Sidama and their struggle for state sovereignty within Ethiopia is but a trigger for forcing the government to implement Article 48 and thus create the precedent for the country’s much larger and more geographically dispersed nationalities to demand the same for resolving their many internal border disputes as well. The “perfect storm” is therefore brewing, one which could throw Ethiopia’s very existence as a unified state into jeopardy and catalyze the geopolitical re-engineering of Africa that might be exploited by foreign actors in the new “Scramble for Africa”.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Inside Junior’s War Room

July 19th, 2019 by Philip A Farruggio

Deep deep deep inside the bowels of the White House is this private, very private chamber. Some say its the place where REAL PRESIDENT Cheney stays, and operates the REAL government.

Today, on this cold, bitter cold Sunday, Super Sunday, the top elite from the cabinet are conducting a very important meeting- the prospect of war with Iraq, or rather the need to have a war with Iraq. Let’s be a “fly on the wall” and listen in.

Colin Powell- “Mr. President..

Junior [GWB]- “Ah yes Colin..

Cheney (over Junior’s voice)- “Yes General Powell…. please Junior..”

Powell- “ I’m sorry Mr. Real President… Mr. Real President,  I must be candid at this time, as these are times that call for extreme candor and….”

Cheney- “Could you just cut to the chase General? We have many things to discuss today.”

Junior- “He’s right, Colin.  Now Dick… I mean Mr. Real President, I need to understand just how this here economic stimulus package will operate; after all, the press calls it the  “Bush Plan’, not yours Dick.. I mean Mr. Real President!”

Cheney- “Calm down Junior. Didn’t I promise your daddy that I would take extra special care of you for this great service you volunteered to do for our nation and …”

Junior- “ I did NOT volunteer!! My daddy forced me to leave Austin where we, Laura and I and the girls, were very happy and content! I do not appreciate you, sir, with all due respect Mr. Real President, or anyone here thinking that I wanted this for myself!”

Cheney- “ Now now Junior, we all understand, especially your daddy, that you were not asking for all this- sometimes, I think it was Nixon who said it, we all get what we deserve, or something like that.”

Powell- “ If I can now continue, Mr. Real President..?”

Cheney- “Please General, by all means..”

Powell- “ Now, on this issue of the war…”

Rumsfeld- “ Dick, if he is gonna start this monologue on how he feels so strongly against this action, well, I may just puke!”

Powell- “ How DARE you question my patriotism Rummy!”

Rumsfeld- “ How DARE you question MY WAR!”

Cheney- “ Now gentlemen, gentlemen, please, lets have some semblance of solidarity here!”

Junior- “Solidarity- now that’s a COMMUNIST term is it not? I thought that war was over- we won that one right?”

Cheney- “ Please Junior, could you do us a favor and sit over there and  memorize the economic stimulus part of your State Of The Union?. Your daddy will be disappointed if you screw up this BIG ONE.”

Junior- “ Sorry, Mr. Real President. Its just that I love history and current events. Sorry…..” (walks toward the rear of the large chamber) “ My fellow Americans..”

Cheney- “Now   gentlemen, lets continue this discussion, with civility, yes? General?”

Powell- “ Thank you sir. As I was stating earlier, sir, I do not think we have exhausted every means possible to get the coalition we need prior to  conducting this offensive..”

Rumsfeld- “ Offensive!! What in the hell is he referring to Dick!?  This is no OFFENSIVE! The future of democracy and life as we know it is on the line here Colin… Tell him Dick, tell him what’s at stake here!”

Cheney- “Now calm down Rummy! General, we as a nation are at war with both terrorism and despots like Saddam. If we, the world’s only superpower left, if we do not take the mantle and rid the world of evil like….”

Junior (from the rear) “ Evil, did I hear Evil? I’m just getting to that part in my speech… ‘This Axis of evil must and will..’

Cheney- “ Not now Junior, just read it to yourself! We have business, important business to discuss here.. Please!”

Junior- “ OK, OK, I getya pardner, I’ll hush up and let you fellers discuss the mean ole bad injuns out there in A-rab land!”

Rumsfeld (whispering to Cheney)- “Dick, I do believe we would have been better off with the other Governor, you know the one from Florida- least he caught on a bit quicker- you get my drift?”

Cheney- “ Yeah Rummy, and maybe we could have done better with a more moderate Defense man too- somebody who didn’t look like an ATTACK DOG! Get my drift?”

Powell- “ Mr. Real President, may I continue…. thank you. I feel, echoing the world press and leaders from just about every nation I have been visiting and conversing with via the phone; that to go in unilaterally, or with just  a few NATO nations, would turn off the entire Middle East, Africa and most of Asia- not to mention the French, Germans, Scandinavians and who knows who else..”

Rumsfeld- “Oh screw em, all of em!! I say we go in and take out this **** and that’s that!. In and out in 48 hours!”

Powell- “ True, it would take 48 to 72 hours, maybe ten to twenty thousand civilian dead, a few hundred of our troops KIA, and the annihilation of Baghdad as we now know it. More importantly, let me stress this ever so strongly, would be the fact that we would invite an increasing number of terrorist actions against not only our presence abroad, but more distressing, within our borders.

Rumsfeld- “ Hogwash!! The Saudis would be thanking us for getting rid of that clown!”

Powell- “Rummy, do you understand that he is one of them, when all else is said and done?. There is a certain loyalty in that part of the world of  which we here in America do not comprehend.”

Rumsfeld- “That’s bullcrap Colin, with all due respect! The only loyalty that the Saudi Princes and Sheiks and whatever in the hell they call themselves, the only loyalty they know is that of the almighty dollar, especially the American kind. By the way, you speak of this “group loyalty”- do you think of yourself as a Black man first, or an American first?”

Powell (getting angry, finally)-  “I do not need you or anyone to ever ever question…”

Cheney- “Now now guys, let’s calm down a bit. We have some decisions to make and make fast. This is no time to be divided…”

Junior (from the rear)- ” A house divided will not stand… great! I can use that in my speech…. can I Mr. Real President, can I please?”

Cheney- “You know, Junior, THAT is a great literary mechanism after all. Great idea! Now please leave us to settle this war situation.”

Rumsfeld- I say, once again, Mr. Real President, let us delay not a week longer. Its gonna get hot as hell out there in a few months. Let’s get the Brits and go on in ASAP.”

Cheney- “Well, Rummy, I think my family’s stock portfolio agrees with you. We need to pump up those war industries as much as feasible. That translates into more jobs, and jobs bring votes for 2004. With this economy, we need something positive.”

Rumsfeld (aside to Cheney)- ” If Junior’s numbers stay down, even after this war thing is resolved, are we gonna keep him around in ’04? Can we win with him?”

Cheney (whispering) -“No choice on that matter. The ‘die is cast’ as Shakespeare wrote. Junior is our lead pony- and Senior says he stays that way. Besides, all we need is some good, really bad terrorism news in early ’04 and the polls will rise. Factor in who the other guys plan to run, and with the exception of Kerry, it’s as they say ‘ in the bag’ for our side.”

Powell- “Excuse me Mr. Real President, but if you do not need me anymore, I must leave for another European trip. We are going to need to solidify England, and get one more crack out of the rest of the EU, if your plans are to go forth successfully. May I be excused Sir?”

Rumsfeld- “That’s rubbish, and you and I both know it!”

Cheney- ” You’re excused Colin- we all value your insights on these matters, even Rummy here, believe it! Thanks for coming……..and remember Colin, a Powell/Jeb ticket is very much a talking point for ’08- especially if those idiots run the “hatchetwoman” on theirs.”

Junior (shouting out to Powell)- “Thanks General, and I think Jeb and you would do just fine in the White House. Jeb speaks fluent  Espanol you know- could come in handy with the l

Latino vote.”

Rumsfeld (whispering )- ” Do you really believe that HE could become President in 2008? “

Cheney- ” Rummy, the last time you looked, what color was Colin?  Forget what I said to him- the guy could never get the nomination, just like Lieberman could never. That’s life!”

Rumsfeld (singing)- “That’s what all the people say… you bomb Baghdad in April, its all over in May….”

Cheney- ” Now let’s go over those troop movements, and the ideal time to strike…”

Junior- “Hey fellers, I actually met Frank Sinatra you know. Big supporter of my Dad…..(singing) “That’s life, that’s what all the people say……”

*

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

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This article was originally published in 2014.

July 17th is the commemoration of the downing of MH17, July 17, 2014

“From start to finish, the Ukraine crisis has been instigated by US imperialism. Every action Washington has taken has been directed at exacerbating and intensifying this crisis. The longer this crisis goes on, the clearer it becomes that US policy is directed not so much at Ukraine as at Russia itself. Ukraine, it would seem, is meant merely to provide the pretext for a war with Russia.” Bill Van Auken, “Does Washington want war with Russia?“, World Socialist Web Site

German pilot and airlines expert, Peter Haisenko,  thinks that Malaysia Flight 17 was not blown up by a ground-based antiaircraft missile, but shot down by the type of double-barreled 30-mm guns used on Ukrainian SU-25 fighter planes.  Haisenko presented his theory in a widely-circulated and controversial article which appeared on the Global Research website titled “Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the “Shooting Down” of Malaysian MH17. “Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile”. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“The facts speak clear and loud and are beyond the realm of speculation: The cockpit shows traces of shelling! You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean, showing the entry points most likely that of a 30 millimeter caliber projectile….”  (“Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the “Shooting Down” of Malaysian MH17. “Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile””, Global Research)

Haisenko notes that the munitions used on Ukrainian fighters–anti-tank incendiary and splinter-explosive shells–are capable of taking down a jetliner and that the dense pattern of metal penetrated by multiple projectiles is consistent with the firing pattern of a 30-mm gun.

The fact that Russian radar spotted a SU 25 in the area where MH17 was attacked, has persuaded many that Haisenko’s analysis is credible.  Adding to the controversy, international monitor Michael Bociurkiw, who was one of the first inspectors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to reach the crash site and who spent more than a week examining the ruins–also appears to be convinced that the ill-fated jetliner was not hit by a missile but downed by machinegun fire consistent with the myriad bullet-holes visible on the fuselage.  Here’s what he told on CBC World News:

“There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pock-marked. It almost looks like machine gun fire; very, very strong machine gun fire that has left these unique marks that we haven’t seen anywhere else.

We’ve also been asked if we’ve seen any signs of a missile?

Well, no we haven’t. That’s the answer.” (“Malaysia Airlines MH17: Michael Bociurkiw talks about being first at the crash site“, CBC News. Note: The above quote is from the video)

The idea that MH17 was downed by a surface-to-air missile (from a BUK system) is a theory that originated with the US government and spread by the western media.  The theory has been repeated thousands of times in thousands of newspapers and TV programs without a shred of corroborating evidence.  Needless to say, the repetition of a fable, does not make it true. The public needs more facts to determine what really happened. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been stonewalling the investigation, preferring instead to use the tragedy to advance their own narrow political agenda by attacking Putin and smearing Russia. This strategy has clearly backfired as we can see by the fact that Haisenko’s analysis has caught on like wildfire convincing many that the missile theory is a fake.

The burden of proof now falls on Washington to produce whatever hard evidence they may have via radar or satellite imagery that will persuade the public that their story is credible.  The best way to do that, would be to provide whatever relevant information and data they’ve compiled but refused to release for the last two weeks.

What we know about the crash so far, is that MH17 was rerouted from the flight-path that other Malaysia “Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur” flights had been taking for the two weeks prior.

Why was the flight path suddenly changed? Why was MH17 rerouted through a war zone? Why was the pilot told to fly at a lower altitude instead of the 35,000 ft he had requested?  Why was the flight path suddenly adjusted 14 kilometers north just as the plane entered the war zone? Was MH17 outfitted with Boeing’s Uninterruptible Auto Pilot (BUAP), and if so, was the system engaged when it suddenly flew off course and began to lose altitude? (And why hasn’t Boeing sent an investigative team to the crash site which is what they do whenever one of their planes goes down?)

The Obama administration hasn’t answered any of these questions. They’ve chosen instead to use the tragedy to bash Russia and blame Putin  without providing any solid evidence or data to support their claim that MH17 was downed by a missile launched from a BUK system. As a result,  public confidence in their allegations has steadily eroded. This situation can only be remedied by taking concrete steps to show the administration is serious about the investigation and genuinely wants to get to the bottom of what happened on July 17.

Here’s what Obama should do.

First, he should demand that the Kiev government hand over the Air Traffic Control cockpit tapes that were recorded on the day the flight went down. That’s number one. That will clarify why the pilot veered  “off course” 14 kilometers and why the plane suddenly lost altitude. (Once again, we ask: Was the Auto Pilot override system engaged or not?) The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) seized the recordings shortly after MH17 crashed and they haven’t been seen since. Why? Why hasn’t this critical piece of  evidence been handed over to the proper authorities, the EU’s team of investigators? Does anyone really believe that Kiev’s US-backed lackey regime made this decision by themselves or that Washington ordered them to grab the tapes to prevent the public from knowing what really happened in the final minutes of the flight?

Second, Obama should come clean and provide whatever radar and satellite data he has that will shed light on how the plane was downed. Most of what we know so far, has been provided by Moscow from a news conference that was moderated by Russian air force chief Lt. Gen. Igor Makushev. Naturally, the western media blacked out most of what Makushev had to say. Surprisingly, however, the right wing Wall Street Journal published an excellent article on the press conference which covered most of the important details. Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:

“On Monday, Gen. Makushev said that the two Russian radar stations near Russia’s border with Ukraine observed the presence of the second aircraft over a period of four minutes on the day of Flight 17′s crash….

Gen. Makushev said that Russian radars could only spot the aircraft at the point of its ascension because the on-duty radars only detected objects at above 5,000 meters. Russian radars spotted the unidentified plane patrolling in the vicinity of Flight 17, “controlling the development of the situation,” he said….

The defense ministry also said it registered the Su-25 fighter jet ascending within close range of several civil aircrafts, including the Malaysia Airlines jet….

Another top military official, Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, said at the same news conference that the jet came as close as 1.8 miles to Flight 17, which is well within the range of the air-to-air missiles it is usually equipped with…

The suggested version of events echoed much of what has been reported on Russian state television in recent days, which has suggested that Ukraine could have shot down the plane, possibly via one of its fighter planes.

U.S. officials dismissed the Russian government’s claim that a second plane was present when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down last week as “desperate” propaganda.”   (“Russia Presents Its Account of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Crash“, Wall Street Journal)

Russia’s findings appear to support the Bociurkiw-Haisenko theory that MH17 was gunned down by Ukrainian fighters.  It’s up to the Obama administration to prove otherwise.

Here’s more from the WSJ:

“Similarly, Gen. Makushev said the Malaysia Airlines plane deviated from its course by close to 9 miles near Donetsk but then attempted to return to its course, crashing shortly after. Russian radars spotted the Flight 17 rapidly descending 32 miles away from the Russian border, Russian officials said…..He said Russia is prepared to hand all of the information it has to the European authorities, which included satellite imagery and data from its own radar.” (WSJ)

Why? Why was the pilot driving the gigantic 777 through a warzone like an intoxicated high-schooler out on a joyride? Does any of this sound suspicious to you, dear reader?

So far, the Obama administration hasn’t even admitted that they had a satellite overhead, preferring instead to stick with their pathetic propaganda strategy. Fortunately, CounterPunch has published an invaluable article by journalist Andre Vltchek that provides a translation of the Russian press conference to which the WSJ refers. Here’s an excerpt:

“According to our records from 17:06 till 17:21 Moscow time on the July 17 over the Southeastern territory of Ukraine, a US space satellite flew overhead. This is a special device of the experimental space system designed to detect and track various missile launches. If the US party has photos made by the satellite, please let us ask them to show them to world community for further investigation….(NOTE: The US satellite system MUST work, because just days later it detected the launching of  three ballistic missiles by the Ukrainian government.)

Is it a coincidence or not? However, the time of the Malaysian Boeing-777 accident and the time of the observation done by the satellite over the Ukrainian territory are the same. In conclusion, I would like to mention that all the concrete information is based on the objective and reliable data of the different Russian equipment, in contrast to the accusations of the US against us, made without any evidence…” (“The New Cold War–MH17 – Sacrificed Airliner“, Andre Vltchek, Counterpunch

In other words, Moscow caught the US “red handed”. They spotted the US satellite, they know the US saw what happened, and they’re calling them out on it.

Where are the photos, Obama? Where is the satellite imagery? We KNOW you have them, so pony up!

Now ask yourself this: Where does this line of inquiry lead? And does it really matter if the Malaysia 777 was shot down by a warplane or blown up by surface-to-air missile?

Of course it matters. It makes all the difference in the world. If MH17 was shot down by an Ukrainian SU 25, then we need to know who gave the order and whether the people who stand to benefit from the incident were directly involved or not. And who does benefit from the downing of MH17, that’s what we need to establish. Just like we need to know why the Obama team has been so cock-sure that Moscow was involved in the incident. Why all the fingerpointing? Why the need to make Putin look like a homicidal maniac? How does that help to reveal the truth?

Finally: Was the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 an accident, a premeditated act of murder or a false flag operation?

We need to know.

Addendum: On Sunday, BBC reports:  “Fresh fighting in eastern Ukraine has forced an international forensics team to halt operations in part of the vast crash site of Malaysian flight MH17. Observers had to withdraw from one village when they heard artillery fire although work is still continuing across much of the area.” (“Ukraine crisis: New fighting hampers MH17 crash probe“, BBC.)

Kiev has restarted hostilities realizing that if the Dutch inspectors find any shell casings or fragments that can be traced back to the SU 25s, the administration’s missile theory will collapse.

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Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Der General der Marine-Infanterie und Präsident des Gemeinsamen Ausschusses der Stabschefs, Joseph Dunford, überreichte am 13. Juni 2019 die Diplome an die Studenten der National Defense University. Er nutzte die Gelegenheit, um ihnen zu versichern, dass es „Aufgabe der Generaldirektoren ist, den Wandel in einer unsicheren Welt zu steuern“.

Die NATO-Verteidigungsminister (Elisabetta Trenta, M5S, für Italien und Ursula von der Leyen für Deutschland und Thomas Starlinger für Österreich) wurden am 26. und 27. Juni in Brüssel einberufen, um die neuen Maßnahmen der „Abschreckung“ gegen Russland zu genehmigen, dem – ohne jeden Beweis – vorgeworfen wird, gegen den INF-Vertrag verstoßen zu haben. Grundsätzlich bedeutet dies, dass sie hinter die Vereinigten Staaten zurückfallen werden, die durch den endgültigen Rückzug aus dem Vertrag am 2. August die Stationierung von bodengestützten Mittelstrecken-Nuklearraketen (einer Reichweite von 500 bis 5.500 Kilometern) in Europa vorbereiten, ähnlich denen aus den 80er Jahren (die Pershing II und die Marschflugkörper), die durch den 1987 von den Präsidenten Gorbatschow und Reagan unterzeichneten Vertrag (mit den sowjetischen SS-20) beseitigt wurden.

Die großen europäischen Mächte, die innerhalb der EU zunehmend gespalten sind, werden in der NATO unter dem Kommando der USA neu gruppiert, um ihre gemeinsamen strategischen Interessen zu unterstützen. Bei der UNO lehnte dieselbe Europäische Union – von der 21 ihrer 27 Mitglieder der Allianz angehören (ebenso wie das Vereinigte Königreich, obwohl es die EU verlässt) – den russischen Vorschlag zur Beibehaltung des INF-Vertrags ab. In einer so wichtigen Angelegenheit wird die europäische Öffentlichkeit von ihren Regierungen und den großen Medien bewusst im Zustand der Unwissenheit gehalten. Auf diese Weise bemerken wir nicht die wachsende Gefahr, die uns alle bedroht – die zunehmende Möglichkeit, dass wir eines Tages den Einsatz von Atomwaffen erfahren könnten.

Dies wird durch das jüngste strategische Dokument der US Armed Forces, Nuclear Operations (11. Juni) bestätigt, das unter der Leitung des Präsidenten der Generalstabschefs verfasst wurde. Da „unsere Atomstreitkräfte den USA die Leistungsfähigkeit bieten, unsere eigenen nationalen Ziele zu verfolgen“, wird in dem Dokument betont, dass sie „diversifiziert, flexibel und anpassungsfähig“ an ein „breites Spektrum von Gegnern, Bedrohungen und Kontexten“ sein müssen. Trotz russischer Warnungen, dass auch der Einsatz nur einer Atomwaffe mit geringer Leistung eine Kettenreaktion auslösen würde, die zu einem großangelegten Atomkonflikt führen könnte, beginnt sich die US-Doktrin auf der Grundlage eines gefährlichen Konzepts – „Flexibilität“ – zu orientieren.

Das strategische Dokument bekräftigt, dass „die US-Atomkräfte uns die Mittel an die Hand geben, um zu diesem Zeitpunkt auf ein breites Spektrum von Zielen und mit den vom Präsidenten beschlossenen Mitteln Gewalt anzuwenden“. Diese Ziele (spezifiziert das gleiche Dokument) werden in Wahrheit von den Geheimdiensten gewählt, die deren Schwachstelle für einen nuklearen Angriff bewerten und auch die Auswirkungen des radioaktiven Niederschlags berechnen. Der Einsatz von Kernwaffen – betont das Dokument – „kann die Voraussetzungen für entscheidende Ergebnisse schaffen. Insbesondere der Einsatz einer Atomwaffe würde den Kontext einer Schlacht grundlegend verändern, indem er die Bedingungen schafft, die es den Befehlshabern ermöglichen würden, die Konfrontation zu gewinnen“.

Kernwaffen würden es den USA auch ermöglichen, „ihre Verbündeten und Partner zu beruhigen“, die im Vertrauen auf diese Waffen „die Idee des Besitzes eigener Kernwaffen aufgeben und damit am Ziel der Vereinigten Staaten, der Nichtverbreitung, teilnehmen würden“.

Das Dokument zeigt jedoch, dass „die USA und einige ausgewählte NATO-Verbündete in der Lage wären, Flugzeuge vorzuhalten, die sowohl nukleare als auch konventionelle Waffen tragen können“. Dies ist ein Eingeständnis, dass vier offiziell Nicht-Atom-Länder der EU, Italien, Deutschland, Belgien, Holland – und auch die Türkei – unter Verstoß gegen den Nichtverbreitungsvertrag nicht nur US-Atomwaffen (B-61-Bomben, die ab 2020 durch die noch zerstörerischen B61-12 ersetzt werden) lagern, sondern bereit sind, sie bei einem Atomangriff unter dem Kommando des Pentagon einzusetzen.

All dies wird von unseren Regierungen und Parlamenten, Fernsehern und Zeitungen geheim gehalten, mit dem schuldigen Schweigen der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Politiker und Journalisten, die dennoch Tag für Tag wiederholen, wie wichtig „Sicherheit“ für uns Italiener und andere Europäer der Union ist. Sie wird uns anscheinend durch die Stationierung anderer Atomwaffen der USA garantiert.

Manlio Dinucci

 

L’Unione europea nella strategia nucleare del PentagonoBy Manlio Dinucci,

il manifesto, 25. Juni 2019

Übersetzung: K.R.

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Trump Ignorant of China’s Resolve

July 18th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Trump is an artful dealmaker in his own mind, his mastery more myth than reality.

Former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res earlier said he wasn’t a great dealmaker. 

“In terms of taking the responsibility for the buck, he just would never do it,” she said, adding: “It’s not in his DNA. He’s never responsible. It is always someone else’s fault.”

According to Trump’s 1987 “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, “most of the deals in the book were failures,” adding:

“And the number of deals he’s made over the years since then have overwhelmingly been failures.” He was “really one of the worst” dealmakers he’s come across.

Expressing “deep remorse” for writing the book, Schwartz said “I put lipstick on a pig…I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”

“I genuinely believe(d) that if Trump w(on) and g(ot) the nuclear codes…it (could) lead to the end.” If he wrote the book today, he’d title it “The Sociopath.”

Former New York magazine publisher and editor Edward Kosner, where Schwartz worked as a writer in the 1980s, said “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein” — creating the monster occupying the White House.

In writing the book, he spent 18 months with Trump in his office, at meetings, on weekends in New York and Florida. He got to know him better than anyone other than family members at the time, he said.

As a public figure, especially a political one, he acted like he wrote the book, Schwartz said, adding:

“If he could lie about that on day one (as candidate Trump)— when it was so easily refuted — he is likely to lie about anything.”

After announcing his candidacy in June 2015, the prospect of Trump becoming president horrified Schwartz — because of his self-centered, impulsive personality, not his ideological ideas, whatever they might be.

Through his team involved in trade talks with China, did the mythical dealmaker meet his match?

After 11 negotiating sessions in Beijing and Washington, along with other bilateral communications for over a year, talks remain at impasse because of unacceptable, one-sided Trump regime demands.

China clearly is unwilling to compromise its sovereign rights and principles. Nor will Beijing sacrifice its ambitious longterm economic, financial, industrial, and technological aims — wanting the country developed into a global powerhouse.

It’s heading toward eventually surpassing the US as the world’s largest economy. It already reached that plateau on a purchase price basis, what a basket of goods costs in both countries.

Nearly three weeks after Trump and Chineses President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the late June G20 Osaka, Japan summit, agreeing to resume trade talks, all that took place were telephone communications between both sides.

No date for a face-to-face meeting was scheduled in either country. Things are no closer to resolving major differences than earlier.

Both nations are world’s apart on major structural issues. The US side appears unwilling to soften its unacceptable demands, China not about to accept them.

The last time bilateral talks were held in May, they broke down. Both sides remain firm. China insists that further talks take place “on a basis of equality and mutual respect” — what the US affords no other countries, notably not sovereign independent ones.

For progress to be made in talks, China demands what the Trump regime won’t agree to — lifting unacceptable tariffs, removing Chinese enterprises from its blacklist, notably tech giant Huawei and its affiliates, along with calling off its dogs against the company’s chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, ordering Canada to release her from house arrest.

The US must also end its unacceptable one-sided demands, be willing to compromise on key issues, and respect China’s sovereign developmental rights.

There’s no sign whatever of the Trump regime’s willingness to negotiate on this basis, differences between both sides remaining at impasse.

China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan was involved in last week’s phone conversation between both sides.

He blamed the Trump regime’s obstinacy for the current impasse, separately saying Beijing must uphold “the spirit of struggle” in defending its sovereign rights.

He indicated that China will increase efforts to advance its belt and road initiative for greater regional integration, involving over $1 trillion in investments.

Chairman of China’s largest construction machinery manufacturer XCMG earlier said “One Belt, One Road makes our internationalization strategy like a tiger with wings added.”

According to Beijing-based commentator Zhang Lifan, Zhong’s remarks and involvement in Sino/US talks “shows China is in no hurry to reach a deal, (is) ready for protracted talks, (and appears to be) waiting to see what happens after the 2020 election.”

As long as the US remains hardline and unwilling to compromise, resolving major bilateral differences may be unattainable no matter who serves as US president.

Protracted stalemate looks set to continue longer-term, resolution perhaps out of reach altogether because of unacceptable US demands.

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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.

Die absurden Beziehungen der EU-Länder zu Russland

July 18th, 2019 by Manlio Dinucci

Der Stand der Beziehungen zwischen Italien und Russland ist „ausgezeichnet“: So lautete die Erklärung von Premierminister Giuseppe Conte, als er Präsident Vladimir Putin in Rom empfing. Die Botschaft war als Beruhigungsmittel, gar als Schlafmittel für die öffentliche Meinung gedacht. Grundsätzlich beschränkte sich die Sitzung auf den Stand der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen.

Russland, in dem 500 italienische Unternehmen ansässig sind, ist der fünftgrößte außereuropäische Markt für unsere Exporte und deckt 35 % des italienischen Erdgasbedarfs. Dieser Austausch – präzisiert Putin – hatte 2018 einen Wert von 27 Milliarden Dollar, 2013 erwirtschaftete er jedoch noch 54 Milliarden Dollar. Das bedeutet, dass er sich halbierte, weil sich „die Beziehungen zwischen Russland und der Europäischen Union, die zu europäischen Sanktionen führten (die in Washington beschlossen werden), verschlechtert haben“, so Conte.

Dennoch gibt es zwischen den beiden Ländern „eine intensive Beziehung auf allen Ebenen“. Ein beruhigender Ton, der an den von Contes Besuch in Moskau im Jahr 2018 und von Premierminister Matteo Renzis Reise nach Sankt Petersburg im Jahr 2016 anknüpft, als er garantierte, dass „der Ausdruck ‚Kalter Krieg‘ die Geschichte und auch die Realität verlassen hat“. Daher geht die Farce weiter.

In seinen Beziehungen zu Russland tritt Conte (wie Renzi 2016) nur in der Funktion des Regierungschefs eines Landes der Europäischen Union auf, das die Mitgliedschaft Italiens in der NATO unter dem Kommando der USA, die er für einen „privilegierten Verbündeten“ hält, verfälscht. Am italienisch-russischen Tisch gibt es also einen Platz für den steinernen Gast, den „privilegierten Verbündeten“, in dessen Fahrwasser Italien schwimmt.

Die Regierung Conte erklärt, dass der Stand der Beziehungen zu Russland „ausgezeichnet“ ist, obwohl sie weniger als eine Woche zuvor im NATO-Hauptquartier erneut Russland beschuldigt hatte, gegen den INF-Vertrag verstoßen zu haben (auf der Grundlage von „ Beweisen“, die von Washington geliefert wurden), und damit mit der Entscheidung der USA in Einklang zu bringen, den Vertrag zu begraben, um neue, auf Russland gerichtete Mittelstrecken-Nuklearraketen, zu installieren.

Am 3. Juli, dem Vorabend des Putin-Besuchs in Italien, veröffentlichte Moskau ein von Putin unterzeichnetes Gesetz, das die russische Beteiligung am Vertrag aussetzt. Ein Präventivschlag, bevor Washington am 2. August endgültig austritt.

Ø  Putin warnte auch davor, dass Russland seine Raketen auf die Gebiete richten würde, in denen sich diese Raketen befinden, wenn die USA neue Atomwaffen in europäischen Ländern in der Nähe von Russland stationieren würden.

Ø  Die Warnung betrifft also auch Italien, das sich derzeit darauf vorbereitet, ab 2020 die neuen B61-12-Bomben zu beherbergen, die auch für die italienische Luftwaffe – unter US-Befehl – verfügbar sind.

Ø  Eine Woche vor der Bestätigung dieses „ausgezeichneten“ Zustands der Beziehungen zu Russland bestätigte die Regierung Conte die Beteiligung Italiens an der NATO-Truppe – unter US-Befehl – von 30 Kriegsschiffen, 30 Bataillonen und 30 Luftgeschwadern, die ab 2020 innerhalb von 30 Tagen gegen Russland in Europa eingesetzt werden können.

Ø  Unter Beibehaltung der Anti-Russland-Funktion beteiligen sich italienische Schiffe an NATO-Manövern zur U-Boot-Kriegsführung. Italienische Panzerstreitkräfte gehören zur NATO-Kampfgruppe in Lettland, während vor zwei Wochen die Ariete Panzerbrigade in Polen ausgebildet wurde. In Rumänien und Lettland sind italienische Kampfflugzeuge – Eurofighter Taifune – im Einsatz.

All dies bestätigt, dass die italienische Außen- und Verteidigungspolitik nicht in Rom, sondern in Washington entschieden wird, direkt vor der Nase der „Souveränität“, die der derzeitigen Regierung zugeschrieben wird.

Die Beziehungen zu Russland, sowie die zu China, basieren auf dem Treibsand der italienischen Abhängigkeit von den strategischen Entscheidungen, die in Washington getroffen wurden. Wir müssen uns nur daran erinnern, dass 2014 die russisch-italienische South Stream-Gaspipeline im Auftrag Washingtons sabotiert wurde, was zu Verlusten in Milliardenhöhe für italienische Unternehmen führte.In absolutem Schweigen und im Konsens mit der italienischen Regierung.

Manlio Dinucci

 

La sceneggiata delle relazioni con la Russia

il manifesto, 10.Juli 2019

Übersetzung: K.R.

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A Farsa das Relações com a Rússia

July 18th, 2019 by Manlio Dinucci

O estado das relações entre a Itália e a Rússia é “excelente”: afirmou o Primeiro Ministro Conte, ao receber em Roma, o Presidente Putin. A mensagem é reconfortante, na verdade, soporífera em relação à opinião pública. Limitamo-nos, fundamentalmente, ao estado das relações económicas.

A Rússia, onde funcionam 500 empresas italianas, é o quinto mercado extra-europeu para as nossas exportações e fornece 35% da procura italiana de gás natural. O intercâmbio – Putin especifica – foi de 27 biliões de dólares em 2018, mas em 2013 chegou a 54 biliões. Portanto, reduziu para metade o que Conte designa como a “deterioração das relações entre a Rússia e a União Europeia, que conduziu às sanções europeias” (decididas, na realidade, em Washington).

Porém, existe um “relacionamento intenso a todos os níveis” entre os dois países. Tons tranquilizadores que reflectem os da visita de Conte a Moscovo, em 2018 e do Primeiro Ministro Renzi, a São Petersburgo, em 2016, quando garantiu que “a expressão Guerra Fria está fora do contexto da História e da realidade”. Assim, a farsa continua.

Nas relações com a Rússia, Conte (como Renzi, em 2016) apresenta-se unicamente, nos trajes de Chefe de Governo de um país da União Europeia, escondendo-se atrás da adesão da Itália à NATO, sob o comando dos Estados Unidos, considerado “aliado privilegiado”. O “aliado privilegiado” em cuja esteira a Itália está colocada. À mesa das conversações da Itália com a Rússia, continua ainda a sentar-se, como “convidado de pedra,” o “aliado privilegiado”, sob cuja alçada se coloca a Itália.

O governo Conte declara “excelente” o estado das relações com a Rússia quando, há apenas uma semana, no quartel general da NATO, acusou novamente a Rússia de violar o Tratado INF (com base nas “provas” fornecidas por Washington), alinhando-se com a decisão USA de destruir o Tratado, para instalar na Europa, novos mísseis nucleares de alcance intermédio, apontados para a Rússia.

Em 3 de Julho, um dia antes da visita de Putin à Itália, foi publicada em Moscovo o decreto-lei assinado por ele, que suspende a participação russa no Tratado: uma medida preventiva antes que Washington saia definitivamente, em 2 de Agosto.

Ø O próprio Putin advertiu que, se os EUA colocarem novas armas nucleares na Europa ao redor da Rússia, esta apontará os seus mísseis para as zonas onde estiverem localizados.

Ø  Assim, também previne a Itália, que se prepara para hospedar, a partir de 2020, as novas bombas nucleares B61-12 à disposição da força aérea italiana, sob comando USA.

Ø  Uma semana antes da confirmação do estado “excelente” das relações com a Rússia, o governo Conte confirmou a participação da Itália na força NATO, sob o comando USA, de 30 navios de guerra, 30 batalhões e 30 esquadrões aéreos que se podem instalar ​​em 30 dias na Europa, contra Rússia, a partir de 2020.

Ø  Sempre em função anti-Rússia, navios italianos participam nos exercícios da NATO, de guerra submarina; forças mecanizadas italianas fazem parte do grupo de combate da NATO, na Letónia e a brigada blindada Ariete exercitou-se há duas semanas na Polónia, enquanto caças italianos Eurofighter Typhoon estão instalados na Roménia e na Letónia.

Tudo isto confirma que a política externa e militar da Itália é decidida não em Roma, mas em Washington, apesar da “soberania” atribuída ao governo actual.

As relações económicas com a Rússia e até com a China, assentam sobre as areias movediças da dependência italiana das decisões estratégicas de Washington. Basta recordar como, em 2014, por ordem de Washington, foi destruído o gasoduto South Stream Rússia-Itália, com prejuízos de biliões de euros para as empresas italianas. Com o silêncio absoluto e com o consentimento do governo italiano.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

La sceneggiata delle relazioni con la Russia

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Iran announced last week they will be enriching uranium to 5% which is over the 3.67% limit set by the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action signed in 2015 under the Obama administration.

Iran has every right to go over that cap, since the US pulled out of the deal over a year ago and reinstated crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

But if you look at headlines in the mainstream media, you would never know Iran was exercising its right as per the JCPOA.

Reuters July 7, 2019: Iran ratchets up tensions with higher enrichment, draws warnings

BBC July 7, 2019: Iran nuclear deal: Government announces enrichment breach

NPR July 7, 2019: Iran’s Uranium Enrichment Breaks Nuclear Deal Limit. Here’s What That Means

USA Today July 7,2019: Iran begins uranium enrichment beyond limit set by 2015 nuclear deal in latest violation

Wall Street Journal July 7,2019: Iran Plans New Breach of Limits of Nuclear Agreement

New York Times July 7, 2019: Iran Announces New Breach of Nuclear Deal Limits and Threatens Further Violations

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog assigned to ensure Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, reported the Islamic Republic’s compliance as recently as May 31st 2019, over a year after the US pulled out of the deal.

The IAE also reported that Iran gave full access to its inspectors,

“Timely and proactive cooperation by Iran in providing such access facilitates implementation of the additional protocol and enhances confidence,” the report stated.

Iran has been staying within the deals limits in hopes that other signatories of the deal would help with relief from US sanctions. Iran’s economy relies heavily on oil exports, which have fallen to about 300,000 barrels per day, compared with the 2.5 million barrels Iran was selling in April 2018.

Section 21 of the JCPOA reads,

“The United States will cease the application, and will continue to do so, in accordance with this JCPOA of the sanctions specified in Annex II to take effect simultaneously with the IAEA-verified implementation of the agreed nuclear- related measures by Iran as specified in Annex V.”

The plan then goes on to specify all the sanctions the U.S. must lift, which now have mostly all been re-implemented.

Section 21 makes it clear, if the IAEA verifies that Iran is complying with the JCPOA the US must lift all the sanctions and keep them off or else they are in violation of the deal.

On Thursday, CNN reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attempted to seize a British oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. The CNN article used two unnamed US officials as its sources. They also quoted an unnamed British Ministry of Defense source that said it “appeared that the Iranian vessels were trying to divert the Heritage from international to Iranian waters” before the British Navy ship HMS Montrose “got between them and issued a verbal warning to withdraw.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif denied the allegations and said,

“They make such claims to create tension, yet these claims are worthless and they have made many such claims.”

No evidence for these claims has been provided.

The CNN article even said,

“A US aircraft was overhead and recorded video of the incident, though CNN has not seen the footage.”

Still no footage has been released, this story could have been completely fabricated and these “unnamed officials” know they can feed any information they want to these “journalists” and they’ll report it as fact. It helps paint Iran as the aggressor.

The CNN article barely mentioned the fact that on July 4th, British Royal Marines landed a helicopter on an Iranian oil tanker off the coast of Gibraltar because it was suspected of being bound for Syria. Selling oil to Syria violates EU and US sanctions.

Look at how the New York Post reported the alleged attempted seizure of the British tanker:

New York Post, July 11th 2019: Iran’s latest provocation isn’t even about the nuke deal

The Post article did report on the British seizing an Iranian tanker, the article read,

“Notably, the Royal Marines took custody of that Iranian ship because it was blatantly taking oil to Syria, in defiance of European Union sanctions. By attempting a reprisal, Tehran is trying to bully Britain and, by implication, the rest of Europe, into giving it a free hand in Syria.”

Somehow to the New York Post Iran is the bully in this situation? All Iran wants to do is sell their greatest natural resource. Who are the United States and EU to decide who they can and cannot sell it to? The US violated the JCPOA first and reinstated crippling economic sanctions, they sound like the bully.

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Dave DeCamp is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He recently joined Antiwar.com as an assistant editor. He is on Twitter at @decampdave.

The situation in northwestern Hama and along the entire contact line around the Idlib de-escalation zone has remained stable but tense during the past week. The Syrian Arab Army, the Tiger Forces and their allies have repeatedly engaged in local clashes with Hayat Tahir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) and other radical groups. However, no side has undertaken any notable offensive operations.

Fresh satellite images of the Russian Hmeimim airbase showed the deployment of seven Su-24, four Su-25, seven Su-34 and four Su-35 warplanes as well as an A-50 airborne early warning and control, an IL-20 electronic intelligence plane, two IL-76 and an An-30 cargo planes.

The warplanes were all deployed on the airbase’s ramp. This indicates that the hardened aircraft shelters are still under construction. New revetments are being built in the northeastern section of the airbase. These measures are needed to prevent any damage that may be caused by repeated armed drone attacks by militants.

On July 14, a terrorist attack targeted a gas pipeline linking the al-Shaer gas fields in eastern Homs with the Ebla gas plant temporarily knocking it out of service. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. However, ISIS cells are known to be operating in the Homs desert, south of al-Shaer. Eastern Homs witnessed several attacks by the terrorist group in the last few months.

Earlier, on June 22, a sabotage operation targeted several underwater pipes of the Banias’ oil terminal on the Syrian coast. The attack damaged five oil pipes forcing Damascus to take emergency measures to repair the damaged infrastructure.

A unit of the Russian Military Police survived an attack by an improvised-explosive device (IED) in the southern Syrian governorate of Daraa on July 13, a chief of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria confirmed. The attack led to no casualties. According to the Russian side, it was carried out by remaining cells of illegal armed groups.

Pro-opposition and pro-Israeli sources immediately speculated that the attack may have been conducted by some Iranian-backed forces. Nonetheless, these speculations were not reinforced by any facts.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) received at least 1,730 trucks loaded with military supplies from the U.S. after the formal defeat of ISIS in northeastern Syria last March, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on July 14.

According to the UK-based monitoring group, the last two shipments included around 280 trucks loaded with logistics and military supplies.

The US decision to continue providing the SDF with military supplies, including armoured equipment, is a demonstration that Washington still considers employing its proxies in some kind of open clashes with other actors involved in the conflict. Taking into account that the US already declared the defeat of ISIS, the only possible targets left are the Syrian government in central Syria and Turkey-led forces in northwestern Syria.

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 A recent slew of articles have hit international media in the wake of Botswana’s decision to lift its moratorium on trophy hunting.

Typically, the argument is that Botswana now has too many elephants, which have exceeded the country’s carrying capacity. Local communities that depended on hunting revenue and bushmeat now go without, reducing tolerance for conflict with crop-raiding elephants and other wildlife.

Moreover, trophy hunting only targets ‘surplus bulls’, so there’s nothing to worry about, and only a maximum of 400 will be killed in any given year. Oh, and don’t tell us what to do, you western armchair critics.

The truth does not support any of these premises.

Elephant poaching

Botswana, as is now clearly documented in the peer-reviewed literature, has an elephant poaching problem, not an overpopulation problem.

Between 2014 and 2018, the population has remained roughly stable at around 130,000 elephants. According to the latest continent-wide survey, the African savannah elephant population is estimated at 374,982 elephants, excluding South Sudan and Central African Republic.

Rowan Martin, veteran wildlife manager, quotes a figure of 541,684 elephants from the 2016 African Elephant Status Report (AESR). Of the remaining elephants, Botswana is home to the vast majority.

Martin is one of the many voices in favour of Botswana’s decision to lift the trophy hunting moratorium. He asserts that the suspicions that the Botswana government is doing so primarily to secure the rural vote in the upcoming October elections are vacuous.

However, it is clear that elephants are being reduced to a political football, caught between the views of its current president and his predecessor. It is a vote-catcher that could go horribly wrong. Martin has chosen to label arguments against elephant trophy hunting as ‘mud-slinging’ that insinuates that ‘native Africans’ can’t manage their own natural resources. This is a pity, as it detracts from the substance of the debate.

There are at least five myths that inform the rationale for reintroducing hunting. Rowan Martin and his followers believe that these are no myths. A brief response to each of Martin’s objections, in light of new research about elephant behaviour, follows:

Population

Myth: Botswana’s elephant population is exploding

Botswana’s elephant population numbered roughly 62,998 in 1995. Martin argues that the most accurate figure for a decade prior to that is between 30,000 and 40,000 elephants. The African Elephant Status Report (AESR) to which he refers puts the figure at 50,000 in 1990.

Martin is also of the view that the current figure of 160,000 quoted at the KAZA conference is accurate. But the AESR to which Martin himself referred puts the 2006 figure at 154,658, notes that it’s disputed, and estimates the 2015 figure at 131,626.

Martin takes issue with the widely accepted view that the Botswana population has been roughly stable between 2014 and 2018. It has clearly fallen since 2006, so it remains unclear why he thinks that Botswana’s ‘elephant populations are growing, not stable’.

It is also not clear what Martin means by the phrase that the ‘Botswana population is pumping out emigrants.’ Elephants are migrating into Botswana from elsewhere to escape hunting and poaching, hardly expelling them. The latest survey by Schlossberg, Chase and Landen (2018) has been lauded as one of the most rigorous scientific undertakings in this field, and it shows stable numbers at best alongside a growing poaching crisis.

The growing populations are humans and cattle, not elephants. Outside protected areas, desertification caused by cattle over-grazing is a problem that too often gets ignored in this conversation. The cattle industry is ecologically and economically costly but politically powerful. Water is also increasingly scarce, which will exacerbate human and elephant conflict. Hunting will not solve this problem; appropriate land use planning will.

Carrying capacity

Myth: Botswana’s elephants have exceeded the ‘carrying capacity’ of the landscape

Martin agrees with the oft-quoted figure of a carrying capacity of 54,000 elephants in Botswana. That equates to about one elephant for every three kilometres squared. This concept remains arbitrary and lacks relevance for large, unfenced wilderness landscapes.

But Martin continues to insist that these landscapes are akin to farms that must be managed to ensure as little variation as possible. Him and Ron Thomson have both lamented the loss of large canopy trees as a result of elephant ‘over-population’. But they haven’t responded to the science that shows the importance of inter-seasonal variation; elephants’ roles as ecosystem engineers; and the fact that there is no benchmark as to what a landscape should look like.

Martin dismisses the 24 authors of the above-linked Ambio article as ‘pseudo-scientists’. His criteria for determining what constitutes ‘pseudo-science’ is anything that contradicts his own experience or cited literature.

He similarly betrays himself when he argues that man ‘does not need “scientific criteria” in his aesthetic quest as long as he is practising adaptive management.’ The literature he cites in support of this is work produced by himself and Marshall Murphree.

Trophy standard

Myth: Hunting will solve the elephant population ‘explosion’

Martin argues that this myth is redundant because we know that trophy hunting only eliminates a small number of bull elephants each year.

But this misses the fact that the myth is one of the pretexts on which the re-introduction of trophy hunting has been rationalised. It also misses the deeper point that trophy hunting is likely to lead to population collapse, especially if it annihilates older bulls.

report by Martin, Craig and Peake shows a high and consistent ‘trophy standard’ in the 15 years leading up to 2010, but Martin’s appeal to it amounts to special pleading as there is no guarantee that such a standard will be maintained from 2019 onwards, especially given the notoriety of corruption in the industry. Nor does it mean that a high ‘trophy standard’ reflects good ecological management.

The quota numbers for some areas were a thumb-suck based on no science at all. But the primary reason why hunting will fail is that there are very few ‘trophy’ tuskers remaining – genetic depletion is real and scientifically documented. Martin ignores the figures about how few trophy bulls over the age of 35 are left in Botswana.

Furthermore, the evidence is now unequivocal that: ‘Male elephants increased their energetic allocation into reproduction with age as the probability of reproductive success increases. Given that older male elephants tend to be both the target of legal trophy hunting and illegal poaching, man-made interference could drive fundamental changes in elephant reproductive tactics.’

The reproductive success of a male elephant increases with age – there is no such thing as a ‘surplus’ bull that can be extracted as a ‘trophy’. Therefore, a combination of poaching and trophy hunting may well lead to population collapse or at least to undesirable lasting population changes.

Devolution of rights

Myth: Hunting will solve human and elephant conflict

Conservationists should generally be fully in favour of devolution of rights to local communities that are on the frontlines of conservation. Martin is right that status conferred is more important than benefits derived.

He contradicts this point by arguing that trophy hunting is an essential component of the system because of the added value it brings to communities. Many communities do not want to return to hunting, and no credible NGO working in Botswana thinks that a return to trophy hunting is wise.

Martin also asserts that the Botswana government called for tenders in previous hunting concessions (mostly in the Central Conservation Areas) but that no one wanted them. Had those concessions been granted, poaching would have been less likely to take root – presence counts for a lot in counter-poaching.

Martin fails to mention, however, that a large part of the reason no investor wanted those concessions is that the Botswana Tourism Organisation insisted that the land use be exclusively photographic and demanded substantial signature bonuses. But blindly insisting on photographic lodges in geographically unamenable areas lacks wisdom.

Self-drive tourism and mobile camps, brilliant options, were precluded as a use option even though it was frequently promoted in those concessions’ management plans. To argue that the hunters were right, after all, does not follow.

Poaching

Myth: Hunting moratorium led to more poaching

Botswana’s poaching problem only started to escalate just before 2017, three years after the hunting ban was imposed. Martin argues that the AESR puts ‘the inception of severe illegal hunting at around 2006.’

It’s not clear whether he means for Botswana or for the whole African population. But either way, that would clearly destroy the argument that hunting presence is necessary to ameliorate poaching. Hunting was at its peak in 2006.

Moreover, hunting presence in places like the Selous hardly countered poaching. To argue that hunters could do nothing about politically protected poaching gangs is an all-too-easy get-out-of-jail-free card.

Where Martin is right is that communities should be far more involved in land-use planning and rights devolution needs to be a priority. None of this means, however, that western trophy hunting is a sensible policy choice, especially given that the practice is morally abominable and ecologically unsustainable.

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Ross Harvey studied a B.Com in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he also completed an M.Phil in Public Policy. At the end of 2018, he submitted his PhD in Economics, also at UCT. Ross is currently a freelance independent economist who works with The Conservation Action Trust.

Featured image is from The Ecologist

The Mad Corruptions of Trump Inc.

July 18th, 2019 by Jim Hightower

Where’s Shakespeare when we need him? Only the Bard of Avon could do literary justice to the tortured madness of Donald Trump, who fluctuates between petulant self-pity and weird self-praise.

His brags are especially weird because they usually involve achievements he hasn’t made. It’s as though his saying something makes it true — even though everyone except his most naive devotees can clearly see that he’s either hallucinating or lying.

In June, for example, at a rally launching his reelection campaign, he retrumpeted an old campaign promise to “drain the swamp,” assuring the adoring crowd that “that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.” Trump gilded the lie with this beauty: “We stared down the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests.”

In fact, he brought that entire unholy alliance directly into the White House, the cabinet and every agency to create a corrupt government of,  by and for corporate plunderers. At least 230 corporate lobbyists have come inside the Trump Inc. administration. He also opened a luxury hotel right in the center of the swamp, just four blocks from the White House, so he and his family can extract high-dollar hotel payments from special-interest lobbyists wanting favors from the Trump regime of swamp critters.

But wait … didn’t The Donald make his political hires sign an ethics pledge agreeing not to lobby the agencies where they work until five years after they leave? Yes, but remember, Trump is a master at the Art of the Loophole, and his “pledge” provides ample room for an invasion of weasels, including an exception allowing former officials to lobby on agency rule-making. Do they think we have sucker wrappers around our heads? Rule-making is what agencies do! So, this gaping loophole frees Trump officials to sell their insider influence to corporate interests wanting to rig the rules against you and me.

At Trump’s vainglorious campaign rally, he also declared that “nobody has done what we have done in 2 1/2 years.” Sadly, that’s the truest thing he’s said.

News Alert! News Alert! This just in: Donald Trump has discovered homelessness in America.

News Update! News Update! Donald Trump says he has the solution to homelessness in America, points out that he’s already ended homelessness in Washington, D.C.

Once again, we can thank Fox News for its in-depth reporting, going deep into the furrows of Trump’s mind to dig out this startling presidential insight and achievement.

In a June interview by Fox TV sparklie Tucker Carlson, the president of the United States articulated his concern about so many Americans’ now living on the streets. Homelessness is “a phenomenon that started two years ago,” Trump explained to the clueless Carlson, calling the problem “sad.” Our billionaire president showed his usual grasp of history and social awareness by adding, “We never had this in our lives before in this country.”

Oddly, the Fox Man let this go without questioning it. Maybe he was dazzled by Trump’s next observation, analyzing why people live in the street: “Perhaps they like living that way,” posited our presidential son of privilege.

Whatever. The Donald proceeded to declare that it’s intolerable to have such homelessness in our rich country — not because so many poor people are suffering, but because businesspeople and shoppers face the indignity of having to walk past the homeless to get to their offices, banks, cafes, etc. As Tucker beamed credulously, Trump proceeded to offer his solution: simply outlaw those people from cluttering our sidewalks and streets. Then, The Donald royally declared that he “may intercede … to get that whole thing cleaned up.”

Indeed, he claims he’s tidied up homelessness before: “I had a situation when I first became president. We had certain areas of Washington, D.C, where (homelessness) was starting to happen. I ended it very quickly. I said, ‘You can’t do that.'” After all, Trump explained to the obtuse Fox interviewer, “When you have leaders of the world coming to see the president … they can’t be looking at that.”

It’s one thing to have a president who thinks “Out of sight; out of mind” should be an actual public policy. It’s another thing to have a president who’s clearly out of his mind.

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Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

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During the past year there has been a deliberate assault on medical sanity by the Silicon Valley’s internet giants and popular social media platforms to abolish and censor voices and websites challenging the orthodoxy of the CDC’s vaccination policies.  Last March, the American Medical Association’s CEO James Madara sent personal letters to the heads of Amazon, Facebook Google, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube “to do your part to ensure that users have access to scientifically valid information on vaccinations, so they can make informed decisions about their families’ health. We also urge  you to make public your plans to ensure that users have access to accurate, timely, scientifically sound information on vaccines.” For the AMA, “valid information” simply means that vaccines are completely safe and effective and the only means at civilization’s disposal for combating infectious diseases.

In 2015, the AMA publicly announced it endorsed the elimination of religious and philosophical exemptions from immunization. It is curious therefore to find that the Association’s Code of Ethics states, “Patient autonomy is the overarching ethical consideration that forms the core of informed consent.” Clearly the AMA abides by a double standard, but Association’s critics have never recognized the organization’s record as representing the public’s best interests. Instead it has a decades long history of being fully compromised by corporate interests and political influence out of Washington. And now it is again parroting the federal government’s efforts to establish a vaccine police state.

A month earlier, Democrat Representative Adam Schiff (image on the right) likewise wrote to the CEOs of Facebook and Google with similar demands. All the contacted companies have now complied with the AMA’s requests to expunge anti-vaccination content and erect the false idol of vaccine safety. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also sent written requests to large Silicon tech companies to confront what it calls “the spread of vaccine misinformation online.”  Increasingly, many more sites and publications climbing upon the vaccine wagon train. This week Huffington Post erased all content submitted by its contributing authors who questioned vaccine safety and efficacy. The nation’s leading newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, the major television networks, as well as liberal magazines and online sites such AlterNet and Mother Jones have frequently acted as CDC’s mouthpieces to ridicule the anti-vaccine parents with injured children and wrongfully accuse parents of vaccine-exempt children as enemies of public health.

Even public crowdfunding sites are joining the adrenaline-rush of pro-vaccine frenzy. Several months ago, Indiegogo reported it would no longer permit fundraising for anti-vaccination projects or what the company termed unscientific “health campaigns.”  Last year, the documentary Vaxxed 2, featuring parents with autistic children damaged from vaccines, raised over $86,000 on the Indiegogo site.  Likewise, the crowdfunding site GoFundMe has banned anti-vaccination content.

Following a CNN Business report that ridiculed Amazon for including films such as Vaxxed and We Don’t Vaccinate! on its Amazon Prime Video streaming service, the company quickly had them removed. More recently Vimeo, YouTube’s competitor, announced it will purge videos that provide the scientific evidence supporting the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Bruesewitz vs. Wyeth that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.” Vimeo attorney Michael Cheah argued in the company’s statement that “Content that falsely claims that vaccines are unsafe is at the forefront of an unfolding public health crisis.” Curiously, Vimeo has been a leading supporter of internet neutrality and sued  Trump’s FCC last year over its order to repeal the 2015 neutrality rules. Seemingly, Vimeo’s persona of free speech is simply a ruse.

The national campaign to black-out and silence efforts to bring to public light the scientific evidence that should make a rational person stop and think critically about the federal health agencies’ claims about vaccine safety and efficacy is well under way. And it is proceeding far more swiftly than we anticipated.

Even while researching this article, we have noticed the dramatic changes underway in trying to access truthful scientific references and analyses that challenge vaccinations. Therefore, we performed identical queries on several internet search engines, beginning with Google. On all queries, such as “measles outbreaks in vaccinated populations,” Google results produced a litany of pro-vaccine propaganda.  The top hits all led to federal vaccine information sites, shortly followed by Wikipedia.  On the other hand, the same queries on encrypted and non-compromised search engines, such as DuckDuckGo and StartPage, more readily brought up unfiltered references specific to our queries as well as actual peer-reviewed studies. And as we reported in a previous article, Wikipedia now walks parallel in goose-step with Google on matters of medicine and health.

The Wikipedia Foundation avoids taking any official position on vaccination. Rather, relying upon its public image as an open-source resource, these kinds of decisions are supposed to be left for volunteer Wikipedia editors to battle out. Nevertheless, even an elementary review of its many vaccine-related vaccine pages makes it clear that Wikipedia is grossly biased. After a  more thorough review, one is likely to arrive at the conclusion that the encyclopedia realistically serves as a propaganda arm of pro-vaccination advocacy groups, the federal health agencies and Big Pharma. It is not so much the textual content and references in the entries offered that is most worrisome; instead, the important scientific data contesting vaccine efficacy and safety is sorely missing. Consequently, Wikipedia inquirers are only receiving a small sliver of truth in return for numerous examples of Skeptical evangelicalism with the goal to indoctrinate the public to accept national vaccine mandates.

Federal and individual state efforts to pass bills that would enforce vaccination mandates have entered hyper-drive, especially after this year’s measles outbreaks. What is being concealed from the public, and very likely state legislatures as well, is that there is strong scientific evidence that many of those infected were fully vaccinated or that the vaccine’s measles virus was in part responsible for the outbreaks. Vera Sharav from the Alliance for Human Research Protection summarized the CDC’s full knowledge of the problem. It was not until 2017 that the Journal of Clinical Microbiology published a study that the CDC knew about individuals who contracted measles during the 2015 Disney Land outbreak that captured national news headlines. The study that showed the outbreak was “in part caused by the vaccine” was conducted by Rebecca McNall, an official at the CDC’s Division of Viral Diseases. The study reports:

“During the measles outbreak in California in 2015, a large number of suspected cases occurred in recent vaccinees. Of the 194 measles virus sequences obtained in the United States in 2015, 73 were identified as vaccine sequences.”

The CDC was fully aware of this finding but kept it hidden from the media and public for two years to enable a window of opportunity for states to mobilize their efforts to remove non-medical exemptions and pass vaccination mandate bills. An earlier groundbreaking study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which included authors associated with the CDC and New York’s department of health, provided a case example showing that the 2011 measles outbreak in New York City originated from a fully vaccinated woman with vaccine immunity. The study’s conclusion was that the measles vaccine is capable of both infecting the  vaccine recipient and as well as infecting others. How many of the recent measles outbreaks this year can be attributed to the MMR vaccine?  Certainly, the CDC has this information, but  patient sequence data of measles cases is locked away.

Since the passage of draconian vaccine bills to eliminate religious and philosophical exemption in some states, health authorities have been alarmed at the rise in vaccine medical exemptions. The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or MMR is perhaps one of the two most feared vaccines on the market, the other being Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil. Over the past ten years in the U.S., there has been one reported death from the measles, and it is unclear based on the medical history of the patient whether and how measles played a role in this death. A second person died of measles this year. Two deaths from a wild measles infection in over a decade. Yet as of March 31, 2018, there have been 89,355 reports of measles vaccine reactions, hospitalizations, injuries and deaths cataloged in the government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). This figure includes 445 vaccine-related deaths, 6,196 hospitalizations, and 1,657 severe disabilities.  A fundamental failure in the VAERS system is that it is a passive surveillance system that relies upon voluntary reporting of vaccine adverse events. The CDC acknowledges that the VAERS system is not ideal and only represents about 10 percent of all annual vaccine adverse reactions. Therefore, conservatively we are looking at approximately 803,000 injuries from the MMR vaccine alone. If we follow a Harvard study’s conclusion that only about 2 percent of vaccine injuries are reported, then the actual number is substantially higher. But you will not find any of this information on Wikipedia for the measles vaccine.

Pharmaceutical funded state legislators, such as California’s Senator Richard Pan, are now accusing pediatricians and doctors for this increase in vaccine medical exemptions. He and his supporters are now making the irrational accusation that doctors are simply satisfying parents’ legitimate vaccine fears. Therefore, Pan has embarked on a Stalinist crusade to even prevent clinical physicians and pediatricians from determining for themselves whether or not a person should be medically exempt.  On the other hand, we may want to consider another possibility that parents of children who were religiously or philosophically exempt have no other alternative but to request a medical examination from their doctors in order to determine whether their children are more highly susceptible to a potential vaccine injury.

Consider the list of medical conditions that are acknowledged to warrant exemption from the measles vaccine. These are listed in Merck’s product insert for its ProQuad MMR/varicella vaccine:  past experience of allergic reactions or anaphylaxsis from previous MMR vaccination, allergies to gelatin and neomycin (ingredients found in the MMR), persons on immunosuppressive drug therapy, pregnant women and women planning to become pregnant, persons with leukemia, lymphoma, blood dyscrasias, blood plasma and bone marrow disorders, febrile respiratory or active febrile infections, advanced cases of AIDS, and a family history of hereditary or congenital immunodeficiency condition. You will never learn this from Wikipedia, which only contraindicates the vaccine for pregnant women or nursing mothers.

Several examples stand out where pro-vaccine Skeptic editors on Wikipedia have intentionally distorted the history and medical science about vaccines and federal vaccination policy in order to twist the entries into blatant propaganda for private vaccine makers. Regarding Wikipedia’s entry for the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) passed by President Reagan in 1986, we read,

“Public health safety, according to backers of the legislation, depends upon the financial viability of pharmaceutical companies, whose ability to produce sufficient supplies in a timely manner could be imperiled by civil litigation on behalf of vaccine injury victims that was mounting rapidly at the time of its passage. Vaccination against infectious illnesses provides protection against contagious diseases and afflictions which may cause permanent disability or even death. Vaccines have reduced morbidity caused by infectious disease; e.g., in the case of smallpox, mass vaccination programs have eradicated a once life-threatening illness.”

This paragraph immediately appears to have little or no relevance to an entry about the NCVIA. This is a common public relations pitch that frequently pops up on Wikipedia to swoon users into a stupor and to reinforce faith in the vaccine regime and Skepticism’s extremism. The entry also  fundamentally ignores the more important message underlying Reagan’s signing of the bill; that is, the nation’s medical consensus at that time was that vaccines cause serious injuries and even death and rising lawsuits were crippling the vaccine industry’s bottom line.

Image result for dr. paul offit

The acellular or killed pertussis bacterium used in current DTaP vaccines has been shown to be far safer than its predecessor that relied upon a whole-cell pertussis toxin. On the other hand, it is also less effective. This has raised a recent debate as to whether to reintroduce a new version of the whole-cell, live pertussis vaccine that was responsible for numerous adverse reactions. This conversation continues despite the fact that Dr. Paul Offit (image on the left), one of the country’s most outspoken vaccine advocates and a hero among Wikipedia’s Skeptics, has discouraged the return of the whole-cell pertussis vaccine because of “safety concerns.”   Furthermore, recent whooping cough outbreaks have been occurring among fully vaccinated children. This is in part due to a new strain of pertussis bacteria that is resistant to current vaccines. Researchers in Australia, where the strain was first identified, suspect this might be a case of an infectious disease mutating because of over-vaccination.

The whole-cell vaccine was a horrible product.  Due to pharma companies’ large payouts for injury, developing and manufacturing vaccines was becoming too risky and no longer profitable for the amount of investment necessary. Peer-reviewed studies have concluded that the whole cell pertussis vaccine caused far more serious reactions than other vaccines including hypotonic/hyporesponsive episodes, febrile or afebrile convulsions, and brain inflammation (also known as encephalitis, encephalomyelitis and encephalopathy).  A 1981 U.S. study funded by the FDA and conducted at UCLA found that convulsions occurred as frequently as 1 in every 875 DPT shots.  The history of the vaccine’s damaging effects resulted in the 1982 award-winning television documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette. The film in turn inspired the creation of the public advocacy organization the National Vaccine Information Center to push Congress to abandon the whole-cell vaccine and adopt the acellular pertussis vaccine, which the Japanese had developed in 1981 after Japan suspended the whole-cell vaccine due to the dramatic rise in neurologically damaged kids and vaccine-related deaths.

Knowing this history, Wikipedia’s misinformation about the whole-cell pertussis vaccine’s risks is in our opinion tantamount to medical malfeasance. It is contrary to volumes of evidence validating the contrary. The entry states,

“No studies showed a causal connection, and later studies showed no connection of any type between the DPT vaccine and permanent brain injury. The alleged vaccine-induced brain damage proved to be an unrelated condition, infantile epilepsy.”

In fact, Wikipedia references one source that suggests incidents of seizures after receiving the pertussis vaccine may be due to an unrelated “known or suspected neurological disorder.”

But even the safer DTaP vaccine is a leading contributor to vaccine injuries. As of June 2018, the VAERS database recorded 150,043 serious adverse reactions from pertussis-containing vaccines since 1990 and half occurring in children under age three. Among these injuries were 2,745 deaths, over 90 percent of those being small children. One can do the math as was done with the measles injury statistics in VAERS and get the more accurate figure for pertussis vaccine casualties. And again, as to be expected, none of this information based upon CDC sources is provided to Wikipedia users.

There are some indications that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is staunchly pro-vaccine. In his 2013 post on Quora, Wales opines that the British paper The Guardian reported that the number of British elderlies receiving the flu shot had declined to under 50 percent. “How many of the other 50 percent,” wrote Wales, “chose not to take it because they believed this hoax remedy [a reference to a popular homeopathic cold remedy] will protect them?” The extent to which Wales has been personally responsible for enabling federal health agencies and private vaccine companies, lobbyists and their public relations firms to monopolize and dictate pages related to vaccination issues is unclear. Nevertheless, the encyclopedia blatantly cherry-picks references that embellish pro-vaccination propaganda. It rejects outright scientific sources contrary to Wikipedia’s covert vaccine public relations.  And harsh criticisms against vaccine refusers are permitted without censor.  What is certain is that Wales is a loyal follower of the Skeptic movement and an ardent supporter of the Skeptic editors who control many health-related pages, particularly regarding non-conventional medicine. And the leading Skeptic voices advocating for national vaccine mandates, such Paul Offit, David Gorski, and Stephen Barrett, are frequently found as reliable references on Wikipedia’s pages.

The kinship between Google and Wikipedia has led to joint efforts to gather traffic statistics on both sites in order to establish a health monitoring mechanism. For example, the project Google Flu Trends “correlates searches for flu to local outbreaks” while simultaneously monitoring Wikipedia views of flu-related pages. During a flu season, users gain access to Wikipedia’s highly biased and distorted description of  the influenza vaccine, including its safety record and adverse effects. Wikipedia’s “Influenza Vaccine” entry makes no mention of the flu shot being the single vaccine still containing toxic levels of methylmercury or thimerosal. The entry’s list of adverse effects is sparse and limited to allergic reactions from the vaccine’s reliance upon chicken eggs as a culture medium, and Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), an autoimmune disease that can cause paralysis of the limbs temporarily or permanently.

The Wiki page references CDC claims that “most studies on modern influenza vaccines have seen no link with Guillain–Barré.” This is contrary to several independent analyses of the government’s vaccine adverse reaction database conducted by Genetic Centers of America, MedCon Inc and IMUNOX confirming that GBS is a well-documented reaction to the flu vaccine. Nor is there any mention of the infamous 1976 flu vaccine debacle against the “swine flu” epidemic that never happened. Under President Ford, a Federally hyped flu scare resulted in almost 50 million Americans being unnecessarily vaccinated.  Rather than protecting the population from a new swine flu strain, the $137 million vaccination program produced an epidemic of GBS cases.  The flu itself killed only one person, a soldier at Fort Dix in New Jersey, the incident that had launched the panic in the first place. The aftermath of Ford’s fiasco was almost 4,000 claims for vaccine injuries, including over 500 cases of GBS and 1,384 lawsuits. A frightening fact Mike Wallace unearthed during a  60 Minute episode in 1979 was that the 1976 swine flu vaccine was never field tested prior to being launched upon the public. This should be a sharp warning about the lengths the federal government will go to appease the pharmaceutical industry by licensing poorly tested vaccines, such as Merck’s Gardasil.

In conclusion the only responsible and scientifically and warranted proposal to bring reliable and balanced facts to this public health issue is to conduct a four group study of children. Such a study would include a group receiving the current vaccine on the CDC immunization schedule. A second group would receive a scientifically valid inert saline placebo. A third group would receive no vaccine and a fourth group would be placed on a nutritional protocol designed to strengthen and enhance the body’s natural immune system in order to ward off infections.

The children would be tested every six months for three years. This should be conducted by independent researchers unaffiliated to the federal health agencies and private corporate interests, and would toxicologists, immunologists, pediatricians, neurologists, and gastroenterologists.  Until that time, the government, at the federal and state levels, the media and the scientific community will continue to make unsubstantiated claims with self-righteous certainty that vaccines are essential to public health, effective and safe.  And Wikipedia, as the number one propaganda cult for Skepticism’s scientific materialism, will continue to disseminate what we believe is dangerous and unfounded information.

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including The War on Health, Poverty Inc and Silent Epidemic.

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A recent issue of Air Force News revealed that a senior NZDF officer served a six-month posting at the Qatar base, placing New Zealanders at the heart of the main targeting and bombing centre in that region, writes Darius Shahtahmasebi.

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Last month the coalition government declared the end of New Zealand Defence Force deployments in Iraq. The announcement was silent, however, about the future of another deployment of New Zealand personnel, to a US military base in the Middle East that has attracted controversy thanks to its role at the centre of a large proportion of US bombing missions in the region.

The base is called the Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) [under the auspices of US Central Command (CENTCOM) Forward Headquarters] and it is located at the Al-Udeid airbase in the small Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. Bombing missions that have been controlled from the base – where aircraft take off and land every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day – are implicated in large numbers of civilian casualties.

A recent issue of Air Force News revealed that a senior air force officer, Group Captain Shaun Sexton, served a six-month posting at the Qatar base; placing New Zealanders at the heart of the main targeting and bombing centre in that region. The presence of New Zealand staff at the base has been kept largely quiet by the New Zealand military before now.

Last month, the New Zealand government delivered its decision to withdraw NZDF personnel from Iraq by next year. But what of Qatar? A spokesperson for NZDF told the Spinoff that

“NZDF personnel based in the Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) operate under a separate mandate to the NZDF personnel in Iraq. This mandate has been approved until 2020.”

Whether they intend to maintain the postings to the Qatar base after 2020 remains unclear.

According to information released by NZDF in response to an Official Information Act request, there are five New Zealand personnel currently serving at the Al-Udeid Airbase. Two of the troops coordinate air tasking in support of the Combined Maritime Forces, Operation Inherent Resolve (Iraq and Syria) and the Resolute Support (Afghanistan) mission. New Zealand also has three personnel supporting intelligence functions within the US Central Command Forward Headquarters at the base.

NZDF confirmed that New Zealand personnel at the COAC work across all regional operations, including those in Syria, where the legality of US-led operations has been thoroughly questioned (although the NZDF states that its troops are not involved in combat operations). NZDF said that because the way the CAOC operates, it is not practical to delineate participation on a country-by-country basis.

The base was responsible for 8,713 air strikes (or weapons released) in 2018, 39,577 strikes in 2017 and 30,743 in 2016 (including both manned and unmanned aircraft).

Group Captain Shaun Sexton told Air Force magazine that “serving in the CAOC gives an amazing perspective of what is happening in the Middle East”.

He added:

“You truly get a birds-eye view, allowing fascinating insight into the politics and tensions in a key region of the world and into the employment of military effects, especially air power.”

In March 2015, a former chief of the operations division at the base, Lt Col David Haworth, told the Associated Press that

“what we are doing today would [not] be even remotely possible without the coalition partners.”

This included intelligence gathering.

According to Sexton,

“most of the people serving in the CAOC are from the United States Air Force. However, the other 15 nations in the coalition have a huge role to play.”

He continued:

“The contribution they make to the fight in terms of people and hardware is significant.”

A Stuff Circuit report last year suggested that NZDF personnel had been secretly operating at the CAOC at Al-Udeid since at least 2016.

Reports indicate that coalition aircraft flying out of the CAOC have been responsible for anywhere between 10% to 20% of sorties flown in Iraq and Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve. In addition, the airbase is the “nerve centre” of US-led air campaigns across the region, managing and directing air operations in not only Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, but in 18 other countries.

Approximately 40% of all strikes in Iraq and Syria have been delivered by the B1 Bomber, an aircraft which has only been departing from the airbase at Al-Udeid.

The CAOC was pivotal in the US-led battle to retake Mosul from ISIS militants. During the early stages of the offensive, US-led airstrikes pounded Mosul every eight minutes.

However, an AP report found an appalling rate of civilian casualties during the operation. It reported that some 9,000 to 11,000 civilians had died, nearly ten times what had been previously reported in the media. This number did not take into account dead still buried underneath the rubble.

CAOC in Qatar (Source: US Air Force)

The Qatar airbase also has undertaken a crucial role in the Syrian war. The fight to retake ISIS’s de-facto Syrian capital city of Raqqa saw the US military raze approximately 80% of the city to the ground.

A Raqqan resident told Reuters that corpses were rotting on the street, with cats eating their bodies. This offensive was further mired by a special BBC report which found that the US military had made a secret arrangement to allow hundreds of ISIS commanders and fighters to escape Raqqa unscathed. Reuters subsequently reported that the number of escaped ISIS fighters numbered in the thousands.

The base also played a part in US President Donald Trump’s April 2018 bombing of Syrian government assets in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack, another controversial use of force.

The NZDF spokesperson said the organisation is confident its personnel on all operations are conducting themselves in accordance with both domestic and international legal obligations.

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This article was originally published on The Spinoff.

Darius Shahtahmasebi is a New Zealand-based legal and political analyst who focuses on US foreign policy in the Middle East, Asia and Pacific region. He is fully qualified as a lawyer in two international jurisdictions.

Twitter has become policy. It is platform, direction and determination.  It has served one particular person well, a hazy mechanism to fog up the lenses of law makers.  When President Donald Trump needs an air-wave filling distraction, a bilious splurge of interest in the blogosphere, he is always happy to lob a grenade of 280 characters or so.  His targets and recipients oblige in an unsettling dance. Speeches are made, press galleries filled and resolutions submitted to Congress.

Trump’s last round of fired remarks found their targets in Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.  They were not mentioned by name, but presumption can be all powerful. 

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.” 

Then came his none-too constructive suggestion:

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” 

While his remarks against “The Squad” are in characteristic poor taste, not to mention inaccurate (three of the representatives were born in the United States) they remain characteristic, brutish panto and all part of the boundless show that is Trumpism.  They are not designed to convert the unconverted or convince the unsure with rhetorical sharpness or insight.  Anti-Trump and pro-Trump lines are firmed, concretely paved for the next election.  The issue, till then, is merely to occupy space with venom and fury, to divide and hope that the house will fall when the votes are tallied.

Such space of distraction assumes a few forms, all ultimately lending false credibility to incendiary smatterings.  Words are broken down, assumptions unpacked. Were his words racist?  Yes, claim some.  Did he articulate a substantive vision?  Most certainly, go others.  (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deemed them “xenophobic”.)  For Omar, Trump’s words are programmatic,

“a blatantly racist attack on four duly elected members of the United States House of Representatives, all of whom are women of colour.  This is an agenda of white nationalists.” 

President Barack Obama’s chief election strategist David Axelrod, similarly sees a program, albeit encased in a trap, with Trump wanting “to raise the profile of his targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party.  It’s a cold, hard strategy.”  The none-too-implicit suggestion here is that the quartet risk being hung out to dry come 2020 by the party strategists. 

In solidarity, the four representatives expressed their marshalled outrage, all the time attempting to give a sense of elevated fury to the garbage gilded twittersphere while denying its enduring relevance.  Omar fell for the laid bait on the issue of impeachment, claiming on Monday that “it is time for us to impeach this president” having “openly” violated his constitutional oath.  

The quartet managed to get up a House resolution, passed by 240 to 187 votes, condemning Trump for “racist comments that have legitimised fear and hatred of New Americans and people of colour”.  The resolution, for good measure, also praised the value immigrants had brought to the United States.  Trump ventured his own view.  “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” 

The show delighted commentators dazzled by the fireworks.  It was seen as historic, because it was the first time in over a century a President had received such a vote of disapproval.  But it was true polarising fodder for the Trump administration, bound to inflict indigestion for anybody keen to seek a united stance. Division reigned; disorder prevailed and the representatives stuck to firmly etched party lines, with the exception of four Republicans who crossed the floor.   

Democrat Representative John Lewis, Democrat from Georgia, spoke of knowing racism when seeing it and feeling it “and at the highest level of government”.  Pelosi claimed that to not condemn Trump’s words “would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people.” 

Representative Dan Meuser, Republican of Pennsylvania, was ill-tempered in response, insisting that the whole show had been a “ridiculous slander” which did a “disservice to our nation”. “What has really happened here is that the president and his supporters have been forced to endure months of allegations of racism.”   

Republicans slanted their attack on procedural improprieties, less on the nature of Trump’s words than the behaviour of their Democrat colleagues, who they regarded as impugning the motives of the President.  A failed effort was made to excise any suggestive words from the House Speaker’s record in accordance with the Jefferson Manual, a text authored by Thomas Jefferson in 1801.  Quaintly if revealingly, the manual states that “references to racial or other discrimination on the part of the President are not in order.”  Appalled by the bickering and disagreement, Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, Democrat of Missouri, banged the gavel and took his leave. “We just want to fight.”    

While the president versus squad show was boiling over, an arguably more significant resolution failed to gather the numbers.  Sponsored by Representative Al Green, Democrat from Texas, the measure seeking to impeach Trump in light of his comments on the four representatives, failed by 332 votes to 95.  Bigotry, argued Green, was “a high crime and misdemeanour.”   

The president, while publically condemning the exercise as “time consuming”, would have been heartened: the squabbling Democrats may well have been united in their rebuke of the president’s tweets, but such consensus was momentary.  In Pelosi’s words,

“We have six committees working on following the facts in terms of any abuse of power, obstruction of justice and the rest that the president may have engaged in”. 

With unwitting comedic effect, the House Speaker found herself claiming that to be “the serious path we’re on – not that Mr Green is not serious, but we’ll deal with that on the floor.”  And dealt with it they did, putting the pro-impeachment Democrats back into their crammed box.

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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]

As soon as Maryam Rajavi, her face beaming across a giant screen, finished speaking, the sky above hundreds of her supporters in the United States filled with red, white and green confetti – the colours of the Iranian flag.

Dressed in a glossy, dark blue suit and matching scarf tied loosely around her neck – a modest way to wear the hijab that went out of style decades ago in the Middle East – Rajavi had just accused the Iranian government of “terrorism and belligerence”.

“Iran Maryam, Maryam Iran,” the protesters chanted back, holding up posters of Rajavi in a show of admiration bordering on religious devotion to the leader of the Iranian Mujahideen-e Khalq, commonly referred to as MEK or PMOI.

Dressed in yellow, the MEK supporters were lively but disciplined, standing in military formations as they stared up at the screen outside the US State Department building in Washington.

They waved pre-Islamic Revolution Iranian flags, which feature a golden lion bandishing a sword instead of the name of God in Arabic script that adorns the country’s emblem today.

Critics have described the Iranian opposition group as a “totalitarian cult“, voicing concerns about its growing clout in the halls of power in the US capital. Only seven short years ago, the US State Department listed the MEK as a terrorist organisation – and the group’s sordid reputation is something Rajavi and her followers are acutely aware of.

At the 21 June demonstration, Rajavi even acknowledged it, accusing the MEK’s detractors of siding with the Iranian government and carrying out a “disgraceful demonisation campaign” against the group. That effort, she said in Farsi in the video, which was accompanied by English subtitles, “seeks to perpetuate the narrative that the people of Iran are better off with the theocratic rule of the mullahs”.

In her brief speech via video feed, Rajavi also thanked her “friends” in the US. Today, they include representatives, senators, ex-generals, former ambassadors and current policymakers of all political stripes.

In fact, two of Donald Trump’s right-hand men have been on the MEK’s payroll: National Security Adviser John Bolton and the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have both charged hefty fees to speak at MEK rallies in the past few years.

MEK rally, Washington, 21 June (MEE)

‘US, US, take action; mullahs must get more sanctions,’ the protesters chanted (MEE/Ali Harb)

For their part, the MEK protesters, standing in front of the same building that labelled their organisation a terrorist group in 1997, were making demands of the US government: “US, US, take action; mullahs must get more sanctions,” they shouted. “#Free Iran” was spelled out in golden balloons in the crowd.

Beyond Giuliani and Bolton, lawmakers from both major American political parties have lauded the MEK as a pro-democracy movement despite its checkered past.

“It’s just ridiculous that they’ve been able to get the influence that they have had in the US,” said Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think-tank.

“I think that’s primarily due to the money … that they pay lobbyists to press their case,” she told MEE. “They’ve had some very influential people like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani who have taken their side.”

Giuliani showed up at an MEK podium again this month, headlining a conference in Albania, where the dissidents are now based. The former New York City mayor described the group as a “government-in-exile”, saying it is a ready-to-go alternative to lead the country if the Iranian government falls.

“We don’t have to say, ‘What could be worse?’ We know that there is something much better,” said Giuliani, who has publicly entertained and backed the prospect of regime change in Tehran.

He went on to joke that Rajavi has more support than he does in the US Congress – and judging by the group’s influence among powerbrokers in Washington, he may be right.

Bipartisan support

Over the years, Senior House Democrats Eliot Engel and Brad Sherman, Republican Congressman Tom McClintock, GOP Senator John Cornyn, Senate Democrats Gary Peters and Jeanne Shaheen, and late Senator John McCain have all attended events linked to the MEK and spoken in its favour.

At the rally in Washington last month, both Democratic and Republican politicians praised the group’s struggle against the Iranian government. Since being removed from Washington’s list of foreign terrorist organisations in 2012, the MEK has taken advantage of its ability to operate legally in the country – and a growing hostility towards Iran – to court policymakers.

“Bashing Iran is good politics in certain circles… If there is a possible financial incentive as well, it becomes easy for a lot of lawmakers to sign up,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington-based advocacy group.

Last month, key legislators and former officials delivered messages of support at the MEK gathering in Washington, including Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Committee on Foreign Relations.

“Thank you for continuing to highlight the plight of Iranians under an oppressive, brutal regime,” Menendez said in a written statement that was read out during the demonstration. “I share your vision for a better future for Iran and all Iranians.”

The rally came less than 24 hours after Trump ordered, then cancelled, military strikes against Iran amid escalating tensions between the two countries. The New York Times reported at the time that Bolton was one of the top White House officials encouraging military action.

Bolton, a regular speaker at MEK gatherings, shares the group’s view that the Iranian regime cannot be reformed and instead must be toppled. At a MEK conference in Paris in 2017, a few months before he joined the Trump administration, Bolton told the crowd they would be celebrating the fall of the Iranian government before 2019.

“I have said for over 10 years since coming to these events that the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” he said at the time.

MEK, CODEPINK (MEE)

Anti-war protesters disrupted the MEK rally in Washington last month (MEE/Ali Harb)

Several speakers at last month’s rally also stressed that the MEK is the right replacement for the government in Tehran.

“We need a new regime, and that regime is you, the MEK,” Bill Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico and US ambassador to the UN from 1997 to 1998, told the crowd.

The Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC), a US-based, MEK-linked advocacy group, did not return MEE’s multiple requests for an interview about its lobbying efforts in the US.

Asked if the MEK has enough legitimacy to be an alternative to the Iranian government, as some of the group’s backers have said, Slavin told MEE: “No, not at all.”

But she added that not all the lawmakers who speak at MEK events are necessarily aware of the group’s history or supportive of the organisation itself.

“They figure out, this group is opposed to the Iranian regime,” Slavin said. “They don’t look at the fine print; they don’t examine the history of the group.”

MEK history

The MEK started in Iran in 1965 as an ideologically driven, self-proclaimed socialist and Islamist movement opposed to the dictatorial rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It joined the ranks of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 but ran afoul of the uprising’s leader Ruhollah Khomeini shortly after Pahlavi’s fall.

After facing a deadly crackdown by Iran’s new authorities, the MEK embarked on a series of attacks on government officials and security forces. The group’s members, led by Maryam Rajavi’s husband, Massoud Rajavi, went into exile and eventually settled in Iraq in 1986. There, they sided with Saddam Hussein in his war against their home country.

The Iran-Iraq war raged from 1980 to 1988, as hundreds of thousands of people were killed and Iraqi forces openly used chemical weapons in battle. In a late stage of the war, MEK militants were at the forefront, leading a major incursion into Iranian territory, which was repelled by the country’s military in 1988.

After the war, the MEK remained in Iraq, and according to some of its critics, including NIAC, the group helped Iraqi forces brutally put down Kurdish and Shia uprisings in the early 1990s – accusations that the MEK rejects.

During the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Hussein, American forces bombed MEK bases in the country before reaching a ceasefire agreement with the group. Massoud Rajavi disappeared that year, and his whereabouts remain unknown, putting Maryam alone in charge of the organisation.

Starting in 2009, the Iraqi government became more openly hostile to the MEK amid growing Iranian influence in Baghdad. As a result, the US led efforts to get the group’s members out of Iraq and shutter their main base at Camp Ashraf outside the capital, where the group’s members were confined after the invasion.

Once out of Iraq, the MEK began to resettle in Albania in 2013. A year earlier, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton removed the group from the State Department’s terrorist blacklist – 15 years after it was originally added – allowing its members to work openly in the US.

During the debate about legalising the MEK in the US, New York Magazine contributor Elizabeth Rubin presciently warned that the group may use its new status to get Washington into war with Tehran.

“If the group is taken off the terrorist list, it will be able to freely lobby the American government under the guise of an Iranian democracy movement,” she wrote in 2011, comparing it to the influence Iraqi exiles exerted on the US decision to invade Iraq.

“Recent history has shown that the United States often ends up misguidedly supporting not only the wrong exile groups in the Middle East, but the least relevant ones.”

Blacklisting and popularity

But not everyone views the MEK in a negative light, as anti-Iran hawks have questioned why the group ended up on the US’s terrorist blacklist in the first place.

Raymond Tanter, a political science professor who served on the White House’s National Security Council in the early 1980s, said he studied the history of the group and is convinced it is on the “right side of justice”.

In a recent interview with MEE, Tanter said former President Bill Clinton placed the Iranian dissidents on the list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997 to appease Tehran.

“They were there because the Clinton administration wanted to do a favour for some of the so-called ‘moderates’ who had been elected in Iran,” he said.

“[Supreme leader Ali] Khamenei was making sounds as [if] he was willing to negotiate, but those sounds became very, very hollow and nothing came of that.” Tanter said he avoids using the term MEK because of its affiliation with the State Department’s blacklist, preferring to go with PMOI, which stands for the People’s Mujahideen of Iran.

Tanter told MEE that bipartisan support for the group stems mostly from the organising efforts of the OIAC advocacy group. He said the OIAC is composed of Iranian Americans from across the US, including many white-collar professionals.

Still, support in the halls of Congress does not necessarily translate into tangible influence on the ground. MEK’s critics say the group has no representation inside Iran itself, where the people loathe the movement because of its militant history.

“They don’t have a following in Iran; in fact, they are widely detested for siding with the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war,” Slavin said. “They have no constituency in the country.”

With a lack of independent reporting in Iran and the underground nature of MEK activities there, it is difficult to ascertain what level of support the group has among Iranians.

Tanter, however, said the MEK’s popularity can be measured by the Iranian government’s stated concern about it. Citing recent research by his students at Georgetown University, Tanter said the Iranian government incessantly mentions the MEK.

“Attention paid is an indicator of the significance of the PMOI and the larger NCRI have in Iran,” he said.

Slavin dismissed that argument, however, saying the Iranian government shows concern about the MEK because it views the group as a proxy for Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“The MEK has committed acts of terrorism in Iran; let’s be real about this,” Slavin told MEE.

Militant past

Seven years ago, NBC News cited two US officials as saying that Israeli-trained MEK operatives were behind the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists between 2007 and 2012. The group denied the report at the time, calling it a “sheer lie“.

Still, the MEK has been accused of being responsible for a string of attacks throughout its history.

In 2006, a US State Department report said the MEK carried out a series of deadly attacks in Iran, blaming the movement for a 1981 bombing in Tehran that claimed the lives of dozens of top Iranian officials, including Chief Justice Mohammad Beheshti. The group also openly conducted violent raids on Iranian embassies across the world in 1992.

Moreover, in the pre-revolution era in Iran, the MEK was behind “bombings and shootings directed against American military personnel stationed in Iran”, former US State Department official Daniel Benjamin wrote in a Politico column in 2016.

But that militant past is behind the MEK now, said Kazem Kazerounian, an engineering professor at the University of Connecticut who spoke at the pro-MEK rally in Washington in June. Kazerounian called the movement an “organised, legitimate resistance to the tyranny of the Iranian regime”.

“Currently, they’re not violent; they’re not a military organisation,” he told MEE. Kazerounian said members of the group are the “key organisers” of peaceful protests inside Iran, and added that the MEK’s ongoing struggle against the Iranian government gives it credibility.

“In the lack of possibility of having a democratic election – which actually we would like to get as soon as this regime falls – resistance is the basis of legitimacy of the [MEK-dominated] National Council of Resistance of Iran,” Kazerounian said.

Yet for a group that advocates gender equality and says it is the main pro-democracy Iranian faction, the MEK does little to hide its ties to the ultraconservative, autocratic government of Saudi Arabia.

MEK rallies often feature pro-Saudi speakers and sometimes even Saudi officials. For instance, Turki al-Faisal, a Saudi prince, former intelligence chief and key diplomat, addressed MEK rallies in Paris in 2016 and 2017, prompting accusations from Tehran that Riyadh supports terrorism.

Salman al-Ansari, president of the Saudi American Public Relations Affairs Committee, a pro-Riyadh lobby group in Washington, also spoke at the MEK conference in Albania on 13 July. He was repeatedly interrupted by cheers from MEK supporters as he bashed Iran in both Arabic and Farsi.

“I tell you clearly, as a Saudi citizen who loves and adores his country and an Arab proud of his Arabism and a Muslim honoured by his religion… we are all Ashrafi,” he said, paying tribute to the MEK’s base in Albania, known as Camp Ashraf-3.

Cult of Rajavi 

The Saudis are not the only foreign officials to attend MEK events.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke at the group’s conference this month in Albania, where he was joined by dozens of legislators and ex-ministers from around the world, including former US Senator and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman and parliament members from across the Middle East.

Most of the speakers denounced Iran and sang the praises of Maryam Rajavi and the MEK.

But Rajavi was not always so revered in Western capitals. In 2003, she was briefly detained in Paris along with dozens of MEK members on terrorism charges. A decade later, she released a 10-point plan for the MEK in which she pledged support for free elections, gender equality, abolishing the death penalty and ending Iran’s nuclear programme.

Still, one provision of the manifesto seemed to address lingering concerns among the MEK’s Western backers about the group’s communist ideology – vowing to respect private property and a free-market economy.

The 2006 State department report says the MEK mixes “Marxism, feminism, nationalism and Islam”. Indeed, the group’s original logo showcases communist symbols, including a sickle and red star, below a verse from the Quran that praises those who struggle – the mujahideen.

The group’s leftist beliefs may appear to make it a strange bedfellow of right-wing hawks such as Bolton and Harper. But Tanter, the political science professor, said he has spoken to many MEK members and found them to be to the “right of” US Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a Democratic socialist.

Ideology aside, rights groups have decried the MEK’s treatment of its own members. The movement requires complete devotion to the Rajavis and the organisation, and a 2005 Human Rights Watch report accused the group of asking its followers to divorce their spouses to be fully dedicated to the MEK.

HRW also said the group has committed violations “ranging from detention and persecution of ordinary members wishing to leave the organisation, to lengthy solitary confinements, severe beatings, and torture of dissident members”.

In 2009, Rand Corporation, a California-based think-tank, said the MEK started demanding “near-religious devotion to the Rajavis” from its members in the 1980s. In addition, the MEK forced its followers to remain celibate and cut ties to friends and relatives, the Rand report said.

And to make up for a drop in popularity tied to its alliance with Iraq’s Hussein, the group started recruiting Iranian economic migrants in the Middle East under false pretences – promising jobs and visas to Western countries, the report found.

Despite these reports about its activities, the MEK remains shrouded in secrecy – and its complex ideological foundation is hard to fully understand, Slavin said.

Put simply, she said: “It’s a cult.”

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African Free Trade Area Launched in Niger

July 18th, 2019 by Abayomi Azikiwe

On July 4 the 12th Extraordinary Summit of the African Union (AU) was held in Niamey, Niger to officially proclaim a project that is inherent within the notions of sovereignty and unity on the continent.

This African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) gathering took place in a nation in the western region which is endowed with uranium, one of the most strategic minerals in the world utilized for industrial, scientific and military purposes.

These contradictions within Niger related to its mineral wealth and the abject impoverishment of the masses of working class and rural people illustrates clearly the tremendous hurdles in which Africa must overcome to harness the economic and social potential of the AU member-states. The AfCFTA was announced at a previous AU Summit in Kigali, Rwanda on March 21, 2018.

Over the past 16 months some 27 governments have ratified the agreement while a total of 54 have signed the document mandating its establishment. The West African state of Ghana, once the fountainhead of Pan-Africanism during the 1950s and early to mid-1960s under the leadership of President Kwame Nkrumah, the foremost proponent of continental unification and socialism, was designated to host the secretariat for the AfCFTA.

Kwame Nkrumah and Haile Selassie I in Ethiopia at the founding of the Organization of African Unity, May 1963

In a statement released by the AU on July 7, it says of the structure for the new continental body that:

“The AfCFTA will be governed by five operational instruments, i.e. the Rules of Origin; the online negotiating forum; the monitoring and elimination of non-tariff barriers; a digital payments system and the African Trade Observatory. Each one was launched by different Heads of State and Government that included President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, President Abdel Fattah El Sisi of Egypt who is current Chairperson of the AU; Mr. Moussa Faki Makamat, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission; and President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, who is the Champion of the AfCFTA.”

Nevertheless, analysts have pointed to prospective barriers for the implementation of the AfCFTA emanating from the legacy of slavery and colonialism. Africa remains divided into 55 separate states where intra-regional and class differences are a source of the conflicts which exists inside many countries.

These impediments are also related to the lack of adequate transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. In addition, the reliance upon western foreign exchange currency in the arena of trade provides incentives for the maintenance of the status-quo.

The AU statement issued on July 7 spoke to the current 1.2 billion people in Africa and projected 2.5 billion by 2050 as a source of strength related to the realization of sustainable economic growth. Six years ago at the AU, the Agenda 2063 was affirmed aimed at economic integration and the adoption of a single currency on the continent.

Estimates indicate that with the actual operationalization of the AfCFTA program the region would become a $3.4 trillion economic zone. The breaking down of borders and the lifting of tariffs would in effect facilitate internal African trade.

At present only 17% of trade in Africa is conducted with AU states. This can be contrasted with Asia where intra-continental trade stands at 59% and in Europe where it is 69%.

Moreover, the uneven development among various states must be transcended considering that countries such as the Republic of South Africa, the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Egypt encompass a sizable portion of the continental Gross Domestic Product (GDP). South Africa is by far the most industrialized state on the continent while countries such as Nigeria, Angola, Libya and Sudan are leaders in the extraction and export of petroleum.

Overcoming Dependency as a Prerequisite for Development

An indisputable historical fact is that Africa has been subjected to enslavement, colonization and neo-colonialism through the rise and dominance of imperialism since the middle decades of the 15th century. This cannot be overlooked in making any honest assessment of the capacity for genuine growth and development.

There has been significant growth within African economies since the beginning of the 21st century. However, the reliance on export-based economic planning is objectively related to the stated mandate of the AfCFTA. Until the challenge of continental integration is seriously addressed the much desired substantial take off will not materialize.

Today’s neo-colonial existence is definitely a by-product of the post-independence era crises of continuing underdevelopment, imperialist exploitation as well as the ongoing military and intelligence interference in the internal affairs of all AU member-states. The nation of Niger has been a focal point of Pentagon and French military engagement.

Through the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the Paris-engineered Operation Barkhane the imperialist governments not only have troops stationed on Nigerien soil. There is the presence of elaborate intelligence-gathering mechanisms including the positioning of highly-sophisticated reaper and predator drones in Niger.  All across Africa, the Pentagon is in evidence under the guise of anti-terrorism and national security. Ultimately, Africa is responsible for its own security against reactionary elements which have their origins within the imperialist centers.

The above-mentioned AU statement on the launch of the operational phase of the AfCTFA emphasizes the link between security and development by stating:

“The Chairperson (Moussa Faki Mahamat of Chad) also highlighted the importance of peace building and security on the continent, adding that ‘it would be a delusion to talk of trade and development without peace and security.’ He also stressed that, for the AfCFTA to be effective, there is [the] need to open borders to other Africans. In this light, host President Mr. Mahamadou Issoufou (Niger), said the free trade area will tear down borders inherited from Africa’s colonial past and ensure full continental integration.”

Nevertheless, the presence of western military forces within AU member-states represents the antithesis of the progressive and revolutionary currents of Pan-Africanism emanating from the First All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) of December 1958 in Ghana right through to the armed resistance phase to colonialism, the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the AU, and the burgeoning class struggle against a comprador elite propped up by international finance capital. Under the present circumstances, the imperialists are firmly positioned to stifle any economic development planning which views the dominance of the world capitalist system as the major obstruction to Africa making a decisive turn in the direction of its rightful trajectory towards continental unification based upon the interests of the majority of its people.

The Political Essentials of Continental Integration

Consequently, a struggle must be opened up against the role of Washington and Brussels where the base of African underdevelopment strategies originate. As many historical materialist theorists have articulated over the decades, the development of North America and Western Europe was carried out through the underdevelopment of Africa.

Fundamentally the character of U.S., British and European Union (EU) foreign policy has not changed since the period of the Cold War. Wall Street, London and the Eurozone states have no intentions of relinquishing their profit-making capacity where the foundation of the exploitative system is situated. The Pentagon, NATO and its auxiliary units are in Africa and other regions of the world to police the maintenance of existing structures in the international division of labor and economic power.

Of course there are other states and regional blocs vying for Africa’s attention in the contemporary world situation such as the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and socialist-oriented states in Latin America. The U.S. ruling class has intensified its economic and military wars against these countries which provide an alternative form of development strategies for Africa and its people.

The attacks by Washington and its allies against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Republic of Cuba are a case point. These two states along with Bolivia are attempting to build their own societies where the well-being of the majority of its people remains primary. Consequently, there are consistent attempts at subversion, diplomatic isolation and economic destabilization by the current administration of President Donald Trump.

African Union 12th Extraordinary Summit to Launch the AfCFTA in Niger, July 4, 2019

As it relates to China and Russia, the twin political capitalist parties in the U.S. view the increasing influence of Beijing and Moscow as a threat to imperialist hegemony. The imposition of trade tariffs, sanctions and disinformation campaigns will undoubtedly lead to another world war. What will the AU member-states role going forward be in this escalating hostile geo-political situation which threatens a protracted international conflagration?

Capitalism and its global outgrowth of imperialism cannot provide any viable solutions for Africa’s development. The abolition of class society, the expulsion of western military interests from the continent and the broadening of trade policy inside and outside of Africa is the only way out of the foreseeable quagmire.

Socialism as an indispensable economic system to counter the imperialist states requires the organization and mobilization of the proletariat, farmers, youth and revolutionary intelligentsia centered on a program of immediate integration and unification. The rising problems associated with imperialist militarism, the potentially calamitous effects of climate change and its concomitant exigencies related to the acquisition of sustainable energy sources, clean water supplies, people-centered agricultural production, guaranteed healthcare and quality education requires the attention of all serious African organizations.

AfCFTA can only be realized when the full weight of the masses is thrown towards its enactment. There is no substitute for the creative genius of the people in their quest for total freedom and social justice.

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

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Selected Articles: The Race for the Domination of Space

July 18th, 2019 by Global Research News

Our objective at Global Research is to recruit one thousand committed “volunteers” among our more than 50,000 Newsletter subscribers to support the distribution of Global Research articles (email lists, social media, crossposts). 

Do not send us money. Under Plan A, we call upon our readers to donate 5 minutes a day to Global Research.

Global Research Volunteer Members can contact us at [email protected] for consultations and guidelines.

If, however, you are pressed for time in the course of a busy day, consider Plan B, Consider Making a Donation and/or becoming a Global Research Member

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Western Intellectuals Freak Over ‘Frankenstein’ China

By Pepe Escobar, July 18, 2019

The latest outburst posits that “we” – as in Western intellectuals – “are the modern version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” who electro-shocked a dead body (China) into a resurrected “murderous monster.”

Why the Canadian Government Is Confronting Venezuela

By Arnold August, July 18, 2019

Since the attempted U.S. coup against Venezuela on January 23, backed by the Lima Group of which the Justin Trudeau government is an active member, Canada’s corporate media have joined in a chorus of hate and disinformation against the Bolivarian Revolution, with the criticism focusing on Nicolás Maduro, the country’s constitutionally elected president.

Korea-Japan Trade Plus War: Where Are You Going Mr. Shinzo Abe?

By Prof. Joseph H. Chung, July 18, 2019

Right after the G20 Conference (28-28 June 2019) in Osaka, Japan,Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan declared the beginning of trade war against South Korea. It was indeed an irony that Abe was the host of the Conference organized specifically to restore free trade system in the world.

The Race for the Domination of Space

By Manlio Dinucci, July 18, 2019

While nuclear disarmament remains on paper, the possibility of proliferation escalates, as does the risk that the arms race will be run increasingly on the qualitative level. This was confirmed by the announcement made, on the eve of the 14 July parade, by President Macron himself – in September, France will create a new National Command for its Military Space Force, with a primary financing of 3,6 billion Euros over 6 years.

Support MH17 Truth: Machine Gun-Like Holes Indicate Shelling from a Military Aircraft. No Evidence of a Surface-to-Air Missile Attack.

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 17, 2019

As we recall, the alleged role of Russia in bringing down the plane was used as a justification to implement the economic sanctions regime against Moscow. Although not explicitly mentioned by the Dutch investigators, Moscow remains the “main suspect” in this twisted and fraudulent investigation, which will no doubt be the object of a new gush of media lies and distortions. Moscow has expressed its disagreement.

Reopening of Pakistan’s Airspace: A Bad Omen for India? Implications for Iran and Afghanistan

By Andrew Korybko, July 17, 2019

The reopening of Pakistani airspace to civil aviation was timed to coincide with PM Khan’s upcoming trip to the US, which is an extremely bad omen for India because it suggests that the resumption of its Afghan air corridor across Pakistani territory might be compensation for the US lifting its sanctions waiver on Chabahar…

It’s “Un-American” to be Anti-Free Speech: Protect the Right to Criticize the Government

By John W. Whitehead, July 17, 2019

If I didn’t love this country, it would be easy to remain silent. However, it is because I love my country, because I believe fervently that if we lose freedom here, there will be no place to escape to, I will not remain silent.

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If you didn’t know it, you would think the British establishment had been deliberately rocking every boat possible to ensure a no-deal or hard-Brexit from the outset. From David Cameron’s so-called ‘miscalulation’ to Theresa May’s guaranteed failure to produce a deal. From ministers threatening business leaders for speaking out about Brexit to the Tory donors colluding over a hard-Brexit plan. The reports continue to emerge on the same theme – that Britain is casually strolling towards leaving the largest trading bloc in the world without demonstrating much concern for its consequences. It’s as if we just ditched a relationship because we were already in a better one somewhere else.

There was no Brexit plan

European Commission chief Frans Timmermans has ridiculed U.K. efforts to negotiate Brexit — likening them to “Dad’s Army,” a classic British TV sitcom about hapless would-be soldiers during World War II. In an interview with the BBC’s Panorama program, due to be broadcast this Thursday evening, the Commission First Vice President singled out David Davis, the first Brexit secretary, in particular for his infrequent trips to Brussels and his “grandstanding.”

Timmermans also said yesterday –

And then the first time I saw public utterances by David Davis and I saw him not coming [to Brussels], not negotiating, grandstanding elsewhere I thought: ‘Oh my God, they haven’t got a plan, they haven’t got a plan. That was really shocking frankly, because the damage if you don’t have a plan — you know, we see it — time’s running out and you don’t have a plan, it’s like Lance Corporal Jones — you know, ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic’, running around like idiots.”

In June last year, a Financial Times piece covered the news that David Davis had spent just four hours in Brexit meetings with European counterparts. The FT (June 29th 2018) said – “the lack of political engagement was cited by EU leaders on Friday as they rebuked the UK for slow progress on Brexit. In a joint summit statement, they insisted on “the need for intensified efforts” and warned that there had been “no substantial” advances on the vexed issue of the Irish border.”

Mr Davis met Michel Barnier, the EU lead on the talks, only three times in the first half of 2018 for high-level political discussions. Meetings between the two principals lasted on average just 40 minutes a month since the start of the year.

Now we are waiting for the UK white paper,” Mr Barnier said at the same time last June. “And I hope it will contain workable and realistic proposals.” He added: “Time is very short.” An acceptable paper has not materialised.

Brexit ‘deal is dead’

In the meantime, U.K. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay dismissed claims he told EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier the withdrawal deal is “dead” during an angry exchange in Brussels last week. The Times reported the pair had a tense meeting over how the Brexit issue could be resolved by the next prime minister.

He told Barnier that the Withdrawal Agreement was dead — not once but five times,” a senior EU diplomat told the paper. “If this is what is coming then we will be heading for no-deal very quickly.

It is also interesting that Barclay has suggested the government could compensate sheep farmers if they have to slaughter flocks after a no-deal Brexit, car manufacturers be awarded compensation if they are hit with a 10 per cent tariff following a no-deal departure and that the U.K. would take a “continuity approach” to fishing waters after a no-deal.

Barclay also said that Theresa May is meeting with car manufacturers this week, adding: “We would also have to look at what support we can give to the industry and there are various computations of that.” But anti-Brexit group Best for Britain said any compensation for car manufacturers following a no-deal departure would have to be worth more than £25 billion.

Financial markets unprepared

From the City of London, it is now reported that the increasing prospect of a No Deal Brexit is prompting new concerns that there are still ‘substantial’ regulatory gaps between the EU and UK in parts of the financial services sector.

In a report published on Tuesday (16 July), the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), an industry lobby group, warned that

while a very substantial amount of work has already been undertaken to mitigate risks by both firms and regulators, a no-deal Brexit is likely to have a significant impact on the financial services sector and regulatory and operational challenges remain.”

The UK’s financial services industry remains one of its most important economically, and the City of London is comfortably Europe’s largest financial services centre.

Fears that the UK is edging closer to a No Deal Brexit have prompted a fall in the value of the pound to its lowest level in more than two years this week.

Prison riots anticipated

In addition, if a no-deal Brexit does happen as promised by both Tory leadership contenders, another report, which was written in January but only just published, warns that prison riots over food and medicine shortages are likely. The report entitled – “Successful mitigation of risks of EU Exit,” was not properly redacted by officials, meaning that sections intended to be cut from the text released publicly could still be read.

The improperly redacted sections laid out that Ernst & Young would work with the Ministry of Justice and other areas of government to push forward contingency plans but the report said:

Not progressing these actions plans could have severe consequences for MoJ Operations, e.g. unrest in prison because of undersupplying of foods or medicines.”

Former Justice Minister Phillip Lee said:

“No one voted for unrest in prisons, shortages of food supplies or any of the other indignities that could result from a disastrous no deal. This is yet another example of how the Brexit being delivered is a million miles away from the one that was being promised in 2016.”

Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon said:

“This shocking revelation is yet more evidence of the threat a no-deal Brexit poses to our justice system. From ending access to the European Arrest Warrant to our prisons being up for grabs by American corporations in a post-Brexit U.S. trade deal, it is clear that a no-deal Brexit risks further damaging our justice system, which has already been weakened by nearly a decade of cruel Tory austerity.”

All of this leads the impartial onlooker to a view that Brexit is going to be very costly to the economy as promises that economic output will improve through leaving the EU trading bloc have yet failed to be supported by economic experts (leaving aside opaque right-wing think tank reports) or any government advisors. The much-lauded trade deal with America that Brexiteers continue to look towards as the ultimate prize for their efforts has just been given yet another blow after an unreported and extensive 2018 cross-Whitehall study of the costs and benefits of Brexit were published. It estimated, in its own words – that a US free trade agreement would increase UK GDP by only 0.2 per cent and even then only after 15 years, a tiny fraction of the 2 to 8 per cent costs of Brexit.

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Trump: America’s “Racist-in-Chief”

July 18th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Racism defines Trump’s private and public life. He falsely said “I am not a racist.” 

“I’m the least racist person you” will ever meet is belied by his unacceptable Trump Organization practices, his hostile actions against unwanted aliens of the wrong color or ethnicity, his hostility toward Muslims from the wrong countries, and his rage against four Dem congresswomen for justifiably criticizing him.

In 1973, the Justice Department sued Trump Management for discriminating against black renters he wanted excluded from properties the firm managed.

The suit claimed that employees were ordered to tell black lease applicants that no apartments were available.

A 1978 DOJ suit followed for breaching terms of the earlier settlement. He and his company dodged a bullet both times to the detriment of people who were harmed.

In 2011, he became a prominent Birtherism proponent, falsely claiming Obama was born abroad, thus serving illegally as president.

He falsely claimed wrongfully accused, convicted, and later exonerated Black and Latino teenagers were guilty of raping a white woman in the notorious 1989 Central Park jogger case — the crime confessed to in 2002 by an imprisoned rapist.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump maintained that the exonerated victims of injustice were guilty, calling a NYC $41 million false arrest settlement “a disgrace.”

At the onset of his 2016 presidential campaign, he raged against Mexican immigrants, vilifying them collectively, saying:

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, adding: “And some, I assume, are good people.”

Citing fake data, he accused blacks and Latinos for most killings of white Americans, linking them to violent crime in public remarks.

He called for removing a Mexican-American judge from the bench because of his ethnicity. He called El Salvador, Haiti, and African nations “shitholes.”

A former Trump Castle/Atlantic City casino employee said when he “and Ivana (entered the premises), the bosses would order all the black people off the floor.”

In June 2019, the Atlantic published “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry” — revealing his racist practices and temperament in detail.

On July 14, he called for four Dem congresswomen of the wrong color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places” they came from.

Three of the four were born in the US. Separately, he tweeted:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democratic Congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all) now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is be run.”

His  venom was unleashed against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.

Time and again, he proves an embarrassment to the office he holds. He’s an unapologetic white supremacist racist, war criminal, Zionist ideologue, predatory corporatist — surrounded by fascist extremists influencing his policies.

Pressley slammed his regime’s “callous, chaotic, and corrupt culture,” adding:

“I will always refer to him as ‘the (White House) occupant’ as he is only occupying space. He does not embody the grace, the empathy, the compassion, the integrity that that office requires.”

“Despite the occupant of the White House’s attempts to marginalize us and to silence us, please know that we are more than four people.”

“We ran on a mandate to advocate for and to represent those ignored, left out, and left behind.”

“Our squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world, and that is the work that we want to get back to…(W)e will not, be silenced.”

Omar slammed Trump for “openly violating the oath he took to the Constitution of the United States and the core values we aspire to,” adding:

“To distract from that, he’s launching a blatantly racist attack on four duly elected members of the United States House of Representatives, all of whom are women of color. This is the agenda of white nationalists.”

Ocasio-Cortez said

“(s)adly, this is not the first nor will it be the last time we hear disgusting, bigoted language from the president. We know this is who he is.”

Tlaib said

“(d)espite many attempts to distract us, I remain focused. We remain focused on holding him accountable to the laws of this land and accountable to the American people. I urge House leadership and many of my colleagues to impeach this lawless president today.”

Trump is symptomatic of racist, belligerent, hostile to the rights of ordinary people everywhere America from inception — its ruling authorities serving privileged interests exclusively, the way it’s always been.

American exceptionalism, the indispensable state, moral superiority, and rule of the people don’t exist.

Increasingly totalitarian plutocracy, oligarchy and kleptocracy define how the nation is governed — a fantasy democracy from inception, never the real thing, today a menace to everyone everywhere.

Majority undemocratic Dems are as hostile to what just societies hold dear as Republicans.

No matter which right-wing of the nation’s war party rules, its war on humanity rages at home and abroad with no prospect of world peace and governance of, by and for everyone equitably.

That’s the dismal state of today’s America, a nation increasingly unfit and unsafe to live in.

Whoever succeeds Trump in 2021 or 2025 may be worst than the incumbent. That’s the dismal reality of the state of the nation.

No profiles in courage are permitted to serve in its highest office or congressional leadership positions — the way all plutocratic, oligarchic, repressive states are run.

Far and away, the US represents the greatest threat to planet earth and all its life forms — their survival threatened by its rapaciousness.

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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 Elijah J Magnier

Former President Rafael Correa’s claim that Julian Assange abused his political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to influence the US’ 2016 elections and his publicly proclaimed admiration for Hillary amount to nothing less than the completion of America’s quest to co-opt the country’s patriotic opposition and ensure the continuance of its influence irrespective of whoever wins the upcoming 2021 elections there.

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Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa surprised his supporters across the world earlier this week by telling CNN that Julian Assange abused his political asylum in the London Embassy in a way that influenced the US’ 2016 elections. He elaborated that Assange was engaging in “manipulation” by not publishing any compromising information on Trump, and then even proceeded to praise Hillary by proudly proclaiming that “I am way closer to Hillary Clinton than Trump. I know Hillary, I admire her.” The ex-leader’s words were a shock because he had previously cultivated a reputation as an anti-American leftist and earlier decried his successor’s decision to revoke Assange’s asylum as “a crime that humanity will never forget“, which is at extreme variance with his newly revealed personal admiration for Hillary and what he just said about the Wikileaks founder.

One would be forgiven for thinking that Correa sold out to the US, which might actually be more than just reactionary speculation upon further scrutiny. He’s currently living in self-imposed exile in Brussels to escape what he claims are the politically motivated charges against him pertaining to the kidnapping of an opposition lawmaker in 2012. From his base in the EU capital, he’s remained a powerful symbol of the patriotic opposition to President Lenin Moreno, and a collection of allied parties under his influence performed pretty well during March’s nationwide local elections. This sets them up for a possible win in the upcoming 2021 general elections and could possibly result in a reversal of the many pro-American policies of the incumbent government, unless, of course, the patriotic opposition is co-opted by Washington before that happens.

Correa told RT last summer that his political opponents want him dead, which is why they unsuccessfully tried to seek his extradition from the EU last year, so there’s evidently serious pressure being put upon him. The current Ecuadorean government is vehemently pro-American, so it can be extrapolated that the extradition request was an extension of Washington’s will at the time. Being based in Brussels, which itself is mostly subservient to America, Correa is never truly safe if the US really wanted him dead. It can’t be known for certain, but the possibility can’t be ruled out that American agents somehow or another got to him and compelled the leftist leader to publicly denounce Assange on CNN while also scandalously singing Hillary’s praises.
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That scenario would explain his unexpected statements that are quite out of character with the Correa that the world thought they knew, which in turn would strongly imply that the US has succeeded in its quest to co-opt the country’s patriotic opposition in order to ensure that continuation of American influence there after the 2021 general elections. This operation might have been part and parcel of Trump’s “Fortress America” vision of restoring the US’ unrivaled hegemony in the Western Hemisphere by hook or by crook, whether through “constitutional coups” like what his predecessor carried out in Brazil or via Hybrid Wars like the ongoing one in Venezuela. Should that be the case, then it would mean that Ecuador will remain within the American orbit regardless of the outcome of the next election, which would kill its “Citizens’ Revolution” once and for all.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Top 10 Facts About Cell Phones and Wi-Fi

July 18th, 2019 by Environmental Health Trust

1. All Cell Phones And Wireless Devices Emit Radiation.

Every wireless device is actually a two-way microwave radio that sends and receives a type of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation called radio frequency radiation RF – EMF. This machine-made radiation is millions of times higher than the natural electromagnetic fields (EMFs) our grandparents were exposed to. Numerous peer reviewed published research studies shows that these made-made pulsed electromagnetic frequencies cause adverse biological effects  and are very different than the natural electromagnetic fields that have existed in the environment for years. Research on humans has found an association between cell phone use and  serious effects such as brain cancer, headaches, damage to the brain and immune system. Yale studies found that cellular radiation exposure during pregnancy led to increased hyperactivity and memory problems in offspring.

2. Our Brains And Bodies Are Penetrated By This Radiation.

When we hold a cell phone against our head to talk, the radiation from the phone moves into our brain. Likewise, when we use a wireless laptop, the radiation penetrates into our abdominal region, chest area and brain.According to the International Agency for the Research on Cancer:

“the average radio frequency radiation energy deposition for children exposed to mobile phone RF is two times higher in the brain and 10 times higher in the bone marrow of the skull, compared with mobile phone use by adults”.

(Read it on page 44 of the IARC Monograph on Radiofrequency Fields)

Multiple research studies report cell phone radiation penetrates more deeply into children’s brains (Fernandez-Rodriguez 2015 , Fernández 2015, Mohammed 2017) in comparison to adults.

Research also has found that radiation from tablets penetrates more deeply into children’s brains (Ferreira 2015.)   A 2018 study that considered the radiation dose into the brain of teenagers found that teens who used cell phones up to their head had decreased memory performance on researchers tests.

3. Cell Phones And Wireless Devices Emit Radiation Constantly, Even When You Are Not Talking Or Using The Phone.

A powered on cell phone is always “checking in” and maintaining a connection to the nearest cell tower by sendsintense bursts of radiation several times per second. Likewise, a wireless-enabled laptop, tablet or other device is always “checking in” with the nearby router or a network base. These “check ins” are radiation emissions—happening several times per second, and whether or not a connection is successfully established.Medical doctors have written many letters to schools calling for administrators to reduce exposures to this radiation in schools.  Harvard doctors have published research linking electromagnetic fields to autism.

4. Every Wireless Device Has Fine Print Instructions Buried In Its User Manual That Specify A Distance Between The Device And User That Should Not Be Surpassed.

For example, most cell phone manuals state the phone should be held at specified distance (often around 5/8th of an inch) from the body. If you look in the user manual for your DECT cordless home phone, wireless laptop or printer, it will state that the device should be at least 20 cm (approximately 8 inches) away from the body to prevent “exceeding FCC radiation exposure limits”. These instructions are in the user manuals because cell phones and wireless devices are tested for user radiation exposures at those specific distances.

In other words, if you are using a laptop on your lap, you are exposing yourself to untested radiation emissions that could exceed the radiation levels our government regulations presently allow. When you use a device closer than the manufacturer’s distance instructions, you risk exposing yourself to radiation levels that our federal government understands can cause sterility, brain damage and tissue damage. Learn more about the fine print warnings on various devices here.

5. These Fine Print Instructions DO NOT Protect You From All Health Effects.

The instructions buried in your manual are not safe enough. Even if you follow these instructions, you risk your health. Note: radiation exposure at the specified distances is much higher than zero. Accumulating research now shows a myriad of health effects occur at levels far far below (literally tens of thousands times lower than) government regulation limits. Wireless devices were not adequately tested before they came on the market.
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6. Research Shows Low Levels Of This Radiation Impact The Brain And Reproductive System.

Wireless radiation has been shown to change brain function even at levels hundreds of thousands of times below federal guidelines. In 2011, Dr. Volkow’s NIH research showed that the brain increased glucose metabolism when exposed to cell phone radiation. Dr. Suleyman Kaplan has published multiple research studies showing damaged brain development in the offspring of prenatally exposed test subjects. Significant research shows that wireless exposures decrease and damage sperm and that prenatal exposure can alter testis and ovarian development. These are just a few examples from a large body of accumulated science which shows effects from cell phone and wireless radiation.
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7. Radiation Emitted By Cell Phones And Wireless Is Officially Linked To Cancer.

In 2011, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer first classified cell phone and wireless radiation as a “class 2 B Possible Human Carcinogen” based on these research studies that showed long-term users of cell phones had higher rates of brain cancer on the side of the head where they held the phone.The United States National Toxicology Program completed a $30M study that found “clear evidence” of cancer in male rats exposed to long term low level radio-frequency radiation.  Due to these findings, several scientists have published  that the weight of current peer reviewed evidence supports the conclusion that radiofrequency radiation should be regarded as a human carcinogen.

8. As The Evidence Linking Wireless Radiation To Cancer Has Significantly Increased Since 2011, Now Scientists State That Cell Phone Wireless Radiation Is A Human Carcinogen.

In 2016, a major US government study found cell phone radiation caused increased cancers (brain and heart nerve) in rats exposed at low levels for two years. The results were stunning because the cancers the rats developed are the same type humans are developing after long term cell phone use.

Furthermore, since 2011, new research studies have been published linking wireless radiation to cancer. CERENAT (a case control national study in France) again showed a statistically significant association between glioma (brain cancer) and long-erm cell phone use. Another study out of Jacobs University (which replicated previous study results) showed that RF acted as a tumor promoter. The study details in its conclusion how, “Numbers of tumors of the lungs and livers in exposed animals were significantly higher than in sham-exposed controls. In addition, lymphomas were also found to be significantly elevated by exposure.”

In light of this published science, several World Health Organization experts are stating that the evidence has now substantially increased. Dr. Anthony B. Miller has testified  on the increased evidence, and he and colleagues have written several published papers detailing their opinion and in 2018 he was lead author on a published literature review concluding that cell phone wireless radiation is a human carcinogen. Scientists from Israel researching cancr in radar operators also concluded that the evidence indicates radiofrequency can cause cancer (Peleg 2018.) Dr. Hardell and colleagues have long published papers concluding that that wireless “should be regarded as human carcinogen requiring urgent revision of current exposure guidelines.”

9. Solutions Exist: Hundreds Of Scientists Worldwide Recommend Taking Action To Reduce Exposures To Wireless Devices Because Of The Serious Health Effects From These Devices.

In 2015, a large group of scientists and medical doctors signed onto a formal Appeal to the United Nations and the World Health Organization, calling on them to take immediate action on this issue. This Appeal is now signed by over 250 experts and is published in the International Journal of Oncology.In 2014, a group of U.S. physicians, including the Chief of Obstetrics at Yale Medicine, presented scientific studies at the  launch of the BabySafe Project, issuing specific recommendations to pregnant women on how to decrease wireless exposures in order to decrease risks to babies’ brain development. We do not have to give up our technology but we can make smarter choices about the way we use it. Every person can easily decrease exposure to this radiation by making simple changes every day.

10. Government Regulations Are Outdated And Antiquated.

In the United States, the last review for radio frequency limits was in 1996, and the reality is that these are limits are based on research from the 1980s. Many countries are using guidelines developed by the IEEE or ICNIRP—guidelines that have remained unchanged for decades. Those guidelines do not consider the more current science showing harm. Thankfully other countries – over twenty countries- are enacting protections to reduce public exposure to  this radiation and have radiation limits far lower than the FCC and ICNIRP. Some have banned Wi-Fi in classsrooms, other have banned cell phones made for young children and others have cell tower limits 100x lower than ICNIRP.Regulations are antiquated because they have not kept pace with the manner in which consumers use devices—usage has changed considerably since 1996. For example, the regulations only consider one radiating device at a time and do not account for a residence, classroom, or workplace, healthcare, retail, recreational and other venues filled with multiple devices. The regulations do not consider that people carry their cell phones tightly in a front pocket of jeans or in a bra. They do not consider that laptops would be placed on laps by schoolchildren in the classroom. Regulations did not consider research that looked at long-term exposures to vulnerable groups such as children, pregnant women or to medically compromised individuals. Guidelines were set by only considering the impact to a full-grown man. Many scientists and major medical organizations have written about the inadequacy of these outdated guidelines.

Final Bonus Fact: No Safe Level Of This Radiation Has Been Identified.

Scientific studies have not been done to develop a “safe level” of exposure. The latest science clearly shows that biological effects could occur at non-thermal (non-heating) levels. Science also shows that children and the developing pregnancy are far more vulnerable to these damaging effects. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not do the research necessary to define a safe level that the public can be exposed to without harmful effects.

In a 2015 study (replicating prior scientific findings linking RF to cancer promotion), the researchers state, “Since many of the tumor-promoting effects in our study were seen at low to moderate exposure levels (0.04 and 0.4 W/kg SAR), thus well below exposure limits for the users of mobile phones, further studies are warranted to investigate the underlying mechanisms.” and “We hypothesize that these tumor-promoting effects may be caused by metabolic changes due to exposure. Our findings may help to understand the repeatedly reported increased incidences of brain tumors in heavy users of mobile phones.”

No medical organization has determined a “safe level” of this radiation for long-term exposure to children. In fact, medical organizations worldwide – including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest group of children’s doctors in the United States and the Athens Medical Association and Vienna Medical Association  – are calling for eliminating and reducing radiofrequency cell phone wireless radiation exposures.

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In Washington on the weekend after the Fourth of July, Israel was praised and Iran was condemned in the strongest terms, with a bit of a call to arms thrown in to prepare the nation for an inevitable war. It might just seem like a normal work week in the nation’s capital, but this time around there was a difference. The rhetoric came from no less than five senior officials in the Trump Administration and the audience consisted of 5,000 cheering members from the Christian Zionist evangelical group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI).

Christian Zionism is not a religion per se, but rather a set of beliefs based on interpretations of specific parts of the Bible – notably the book of Revelations and parts of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah – that has made the return of the Jews to the Holy Land a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. The belief that Israel is essential to the process has led to the fusion of Christianity with Zionism, hence the name of the movement. The political significance of this viewpoint is enormous, meaning that a large block of Christians promotes and votes for a non-reality based foreign policy based on a controversial interpretation of the Bible that it embraces with considerable passion.

It would be a mistake to dismiss CUFI as just another group of bible-thumpers whose brains have long since ceased to function when the subject is Israel. It claims to have seven million members and it serves as a mechanism for uniting evangelicals around the issue of Israel. Given its numbers alone and concentration is certain states, it therefore constitutes a formidable voting bloc that can be counted on to cast its ballots nearly 100% Republican, as long as the Republican in question is reliably pro-Israel. Beyond that, there are an estimated 60 million evangelical voters throughout the country and they will likely follow the lead of groups like CUFI and vote reflecting their religious beliefs, to include Trump’s highly visible support for the Jewish state.

Trump’s reelection campaign is reported to be already “…developing an aggressive, state-by-state plan to mobilize even more evangelical voters than supported him last time.” This will include, “voter registration drives at churches in battleground states such as Ohio, Nevada and Florida.” Without overwhelming evangelical support, Trump reelection in 2020 is unlikely, hence the dispatch of all available White House heavyweights to CUFI’s annual summit at the Washington Convention Center.

Though it is an organization that defines itself as Christian, CUFI makes no effort to support surviving Christian communities in the Middle East as most of them are hostile to Israel. The group also supports war against Iran as a precursor to total global conflict. Hagee has explained that “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.”

CUFI operates out of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio Texas. It was founded at the church in 2006 and is headed by John Hagee, a leading evangelical who has been courted both by the Trump Administration and by Israel itself, which presented him with a a Lear business yet complete with a crew so he would be able to do his proselytizing in some comfort. He frequently appears at commemorations in Israel, is a regular at the annual AIPAC meeting and has been a guest at the White House. He was present at the Trump administration’s ceremony last year when it moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and gave a speech. He has said that “there has never been a more pro-Israeli president than Donald Trump.”

Present at the CUFI summit were Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and US negotiator in the Middle East Jason Greenblatt. Lest there be any confusion, the White House was represented by two Christian Zionists, two Jewish Zionists and John Bolton, who has been variously described. All five have been urging a military response against Iran for its alleged “aggression” in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister also addressed the conference via videolink, with his similar “analysis” of the Iranian threat. There were also a number of Republican Senators present, to include Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Roy Blunt and Tim Scott.

The speeches were all pretty much the same but perhaps the most suggestive was the 2,000 word plus exhortation delivered by Pompeo. His presentation was entitled “The US and Israel: a Friendship for Freedom.” He asked, in a speech full of religious metaphors and biblical references, his audience to “compare Israel’s reverence for liberty with the restrictions on religious freedom facing Christians and people of all faiths throughout the rest of the Middle East,” where “if a Muslim leaves Islam it is considered an apostasy, and it is punishable indeed by death.”

Pompeo was more interested in stirring up his audience than he was in historical fact. He said

“In Iraq, Syria, and other countries in the region, the last remnants of ancient Christian communities are at near-extinction because of persecution from ISIS and other malign actors. And just one example: before 2003, there were an estimated 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq. Today, sadly, almost a quarter of a million.”

Pompeo, whose grasp of current events appears to be a bit shaky, did not mention two of the principal reasons that Christianity has been declining in the region. First and foremost is the Iraq War, started by the United States for no good reason, which unleashed forces that led to the destruction of religious minorities. Second, he did not note the constant punishment delivered by Israel on the Palestinians, which has led to the departure of many Christians in that community. Nor did he say anything about the reverse of the coin, Syria, where Christians are well integrated and protected by the al-Assad government which Pompeo and Bolton are seeking to destroy to benefit Israel.

The Secretary of State also delivered the expected pitch for four more years of Donald Trump, saying

“But thank God. Thank God we have a leader in President Trump – an immovable friend of Israel. His commitment, his commitment – President Trump’s commitment is the strongest in history, and it’s been one of the best parts of my job to turn that commitment into real action.”

But it has to be Pompeo’s conclusion that perhaps should be regarded as a joke, though it appears that no one in the audience was laughing. He said

“Our country is intended to do all it can, in cooperating with other nations, to help create peace and preserve peace [throughout] the world. It is given to defend the spiritual values – the moral code – against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.”

It was a reiteration of Pompeo’s earlier “America is a force for good” speech delivered in Cairo in January. Nobody believed it then and nobody believes it now, given what has been actually occurring over the past 18 years. It would be interesting to know if Pompeo himself actually thinks it to be true. If he does, he should be selling hot dogs from a food truck rather than presiding as Secretary of State.

So, the bottom line is that the Trump Administration pandering to Hagee and company is shameful. Christian Zionist involvement in American politics on behalf of the Washington’s relationship with Israel does not serve any conceivable US national interests unless one assumes that Israel and the United States are essentially the same polity, which is unsustainable. On the contrary, the Christian Zionist politicizing has been a major element in supporting the generally obtuse US foreign policy in the Middle East region and vis-à-vis other Muslim countries, a policy that has contributed to at least four wars while making the world a more dangerous place for all Americans. Christian Zionist promoted foreign policy serves a particularly narrowly construed parochial interest that, ironically, is intended to do whatever it takes to bring about the end of the world, possibly a victory for gentlemen like Pastor John Hagee if his interpretation of the bible is correct, but undeniably a disaster for the rest of us.

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Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Flickr

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